Page 10 of Cloverleaf Station

Fine. This was fine. Watching all his meticulous maps get shoved out of the way, losing the progress he’d made with the search algorithm, undoubtedly having to explain it all the moment this asshole wasn’t totally preoccupied with whatever he was searching for now—that was all fine. Kieron sat back in the chair that Dave had customarily laid claim to, sighing when something crunched beneath his butt. He stood back up and pulled a protein-supplement wrapper out from the back of the seat. Chunky choc-cherry flavored.

Fucking Dave.

“Eating on the job?” Elenus asked snarkily as he continued to scan the log. Kieron didn’t bother to reply, just put the wrapper in the nearest recycling unit and sat back down. He watched in silence as Elenus scrolled back one day … two days … three. He paused when he got to the rescue of the Mason’s Bay, reading through the terse report and glancing at the visual recording before moving on without saying a word.

Yeah, I do my job. What the hell is your job here, fucker?

A little further into the log, Elenus suddenly stopped scrolling. He stared down at the screen for a long moment, then delicately tapped an audio file.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

Kieron startled in his chair, unnerved by the sound of that strange scream. He still couldn’t place it, had logged it as some sort of audio distortion from one of the miners’ ships, but from the way Elenus’s face went from cool and detached to heartbroken in a matter of seconds settled that for him. This was no distortion. This was something deliberate, and it was bad news.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Elenus murmured, stroking over the audio icon. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m here now; I’ll find you.” He took a deep breath, then straightened his back and stared at Kieron. “I need to track down the source of this signal.”

He needed to what now? “There’s no way to figure out the source of the signal since it’s no longer broadcasting,” Kieron pointed out.

“Then I need the best guess you can put together, so I can get out there and start looking for it.”

Kieron’s jaw dropped. “Are you insane?” he managed after a second.

Elenus smirked. “Not today, I don’t think. Are you?”

“You can’t go out there right now. It’s deadly. Without Big Momma blocking the radiation from the quasar, you’ll be dead in a matter of minutes. Dead-dead, as in nonRegenerable.”

“I’m party to information that you don’t have, and it says I absolutely can go out there right now, with no ill effects.”

Holy hells, this guy had a death wish. “No mobile, manmade technology has been found that completely blocks radiation this strong,” Kieron explained, like he was speaking to a child. “Even this station isn’t perfect under these circumstances, and its walls are over fifty feet thick, with lead alloy, concrete, and water layers. If you try to go out there, you’re going to die a horrible death.” Ask me how I know.

“I’m delighted to say that, in fact, I have a ship that is capable of withstanding such high amounts of radiation for hours at a time,” Elenus replied blithely, folding his elegant hands. “It’s right there in the name of my company. Lifeship Enterprises is concerned not only with operating on the nano-edge of technical ship specs, it wants to protect human life in whatever situation it might get itself into. That includes being stranded in a situation where high radiation is a factor. My ship continuously sheds and renews its outermost hull when the current skin has absorbed as much cross-spectrum radiation as it can. While that skin is functional, so is the ship, and so is the pilot.”

Kieron’s brain felt frozen in place, like every thought and emotion that had been churning in him since this asshole sat down was suddenly put on hold as he grappled with this statement. It couldn’t be. That just wasn’t possible, it wasn’t … but if it was … and Elenus had gotten here in one piece, after all …

The sudden urge to get on this guy’s good side was intensely annoying, but Kieron would do anything if it meant upping his chances of finding Zakari. Still, he needed to be thorough.

“All that aside,” Kieron said although the last thing he wanted right now was to push that incredible knowledge aside, “it’s not that simple. The signal has to be actively transmitting to find it—there’s no way to trace it in space this heavy with audio interference. Have you figured out a fix for that problem too?”

Judging from the way Elenus scowled, he hadn’t.

“I assume that whatever it is you’re tracking is similarly shielded?”

“No,” Elenus said, which surprised Kieron. Before he could tell the guy then you’re fucked, he went on, “It’s actually the next generation in Lifeship design, way better than what I’m flying. My ship is good, but it can only stay out there for a few hours before it burns through the special mix that gives the skins their resiliency.

“I have the tools with me to grow more,” he added before Kieron could even open his mouth, “but that’s going to take time to set up, and the ship’ll still only be able to fly for a few hours before needing to refuel. The ship that’s out there has a proprietary AI system and a biomolecular generator in its core that recycles and cleanses old particles to be used again. It’s got a body and a brain to drive it. And inside it all, there’s a heart that yearns for connection.” He smiled briefly, and it made him look terribly handsome. The asshole. “I’ve created more than just a new generation of spaceship. Catalina is an entirely new life-form. She’s my child. And three weeks ago, she was stolen from me.”

Kieron was surprised at how invested he felt even if half of what this guy was saying had to be hyperbole. “By whom?”

Elenus bared his teeth in a snarl. “By my fuckface of a business partner, who cut a deal with a competitor to give them Catalina, the only working model of this design, for an obscene amount of money. And,” he added reluctantly, “he also did it for the chance to fuck me over. We’ve been on the outs practically since we began the company, but I never thought he would go this far.”

“Why didn’t he go straight to your competitor instead of running out here to the middle of nowhere?” Kieron asked.

“Because my baby is loyal, and I’m smarter than I look,” Elenus replied briskly. “Now that we’ve shared our life stories, maybe we can get back to figuring out a way to track down Catalina’s signal and rescue her from that festering asswhore.”

“Well, you can’t just fly into the meteor field. You can’t,” Kieron reiterated as Elenus opened his mouth to inevitably argue. “Even with a radiation-resistant ship, the meteors don’t have set orbits around the quasar. I’ve been tracking them ever since I got here, and while my files are good, they’re not perfect. If you want to make it more than a hundred kilometers deep in there, you’re going to have to scout your path with probes.”

Elenus frowned. “I don’t have any … but I saw from your tracking spreadsheet that you do.”

The hells? How had he had the time to look at that, much less read any of it before Kieron swiped it out of the way? “I do, but I’ve got my own time-critical project that requires their use.”