Chapter 2: Something Wrong

  The corridor to engineering was narrow enough that Keshen's shoulders brushed the walls if he didn't walk carefully. The Kindness had been built for efficiency, not comfort, every centimeter of her designed to maximize cargo space at the expense of the people who lived inside her. After two years, he'd learned to navigate her angles without thinking, his body adjusting automatically to the slight list to starboard that Decker kept promising to fix and never did. The emergency lighting strips along the baseboards cast the corridor in amber tones, making the metal walls look almost warm despite the chill that crept from the outer hull.

  Yeva's footsteps fell into rhythm behind him, close enough that he could feel her presence without looking. She moved quieter than he did, her boots finding the deck plates with precision that came from years of training. Even now, even here, she was watching for threats. Old habits carved deep. He'd stopped asking her not to, had learned early that her vigilance was as much a part of her as her dark hair and the scar on her jaw.

  The ship hummed around them, the low thrum of the reactor, the whisper of recycled air through the vents, the occasional creak of metal settling against metal. Keshen could read those sounds the way Decker did, though he'd never match the old man's fluency. The Kindness spoke in a language of vibrations and frequencies, and if you listened long enough, she'd tell you everything you needed to know.

  Right now, she sounded worried.

  Engineering was cramped even by the ship's standards, a maze of conduits and access panels that Decker had somehow transformed into a functional workspace. Tools hung from magnetic strips on every available surface, organized in a system that made sense only to their owner. The air smelled of ozone and lubricant, undercut by something sharper that Keshen had never been able to identify. Machine sweat, Decker called it. The smell of a ship working hard. A coolant pipe ran along one wall, its surface beaded with condensation, the soft hiss of liquid flowing within adding to the ambient symphony of sounds.

  The old man stood at the main diagnostic console, his mechanical arm braced against the housing while his organic hand traced patterns on the screen. The light from the display cast his face in pale blue, deepening the lines around his eyes and the grey in his beard. His scanner eye was fully dilated, the iris a thin ring around an abyss of black. He didn't look up as they entered, didn't need to. He'd probably heard them coming from three corridors away.

  "Show me," Keshen said.

  Decker didn't turn around. His fingers moved across the console, pulling up a cascade of data that meant nothing to Keshen's untrained eye, waveforms and timestamps and strings of numbers that scrolled faster than he could read. The display reflected off the metal surfaces of engineering, creating ghostly duplicates of the data that seemed to surround them.

  "Beacon array picked this up about six hours ago." Decker tapped the screen, isolating a section of the data. "Someone ran a query on our registration. Standard format, routed through a commercial database. Nothing unusual about that, happens all the time when you dock somewhere new."

  "But?"

  "But we haven't docked anywhere in three weeks." Decker finally turned, his organic eye meeting Keshen's while the scanner continued its restless sweep of the room. His mechanical hand hung at his side, the servos humming softly with each micro-adjustment. "And the query didn't come from a port authority. It came from a private vessel."

  Yeva stepped forward, her attention fixed on the screen. Her hand didn't rest near her knife, but her posture suggested she could reach it in a heartbeat. "Can you trace the source?"

  "Tried. They bounced it through six relay stations before it hit the database. Professional work." Decker's mechanical hand flexed, servos whining softly with the movement. "Whoever's asking questions about us, they don't want us knowing they're asking."

  The cold in Keshen's chest spread outward, settling into his limbs like ice water finding its level. He'd known this day would come, had been waiting for it, in some corner of his mind, ever since he'd walked out of Helix Station with Yeva's hand on his arm and blood on both their clothes. Two years of running, of hiding, of building something new in the margins of civilized space. Two years of hoping that maybe, just maybe, he'd slipped through the cracks.

  Hope was a luxury he couldn't afford.

  "Could be nothing," he said, not believing it. "We've made enemies. It could be anyone."

  "Could be." Decker's voice was flat, neutral, the tone of a man who'd learned not to offer false comfort. "But you don't think it's anyone."

  Keshen didn't answer. He didn't have to. His hand had already found the stone in his pocket, thumb pressing against its familiar smoothness.

  Yeva was already moving, her hand resting on the console as she studied the data with the same intensity she brought to tactical assessments. The light from the screen painted her features in shades of blue and grey, making her look harder than usual. "When did the query originate?"

  "Best I can tell, about forty-eight hours ago. Takes time for the bounce-back to reach us out here."

  "So they knew where we were two days ago." Her jaw tightened. "If they've been tracking our beacon signature, "

  "Then they know we're heading for Verata." Keshen finished the thought, his stomach turning. "They know about the job."

  Silence fell over the engineering bay, broken only by the hum of the reactor and the soft click of Decker's mechanical fingers against the console housing. The silence had weight to it, the mass of implications neither of them wanted to speak aloud. Keshen could feel Yeva's tension radiating off her like heat, could see the way her weight had shifted onto the balls of her feet. Ready to move. Ready to fight. Ready to do whatever was necessary to keep them alive.

  He thought about the eggs cooling on the table in the common area. The way Seli's work-hands had gone still when the intercom crackled. The flicker in Quill's eyes as they processed information they didn't yet understand.

  His crew. His responsibility.

  "Options," he said.

  Decker shrugged, the motion pulling at the cables that connected his arm to the ship's diagnostic systems. "We could change course. Pick a different route, different destination. See if they follow."

  "And leave Verata without the medicine."

  "I'm laying out options, not picking them."

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  Yeva's voice was sharp. "We could go dark. Cut our beacon signature, run on minimal power. It'd slow us down, but they'd lose our trail."

  "For how long?" Keshen asked. "We can't stay dark forever. The moment we light up again, they'll know where we are."

  "It buys time. Time to figure out who's asking and why."

  "We know why." The words came out harder than he intended, edged with a bitterness he usually kept buried. The weight of the files he carried, the evidence he'd stolen, the choices he'd made, pressed against his chest. "I know why."

  Decker and Yeva exchanged a glance, quick, silent, the kind of communication that happened between people who'd learned to read each other in situations where speaking could get you killed. Keshen caught it, understood it, and felt a familiar mix of gratitude and guilt twist in his chest.

  They'd followed him. Both of them, in different ways and for different reasons. Yeva because she'd chosen him over everything she'd known, Decker because, well, Keshen still wasn't entirely sure why Decker had said yes that third time. But they were here, tied to his decisions, exposed to the consequences of choices he'd made before he'd ever met them.

  "Helix," Yeva said. Not a question.

  "Maybe." He ran his hand over his face, feeling the stubble he'd forgotten to shave that morning. "Probably. I took something from them when I left. Something they want back."

  "The files."

  He nodded. The documentation he'd downloaded in the last frantic hours before everything fell apart, shipping manifests, internal memos, the evidence of a systematic program to destroy medicine that could have saved lives. He'd meant to release it, once. To blow the whole thing open and watch Helix burn. But running had been easier than fighting, and somewhere along the way, the files had become just another weight he carried.

  "If it's Helix," Decker said slowly, "then they've got resources we can't match. Money, ships, people. They can afford to be patient."

  "I know."

  "And if they've been tracking us for two days, they might already have assets in position. Waiting for us at Verata. Waiting for us anywhere we might go."

  "I know."

  "So what do we do?"

  Keshen looked at the data scrolling across the console, numbers and waveforms that represented someone, somewhere, trying to find him. Trying to find his ship, his crew, the family he'd built from broken pieces and good intentions. He thought about forty-seven dead on a mining station, about children drowning in their own lungs because a corporation had decided their lives weren't worth the shipping cost.

  He thought about his grandmother's voice, steady and warm despite the tremor in her hands. For when you need to think.

  "We do the job," he said. "We deliver the medicine. And we watch our backs every second until we know who's hunting us."

  Yeva's expression didn't change, but something in her posture shifted, a release of tension, or maybe just an acceptance of the inevitable. "And if they're waiting for us at Verata?"

  "Then we deal with it. But we don't leave those people to die because we're scared."

  "I'm not scared." Her voice was cool, precise. "I'm tactical. There's a difference."

  "I know. That's why I need you."

  Something flickered across her face, too fast to read, too brief to name. Then she nodded, her hand dropping from the console as she turned toward the hatch. "I'll run a full sensor sweep. See if there's anything else out there we should know about."

  "Thank you."

  She paused at the threshold, her silhouette sharp against the corridor lighting. "Don't thank me yet. Thank me when we're alive on the other side of this."

  Her footsteps faded down the corridor, leaving Keshen alone with Decker and the humming machinery. The old man watched him for a moment, his scanner eye still sweeping in patterns that seemed almost autonomous.

  "She's right, you know." Decker's voice was quieter now, stripped of its usual gruffness. "This could go bad in ways you're not seeing."

  "I know."

  "And you're going anyway."

  "I am."

  Decker nodded slowly, his mechanical hand flexing and releasing in a rhythm that might have been unconscious. "There was a captain I served under, back in the Merchant Marine. Good man. Believed in doing right by people, same as you." He paused, his organic eye going distant, focused on something far away and long ago. "Got himself killed on a supply run to a colony that couldn't pay. Left a crew of twelve without a ship or a leader."

  Keshen waited, unsure if the story was a warning or something else.

  "Point is," Decker continued, "believing in something doesn't make you bulletproof. And having a good heart doesn't mean everyone else does." He turned back to the console, his fingers resuming their dance across the controls. "Keep your eyes open out there. Ship's talking, and she doesn't like what she's hearing."

  "I will."

  "And Kesh?" Decker didn't look up. "Whatever you took from Helix, whatever's in those files, might be time to think about what you're going to do with it. Running's one thing. Running forever is something else."

  The words settled into Keshen's chest like stones, joining the weight he already carried. He wanted to argue, to explain, to defend the choices he'd made and the ones he hadn't. But Decker had already turned away, his attention absorbed by the ship's systems, and Keshen understood that the conversation was over.

  He made his way back through the corridor, his shoulders brushing the walls, his mind churning through scenarios and contingencies and fears he couldn't quite name. The common area was empty when he passed it, the table cleared, the eggs presumably disposed of, the crew scattered to their assigned tasks. The space felt different without people in it, the warmth of the morning replaced by something emptier. Seli would be on the bridge, plotting their course through the secondary beacon chains. Quill would be running their own analysis, searching for patterns in the data that human eyes might miss. Yeva would be,

  Yeva was waiting for him at the entrance to his cabin.

  She leaned against the bulkhead with her arms crossed, her expression unreadable. The scar on her jaw caught the light as she turned her head, a reminder of violence she never discussed.

  "You should have told me about the files," she said. No preamble, no softening. That was Yeva's way, direct as a blade, with roughly the same capacity for comfort.

  "I should have." There was no point in lying. "I meant to. I just... didn't."

  "Why?"

  He leaned against the opposite wall, suddenly exhausted. The weight of the morning, the hope of breakfast, the fear of the beacon ping, the certainty of being hunted, pressed down on him like a physical force. "Because if I told you, you'd ask what I was going to do about it. And I didn't have an answer."

  "You still don't."

  "No. I don't."

  She was quiet for a moment, studying him with eyes that missed nothing. Then she pushed off from the wall and stepped closer, close enough that he could smell the ship's soap on her skin and see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes.

  "I didn't follow you because of your plans," she said. Her voice was softer now, though her expression remained fixed. "I followed you because of who you are. The planning part, that's what you have me for."

  "Yeva, "

  "We're going to Verata. We're delivering the medicine. And then we're going to figure out who's hunting us and make them stop." She held his gaze, unflinching. "That's the plan. Unless you have a better one."

  He didn't. She knew he didn't. But somehow, hearing her say it, hearing the certainty in her voice, the steel beneath the words, made the weight on his shoulders feel slightly less crushing.

  "That's the plan," he agreed.

  She nodded once, a sharp motion that signaled the end of the conversation. Then she turned and headed for the bridge, her footsteps precise and economical, her hand resting briefly on the bulkhead as she walked.

  Reassuring the ship, Keshen thought. Or maybe reassuring herself.

  He stood alone in the corridor for a long moment, listening to the Kindness breathe around him. Then he reached into his pocket and found his mother's gift, its surface smooth and cool against his fingers.

  For when you need to think.

  He had a lot of thinking to do.