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Luckily, Quadrant Delta was against the hull on the starboard side of the hold and easily accessible. Once I got close, urgent beeping led me straight to one container in particular. XKDP6335 turned out to be a large unit about four meters wide by five meters tall and twelve meters long. Two more identical units were stacked on top of it.

The shipping agent had locked the container. According to my contract, I had to leave that lock intact or risk a deduction from my payout for its compromised contents. Given the work I needed done on my ship, money had a strong claim to the top of my list of concerns. However, slightly above that was wanting to know who the hells was stashed in this container. Plus I still had six Earth-standard days of travel to get to Ymar II and I didn’t want to spend them with a corpse in the cargo hold.

I had to consider that this could be a ploy to get me to open the container, where an assassin might lie in wait. Despite how carefully I had built my new identity since leaving the mercenary guild, a past enemy could have tracked me down or hired someone to find me. That was an argument for leaving the container locked, dropping it on Ymar II, and letting its contents be their problem.

On the other hand, if a potential assassin didn’t have a way to open it from the inside, they would hardly have locked themselves in and gambled I’d voluntarily open it. So either I had to open it now or risk the person inside opening it later.

Meanwhile, the beeping had turned into a full-fledged alarm that indicated the stasis pod had reached critical failure. If there reallywassomeone in the pod, I was about to have a corpse on my hands who wouldn’t be able to answer any questions without the help of a medium.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I typed my override code into the container door’s keypad, got ready to shoot anything that moved, and yanked the door open.

chaptertwo

kerian

I am dying.

From the depths of an unconsciousness darker and more abyssal than I’d ever experienced before, I struggled to reach the surface and wake. My chest heaved as I gasped for air and my body ached down to the bones.

Instinct told me to move, to get away from whatever caused me pain and stifled my breathing. But when I reached out, my hands struck something solid about thirty centimeters from my face. I saw nothing but pitch black, though I felt sure my eyes were open.

What was right in front of me felt like a glass window. When I rapped on it with my knuckles, the sound confirmed it. Everything else around me smelled like metal. A metal cocoon. But with a window?

My wheezing breath brought in no air.

Thinking was difficult, but even in my foggy brain, the links of evidence formed a chain: I had woken in a stasis pod. A stasis pod that was about to become my coffin.

Fumbling, my fingers and toes numb from what I now recognized as the effects of long-term stasis, I searched the interior of the pod for an emergency release and found none.

I drew back my fists as much as the pod would allow and punched the glass with all my might. Nowthatpain I felt very clearly. I had no breath with which to curse. The window creaked but didn’t break. The ringing in my ears grew louder. Unconsciousness was moments away and death right behind it.

I had not survived the horrors of genetic manipulation on my home planet and ten years of service as a spy in the Gandarian army to die in this gods-damned pod.

With darkness closing in, I hit the window one last time with my fists, my feet, everything I had. I felt the door give, but I thought it was probably lack of oxygen or wishful thinking?—

—Until my shuddering breath drew in a lungful of stale air and I began to cough. The ringing in my ears cut off abruptly. An alarm of some kind? I couldn’t think about that now. All that mattered was breathing.

To my sensitive nose and antennae, the air reeked of machine parts, industrial solvents, and recycled ventilation, but I had seldom smelled anything sweeter.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself staring at the business end of a pulse gun pointed directly at my face. Holding the weapon was a human woman in a captain’s jumpsuit. She had long blonde hair in a braid, the physique of someone who worked hard every day of her life, and a smear of what appeared to be engine coolant on her forehead.

She also had the coldest eyes I had ever seen that weren’t in the mirror looking back at my own.

“Who. Thefuck. Are you?” she demanded. Each word promised death.

I recognized the tone, the look, the way she held her gun and the kinds of blades she wore in her thigh holsters. She might be a ship’s captain now, but at some point in the very recent past, we’d been in roughly the same business.

With numbness in my extremities and my brain still muddled by long-term stasis, I couldn’t move fast enough to disarm her—not when her finger was already on the trigger.

On the other hand, she had opened my pod before I asphyxiated and hadn’t shot me on sight. That meant I had a chance to survive.

“I’m Kerian Nos, Captain.” My voice sounded hoarse. I coughed. My throat and lungs hurt from gasping for air. “Permission to come aboard?”

Behind her, through the open door of this shipping container, I saw a large cargo hold full of identical units. I had no idea how I got here, or whereherewas, other than the amount of cargo, thrumming of engines, and smell of recycled air indicated a freighter traveling at hyperspeed.

I had no memory of where I’d been before this except hazy impressions of sitting in a bar on the planet Erzia and meeting a woman with red hair and a scar on her shoulder. After that…nothing. Not a gods-damned thing.