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His hands tightened on the controls as the ship hurtled forward, and he rolled her hard onto its side. One wing tilted toward the deck, and the other toward the bay ceiling. The gap filled the viewscreen. Metal on both sides. No room to spare.

Behind him, the human females gasped.

He couldn’t do anything about that. Couldn’t turn around and reassure them that he had this. Not when all his focus needed to stay exactly where it was.

The trader bucked beneath him as he adjusted the thrusters, tiny corrections, one after the other. The left-side alarm changed pitch.

“Come on,” he muttered. “You can do this, old girl.”

The nose slipped through.

For one terrible second, he thought the broadest section of the cargo hull would meet the narrowing gap. B sucked in a breath behind him; her engineering console was screaming warnings. He held the roll, cut thrust on one side, and kicked the rear stabilizers.

The trader shot through the doors and the inky blackness of space opened ahead of them.

A whoop rose in his throat, and he gave it voice, grinning. Leveling the ship out, he opened up the engines, and they roared away from the station.

The station fell away behind them, the docking ring shrinking on the rear display screen as he kept the engines hot. He didn’t push the engines to flat out. The old trader would shake herself apart if he did that, and he’d already pushed the old girl hard enough for one day.

Reaching up, he double-tapped behind his ear, a silent thanks to Jex on the subdermal comm unit before he cut the connection. Finally, he swiveled in the pilot’s chair to face the two females and the tense silence behind him.

Stevie’s face had gone tight, her blue eyes narrowed. But B—B’s expression was worse.

It was hard and suspicious, ready for a fight. But there was something else there, buried deep beneath. He frowned as he tried to identify it, and then he did, and it was like a knife between his ribs. It was resignation, like she’d expected this... like males lying to her was nothing new.

His chest ached right in the center over his heart. Sharp enough that he almost rubbed over the spot with the heel of his hand, but stopped himself just in time.

“Jex?” B demanded. “Who is Jex?”

“Yeah,” Stevie said, one brow raised. “Who were you talking to, Randall?”

Shrugging, he smiled, trying for the easy, charming expression that Covak pulled as naturally as breathing. “It’s not just Joe on the station who’s got contacts.”

As soon as the words left his lips, he knew it was the wrong answer. Both females’ expressions hardened, and B’s hand slid toward the wrench hanging from her belt, the one that he’d seen her use to great effect in the station corridor.

“Joe?” B’s head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed. “What exactly do you know about Joe?”

He made sure to keep his hands loose on the armrests where she could see them, and his body language relaxed. The last thing he wanted was her swinging that wrench in this small space. Not that she could hurt him. She was small, she was female, and she was human. There was no reality where she could best him in a fight, even as good as she was. But he was worried about hurting her, which he absolutely did not want to do.

“Just the fact that as soon as someone mentioned his name, you beat feet like you’d been stung, and now we’ve left the station immediately.” He looked between the two women. “So I figure you lot are running from whoever Joe is.”

He smiled at B, urging her to understand where he was coming from, and not decide to swing that wrench at his head. “It really didn’t take a genius to work out, beautiful.”

Her glare could have burned through the whole plating.

“That still doesn’t explain who Jex is,” she said, “and how the hell he got into the station systems that easily and quickly.”

“Jex is…” he thought quickly, then he shrugged again. There was no point giving them more than he had to. The best lies were the simple ones, where there were very few facts that could trip him up later. “Let’s just say he’s something like a super-hacker. I’ve not known him long, but the guy’s sound. He can get into any system anywhere.”

He didn’t add that Jex had probably been crawling around in the systems of the ship. A couple of seconds would have been all he needed to crack this ancient trader’s computer systems and find out everything he wanted to know about it, up to and including the engine specs, as well as whatever was rehydrated in the galley last for dinner.

“Sounds like an interesting person to know,” Stevie said, exchanging a glance with B. “But what if Joe finds him? Just an association with us puts your friend at risk.”

Rann couldn’t help the bark of laughter that escaped. “Yeah, seriously. If Joe finds Jex, actually manages to find him, and then tries anything, believe me, Joe is really going to have a bad day.”

Stevie’s eyebrow winged up, and B didn’t look convinced. But he couldn’t say anything else without revealing that Jex was a former cyborg now housed in a special forces combat suit—with onboard weaponry.

“Seriously, it’s not a problem,” he said, starting to rise out of his chair. He made sure to keep his hands in sight, just in case B was still a bit tweaky with that wrench. Sure enough, her gaze lingered over him, still suspicious and assessing. It moved from his face down across his shoulders, and then over his chest.