Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

“If only they’d thought of that,” Romy snarked, before realizing she may have said something confrontational. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

I raised my eyebrows to show I’d taken no offense. Slay cut in.

“She only understands certain aspects of the device,” Slay explained. “To create another one, we’d need the whole team. That isn’t feasible at the moment.”

I nodded. Suddenly it was a “device” and not an item. Interesting.

“I guess she’s exempt from uniform because she’s so smart?” I asked.

“She’s not a fed,” Slay said, stating the obvious. “Romy is an independent contractor.”

I appraised Romy and decided the hipster genius girl was not a threat. Gareth on the other hand…

“Fine. She’s mission-critical. But we can’t have silent muscles over there,” I said.

“You get him or you get a failsafe,” she said.

Failsafe was a fancy word for a bomb. Basically, they’d rig the Stang to blow if we deviated from the plan in any way. The right bomb setup was basically impossible to defuse, and given her confidence, I knew Slay had the right setup at her disposal.

“Besides, it seems you have all the muscle you need already,” she admitted, referring to Edgar and Batista.

“Done,” I agreed.

Gareth wanted to say something, but he knew his place and simply bit his tongue. Slay’s decision to allow Romy to go alone with my crew answered one of my questions: was Gareth protection for Romy or insurance if my crew ran into trouble on the Rox. Seemed like the latter. What Slay didn’t know is that we couldn’t take Edgar onto the Rox. She also didn’t know we had an inside man in my brother.

Avery. It was breaking my brain a bit to consider all the angles and pieces in motion. Whatever was on the Rox was a universe-changer, enough to force all kinds of unlikely alliances. On top of that, add the fact that someone wanted to destroy Jasper Station. Strange days.

As for the negotiation at hand, I was good with the results. Romy didn’t seem like trouble and a failsafe was a problem for another day. Survive today, I thought. Worry about complicated bombs tomorrow. Something told me it wouldn’t be the only deadly device in my immediate future.

Chapter 17

The Stang was getting crowded.

When I inherited the ship from my Uncle E, I hadn’t thought much about putting a crew together. I just never envisioned myself as a “captain.” I also had my uncle as my role model. He was a loner in his own ship, traveling where he wanted, when he wanted. He took the jobs that appealed to him and avoided the ones that smelled like trouble. It only felt natural to follow in his footsteps. Sure, I had told myself at the time, it would lead to a more lonely existence than surrounding myself with crew members.

But it was safe.

I would be accountable only to myself (and Pirate, of course). Life, it seems, has a way of messing up plans like that. Maybe it would turn out for the better, I thought.

Sure, that’s how my luck had been going as of late. Everything would turn out perfect!

* * *

Romy might have been small in stature, but she was another person who required a room, personal space and a station in the cabin. I actually had to bring a little table into the cabin for her to sit at so she didn’t feel left out. Not that she would, probably, but once you’re on my crew, you get treated the same as everybody else. Even if you’re an oversized killing machine like Edgar.

On the bright side, the failsafe was only about the size of a lunchbox. So it didn’t take up much room at all! Slay’s team had installed it in the cabin, I guess in the hopes I wouldn’t forget about it when I was making important, life and death decisions. The bomb was hardwired into the ship’s power supply, which basically meant if we tried to remove it or bypass it in any way, we were screwed. Slay personally had access to remote-detonate the ship as well. That didn’t bother me as much as it could have. The woman had already held our lives in her hands once and let us continue breathing, so maybe she would do it again.

I had no intention of making any other stops before we reached Jasper. If we ran out of food, so be it. No more beer? Too bad. Okay, maybe for coffee I’d stop, but considering Batista and I were the only caffeine addicts, we were likely okay on that front. Edgar seemed to run mostly on candy bars, and Romy had a supply of little yellow pills she took a few times a day. I didn’t even want to know what they were.

She was proving to be an odd one, even by current crew standards. The first couple days, she mostly kept to herself. She retrieved food from the kitchen when nobody else was in there, and she still hadn’t used the workstation I’d set up for her in the cabin. Her work would be done on the Rox, assuming our plan got that far. Gary had tried to interact with her, but she was completely immune to his comedic stylings, which I actually liked about her.

I was making coffee in the kitchen at one point when she walked in, eyes glued to her handheld. She sensed my presence and began to turn around, when I tried to engage, asking her how she was doing. “Fine.” And what she was so busy working on? “Nothing.” That was the extent of our conversation.

So I guess you could say I was more than a little surprised when she knocked on the door of my quarters and wanted to talk about The Avengers.

“As in…the movie?” I asked.

She stood in the doorway and nodded. It was the most direct eye contact she’d made with me since coming aboard. I motioned for her to sit in