probably the source of your trouble in the first place.
“Could the spiders be using Monterey as a base?”
She linked her screen into the ships’ network, and through that to Baharain Traffic Control.
“There’s a liner listing Monterey as part of its itinerary, within the last two weeks. Monterey is only two hops from here, through a large colony called Solistar. I can’t imagine the spiders are squatting on a system right next to a heavily populated world, and nobody has noticed.”
“There are bloody spiders squatting on
She waited, letting him unload the burden at his own pace.
“I got a kid killed.” He sighed, biting his lip in shame. “He survived the attack on Kassa, came all the way out here to make a paycheck for his family, and I went and fed him to the Earth-damned spiders anyway.”
It must have happened while he was taking those pictures.
“Should we go after them?” Jandi would die of shock if she brought him a whole alien, rather than a mere artifact. Actually, he probably would have a heart attack. Maybe she would just show him a leg or two.
“No,” Kyle said. “I don’t know how many there are, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t poke Dejae’s security net again and expect to leave this planet alive. I’m not sure we can get out of here as it is. And it’s no use going back to Altair. These pictures aren’t enough.” His lips tightened in pain, the jaw underneath set in mulish anger. Those pictures had come at a high cost.
“Then…” But she already knew the answer.
“We’re going to Monterey.”
Garcia had gone straight to a bar and started drinking. Prudence could hardly complain. She’d told him to act normal.
“Buy a bottle of whiskey from the bartender,” she instructed Jorgun over the comm link. “Tell Garcia he can have it when he gets back on the ship. Don’t let him trick it away from you, Jor. Just hold it high in the air, where he can’t reach it.”
She was still trying to get clearance to launch when her pied piper came on board dragging his rat. Garcia was cursing savagely, but he pulled himself together when he walked past the open door to Prudence’s cabin. Kyle was in there, still hunched over the data console.
“You don’t have any pants on, man.” Garcia seemed to be asking for confirmation. He must have been drinking hard.
Kyle looked up from the screen in surprise.
“Oh. Right.” He ducked out of the room and headed aft to the shower.
“That man didn’t have any pants on,” Garcia shouted down the passageway to the bridge. “I leave you for one lousy minute and you get naked with the League!”
“Jor, give him the bottle,” Prudence shouted back.
Kyle came onto the bridge, finally dressed. He was going to be a problem that couldn’t be solved with a bottle of free liquor.
“So how long will it take?” He sounded like a man in a hurry.
“It’s a three-day hop from here to Solistar, and another five to Monterey. That doesn’t count in-system travel time. And we’ll have to dock at Solistar. We need fuel and cargo. If we show up at Monterey with an empty hold, they’ll be suspicious. So make yourself comfortable, Lieutenant. It’s a long trip.”
“Call me Kyle. I don’t think dead men have ranks.”
“You can call me Captain,” she said. In case he might be getting silly ideas.
“Of course, Captain.” He said it with an exaggeration of his bureaucratic obsequiousness. She was surprised how much it hurt to hear that tone again.
Jorgun made a mockery of her formality anyway. “Do you want me to look at the cargo lists, Pru?” He was trying to do his job, the one thing he was good at.
“I’m sorry, Jor, but we don’t have any.” Normally he would examine all the destinations, fees, and expected returns, and put the stops in the best order. It was called the “Traveling Salesman” problem. Computers could solve it, of course, but it was a pain to enter all the parameters and assign the right weightings. Jorgun could do it instantly, and besides, he enjoyed it.
“Garcia said if we didn’t get a cargo soon, we’d be landed.” Jorgun probably didn’t know what landed meant, but he was upset anyway.
“Garcia is drunk,” Prudence pointed out. “Don’t worry about it, Jor. We’ve got a lot of money from—” She stopped, not wanting to mention Kassa. “We still have lots of money.” Now she was telling outright lies. “We have enough.”
“Enough to get us back to Altair?” Kyle wasn’t so easily fooled.
“Us? You can take a commercial liner back.” Landing on Altair with the renegade dead League officer- turned-betrayer as her cargo would be equivalent to suicide.
He didn’t argue. “Just get me in and out of Monterey. I’ll take care of the rest. It’s not your problem, Prudence. But I appreciate the help. Altair appreciates it.”
“I’m not doing it for Altair.” She bit her lip. Why did she have to keep reacting to him?
“Nonetheless, we appreciate it.” He couldn’t seem to stop smiling. It was so very different from the last time he had stood on her bridge. “Dejae went through a lot of trouble to hide his planet of origin. That means there’s a good chance they kicked him off. If he left enemies on Monterey, we might find some friends.”
“And if not?”
Kyle’s smile turned wry. “Everybody has enemies.” That was closer to the man she remembered.
She tried to keep that man in mind over the next three days. She wanted to remember that Kyle could be false. He’d demonstrated the ability to lie convincingly, wearing a cover persona for years at a time. He was a dangerous man. Not just because he was strong and trained in combat by the police force, but because he was emotionally capable of extreme dedication. She had been mistaken in thinking he was not as hard as a soldier. He was stronger than that. The years of obedience had not left him dulled and useless. They had not killed his passion.
Right now he seemed passionate for justice. That was a goal she could identify with, despite the attendant danger. Justice was never free, and sometimes it could be quite expensive. If Kyle had to sacrifice her and her crew for the sake of Altair, he would do it. But she was prepared to run that risk.
What she was afraid of was what came after. Once he had achieved his goal—or figured out it was unachievable—what would he do then? What direction would all that pent-up passion take? A man like that, with so much energy, so much life to recapture, might do almost anything.
What he did for now was to fit seamlessly into her crew. He played cards with Garcia and vid games with Jorgun. He took his turn in the galley, without being asked, making a credible casserole out of the random contents of their freezer.
And he kept his distance from her, never pushing, never crowding. But sometimes, when he didn’t think she noticed, she caught him staring at her.
Jorgun was happy with their new crew member. She was a little surprised to see him playing his favorite vid game, Starfighter, with Kyle. It was one of the things Jorgun and she shared. Garcia had no interest in any activity that didn’t result in exchanges of wealth, and Melvin had been unable to take the game seriously. He’d get stoned and fly around in spirals grooving on the pretty lights instead of shooting the targets.
“I like playing with him,” Jorgun explained, when she asked him about it in private. “He doesn’t have to let me win.”
She had developed a careful habit of losing approximately every other game when she played with Jorgun. The game was too similar to the sims she ran to practice her flying skills, so her reflexes were completely dominating if she didn’t rein them in. But she hadn’t realized Jorgun could tell. All those years she had fought to get others to not underestimate him, and she’d being doing it herself.
The shame mixed with the jealousy to form a biting hole in her stomach, much like Garcia’s absurd chili recipes always did.
“I’m sorry, Jor. I just thought it would be more fun that way.”
