Someone had clearly been aboard their ship causing mischief.
Verdara was a green-and-gold marble shrinking behind them, but Jack had decided he did not like the farm planet very much.
Not because Verdara had been unpleasant. No. Verdara had been downright pretty in a wide-open, windblown, “please admire our endless grain fields and emotionally complicated civic policies” kind of way.
He had even liked the Hearthvale Cooperative grain belt market hub, right up until the local weather produced a Class Four windstorm as they ran to their ship. He didn’t see it firsthand, but suspected every sane citizen had begun tying down livestock, shutters, and possibly elderly relatives.
No, Jack’s problem with Verdara was that it had tried very hard to keep them. That windstorm had been no joke. And now, apparently, it had tried to keep part of their ship. The most important part. Their fuel reserve. Not cool.
Madelaine stood in the narrow service compartment across from the storage area at the back of the ship, one hand braced against the wall, the other holding open the fuel locker door.
She had gone very still.
Jack knew that stillness. It was not calm. It was not composure. It was Madelaine Archer locking every emotion behind her eyes because letting one out might cause something to break.
“Tell me that face means you found a secret button,” Jack said from the doorway. “A happy button. A button that says, ‘Just kidding, Jack, we have enough fuel to visit three planets, two moons, and one suspiciously themed gift shop.’ What do you say?”
Madelaine did not turn around. “Sorry. Not this time. All of our reserve fuel is gone.”
Jack’s smile fell away. The fuel locker had been broken into and the lock was in several pieces on the floor.
He stepped into the compartment, ducking under a low archway that had tried to scalp him twice since he’d boarded this vessel. Did the designers not understand Alphas were tall?
“Gone, as in misplaced? Or gone, as in the universe hates us and has decided to express that hatred through theft?”
“Gone, as in stolen.”
The locker shelves were bare. Not mostly bare. Not unfortunately low.
They were completely and utterly empty.
“How much did they get?” Jack asked, wondering how long a Class Four windstorm with rain and thunder would last before they could make their way back to Verdara and safely land or if they would simply fall out of the sky or go permanently adrift in space when their fuel ran out.
Madelaine gestured inside the compartment, and he saw for himself that the three bauxite fuel cubes they’d had in reserve for this mission were gone as if they’d never existed.
“All of it,” she said and slammed the broken compartment door shut and said a colorful bad word that he had almost uttered himself.
Jack stared at the empty brackets where the compact blue-gray bauxite cubes should have been secured for interstellar travel. The basketball-sized brackets had been opened cleanly. The security seals were sliced through, the little silver strips curled back like peeled ribbon.
“Well,” he said after a moment. “That seems rude.”
Madelaine finally looked at him.
Her face was pale, her mouth tight. “The storm warning on Verdara was real. But someone must have used the evacuation rush to get aboard while we were racing back to the ship in Jeb’s beast-drawn cart. I didn’t even see anyone close to our ship when we got there, did you?”
“Nope. But honestly, I wasn’t looking. I was running because fat drops of rain were pelting me.”
“So was I.” Madelaine had moved from anger to maybe forlorn.
“Besides, they could have taken it soon after we left in Jeb’s beast-drawn cart.”
Madelaine nodded. “True.”
Jack looked around, seeing that nothing else had been taken. Nothing else rifled through. They had left the planet in a pretty big hurry, but if bandits had raided their ship, why didn’t they take the rest of the valuables aboard?
More troubling, how did these bandits know where their fuel was stored? The compartments were mostly unmarked, with the exception of safety items like the first aid kit and fire extinguishers.
