“Cut off in the middle of a transmission,” Craig repeated, touching the tips of his fingers to the gray plastic hatch numbers as he followed. “Mechanical problems?”
Pedro snorted. “On Jan’s ship? I don’t think so. Jan considered her ship a part of her body.” He tossed the information in Torin’s direction. “No way it would have the kind of mechanical problems that’d keep them from getting a message out for four days. Wouldn’t happen. Just, no. And,” he added darkly, “Sirin said they’d picked up a maker.”
“The kind of salvage that’ll make you,” Craig explained.
Torin nodded and filed the slang away as she also touched the hatch numbers. It was a habit they’d both picked up since discovering a marker left in their brains sometimes caused the plastic aliens to spontaneously react to their touch. Sometimes. But it was all they had. When the hatch numbers remained inert, she turned her attention back to the matter at hand. If the salvage ship had been military, she’d assume they’d been attacked.
“You think they were attacked?” Craig asked Pedro as though he’d been following Torin’s train of thought.
“Don’t like to think it, but ...” Pedro spread his hands and shrugged.
It was unlikely but possible, Torin acknowledged silently, that a CSO could get caught up and destroyed in a naval battle. Sometimes they came in a little close.
“Fukking pirates!”
She grabbed Craig’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “Pirates?”
He nodded. “They net your pen with buoys to keep you from folding to Susumi. Most people dump the pen at that point, give it up. Sirin wouldn’t.”
“Wait.” Torin shook her head, trying to settle the thought. “There are actually people in ships—criminals in ships—stealing lawfully acquired salvage?”
“You didn’t know?”
“There was a war on, I was busy.” The concept of criminal activity on the scale of bad vid programming was a little hard to absorb. This wasn’t an episode of SpaceCops; real people, people Craig knew, were being attacked. “What’s being done about it? Are the Wardens involved?” The Wardens dealt with crime outside the jurisdiction of planets—or systems depending on local resources—and answered directly to Parliament, specifically the Justice Minister.
“Wardens don’t do shit. They’re supposed to send the Navy out to chase them down, but ...” Pedro shrugged again. “. . . there’s a war on. They’re busy.”
“War’s over.” Although, given the scale of the conflict and the geography of space, not to mention pure bloody-mindedness of some participants, battles continued to be fought.
“And I’m sure they’ll get around to us eventually.” Pedro’s tone had moved past dry to desiccated.
Torin’s hand dropped to her slate at the same time Craig wrapped callused fingers around her wrist. She was impressed he knew her that well.
“Okay, your first instinct is to fix it, I get that,” he said quietly, “but who are you going to tell who doesn’t already know?”
“Presit.”
She tried not to laugh as Craig opened his mouth and closed it a few times.
“Presit?” he managed at last. “Are you shitting me? You never liked her.”
“Liking her has nothing to do with it.” Presit a Tur durValintrisy had been a furry little pain in Torin’s ass from the moment she’d appeared on the alien ship, Big Yellow, determined to get the story in spite of its highly classified nature. While true that the reporter had far too high an opinion of her own importance, Torin had come to realize that media could be used as a powerful weapon and pointing powerful weapons had made up a large part of her previous career.
“The pirates are going after salvage operators now because you’re . . . we’re,” she corrected when Craig’s grip tightened, “in small ships working independently. If they get away with it unopposed long enough, they’ll up their game and start going after more lucrative targets. Ore carriers, say.”
“There’s a rumor unmanned ore carriers are going missing in statistically relevant numbers,” Pedro interrupted.
“There you go. Presit tells the story, the mining cartels see the danger, they put pressure on their representatives in Parliament, Parliament pressures the Navy, and the Navy finally gets its head out of its ass.”
“Just like that?” Pedro’s brows had risen nearly to his hairline.
“It’s a fairly simple cascade of cause and effect.” Torin shrugged. “No guarantee, but we won’t hit anything if we don’t pull the trigger.”
Pedro raised both hands in surrender. “I bow to your superior knowledge of violent responses.”
When she shot him a pointed glance, Craig released her wrist.
“Presit’s a big shot celebrity now,” he reminded her as