Nate nodded at her, then turned and hollered down the ladder. “Kohl? Kohl! Get your ass to engineering.”
October’s voice came back muted by two things: distance and annoyance. “Why?”
“Something heavy needs moving,” said Nate. He winked at Hope.
She sighed. Time to get to work.
• • •
Hope kicked back in her chair, the acceleration couch feeling like an old glove. Soft in all the right places, strong where it was needed, a little faded here and there. The gimbals at the base let her spin around, the room turning about her as she thought about the lockdown. The problem with the lockdown was the way it worked — convincing the Tyche that Dock Control was, uh, in control, and not the Tyche’s own Helm.
She’d broken a couple of lockdowns before, but not a Republic one. There was one ace in the hole, a thing that could get them off this perch and into the air where they belonged. The Tyche, she was ex-Empire. Retrofitted with all the right codes, transponder all legal and above board, but the coupling between the transponder and the real Tyche, well that was a complex mix of wires. The tech who’d installed it had looked flustered most of the time he’d been working on it, always talking under his breath about fuck they got me doing this shit for and well it doesn’t say that in the manual. She’d watched over his shoulder, a thing she knew hadn’t helped his state of mind, but his Republic uniform hadn’t helped hers, so Hope felt that made them even.
She put a foot down on the deck, slowing her spin. Hope reached out her hands to the console in front of her and typed. The systems responded to her touch, engineering specs and console windows popping up on the holo. She rubbed a thumb across her jaw, not knowing (or caring) if it left a grease smudge on her face. An alert from the console, a bright and angry red, flashed as she violated a few protocols supposed to be inviolate. It didn’t describe what she was doing right now in the manual.
Kohl leaned next to her. “What you doing?”
She gave him a glance, then turned back to the console. “Fixing things.”
“Fixing,” he said. “What’re all the alarms for?”
“Things that aren’t fixed yet,” she said. She paused. “Kohl?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m working, Kohl.”
“Okay,” he said.
“And,” she said, “you being here is not helping me work.” It wasn’t just that he was a distraction. It was that he hated her. She knew it, he knew it. Everyone knew it. She felt … judged by him. By this bad man full of bad habits. Even that wasn’t the real problem; the problem was that she didn’t blame him for hating her. Not really. Not after what she’d done. Hope had run out on her wife to get out from under the heel of the law, and it’d been a problem everywhere the Tyche went. It didn’t matter that the captain had said no way this was your fault and busted her out from a cell he’d shared with her one night. If you believed the Republic propaganda, it was deviants like her that led to the fall of the Empire. They weren’t wrong. They weren’t right. But Kohl thought they were, and she understood.
So, she needed him to not be here. Because thinking about all that, thinking about Reiko, was not helping Hope solve the lockdown situation.
He sniffed, coughed, leaned back. She heard clicks from his spine. “Okay,” he said. “Cowl’s back in place. Need anything else?”
She considered a new alarm that popped up on the display floating in the air in front of them both. “No,” she said. Not from you. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.” He turned away, swung onto the handrails leading down from Engineering, and slipped from view.
Hope typed a little more. Saw what could be a deal-breaker here. While she could convince the Tyche, bless her heart, to ignore the Republic’s lockdown, there was a corresponding coupling on the docking platform. A series of clamps held the ship in place. Nothing too serious; a couple of hours with a cutting torch would see them gone, if they had a couple of hours to burn. The could just fire up the engines, tear themselves away, but that would leave damage, and damage to landing gear led to questions, and the questions led to inspections, and inspections led to jail. The clamps on the docking platform were under Dock Control, which meant Republic fingers were holding her ship on the ground.
She stood up, grabbing her rig. She slung it over her back, felt it reach around to hug her, protective plates sliding into place down her front. The four actuator arms whined, spun, and then locked in place behind her. The rig’s HUD blinked into life, first the top right corner with power indicator, systems check, status of the actuators — lower left arm’s gonna need work, second elbow is sticking — and then the other corners blinked up. Top left, slots for status of a work crew she didn’t have. Bottom right, a blank pane blinked, then filled with some of the schematic details she’d been working on at the Tyche’s console. Bottom left, a series of comms and other systems details that were useless right now.
The HUD was reassuring for two reasons: because systems were green across the board, and because the visor that slipped over her face would hide it from view. The Republic had facial recognition everywhere. Spaceports. Public transit zones. Hell, even the damn toilets on these border worlds watched your face, scanned your irises, even checked your skin for blood flow changes that would indicate distress. While some of that was useful for good, law-abiding Republic Citizens, she was neither law-abiding nor a citizen. And she was about to get less law abiding.
• • •
“Hope,” said Nate’s voice. “How’s our status?”
“It’s good, Captain,” she said, as she looked at the docking control system on the Tyche’s landing pad. She was outside. On the platform. Hope wasn’t breathing good Arlington air on account of the visor’s airtight seal, but the illusion was good enough. Sun. Open space. Smoke.
Wait. Smoke?
She could see the smoke rising from the city in the distance — Nate was right, that wasn’t a happy thing.
“We’re still in lockdown,” he said.
“Working on it,” said Hope.
“How much longer?” he said.
She made a growl low in her throat, then coughed to cover it. “Captain?”
“Yes, Engineer.” No matter she wasn’t a proper Engineer anymore. He called her that because it’s what she did. But there was a smile in his voice as well, because he didn’t much like Guild titles or Guild rules.
“Do you find when you’re under a lot of pressure, you know, when things are really urgent? In those situations, do you find it helps to be interrupted and asked how things are going?” Hope pulled together a couple of programs, the rig’s actuators reaching out from behind her to grasp the housing of the docking control system. There was a whine, a series of pops, and rivets fell from the housing like metal rain. “Because I don’t find it helpful. I find it distracting, and I work slower when I’m distracted.” The actuators were moving fast, pulling away the housing, dropping the ceramic and metal to the ground at her feet. Inside, treasure: the glowing heart of the docking control system.