and some part of me knew it, but I didn’t stop, not even when Ian shouted my name.
He caught up to me in the middle of the tiny cargo hold. “Bianca, talk to me, what’s going on?”
I stopped, but only because he’d wedged himself between me and the door control. “I won’t be responsible for their deaths,” I said. “Or yours.”
He smiled at me, a true smile, and my breath caught at the beauty of it. “You may not have noticed,” he said calmly, “but I’m hard to kill. Next concern.”
“Alex and Aoife know they are going to die, and they’re going anyway—I’ve seen that look before. They were kind to me and they helped me and I won’t repay them with death.”
Ian stepped closer, into my personal space. “Alex and Aoife are soldiers. They know what it is to prepare for battle. I didn’t order them to come, they volunteered—after I’d warned them about the risks. They hope to be able to kick some Rockhurst ass, but they’ll settle for MineCorp. Next concern.”
“Ada will never forgive me.”
Ian slowly and carefully slid his arms around me. When I didn’t balk, he pulled me into a gentle hug. I rested my head against his shoulder and wrapped my arms around his waist.
“Your sister will forgive you,” he said. His voice vibrated through his chest, a soothing rumble. “She understands sacrifice. Next concern.”
Lulled by the comfort he offered, the truth slipped out. “I’m worried that if I let you, you’ll break my heart.”
I tensed. He froze. His breath caught, interrupting the even rise and fall of his chest. Finally, he said, very quietly, “Anyone lucky enough to be entrusted with your heart would be a fool to treat it carelessly.”
“Are you a fool?” I ventured.
“I was, once. I try not to be anymore.”
Chapter 22
Ian coaxed me back to the flight deck. We did not speak of the final words whispered between us, but the sprig of hope nestled next to my heart burned brightly.
I responded to Ada’s flurry of messages with just a single line: I will bring him home. I wrote another message with everything I knew about Ferdinand, MineCorp, and XAD Seven. I encrypted it with our shared key and set it on a twelve-hour timer. If anything happened to me, Ada would know where and why.
I briefly searched through the files I’d pulled from MineCorp. They had regular shipments of people headed to XAD Seven. Either Rockhurst was radically expanding mining operations, or workers were dying at an alarming rate. Maybe both.
Ian took us into orbit, then turned to me. “Where is Ferdinand?”
“XAD Seven.”
“Fuck.”
Well, that pretty succinctly covered my feelings, too. “Yeah. It’s not quite as bad as if it was XAD Six, but it’s not great. The only positive, if you can call it that, is that MineCorp keeps shipping in new people. We have a few options.”
“Any idea how advanced their base is?” Aoife asked.
“No. Ada said XAD Six wasn’t terraformed, so I don’t expect Seven to be, either. They’re mining, so they’ll be underground. And based on the number of people they’re shipping in, it’s either a large operation or multiple sites.”
“I will check to see if House von Hasenberg has any recent intelligence or surveillance,” Ian said.
“As far as I can tell, we have three options.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, we go in stealth and parachute in from a high altitude to avoid detection. Once we grab Ferdinand, Phantom will need to do a hot pickup then disappear.”
Ian grimaced. It wasn’t my first choice, either, but it was an option.
“Two,” I continued, “I fake the registration on Phantom and we pretend to be a MineCorp special delivery or inspection. XAD Seven is far enough from a gate to buy us time while the verification goes through. Even if they’ve set up an FTL hub on XAD Six, we’d still have over two hours before the response comes back. But if they have their own hub, then we’re screwed.”
Direct FTL communication was tricky to set up and wildly expensive, so most messages were bounced through the gates on communication drones and passing ships. For distant planets far from a gate, messages could take days to be delivered.
I touched my third finger. “Or option three: we take over a real MineCorp shipment. Ian and I will sneak in and find Ferdinand while Alex and Aoife deliver the workers.” My mouth curled in disgust at the word. We’d be delivering people to a hellhole