“Neutral stations…” Raven repeated thoughtfully.
“I never noticed that,” Blake said, his brows knitting. “But yeah, for those last months, all of mine were too.”
Marlo inclined his head.
“The drug is only illegal in Earth and Allied areas. They would be free and clear at a non-allied station. They just needed you guys to get it into those areas, where someone would be able to pick it up,” Raven theorized out loud.
“How are they doing it on an AI ship, though? Without hunter or AI knowing?” Marlo asked.
Raven and Blake filled him in on what they had found on Blake’s ship. Without saying anything else, the Aloan stood and left the bar. The humans looked at each other and then followed, since Raven had already given enough money to cover these drinks and a few more. The server would have a good tip.
They followed Marlo to the docking ring. He never looked back or acknowledged them until they reached his port.
“You were able to fix your ship’s sensors to read the compartment?” Marlo asked Blake without looking back.
“Yes,” Blake answered and gave him a quick explanation.
“Then let us see what Kavi can find.” The port doors opened and let them into the tunnel, closing behind them and letting them through into the ship.
Marlo’s ship looked similar in the interior, although the furniture was slightly altered for his Aloan body. On the floor was a six-legged animal that looked like a combination of a dog and a fish, which Raven knew to be native to Aloa.
“That’s Fanar,” Marlo introduced on his way to the lower cabin. The dog-fish lifted his head, looked at them, then went back to sleep…or Raven thought that’s what was happening.
Neither of them left the upper cabin, since they knew that Marlo wouldn’t appreciate them being in his ship’s core. However, they knew that things were going to get very crowded in the upper cabin when Marlo came back. It felt crowded with just the two of them standing there.
They didn’t speak, just stood there and waited anxiously.
The Aloan finally returned. “Kavi, tell me what you see,” he said.
After a moment, the ship’s voice came over its speakers. Just like with Marlo, the language was first Aloan, but translated almost instantly into their minds.
“There is a small block of a substance,” she reported. “I am analyzing. Substance has been identified. Common name of Exotic K.”
Marlo had apparently heard about this just like they had, because all three of his eyes started to spin before stopping after a moment. “I cannot believe they would put such a thing in my ship. Do you know what could have happened to me?”
“You could have been arrested and put in prison,” Blake said.
“At best!” Marlo said, his voice rising in agitation. “If a raider had learned there was Exotic K in my hold?”
That hadn’t even occurred to Raven, and suddenly, she felt a hole open in her stomach that threatened to swallow her. “They would kill you.”
23
Although it left a bad taste in all of their mouths, they agreed that Marlo should go on to his scheduled port. It would put him soundly back in Allied space and give the smugglers the chance to get the substance off his ship. They thought this best so that it took the danger off him, and also kept the people in Halliwell from knowing that he knew.
It bought them all some time.
They decided he’d have some sudden ship repairs needed when Halliwell called with the next assignment that sent him to neutral space, however.
“What do we do now?” Blake asked with a long sigh as they walked around the docking ring, away from Marlo’s ship and toward their own.
“How should I know?” Raven retorted, managing to pull back some of the edge to her voice at the last minute, if just barely.
“Well, I have no clue either!” he replied with similar aggravation, stopping and turning toward her. “I’m the one who was in the middle of all this…and nearly got bones broken because of it. Now people I know are in danger too!”
She also stopped and faced him. “Do you really think now is the t—”
A gunshot interrupted her.
The old-fashioned metal round whizzed through the air between them and ricocheted off a bulkhead. They both gasped and spun to see where it had come from, which turned out to be a man standing at the end of the corridor. Raven knew in an instant that she didn’t recognize him, but he had to be associated with Halliwell.
He was also standing in the way of where they needed to go.
They spun on their heels and sprinted in the opposite direction just as another bullet just barely missed them.
‘Silvanus!’ Raven shouted in her mind, just as she was sure Blake was calling to Nyx. ‘Get the ship ready to take off, and fast! We’ve got a guy trying to kill us!’
‘Raven!’ Kyra said with irritation. ‘I just can’t leave you alone for one minute, can I?’
‘Apparently not…’
They rushed around a curve in the corridor, and Raven spotted an open access corridor along the floor. She grabbed Blake by the shirt and shoved him bodily down toward it. Raven followed so close, she was nearly on his back, but they crawled inside and then back enough that they hoped the man wouldn’t see them.
A moment later—barely—they heard the heavy pounding footsteps of their pursuer, and Raven bit her lip. The steps got closer and closer until they saw the very edge of a pair of boots thunder past the vent, and keep going.
Neither moved right away, of course. Raven breathed out and counted in her mind, waiting to hear if the steps returned. They didn’t, at least not immediately, so they crawled back out of the access tunnel and sprinted back the other way. She knew the sounds of their steps might alert their pursuer, but at least they were now running in the right direction.
Fortunately, there wasn’t anyone else in the corridor as they rushed through it, looking for their docking ports.
As the ports came into sight, Raven could hear the sound of their pursuer once again and she made an angry noise in her throat. They put on what speed they could for the last of it, just barely making their turns into the tunnels that would lead them to their ships. A bullet hit the wall just beside Blake as he made the turn and yelped.
Rushing down the corridors, the doors shut behind them. The man reached Raven’s door just as it was almost closed. He stuck the barrel of the gun inside the crack and tried to fire, but the door squished the weapon before he could pull the trigger.
Raven threw herself into her ship and the door shut.
“Silvanus! Go!”
24
They were hiding again.
It was another nebula, but the game was the same. Someone from their old company had it out for them and they had to find somewhere to lay low until they could figure out how to evade this next round of bad guys.
Raven sat at the edge of her sofa with her head on her hands. She had roughly one nerve left, and it was wearing thing.
“I’m concerned about your blood pressure, Raven,” Silvanus said.
“So am I,” Raven groaned.
What was it they said? No good deed goes unpunished? She had only gotten into this infernal mess because she couldn’t leave Blake stranded. Why did he have to call on her? He knew other people out in the big universe, surely.
She tried to think of how long it had been, and how long she’d been awake…
When she couldn’t, she got up and made a cup of coffee.
The speakers chirped, and Blake’s voice followed. The moment she heard him, she had to stifle a groan. She allowed herself the grimace, though, since it was audio-only.
“What are we going to do, Rave?”
“How should I know?” she snapped, then took a long drink of coffee. “You keep acting like I somehow know the right thing to do about everything, and you know what? I really freaking don’t!”
“Well, you’re the big hotshot who gets her name in the papers! Why don’t you
know everything?!”
“Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me!” she shouted, glaring angrily at the air. “Your ego is still just as fragile as ever. Can’t handle having your wife do better than you at something so you have to go boohoo and take your toys home! And you know what? I end up having to do everything alone!”
“You were always so good at it, why would you even NEED help?”
“Maybe I needed my husband,” she snapped back. “Maybe I needed some freaking support! Maybe I needed to not be abandoned!” She threw her coffee cup at the bulkhead, where the cup shattered and the hot liquid ran down the metal as her large cat shot out of the missile’s way. “Maybe I needed to be left alone once I was and not dragged into your damn mess, running for my life, and STILL having to deal with your childish self!”
“Maybe it’s kind of hard to live with the idea that you and I are only in this mess because I suck at my job, you know? I got you into this mess, and every mess. You know how that makes me feel, knowing that?” He paused and she heard a sigh. When he started talking again, he wasn’t shouting. “I’m sorry, Rave, okay? I’m sorry I left you, and I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’m just a selfish jerk, okay?”
Raven took a breath and rubbed her hands over her face. “Not all the time,” she finally said. “I wouldn’t have married you if that was the case.” Sighing heavily herself, she looked at the shattered cup and realized what she’d done. She went to the maintenance locker and pulled out some cleaning supplies, starting to clean up. “When you left me, it hurt. Really bad.”
“You may not believe this, but it hurt me too,” he said, sounding defeated. “I knew I made a mistake almost the instant I made it, but I couldn’t come back. I had to prove something to myself and not just become a bitter. You deserved better than to deal with me like that. I hoped I could sort myself out and then grovel and we could try again, but you started divorce proceedings and were…really angry.”
“Were you surprised?” she returned as she got to her knees and started cleaning.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
“Your ego doesn’t seem to have changed much, though,” she pointed out, but the rancor had already fled fast.
He grunted softly. “I thought I’d changed. And I think I had…but I feel so unbelievably bad for getting us into this mess…and so inadequate to get us out of it. This is a serious mess, Rave. After what Marlo brought up, about if raiders had found out, I realize how close I could have come to getting killed, and now the people that know us best are trying to kill us both. I could get you killed, Rave! If that happens, I hope they get me too, because I don’t think I could live with that.”
Raven swallowed hard, sitting back on her heels for a moment. “You’re not, like, an idiot, you know? Just because you weren’t stellar at the job, don’t use that as an excuse to not try to do things.”
There was a long pause. “You’re right,” he finally said quietly.
“I can’t do this all alone. I can’t figure everything out by myself,” she went on. “I don’t really care who is to blame for how we got here. We’re here, and tossing around blame doesn’t help anything. What will help is if we work together and you stop acting like an idiot.”
“You always could get straight to the point,” he said, laughing softly. “But you’re not wrong.”
She snorted and resisted the urge to say something that wasn’t helpful.
He sighed again. “We could just run away together,” he said quietly.
“What?” she asked as she got up to throw out the remains of the cup and put the cleaning supplies away. “What are you talking about?”
“I was just thinking… I mean. We can’t take on guys like this, can we? So what if we just take off? We could find somewhere away from all this and just…” He trailed off, like he either didn’t know how to finish that or wasn’t sure he should.
For a moment, she was tempted.
It only lasted that moment, though. She shook her head, despite the fact that he wouldn’t be able to see it. “We can’t, Blake. I do see the appeal, really I do, but we can’t run away. You ran away from me. You ran away from Halliwell. You can’t keep running from things. We gotta figure out what to do about this, then do it.”
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I kinda like the idea, though, and not just because of running from this.”
“I know,” she said just as quietly. The truth was, she liked it too, but she didn’t know if she wanted to tell him that.
The silence stretched out between them for a while. Raven though that the animals and AIs were being remarkably quiet during all this, when Kyra was usually the type to butt right in to everything.
Raven was the one to break the silence.
“We need to get proof of Halliwell’s involvement, or at least Stillwell’s. Right now, we have drugs in cargo compartments, but that’s evidence against the hunters with those ships and not against the person who put it there.”
“We need to find the one who is either putting the drugs in or taking the drugs out,” Blake said, audibly trying to help more. “No, that’s not right. We need to find the people who are taking the drugs out, because the ones putting them in are not technically committing a crime while in neutral space.”
“That’s right,” Raven said thoughtfully. “We need to find the people who are taking the drugs out, and find out where they take them.”
Blake was quiet for a moment. “We could tail Marlo? He was leaving tomorrow, he said, and would be taking his ship with the drugs back to Allied space…”
She smiled slowly. “You’re right. He was.”
25
They stayed a little while longer in the nebula, just to help dissuade anyone from looking for them. The time was hardly a guarantee of that, of course, but it had to help. Somehow, Raven doubted their pursuers were paragons of patience.
“How do we know that we’re not just going to draw their attention again the moment we get back to the station?” Blake asked as the AIs prepared the ships to head back out of the nebula.
“We don’t,” Raven replied matter-of-factly as she drank another cup of coffee. She had lost count. “We can just hope. We will not, however, be docking with the station, and I think that will help. If they have active sensors running with details of our ships, then we’re screwed, but if not, we have a chance.”
There was a long pause. “I’m not full of confidence.”
She laughed mirthlessly over the edge of her cup. “Join the club.”
“We’re ready to depart, Raven,” Silvanus announced. “We will be leaving the nebula in one minute. Our scans out are just about as limited as anyone’s scans in, but from what we can see, there are no other ships in our vicinity.”
“At least that’s one positive,” Raven said, leaning back in her seat.
The ships left the nebula one minute later, down to the second. At least without atmospheric travel, everything went pretty smoothly. Raven closed her eyes and tried not to think about everything that could go wrong…that likely would go wrong. This was potentially the dumbest plan she’d ever had or agreed to, but it wasn’t like they had much time to come up with something better.
‘Kyra,’ she began wearily, not even wanting to hear the sound of her own voice, ‘what am I doing?’
‘The only thing we can do at this point,’ the cat replied without even opening her eyes as she lay stretched out on the floor. ‘You can be all…human and spend lots of time going back over things to see where you could have made a different choice, but considering your lack of ability to bend time, you can’t do anything about it so why bother? This is the choice we have now, so we take the best option we can. We can’t live on the run. We can’t roll over and die. We can’t join the corruption. So, we do this. Stop questioning it.’
It was perhaps the longest speech that Kyra had ever made, but at least it was still made with all her usual annoyed pragmatism.
‘Thanks,’ Raven said with
tired amusement.
Kyra didn’t reply.
The AI ships cruised back into the space around Starbase Marauder, cautiously watching for any sign of trouble. So far, the trouble that had found them had always been in person and not in space, but that could change at any moment. They didn’t need to add mistakes to the list of chances being taken.
“Is Marlo’s ship still here?” Raven asked.
“Yes. Kavi is still docked with the star base. We are approaching on the opposite side of the station to avoid any passive scans,” Silvanus replied.
Raven nodded slowly. “Let’s stay as far away as we can while still keeping an eye on them. I really don’t want to be spotted.”
“Of course.”
The AI made sure Nyx was still on the same page, and then…they waited.
After about twenty minutes, there hadn’t been any trouble, but there also weren’t any signs of Marlo’s imminent departure. Raven ended up falling asleep on her sofa.
“RAVEN!”
“What?!” Raven cried, sitting up so fast that her blood dropped out of her head and she nearly blacked out. She grabbed her head with both hands and a groan. “What? I’m awake. What’s going on?”
“You wouldn’t wake up,” Silvanus explained in a much quieter volume. “If shouting didn’t work, we were moving on to alarms and flashing lights next.”
Raven grimaced.
“We have been following Marlo’s ship for four and a half hours, and he is heading to a station to dock. We are back in Earth-Allied space,” the AI reported.
“Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” Raven asked, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands as she tried to push the grogginess out of her brain. She worried that she had been asleep too long, and yet it felt like it wasn’t nearly enough.
“There was no need,” the AI replied. “I attempted to when we departed, but you did not rouse easily. I knew you needed the rest. You should get something to eat and some water now before you drink any more coffee. Nyx and I will be monitoring Marlo’s ship and the section with the compartment.”
Double Sharpe Page 8
