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Unconsciousness beckoned—the medically induced kind, not the bleeding-out-on-death’s-doorstep kind.

When I woke up, I’d book my next cargo haul. Something hopefully lucrative and far away from Daventi Station. In the meantime, I’d also quietly reach out to some contacts and try to figure out who was behind the attack today. Once I knew who’d sent those nagas after me, I’d decide what I was going to do about it.

For now, I closed my eyes and let the soft darkness sweep me away.

CHAPTER 2

JARRIX

ONE MONTH LATER

Roughly half of the injuries sustained by the crew of a privateer vessel were inflicted on one another, or so I’d learned.

“Hold still,” I snapped at the second engineer, Jonor. Both of his thick right arms were very obviously—and very gruesomely—broken as a result of a disagreement with the ship’s weapons master. Their fight had also left the galley in a bloody shambles. “Do I need to tranq you so I can do my job?”

Jonor snarled and bared his fangs, one of which was chipped. “Just try, you scut. You’ll be cleaning your own entrails off the floor.”

“I could just let you suffer,” I muttered, my focus on the medical equipment currently attempting to set and repair the bones in Jonor’s broken arms.

As usual, he’d refused to get in the ship’s medpod, so I’d had to resort to a slower method to heal his injuries. He worried Kitna, the weapons master, would do something to him while he was trapped in the medpod because that would be what Jonor would do if the situation were reversed. Never mind that I’d never permit something like that to happen in my medbay, or that Kitna wasn’t the dishonorable scut Jonor was.

Jonor twitched and cursed at me.

“Shut up, Jonor.” Captain Sjer leaned against the medbay doorway, arms crossed. His thick blue brows were set in an even deeper scowl than usual. “Our very fine medic Tal here is trying to get you patched up before we get to the next job. You want your full share of the take, you got to pull your weight. Half your normal number of working arms, half your normal share. We clear?”

Jonor grunted acknowledgement, but made an obscene hand gesture at me with one of his unbroken arms, using my body to block the captain’s view of the movement.

Sjer’s threat worked, though, because Jonor stopped trying to get off the exam table and go after Kitna to continue the fight. It was a fight he wouldn’t win, but the idiot was determined. I expected him to be back in medbay before too long with more broken limbs, if the captain didn’t lose his temper and just dump Jonor at the next planet or station we visited. That would be my vote, if there were such a thing as a vote aboard a pirate vessel, which there wasn’t. The captain’s rule was absolute.

My covert identity for this undercover job aboard the Fleeting Fancy was one I’d used before: Tal Noku, a career privateer and ship’s medic who’d been in the game far too long to be bothered by much, whether it was Jonor's combativeness or the chief engineer’s highly imaginative approach to on-the-fly ship repairs.

And after surviving fifteen years as an operative for the Galactic Alliance Intelligence Service, it would take more than name-calling, threats, and obscene hand gestures to push me into putting my fist in Jonor’s flat, three-eyed face, or driving my dagger into his throat and jettisoning him out the airlock.

That didn’t stop me from envisioning it, though.

Maybe I could drop a hint to Sjer the next time we made a supply stop and accidentally stumble across a well-qualified replacement second engineer. The trick was to make the captain think it was his idea rather than mine. I had a knack for that, along with languages, hand-to-hand combat, and field medicine, plus a few other handy skills I hadn’t revealed to this crew.

To stay in the game and stay alive, a GAIS operative had to have a lot of knacks.

Jonor had finally settled, but Sjer lurked in the doorway as if he expected the second engineer to change his mind and start swinging at me. Or did he have something else on his mind?

“Are we still on course for Puret IV, Captain?” I asked over my shoulder, adjusting the osteorepair device on Jonor’s lower right arm. It would take another fifteen minutes to finish knitting the smashed bones back together. Kitna had really done a number on this arm in particular.

“We’re making a stop along the way,” Sjer said, which surprised me. He’d been impatient to get to Puret IV, chasing the best lead he’d gotten yet on a crashed vessel that had disappeared in the area with cargo bay full of items destined for the luxury cruiser shipdock on Raxia Prime.

The Fleeting Fancy’s crew had been speculating nonstop on what the ship’s fate might have been and what would be recovered from its wreckage. Their hopes were high despite Puret IV’s inhospitable atmosphere and the number of enormous predators who lived on the planet’s surface. It could be our ship’s biggest payday in a year, and that was saying something. Sjer had a nose for good-paying jobs.

“Picked up an easy side job,” Sjer said with a too-casual shrug, his eyes still locked on Jonor, who was muttering under his breath in his native language. It sounded like a list of injuries he planned to inflict on Kitna in retribution. I heard the Barmian words for eyeball and asshole.

“There’s a bounty out on a smuggler who’s supposedly surfacing today on a station only a slight detour off our route to Puret,” Sjer continued. “We’ll be there in plenty of time to grab her and cash in.” He scraped one long claw against the hull. The sound made my wings restless and my tail twitch. “They pay only if we deliver her alive, though,” he added.

My eyebrows shot up—both at the change of plans and that Sjer was revealing this to us. He wasn’t known for sharing information beyond what was absolutely necessary for the crew to know.

“Enough to delay getting to Puret, sir?” I asked, and if there was a slight disbelieving edge to my voice, I couldn’t help it. The missing ship’s cargo was rumored to be worth a fortune.

The captain’s laugh actually had a hint of real humor in it, which was almost as unsettling as the scrape of his claws on the metal doorway. “The individual who posted the bounty is offering more than just credits for a living prisoner. It’s enough to make it worth our while to put effort into taking her alive and relatively unharmed. At least, unharmed enough that you—” Sjer’s casual punch to my upper arm nearly made me stagger “—can patch her up before we hand her over.”

“A big bounty, but they’d prefer her alive and unharmed?” Jonor chortled. “So they want the pleasure of breaking her bones and burning off her flesh themselves, then.” He slapped his knee with his lower left hand as if this was funniest thing he’d ever heard. The blow vibrated the exam table he was sitting on and jostled the osteorepair devices on his arms.