Free Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) by K.L. Tremaine Page B

doubles back to rendezvous with us.”
    “ Do you think they’re going to come out and try to take back the ship?”
    “ Probably. According to Alyssa, their manifest has their destination at Inari D, so they might think they have a fair shot if they manage to get the drop on us–it’s only thirty light-years away.”
    As the two trooped off down the corridor, Ress’ face developed a sneer. These Alliance spacers were getting too close, dammit. He was lucky that the crew was so loyal; nobody would willingly give away that he was the captain, and the Alliance had banned giving captured smugglers the third degree.
    The Alliance military didn ’t know how much contempt smugglers held it in. They probably had an idea, but they certainly didn’t know .
    Ress wondered if Duke Ifrit was trying to get a load of hot cargo away from his property and out of his hands. What mattered was the cash , and Duke Ifrit’s cash was as good as anyone else’s, now that Ress was away from Maraway. If, of course, the man survived to transfer the property to its destination and tell about it.
    Ress looked around at his crewmen. He’d been patiently winning back their respect ever since they took the damn cargo on board, only to have it swept away in an instant by the damn Navy. They resented their position, they resented the loss of their buddies, and they no doubt were quickly deciding that both of them were the fault of their abrasive captain’s preference for negotiating and his aversion to leaving money on the table.
    The problem was that potential employers also hated leaving money on the table, so he often ended up leaving jobs on the table when his employers left it. And if it had been hard for his crew to ignore that fact when things were merely stretched thin, how much more when staring down the barrels of Navy guns?
    The last two flights of the Arrant Knave hadn’t even really been runs , exactly–they’d had a little cargo in them, but mostly they were moves from one planet to another to try to find paying work.
    Mattingly looked at him with poorly disguised irritation. “This is another fine mess, Jonah. We all try not to judge your tendencies with us. You’ve always been straight, honest, and correct. But there’s just this… complete lack, where your tact is, and right now? We’re not in a good spot.”
    “ I know, Matt, and I’m going to try to get us out of this, any way I can. I haven’t given up on the idea of getting the Navy to pull up stakes and go home, though I’ve got no idea how I’m gonna manage that at this late a date. That captain of theirs gives me the shivers.”
    “ She’s got an intense glare, doesn’t she,” piped up Erwin Bates, a dark-skinned engineer, “I feel like I can’t get away with anything around her.”
    Jerry Laures was whimpering on the floor, cradling his hand and his rapidly-swelling index finger. It was definitely broken, and Megan Keys, his wife, was getting the first aid kit from out the wall safe.
    “ Laures,” said Ress, “Why’d you have to go and shoot at powered armor?”
    The man was too focused on his wounded paw to answer. Laures had always been something of a shoot first and think later type of operator, and his wife seemed to work on the same wavelength. On the other hand, Megan wasn’t exactly jumping up to try to wrap a crowbar around those Navy assholes’ craniums–not that it would do any particular amount of good against those helmets of theirs. The frangible round had splashed right off of it, though he suspected that something heavier might have actually punched through.
    It was just their damn luck to have been passing through a star system at the same time that a Navy carrier was dropping fighters– they ’d watched the spatial distortion move through the system and tried their hardest to avoid it, but keeping ahead of the deployment wave would have required suspicious amounts of speed on their path out of the system. Keeping a low profile