Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Everyone had finished lunch, but the afternoon work orders still hadn't appeared on the viewscreen.
The others were happy to stay in the galley, talking and drinking and trying to persuade Virtue to program the food dispenser to produce some sort of decadent dessert.
Of course, no one could agree on which decadent dessert, so when the inevitable argument erupted, no one saw Sinclair slip out.
Mr Perfect was never late, so this was just another ringing endorsement of her sense of wrongness. And while the others weren't worried yet, maybe he knew more than he'd be willing to say in front of everybody.
She sought him out in the guard office, raising her fist to rap on the door, only to find he hadn't even bothered to close it properly. That wasn't right – he always locked this door, because he knew he couldn't trust convicted criminals not to cause trouble.
"Mr…Edward?" she ventured, peering inside. She'd almost called him Mr Perfect to his face. That would have gone down well. "Are you in here?"
"Stars, I killed him."
His voice came from under the desk.
Sinclair leaned down for a better look. He was under there, all right, with his knees up under his chin, and his head buried in his hands.
Only something utterly earth-shattering could have wrought such a change in him. Whatever it was, Titania had to be at the heart of it.
"What happened?" she asked.
"I killed the captain."
Sinclair scanned the office. There was no corpse to be seen – not the captain's or anyone else's. She scrutinised the checkerboard of surveillance footage on the screen for a long moment before she had her answer.
Captain Solon did appear to be dead.
"I didn't know he was in the cargo hold, and the artificial gravity failed. He must have been crushed. If I'd known, I could have saved him," Edward – for she could hardly call the ashen faced guard huddled under the table perfect – mumbled, more to himself than to her.
Sinclair had answered enough emergency calls to recognise shock when she heard it. What he needed was to be talked off that hypothetical ledge, into taking practical action. But in order to help him, she needed more information.
Information she could find far more quickly for herself, instead of having to talk him through getting it for her.
She pulled up a diagnostic on the ship's systems. Just one look had her swearing, wishing she'd had this data hours ago.
The ship had lost contact with Titania in the early hours of the morning, and the ship had responded by kicking the systems into emergency mode.
Anything non-essential, like gravity in the cargo holds or the equipment in the refinery levels, had shut down.
If the captain had sneaked into the cargo hold to snack on the ore, which he did several times a day, he could easily have fallen asleep in there and not noticed when the gravity failed.
"You couldn't have saved him. He's in a hold full of free-floating ore that was waiting to be crushed before it could be stored safely.
The safety locks on the doors won't let anyone in there until gravity's restored.
He shouldn't have been in there in the first place," Sinclair said. "What was he after, anyway?"
"Aluminium," Edward said. "He was addicted to raw aluminium ore.
He had aluminium supplements, which should have been enough for any alicanto, but he'd developed a taste for the raw stuff while working the mining ships, and no one cared enough to help him as long as there was enough lithium on board when the ship reached port.
I told Central a few times, but all they cared about was the lithium, and they told me to let him do as he wished on his ship.
He'd scoff as much aluminium as he could before the lithium he'd accidentally ingested with it sent him off to sleep. "
Sinclair nodded slowly. So that's why Captain Solon had showed up as unmoving on the life signs detector when she was manning the comms desk. He'd been in a lithium-induced stupor. "Have you contacted your superiors on Tito?" she asked.
Edward shook his head. "Comms are down, too. Haven't received any messages since before midnight last night."
Stars. So Titania really was taking over.
"Then we need to return to Tito," she said.
Edward stared at her for an impossibly long moment. He climbed out from under the desk and stood in front of her, still staring. "You are a genius," he breathed.
Sinclair wasn't entirely sure how it happened. One moment, she had her mouth open, ready to tell him she wasn't, and the next…
Mr Perfect was kissing her, and if there could be such a thing as a perfect kiss, then he was definitely giving it to her.
Was it any surprise that he had her kissing him right back?
Stars, she didn't want to stop kissing him. He was…it was…everything was…perfect.
Until it ended.
They both gasped for breath, staring, but not daring to say a word, for that would break the spell.
Sinclair swallowed. Her mouth tasted of him. She hadn't imagined it, though it sure felt like she had, but they needed to face reality.
"Everyone is still in the galley, awaiting the afternoon work orders. We'll have to…you have to go tell them," she said. When his eyes widened, she added, "About returning to Tito, of course."
If anyone found out she'd kissed a guard, even Mr Perfect, there'd be hell to pay. And if the others found out he'd kissed her…that'd be even worse.
So they kept a courteous distance, like any other guard and prisoner, as far apart as the passageway would permit, all the way back to the galley.