She opened her eyes. “I felt you staring at me.”
“I wasn’t staring, just admiring.” She furrowed her brow, coaxing him to confess, “Okay, maybe I was staring, just a bit.”
“Who could blame you?” She laid one hand on top of his. “You seem like you have something on your mind. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. I guess. I just . . .” He let the sentence trail off and fade away.
The silence seemed to worry Bridy. “What? What’re you thinking?”
He had rehearsed and rehashed this conversation in his imagination so many times that he no longer knew how to begin. “Do you ever think we could . . . you know . . .” His eyes scanned the bulkheads while his brain searched for words. “Is there any chance that we could ever just walk away from all this?”
More awake now, Bridy propped herself up on one elbow. “And do what?”
“I don’t know. Just live, I guess.”
“Wow, I can tell you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
Quinn shook his head. “I’m serious. In between gettin’ our asses half shot off, we’ve made some good money these last few months. We’ve got enough rare junk and hard currency stashed in our hold to go anywhere we want and be set up for life.” He reached over and gently stroked her perfect chin with his callused thumb. “We could buy a piece of beachfront property on some perfect, blue world and just ‘live large,’ as my pappy used to say.”
“It’s a pretty notion,” Bridy said, “but that’s only ’cause it’s far away. If we cashed in and settled down, you’d be bored out of your mind inside a week.”
The accusation stung. “The old me.” He clasped her hand. “But I’ve changed—you’ve seen it. I let a lot of my life slip away while I wasn’t looking, and I ain’t gettin’ any younger, that’s for damned sure. I don’t know how much time I got left, but whatever I got coming, I want to spend it with you.”
Bridy sat up and tucked her knees to her chest. “I have to give you credit—you never fail to surprise me.” She hugged her knees with one arm and used her free hand to finger-comb her tousled hair from her eyes. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a domestic breed. You’ve always struck me as a rover.”
“No. Just a guy runnin’ from his past.” He pressed his hands over his face and tried to massage away a lifetime of accumulated stress and fatigue. “Fact is, I’m tired. Can’t do it anymore. Time to stop runnin’ and start livin’.”
“You make it sound so easy.” She pushed aside the sheet and got up to pace beside the bed. “I spent half my life working to get intoStarfleet and the other half working forStarfleet. How am I supposed to turn my back on that?”
“Think about what you just said. You’ve given them your whole life so far—don’t you think maybe that’s enough? Shouldn’t some of your life be yours?”
She shook her head. “I took an oath.”
“For life? Are you saying you’ll never hang up the uniform?”
“Never’s a long time.” She threw a nervous glance his way. “What are yousaying? That if I stay in Starfleet, you’ll leave without me?”
He looked away to hide his frustration at having his bluff called. “No. If you say we stay, then we stay.” He put on a crooked smile. “I’d rather be in hell with you than in heaven by myself.”
Bridy circled the bed and sat down beside him. “Seriously? In hell? Is our life out here that bad? I know it gets hairy now and then, but we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?”
“Maybe a few,” he admitted with reluctance. “But I’ve had my share of rotten luck, and I know the longer we keep goin’, the better the odds one or both of us’ll wind up dead.”
“So, what’s the alternative? How would this play out, if you had your way?”
“In a perfect world? You’d resign from Starfleet by subspace radio, and then we’d get the hell out of the Taurus Reach as fast as this ship’ll go. Find a place to settle down, sell the ship, and make a few munchkins. Just be regular folks.”
She looked amused, and that made him nervous. Planting a hand on her hip, she said, “Hypothetically speaking, what if I wanted to finish this mission before we go and start pricing beach houses? Would that seem like a reasonable request?”
Quinn shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
“And I’d need to be in charge of naming any munchkins.”
“Now hang on just a—”
“Take it or leave it.”
“ Hrmph. Okay. Sold.”
Bridy planted a quick kiss on Quinn’s mouth. “In the interests of starting our new life as soon as possible, do you think you could squeeze a few extra tenths of a warp factor out of this heap?”
His knees creaked, his back ached, and his stomach gurgled loudly as he stood. Plodding out of their cabin, he mumbled, “I’ll see what I can do.”
5
Descending the Dulcinea’s ramp, Bridy tugged at the neck of the wheat-colored garment Quinn had insisted she don before leaving the ship. “Why are we wearing cloaks with hoods? What, are we joining Robin Hood’s merry men?”
Quinn pulled up his cloak’s hood. “You’ll thank me once we get outside.”
A hot, foul wind greeted them as they disembarked. She followed him away from the Dulcineaand across the dingy, open-air starport hangar. True to his word, he had shaved nearly an hour off their travel time to Seudath, and he had overloaded only one plasma relay to do it. Compared to the wear and tear he had routinely inflicted on his previous ship, the Rocinante,the sacrifice of a single plasma relay seemed like nothing. With muted amusement, she wondered whether Quinn was getting cautious in his old age.
“Nice place.” She eyed their run-down environs, which in searing midday sunlight resembled a deep and heavily rusted iron pit, and waved away a cloud of noxious smoke wafting over them. “Really first-rate.”
“You get what you pay for.” Quinn squinted against the harsh daylight and nodded at the four-person ground crew, which was busy attaching umbilicals to the Dulcinea’s underside to provide it with local comms, waste extraction, fuel, and the replenishment of its air and water reserves. “At least the basics are covered. If you’d wanted luxury, Starfleet should’ve given us a better cover.”
She scowled at him. “They had to work with what you gave them.”
They paused at the entrance while Quinn programmed in their standard temporary security code. Once he confirmed the code, the door lifted open, revealing a street busy with vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The air was heavy with the scents of exotic spices, the savory aroma of cooked meat, and the acrid bite of smoke and combustion-engine exhaust fumes. He stepped over the threshold and led Bridy outside. “Away we go.”
They moved in careful steps through a dense crowd of aliens, most of them humanoids, all of them being observed by armed Gorn soldiers moving in pairs or squads of four. Right away, Bridy noticed strangers glaring in her and Quinn’s direction. “I get the impression humans aren’t very popular around here.”
“Not just humans—anybody from the Federation. We’re about as welcome here as a shit stain on a wedding dress.”
“Thanks for the visual.”
“Pull your hood up. You’ll draw less attention.”
As they rounded a corner into an intersection, they could see the city of Tzoryp sprawled around them. Built on and between six low hills, it was uneven and incomplete. Its main starport had been erected atop its broadest and highest elevation, affording Quinn and Bridy a commanding view of the cityscape. Squat industrial structures stood flanked by mid-sized residential towers and hotels, and entire blocks were filled with half-constructed buildings, steel skeletons gleaming beneath the brutal white glow of a Class F star.