Chapter Seventeen #3
Madelaine shrugged. “Dirk is not the Paladin Courier. No one will give him any packages.”
“How can you know that for certain? Can’t he pretend and just say he is the Paladin Courier?”
“No. Because the Paladin Courier is always a woman.”
“Ooh. That must really chap Dirk’s hide,” Jack said with a grin.
Madelaine shrugged. “Don’t care. He can suck a lemon dry for all I care.”
“But if another woman said she was the Paladin Courier, wouldn’t that be bad?” he asked.
Madelaine closed her eyes. “It would be catastrophically bad, except that the woman also has to be in my bloodline to open any of the packages.” Jack remembered she’d used her thumbprint on the packages he’d seen her open.
“I hate to say it, but at this point I’m hoping only Dirk—and no one else, especially any females with secret knowledge—is on our tail. If they can collect the packages even if they can’t open them, that would also be terrible, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. I hate to agree with you on this, but I do. We need to get fuel and get going to our next destination, whatever it is, and hope no one beat us to it.”
She sat in the pilot’s seat for several moments, silently staring at the blinking red fuel numbers. She stayed that way long enough that he was about to ask if she was okay. Then her whole body went rigid.
She straightened up and her eyes were wide.
“What?” Jack asked. “What’s wrong? I mean, beyond the obvious low-fuel problem.”
Madelaine climbed out of the pilot’s seat, stalked back into the storage area and the opposite side of the empty fuel locker. She popped open an unlocked, unlabeled compartment and pulled out what looked like a white bowling bag with the words “self-adhesive bandages” printed on one side.
“I don’t get it. Do you have a giant wound I don’t know about?”
She unzipped the bag and peered inside, looking suddenly relieved.
“They didn’t get it.”
“What?”
Madelaine carefully held the bowling bag in one arm and pulled out a bauxite fuel cube hidden within.
“Awesome. How did you know to do that?” It was a fantastic hiding place, unless the fuel thieves had been wounded and looking for first aid.
Madelaine smiled. “Someone very smart taught me that any pilot worth their salt should always have an emergency reserve fuel cube that no one else knows about. This is mine.”
“Great, let’s plug it in and get going.”
“The thing is, it’s not a full cube. In fact, it’s only a little over five percent full. Four hours of fuel at best. I kept meaning to replace it with a full one, but it’s been an adventure lately and I forgot.”
“Well, you have perfect memory mastery, that’s for certain.” Jack grinned. They were saved. “And with the two hours we already have it gives us six hours of fuel. And that’s math I can get behind.”
Madelaine smiled.
She loaded the partial fuel cube into the auxiliary chamber. The ship hummed as the system accepted it.
The fuel readout on the cockpit’s dashboard display recalculated. The red numbers turned green. Green was a good color. In this case, green meant go. They now had six hours of fuel.
Jack exhaled. “That’s so much better.”
“It’s not enough to be comfortable.”
“Comfortable flew out the airlock somewhere around ‘all the reserve fuel is gone.’ But six hours gives us options.”
“Well, it gives us one option,” Madelaine said, pulling up the star map again.
The flickering point at the edge of the chart grew brighter.
Jack leaned in to read the name.
Crooked Halo Station.
“That sounds inviting,” he said. “Like a place where people sell questionable soup and ask how attached you are to your fingers.”
“It’s an old rim station. Independent. Technically neutral.”
“Yeah. And I sense the word technically is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” Jack joked.
“It sits outside most trade protections. Smugglers use it. Salvagers. Rim miners. People who don’t want official records. It’s on the very edge of the explored galaxy.”
“Perfect. My favorite kind of vacation.”
Madelaine set the course. “They should have bauxite cubes.”
“Should?”
“They fuel half the mining rigs in this sector.”
“Great. We go in, buy three cubes, leave, and never speak of the place again.”
She glanced at him.
Jack narrowed his eyes. “Why did you glance?”
“I have a Paladin Courier emergency credit device.”
“That sounds expensive.”
She shrugged. “It is essentially unlimited.”
“That sounds delightful.”
“Unfortunately, it may not work there.”
Jack looked back at the star map, where Crooked Halo Station blinked like a bad idea waiting patiently for company.
“Of course it may not work there. Still, I believe this is our only option, so let’s get going.”
“Yes.” Madelaine said. The worry creasing her brows had abated. Her overall frightened attitude regarding this latest challenge had subsided.
The ship turned hard, further leaving Verdara’s wind-torn atmosphere and fertile orbit behind. Ahead, the stars thinned toward the outer dark, where charted space began to fray into rumor.
For the next five hours, they flew toward the edge of the galaxy in the opposite direction of their next package retrieval.