Chapter 8: The Last Twelve Hours
The cargo hold of the Free Lance smelled like ozone and cold coffee. Behind the bulkhead, a plasma cutter whined against hull plate, and Solano's people called back and forth in clipped bursts as they fitted the hijacked hauler's transponder into its mount. Dave stood in the shadow of a supply stack, counting the crew through the gap in the crates. Four of them, maybe five, all working the far side of the hold.
Jane came up behind him without a sound. Her hand found his belt and hooked a finger under the buckle.
"You're supposed to be resting," he said, not turning around.
"I'm not tired." She pressed her chest against his back, her breath warm at his ear. "You promised me something before."
"I promised you a cabin on a moon."
"That's not the one I meant."
He turned. In the hold's dim glow her face looked younger than it had in weeks, the hollows softened, the wariness gone from her eyes. She was wearing one of his shirts again, the sleeves rolled past her elbows, and nothing else that he could see.
"You want to do this here?" he said. "Half the crew is a bulkhead away."
"Does it look like I'm asking?"
She held his stare while the plasma cutter shrieked on the far side of the hold. Somewhere past the crates, a crate lid banged shut, and Solano's voice cut through the noise, telling somebody to brace the mount before it tore loose.
Dave caught Jane's wrist. Then he let go and stepped past her, deeper into the shadows between two towers of supply crates, where the neon didn't reach.
"That's a yes," she said, and followed.
The gap between the stacks was barely wide enough for the two of them. Crates of stripped engine parts rose on either side, sealed and stencilled with Council serials, and the deck plates underfoot were cold enough to bite through boot leather. Overhead, a pipe sweated condensation in a slow, irregular drip.
Jane didn't wait for him to say anything else. She put a hand flat on his chest and pushed until his back met crate metal.
"I've been thinking about this since the briefing," she said. "You standing there with your jaw doing that thing. Solano talking about girls like me disappearing, and you not looking at me once."
"I was looking at the map."
"You were looking at the wall." Her fingers worked his belt open. "So I decided I'd stop waiting for a bed."
"You're going to get us caught."
"Then be quiet."
She went down. Not graceful about it, either. Her knees hit the deck plate with a dull knock, and she hissed through her teeth at the cold, and then she had his cock out through his open fly and her hand wrapped around the base of it, and she looked up at him once before she took him in.
Dave's head tipped back against the crate. The stencil dug into his shoulder blade. He didn't care.
Her mouth was hot after the cold air, and she didn't tease him. She took him in slow, an inch at a time, her tongue flat along the underside until she had most of him, and then she pulled back and did it again. Spit gathered at the corners of her mouth and ran down the shaft into her fist. Each stroke made a wet, obscene little sound that seemed far too loud in the narrow gap between the stacks.
"Fuck," he breathed.
She hummed around him, pleased with herself, and the vibration went straight up his spine. Her free hand came up to grip his hip, fingers digging in over the fabric of his pants, holding him in place like she was afraid he'd bolt. He wasn't going anywhere. He let his hand settle on the back of her head, not pushing, just there, feeling the shape of her skull under his palm and the steady rhythm she'd found.
Beyond the bulkhead someone laughed. A tool clattered. Solano said something about the transponder code and got an answer Dave didn't bother to parse.
Jane pulled off him with a wet pop and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
"Don't tell me to stop," she said.
"I wasn't going to."
"Good." She stood, and her knees cracked, and she shoved her own shorts down over her hips and stepped out of them. They landed in a puddle of pipe sweat on the deck. She didn't pick them up.
He got a hand on her waist and turned her toward a stack of supply crates, the low ones, lids bolted, wide enough to brace against. She understood and bent over them without being told. His shirt rode up her back. She wasn't wearing anything under it after all.
The crate lid was cold against her forearms. She spread her legs as far as the gap allowed, and Dave stepped in behind her, one hand on her hip and the other finding her, sliding two fingers through the wet heat of her to make sure she was ready.
She was. She'd been ready the whole time.
"Just do it," she said. "I told you I'm not made of glass."
He lined himself up and pushed in. She took him all at once, no easing, and her breath punched out of her in a hard, bitten-off sound that she killed in the back of her throat before it could carry. Her hands curled into fists against the crate.
"Quiet," he reminded her, and she nodded fast, and he started to move.
The slap of his hips against her ass was the loudest thing in the world. He kept it slow at first, long pulls that let her feel every inch drag back out of her, and she pushed back into him every time, greedy, chasing it. Then she reached back and grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand around to her front, and he got the message.
He fucked her harder. The crate shifted an inch, grating on the deck plate, and they both froze and listened to the noise on the other side of the bulkhead. Nobody came.
"Again," she whispered.
He gave it to her. Hard and steady, one hand clamped over her mouth now, his palm tasting of gun oil, and she bit down on the meat of it to keep quiet. Her breath came in hot huffs through her nose. Sweat gathered at the small of her back and dripped off his jaw onto the curve of her spine. His other hand worked between her thighs, thumb dragging rough circles over her clit, and her whole body started to shake with it.
She came with his hand still over her mouth, teeth sunk in, a low animal noise trapped in her chest. Her cunt clenched hard around him in waves and that was the end of his restraint. He drove in twice more and emptied himself into her with a groan he couldn't keep down, face pressed into the back of her neck, breathing her in.
For a count of five neither of them moved.
Then the intercom crackled and Solano's voice filled the hold. "Callahan. Hauler's fueled and the transponder reads clean. You and Jane get down here in ten, I want you walking the manifest before we launch."
Dave pulled out of her. Jane straightened up slow, both hands on the small of her back, and gave him a look over her shoulder that was almost a smirk.
"You heard the captain," she said.
"Your shorts are on the floor."
"So they are." She bent and fished them out of the puddle, shook them off, and pulled them on. There was a dark patch spreading on the fabric, and she didn't bother hiding it.
Dave tucked himself away and straightened his belt. His hands weren't entirely steady. He checked anyway, the habit too old to drop.
"Ten minutes," he said.
"Then we'd better walk fast." Jane stepped out of the gap between the stacks ahead of him, smoothing his shirt down over her hips. When she glanced back, her face was already closed again, the softness wiped off it like condensation off glass. But she reached back and caught his fingers in hers for three steps before she let go.
Solano was waiting near the airlock when they came around the last stack, arms crossed, watching the hauler through the open hatch. She looked them over once, head to boots, and said nothing about the flush still sitting high on Jane's cheeks or the hole in the shoulder of Dave's shirt.
"The manifest's on the console," she said. "Read it twice. If Hephaestus asks us for a code we don't have, we're all dead before we clear the bay."
Dave took the console. Jane stood at his shoulder and read it with him, line by line, and neither of them looked at the other for a long while.
Jane took the manifest from him before he could start, laying it flat on the console and running her finger down the first column. It was a dense thing, six pages of goods code and routing stamps, printed in the Council's narrow utilitarian font. She read like she was inhaling it, eyes tracking fast, lips moving on the harder numbers.
"Read it twice," Dave said.
"I heard her." She didn't look up.
He stood where he was and watched the hold instead. Solano's crew had the hauler hatch open, two of them inside running a light down the length of the cargo frame. The thing was ugly, a blunt wedge of a ship built for volume and nothing else, its hull scabbed with old patch jobs. Somewhere inside it was a Council transponder that would tell Hephaestus exactly what it wanted to hear.
Jane turned the page. "Page three. Line four. Read me that back."
He leaned in. "Medical stores, class two. Two hundred kilos, consigned to the Hephaestus commissary."
"Wrong."
"It says what it says."
"It says class two because that's what they declare." She tapped the line. "Class two is bandages and saline. Two hundred kilos of bandages doesn't come through a secured depot. That weight is a signature. It's a code for something they don't want on the books."
Dave looked at the line again. She was right about the weight. Nobody moved two hundred kilos of gauze.
"How do you know that?"
"They kept me in a store room for four months on Ganymede." Her voice didn't change. "I slept next to the manifests. You learn what the numbers mean when the numbers decide whether you eat."
Dave let that sit. He didn't say sorry and she didn't want him to.
She flipped to the next page and traced a route stamp with her nail. "This one's a double. Same consignment number, two different origins. That's a smuggling trick, they deadhead a second load under the first one's papers. If Hephaestus runs the code, they get the first load's record and the second one rides in free."
"You've been reading these for years."
"I've been surviving with them." She turned another page. "Don't write any of it down. If we get boarded, paper is evidence."
"I wasn't going to write it down."
"Good."
She finished the fourth page and went back to the first, slower this time, mouthing the codes. Dave watched her work. The flush was gone from her cheeks and something harder had taken its place, the look she got when the past turned useful. It was the first time he'd seen her enjoy anything that came out of that store room.
Solano came down the ramp wiping her hands on a rag. "How's the reading?"
"She's got three anomalies already," Dave said.
Solano looked at Jane with new interest. "Anomalies."
Jane turned the manifest toward her and pointed without ceremony. "This cargo weight is a code. This consignment number is doubled. And this one here." She jabbed the fifth page. "The receiving officer's stamp is expired by eleven days. Nobody sends a shipment into a depot with stale paperwork unless they're not expecting the receiving officer to still be alive to check it."
Solano read the page twice. Her jaw worked. "That's an internal hit. Somebody at Hephaestus is clearing a path."
"That's what it looks like."
"Then they'll be expecting a hauler." Solano folded the rag and tucked it in her belt. "Which is exactly what we're bringing them. Problem is, if they're crooked, they've got their own codes running. Ours could be stale too."
"No." Jane tapped the top line. "This routing stamp is dated yesterday. The crystal's codes came off a live terminal. We're current for at least another thirty hours."
Dave caught the look Solano shot him, quick and sharp, the first genuine approval he'd seen from her. She wiped it off fast.
"Then we launch on schedule." She turned toward the airlock. "Jane, I want you on the console for the approach. If anything on that manifest doesn't match what Hephaestus asks for, you tell me before I answer."
"You'll answer to me first," Jane said.
Solano stopped. For a second the hold went quiet enough to hear the condensation dripping off the overhead pipe. Then she nodded, once, and kept walking.
"Ten minutes," she called back. "Say your goodbyes to the deck plates."
Dave folded the manifest and handed it to Jane. She tucked it inside his shirt, against her chest, the way she'd carried the crystal.
"You just talked yourself onto the bridge of a warship," he said.
"I talked myself onto the one seat where I can keep us alive." She looked up at him, and there was the softness again, brief and stolen, before it went. "You didn't think I was going to sit in the hold and wait, did you?"
"No."
"Good." She walked past him toward the ramp, and this time she didn't reach back for his hand. She didn't need to. He was already behind her.
The hauler's interior was worse than the outside, bare ribs and a floor slick with condensation, but the console up front was clean and lit, its screens running the manifest against the crystal's data in a slow green crawl. Jane slid into the co-pilot's seat like she'd been born in it. Dave took the wall next to the hatch, where he could see the whole cabin and the ramp both.
Solano dropped into the pilot's chair and wrapped her hands around the yoke. "Free Lance airlock sealed. Hauler undocked in nine."
Jane leaned into the screen and began to read.
The hauler shuddered as the docking clamps released, a long grinding groan that ran the length of the hull and settled into the floor plates under Dave's boots. Through the forward port he watched the Free Lance's cargo bay swing away, a cave of flickering light and stacked crates receding into the dark. Then the hauler's own running lights came up and there was nothing out there but stars.
"Clean separation," Solano said, working the yoke. "Course laid for the Hephaestus approach corridor. Four hours, give or take."
Jane didn't answer. She had her face close to the screen, one hand flat on the console, the green crawl of data reflected in her eyes.
Dave stayed where he was by the hatch, back to the bulkhead. Old habit. On a ship you learned it in the first month: never sit in a cabin you haven't walked. He'd done it on the Salt Harvest and he'd do it here.
So while Solano flew and Jane read, he walked the cabin.
It was small. Two flight chairs, a console, a service locker, a hatch aft into the cargo frame. Bare ribs, conduit bundled along the ceiling in cable ties that had yellowed with age. Somebody had bolted a coffee bulb holder to the wall and never cleaned the ring of old grime around it.
He opened the service locker. Tools, a first aid kit with a cracked seal, three rations. Nothing.
"You checking my ship?" Solano asked without turning.
"Checking the ship I'm on."
"Fair."
He moved aft to the cargo hatch. It was dogged tight, the handle stiff, and when he cracked it the smell that came out was old cardboard and machine oil. He pulled it wide and stepped into the frame.
The hold was a long ribbed tunnel lit by two strip lights, both flickering at different rates. Crates were strapped down both sides in neat ranks, all of them stencilled with the Council's serials. The manifest said medical stores. It said spare parts. It said a lot of things.
Dave walked the port side first, running his palm along the strap tensioners. Second crate up he stopped.
The strap on that one was tight. Too tight. Whoever had cinched it had done it in a hurry and left a fold in the webbing where the buckle bit. He crouched and put his light on it.
There was a plate on the crate's side, a small recessed housing about the size of a deck of cards, and it didn't match the paint. The paint around it was older, grayer. Somebody had cut that housing in after the crate left the factory.
He used his knife to pop the cover. Inside, packed in foam, sat a fist-sized cylinder with a single pin diode blinking slow and green.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
He knew that hardware. He'd pulled four of them off the hotel's service corridors in the two years before he left. Council issue, short range, encrypted burst. Meant to be bolted to cargo so a handler could find their shipment if it went missing.
Meant to be bolted to cargo a handler wanted found.
He sat back on his heels and did the math. The Free Lance had taken this hauler six months ago. Solano said it had been in cold storage. But the diode was blinking, which meant it had power, which meant either the cell was fresh or nobody had bothered to pull it.
Either way, something on this ship was talking.
He checked the other crates. Three more. Same housing, same cut-in paint, all four blinking their slow green pulse into the dark of the hold.
"Solano," he called. "Get back here."
Boots on deck plate. She came through the hatch with her hand on her sidearm, which told him she'd heard the tone right. Jane came behind her, manifest still in her fist.
Dave pointed the light at the open housing. Solano crouched, looked, and went very still.
"Fuck," she said. It wasn't loud. It was the flattest word he'd ever heard her say.
"Four of them," Dave said. "Port side, every third crate. Could be more on the starboard rack."
Solano reached for the cylinder. Dave caught her wrist.
"Don't. If it's got a tamper switch, moving it trips a burst."
She pulled her hand back. "How do you know this hardware?"
"I ran station security for six years. I've pulled these off smugglers' crates in the construction wings maybe a dozen times." He straightened up. "They're Council issue. Short range, encrypted. They're cargo finders."
"Then it's a leftover." Solano's jaw worked. "Hauler's been cold six months. Battery's just still good."
"No." Jane's voice came from behind them, quiet and certain.
They both turned.
She wasn't looking at the cylinder. She was looking at the housing, leaning in close with the strip light behind her so the cut edges of the paint showed.
"That cut's clean," she said. "No corrosion in the seam. That housing went in weeks ago, not six months."
Solano leaned in and looked. Her face changed.
"You're sure."
"Look at the paint edge. Six months in a cold bay and there'd be rust bloom on the cut steel." Jane tapped her nail on the rim. It rang clean. "That's fresh work."
Dave felt the deck tilt under him, and it wasn't the ship.
"Somebody put these on after we took the ship," he said.
"Or somebody put them on after we took the ship and before we fuelled her today." Solano stood up slow, and her hand came off her sidearm and went to the wall for balance. "Somebody in my crew."
The hold went quiet except for the two strip lights buzzing at each other.
"How long have they been transmitting?" Jane asked.
Dave crouched again and got his light on the diode. It wasn't just blinking. It had a faint second light under it, a tiny amber bead, and that bead was steady.
"Amber means it's got a fix," he said. "It's been heard by something. That's the handshake light."
Solano turned and walked back toward the cabin without a word. Dave and Jane followed her through the hatch. She dropped into the pilot's chair and started pulling the comm array up on the screen, punching through menus, her fingers fast and sloppy.
"Last outgoing burst from this ship," she muttered. "Anything, any band."
The screen scrolled. Then stopped.
There it was. A tightbeam packet, sent the previous night, twenty-two minutes after the Free Lance docked the hauler to the outer ring. Destination logged as a relay buoy on the Hephaestus approach lane.
Solano sat back.
"They know we're coming," she said.
Jane put the manifest down on the console, flat and careful, like it might bite.
"No," Dave said. "They know a hauler's coming. They don't know who's flying it. That's the only thing we've got left."
Solano looked up at him. For once there was no smirk in it.
"Then we've got four hours to decide whether we turn around or walk into it."
Dave looked at the screen, at the blinking number of the burst packet, at the relay buoy sitting right where they were headed like a light on a runway.
Jane's hand found his, quick and out of sight of the pilot's chair. He squeezed it once and let go.
"Kill the beacons," he said. "Then get me a manifest of every soul who's been aboard this ship since we took her."
Solano didn't answer him right away. She turned back to the console and dragged the ship's log up onto the screen, scrolling past fuel figures and dock times until she found the crew roster. Nine names, not one of them crossed out.
"Nine souls aboard since we took her," she said. "The list is nine."
"Put it up bigger." Dave leaned over her shoulder. "And pull the fuelling record."
The roster filled the screen in green. Four of the names belonged to the deck crew who'd prepped the hauler. Five belonged to the Free Lance's own complement, and those five were people Solano had flown with for years.
"Who else fuelled her today?" Dave asked.
"Reyes and Pell. Reyes signed the slip." Solano tapped the second name. "Pell's the one who mounted the transponder."
"Where's Pell now?"
"On the Free Lance, strapping down the last of our stores." Solano's mouth flattened. "Where he's supposed to be."
Jane stepped up behind them, close enough that Dave felt her shoulder against his. She was reading the roster the way she'd read the manifest, slow, one name at a time.
"Twelve hours," she said. "That's when the packet went out. Twenty-two minutes after the hauler docked to the ring."
"So?" Solano.
"So the docking took thirty-one minutes." Jane's finger tapped the screen. "Whoever sent that burst from this console had it warmed up before the clamps even closed."
The cabin went quiet. Out past the port the stars held steady, and somewhere behind them the Free Lance was a receding smudge of running lights.
"That's not proof," Solano said. It came out rough.
"No," Jane said. "It's a name with a window around it."
Dave straightened his back and looked at the pilot's chair, at the woman sitting in it with her hands loose on the arms. She'd been hunting the Council since before he'd been old enough to carry a badge. She knew how this ended.
"You want me to write the crew list on the wall where anyone can read it?" Jane asked. "Because that's the only other way to sort them. Ask each one what they were doing at dock and watch their face."
"No." Solano shook her head once. "We don't have four hours for a witch hunt, and if there's a rat on my ship, the last thing I want is him knowing we're onto him."
"Then we turn around," Dave said. "Kill the beacons, go dark, eat the four hours and come back with a plan that doesn't walk us into a prepared reception."
"If we turn around, the relay buoy logs us reversing course. That's a red flag on the approach lane and the Free Lance is sitting right where we left her, fat and slow. They'd burn her where she floats."
Dave had already done that math. He'd hoped she hadn't.
He pulled the cargo hold's interior onto the screen instead, the manifest, the codes, the four blinking beacons still plotted on the port rack. The crystal's data had gotten them this far and there was still a clean line through it: a shipment coming in with the right stamps at the right hour. Everything past the docking bay was written down in that green crawl, and everything before it was poison.
"So what's the play?" he said.
Solano put her hands on the console and pushed herself up out of the chair. She stood in the middle of the little cabin with the strip light behind her and looked at the two of them like she was measuring whether they'd hold.
"I'm the play," she said. "The Council's wanted me for eleven years. Every depot in their network has a standing bounty on my head big enough to buy a moon." She shrugged one shoulder. "So we give them what they've been salivating for. I walk down that ramp with my hands cuffed and my crew surrendering me."
Nobody spoke for a second. The strip light buzzed.
"Say that again," Jane said.
"I walk off the ramp in irons and I tell them the hauler's a defection. I tell the bay commander I've got the Free Lance's codes and I'll trade them for a full pardon and a berth. They'll take me straight to whoever runs Hephaestus, because a prize like me doesn't sit in a holding cell, it gets walked up the chain." Solano's eyes moved between them. "Every gun in that bay turns toward me. Every sensor, every guard, every officer with a promotion in his teeth. And while they're all staring at the old woman in cuffs, the two of you go through the service hatch the manifest says is behind the fuel bunkers."
"You're volunteering," Jane said.
"I'm proposing."
"Same thing."
Dave crossed the small cabin and stood in front of her. He was taller than Solano by a head and she didn't step back.
"And you expect them to believe that?" he asked. "A hauler full of stolen Council freight, flown in by the woman they've been hunting for eleven years, and she hands herself over for nothing?"
"For a pardon." Solano held his look. "They'll want to believe it. That's the whole trick with a bribe. You make it the story the other man already wants to hear."
Jane hadn't moved from the console. Her hand was still flat on the screen, fingers spread over the blinking amber bead.
"What happens to us if they take you apart on that deck?" she asked. "They'll scan you, they'll cuff you, they'll pull you off to an interrogation room and you'll be gone. What do we do then, with no pilot and no codes and a station waking up around us?"
"Then you run, and you're on your own, and you knew that when you got on my ship." Solano said it plainly, no apology in it. "That's the cost of using me."
Dave looked at Jane. Jane looked back, and something passed between them that Solano wasn't part of, a quick tally they'd been running since the brothel floor.
"Who flies the Free Lance out if you don't?" Dave asked.
"Mercer can. He flew salvage tugs before he got into security." Solano turned and pulled a small flat case out of the console's side pocket, thumbed it open, and held it up. A data chit, plain, unmarked, and a key card under it, both of them on a ring.
"Free Lance's master override and the berth code for a bolthole on Ceres. The identities I promised you are in the chit. All four of us, clean papers, no Council ink on any of them." She put it in Dave's hand and closed his fingers over it. "If you don't hear from me on the dock band within ninety minutes of your reaching the data core, you take Jane and you take Mercer and you take my ship, and you never look back."
Dave looked down at the chit in his fist. It weighed almost nothing. Three months ago he'd been a security chief counting trap houses and now every plan he had left fit in the palm of one hand.
"Ninety minutes," he said.
"Ninety. Not a minute longer. I'll know if you're late because I'll be dead."
Jane finally left the console. She walked to the locker by the aft hatch, opened it, and came back with a set of the ship's own cargo restraints, spring-steel cuffs on a short chain.
"Then we'd better make it look real," she said, and dropped them into Solano's lap.