Finders Keepers Read online

  Trilby swiveled in her seat for a while, thinking. The Bagrond run had come through a reliable agent, an old friend. She stopped swiveling, pulled it up again on the comp, and tried to read between the lines. Nothing. At least, nothing that shouldn’t be there.

  But there’d been other requests. Not to her. But before she’d left Rumor she’d seen a couple of the pricier bottles of gin being poured.

  And then there was Rhis. The Zafharin pilot. A lieutenant. Off the Razalka, he said. Who just happened to be in possession of a ’Sko fighter. Captured years ago, he told her. Used now only in war games. Malfunctioned and landed in her front yard.

  That fit, to a point. She’d seen no other craft, ’Sko or anything, in pursuit. If the Tark were stolen, the ’Sko would obviously have been on Rhis’s tail.

  But maybe it wasn’t stolen. Maybe it was a gift. A thank-you. For that other rumor Neadi alluded to.

  Who else but the Zafharin would be sleeping with the ’Sko?

  4

  She left the bridge, her mind more on Neadi’s warnings than where her feet were taking her. It wasn’t as if running trade in Gensiira was easy to begin with. But at least the enemy was known: the government, mostly in the form of customs inspectors. And generally visible in one place: dockside. But the ’Sko—and the Zafharin, for that matter—made their own rules. A little caution might be advisable at this point with her business. And her onboard guest as well.

  Shame she had no inbred distrust of Zafharins. Port Rumor had always been indiscriminately eclectic in its populace. She knew several Zafharin freighter operators. And more than a dozen half-Zafharin merchants, including Neadi’s husband. Port Rumor was a busy place now, and had been even before the war ended.

  But to have an Imperial military officer dumped in her lap, courtesy of a ’Sko Tark—a fully armed ’Sko Tark—wasn’t quite the same as sharing a beer with a half-Zafharin drive tech in Flyboy’s.

  She stopped walking and stared at the door in front of her. Cargo Hold 3. She had intended to head for her cabin, one deck below the bridge. Not all the way down here.

  Brilliant, Tril, just brilliant. She resisted the urge to pound her head on the door.

  She turned quickly instead, flinging her arms wide in a gesture of frustration. And smacked Rhis Vanur firmly in the chest with the back of her hand. “Damnation! Sorry.”

  He grabbed her arm, steadying her as she looked up at him in surprise. And something flared, sparked again. Something primal. Intense. Urgent.

  She shook off his hand, stepped away quickly. “You following me, Lieutenant?” She tried to add ice to her voice, her body needing it.

  He hesitated. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Down here?”

  “I called the bridge. You didn’t answer. And your ship has no CLS.”

  Trilby tamped down her newborn paranoia. He was right; she didn’t have a functioning crew locator on board. Dezi used his thermal grid to find her on the ship. When she wanted Dez, she used the comm. She belatedly realized she’d never told Vanur to do that. “What’s the problem?”

  “Problem?”

  “I don’t think you’re down here looking for a copy of my potato-and-cheese casserole recipe. So what’s the problem?”

  “Oh, yes. Well, not a problem. Just a modification I thought you might consider for the booster.” He shrugged.

  “I thought you finished that yesterday.” She fell in step with him as they headed toward the companionway.

  “I did. At the time, I didn’t think it would work with your equipment, but I’ve been playing with the idea. I might be able to customize—”

  “Wogs-and-weemlies?”

  He turned at the bottom step, smiled down at her. “Ones you would like, I think. Our ships use it on border patrol. I guess you could call it an invasive filter.”

  She followed him up to the next deck in silence, stopped just short of the open lounge hatchway. “You mean, you can grab messages that aren’t meant for you.”

  He hesitated only a fraction of a second. “Yes.”

  “Nice modification.” And one she could sell in Rumor for a pretty piece of change, once she unraveled the program and found how it worked. “How long will it take you?”

  “An hour, perhaps less. I can work on it on the way to Rumor. Right now I want to finish calibrating the sensors with Dezi.”

  “I want to see the program before you install and run it.”

  “Of course.”

  Of course. And this from a man who just yesterday had held her throat in the paralyzing G’zhen Dai grip used by thirty-second century warrior-monks on Dakrahl. Or was it the fatal Tah Fral hold employed by the Order of Despi Guild assassins?

  She shook her head as he headed belowdecks to the drive room.

  She stepped into the lounge. Her stomach had been rumbling for a while. She removed the large casserole of stew from storage and placed it in the processor. That’s what she was supposed to have done ten minutes ago. Instead, she’d been wandering on autopilot on the cargo deck. If she hadn’t bumped into Vanur—

  A thought struck her with the same high-voltage intensity as his touch had by Cargo Hold 3.

  What was Vanur doing down by the holds?

  Looking for her, he’d said. She didn’t know what bothered her more: the fact that he was following her, or the fact that he was following her and she’d been blissfully unaware of the fact.

  The processor chimed. She thumbed the door open, let the spicy aroma pour over her for a moment.

  Maybe she was being paranoid. Or maybe she didn’t want to face the real reason she was so jumpy around him. She just didn’t know if it had more to do with his heritage or his gender.

  He was terribly male. Terribly, wonderfully male. That might be something worth exploring if she weren’t still smarting over Jagan. And if Rhis weren’t also walking around her ship in a Zafharin uniform. Six months ago she wouldn’t have cared. Now she was doubly cautious.

  She secured the stew in the server, then tabbed on the coffeemaker. When he came in for dinner she was still on her first cup. But it was cold. She stirred it halfheartedly and pretended to stare out the viewport at Avanar’s lengthening shadows. Two moons were rising. She could see Rhis’s reflection—dark-haired and dark-shirted—outlined on the viewport as he sat at the high counter that separated the galley area, a bowl of stew before him. The glint of one of her ship’s portable datapads was next to that. He was working on a sensor glitch that Dezi’s diagnostics couldn’t unravel.

  Or so he said.

  For all she knew, he was working on plans to help the ’Sko conquer all of Conclave space.

  Neadi’s words haunted her, but her thoughts kept being sidetracked to the heat generated between them in the maintenance tunnel earlier. She was surprised the insulating plates hadn’t melted after falling on their bodies.

  It exasperated her how he’d caught her off guard. But then, maybe what she thought had happened really hadn’t. Maybe they did only fall against each other by accident, her shirt riding up, his hands simply landing in a logical spot.

  But that kiss, that kiss had been no accident.

  So she watched him now without watching him. Tried to watch the “him” that was Zafharin Imperial Lieutenant and not the “him” that was broad-shouldered with strong arms. And night-black hair, the only soft thing on his body. Like the soft hair matting his chest—

  She stood suddenly, irritated at her train of thought, forgotten coffee cup still in her hand. “We’ll be ready to go at 0600?”

  “Absolutely. We could depart tonight, within the hour.”

  Trilby shook her head. “No. I need some sleep, Dezi needs some downtime, and you’re still recovering from some good bumps and bruises.”

  He glanced down at where his shirtsleeves were rolled up, exposing the faded purple gash on his arm.

  “I know, I know,” she said with exasperation, seeing him start to reply. “You’ve got a hot date waiting for you bac
k there across the zone. Well, even if we leave at sunrise tomorrow, we’re still ahead of schedule. We all need a good night’s sleep.”

  She moved around him to place her cup in the sani-rack.

  He handed her the empty casserole dish. “I could start—”

  “Thanks, but no. I need you on the bridge at 0545. I want to run a complete systems check before we blow this pop stand.”

  He pushed himself away from the counter, tucked the datapad under his arm. “Then 0545 it is.”

  She let out the breath she’d been holding as she watched him leave, then hurriedly finished securing the galley. With Rhis in his cabin, she’d have some time to poke around in her ship’s systems undisturbed. Find out just what Mister Friendly Lieutenant had been doing near her cargo holds.

  And while she worked on it, she’d try not to think about what it felt like to kiss him.

  He saw it the minute the door to his small cabin slid open. His black jacket, cleaned and patched, draped across the back of the only chair. He picked up the jacket, caught the light scent of her perfume, then saw something else.

  A long-sleeve white shirt, large enough for him. It felt new and didn’t smell of powdery flowers. He wondered where she’d gotten it. Replicator? But no, her ship didn’t have a hard-goods replicator on board.

  Her consideration surprised him, yet it didn’t. He was learning she could be brash and flippant one minute, warm and beguiling the next. She made it clear she didn’t trust him. And, of course, that she didn’t particularly like him.

  The last he was used to. Not many people did.

  But then she’d patched his jacket, found him a shirt, and made sure there was always hot soup, or coffee, within his reach. Asked if he needed another blanket. If there were enough clean towels in his sani-fac.

  And a couple of times had teased him in such a way that made him think maybe he was wrong. Maybe she might like him, even if only a little bit.

  That worried him. Because he didn’t know what he’d do if she did.

  He tossed the jacket back onto the chair, thrust all thoughts of her from his mind. He had to remember who he was, why he was here.

  He set his alarm to wake him at 0130. He still had work to do.

  The first thing Trilby did when she stepped through the door of her quarters was to set the alarm for 0530. The second was to pull the comp around on its swivel arm so that it faced her bed. She sat on the faded purple quilt, legs crossed, elbows on her knees, and put the Venture through a little-used series of paces. Little-used because she’d not had to deal with an intruder on board before.

  The program was one she’d created with Shadow, one of their best. His young, lanky form floated into her mind. She could still see his unruly mop of muddy-brown hair, forever being pushed out of his eyes with long fingers. But his face blurred in her memory. It had been almost seventeen years since he was killed.

  She’d just turned sixteen when it happened. Shadow was about two years her senior. He’d picked up a skim job on a Herkoid long-hauler. Three months later, Trilby followed. Herkoid knew where to find cheap labor.

  Port Rumor. The junkyard of civilized space offered not only spare parts but spare bodies. Orphans, bastards, by-blows. Thousands of children, living in storage sheds, working illegally on transports and freighters. Jobs, food, clothing were snatched from discards and castoffs. First to see it owned it. Finders keepers.

  That was Port Rumor in those days.

  Now Shadow was gone. He’d been on the bridge when ’Sko lasers had sliced through the hulking freighter. Sliced first the bridge, then the drive room, aft.

  But the cargo holds were spared. Sacred. The ’Sko never damaged the cargo. Didn’t shit where they ate, as Shadow used to say.

  Trilby and three others had been in the holds. Two containers had unstrapped as they’d come out of jumpspace and shifted. Her stint on cleanup detail, and the arrival of a Conclave squadron, had saved her life.

  Trilby pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. Tiredness washed over her as the memory receded. She shook her head, stared at the data on the screen. Saw the patches Dezi had made and the ones Rhis had made. Everything within acceptable parameters. No wogs. No weemlies.

  She’d deliberately stopped staring over his shoulder just to see if he would try something. Because if he was going to, she wanted him to try it before they hit the lanes.

  Her fears, however, appeared to be unfounded. Looked like Rhis was being a good boy.

  She stripped off her green T-shirt and lay her utility belt, laser pistol attached, over the nightstand that jutted out from the wall. Her pants she balled up and tossed into the hamper in the corner. She’d have plenty of time to do laundry on the trike back to Rumor.

  Or maybe she’d assign that duty to Mister Friendly Lieutenant. In spite of his obvious helpfulness, she could tell he had no experience in the domestic end of shipboard duties. That tagged him as a career officer in her book. Career officers, especially Imperial ones, didn’t do their own laundry.

  Perhaps it was time someone filled in those gaps in his training.

  She fell asleep, a smile still on her lips.

  He woke a few minutes before the alarm chimed and lay in the darkness of the small cabin. It seemed unnatural to be on a ship and not moving, not feeling the thrumming of the drives through his body.

  He pulled on his clothes, then slipped into his jacket. The new white shirt would shine like a beacon in the Venture’s dim corridors, and he needed to be part of the shadows for a while. To do what he had to do. To work his “wogs-and-weemlies.” He heard Trilby Elliot’s voice say that in his head, a voice wary yet laced with sarcasm.

  Wogs-and-weemlies.

  He retraced his steps to the auxiliary systems and communications backup panel recessed in a small storage closet just before the holds. He decoded the lock, careful of tripping any alarms. Then it was a good half hour’s worth of work, aided by the pilfered datalyzer, before he was into the ship’s primaries.

  All her illegal customizations floated before him. Trilby Elliot’s handiwork. He didn’t know if he was more surprised by the sophistication of her methods or just her downright crazy creativity.

  There was a talent there. The brash little air sprite had a real knack. Had she been raised in the Empire, schooled through the Imperial Academy, she probably could have run circles around half the chief engineers he knew.

  He could learn a few things about wogs-and-weemlies from her, though he doubted she’d want to teach him. But he should be able to find some answers in her Master Program Templates. It might be interesting, later, to run her patch methodology through the Razalka’s computers.

  He tapped at the pad, trailed down a datafeed to her personal files, the most likely place for her templates to reside.

  But found the J files first. It took him a few minutes to understand J was for Jagan Grantforth. Grantforth Galactic Amalgamated. The Empire had taken enough of their ships that he recognized the ID stamp in the transmission code. What tugged at his curiosity was the regularity of the entries over the past year and a half that had ended abruptly about four months ago.

  Grantforth was a well-heeled outfit. New money, it was true, but then most of the Conclave was built on new money. Not like the long clan heritage of the Zafharin.

  He couldn’t imagine why a high-profile export firm like GGA would utilize a short-hauler like Trilby Elliot. Or why she hadn’t profited from the relationship.

  Except the relationship hadn’t been business. He discovered that as the messages scrolled by on the small screen. And his real reason for accessing the Venture’s primaries, as well as Trilby’s intriguing patch templates, slid from his mind.

  Wealthy, influential Jagan Grantforth had thoroughly bedazzled, and seduced, an unsuspecting, gullible Trilby Elliot of Port Rumor.

  He watched Jagan’s vid transmissions with growing distaste. The well-tanned blond-haired man on the screen dished out compliments with a sugary sweetness.
A few later transmissions were also the same; only the last two were obviously different.

  “But, Trilby, little darling,” Jagan’s miniature image said on the screen. “You know I adore you; you know no other woman can make me feel what you do. But there are differences in our lives and that can’t be ignored.” The image looked down at the half-empty wineglass in his fingers for a moment, then back at the vid lens. “Sorry you had to find out about my engagement to Zalia that way. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But there’s no reason why we can’t keep on with this beautiful relationship we have. You just have to understand I’m going to marry Zalia out of … well, duty. Her family’s wealthy, well connected. And I am, after all, one of the Grantforths.”

  The final transmission was a bit more heated. Jagan still pleaded that he wanted her, but there was an anger there as well. Evidently Trilby had given him his walking papers and he didn’t like having his sweet little setup so peremptorily disrupted. And, judging from his closing remark, she had also been less than diplomatic in her ending of their affair:

  “Mother was right.” Petulance clouded Jagan’s handsome features. “You are nothing more than low-class trash from Port Rumor.”

  An unexpected bolt of hot rage shot through Rhis’s chest. With surprise he realized that had Jagan Grantforth been standing in front of him at that moment, he would’ve gladly flattened the man against the nearest bulkhead.

  Trilby glanced at Rhis as he strapped himself into the copilot’s seat and saw shadows under his eyes. It was 0542. He looked like he could use another few hours of rest.

  She should have forced him to spend another day in sick bay. But her need to get the Venture functioning quickly had taken precedence over his medical condition. She felt slightly guilty about that now. “You want a light trank?”

  “Of course not! I am fine.” He tugged on the strapping with a show of force.

  “Yeah, yeah. I heard that line before, Rhis-my-boy. That’s what you said just as you passed out in—”

  “You said something about a full systems check?” He overrode her comment, focused on the screen flickering to life on the console.