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"The food is crap."
"Not arguing, but Doc likes it and there's always a market for kitchens. You're letting your prejudices cut into profits."
"It's not prejudice. I know the food they turn out is crap."
"And I know," his quartermaster grunted, "that these two'd probably work faster if you weren't peering over their shoulders."
"Sucks to be them."
In spite of the captain's presence, or maybe because of it, the two di'Taykan worked full out for almost two hours, creating a complex three-dimensional jigsaw of captured salvage in order to fit it into the available space. Finally, Almon sighed and said, "Cargo's locked and loaded, Captain."
"Noted." Cho raised his voice slightly; the comm pickups in the extension could be temperamental. "Huirre."
"Captain."
"Turn us toward home." They'd kick on the Susumi drive after he and Nat had the cargo sorted, separated the crap from the cream, and ditched the crap.
"Aye, sir. Home it is." The subtext-about fukking time-came through loud and clear, but they'd been roaming for a while, looking for a prize worth the trip, so he let it go.
"Cap and I going to fit in there?" Nat wondered, peering past Almon at his screen.
"No. Too tight." Almon turned just far enough to wink at her, a Human gesture the di'Taykan had wholeheartedly adopted. "Tight's good."
Nat winked back. "Not arguing, kid."
The di'Taykan were known as the most sexually indiscriminating species in known space, but tossing i
"That's not so much tight as wall to fukking wall," Nat snorted, transferring her attention from Almon's screen to her own. "Crowded enough we'll have to use the eye for first sort." She called up the controls on her slate one-handed, then ran the hand back through short gray hair. "Eye gives me fukking vertigo. Let's just hope I don't puke."
"Don't," Cho told her, his own slate ready.
"Yes, sir, Cap. Because my stomach always does what you tell it."
It was a good prize, Cho acknowledged as he guided the remote camera around and through what were clearly parts retrieved from a single destroyed battle cruiser. Looked like they'd scored some of the Marine package, too, he realized as the eye picked out the crest of the Corps on a…
"Holy fukking shit."
"Cap?"
He fed her slate the coordinates without speaking.
"Holy fukking shit," she agreed a moment later. "Now that's worth puking over."
They'd scored a Marine armory. An undamaged Marine Corps armory. A small fortune in weapons if he decided to sell them. A way to change the future if he didn't.
The seals were solid and…
… had been oversealed by one of the dead CSOs.
If he wanted to get the armory open without blowing it and everything around it to hell and gone, he needed another CSO. Alive this time. "Promise, you are cleared at vector twenty-four point seven for two hundred kilometers. Returning computer control in three, two, one."
"Return acknowledged, Paradise Station." Craig ran both hands along the edge of his board, the movement not quite a caress. While he understood why the station controlled all approaches and departures-the unforgiving nature of vacuum made accidents usually fatal and always expensive-it wasn't required that he actually like being forced to sit as a passenger in his own ship. So he didn't. But he sure as hell liked getting his lady back.
"All right, you said you'd tell me when we were in space." His poor old pilot's chair dipped as Torin settled enough weight to make a point across the top. "We're in space. Spill."
Torin hadn't been happy about being kept in the dark, but she hadn't done anything about it either, and Craig knew that represented a huge leap in trust for them. Torin didn't like not knowing things.
"We've seen your family," he told her, leaning back and looking up. "I figured that now we could lob in and see mine."
She frowned. "Your parents died thirteen years ago, and you haven't seen your cousin Joe for nearly six."
"You fossicked through my records, then."
Torin spun the chair around and straddled his lap. The chair complained again, and Craig told it silently to shut up as he slid his hands up the curve of her hips to settle around her waist. At 1.8 meters with a fighter's muscle, Torin wasn't light, but he knew for a fact the chair could hold them both… while moving a lot more vigorously.
"I checked after I joined you here, on the Promise," she said. "Not before."
So her research had no influence on her joining him. He appreciated that she'd decided with her heart and not her head. "You could have asked."
"You never spoke of them and, just in case…" She waved a hand, the gesture taking in the bunk, the half-circle table, the two chairs, and closed hatch to the head. "… we don't have a lot of room for touchy subjects."
"'S truth. But unless we make one hell of a find-working tech say-even adding another three square meters'll cost more than we can afford this year." They'd used a chunk of Torin's final payment from the Corps to put in a new converter. As long as they could find ice-and if they couldn't find ice, he was in the wrong business-they could replenish both water and oxygen significantly faster than two people could use it. That and the upgraded CO2 scrubbers went a long way toward removing any residual dread of sharing the limited resources of a small ship with another person.
With Torin anyway.
"We were talking about your family." She rocked her hips forward, and his eyes rolled back. Torin had relaxed the moment the air lock telltales had gone red and they were clear of Paradise and her family. When she got like this, it was hard to remember she knew twenty-five ways to kill a man with her bare hands. "Where are we going?"
"Salvage station."
She stopped moving. Craig made an inarticulate protest.
"They actually exist?"
"Seventy-two-hour fold and we'll rock up. You can see for yourself."
"And they're safe?"
He laughed at that. The myths about salvage stations usually included the word deathtrap in the description. "For fuksake, Torin, you were a Marine!"
"And contrary to popular opinion, gu
"Trust me, if there's one thing a salvage operator understands, given how much time we spend suited up, it's not breathing vacuum. Now then," reaching up, he cupped the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, "you could keep working on that twenty-sixth way to kill a man. Seems I'm not dead yet."
"It does not look cobbled together," Craig muttered. "It looks…"
Torin waited while Craig frowned out at the station they were approaching, obviously searching for the right response to her initial reaction. Which had been, all things considered, relatively mild.
"All right, fine," he surrendered, "you win. It looks cobbled together. But give it a fair go. People are raising families in there."
"Families?" Torin leaned forward and took another look at the tangled mass of habitats referred to as Salvage Station 24. "In that?" It was hard to pick out details given the glare off the hectares of deployed solar sails, but she was certain she could see one of the H'san's ceramic pods cozied up next to a piece of a decommissioned Navy cruiser, as well as half a dozen Marine packages. Tucked up against it, in no discernible pattern, she could see a dozen ships the Promise's size or a very little larger. Apparently, salvage operators didn't believe in docking arms on their stations.
A direct hit by the enemy would turn ninety percent of this particular station back into the scrap it had started as.