“I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“What have you been up to all this time?” he asked.
She fumbled for words. “Working on freighters. I have my own now, the Rapture. She’s nothing fancy, but I like being my own boss. I guess you’re still with the Fleet?”
He nodded. “Lieutenant in communications, but I’m switching to a desk job and I can focus on coding and development. I’m working on a new transport unit code that won’t make people so sick.” A server stopped at their table with their drinks, a real person and not a bot.
When she glided away, Brya whispered, “Where’s the food?”
He chuckled. “Hungry?”
“No—well, yeah—but why wouldn’t she bring it with her?”
“It isn’t replicated here,” Kai explained. “It’s cooked from scratch.”
That explained the prices. Brya hadn’t had a home-cooked meal since she left Ra’lani. “Oh,” she said, feeling like an idiot. “Do you cook?”
“No.”
An awkward silence fell over the table. Brya looked at their surroundings, taking in the soft lighting and quiet atmosphere, and feeling like a grubby kid. Kai finally leaned forward and said, “Tell me what’s going on. I can help you.”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. Just an old colleague who’s pissed off. I’m not a threat to his business, but he’s still pestering me.”
“What about Dav?” Kai asked. “Where is he?”
“He died,” Brya said shortly. “Two years ago. It was an accident with unstable cargo.”
Kai’s eyes widened in surprise. “I’m sorry,” he said genuinely.
“Don’t be.” She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t going well the last few years of our marriage, and he died because he was an idiot.” She held up her hands in frustration. “That makes me a horrible person to say that, but it’s true. You don’t just walk into a cargo bay when a fuel container explodes.”
Kai nodded and spied her left hand.
Shit.
He grabbed it in a firm grip that she couldn’t wrench away from, zeroing in on the stumps where her last two fingers had been. They had been cleanly sheared off above the first knuckles. “What the fuck?” he said in a hoarse whisper. “How did this happen? Who did this to you?”
She yanked her hand free. “It was an accident,” she lied. “A console caught fire on an old tanker I was working on, and…”
“That wasn’t an accident,” he argued in an angry whisper. “I’ve seen accidents before. The rest of you doesn’t look like it’s been in an electrical fire. You don’t lose just two fingers in an explosion. Your hand would have been charred. Why didn’t you see a doctor? The bone could have been regenerated.”
She stared at him icily. “Okay, you got me. It wasn’t an accident. But I’d prefer not to talk about it.”
The server reappeared at their table, dishes in hand. Kai and Brya murmured thanks and she dug into hers, momentarily forgetting their argument. Gods, she hadn’t eaten like this in years. She had to force herself to not to start shoving everything on the table in her mouth as fast as she could.
“Just answer one question,” Kai said. “Then I’ll drop it.”
She reluctantly set down a piece of still-warm bread. “Okay,” she said cautiously. “But I don’t have to answer it.”
“Your fingers look like they were cut off with a laser scalpel. It was deliberate.” He took a deep breath. “Did Dav do that to you?”
She almost laughed at the question. Dav? Her late husband had been an idiot and blindly followed whatever orders Wethmore issued, but he hadn’t been a sadist. “No.” She returned to her meal, and they ate in silence until the dishes were clean.
“Do you want dessert?” Kai asked.
Oh, hell, she could eat half a dozen desserts. “Yes, please.”
“Good. They have a cart here. We’ll get a little of everything.”
****
Brya was comfortably full when they left the restaurant, for the first time in what felt like forever. She and Kai stopped at his hotel, a small, cozy building a deck above. “Thank you,” she said awkwardly. “I guess this is where we go our separate ways.” Again, a voice added in her head. “Do you have a datapad? I could give you my ship’s transmit address and we could keep in touch this time.”
Kai felt through his pants pockets and produced his handheld, presenting it to her. She thumbed in the Rapture’s address and handed it back. She didn’t want him to know she was too scared to return to her ship right now. It was probably being loaded with the ungraded fuel Wethmore had blackmailed her into hauling. She didn’t want to be anywhere near it until she was ready to leave, in case one of the station authorities found it and arrested her. She didn’t have enough to spare on a room. She planned to spend the night in one of the seamier cafés below the commercial strip that served bottomless coffee for half a credit.
As if he could read her mind—and for all she knew, maybe those dormant telepathic abilities had developed since they were kids—he asked, “Where are you going?”
“I have a room booked on deck three,” she lied, then mentally kicked herself for it. Deck three was kitty-corner to the barracks the Fleet used when a ship docked at Karys Station.
He stared at her, and she looked away. “Okay,” he said finally. “It was good seeing you, Brya. I wondered, you know.” He paused, searching for words. “If you ever need any help, contact me. No questions asked.”
She nodded and wished she could. “Thank you.”
They shared an awkward hug and he let himself into the hotel. She turned down the corridor to go to the lower decks.
And immediately saw a familiar face in profile. Wethmore’s hired thug.
She froze on the spot, unsure what to do. He didn’t turn his head, but when he did, he would see her, and she would have too much explaining to do. She had never told Wethmore that she had been married before she married Dav, even if it wasn’t recognized off her home world. It wouldn’t be hard for someone like him to find out more about Kai and do something to him. She couldn’t let that happen.
She turned away and fled into the hotel.
Chapter Four
Kai had fitted his hand into his hotel room’s palm lock when Brya’s panicked voice called his name down the corridor. He looked up to see her running toward him.
“I need help,” she said simply.
He nodded and unlocked the door. Automatically the room’s lights cycled on, highlighting the spare, windowless space. There was a wide bed taking up most of the room, a replicator, a desk and vidscreen, and a small bathroom off to the side. Kai shut the door behind them and faced her.
“You need to tell me what’s going on,” he demanded. He pointed to the chair locked to the desk. “Sit.”
She obeyed. “Um, why aren’t you staying in one of the Fleet’s places?” she asked. “You must be getting gouged here.”
“I’m not letting you change the subject, but since you asked, I was supposed to take a regular holiday and a hotel is part of that. And yes, I’m getting gouged, which is why I hope no one from the front desk saw you. They’ll double my bill.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell me.”
“I don’t think anyone saw me.”
“Brya.”
The warning in his voice was unmistakable. Who could blame him? She had run away with another man and dropped off his radar for a decade. He had already been more generous to her than she deserved, and now she was going to drag him into her own shitstorm. “I’ll go,” she volunteered, and stood up.
His hands pressed down her shoulders until she was planted back in the chair. A frisson of awareness jolted through her but she pushed it away. “Okay,” she acquiesced. He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. A sigh escaped her lips, and she was in danger of crying for the first time in years. She hadn’t even cried when Dav got himself killed, only when Wethmore took her fingers. But there were conc
essions that had to be made first. “If I tell you, I need you to keep the Fleet out of this,” she said. Kai aside, she would always harbor at least a little fear of law enforcement.
“Depends on what you’re into.”
“I need you to do this for me.” She didn’t bother trying to hide the pleading note in her voice. “A lot of it is my fault, but I’ve been doing things right for the last year. Or trying to.” She would not cry, would not let Kai think she was trying to manipulate him. That was something the old Brya would have done and what he was probably expecting. She closed her eyes until the tears receded, and began her story.
“You remember when we left Ra’lani?” she said, and he nodded. “We arrived here, and you signed up with the military and Dav and I joined a freighter crew. We worked that ship for a few months before we heard about a better-paying operation with Angel Transport. Have you heard of them?”
He shook his head. “I don’t follow the transport business.”
“Dav and I took jobs with them for about a year, and he met a guy who was starting his own business. Yawdi Wethmore. He’s from one of the planets in the Outer Rims, or that’s what he said. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t know why exactly.” She paused. Wethmore had been polite and respectful to her in the beginning, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it why she disliked him. “He and the stuff he was talking about seemed too good to be true,” she continued. “Dav fell for it, and I didn’t know what else to do, and I loved him and wanted to be with him. I ruined all of our lives for him. So I joined Wethmore’s crew.”
“And it turned out to be too good to be true?” Kai guessed. He sidestepped her comment about her ruining their lives. He already knew that.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure you know most small-time operators move something shady from time to time to stay on top of things, and no matter what the Fleet thinks, most of it’s harmless. Almost everyone moves untaxed liquor at least once. It pays pretty well, and if you get caught you’re only stuck with a fine. No one dies or gets hurt. I was expecting an occasional booze run with Wethmore, but I found out fast that nothing he was doing was legal. It was the worst kind of shit to be hauling across space, too. Ungraded fuel, drugs, and sometimes people.” She shuddered and had to fight back tears again.
“Why didn’t you go to the Fleet?” Kai asked.
“Wethmore knew people,” Brya said miserably. “I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’ve been in Alliance space for twelve years and I’m still not sure how things work that way. But he told everyone on his ship that if anyone blabbed, he’d find a way to track us down and kill us.”
“What did Dav think of all this?”
“Dav didn’t care,” Brya replied. “He and Wethmore were friends, and Dav was like his disciple. Before we met him, we’d been talking about using the money we’d saved up to buy a ship of our own and run our own freighter business, but once he met Wethmore, that was it. He was never leaving him, and that meant I wouldn’t either. Dav never hit me, but if Wethmore told him to, he would have. He was so devoted to Wethmore that he walked into a firetrap and died.” She looked at the carpet. “Gods, he was an idiot. We both were.”
“So Wethmore was running a smuggling operation, then,” Kai said.
“Yeah, he smuggled everything. It was people that was the worst. He moved slave labor around the Rim Worlds and Outer Rims. I didn’t know where they came from or how they ended up like that, and I didn’t ask. I was too scared to.”
“And you escaped.” Like all of his contributions to the conversation, Kai kept things short and to the point. He was definitely Brya’s idea of a military man.
“Sort of. I bought my way out,” she explained.
Kai raised an eyebrow, but kept his face impassive.
“I’d tried to escape before, and I had the shit beaten out of me,” she confessed. “Twice before Dav died. I tried hiding out at spaceports but Wethmore or one of the crew always found me. Dav didn’t do anything about it, and he couldn’t see why I wanted to leave. He was being paid well and Wethmore liked him. When Dav died, Wethmore and I had a talk and he said I could go under a few conditions.” She looked down at her left hand and her shortened fingers. “I had to give him most of Dav’s money. I kept enough to buy a ticket to Prime and find work on a freighter there, but everything else went to Wethmore.” She faltered. “Ten days before we reached the spaceport where I would catch a flight to Prime, he cut off my fingertips as a warning.”
As she spoke the words, she remembered the searing pain of Wethmore’s laser scalpel, the smells of burning flesh and bone cooking. The sight of the tops of her fingers, their polished nails winking in the lights overhead, on the floor. Two years later, she still had nightmares about that night.
“I went to Prime with my hand bandaged,” she said, forcing herself to continue. “I went back to work at Angel Transport and lived in employee housing to save money for my first year on my own. Angel was bought out by Renascent Galactic six months ago, and I bought the Rapture around that time instead of signing on with them. Now I’m moving perfectly legal cargo. Spare parts, EVA suits, that kind of thing. I won’t even move a single bottle of untaxed whiskey.
“Everything was going fine until today. Someone who works for Wethmore found me here after I docked for refueling, and blackmailed me into moving ungraded petrik to somewhere in the Rims. He threatened me and after he let me go, I ran into you in the commercial sector. That crowd was dumb luck. A few drunks were kicked out of a bar and started a brawl. Did you see it?”
“No. And you agreed to this delivery?” Kai’s voice was flat and his eyes expressionless.
“It was either agree to take the fuel or Wethmore would have killed me. I saw the guy who forced me into it again in the corridor outside your hotel, and I came in here. I don’t know if he saw me or not.” Her voice rose. “I don’t want to be tortured or killed or mind-wiped. I don’t want to go to a prison colony, and we both know that’s where smugglers end up. I’m sure you know what the consequences are for accomplices. Being a stupid person who tries to keep a marriage together at any cost doesn’t make me less of an accomplice. Feeling like shit about what you’re doing doesn’t make things magically better.” She stood up and began to pace the small room.
“Why don’t you go to the Fleet now?” Kai asked.
“And tell them what?” she said. “I’d probably be going to a prison colony for twenty years. You know that.”
“You were forced into that life. You were abused.”
“I’d still be completely screwed, Kai. Wethmore would find a way to track me down and do away with me and make it look like an accident. He’s done it before.” She stopped her pacing. “I’m just going to deliver the fuel and disappear. It’s easier that way.”
“What if I could help you?” he asked.
“How?” She spat out the words.
“I tell the Fleet what’s going on,” he said. “You deliver the fuel, but we trap Wethmore. Would that work?”
Hope flared in Brya. “You could do that?” she said. “What are you in the Fleet, anyway? I thought you were a lieutenant.”
“I am. I’m not that high up,” he said. “But I know people who could help you. You must know how the Fleet feels about human smuggling and drug trafficking and murder. You can help us catch them.”
“And what would happen to me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I can find out.”
The tears that had been threatening spilled over and she started to cry. She was mortified, but couldn’t help it. “Why?” she said between sobs.
“Because Wethmore’s a piece of shit,” he said simply. “And because both of us left Ra’lani to start over and you deserve to start over.” His expression softened and he opened his arms. “Come here.”
Obediently, she let him hold her, the feeling of him settling and reassuring. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt safe like this. His breath ruffled her hair, stirring someth
ing inside her she couldn’t recognize. Reluctantly, she pulled away.
“Now, where are you going for the night?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“I’m not going back to my ship until I have to,” she confessed. “It’s supposed to leave with the fuel at fifteen hundred hours tomorrow.”
“So, do you have a room anywhere?”
“No. I was going to a café on the lower decks to drink coffee and watch a vid serial all night.”
“Stay here,” he said. “I have weapons if someone breaks in. I’m not at top form at the moment, but I can still shoot.”
Brya realized that in all of her wallowing, she hadn’t asked why Kai was at Karys Station. “What happened?” she asked, feeling selfish.
“There was accident on the ship I’m assigned to. Some idiot ensign with more brawn than brains was showing off in a training exercise I was leading and shot me in the leg and wrist.”
She gasped.
“It’s fine, but I’ll be doing desk work for the rest of my career. I work in communications, but I do a lot more than just that.” He straightened, and pride tinged his voice. “I redesigned the way comm badges work and made them more efficient. They can now be used in a greater range, including outside the ship they’re programmed to. Useful in emergencies and rescue missions.”
Brya was unsure what to say to that. “Congratulations.”
He smiled, and her stomach flipped a little. “We can’t risk Wethmore’s hired thugs finding you. Which side of the bed do you want?”
She shook her head. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Just pick a side, Brya.” He dug through his duffel and produced an oversized t-shirt. “You can sleep in this.” He handed it to her.
“Um.”
“I’m helping you, Brya. Obviously Karys isn’t the best place for you to be right now. We’ll get up early tomorrow morning so I can notify the Fleet of the situation and get this sting set up.” He gestured to the bathroom. “You should wash up first. It’s a water bathroom.”
Brya’s boat had a water shower, but it worked only intermittently. She stepped into the bathroom and was delighted to see it had a full-size bathtub. “Can I take a bath?” she asked excitedly, and immediately regretted it. He was probably paying for water consumption here and she had already taken so much from him.
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