5. Chapter 5
Chapter five
“Your information on the paths of the meteors, how good is it?” Elenus asked, turning back to the console and opening up Kieron’s programs.
“Right now? Compared to my historical data, probably ninety-eight percent accurate,” Kieron said, then before Elenus could do more than intake an excite breath, continued, “That’s only right now and only because I’ve uploaded positioning data from hundreds of mining trips over the course of this season.
Every minute that passes, my information becomes more and more inaccurate, and inaccuracies out there will get you killed. ”
“I told you, my ship can take the radiation.”
“For two hours,” Kieron reminded him. “That’s not enough time to fly out there and find your ship blind. We need to narrow things down into search patterns, then use probes as advance scouts so that you have more accurate information on meteor placement before you go out there.”
Elenus smiled tauntingly. “I thought you weren’t going to let me use your probes?”
“I’m not,” Kieron said. “I’m going to use them. You’re going to show me how to fly your ship, and I’ll conduct the search myself.”
The smile was gone far faster than it had appeared. “Absolutely not. That ship has a completely proprietary and revolutionary design even if it isn’t the absolute latest experimental model, and I won’t hand it over to someone who could profit from its secrets.”
Kieron sighed. “I don’t care about your ship except insofar as it’s going to let me do a better job searching the local meteor cluster for our targets.
” Elenus’s expression changed from offended to intrigued.
“Your target,” Kieron corrected, mentally cursing himself for slipping up so quickly. “Looking for your target.”
“Oh, come on now, you were doing so well there for a second!” Elenus said, spinning his chair to fully face Kieron and folding his hands over his flat stomach.
He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles—the chair had an auto adjust, but it hadn’t been made with Ganians in mind.
Facing the console probably made him feel more condensed than a neutron star.
“Tell me more about this target of yours. It’s only fair,” he added as Kieron continued to stay silent. “You know what I’m looking for out here. It’s time to lay your cards out on the table.”
Fucking Ganians and their gambling metaphors. If Kieron hadn’t met a few of them already in his time here on Cloverleaf Station, he wouldn’t have any idea what Elenus was talking about. “It’s a ship,” he said after a moment. “Mining class, an X-250.”
“Small but tough,” Elenus noted. “How long has it been out there?”
“Twenty-seven standard months.”
Elenus abruptly uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.
“Excuse me? Twenty-seven months?” He had gone from looking amused to furious.
“That ship is dead. Its systems are dead, its engine is dead, and whoever was in it is definitely dead. How is this any sort of priority? Why should your search for this outweigh my pursuit of something that’s alive and—”
“And a machine,” Kieron interjected, spitting the word viciously.
“You can say what you want about your AI being sentient, but it’s still a fucking machine.
Even cyborgs don’t get the rights that organic life-forms do in the Alliance—you think a ship is going to qualify as more important just because you’ve outfitted it with some fancy programming?
And yeah, there’s your crooked partner too, but you don’t give a fuck about his life.
My ship might be gone, but it was piloted by a person with a family, and that man’s body needs to be recovered for their sakes. ”
Elenus’s ire had melted away almost as fast as it had appeared. He was so changeable it was a wonder he had time to feel half of what flittered across his face. “There’s some truth to that,” he said as though he were being generous.
Prick.
“But dead is dead. Surely you can at least see that my ship needs to take priority here, given that it contains a living human being.” He smiled crookedly.
“Even if I would like to see him roasted from the inside out with radiation, that’s not all my call to make.
Deysan has hurt a lot of people, and he should pay for his crimes before a court of law.
Where, incidentally, I’d be willing to fight you about the classification of my ship, but that’s neither here nor there right now. ”
Kieron gritted his teeth. The hell of it was, Elenus was right—at least about this part. A rescue mission of a living person took precedence over recovering the dead, and every court in the galaxy would back Elenus up on that.
“Fine. Your ship is the priority, but the probes are still mine and only available in limited quantities. Their control systems are very finicky, thanks to the amount of radiation shielding I’ve had to install on them, so they’re very difficult to fly.
I need to be as close to them as possible in order to maximize the odds of recovering your missing ship, and that means I need to be the person flying the one you arrived in. ”
Elenus traced the edges of his intricate facial hair before nodding abruptly. “There’s only one thing to do, then. We’ll have to handle her together.”
We what now? “Your ship’s interior is too small for both of us to move around in there,” Kieron protested.
“It’s built to house two,” Elenus replied.
“Not comfortably, but the safety equipment is there. It won’t be the smoothest ride you’ve ever had, but I’m not letting anyone else handle her controls, and you’re not letting anyone else pilot those probes.
That makes us co-captains of the Lizzie on these expeditions, Sparky. Any questions?”
Co-captains. Holy hells. In a space that tight, it was going to be hard enough to avoid committing an act of homicide, much less keep his mind as sharp as it needed to be to pilot the probes. Still, what choice did he have? “Just one question,” Kieron replied. “When do we start?”
***
Kieron wasn’t expecting the answer to his When do we start? to be Tomorrow, but there it was. He blinked at Elenus, feeling thrown off-kilter. “What?”
“Tomorrow,” Elenus repeated, a pleasant smile on his face.
“Now that we’ve worked out our agenda, there are a few changes I need to make in the Lizzie—a little housekeeping, so to speak.
Not to mention, I’ve been flying on next to no rest for the past hundred and eleven hours, and that’s a lot, even for me.
I need to catch up on my beauty sleep if I’m going to be as useful as I need to be. ”
He stood up, in a second back to towering elegantly over Kieron. For a guy who claimed to be tired, he moved like he had all the energy in the world. Tall, handsome, and full of life … he was tempting in a way Kieron hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Too bad he was such a fucking asshole.
“How long do you need?” Kieron asked, staring just past Elenus’s face.
“Aren’t you accommodating all of a sudden, Sparky?”
Kieron bristled. Was there no way to please this guy? “I can be something else real easy.”
“Oof, hey.” Elenus raised his hands in mock surrender. “Don’t get me wrong, I like accommodating. It just doesn’t seem to be your style.”
“It’s how I get every time someone threatens me into compliance,” Kieron replied sweetly. “I like to lie low until I get a clear chance to stab them in the back or cut their throat. Not,” he added, “that I would do anything like that to you, boss.”
“Oh yeah? Are you sure of that?” Elenus looked at him a little more closely. “Kieron Carr … with that name, that carriage, I think odds are even that you come from Hadrian’s Colony.”
Kieron felt the blood drain out of his face even has his hand automatically reached for the knife it had taken him months to train himself out of keeping at his hip.
Luckily, he didn’t need a knife to be taken seriously.
He had Elenus bent back across the control station, one arm across his throat as the other hovered over potentially fatal pressure points, before the other man could finish the final syllable of colony.
“Whoa, whoa!” Elenus’s mock surrender had transformed to a real one, his hands not trying to push Kieron away—that would be futile—but plainly open and vacant in his line of sight.
“No harm, huh? No harm, it’s all right, I’m not an enemy.
What am I going to do, report you? To whom? There’s no one left.”
“There are people out there who would pay a hell of a lot of credits to get their hands on me,” Kieron growled. “And you just happen to be able to pick out what I am? My file says—”
“Drifter, I know, I read it.” Elenus’s voice was astonishingly calm.
“Drifters are the best designation for someone like you, aren’t they?
Someone who’s been everywhere, influenced by everything …
and I respect that, I do. I swear, on my baby’s life, I’m not here for you.
It’s pure coincidence that I figured out what you are, and it’s only because I know someone else from Hadrian’s Colony.
“Someone alive!” he added with a wheeze as Kieron’s grip tightened.
“A friend of mine, I swear it! I haven’t turned her in, and I wouldn’t turn you in either.
” His glittering gaze met Kieron’s as he said, with perfect earnestness, “No one deserves to be taken apart just for who they are. Not my baby and not you. I’m no threat to you, Kieron.
How dumb would I have to be, to threaten you right now? My life is literally in your hands.”
“Then why did you mention it at all?” Kieron asked, reason slowly coming back online in his brain as adrenaline stepped aside. “Why bother?”
“Because I find it hard to shut up sometimes,” Elenus replied. “I ramble to myself and everyone around me a lot, and things can slip out without me being aware of them. I’d rather get this out of the way now instead of during our mission, when it could cause a real problem.”
That was a good point. Kieron inspected Elenus’s face for any trace of dishonesty, monitored to his heartbeat and his other biometric tics, but there was nothing to suggest he was being anything but sincere right then.
Slowly Kieron leaned back, removing his weight from Elenus’s body.
The taller man closed his eyes for a long moment, then let out a gusty sigh and held out his hand.
“Help a guy up, huh?”
Kieron rolled his eyes. “Oh my god, you’re ridiculous,” he muttered, but he helped Elenus to his feet.
“Thanks, Sparky.” Elenus winked at him. “Trust me, your secret is safe.”
“Until you start rambling to someone else and slip up.” Ugh, that was a good point. Maybe Kieron should just …
“No, nope, I see your murder hands getting twitchy, and no,” Elenus said sternly.
“It’s only on my mind right now because you’re on my mind.
Once we’re done here, and we never have to see each other again, it’ll fall right out of my mind.
I generally don’t keep close track of things that aren’t immediately relevant to my life.
If that’s not good enough for you, I’ll let you put a neural block in. ”
That was a … decent solution. Not great—neural blocks weren’t invisible to a professional, and they weren’t foolproof either, but it was probably the best Kieron was going to get. He nodded, took a step back, and watched as Elenus’s shoulders dropped about an inch with newfound relief.
“Threatening the boss with death on the first day,” Elenus said, shaking his head as he walked out of the room.
“You’re a firecracker, aren’t you, Sparky?
I’m going to send you some specs for the Regen unit,” he added in a louder voice as he strode down the hall.
“The changes are nonnegotiable. Let me know if you don’t have any of the parts required, and I’ll see you in eight standard hours! ”
Then he was gone, turning toward the hangar and out of Kieron’s line of sight. As soon as he vanished around the corner, Kieron stepped mechanically over to his chair and sat down in it, dropping his head into his hands.
Holy shit. He’d nearly murdered Elenus Desfontaines. Elenus Desfontaines, ridiculously wealthy inventor and entrepreneur, who also happened to be his boss. All because of … of …
No. He wasn’t going to let his mind go back to that place.
He’d gotten out of Hadrian young, too young to get the full “benefit” of the military training and genetic modification.
He’d foolishly thought that because of his youth, and the fact that no one was supposed to have survived the Hadrian massacre, he could keep his name.
It wasn’t such a remarkable name, after all. Plenty of people had similar ones.
More the fool he.
His implant beeped with a new message. Kieron activated his internal viewer and opened the file.
It was a blueprint for a Regen unit, only this one definitely had some nonstandard additions.
The upgrade to the health scanner alone …
why did it have to be so specific? That was one of the great things about Regen—it healed broadly and perfectly, without needing to be directed.
So why insert a program designed to limit its own potential?
Just do it. You’ve pissed the guy off enough for one day.
Not to mention, Kieron needed some sleep, too, after such a concerted clusterfuck.
An hour of unconsciousness should be enough for him—a luxurious amount of sleep for a Hadrian, honestly—but he was tempted to push it to two, just to put this day out of his mind for a little longer.
Work will help. Work always helped. Before heading for the Regen unit, though, he got his algorithms back up and processing the limited data that came in from Cloverleaf’s sensors. Every byte of refinement could make the difference between life or death out there.
And Kieron couldn’t die. Not yet. Not before he found Zakari.
After that? He’d have to wait and see.