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There’s no hiding the scowl on his face, though.
Adiron ignores that scowl and wraps his arms around the man in a brutal bear hug. “Jerrok! Aren’t you glad to see us?”
“No.”
“We need a favor,” Mathiras adds, bounding down the ramp.
“No again,” says the stranger called Jerrok. “Get the kef out of here unless you’ve got some scrap to sell me.”5JERROKIt’s been a few weeks since anyone’s swung by with salvage. Weeks of utter quiet, weeks of not hearing a single voice other than my own. Weeks of no ships in the hangar, no one breathing my air, no one on this old abandoned asteroid but me.
It’s been keffing bliss.
Now, of course, all that bliss is ruined. Adiron va Sithai grins at me as if he’s shown up with presents, ready to hug me as if that will somehow improve my mood. I shove him away, irritated, and look around for the junk they’ve surely hauled in my direction. That’s why they’ve come out here, right? “Where’s your salvage? Dump it and leave.”
“I told you,” the oldest va Sithai brother says—the one with the stiff form (and likely a stick up his ass). “We need a favor.”
“And I said no. Show me your scrap, let’s make a damn deal, and you can stop hogging all my recycled air.” I cross my arms over my chest, irked. “Didn’t even have the decency to comm ahead of time?”
“Like you would have answered,” Adiron scoffs, and then wraps his arms around me in a bear hug. It makes my defective cybernetic arm ache against the bone its grafted to, and I clench my jaw. He doesn’t know that he’s shooting red-hot agony up my shoulder, so I just elbow him away. We were friends a long time ago. Served together in the Threshian Wars. Adiron somehow thinks that makes us best buddies for life. I believe differently.
I don’t have buddies. I don’t have friends.
I like my solitude. Prefer it that way.
It’s safest. Easiest.
No matter how irritating the va Sithai are, though, the brothers do tend to bring in good scrap…and they don’t show up often enough to make nuisances of themselves.
So I peel myself free of Adiron’s clinging grasp and decide not to kill him. “Why are you here? Kinda out of the way for a ‘favor,’ which means I’m not going to like it.” I give them a polite smile. “So my answer is no. Whatever it is, no.”
“We haven’t even asked,” Kaspar says, frowning at me as he storms down the ramp.
I sigh as all three brothers enter the docking bay, flinging my hands up. “Please. Make yourselves comfortable. You know just how much I love hosting a party out here on a deserted asteroid.” I let sarcasm bleed through my voice.
“We won’t stay long,” Mathiras says, waddling forward in that stiff-hipped way of his. Definitely a stick up his keffing ass.
“Good.” I was looking forward to more peace and quiet. My next regular client isn’t scheduled to bring by a load of scrap until next week. “Speak your business so I can repeat my answer—no—and get you out of here.”
Adiron just grins at me. “You look like shit, my friend. What’s with these rags?” He grabs my sleeve and snorts with amusement when the plas-film, worn clear through, tears a hole.
“Excuse me if there’s not a lot of shopping on this end of the system,” I retort. “Did you come here to critique my fashion, or did you need something?”
“Missed you too, my friend,” Adiron says, ignoring my sour attitude. “How’s the arm?”
“Hurts. Like always.”
“And the leg?”
“Hurts.”
“Like always.” Adiron grins at me. It’s always like this with us—I rebuff him and let him know how completely irritated I am with him, and he ignores my scowls and acts as if we’re soldered at the hip like two transistor chips.
I only tolerate it because we served together. It’s not that I enjoy it.
Mathiras takes a deep breath. “We’re about to go on a very dangerous salvage run.”
“And?” They’re speaking my language, at least.
“And we’re chasing down the Buoyant Star.”
I snort at that. “Good luck.”
“We have a map,” Kaspar says, his eyes glittering with the insane enthusiasm of one with a charmed life. He’s never had his blaster shot out of his hand or a limb blown off, and it shows. If he had, he wouldn’t look so keffing eager to meet danger head-on.
These brothers. Idiots, all three of them.
“So you have a map. Want me to clap for you?”
“We have a map, but it’s leading us to a dangerous end of the Slatra system. And we have some cargo we need you to keep watch over for us while we go.”
I rub my jaw. My goggles whirr with the readings of the old base, letting me know temperatures and oxygen levels of all the different established living areas. It’s a routine feed—white noise—but I like it. I like routine. After serving in the war, I crave routine, and silence, and solitude…unlike Adiron. “So let me get this straight. You hauled ass through my asteroid belt just to come drop off some cargo while you go treasure hunting?” I squint, an old habit, and it activates the magnification module in my cybernetic eye. Irritating, but it quickly flicks back to normal after giving me a too-close-up view of Mathiras’s tunic. “How illegal is this cargo? And what’s my cut?”
