“Nev, get out of there now.” If he was stuck in there, maybe I could reach for the Shadow and try to direct it…and risk killing myself. “If you’re locked in, I can manually override—”
“I’m out. I was the one who put the pressure lock on.”
I let out a massive breath into the comm. “Thank the ancestors.”
“Well, I didn’t want to stay in there,” he said with some humor. “And I didn’t want anything leaking into the rest of the ship.”
Maybe I’d been too hard on him. He’d not only saved himself but tried to protect the Kaitan. “Good work. Get away from the door and strap yourself in in the mess. Arjan, get the skiff back on board. We need to get those canisters offloaded, now.” I couldn’t keep the rest of my words from coming out clipped, even though I knew it was the right thing to do. “We’re headed back to Alaxak.”
The Kaitan’s bow parted the icy gray waves as I landed in the ocean and then taxied into Gamut’s small harbor. As far as I knew, our planet was the only one where ships docked almost exclusively in water. No one had the money to build industrial landing pads, and the permafrost was too unstable otherwise. The ground couldn’t take the force or heat of a ship’s thrusters for long before turning into a bog.
I wished we were taking off instead. I wanted to feel caught between gravity and the plasma jets, between ice and fire, my back mashed into the seat. That tug-of-war with me at the center would mean I was moving. Here on my frozen planet, movement never came without a fight. And if what I still felt in my gut was right, this was a catch worth moving for. We should still be out there.
But no, we were headed in the opposite direction of the call I felt. The knowledge tingled on my skin, crackling along my nerves, pulsing through my bones, pounding through my entire body, a comm speaker shouting now, now, now.
Shadow was calling to me.
“Let’s get this done quick, hey?” I was so distracted as I pulled up to the pier that I forgot to catch the local accent I often muffled for the benefit of my offworlder crew. The dockworkers outside reacted quickly to our arrival, tossing heavy lines to secure us to massive cleats while steam hissed from our hull, still hot from reentry.
From his station below me, Basra glanced up through the metal grating of the bridge floor. “I’ve already commed the cannery to let them know we have a situation. They’re sending a containment van to get the canisters, and they’ll be geared up, so we won’t even have to enter the cargo hold. That shouldn’t take more than an hour, and they estimated decontamination might take another two or so hours, if there is any.”
I blinked. I usually couldn’t get them to respond so fast or efficiently. Maybe Basra had sweet-talked them somehow. “Nice.”
“The only downside is they can’t offload the rest of our catch now, since they’re at processing capacity for the moment.”
In which case, it was doubly impressive they were coming so soon. “No problem. We can fill all the way up and deliver in a couple of days.” I shrugged. “I guess that means whoever wants to can grab a nap. And we can all sleep for a few more hours after we lift off again, since we’ll have to wait on the blasted drone traffic.”
The cosmologists had predicted particularly heavy drone activity between us and the Alaxak Asteroid Sea over the next six hours—exactly in our flight path. The automated mining drones always got in our way, trying to blow up the ship whenever they felt I got in their way. Usually I maneuvered around them, but not even I would risk heading into that many. Still, we’d be back fishing sooner than I’d expected.
“What is this, free time? Are you getting soft?” Telu laughed from her own station. “Excuse me while I get right on the sleep. I wouldn’t miss this date with my bunk for the galaxy in a glass.”
“Not sleeping in your chair, for once?” I asked, attempting to return her teasing tone, even though my fingers were drumming on the dash. “What’s the occasion?”
“More than thirty minutes to catch some shut-eye is an occasion. Plus”—she grinned up at me—“did you notice how fast I had that drone chasing its own tail? Any time I can stick it to the royals is cause for celebration.”
She had reason to hate the royals, one royal family in particular. The Dracortes owned the mining drones. Their programming was impossible to change—not even the Dracortes knew how anymore—but temporarily rerouting them wasn’t impossible for a hacker like Telu.
Not that hackers of her skill level were common. Her family was nearly as old as mine. She never seemed to be able to point the way to Shadow as well as Arjan or I could, but she definitely had the much faster reflexes gained after generations of Shadow exposure, even if she employed them in a different way. She was to drone hacking as I was to piloting, meaning she was one of the best damned hackers on all of Alaxak, and maybe beyond.
I gave her a tired smile. “Good job today,” I told her. “We’re fishing hard, but you’re as sharp as ever.”
Her eyes grew softer behind all their edges. “Thanks,” she murmured.
When she stood, I added, “Set the cams outside the cargo hold to record if they detect motion.” When anyone but my crew was on board, I liked to be cautious—and even among my crew, I didn’t trust Nev yet.
“Already did,” she replied, giving me a knowing look, one that would be more of a deterrent than cameras to thieves or saboteurs, if only they could see it. “I set an alarm too.” She gave me a smirk, following fast on the heels of her death-stare, as I’d always called it. “Don’t you sleep in your chair, either, hey?”
I wasn’t sure if I would be sleeping, but I didn’t want her to worry about me. “I won’t.”
Telu had only just left her station and I’d barely settled in to wait, when there was a commotion on the stairs leading up to the bridge. Eton’s voice rose—no surprise, in these sorts of situations.
“I said, you don’t get to bother the captain. That’s not part of your job, as I would have explained to you in unmistakable terms if I’d been the one to hire you. No, scratch that, I just wouldn’t have hired you in the first place.”
I stood from my chair in a rush, irritation practically dragging my body upright. I knew whom he was talking to, because Eton had disapproved of my snap decision to hire Nev practically straight off the dock. I almost couldn’t blame him: Nev was an unknown element with no fishing experience, but Arjan had found Nev and approved of him enough to recommend I give him a shot. Besides, there was no one else under such short notice—it wasn’t like Gamut was a bustling hub of commerce. I expected Eton to grumble—which he had—but to second-guess me in front of Nev and the rest of the crew was a step too far.
“Well, good thing the captain hired me instead of you, hm?” Nev retorted, his voice far more calm than Eton’s but no less loud. In spite of his being a source of plenty of irritation himself, the words made me smile. He already understood what Eton apparently still didn’t.