He fed her slate the coordinates without speaking.
“Holy fukking shit,” she agreed a moment later. “Now that’s worth puking over.”
They’d scored a Marine armory. An undamaged Marine Corps armory. A small fortune in weapons if he decided to sell them. A way to change the future if he didn’t.
The seals were solid and . . .
... had been oversealed by one of the dead CSOs.
If he wanted to get the armory open without blowing it and everything around it to hell and gone, he needed another CSO. Alive this time.
“Promise, you are cleared at vector twenty-four point seven for two hundred kilometers. Returning computer control in three, two, one.”
“Return acknowledged, Paradise Station.” Craig ran both hands along the edge of his board, the movement not quite a caress. While he understood why the station controlled all approaches and departures—the unforgiving nature of vacuum made accidents usually fatal and always expensive—it wasn’t required that he actually like being forced to sit as a passenger in his own ship. So he didn’t. But he sure as hell liked getting his lady back.
“All right, you said you’d tell me when we were in space.” His poor old pilot’s chair dipped as Torin settled enough weight to make a point across the top. “We’re in space. Spill.”
Torin hadn’t been happy about being kept in the dark, but she hadn’t done anything about it either, and Craig knew that represented a huge leap in trust for them. Torin didn’t like not knowing things.
“We’ve seen your family,” he told her, leaning back and looking up. “I figured that now we could lob in and see mine.”
She frowned. “Your parents died thirteen years ago, and you haven’t seen your cousin Joe for nearly six.”
“You fossicked through my records, then.”
Torin spun the chair around and straddled his lap. The chair complained again, and Craig told it silently to shut up as he slid his hands up the curve of her hips to settle around her waist. At 1.8 meters with a fighter’s muscle, Torin wasn’t light, but he knew for a fact the chair could hold them both . . . while moving a lot more vigorously.
“I checked after I joined you here, on the Promise,” she said. “Not before.”
So her research had no influence on her joining him. He appreciated that she’d decided with her heart and not her head. “You could have asked.”
“You never spoke of them and, just in case . . .” She waved a hand, the gesture taking in the bunk, the half-circle table, the two chairs, and closed hatch to the head. “. . . we don’t have a lot of room for touchy subjects.”
“’S truth. But unless we make one hell of a find—working tech say—even adding another three square meters’ll cost more than we can afford this year.” They’d used a chunk of Torin’s final payment from the Corps to put in a new converter. As long as they could find ice—and if they couldn’t find ice, he was in the wrong business—they could replenish both water and oxygen significantly faster than two people could use it. That and the upgraded CO2 scrubbers went a long way toward removing any residual dread of sharing the limited resources of a small ship with another person.
With Torin anyway.
“We were talking about your family.” She rocked her hips forward, and his eyes rolled back. Torin had relaxed the moment the air lock telltales had gone red and they were clear of Paradise and her family. When she got like this, it was hard to remember she knew twenty-five ways to kill a man with her bare hands. “Where are we going?”
“Salvage station.”
She stopped moving. Craig made an inarticulate protest.
“They actually exist?”
“Seventy-two-hour fold and we’ll rock up. You can see for yourself.”
“And they’re safe?”
He laughed at that. The myths about salvage stations usually included the word deathtrap in the description. “For fuksake, Torin, you were a Marine!”
“And contrary to popular opinion, gunnery sergeants can’t breathe vacuum.”
“Trust me, if there’s one thing a salvage operator understands, given how much time we spend suited up, it’s not breathing vacuum. Now then,” reaching up, he cupped the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, “you could keep working on that twenty-sixth way to kill a man. Seems I’m not dead yet.”
“It does not look cobbled together,” Craig muttered. “It looks ...”
Torin waited while Craig frowned out at the station they were approaching,