Right now, all his energy was focused on tracking the power signature. “It’s getting stronger. Still too far away to calculate its exact position, but we are headed in the right direction.”

“Distance?”

He shook his head. “Unknown. Could be a matter of a few days, at least.”

Terrific. Nervous energy hummed along her body. She didn’t realize that she was tapping her hand against the controls until Calder placed his hand over hers. His touch came as a surprise, the feel of his large, warm hand covering her sending a visceral jolt through her.

“Throttle down, Jur,” he murmured, “or you’ll burn your engines out too soon.”

“Tough for me to sit still if I’m not on patrol or in combat. Bad habit.”

He raised his brows. “Stainless Jur doesn’t have any bad habits.”

Damn, it was starting already. Soon he would discover she was not the paragon everyone imagined her to be, and then he’d be another man looking at her in angry disappointment.

“Stainless Jur has none.” She tugged her hand free. “I have plenty.”

He shifted back, his expression distant, and then he returned his focus to the tracking screen.

They flew on in tense wordlessness. He did not look at her with veneration. He did not look at her at all.

Celene knew silence. She’d flown enough patrols to grow used to it. Chatter between ships had to be kept to a minimum in case the frequencies were monitored. A Wraith usually held a lone pilot, but it could also be configured to accommodate a gunner. Even when her ship contained herself and another, they talked infrequently, for security purposes. It was an easy silence.

So she understood long stretches of utter quiet, when it was only her, her Wraith and the deep, jeweled infinity of space.

This silence, however, between her and Calder… Nothing familiar or comfortable about it. It pulled tightly until she thought she might crack from the strain.

“Tell me what you know about Marek.”

The illumination from the display traced the contours of his face. His high cheekbones, the straight line of his nose and fullness of his mouth. Again she felt a strange flicker of memory, a far-flung sun glinting across light years of distance.

“He had almost two decades with the 8th Wing. Career. Or so I thought.” Though his voice had been toneless before, now it held a sonic blade’s bite. “There were discussions, ongoing debates. If we had a shift together, we’d talk of circuitry arrangements, the best way to make ships faster, more responsive. The whole time he sat drinking kahve in the mess, listening to stories about sweethearts on homeworlds, he was plotting. Planning.” His tone hardened with self-recrimination. “None of us in Engineering knew.”

“Nobody blames you.”

His mouth curved, sardonic. “The fact that you immediately try to absolve me causes me to believe that I do actually shoulder some responsibility.”

“I don’t shoot down every PRAXIS ship I face. I try, but sometimes even my best effort is not always enough.”

She waited, wondering what he might make of this admission of imperfection. Denial, perhaps. It often went that way, when the fissures in the cation armor began to show.

He stared at her. Then, slowly, nodded.

She didn’t know who was more surprised: her, from his acceptance, or him, for offering it.

“But Marek did keep himself aloof.” He returned to the subject as if eager to put the strange, tenuous moment behind them both. “Didn’t take criticism well. Whenever review came around, he’d be sullen for solar weeks. If he thought he wasn’t getting enough recognition, he’d get angry.”

“Violent?”

Calder shook his head. “He never kept up with his PT. If he wanted to hurt someone, he’d find another way to do it.”

“So he might not be a threat.”

“Physically? No. But Marek knows his tech. Wherever he is, he’ll have systems in place. And the leash will be off.”

“Leash?”

He stared out through the front-facing window as planetary systems slid past, and it surprised her now, how such a lean man could fill the cockpit with his presence. Rather than growing less aware of him as time passed, she had somehow developed a new sensitivity to him. She had seen him in combat, so that now, with each shift of his body, she had a precise knowledge of his muscles, and how he moved.

“Marek pushed for making the weaponry more aggressive, stronger.”

“We need all the firepower strength we can get.”

“Not the way he wanted it. It had elements of…cruelty. Not fast, quick enemy deaths, but a drawing out of their suffering. He wanted their ships to burn around them, giving them time to die slowly, smell their own charred flesh.”

Celene cursed. “Someone had to suspect that we had a monster in our ranks.”

“When called before a panel, he retracted. Said he was only joking. But, Lieutenant,” he said, turning to face her, “there was no jest. I didn’t know Marek well, but I knew that he wasn’t prone to jokes.”

“Then we’ll need a strategy to face him.”

His brows raised. “Word on base is that the best pilots rely on intuition, not strategy.”

She shook her head. “As a Wraith pilot, I’ve faced so many battles, I can’t count them anymore. Some arrive with no warning. I might be on patrol, or escorting a ship of refugees to their new homeworld, and then PRAXIS is there, in small force or large. Always deadly. Years of training and experience taught me to react without thought, to trust instinct and my squad mates not merely to survive, but to prevail.”

She gazed at the tracking screen, and its faint flicker showing her the way to find a traitor. “But sometimes, when I’m fortunate, I get a chance to formulate a strategy beforehand. I’m not so faultless that I won’t grab any advantage.”

Calder studied her for a moment. “Wherever Marek’s situated himself,” he finally said, “he will be well guarded. Count on very tight security protocols. And cutting-edge tech.”

She allowed herself a smile. “Good thing I’ve got the NerdWorks’s best as my partner.”

Chapter Four

They had been following the tracking signal for three solar days when the com shrilled to life. Nils manned the controls as Celene slept in the single bunk in the sleeping chamber at the rear of the ship. The Phantom came equipped with autopilot, but the safer option meant having a live human at the controls, and he needed to keep readjusting the tracking device.

Now alone in the cockpit, he started when a man’s voice crackled through the line. It came in faintly, pops and hisses cutting into words.

“Any ship within range—can you hear me? This is a distress call. Anyone?”

“Reading you,” Nils said into the com. “Identify yourself.”

“Akash Gabela, Galactic Registry number 473-Beta-Rho-229.”

Nils ran the name and registry number through the ship’s database.

“Who is he?”

He glanced over his shoulder to see Celene coming into the cockpit, strapping on her plasma pistol. As always, he needed to hide his reaction to her. It didn’t matter how many times they changed shifts, seeing her made his pulse accelerate, his breathing quicken. She might have been asleep moments ago, but her silver eyes were alert now as she stood beside him and scanned the readout.

“Smuggler, pilot for hire.” Nils focused on the information scrolling on the display rather than Celene’s hand braced on the back of his seat. “He has a few outstanding subpoenas for trafficking black market goods.”

“Untrustworthy.” She narrowed her eyes.

“Not an upstanding citizen, no.”

“Hello?” Gabela’s voice came fainter now. “Unknown pilot, you still there? Situation critical on this end.”

“What is your situation?” Nils asked.

“Ran into a debris storm. Took out propulsion systems, life support on emergency power. I’ve got maybe four solar hours left. You going to help, or what?”

Nils clicked off his end of the com. “His ship’s a standard hauler. I could get him up and running in less than a solar hour.”

Tension resonated through Celene’s posture. She balanced on the balls of her feet as if ready to fight. “Could be another ambush.”

He remembered the debriefing report he had read. She had been on patrol when she responded to another distress signal. And went straight into a trap that nearly cost the 8th Wing a Black Wraith, as well as Celene’s freedom. Easy to see why she would be wary of making the same mistake twice.

These past few days had taught him well: Celene Jur had earned her reputation. Nothing had been given to her.

“Mara Skiren used to be a smuggler,” he said now. “She would know him.”

Celene nodded. “Let’s get her on the line.” They would be breaking com silence, but 8th Wing never ignored a distress call.

Quickly, Nils patched them through an encrypted line to base. “Trouble already?” Ensign Skiren asked.

“Akash Gabela’s giving us a distress signal,” Nils said. “Says he’s drifting and solar hours away from life support failure.”

“Can we trust him?” Celene asked.

“Gabela’s a terrible geluk player,” Mara said, “and he’ll drink all your Lulani rum the second your back is turned. But he doesn’t run bait and switch. If he says he’s in trouble, he’s in trouble. Besides,” she added, “that grizzled bastard knows the darker sectors of the galaxy. He could give you some valuable intel.”

“Then you vouch for him?” Nils asked.

Ensign Skiren’s laugh was rueful. “As much as one former scum can vouch for another.” A deeper, masculine voice sounded behind her, and her response was another husky chuckle. “Oh, you get off on having a shady lover. What? Going to give me a spanking?”