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"When?" I asked.

"Two days," he said.

Two days. The trial was set to take place in three.

Afterward, the pirates would be executed or shipped to a prison colony. Either way, they'd be out of my reach. Two days was pushing it, but it was better than nothing.

I looked down at Rikard. Tears still ran down his

face. His fur robe gaped open, revealing the pale skin of his chest, his ribs visible along his sides. I almost felt sorry for him.

"Don't do anything stupid," I said. "I've taken precautions. Don't try to have me arrested. Don't try to have me killed. If I disappear or turn up dead, those packets will find their way to the people who need them. The best thing you can do is give me what I need. Then we can go on with our lives and forget we ever knew each other."

He nodded. "I'll do what you want."

"Good." I didn't twist his arm any further, but I tightened my grip on his wrist, just to get his attention.

"You fuck me over on this, and you'll regret it," I said. "I'll break every bone in your body, and I don't care if I hang for

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it. We clear?"

"Crystal," he said. "You'll have your money."

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The next two days were tense. Despite all my dire

threats, I really had very little on Rikard. And despite his assurances, I still didn't completely trust him. I stayed away from my room except to sleep, and even that I did with a makeshift weapon in my hand. I was on edge, and I barely managed to eat, but at the end of the second day, Janus showed up at my door.

Her face was tear-streaked. She dropped five small

chips into my hand. She turned around and left without saying a word.

Now came the hard part.

I bought as many hats and nondescript jackets as I

thought I could get away with without attracting attention.

People might have been suspicious if they'd bothered to notice. After some debate, I bought clothes for myself as well. My uniform granted me access and a certain amount of freedom from idle questions. However, it also made me recognizable, and it was worthless for fighting.

Deep in the dead of night, dressed as a civilian, I left my room for the last time. I had a bag of clothes over my shoulder and a pocket full of credit chips. It seemed completely insufficient for a prison break, but it would have to do. I made my way to the cellblock where Valero

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and his men were held. There were two guards—one

outside the main door, and one at the desk in the anteroom.

Before meeting Valero, I might have relied on

combat skills, but I'd learned there were other ways.

The first guard eyed the chip I offered him with

hungry eyes, but he was hesitant. "I'll make it look good," I said. "If you can take a bit of pain."

He licked his lips, then looked up at me with a

smile. "Do your worst, sir," he said, and then he laughed.

"Within reason."

The next guard wasn't so easy. He started to reach

for the alarm, and I fell back on what I knew. I hit him in the nose with the heel of my hand, feeling bone break as I did, then swept his legs out from under him. He fell to the ground, out of reach of the alarm.

"Open the door," I said to the first guard as I dragged the second one to his feet.

The pirates were lounging on the floor. Most

seemed to be asleep, but a few heads turned my way as we entered. "Tristan!" somebody by the door said—a voice I recognized, but couldn't attach to any particular face. The men in the cells by the door were quickly on their feet, reaching through the bars to wake the men in the cells next to them.

"Open the cells," I said to the first guard. I was a bit

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worried he'd hit the alarm instead—we would have been fucked—but he didn't. He wanted the credits more than he wanted the glory of catching one more bad guy. He started hitting buttons, and the clicks of latches being thrown echoed down the line of cells.

I stuck the bleeding guard in an empty cell. I held up a credit chip. "Keep your mouth shut about the other guard," I said, as I slipped it into his pocket. "Let this ease your conscience."

Somebody had the honor of punching the first guard

in the face a few times, and then I locked him into a cell of his own. "Good luck, Captain," he said through a bloody hand as I slipped a chip into the other one.

"I'm not a captain anymore."

I turned around and walked right into Valero. He

grabbed me and kissed me once—short and quick—and

then we were all business. I pulled out the hats and jackets, and they set about trying to cover the most obnoxious of the mohawks and silk shirts. We still didn't exactly look like civilians, but we didn't quite look like pirates either.

"All of us at once will attract attention," I said. "We should go in small groups."

"No," Valero said, shaking his head. "Not unless you have enough chips to give each group bribe money."

"Only three left," I said, holding them out to Valero.

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It was Yima who took them, though. "Then we go together," he said. He looked around his group. "Franci, Sal, Dani." Three of them came forward, one man and two women. I knew from the lunchroom Franci was the male.

He seemed made entirely of muscle. A scar turned the right side of his face into a sneer. One of the women was small and waif-like and could have passed for a fourteen-year-old boy. The other was her exact opposite, curvy and

voluptuous and with an ample amount of cleavage

showing. Each of them was handed a chip.

"Hold your heads up," Yima said, looking around at all of his crew. "Look like you know exactly where you're going. Don't bunch up. Tristan's right—small groups will attract less attention—so we'll spread out a bit, but not so much that we lose sight of each other. You all know how it works."

And then suddenly, they were all looking at me.

Valero smiled at me. "Lead the way, Captain

Kelley."

"I'm not a captain," I said. But I led them to the door.

Of my two defectors, one chose to come with us.

The other shook my hand in the hallway.

"Where will you go?" I asked.

He smiled at me. "I have cousins in second

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quadrant," he said. "Just have to find a ship I can book passage on."

"Good luck."

He went one way, and the pirates and I went the

other.

They did well, and I had to wonder how many times

they'd done this type of thing before. Valero and I went first, with Pierce and a group of men right behind us. They all had Valero's dark skin, and whatever hair wasn't dyed was black. Their eyes ranged all shades of green and brown. His men from the Rosenth Brigade.

Behind them, the rest trailed. One group of men

acted drunk, to the point of dragging one of their men with them, laughing as they went. Some of them walked in couples with the women, their heads tucked together like lovers.

If it had been daytime, we would never have made

it. No matter how much we tried to not look like a giant group, there were too many of us, too close together. But this late in the evening, it worked well enough. We passed one group of men who were as drunk as the pirates were pretending to be. They didn't even look twice. We passed one woman who was obviously a call girl. She held her hand up to the side of her face, mimicking the blinders used on horses, and walked by us without a word. We had to

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take lifts down, which turned out to be the most nerve-wracking part. There were three lifts, and each could hold eight of us at a time. There were thirty-four of us, so it took two trips to get everybody to the floor where the ship was held, and waiting at the bottom for everybody else seemed to take an eternity.

Finally, we were all clustered together again, and I led them down another hall.

"Almost there," I told them.

We turned the corner, and ran right into a guard as he was walking out of a bathroom. I saw the way his hands went to his belt, feeling for a weapon. His eyes were wide as he looked over the group of us.

I could take him easily, if I hurried, and I was just stepping forward when I felt Valero's hand on my arm.

"Wait," he said, nodding over to where three people stood—Franci, Sal and Dani.

This was why they'd divvied up the bribe money.

It only took them a second to decide which ploy to

use. It was the voluptuous one.

"Hey, baby," she said as she sidled up to him. "Let me make your night." She kissed him, pushing him back against the wall, her hands going to his belt.

The rest of the group pressed forward, moving past

them without a second glance. "Dani's good," Valero said

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as he took my arm and led me down the hall. "She bribes them twice. Money in his pocket and cum all over his pants, he won't bother to sound any alarms before he goes home to change."

I looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged.

"Nobody makes her do it," he said. "I think she gets off on it."

I was a guy who liked wearing women's underwear.

Who was I to judge?

We made it all the way to the ship's docking bay.

And that was where we had to stop short.

I hadn't counted on the ship being guarded, but it

was. We huddled in the hallway, taking turns stealing glances through the windows on the doors. There were at least half a dozen guards in the anteroom to the airlock.

My first thought was that Rikard or Janus had told

somebody we might try to escape, but if that had been the case, they would have put extra guards on the prison bay, not the ship. "Why so many guards?" I asked.

Valero and Yima laughed. "You have any idea what we had on board?" Yima asked. "Cargo on that ship's probably worth several hundred thousand credits. And you can bet the Regency doesn't want any of it leaking onto the black market, either."

I looked back through the door at the guards. Six of

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them, but none of them looked very alert. They were sitting around a table playing cards.

"I can take them," I told Valero.

"Before they sound the alarm?"

It wouldn't be easy, but it wasn't impossible either.

"With help—"

"If we could jump them all at once, it might work,"

Pierce said, interrupting me. "But we can't. The door won't open fast enough. First couple of us will be going in one at a time, and that'll give the rest of them time to sound the alarm."

There was really only one solution. "We'll have time," I said. "The alarm will go off, but I can take the rest while you all get on board."

"They'll have backups here before I can fire up the engines," Yima said.

It didn't matter if I was caught. I could still play the Stockholm Syndrome card. A slap on the wrist, some

counseling, and in a few weeks I could slip away on a private carrier. "I can hold them off while you all get away—"

"No!" Valero started to say.

"It's the only way! I can meet up with you later—"

"No!"
he said again, grabbing me. "Absolutely not!"

And that was when a deep, gravelly voice from

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behind us said, "Where exactly do you men think you're going?"

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I reached for my weapon, only to remember I no

longer had one. Men cursed. I saw Sal, the waif-like woman, and Franci exchanging looks, trying to decide if fear or pity was the key to our freedom. But something about that voice…

I turned around to find Jerald standing in the

doorway, a grin plastered across his broad face. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen him smile before.

"I've been hanging close," he said. "I heard a rumor you all might be trying to make a break for it."

"You came to help us?" I asked. It seemed too good to be true, but there were no guards with him.

"Being nothing but an independent shipper—and a victim of the pirates to boot—has its benefits," he said.

"They returned my ship to me days ago."

Yima stepped up next to me, looking as surprised as I felt. "You have dock clearance?"

Jerald's smile grew even bigger. "The all-clear. I'm not a Regency employee, and they had no reason to

suspend my license. So." He leaned against the wall to regard us all. "Which matters more? Your ship, or your freedom?"

"Fuck the ship," Yima said. "I'll buy a new one."

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Jerald laughed. "That's what I thought."

* * * *

After that, the entire escape proved ridiculously

anticlimactic.

Jerald led us back to the main hallway, down one

more set of lifts, and through another passageway to the non-Regency ship dock. We passed one older woman on the way who stopped to watch us with wide eyes. Sal walked up to her, her head hanging low, scuffing the toe of her shoe into the floor. I couldn't hear what she said, but in the end, the lady took the chip she offered, and turned a blind eye.