By morning, the whole station would be talking about her, but by morning they'd be gone.
"Are we playing or talking?" he asked the table at large as Nat dug bloody fingernails into her scalp.
Sleep when you can was not one of the Corps' official mottos, but Torin had always figured it should have been. Head pillowed on her jacket, she woke when Craig approached their air lock. Ankles crossed, she rolled up onto her feet.
"They charge us every time we use the lock," she reminded him as his brows rose.
He grinned and spread his hands. "I wasn't going to ask."
"How'd you do?"
"I won big." He moved closer when she turned to code in.
Torin leaned back against his heat. The floor had been a bit cold. "And then?"
"How do you know there's an and then?"
Torin said nothing as the telltales turned green.
"Okay, there's an and then." He shifted, trying to get a look at her face. "Are you smiling?"
She was. "So you blew your winnings on racing stripes for the Promise?"
"Not quite." Torin felt his chest rise and fall against her back as he took a deep breath. "I used my winnings to buy the coordinates for a tech field from a cargo jockey."
"Magic beans were going to be my next guess."
FOUR
Craig blinked up at the top of the bunk, wondering what had woken him. He shifted, realized he was alone, and from the lack of residual heat, probably had been for some time. Rolling up onto his side, he could see the back of the pilot's chair silhouetted against light rising from the control panel and assumed Torin was in the chair.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," she said before he could speak.
It would never not be fukking creepy when she did that.
"Your breathing changed," she added, spinning the chair around far enough so he could see her against the lit screen.
Craig thought about pointing out that most people wouldn't have noticed, but Torin wasn't most people, never would be. The hour seemed to call for the direct approach. "What're you doing?"
"Threat assessing. Go back to sleep."
Yeah, like that was going to happen now. "Are we in danger?"
Torin huffed a laugh. "Most of the time." One hand rose up through the light to wave at the fuzz of Susumi through the front port. "Screw up a basic trigonometric function, and that shit eats you for breakfast."
Old news. "Specific danger?" he prodded, covering a yawn with his fist.
He couldn't quite see her shrug, but her tone told him she had. "The data stores have nothing on The Heart of Stone."
"No reason they should. It's a cargo ship I've never run into before."
"I don't trust this… Nat. I don't trust that she sold you the coordinates for so much less than they could be worth."
"Could be worth," Craig repeated, adding emphasis. "And she sold them for as much as she could get. Nat did okay, more than, given that she can't bring in military salvage without tags. She got a sure thing. We're taking the chance. And I checked the math before I paid her-the odds of it being a debris drift from the destruction of the Norrington, the M'rcgunn, and the Salvanos are high. Very high, even. But you know that because I showed you the numbers." Eyes narrowed, he strained unsuccessfully to see her expression. "What's really wrong?"
For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to answer. Finally, she sighed.
"I knew Marines on the M'rcgunn. Most of them are still MIA."
"… three hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and twenty brought home. And counting."
"You're wondering if we'll find them."
"It had crossed my mind."
Craig knew that one of Torin's hands rested on the place the tiny cylinders holding the ashes of the dead would fit into a combat vest. He suspected she still carried every Marine she hadn't been able to bring home alive. He wanted to tell her she could put them down. Knew it wasn't his place. But he'd do what he could. "Come back to bed. Celebrate life."
He could feel her stare. Heard her snort. "That may be the corniest pickup line anyone has ever used on me."
"What can I say?" He grinned. "You're a sure thing; I've stopped trying."
Torin had always thought that, given the chance, she'd prefer to be at the controls during a Susumi fold rather than have her survival depend on another's ability to get the equation right. Far as the Navy's Susumi engineers were concerned, Marines were meat in a can. Not that Torin had ever actively worried about them getting it wrong. No point. Nothing she could do, strapped down in one of the Marine packets, would affect the outcome. She preferred to save her concern for things she could affect.
Turned out, being at the controls gave her exactly as much satisfaction as she'd thought it would. It felt good to have external responsibilities again.
The last time, she'd merely been at the controls when they emerged. This time, it was her fold, start to finish.
As the Susumi wave faded, she brought the front thrusters on to slow their emergent speed, and then checked her boards. "We've arrived at the coordinates we were aiming… Shit!"
"What?"
A piece of duct tape tore as Craig's grip on the top of the chair actually tightened. Given the white-knuckled grip he'd been using as they came back into normal space, Torin hadn't thought tighter was possible. "Scanners are reading dispersed Susumi radiation."
"Our wave…" he began, but she cut him off.
"No." Enlarging the display, she frowned at the scrolling numbers. "That's the edge of our wave there. See the overlap?"
He was close enough that his sigh of relief moved her hair, breath lapping warm against her scalp. "Oh, thank fuk. Levels that low, we ignore."
"Ignore?" With the Promise now essentially motionless, she twisted around to face him, putting them nose-to-nose. "Are you serious?" Susumi radiation wasn't just nasty, it was variable at the molecular level, and results were never the same twice. The scientific community had agreed only that run away, run away was the wisest response.
Shifting to the right, Craig reached past her and enlarged a different display. "During the battle, three Confederation ships blew within five thousand kilometers of these coordinates-this is just residue. And, Nat, the cargo jockey who pointed us this way told me they'd had a hinky fold. Might be nothing more than that. We can pull salvage at twice this level."
"And you have?"
He snorted. "Sure."
Torin took another look and still didn't like the numbers. "Tell me you've banked sperm."
"I've banked sperm."
"Good." Both branches of the military required the banking of reproductive material upon enlisting, given the hundred percent probability of being exposed to hard radiation while serving. Torin had an ovary in storage back on Paradise. Civilians who went into space made their own choices. Most of the mutations weren't viable.
An incoming communication pinged the board.
"Fukking figures." Craig scaled the radiation readings down so he could bring up the code. "Looks like there's already a tag registered."
Torin surrendered the pilot's chair. "If this is a one-on-one with another CSO, you'd better take it."
He grinned and sat. "You have to learn to talk to them sometime."
"The moment they learn communication protocols."
"You know some people would consider the term hot mama a compliment."
"Some people think the H'san are cuddly, I'm not responsible for their delusions either." She took the position he'd been holding behind the chair, just as glad she had no farther to walk as her first Susumi fold had left her legs feeling embarrassingly wobbly. Ex-gunnery sergeants did not wobble.
"It's just the code for the tag coming through-no one I know. Seems they don't want to talk."
"Is that standard operating procedure?"
"We're a little skint with those." Craig pulled up a keyboard. "If they're working alone, maybe suited up outside-they won't want the distraction of talk. I'm registering second tag," he added, before she could ask. "Whoever they are, their registration says they're on the other side of that lopsided planetoid with the ring, so I'll do a long-range scan and see if there's anything worth investigating about 500 kliks from their…"