Page 72 of Cloverleaf Station

Nothing. He got silence, then static, like the man on the other side had abruptly killed the connection. “This is Kieron Carr, from Cloverleaf Station, over,” he repeated. “I need to know what’s going on over there before I can do anything to help you. What’s your status?”

“Cloverleaf Station?” This was a new voice, a feminine one. “What … our signal can’t possibly be reaching that far.”

Kieron cut his side of the link and groaned out loud. Force of habit. What was he supposed to say, though?

“Strange and suspicious ship,” Elenus broke in before Kieron could rejoin the conversation, “ignore my confused friend for a moment and break your situation down for me. Any medical emergencies? What are your stores like? How are your environmental controls? Got any fuel? Talk to me.”

“What if you’re a pirate?” the woman said, her voice trembling.

A pirate? What in the hell … piracy was a rare thing these days, especially in Alliance space. It was too damn expensive to operate a ship to rely on finding vulnerable targets in the black, and relief points were too few and far between. If you got a reputation for harming others or taking advantage of people, you’d be reported and shut down—with prejudice if necessary.

But these were Traktans. They didn’t know any better. Almost none of them ever went off planet—they were nearly unheard of in space. Zak had been a very rare anomaly.

“I’ll ignore that statement due to your understandable ignorance, but—no, actually I won’t. A pirate? Seriously? Why the hell would I be having a conversation with you if I was planning on taking over your ship? Or if I did want to waste my time talking to a group of people on board a vessel which clearly has no defensive capabilities, why wouldn’t I dive into the demands about what you need to give me before I—you know what, no. No. We don’t have time for this. Put Xilinn on the line.”

“Xi-Xilinn? Um …”

“Xilinn Pitu, nice woman, a schoolteacher, got a couple of kids—actually, we’ve got one of them—and—”

“I’m here!” Every taut muscle in Kieron’s body relaxed as he heard her voice. She was there. They’d found her. It was one thing to hope she was still with the refugees, another to know like they knew now. “I’m here, I’m Xilinn! Who are you? How do you have one of my children? Did Kriev and Laina send you after me?”

“It’s me,” Kieron cut in before Elenus could say something even more embarrassing. “It’s—Kieron.”

“Kieron!” Her voice warbled with desperate relief. “Oh, thank the gods, you made it. Did you—you brought Zakari back, did it all go all right? Is he home?”

“Yeah,” he said, his throat tight. “He’s home.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you! I wasn’t sure you were even going to be allowed on the planet, I … And the kids, what happened with the kids, are they with you? Are you—where are you?”

“I’m not far from your ship, actually.” He filled her in as briskly as possible, glossing over her family’s betrayal and trying to downplay the fact that Szusza hadn’t wanted to come with them. “Pol is here, though. He insisted.”

The child in question, who’d been sitting and listening with huge eyes up to that point, chimed in, “Because otherwise I was running away, Mama!”

“Oh, my darling.” Kieron could tell she was crying but doing her best to hold it together regardless. “You should have stayed with Mama Laina and Papa Kriev. They would have taken care of you.”

“No! I hate them! I want to be with you and Kieron and Lizzie!”

“But you—”

“It’s done, boo-hoo, let’s move on,” Elenus interjected, and Kieron was for once glad of it. “Give me your ship’s specs. Active propulsion?”

“None,” Xilinn said, sounding more grounded now. “We were sent up attached to rockets, set on a course, and then just … let go.”

“Shitty, but workable. Guidance systems?”

“Basic,” a new voice said. “We know where we are, but we have no way of avoiding anything we might come upon out here.”

“Not that it’s likely you will, but okay. Facilities?”

“Rudimentary,” the new voice opined dryly, “and I say that as someone who’s lived for months at a time on Duras Two.”

Elenus whistled. Duras Two was one of the wonders of the universe, a sandy planet with brutal windstorms that created rare mineral interactions in the atmosphere, filling every night with one of the most beautiful natural light shows ever seen. It was a hellishly difficult planet to live on, though. “Shit. Okay. That leaves out reorienting you. I can send ships in for you to transfer to, but it’ll take them at least three days to converge. Can you make it that long?”

“Do we have a choice?”

Kieron could practically see Elenus’s eyeroll. “I mean, no, not really, not if you have any sense of self-preservation at all. As long as you don’t fuck shit up too badly, we can get Alliance recovery vessels to you, but the only ship close enough to touch right now is at max capacity for human cargo at the moment, so you’re gonna have to hold yourselves together until backup arrives, got it?”

“Trakta won’t let any Alliance vessels within a million kilometers of the planet,” the person said. “They’ve got the planetary defenses to back that up. You could spell out our death warrants if you come in like that. What if they decide to simply shoot us instead of letting you help us?”