The coffee was strong. Probably horrible, as well. I wouldn’t touch the stuff. The liquor Hao provided herself, from a small, leather-bound hip flask taken from her tool chest. I don’t drink. Nor would I trust a mage that does, even a warder like myself. Drunk mages are like drunk mercenaries – dangerous and always armed.

  “So you’re a spy,” I said, putting down the pot, still sloshing with boiled grounds, on my mess table. I like the smell of coffee and can enjoy it in desserts, but drinking it straight? No, thank you. Still, I do have dried beans. You never know when you’ll encounter someone who can stomach the brew. Just like you never know when you might need a ship's mess. The Bucket’s mess was an auto-kitchen, a pair of benches, and a table that might, in a pinch, fit four. So might the auto-kitchen. At least I’d painted everything that wasn’t chromed a soothing light green. It didn’t soothe Hao.

  “Say what?” she said.

  “You come here ten years ago, work for the port authority, repairing the transmission towers. Maybe you send an unlogged message or two while you’re at it. Then the Baylens show up. You turn to working for them. Makes a pretty trail, doesn’t it?”

  Hao took a sip of coffee, grimaced, poured in some more liquor. The stuff smelled like clinical disinfectant.

  “No denials?” I said.

  Her cup clinked against the table.

  “No,” she said. “Why would you care?”

  A hundred answers flowed through my head, each discarded before becoming fully conscious. I could lie to her. I could threaten her. I could try to distract her. I didn’t have any mind-control drugs, and would have been very wary of using them if I did. Interrogation serums don’t work.

  I could tell her the truth. It would come out, sooner or later. And I needed allies. Still, old life-saving habits died hard.

  “How close are you to the Baylens now?” I asked. “Tomlin thinks you’re independent.”

  “Not independent enough,” Hao said. “Old Sahel could crush me if he wanted.”

  She didn’t seem too worried about this.

  “Why doesn’t he?” I said.

  “Because I’m useful? Because I annoy his son? Who knows, maybe he’s racking up karmic points.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “You make lousy coffee,” she said.

  “If I knew that our relationship would hinge on it, I’d have made more of an effort,” I said. Then I sighed. “Look, maybe we can scratch each other’s backs.”

  “If that’s a come-on, it’s worse than Young Baylen’s.”

  I laughed. The conversation was taking a turn for the surreal. Time to shake it up.

  “Do you know what the thieves took?” I asked.

  “Your vanilla, and your dog.”

  “To the void with the vanilla,” I said. “They took my charge.”

  She did her raised eyebrow trick. Both of them, this time. “You had a child sleeping on the floor surrounded by dog food?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “It was a hatchling.”

  I waited, watching the information make its way through her eyebrows. First they went down, then they drew together. Finally, they shot back up.

  “Like a hatchling, hatchling?” she said. “A baby dragon?”

  “Yes,” I said. “An infant void wyrm.”

  She leaned back, away from me and the table.

  “Crud,” she said. “How did you steal a hatchling?”

  “I didn’t steal him,” I said. “He was entrusted to me as my charge.”

  “Entrusted?”

  I could hear the doubt in her tone, an unspoken accusation. A mercenary mage, flying a run-down ship without even a single working warpstone, holding one of the most desirable slaves in the universe.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Very twisted. And I have no intention of telling it to you. Please accept that yes, there was a hatchling sleeping in my cabin, and yes, he is my charge, and I intend to do everything in my power to rescue him.”

  She chewed this over for a while – literally, her jaws going up and down. In the silence of the mess I could hear the crunch of coffee beans between her teeth. I probably should have ground them better.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I was a spy.” She leaned forward, planting her elbows on the table, stapling her fingers and resting her forehead on the resultant triangle, staring at the apparently fascinating chromed steel top. Or maybe she was staring at her slightly distorted reflection.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “I’m from New Nairobi,” she said. I was vaguely familiar with the heavy-grav world. “Worked as a mechanic after my dishonorable discharge from the navy. Odd jobs, the kind where people get paid not be too particular about the details. Savvid Baylen ran a number of rackets in the area.”

  “He’s Syndicate?” I said.

  Hao shook her head. “Affiliate, or just a hanger-on. I never figured it out. He was stealing from the wrong people and needed a way out. Sent me here to do some reconnoitering. I needed to go away for a while too, thought it would be a suitable solution. Turned out otherwise.”

  “So now you’re stuck on Jackson,” I said.

  “Stuck and in debt. A bad combination, I might mention. For a while, I thought I might marry into one of the families. Now, not so much.”

  She drained the rest of her cup. I reached for the pot.

  “Don’t,” she said, filling up from her hip flask. “Your coffee really is horrible.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You think Baylen would know a hatchling when he saw one?”

  “Maurice would. That’s one creepy crudmucker, but he’s sharp. He could sniff out a way to make money in the deep void.”

  Meaning that I’d been correct in my assumption that the thieves weren’t the infamous not-quite-Syndicate Baylens. Time to throw caution to the crudmucking void.

  “Who among the Jackson families would break into a licensed freighter docked in the port zone?” I asked.

  “Old Vincentes, maybe, if he needed something from it. He’s got a lot of pull with the older generation among the families. They tend to stick together, but they rule everything except what the Baylens have, so they’d just impound the ship. Might be Third-son Tell – he’s one of Young Baylen’s friends – runs what amounts to a crew. Maybe one of the Rusmanovs, I don’t know. They keep mostly to themselves.”

  “Baylen got many friends on Jackson?”

  “Some,” Hao said. “Mostly young, always men. Lot of them cause trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  Hao shrugged. “Trouble trouble. Drinking, fighting, pestering the girls. Stealing, sometimes. They take their lead from Baylen.”

  Which might be an explanation. Baylen’s friends could have breached the Bucket without him knowing, maybe taken the hatchling without knowing what he was. In that case, I had to move fast, before the Baylens got hold of the hatchling. They might be on the Syndicate’s bad side, but real, live hatchling could buy a lot of forgiveness.

  “Who else runs with Baylen?” I said.

  Hao shook her head. “My turn. You a full mage?”

  I had to dig my fingers into my thigh. I didn’t have time for these kinds of games. But I had a feeling that I had to play by Hao’s rules, or the game would end, and I had a lot more to lose than she did.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Trained?”

  “I reached the level of Academy Capelan,” I said. “Four years of basic conjuring and shaping, then another ten studying warding.”

  “You don’t look that old,” she said.

  “I got into the Academy at twelve,” I said. “Burned down the Hall of Punishment at twenty-six. Been running ever since.”

  She lifted her cup, saw that it was empty, and upended her flask over it. The flask was empty, too.

  “The big explosion in Ravin Prime Habitat, that was you?” she said.

  “No, that was a house war gone bad. I was never on Ravin. Studied at the Branch Academy on Nueva Siria, then the full Academy on Shaya.”

  “Never been there,” Hao said. “What can you do?”

  “Ask nicely, and I’ll show you some day,” I said. “My turn.”

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  I got a few more names out of her, mostly third-, fourth-, and fifth-sons, evenly spread among the families. Except the Tomlins.

  “Why not Tomlin?” I said. “They some kind of law-abiding citizens?”

  “They might be,” Hao said. “Da Tomlin was sheriff and portmaster before the Baylens got here. Was chairman of the Jackson Depot council for a while, too. But mostly on account of them all being dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Killed in accidents, mostly. One shootout, when First-cousin Tomlin tried to haul one of Baylen’s men in for drinking and fighting. It ended badly for the Tomlins.”

  “No wonder Tomlin hates the Baylens,” I said.

  “They both do,” said Hao. “Most of the families dislike the Baylens, especially the old-timers, but a Tomlin wouldn’t give a Baylen a knife in the heart.”

  “Say what?”

  “Local saying. When you’ve been in a rockfall and are dying, they put a knife in your heart, or a bullet in your ear, depending on what’s available. Give you a quick way out.”

  That I could respect, ending a friend’s life if they had only pain and death to look forward to. At least the death you could give them was clean.

  And I thought I could reconstruct what had happened. But I needed to check something.

  “Wait here,” I said, rising.

  “The crud I will,” said Hao, following me out of the mess and to the airlock.

  I ran my hand over the damage to the door, especially around the part where the hull seal normally was. The smell of the fire had dissipated and been replaced by the stink of ammonia in the air, but the edges were still rough and untouched. I tapped my fingers on them.

  My fingers grew cold, and black from the soot on the uneven edges. I moved up along the edge, then down. Nothing. Nothing.

  There.

  “What are you looking for?” Hao said.

  “This,” I said, tapping the side of the airlock’s frame.

  “And?” she said, squinting. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Residue,” I said. “There was a ward here, a powerful one, that subsumed my wards. Likely propagated through the ship, which is why you and Tomlin could enter without incident. I was a bit too preoccupied checking my ship to safe everything.”

  “So?”

  “So Young Tell gets a breaker ward from Maurice. Or maybe Da Baylen has a stack of them and Baylen steals one and gives to his friends. Either way, they get to the Bucket, nullify my wards, and blow the airlock open.”

  “How?”

  It was a valid question. As was the question of who was strong enough to simply blow past my wards.

  “Haven’t figured it out yet,” I said. “But it’s not important. What’s important is to find Third-son Tell and company, and get the hatchling back before Da Baylen finds him. So the question here is, will you help me?”

  Hao’s eyebrows rose. To her credit, she didn’t ask why I needed her help. It was pretty obvious that I couldn’t tell a Tell from a Rusmanov. It was also obvious what it would cost her. She’d alienate both the Baylens and the Jackson families. I could draw the logical conclusion of that.

  “You offering to get me off the planet?” she said.

  Smart. To the point. I liked that.

  “If you can get the Bucket flying, then I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” I said.

  “And if I’ve got nowhere else to go?” she said.

  Which she probably didn’t. After all, she’d agreed to come to Jackson in the first place.

  “The Bucket hasn’t had a proper mechanic in a long time,” I said. “Since before I acquired her.”

  Her intensely blue eyes glittered in the moonlight, and her grin was fierce, like a cat about to pounce.

  “A job?” she said. “Flying?”

  I held up my fist. She bumped it.

  Easy as that, I’d doubled my forces. Now it was time to go to battle.

  I settled my foil on my belt, and stuck my stockman on my head.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

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