Page 114 of Tempting Fate

I bit my lip, hard, and paid attention to my friends.

Up close, the crashed pod was way larger than I’d expected, easily as big as the Dorimisa’s cargo bay. Two walls must have cracked in the crash, and the salvage teams had clearly peeled them back to make an entrance.

There was nothing left. Even the control panels on the walls had been stripped for parts.

I kept looking around, expecting to see bounty hunters behind every tree, every rock, a menacing figure in every shadow.

“What’s up with you?” Kira asked.

“This stuff’s got me seeing bad guys round every corner.”

“What?”

Shit, I hadn’t told them. “Airida’s mum put out a contract on him and his sister. There’s a bounty hunter here, but she can’t get at him.”

Kira blew out a long breath. “Damn. I’ll get Reski to put out feelers in town, see if he can find anything out.”

“Thanks.” As we walked around the back, I wrinkled my nose. “Not being funny, but does anyone else smell weed?”

Kira caught my eye and smirked.

“But really, what is that?” It wasn’t quite a plant smell, more like burnt rock, but it held that distinctive tanginess.

Reskavi pulled his head out of a charred engineering tube and strode to the exit, all four nostrils flaring. Without a word, his headspines flexed, and he jogged to the far side by the lake. By the time we joined him, he was squatting down on the ground, his claws sifting through the dirt.

I cast a wary eye to the water’s edge and moved closer. A crack split the ground from a corner of the crashed pod, splintering out towards the water. “What are you looking for?”

Reskavi leaned forwards until his arm was in the hole up to his shoulder, reaching for something. With a satisfied grunt, he drew out a large nugget of what looked like a dark blue-grey rock. “This.”

Out of the ground, the smell was far more noticeable.

“Well, what do you know? It does smell like weed.” Kira draped an arm around her mate’s shoulders. “What is it?”

“Gyska.” Reskavi set the rock on the ground in front of him. “Useful to some. It’s used in medicines and hard drugs. For some species, its a euphoric. Others, it’s a poison. Or, like us, it does skik all, or I wouldn’t be holding it.”

I peered into the crack, lighting it up with my comm’s torch. It was deep enough I could see the striations in the rock beneath the surface, and what I assumed were gyska nuggets scattered within it.

“It’s a small vein, and this has too many impurities to be valuable,” Reskavi continued, “but I’d bet my left arse cheek there’s a cave system under there.”

“What sort of cave system?” I peered in the crevasse again. This was the same type of rock as the hole I’d found in the gardens, with the same crystal striations through them. “Reckon we could get down there?”

It had been years since I’d gone proper spelunking—and it had been bloody awkward in a protective spec-suit, but that was the only way to get into an asteroid’s interior. One of the team had been seriously injured on that expedition, and we’d moved to only using drones after that, but this would be fine.

Reskavi gave my friend a wicked grin. “Ooh, I like this one, kamevi. She’s fun.” Then to me, “We can try. But we’d need some rope.”

“There’s usually some recovery gear stashed in the speeders,” I offered. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

Reskavi snorted. “We’ve got a topology mapping rig back on the Tusk. That’d do it.”

Kira put her hands on her hips, eyeing her mate with affectionate exasperation. “And why the fuck do we have one of those?”

Yeah, why?

He spread his arms wide, the cocky smile across his features splitting all the way to his ear ridges. “A corsair is always prepared, taamthi.”

“You mean like the time that Rintan crew seduced you with a new set of throwing knives, and they snatched our shipment from under our noses?”

“Skikking Dickbeard,” Reskavi muttered. “That was different. Those knives have maughni silver inlays.”