“Not quite.” Torin felt his chest rise and fall against her back as he took a deep breath. “I used my winnings to buy the coordinates for a tech field from a cargo jockey.”
“Magic beans were going to be my next guess.”
FOUR
CRAIG BLINKED UP AT THE top of the bunk, wondering what had woken him. He shifted, realized he was alone, and from the lack of residual heat, probably had been for some time. Rolling up onto his side, he could see the back of the pilot’s chair silhouetted against light rising from the control panel and assumed Torin was in the chair.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said before he could speak.
It would never not be fukking creepy when she did that.
“Your breathing changed,” she added, spinning the chair around far enough so he could see her against the lit screen.
Craig thought about pointing out that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Torin wasn’t most people, never would be. The hour seemed to call for the direct approach. “What’re you doing?”
“Threat assessing. Go back to sleep.”
Yeah, like that was going to happen now. “Are we in danger?”
Torin huffed a laugh. “Most of the time.” One hand rose up through the light to wave at the fuzz of Susumi through the front port. “Screw up a basic trigonometric function, and that shit eats you for breakfast.”
Old news. “Specific danger?” he prodded, covering a yawn with his fist.
He couldn’t quite see her shrug, but her tone told him she had. “The data stores have nothing on The Heart of Stone.”
“No reason they should. It’s a cargo ship I’ve never run into before.”
“I don’t trust this . . . Nat. I don’t trust that she sold you the coordinates for so much less than they could be worth.”
“Could be worth,” Craig repeated, adding emphasis. “And she sold them for as much as she could get. Nat did okay, more than, given that she can’t bring in military salvage without tags. She got a sure thing. We’re taking the chance. And I checked the math before I paid her—the odds of it being a debris drift from the destruction of the Norrington , the M’rcgunn, and the Salvanos are high. Very high, even. But you know that because I showed you the numbers.” Eyes narrowed, he strained unsuccessfully to see her expression. “What’s really wrong?”
For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she sighed.
“I knew Marines on the M’rcgunn. Most of them are still MIA.”
“. . . three hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and twenty brought home. And counting.”
“You’re wondering if we’ll find them.”
“It had crossed my mind.”
Craig knew that one of Torin’s hands rested on the place the tiny cylinders holding the ashes of the dead would fit into a combat vest. He suspected she still carried every Marine she hadn’t been able to bring home alive. He wanted to tell her she could put them down. Knew it wasn’t his place. But he’d do what he could. “Come back to bed. Celebrate life.”
He could feel her stare. Heard her snort. “That may be the corniest pickup line anyone has ever used on me.”
“What can I say?” He grinned. “You’re a sure thing; I’ve stopped trying.”
Torin had always thought that, given the chance, she’d prefer to be at the controls during a Susumi fold rather than have her survival depend on another’s ability to get the equation right. Far as the Navy’s Susumi engineers were concerned, Marines were meat in a can. Not that Torin had ever actively worried about them getting it wrong. No point. Nothing she could do, strapped down in one of the Marine packets, would affect the outcome. She preferred to save her concern for things she could affect.
Turned out, being at the controls gave her exactly as much satisfaction as she’d thought it would. It felt good to have external responsibilities again.
The last time, she’d merely been at the controls when they emerged. This time, it was her fold, start to finish.
As the Susumi wave faded, she brought the front thrusters on to slow their emergent speed, and then checked her boards. “We’ve arrived at the coordinates we were aiming . . . Shit!”
“What?”
A piece of duct tape tore as Craig’s grip on the top of the chair actually tightened. Given the white-knuckled grip he’d been using as they came back into normal space, Torin hadn’t thought tighter was possible. “Scanners are reading dispersed Susumi radiation.”