Nadayki's eyes darkened. "If the captain does anything to keep me from working, he'll never get through this seal. Not when I'm the only one who understands the groundwork I've laid."
"Was that a threat, kid?"
"No." Nadayki's chin rose, but his hair flattened. Mixed messages. "It's a simple if/then statement. If he hurts me because I haven't finished, then I can't finish. Cause and effect."
"Yeah?" Huirre flexed his toes against the deck. "Does it effect you if he hurts one of your thytrin to motivate you?"
"Affect," Nadayki snapped. Craig had to suppress a completely inappropriate desire to laugh. "And no. If he hurts one of my thytrin, I won't finish." This, he was sure of. His hair started moving again.
"If you're not going to finish," Huirre pointed out thoughtfully, "he might as well hurt you."
"What?" Nadayki's hair stopped moving again.
Craig sighed. "Huirre's fukking with you, kid. Getting you to waste time. Then he tells the captain, and he's golden while you catch shit."
Huirre snickered. "You're no fun at all. Tasty, but no fun."
Eyes darkening, Nadayki frowned, then smirked in triumph. "You hate that I'm more important right now than you!"
"Moment of glory. Enjoy it." The Krai dipped a hand into his pocket and held it out, a stim on the tip of one finger. "Captain wants you to take this."
"I don't need a…"
"Yeah, you do, kid." Back against the bulkhead, Craig worked himself up onto his right foot, keeping his weight off the left until absolutely necessary. "You get tired, you'll make mistakes. You make a big enough mistake, we all die. Bottom line, that's what the armory blowing up means. We all die. I don't want to die. You don't want to die. Take the stim."
"Stop calling me kid!" But he took the stim.
Huirre picked up one of the takeout boxes with his left foot and tossed it up into his hand. He sniffed the stained interior and took a bite. "Chrick. Just like my jernil used to make. Now get lost, Ryder. And you might want to fukking shower. You stink."
Considering he was still breaking out in a sweat every time he moved his foot, Craig wasn't surprised. He hadn't thought of showering until Huirre mentioned it, but right now, there was only one thing he wanted to do more than stand under hot water. Torin's implant could reach dirtside to a ship in orbit. It could reach him in the Heart.
He took a careful step away, weight on his left heel, and remembered Torin had wanted him to check on how they'd moved the armory into the pod. The deck was smooth. They had to have shifted the armory from the ship's cargo bay doors in through the big decompression doors-it was too gods damned big to get it to the storage pod any other way-but they hadn't moved it on rails.
"Hey, Huirre." He nodded back toward the pod. "You know how they got that thing in here?"
"The armory? Yeah."
Craig waited.
Huirre snickered. "I'm not going to tell you. Ask the captain. Or Almon. He could beat you up again before he fuks you." He took another bite of the box. "I don't give a shit about Doc's pirate guidelines. Far as I'm concerned, you're not crew until you're in deep enough you can't screw us over with the Wardens. Until then, you're walking snack food." After showering, Torin felt a lot more Human. They still had ice in the hopper, and the Star had a top-of-the-line recycling system; they'd have plenty of water to get them through the next…
She glanced at her slate.
… five hours and seventeen minutes. Given what Big Bill charged for water-up front-that was no small thing.
The station schematics had proved without a doubt the armory had come through the ore dock's decompression doors-the armory was just too big to have gotten onto the station any other way. But how had they maneuvered it from the doors to the storage pod? That was the question. The schematics showed nothing capable of maneuvering that kind of…
Her implant didn't so much ping as ring loudly enough she felt her jaw vibrate. *Good morning, Gunnery Sergeant. I hope I'm not waking you.*
Torin had survived under fire more times than Big Bill had charged his fifteen percent. No way was she going to show that the son of a bitch had startled her. "I'm up." *Good. Meet me at the old smelter in thirty. I'll send a route to your slate.* The ping when he broke the connection was at a volume significantly closer to the default.
Torin fought the urge to beat her head against the bulkhead, reached for clean clothes instead, and began dragging them on. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten that Big Bill had her codes. Technically, he was her employer, so she'd had no good reason to refuse when he'd asked. Actually, she'd had any number of good reasons, but none she could give him.
She paused, one arm through her shirt. Big Bill's implant codes didn't go into the system. As far as the station sysop was concerned, that call hadn't happened. Therefore, her codes hadn't been put into the system and she could still contact Craig without putting him in danger.
"Probably," Ressk agreed as she put her boots on. "I'll go in and check. Easy enough to take them out now anyway."
"Easy enough?"
"I set it up as a link to the communications boards." He waved his slate. "Full access from here."
"Can you eavesdrop on Big Bill's implant?"
"Not yet. But I'm working on it."
"Good." Second boot on, she took a moment to lay her head on her knees and get her shit together. "I'm a soldier," she muttered. "I fukking suck at this undercover shit."
"You're doing okay so far, Gunny."
She straightened then and glared across the cabin at Ressk. "Just okay?" That pretty much proved her point.
He grinned. "I'm sure you'd be happier if someone was shooting at us." He held out his hand, a familiar white dot on his palm. "Mashona found stims in the first aid kit. Look like ours-the Corps'-don't they?"
They did. She crossed the cabin and lifted the tiny white pill on her fingertip. "How many?"
"Two. I took the other one. Mashona and Werst'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. They've fought a war on less sleep."
"War." Torin swallowed a mouthful of saliva caused by the familiar, bitter taste of the stim. She shrugged into her tunic, checked that Presit's camera was secured, and headed for the air lock. "War has rules. Whatever this is, it could use some rules."
"Harder to break an arbitrary decision," Ressk agreed as the lock cycled closed.
Five hours and six minutes. They needed a plan.
The route Big Bill had sent to her slate would have taken her more than thirty minutes even if she'd left the ship immediately after receiving it. With only nineteen minutes remaining, she took a short cut. First up to the Hub's mezzanine level, moving quickly through the public areas-senior NCOs did not run in order to reach their destination on time. At least not where they could be seen. Once through a locked hatch, Torin picked up the pace, racing down the pale gray corridor that led to the staff quarters, left at the t-junction, then past twenty identical darker gray hatches…
"Hey! What the fuk are you doing up here?"
Torin ignored him, opened the maintenance access she'd been aiming for, and stepped into the darkness, closing the access behind her. Using her slate as a light, she hooked two fingers under a bit of gray plastic conduit, and, having given it as much time as she could spare to respond, pushed herself down toward the smelter level-for representational rather than gravitational values of the word down. Like the verticals, the maintenance shafts were kept at zero G-one of the reasons so many maintenance workers were Krai. The Krai, as a species, suffered no nausea, no disorientation; without gravity, they were able to use both hands and feet to double their efficiency.
She skimmed her free hand along the plastic cables.
One deck. Two. Three.
Snapping her slate back on her belt, Torin snagged another conduit to stop her descent and flipped the access panel open with her free hand. She swung her feet out onto the deck, twisting sideways to clear her shoulders as gravity took over and her weight pulled her clear.