12. The Game is Afoot
Nobody was less shocked to wake up alone than I was.
Vaughn had even managed to straighten his pillow and neatly tuck in the sheets and comforter on his side of the bed.
I smiled at the thought of messing it up and leaving the bed unmade for him to find. I imagined him grinding his perfect teeth together, his brow creased with frustration, muscles tensed for a fight. How glorious it would be to unravel him so entirely over something so small.
But I’d save that for later. He wasn’t at the end of his rope yet, and leaving the bed in disarray would be the perfect thing to push him right over the edge, when the time came.
Still, sleeping next to him wasn’t as bad as I’d anticipated. He hadn’t touched me, just like I’d assumed, and he was a sound sleeper, a far cry from Simon, my last relationship…if you could even call it that.
Simon was a terrible bedfellow. When he actually slept, he tossed and turned and stole the blankets, and more than once kicked me in his sleep.
And when I’d tell him about it the next morning, or suggest that he didn’t need to spend the night after we’d had sex, he’d get all grumpy and sulk about it, not caring that my sleep was non-existent when he was next to me.
But most nights, he didn’t even sleep. He’d take work calls from bed, scroll through news feeds on his comm at full brightness for hours, and make comments aloud about whatever he was watching, oblivious to my discomfort.
But that, I came to learn, was just Simon.
He didn’t think of other people, only himself.
It was never in a malicious way; it was just the way he saw the world.
And no matter how much I told him that he was an asshole, he insisted I was the one who was odd for not taking what I wanted, consequences be damned.
Although we both came from well-known families, his was the type that was more quietly wealthy, pulling strings from afar, whereas my parents were diplomats, and very public with their notoriety.
But Simon always liked the attention, and I realized too late that it might have been the attention he got from being associated with me that made him want to pursue me in the first place.
Simon was the first relationship, if you could call it that, as we had been long-term, but casual, where he’d doggedly pursued me, and especially in the beginning, it felt like I was being properly courted, which had been nice.
Unfortunately, it made it easier to overlook so many red flags that I should have seen, as I so badly wanted to be desired for more than my body and family name, but for my mind and for who I was as a person.
Unfortunately, when I’d lost my parents, it became clear, very quickly, that Simon had only been with me for name recognition, I supposed, and not for me. I guess dealing with me going through debilitating grief and a healthy period of mild depression was too much work for him.
And like the mature adult that Simon was, he’d stood me up at my parents’ funeral and instead hooked up with some famous starlet. The photos of their rendezvous were splashed all over the news by the time I exited the services.
So when I’d lost Xavier not too long after that, it made it that much easier to spiral and isolate. There was nobody left to pick up the pieces. The last I’d heard, he’d gotten himself a cushy emissary role for IA.
Simon and Vaughn couldn’t have been more opposite if they tried, but I figured the farther apart they were, the better. I learned a lot of hard life lessons from being with Simon, paramount of which was not to rely on other people, especially when they had proven themselves to be unreliable.
Clearing my head of thoughts of Simon, I tried to run through a plan for the day while I got cleaned up.
I’d been talking to Natalie tons, or rather, she’d been talking at me, but I needed to form my own thoughts and opinions on a few of the crew members I had yet to interact with outside of her presence.
Jordan would be the trickiest to run across now that we were on opposite shifts.
But I thought maybe it would be best to save her for last anyway, as she seemed like the hardest nut to crack, based on my first impressions of her.
I could gain insight on the second officer from the others and use it to gain her favor and get more information from her.
I also knew she was the closest to Vaughn, so I would need to tread very carefully, so as not to upset either of them.
I was very curious about Ethan, the resident prankster and self-proclaimed himbo, which always got a loud giggle from Natalie.
There had to be something behind all that bravado, some trauma I could exploit, no matter how awful that sounded.
That was my talent, finding the emotional cracks to form a connection and weasel my way in, and Ethan had very obvious cracks; I just needed the right strategy to pry him open.
Then there was Rion. I knew the most about our sweet and nerdy chief technology officer, thanks to Natalie.
I still wasn’t sure why neither of them had acted on their clearly mutual crush on one another, but knowing Natalie, it was for a good reason, and she’d pounce on the poor guy the second she was ready, and not a moment before.
I didn’t think it would be difficult to make up some imaginary issue to consult with him on, and then open the conversation to more personal topics, where I could get a better sense of who he was, other than the “sweetest, dreamiest, nicest person,” per Natalie.
And then there was Chadwick. Oh, Chadwick…
He’d joined the Radiant the same time as I had, so it was extremely unlikely that he’d had anything to do with any previous Meridian operations that had involved the ship, but it didn’t exactly rule him out, and for as annoying as he was, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have his own brand of insight.
Everyone on the crew had written him off, due to his constant complaining about having to earn some real-world experience instead of being handed a title and a stack of cash, non-stop posturing about how he was going to get revenge on anyone that wronged him while he was at a disadvantage, and continual use of his family name and other connections he had through his family.
But I found that I did my best observational work when I was ignored, so I wondered what a little bit of attention and ego-stroking would get out of him. It was certainly worth a try.
And finally, there was Cassidy. Considering both Vaughn and I had separate histories with him, he should have been the hardest to figure out and rule out.
However, the first step I’d taken in my initial days on the ship, while Vaughn had been ignoring me, was to do extensive deep-dive background checks on everyone, with Darren’s help.
Everyone had a story, and I needed to verify their claims to get some sort of baseline.
The crew was who they appeared to be on a surface level, Cassidy included.
But the reason why I was leaning toward ruling him out was because, as he’d mentioned when we’d first run into each other, prior to joining the Radiant, he’d worked on a heliopause relay station at the edge of the system since graduating with a communications architecture and deep space engineering degree.
Heliopause station communications were always on the fritz, delayed by days, sometimes weeks, depending on planetary alignment and solar storms. It would have been next to impossible for him to live and work out at a station like that and strategically grow and mastermind a criminal syndicate.
While everyone aboard had plenty of records and footage of their whereabouts, including Cassidy, the others had means, where he didn’t.
I wouldn’t pretend it wouldn’t be a relief to exclude him from the investigation, but it was so improbable that he was the Phoenix, I felt my focus was better spent digging into Jordan and Ethan, and maybe Rion, much more thoroughly.
Between those three, I had no strong indications as of yet, so any leads were good leads.
Chadwick was waiting for me when I arrived down in engineering. He’d been cycling between the different departments to assist with their needs, and performing general cleaning and maintenance tasks on the ship, as required, much to his dismay.
As far as I could tell, he was merely tolerated by everyone else, and the monotony of being alone, in the middle of space, without a friend, was clearly wearing on him.
The first cycle he’d been assigned to work with me, I was still setting up the ship coding, so I’d told him I didn’t have any work for him.
I still didn’t have any work, but if it was true, what Natalie had said, that he was interested in engineering, I was willing to try to work with him, as long as he didn’t piss me off too much.
He was spinning in my office chair when I got in, and almost fell off when he saw me in the doorway. I thought he’d apologize, but instead, he narrowed his eyes and said, “I know who you are, ya know?”
“Everyone knows who I am.” I leaned casually against the doorframe, nonplussed by the accusation.
“Are you sure about that?” He raised a brow. “They don’t act like it.”
“What should they be acting like?”
“You’re the last scion of the Sterling diplomatic dynasty.” He sneered. “They should be treating you like royalty.”
Ahhhh. I knew what he was after.
“Just like they should be treating you like royalty, being the heir to the Rothschild fortune.” I cocked my head, not wanting to sound or appear condescending.
“Exactly.” He leaned back in the chair, assessing me.
“Listen, we all know you don’t want to be here. I get it. My parents made me earn every little thing too, even when it would have been easy for them to just give it to me. But why make yourself and everyone else on this ship miserable if we’re all stuck here anyway?” I posited.
His brow furrowed.
“If we work together, you can leave the ship in two months with some allies and a great recommendation from the captain, which would go a long way, with his service record.” I didn’t know that Vaughn would do any such thing, but even dangling a carrot in front of someone like Chadwick could be the motivation needed.
“And what if I wanted a recommendation from you—saying that I was fit for a chief engineering position?” he hedged.
What a cheeky bastard.
“What other qualifications do you have? A letter from me won’t mean shit if you don’t have an educational background or quite a few years of real experience working on ships.”
Chadwick’s lips tipped into a frown.
“You know”—I pushed off the wall and paced toward him—“if I was in your position, I’d focus on using your family’s influence to assure that your assignments were nice and easy, on low-risk runs, with crew that would be scared of your pedigree, assuring they’d leave you alone.”
His mouth twisted, maybe irritated that he hadn’t thought of it himself. “How did you find yourself on the Radiant?” I asked, hoping to learn a little more about our petulant junior officer.
“My dad consulted a friend who works in the military and he said this ship would be safe because of the captain’s record,” Chadwick cautiously replied.
His family was right to be worried about his safety out in space. Put on the wrong vessel, with the wrong crew, and he’d be a ripe target for a hefty ransom. And regardless of my complicated feelings for Vaughn, it was clear he was a man of integrity.
I nodded in agreement. “Your father’s smart to go that route, but you’ll want to be assigned to a safe ship that does shorter runs,” I advised him.
“IA requires Starlane to have a mandatory waiting period between journeys, and the sweet spot is a trip right around three weeks, because they automatically get rounded up to the required break for a month-long run, which is five days, so you’d get to do short runs and have decent time off in between. ”
Chadwick’s lips parted. Clearly this kid hadn’t done much research on what he was getting himself into.
“Our current route will run us over three months round trip, but ship maintenance only takes so long, so at best, we’ll have just under two weeks off, which is annoying after being stuck in space for so long, but maximizes profitability for Starlane. ”
He studied me for a moment, as if assessing whether or not I was teasing him, or possibly whether or not I could be trusted. “Got any other tips?” he hedged after a beat, deciding that my intel was legitimate and sincere.
“Yeah, stop correcting people when they call you Chad.” I chortled. “You don’t want to know all the nicknames they’ve come up with behind your back. And this crew is tame compared to some of the people I’ve met.”
A grimace flashed across his face, but was almost immediately wiped away when multiple alarms started blaring from my station.