“Come on.” To my relief, he turned to leave the hold, waving me on with him. “I’ll give you the free-fall tour while you can still move.”
A flight of stairs just about as wide as I was, a hallway flanked by doors, and then more stairs brought us to the crew stations. A walkway bisected four recessed consoles that were ringed with monitors.
The Kaitan wasn’t what I was accustomed to. Unlike the ships of the inner subsystems, it wasn’t all glowing walls and hovering displays. Instead, mechanical parts and pieces were used wherever possible, in what I assumed was an effort to simplify repairs, while some of the displays were decades old. And the crew was just as atypical. Laughter surrounded us as we entered the space, and I caught the last part of a conversation.
“You should have seen his face, Basra, when you told him you’d never planned to sell to him. I thought you’d make someone cry in record time.” The speaker, a young woman, was one of two occupants in the stations. A striking slash of black hair covered part of her face, the strands parting just enough to show an intricate tattoo around the hidden eye. Like Arjan, she had the darker hair and skin tone that still characterized native Alaxans, their population having remained mostly undiluted on their isolated planet. She cut her words short, and we surveyed each other.
After a second of silence, the other crew member stood up easily and reached out a hand. “Basra,” came the introduction, and I shook a beat longer than I should have. He definitely wasn’t from around here, though I couldn’t place where. Nor could I discern whether the pleasantly modulated voice or slender frame belonged to a man or a woman, and the hairstyle—an unabashed crest of brown curls rising from a shaved scalp—combined with simultaneously soft and angular coppery features, was no help at all. I settled on thinking of him as male for the sake of convenience.
“Nev. Nice to meet you,” I replied, stupidly late.
Basra retreated just as smoothly back to his station, shoulders slightly curved, never giving me the once-over I had been expecting. I wasn’t sure if the assessment had happened faster than I could notice, or if he just didn’t care.
The young woman, in contrast, did not get up. She remained in her seat, legs casually propped up on the consoles in front of her. Both eyes, tattooed and not, were busy burning holes in my skull with the intensity of their stare. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey. I’m, uh, still Nev. The new loader. And you are?”
She raised both eyebrows and pursed her lips in a quick motion. “Telu. Hacker.” She jerked a finger at the consoles around her in emphasis, and I noticed that they were the only thing on the ship that was thoroughly up to date. “You look awfully clean for a loader.”
I nodded, shifting my travel bag from one shoulder to another, thinking of the appropriately humble thing to say.
“He’s new on the planet,” Arjan supplied. “Won’t last.”
Any humility of mine turned sour as I threw him a glance.
Telu laughed before the ship lurched, and then she swept her legs underneath her console to examine the feeds. Her fingers deftly swept through a few status screens. “Looks like we’re getting close, since the captain’s going straight through pretty much every flare and gravitational eddy to get us there.”
I perked up, noticing another set of stairs at the other end of the room. “Should I meet her before we get down to it, then?”
“Sure.” Arjan shrugged. “Dead ahead.”
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to discourage me with a double meaning there. Despite that, I was headed for the stairs before he was finished speaking.
“Not right now,” a voice rumbled as I approached, and a heavy set of boots appeared on the steps first, followed by the rest of the speaker. My gaze traveled up…and up. A pale face as beaten as the rest of the Kaitan greeted me. A number of scars crisscrossed the craggy features, and bushy eyebrows and graying, close-cropped hair further suggested that he was a human mountain. Unlike his other crewmates, this huge man had no problem eyeing me as though I were an assassin entering the royal chambers.
“Eton, this is Nev, our new loader,” Arjan piped up behind me, and I could hear the grin in his voice as he did. “Nev, Eton is our weapons tech. And muscle.”
I held out my hand to Eton. “Hello, a pleasure.”
I was surprised that he actually reached down and took it, but I understood why when he turned my hand to jelly in his own paw. “Introductions later. Maybe.” He crossed the two tree trunks he had for arms and nodded at me. “We’re about to start the run, so hustle to your station.”
I was pretty sure he wasn’t the one who should be giving me orders, but I plastered a friendly smile on my face instead of shaking out my pulped hand and screaming that I didn’t have time for this. “Of course. I look forward to it.”
Eighteen hours later, I definitely wasn’t smiling.
The Kaitan Heritage was poised at the outskirts of a vast molecular cloud. Thanks to the projected image in the hold, intended to help me keep pace with what Arjan was doing in the skiff—the small secondary shuttle that he used to maneuver the net when it wasn’t docked in the Kaitan—I had a front-row seat. The edges of the cloud seemed frozen in time in spite of the cosmic forces that propelled them outward. These gas streamers spread for light years, streaked with oranges, purples, and greens like the product of a painter gone mad. The fingers reached to where we hovered in the Alaxak Asteroid Sea, a stretching field of celestial rubble.
And yet the enormity of that brilliant sky crammed with stars was nothing to my first glimpse of a Shadow run. Surrounded by undulating fields of blackness, waving pinpricks of light coursed toward us in a bizarre mimicry of planetary fish migrations—a mesmerizing, swirling, diving current that invited uninitiated “fishermen” to gape unabashedly.
Which I was certainly guilty of on our first run. Now, countless runs later, I couldn’t have cared less. I was frozen, depleted beyond measure. The Great Unifier himself could have reached a finger out to create a new cosmos and my response would have been to take a nap, grateful that we weren’t making a run for another catch.
Captain Qole, on the other hand, had no plans for sleep. From the chatter on the comms it seemed we were raking in a catch of epic proportions, and she had brought us about for yet another run.