Page 111 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

“So you say, but how can I trust you?” I demanded, pacing around the small space, eyeing the rather large bunk and the size of the pilot chair, which had a cutout in the back likely meant to accommodate a tail.

“If I meant you harm, I would not have expended effort to rescue you,” the AI returned calmly. “And my crew was captured; I have been trying to locate him.”

Him, a single entity. That made sense, considering the extremely tight quarters aboard the ship. “How long ago did this happen?” I asked, curious despite myself. I had enough problems as it was; my whole life was in shambles.

“Three cycles, six solars, and thirty-two rises ago,” the ship answered precisely.

I didn’t know exactly what units of measurement it was talking about, but if a cycle was its version of a year…

this ship had been without its crew for a long time.

I shivered, if it even spoke the truth. For all I knew, it had chucked its pilot out of the airlock I’d just come in through.

“I see. What now?” I asked, looking around.

Now that I was warmer, other matters were becoming more pressing.

Like my full bladder and my empty stomach.

I headed for the bunk and started stripping out of the clunky EV suit; it had to go if I wanted to pee normally instead of using the suit’s recycling unit.

That always left a funky smell, so I preferred not to.

“I believe you need to see to your physical needs, Camila. If you let me know where you’d like to go, I can plot a course.”

The ship helpfully opened the cleansing unit for me when I’d stripped down to my undersuit, and a toilet bowl of some kind slid out of a wall. “Thanks,” I murmured as I slipped inside. “Please tell me you don’t have a camera in here.”

The ship made a sound that could only be described as a kind of bullish snort. It wasn’t a sound I expected an AI to make, and it was eerily close to human. “That would be an invasion of privacy, Camila. Of course not.”

With a sigh, I let the door slide closed and took care of business.

If the ship was speaking the truth, I’d have at least one spot on this tin of sardines where I could hide from its scrutiny.

When I exited the small unit, the ship had undergone a mild transformation.

A table had slid out next to the cot, and on it sat a tray with what looked like ration bars of some kind.

How thoughtful of the ship, providing me with food.

I sat down and tried the bars, a kind of hard, leathery jerky that I had to work at to soften enough to swallow. At least the taste was pretty good.

“Have you decided where you wish to go?” the ship asked, interrupting my quiet contemplation and struggle with the meal. I had no fucking clue, of course, and felt a little suspicious that it would just be willing to fly me somewhere and drop me off. This was just a little too good to be true.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It wasn’t like I chose to be out there, floating through space. I think my bridges are all rather burned at the moment.”

“I am sorry your bridges are burning, Camila. Can you put them out?”

I snorted a laugh at the ship’s wording. “I don’t think these bridges can be saved, ship.”

“You can call me Akri. My captain used to call me Akri, I liked that.” I fought a smile; it was rather endearing how eagerly the AI offered me a name to call it.

I wasn’t sure if this AI was exhibiting normal behavior or not, but it felt comforting to realize that some of its mannerisms were less robot and more human.

“Okay, Akri, thank you for the rescue, I guess. I just don’t know what to do from here.

Any safe place you recommend I should go?

” One thing was for sure: I’d go mad if I had to remain inside this tiny space for too long.

It was extremely cramped in here, even if the size of the chair and the bed led me to assume that the crewman the ship had lost was far bigger than your average human.

“You should rest first, Camila. You nearly died of oxygen deprivation and hypothermia. That is a shock to the system, sleep should help.” I laughed at the dryness of that delivery, though this Akri appeared happy to take care of me.

I wasn’t sure I felt safe enough to go to sleep.

How near were we to the UAR battleship? When I asked, the AI responded crisply that the ship had jumped into FTL and we were currently alone in the solar system.

Good enough, I guess. So I kicked off my boots, wiggled underneath the thin, oddly leathery material of the blanket on the cot, and tried to relax. Here, training kicked in, though, and I was asleep in seconds.

*

Thorin

What a mess. I sighed as I surveyed the lounge area where the body had been found.

It had been over two weeks since Chloe and Kitan had stumbled across the badly decaying body of the Elrohirian doctor, Miean.

I fingered the medallion on my cheek, which dangled from a chain connecting my earlobe to the piercing in my nose.

Chloe had recognized the doctor immediately by the medallions on the Doc’s Caratan chain.

His body had otherwise been so bloated and decayed that he’d become virtually unrecognizable.

The clan symbols on our Caratan were unique identifiers.

How a pirate doc—kicked out of medicine for malpractice—had managed to hold onto his clan medallions was a puzzle I couldn’t figure out.

Had he worn them without permission? Unlikely; even a degenerate like this doctor wouldn’t have done that, or gotten away with it. Galling, really.

Tori and Sunder had been into this space to take inventory after Luka and Ziame had gone over the room and cleaned it up, declaring it safe for the pregnant female, who had since become a new mother.

Ziame had let me in to search for clues, but I’d come up with nothing, just like he had.

I wouldn’t know if there had been clues we’d missed; the scene had been contaminated from the start.

Still, I liked coming here and eyeing the stacks upon stacks of mag-lock crates, imagining what Miean might have been up to in here.

Maybe Ziame was onto something when he asked me to investigate this death, it was almost pleasant to fall into old rhythms, as long as I didn’t think about how everything had crashed and burned.

With an annoyed snarl at letting myself get distracted, I tried to get back to the task at hand.

My suspect list had to include all of my brothers and the humans aboard the ship.

I hated having to investigate them, and it was difficult to retrace all their steps, especially when I wasn’t certain if Miean had been killed here or somewhere else.

I could ask Da’vi for help getting access to the computer logs, but the mechanic was more surly than I was and extremely busy with the Doc, trying to figure out the hand prostheses that had been acquired for him.

Right now, I was making do. Doc had supplied a time and means of death: stabbed by a poisoned blade.

My current hypothesis was that the stab wound hadn’t done him in, and he’d crawled into this lounge himself, dying from the poison.

From what Chloe had said about this bastard, it was exactly the kind of end he’d deserved.

But with this being the secondary crime scene and not the first…

I still had to figure out where the hell this guy had managed to get himself stabbed in the first place.

Not to mention figure out how he’d gone undetected on the ship by us for an entire week.

That thought alone made my skin crawl. Da’vi and Ziame had coordinated a top-to-bottom search of the Vagabond, but that had turned up nothing.

Now that Chloe was awake and back in good health, I’d asked her to show me the smuggling hatches she knew about.

I’d also had her point out which of the many crew quarters had belonged to the Doc.

She’d struggled to get me into each hatch, now that she was blind, it was much harder for her to undo the various finicky locking mechanisms. At least Kitan never left her side and eagerly assisted with anything she might need.

I had the feeling, with one of those hatches, that someone had been in it, but I could only base that on the fact that, according to Tori’s master inventory list, that hatch had mostly been empty and, in her words, “a frickin’ mess.

” Whether it was the dead Miean or the perp who had gotten into that hatch? No clue.

I really should get Da’vi to help me access the ship logs; it would greatly help account for everyone’s location at the time of death.

I just didn’t know the guy, it was already a struggle for me to trust the gladiators I’d fought alongside, let alone one who had once nearly killed Ziame with a claymore.

Rubbing the back of my neck, I concluded that nothing was going to jump out at me and miraculously help me figure this out, so I headed back to the bridge.

I’d make another attempt at looking at the ship’s systems myself.

Maybe Kitan could help a little; I was pretty certain the pilot and his girl hadn’t had anything to do with Miean’s death, even if Chloe was the only one with a direct relationship with the dead guy.

Ziame wanted to believe that Diamed had done it. She was our former nav, the bitch who had betrayed us and nearly gotten our nav and pilot captured or killed. She certainly made for the most convenient suspect. Nobody wanted to consider that one of us had done it.