Local Star by Aimee Ogden (ebook reader online free txt) 📕

When he spoke again, he kept his voice lower, but it came out raw and red as the knotted hurt inside her. “There are other prisoners in there—”

Yeah, Rocan and his Ceebee buddies, missing important appendages.

“Not to mention wardens and clerks. There is no such thing as a safe hull breach. You know better than that.”

Triz didn’t answer, but she didn’t stop him from taking her by the hand this time. They sat like that, tethered together by their limp arms, for several long shuddering breaths. Kalo was the first to break the silence. “If you had something else in the wrenchworks. A Scooper, maybe. Something that’ll hold a passenger.”

Scoopers usually held crews of two or three and had cargo space to boot. Quelian had several come into the wrenchworks before the Fleet arrived and knocked everything else several slots down their work queues. At least one of them should still be there, probably wanting just a few more hours of attention to get up and flying again. And Quelian wouldn’t be down there at this hour. And she would bet a week’s pay that he hadn’t yet reconfigured the security system to exclude her fob. . . “How are you going to get her out of Justice in a Scooper?”

“How am I going to—will you just listen a second?” Kalo let go of her wrist and ran both hands through his hair. “Look. This is not Plan Alpha, Triz. There’s going to be a trial, Admiral Savelian will see to it she gets a fair hearing. And any fair hearing is going to clear her name. There’s no doubt of that as far as I’m concerned. Okay?”

Before she could open her mouth to spit daggers at him, he kept talking. “But if things go explosive-decompression-style, somehow . . . let’s just call it a backup plan. A couple days to get things ready, and get them ready safely.” As her anger softened, he pressed on: “A Scooper has passenger room, plenty of it, and a fighter doesn’t. Now, obviously, I can’t scoop a hole out of the top of the Hab. We’ll have to figure out a way to get her out of there. There’s a drill bit on a Scooper, isn’t there? Maybe I could use it to . . . or we could figure out a way to smuggle her to the works . . .”

Belas’ face swam up in Triz’s vision. “I know someone in Justice who might be willing to help us. It’s a big might.”

“But better than nothing. We’ll make it work. Right?”

She didn’t answer. Her fingers found his lips and parted them gently, as if she could pry free the answers she needed. “You’d do that for me?”

“I’d do it for her,” he said. “Is that . . . ?”

She stood up, pulling him up by his hand. “It’s good enough,” she said, and she thought maybe it could be. “Meet me at the wrenchworks tonight. I’ll work on Justice today.”

“I have an appointment back on the Dailos I can’t really miss.” Kalo grimaced and Triz made a point not to look while he touched the healing wound through the fabric of his shirt. “If you think of anything I can do from there?”

She wanted to be mad at him for that, for failing to be invincible. But if they were making plans of dubious legality, it might be better to make as small a footprint as possible, so that no one thought to ask the questions to which they wouldn’t have the answers. “Tonight, then,” she said. She still had his hand in hers, so she gave it an awkward shake before he broke away and retreated from her rooms.

Triz, who’d never been one to turn up her nose at food, forced herself to choke down half a crispbread for breakfast. She poured the spicy sauces from the mealcase into the recycling port—she didn’t want to risk anything more than bland bread in her jumping stomach.

Justice didn’t open its doors to Hab residents for another hour and change. Counting down the minutes left Triz’s patience more brittle than a bad batch of plastisteel. More than once, she stepped up to the door of her pairhome and put her fob to the door to go down to the quad and loop them into this wild plan. Veling would be up for it, and she was a recycling engineer, smart, cool-headed, able to spot the bugs in Triz and Kalo’s kludged-up machinations. Casne’s damu Othine knew how to fly most of the rigs that came through eir quadhusband’s wrenchworks, which would build in some redundancy where Kalo was concerned—not that Triz meant to cut Kalo out of the loop entirely. Or did she? She shelved that question for later. Casne’s daddy Idha was quiet but loved his quaddaughter and quadwife enough that, Triz thought, he’d go with Veling on this.

The problem was Quelian. Triz couldn’t count on him not to be there, couldn’t count on him not catching wind of this somehow. Othine didn’t like secrets, e’d spoiled the surprise of Triz’s first-ever Remembrance gift before Casne ever gave it to her. Would this be different? Could it?

Each time she got up to go to the door, Triz sat back down. Her cuticles were a bloodied mess by the time her fob alert chirped to let her know Justice’s doors had opened.

Queues had already formed by the time Triz emerged from the lift at the top of the Hab. Belas’ was long, but she tucked herself into it anyway, behind a man talking loudly into his fob about the indignity of having to pay an import fee for Erreti dry-pearls when he held dual citizenship in one of the arcologies there.

When at last the line shuffled Triz to Belas’ counter, he greeted her with a sad smile. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform the same trick this time. Security is spacetight these days.”