took it for granted he’d succeed. He liked that. Braced against the tiles, he bent to wash his legs. “You have a time frame?”
*Depends on Ressk.*
“He’s got to take control of the program.”
*Programs. Gravity, hatches, and the runners—the cables that’ll help control the armory.* “Zero G; it won’t weigh anything.”
*It’ll still mass one fuk of a lot.*
“Right.” They were talking just to hear each other now. Since he knew it, Craig assumed Torin knew it, too. “Well, give me a heads-up and I’ll go out with the armory. While you’re getting the grapples on it, I’ll hit Promise’s air lock and be inside before they even notice I’m gone.”
This new silence felt different.
“Torin?”
*I’m not on Promise. I’m on Pedro’s Second Star.”
“God fukking damn it, Torin!” So much for her just calling in the Marines. And how nice she didn’t mention it until now. “Pedro has kids!”
*Pedro’s not with us.* Her voice gave nothing away. Absolutely nothing. She never pulled that shit on him, never, so if the situation was so bad she couldn’t not . . . Craig shifted into a more stable position as she continued. *I bought the Star from him, from the family, because the Promise was too badly damaged to use.*
“What? Damaged?”
*Cho shot the shit out of it when he took you.*
His skin pebbled as a chill slid down his spine. Torin wasn’t hiding how she felt about the Promise—or Cho’s part in it at least. And she’d clearly gone back to the station if she had Pedro’s Star. What would Torin have done when . . .
“You tried to turn the salvage operators into a ragtag battle fleet, didn’t you? I could have told you that wouldn’t work.”
*You weren’t there.*
“They’re not Marines, Torin,” he said gently, turning the water off and reaching for a towel. “You can’t feel betrayed because they didn’t act like Marines.”
*Not the time to talk about it.*
“Granted.” He added it to his mental list of thing they needed to talk about after the rescue. The list, not exactly short before he’d needed rescuing, had grown to the point where whatever this was between them needed to last for a good long time or they’d never get to everything. He crumbled the towel between his hands and sagged back against the bulkhead. “Torin, where the fuk is my ship?”
*The Wardens have her. Evidence. The damage is external. Structural—not functional. I patched what I could in order to fold her back to the station . . . *
“You what? Never mind.” Not a story he needed to hear now. Even thinking of the possibilities had begun to knock sharp edges onto the throbbing in his skull. “We’re going to have to break her out, aren’t we?” At the speed the Wardens worked, both he and Torin would be dead of old age before they were ready to release the Promise back into his hands.
*I’ll add it to the list.*
Not a big surprise to discover that Torin also had a list. Hers probably involved a lot more hitting and a lot less talking.
*We need to break this off. Chance of random scans . . . *
“Right.”
*Three hours, forty-six minutes and it’ll all be over. One way or another.*
Craig stared down at the place his toe had been and wished she hadn’t added the qualifier.
“Fukking hell, Cap, I have no idea where Doc is.” Nat dropped into one of the eight chairs surrounding the big galley table and stared into a mug of coffee like she wasn’t entirely certain what it was. “I’m not his fukking mother, am I?”
Cho folded his arms and leaned back against the counter. “How drunk are you?” he growled.
“Not very. I took a party pooper pill on the way back to the ship. Be sober as a C’tron any minute now.”
“And while you were out there drinking, did you remember what I sent you out to do?”
“Sure.” The fingertips on the hand she waved were stained with fresh blood. “Find out what Big Bill’s up to without giving anything away. Shit, I couldn’t do that without drinking because me being in a bar without drinking would raise suspicions you don’t want raised. That last one, that was not the first party pooper pill I took and my stomach would like . . . oh, fuk.” Nat set the mug carefully on the table, stood, walked to the sink and puked up a thin stream of colorless bile.
Barely maintaining a fingernail grip on his temper, Cho sidestepped farther from the sink