“Not fair, Captain!” Axel tilted his head back at Marco and Boom with an exaggerated pout. “Daddy’s playing favorites again.”
“That’s your first fine,” Jun snapped over Axel’s flailing protests.
“That wasn’t even about the ship!”
Jun made a short, sharp gesture at the entire bridge, expression flat. “Who cringed?”
Everyone but Theo raised their hand. Jun counted them out while staring Axel down. “That’s 300 chips so far. Care to keep going?”
It seemed like the right time to interject, so Theo did. “Well, I, for one, didn’t mind the Daddy bit. And you can’t fine me because you don’t pay me.”
The groan Boom gave sounded as though it had originated in the depths of space before exiting her mouth at full volume. “This is all frankly traumatizing to hear, so could we just move on, or should I start stabbing things? Starting with my own ears?”
Marco elbowed her lightly, his soft voice barely carrying across the bridge. “You can do my ears too. I’d thank you for it.”
The posture Jun assumed—finger and thumb pinching the bridge of his nose while he scrunched his eyes closed and tightened his mouth—was so reminiscent of Theo’s brother that it sent a pang through his chest.
“If we’re going to crash Barnes’s Dome”—Jun’s voice rang out across the bridge—“we need funds. Chips to flash around and drop into all the right pockets. The floor is open for your terrible ideas.”
He turned to Boom, who didn’t even pause in scanning her security feed, answering with a sardonic tone. “I don’t know; we could pick up a hit on somebody?”
Something in Jun’s sigh indicated this was not the first time he had refuted this suggestion. “No, terrible. Next?”
To say Marco spoke up would be to say he spoke at a normal, conversational volume rather than his usual quiet tone. “Petty theft? Strip some abandoned fleet for parts and sell them off to junk raiders?”
Jun gave that one some thought, furrowing his brow, then tilting his head in Marco’s direction. “Better. Takes too much time. Next?”
“Sell your fucking Doll and make a stack of chips right off.”
Theo sat up straight at the unexpectedly sharp snap of Axel’s voice.
Only Axel and Theo jumped when Jun swooped down to cage the pilot in, with his hands gripping both armrests of Axel’s chair. His expression brooked no argument as he stared Axel down. “We don’t joke about the Doll trade on this ship. You will speak to your fellow crewmates with respect. Apologize.”
Leaning back as far as his chair would allow, Axel turned his face to side, words tumbling over his shoulder. “Shit. Sorry, dollface—” He winced as Jun flicked him once, hard, directly over his larynx. “Ouch, fuck! Okay, okay. I’m sorry, Dr. Campbell. Won’t happen again.”
Jun waited until Axel reluctantly met his eyes and then growled, gripping the armrests. “No. It won’t.”
To Theo’s complete surprise and secret delight, Jun turned to him next, lifting expectant eyebrows like he had not just intimidated his pilot into submission. “What would you suggest, Dr. Campbell?”
Finances were not exactly Theo’s expertise. No one had ever asked him for his input on something like that. He gave it careful consideration before asking, “Well, what do you usually do for money?”
It was astounding, the way every member of the crew abruptly found something very important to focus on at each of their consoles. Marco even poked at a blank panel as if it was a screen.
Axel finally answered after a few beats of silence. “Didn’t the captain tell you? We’re in the delivery business.”
Was it the kind of profession Theo had imagined it might be? No. But he was intrigued nonetheless. “Oh, well. Could you make a delivery?”
It wasn’t the kind of question Theo had anticipated might provoke laughter, but Axel seemed to find it hysterical. “I don’t know, Captain, could we?”
Jun stood facing the schematics with a thoughtful expression, the fingers of one hand tapping restlessly against his thigh. It was the closest Theo had ever seen him come to fidgeting. “He’s right. We need to make the next drop ahead of schedule.”
Theo bounced over to Jun’s console to stand alongside the captain and Boom. “What are you dropping?”
Boom turned to Jun rather than acknowledging Theo. Jun pretended he didn’t notice her scrutiny as she said, “Seriously, why is he here, again?”
The obnoxious crack of Axel’s knuckles resounded in the room. He had rolled them into a fist to press against a flat attachment on his other arm. “Let me put it to you this way, Doc. It’s best in this business if you don’t ask too many questions.”
Hopping up onto the small stretch of empty space at the end of Jun’s console, Theo gave a delighted gasp. He dismissed Boom’s warning snarl with a wave of his hand. “My word! You’re criminals!”
Boom scoffed while she closed out her screen and pulled up something that appeared to be an encoded inventory list. “There’s no crime when there are no laws. You’re not in the Core anymore; this is the deep dark.”
Theo clapped and pointed at Jun, who continued to pretend like he was all alone on the bridge, poring over the list. “Brigands, then! Scoundrels. Rapscallions.”
Even Axel seemed to be working now, furiously typing something out on his console, strings of numbers flying across his screen. “Yeah, no, we’re definitely not whatever that last one was. That sounds like the opposite of awesome.”
“I’d kind of like to be a rapscallion, actually.” The soft sound of Marco’s voice made Theo smile as he gestured to Theo with his contraption, which appeared to have nearly doubled in size with clear tubes now protruding in all directions.
For once, Boom’s disgusted sigh was tinged with warmth as she slanted a glance at her brother. “You would. Probably because it sounds like some kind of food.”
Theo swung his legs, drumming his heels against the metal panels of Jun’s console and
