Torin narrowed her eyes but stopped looking like she wanted to disembowel him. "The Dornagain don't work quickly."
"No shit."
"Jan and Sirin died defending their cargo from pirates. Pirates tortured Page but ignored his salvage. Two exceptions to the rules could mean the rules are changing. If the pirates are changing the rules, they're going to be moving a lot faster than One Who Maintains. I want to know if Page was in contact with the Firebreather. If so, they could have passed on the information that got him tortured to death."
"Why?"
"Why?" she repeated.
He hadn't been shot that look since the early days when, he suspected, she'd considered him a distinct species. Not a Marine, therefore nothing to do with her. "I know you're angry about this, Torin, hell, I'm angry about this, but a tenday ago you didn't even know pirates existed."
"And?"
"And now suddenly it's your responsibility to stop them." He scratched at the spot on his jaw where the depilatory wore off first. "Look, I get that your first inclination is to fix shit, but this shit, you can't fix. We've brought it to the Wardens, who will take their time doing sweet fuk all, and now we get on with things."
"You done?"
Worse than the look was the tone. Craig hated that tone. That gunnery sergeant tone. Both tone and look had been way too close to the surface since they'd found Page. "No, I'm not," he growled. "We risked our necks to bring this to the attention of the authorities-and don't look at me like you don't understand what I'm talking about. A ship in a pen doesn't make for an easy Susumi equation. You and me, we're not living in a cheesy vid; it's not our job to illuminate the dark between the systems with the light of justice." It was a SpaceCops quote. He'd never seen the show before he'd hooked up with Torin, but she loved it. When Torin folded her arms, waiting for him to go on, he sighed. "Okay, now I'm done."
"We work and live in the dark between the systems," she pointed out. Unnecessarily, considering how she'd just started the job and he'd been doing it for over a decade. "This isn't about the light of justice, it's motivated self-interest."
And about the undeniable fact that ex-Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr was incapable of walking away from a fight.
"All right, fine." It wasn't like he hadn't known that about her from the beginning. He could get into the Fancy; he'd done it once already to power her down before the jump. The ship had known Page had been out too long for his air supply, so emergency protocols had gotten him in. Whether he could access her data stores though, that was another question. If Page had locked his board down before he went out, the odds weren't high he could crack it before they attracted attention. CSO codes were idiosyncratic at best, and his codes would only take him so far. "Say I can hack Page's ship. First I have to get to it. What happens if the Wardens have put a guard on it?"
Torin snorted. "We're on a Taykan station. They're not that hard to distract."
Page's ship wasn't guarded. No reason why it should have been, Torin supposed. One Who Maintains wouldn't consider it part of an ongoing investigation until she had, as she'd said, a lot more evidence. They walked unchallenged into the repair bay and across the deck, footsteps echoing. Without the added bulk of her pen segments-they'd been tethered outside-Fancy looked dwarfed by her surroundings. Someone had run a ramp up to her air lock, but the outer door remained closed and the telltales were red.
"Let's hope they haven't recoded the lock," Craig muttered, fingers on the pad. On cue, the telltales turned green, and both outer and inner doors opened.
Torin followed Craig into the tiny air lock. He paused at the inner door and when she put one hand flat against him to steady herself, she realized that the muscles of his back had twisted into knots under his shirt. He'd only just learned to tolerate having another person on the Promise with him, using his resources, and Fancy was smaller. From what she could see over Craig's shoulder as the inner door opened, depressingly smaller. The toilet and sink folded up into the bulkhead and Page had left the toilet folded down before his last trip out. It smelled like he'd forgot to hit reclamation when he finished. Or maybe he was just a lousy shot.
He'd decorated by attaching old-fashioned, two-dimensional, Human-centric porn to every vertical surface. The closest piece proved just how flexible a bipedal species could be. Not something Torin would want to look at every day, out in deep space, alone, but it took all kinds.
"I'll wait out here."
Craig turned just far enough to glare. "I'm fine."
"I know." Since her hand was already on his back, she traced the valley of his spine with her thumb, fingers trailing over the heavy muscle to either side. "But you don't need me hanging over your shoulder, and if I go in there with you, there won't be any other option."
His gaze swept around the cabin, then back to her. It didn't take long. "Good point," he said.
As she took her hand away, she felt him begin to relax.
Back at the bottom of the ramp, habit dropped her into an easy parade rest. If it turned out Page knew what Jan and Sirin had salvaged, knew what they'd died trying to protect, that connection might be enough to light a fire under One Who Maintains' enormous, furry ass. If it didn't, it was still information they could take to a military station in order to direct the Navy patrols. The patrols responsible for hunting down and removing the pirates.
Pirates.
She still had trouble believing it.
There wasn't enough organized violence around? People had to freelance?
Maybe the Elder Races were right. Maybe a species shouldn't achieve interstellar capability until they'd learned to manage their aggression. Not that it mattered, after a couple hundred years of war, that ship had well and truly folded and there could be no going back. She wondered how the Primacy, made up entirely of young aggressive species, was managing without the focus the gray plastic aliens had provided. Odds were about even they'd started pounding on each other.
In much less time than Torin had expected, the sound of Craig's boots ringing against the ramp pulled her around to face him.
He shook his head as he walked toward her. "Not locked, not that it mattered. There's no record of contact between Page and Firebreather, but," he added before Torin could respond, "he had been messaging someone fairly frequently on the Two-four. No idea who, but I uploaded their codes so we can find out. A mate of Alia's is maintaining a database-who uses what codes when. Not that I'm saying some might use more than one set of codes," he added, seeing her expression. "If Jan or Sirin happened to have been talking to the same person Page was…"
"Long shot," Torin acknowledged, falling into step beside him as he stepped off onto the deck. Even a tenuous connection would be better than nothing but it wouldn't get One Who Maintains or the Navy moving against the pirates.
"We'll bog in first, I'm starving." Craig threw an arm around her shoulders. "Then we go make Rogelio Page proud by taking a group of hardworking engineers for every credit they have."
"That would make him proud?"
"It'd make me happy."
When it came right down to it, the living had to be more important than the dead. "Good enough."
Torin finished checking the Susumi equation and glanced up at Craig, who backed away and tried to look as though he hadn't been checking it over with her. Given that mistakes were usually fatal, she didn't mind. "So, tell me why we're returning to the same debris field?"
"We have first tag on it, now Page is dead." Craig scowled at the empty coffeepot, then took it into the head to fill it, raising his voice over the sound of running water. "Not to mention, if we chuck back to our previous coordinates, the government will pay for the fold. It's a little ghoulish, but it's practical since the reason we were headed there originally still stands-we know there's no surprises in the salvage to mess up a rookie run."