Page 61 of Farborn

I hope.

I mean, we slept together at one point and parted ways in that respect as friends.

As he walks past me to the cooler, I use my com unit to log into my bunk terminal remotely and switch off the galley com system for a moment.

“Can I ask you something and keep it between us?” I whisper in case someone walks into the mess area just outside the galley.

He scowls. “I thought you partnered with Olarte now, and—”

“No, not something personal likethat.”

He studies me for a moment. “I told you I don’t know yet what caused—”

“What if I knew something illegal was going on? On the ship. Involving the captain.”

He pauses, staring at me. “Is this some sort of joking?”

“Joke, and no. It’s not.” I show him on my com unit what’s going on, and his eyebrows nearly launch off his forehead as he looks up at me to verify what he’s actually seeing.

“Hell’s brains!” His hair bristles. “What’s this about?”

“I don’t know. It cannot be a coincidence that we have an undeclared passenger and live cargo that shouldn’t be on board, and we’ve suddenly had a jump drive problem that dropped us in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

He replays the video I took in the cargo bay. At least I am reasonably sure from his reaction that he has no idea what’s going on and isn’t involved in it.

Thank goodness.

I honestly wasn’t sure what I’d do if I thought he was involved. Fortunately for me, Onyx don’t have poker faces.

Seriously, they don’t. It’s why some captains love having them on their crews, and some captains hate them.

Depends on whether or not you’re an honest captain, I suppose. Until today, I thought Xhogrhan was honest.

Then McMurtry pulls his own com unit from his pocket and scrolls through something.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Looking.”

That’s not helpful. “Looking forwhat?” I ask.

“For cause.”

“I thought that’s what you’d been doing?”

He slowly shakes his head. “I never anticipated…” His gaze narrows as he studies his com unit.

“What is it?” I ask.

He turns his com unit so I can see the screen. He’s isolated a signal feeding into the ship through the auxiliary life pod command terminal. Apparently, it’s a signal that’s been scrambled through the terminal in the captain’s quarters, meaning it didn’t show up in the usual systems scans his team used to try to diagnose the problem.

Because it wasn’t a problem the shipcouldnormally have.

“It is why our jump drive died,” he says, sounding grim. “Interference oscillation.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“Sabotage.”