Chapter 12
Cait stepped into the cockpit with two breakfast wraps balanced in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. She hummed lightly under her breath.
Raaze sat in the co-pilot’s chair, studying the nav-display with intense focus.
He was naked to the waist again, all that glorious hard muscle and satin skin on display.
She tried not to stare at the way his long, dark hair cascaded over his broad shoulders, then remembered she could look now.
He glanced up, and the smile that spread across his face made the butterflies set up in her stomach again.
“Brought you food,” she said, handing him a wrap. “It’s not much, but it’s hot and Fred alleges that it’s edible.”
“I resent that comment,” Fred grumbled. “I did recommend far more nutritious options during supply reloading.”
She ignored him and handed Raaze his wrap. “All the major food groups… sausage, cheese, egg, bread.”
“Thanks.” His fingers brushed hers, and her skin tingled at the touch.
“Eat up. You burned a lot of calories last night.”
His lips quirked, and he slid her a sideways glance. “That a complaint?”
“Uh-huh… More like a request for an encore.” The words slipped out before she could stop them.
“I’m ignoring the fact that I heard that,” Fred cut in as her cheeks burned.
“Heard what?”
Shit. She never said things like that. Never felt confident enough to. But right now her body still carried the imprint of Raaze’s hands, and she was happy. Stupidly, un-complicatedly happy.
She dropped into the pilot’s seat, tucking one leg underneath her, and attacked her own wrap. The silence between them was comfortable but charged.
He watched her again. She caught it from the corner of her eye and her face went hot again. She grinned around a bite of wrap instead of hiding it.
This. This right here. I could get used to this.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
She nodded. “Fine. Good. Really good.”
God, she sounded like an idiot. Like she’d never had sex before. She took another bite and avoided his eyes, but she could feel him watching her, amused.
When she glanced over, he was still looking at her with that half-smile.
“So,” she said, trying to sound casual. “About last night—”
“Cait,” Fred cut in again, his voice serious. “I need your attention.”
Cait swallowed her bite. “What is it?”
“I’ve intercepted a security inquiry routed through official Imperial channels. Someone is looking for a specific freighter registration.”
Her stomach dropped. “Which registration?”
“Ours.”
The wrap turned to lead in her stomach. She set it down on the console. “Show me.”
“I tracked the request back,” Fred said as he displayed the inquiry on the main console screen. “It’s not from Parac’Norr. Seems to be a private security inquiry routed through Latharian Imperial channels.”
She frowned. “Define private security? I didn’t think civilians were allowed to access the Imperial net?”
“They’re not,” Raaze rumbled, leaning forward to look. “Which means someone has serious backing and someone imperial in their back pocket.”
“It’s my fault,” she said, her voice tight. “I must have tripped something.”
“No, the work was clean,” Fred countered. “The system must have been monitored remotely. There was no way for us to know that.”
She looked over at Raaze. His expression was level and unsurprised.
“You knew.” The words came out flat. “When we lifted your file. You knew they’d come after us.”
He met her eyes and inclined his head. “I suspected. Accessing those files would have triggered an alert. The R'Tev has too much at stake not to monitor their tracks.”
She hissed between her teeth. “And you didn’t think to mention this before we broke in?”
“One, we didn’t know it was the R’Tev back then. When I saw the name…” He shrugged. “I didn’t tell you because—”
“Because you didn’t trust me with it.” She cut him off. The words were bitter, but she filed the hurt away. They didn’t have time for this conversation right now. They had bigger fish to fry.
“Shit. We’re sitting ducks.”
“Language, Cait,” Fred chided.
“Stow it,” she ordered, her voice clipped. “We have the might of the fucking Latharian Empire looking for us. So I don’t think a bit of cursing is going to matter here!”
Fred went silent.
“Okay. They know what we look like,” she said, thinking fast. “Which means we need to not look like what we look like. Fred, what’s our transponder status?”
“You’re suggesting an illegal transponder swap, Captain.”
Uh-oh. When he called her captain, he was pissed. Tough.
“I’m aware.”
“I must register my objection to this course of action.”
“Noted.” She moved to the maintenance panel beneath the nav console and popped it open, revealing the ship’s transponder array.
She’d never actually performed a swap before, but she knew the theory.
“Fred, pull the diagnostic overlay. And log your official disapproval so you can yell at me properly when this is over. And now help me do it.”
“Disapproval logged,” Fred said. “This is illegal in seventeen sectors. Also, you’re about to commit a felony that carries a minimum ten-year sentence in an Imperial labor camp. Just so we’re clear.”
“Crystal,” she said, frowning at the tangle of wires behind the panel. “Raaze, can you grab the toolkit from the service locker by the door, please?”
Raaze retrieved it, and she popped the lid.
Standard kit components. Nothing special.
She wrinkled her nose, wondering how the hell she was going to do this.
She needed to pop the transponder out and change its coding to make it appear like something else.
Removing the transponder was the easy part.
Like everything else aboard the H4-RPY, it was modular—plug-and-play.
But recoding it? Yeah, she had no idea how to do that.
Hopefully Fred would be out of his snit, or she was shit out of luck.
Two minutes later, she had the transponder out and on the console in front of her. Okay, this is where it got dicey. The closures weren’t screws or bolts, but hexagonal instead. Rare, but not like a unicorn or anything.
“Hexagonal… hexagonal,” she murmured as she scanned through the toolkit. Perhaps she could jam a standard multi-tool blade through the widest part and open it that way? “Gotcha.”
She grinned as she spotted a hex tool, and within a minute, she had the back of the transponder panel off. She handed it to Raaze and looked inside.
“Shit.”
She knew the theory of transponder swapping, but she’d assumed there would be an input screen in here for her to make the change. There wasn’t. Instead, there was a blank plate with a weird type of pin connector.
Frowning, she looked into the toolkit again. The connector was female and longer than anything she’d seen before. Perhaps she could use two shorter male connectors and hook them up to the main console or something?
Her gaze caught on a tool tucked in the back of the compartment.
It had a matte-black handle and a single-purpose connector port.
She’d seen it a thousand times and never looked at it properly.
Single-use tools were rare in ship kits, but she’d never thought to ask why the maintenance kit carried something so specific.
She picked it up, turning it over. It had a long, male pin connector. Her frown deepened as she compared it to the transponder input. “Fred, what’s this tool for?”
“I have no idea, Captain. I can’t see it.”
She sighed, biting back her retort. Sometimes Fred could be too literal for his own good.
“Look at it.” She held the tool up so the ship’s cameras could see it through her eyes. “This isn’t on the equipment manifest, is it?”
A pause. Fred never paused.
“So, what is it? I know you know.”
“That is a transponder interface tool, Captain. It has exactly one function: swapping transponder codes.”
“And exactly why do we have a transponder interface tool on board, Fred?”
He sighed. “This ship was equipped for a cargo run your brother was going to make. When it was transferred to you, he forgot to remove his ‘extras’ from the ship. Like that adapted toolkit.”
“So why would he need…”
She stopped talking. She knew the answer. Her brother had been running black-market this whole time. That was why Kian’s numbers always beat hers on the same routes. He’d been cheating, and their father had been praising him for it.
The laugh that escaped was sharp and brittle.
“Cait?” Fred sounded concerned.
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. Not right now. But she would be. “Let’s get this swap done.”
Her hands moved on autopilot. She slotted the tool into place, watched the diagnostic lights flare green under Fred’s guidance.
The work kept her focused and kept her from thinking about how many times she’d defended her family’s honor to outsiders.
How many times had she told herself she just needed to work harder and prove herself?
And it had all been a fucking lie.
Raaze shifted closer. His presence filled the small space, warm and solid at her back. “Cait.”
“Not now.” She kept her eyes on the panel. “Tell me what you’ve been chewing on since the Healer’s Hall. I can hear your brain working from here.”
He sighed.
“The evidence can’t go anywhere it can be buried,” he said. “Officials can be bought. Investigations can be suppressed. The R’Tev operate in the dark.” He paused. “But a celebrity operates in the light. I built my career on that machine. I know how it works.”
She glanced up at him. “Keep talking. What are you thinking?”
He propped his ass back on the side of the console where she was working, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
“The Summer League. It’s the biggest public stage in the Empire. It’s an open-registration celebrity event with wildcard entries, including the traditional masked solo player who enters against both teams. We call it the suicide slot. No one takes it seriously.”
“The suicide slot?” she asked, an eyebrow winging up. “Not surprised if it’s one player against two teams. It is suicide.”