Page 66 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron shook his head. “We’ll be scanned by the port authority. They’ll see an extra person.” So he might as well get in trouble for two.

“No, they won’t, because Lizzie’s going to dial up her ambient radiation so that their scanners are rendered useless, and they’re more anxious than ever to get you off planet.” Elenus looked so smug. “Nothing worries the local bureaucrats more than ships that look like they might go ‘boom’ on their watch.”

Oh, that was actually a good idea. Of course, it was, this was Elenus that Kieron was talking to. He was ridiculous, but he was also a genius. “What about Xilinn? How will I get to her?”

“You won’t. She’ll come to you.”

What was he talking about? “I don’t—”

“Kiieronnn!” Catie broke in, her voice impatient and shrill. “Pleeeeease let me plaaay you my sooong!”

“Rude,” Elenus said gently. “It’s not nice to interrupt, baby.”

“But you told me to wait for teeeeen minuuuuutes, Daddeeee!”

“I did, but—”

“Yes,” Kieron said. “I want to hear your song.” He could wait for Elenus’s revelation for a few more minutes.

“It’s orcheeeeestraaaaal!”

Or thirty minutes.

***

The pieces took a week to put together. It was a week of one of the most nerve-racking balancing acts Kieron had ever had to do. Cloverleaf Station might have been a dangerous place, but oddly enough, that was part of what he’d appreciated about it. The station had to be run a certain way in order to keep people safe—there was no room for experimentation or trying to do things a new way, when you had to make sure your clients lived through the mining season. And once they were gone, Kieron had only had himself to worry about, which was so much easier than taking the fates of dozens of other people into account.

Elenus had put a stop to that easygoing lifestyle. He had introduced complication as inevitably as breathing, made everything more dangerous but also so much more interesting, and in the end, he was the reason Kieron had found Zak.

Handling personal danger? Easy. Dealing with a mountain of bureaucracy that threatened to overwhelm him every half hour? Painful. So Elenus made certain that Kieron didn’t have to deal with it on his own.

The girls helped. Between them, Catie and Lizzie figured out a way to spoof a radiation signature that would fool third-party sensors without compromising Lizzie’s focus, and they set up a proximity warning system that triggered an increase in particle shedding whenever someone got close enough for an in-person inspection. Meanwhile, Elenus read up on Traktan politics and business practices like a mad fiend and, once he felt competent, immediately dove into finding legal ways for Kieron to stay on the planet longer than his visa allowed.

That was the hardest part. The Traktans wanted his money for the berth, but they were scared shitless over the radiation and the health complications it might cause for dock workers. They wanted money, but they wanted him gone more. They went so far as to threaten to tow Lizzie into space and leave her there, whether she was operable or not.

“You can’t do that,” Elenus said in his Kieron-imitation voice. Lizzie had put the overlay together, so that everything Elenus said made it sound as though Kieron was the one speaking, right down to flattening his intonations so he didn’t come off as too effusive. “It’s against Alliance protocol.”

“We are no longer members of the Alliance, Mr. Carr, and—”

“And if they find out you are forcing non-native visitors to your planet off of it, while they’re complying with all your rules and regulations and doing their best to fix unavoidable mechanical issues, which you knew about when they landed, they will not send you a strongly worded letter, sir. They will come and get me in a military ship. Maybe two. Maybe more. You know that the Alliance has been looking for a new focus ever since they finished dealing with the piracy issue in the Fringe. Do you want Trakta to be the planet they focus on?”

“Who do you think you are?” the man on the other end of the call demanded. “You’re not a diplomat, you’re not a head of state—you’re no one to the Alliance!”

“I’m the part owner of one of the largest corporations on an Alliance planet,” Elenus replied coolly. “My company employs over three million people across Alliance space. We account for almost an entire percentage point of their gross galactic product. We are who people in power listen to, and believe me, when I tell them about this, they’re going to be listening really hard.”

“You can’t expect me to—”

“I expect you to let me finish my repairs and be off your planet of my own volition in the next forty-eight hours, sir. Otherwise? I expect people will remember your name as the man who got Trakta embroiled in a war with the Alliance.” Elenus ended the call.

“That was a load of shit,” Kieron accused him, not quite able to keep from smiling at the same time.

“What part?” Elenus asked in his normal voice.

“Where to start? I’m not the part owner of anything, much less—”

“You’re Lizzie’s father, aren’t you?”

“Um.” Goodness, that was out of nowhere. “I …” The sounds of the ship seemed to slow, almost like Lizzie was holding her breath. “I would be honored to be that if it was what she wanted, but you—”