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She tensed, about to warn him, but his hand stopped halfway.

“It’s okay,” Callie said from behind them, her voice soft. “I already disarmed it.”

Blythe turned to look at her.

The geologist was responsible for the excavation explosives aboard, which meant she spent more time around things designed to blow holes in things than Blythe was entirely comfortable with. Callie knew her charges, though. Knew them far too well in Blythe’s opinion—far more than she actually needed for construction, but she’d never asked where Callie had learned it.

They were all running from something. The specifics didn’t matter, not if they kept to their jobs when they got to where they needed to be.

Rann nodded at Callie, his gaze dropping briefly to where her hand rested on the gentle curve of her stomach before returning to the device. Callie wasn’t far along, not enough that it changed how she moved too much, but enough that everyone knew.

“So that was designed to slow us down?” B asked. “Where was it?”

“Tucked in the starboard aft sensor housing,” Callie said. “The access panel had been resealed. Badly.”

B folded her arms, her attention hijacked as Rann leaned forward, his shirt pulling tight over heavily-muscled shoulders. Most men she’d worked with would have needed both hands and a grunt to lift the thing. Rann just picked it up and inspected it.

Hell, he was strong.

Maybe they should take him with them instead of ditching him en route? He could carry half the colony supplies by himself if it came to it.

“Interesting,” he mused, already easing the outer casing apart. “Shaped charge for a targeted hit rather than indiscriminate damage, which means they want the ship mostly functional.”

“Really? How comforting,” Layla muttered.

Rann’s expression tightened as he studied the exposed components, thumb brushing over a scored metal edge. “But this has been adapted by someone to do that. Doesn’t look like that’s what this unit was originally designed to do. In fact, it looks like it was originally a ship construction tool.”

“I thought that!” Callie took a half step forward, her face lighting up. “I think it was a ship stripper. You know, the kind they use to take big old ships apart in the dockyards?”

Rann nodded. “Agreed. It’s definitely not military.”

Callie met his gaze. “Not any that I’ve seen.”

B blinked. Were both of them former military?

Rann, she could definitely see. The scars. The strength. The way he’d moved in that alley had been fast, brutal, and entirely too practised.

But Callie?

Blythe looked at the quiet woman’s rounded stomach, then at the disarmed bomb.

Well, shit.

“What about this one?” Blythe asked, nodding toward the other, smaller device. “And how did you get these back in? Drones wouldn’t be able to lift these.”

“Crawler,” Stevie said, jerking her chin toward the units at the back of the engineering bay. The crawlers were low, flat platforms on chunky tracks, usually used for shifting cargo through spaces too tight for loaders, but they also had modular units designed to hook into the rail system on the hull.

Two sat against the bulkhead with their charging leads still attached. There should have been three.

One was missing.

“Callie and Hope used the drones to identify them, then Layla and I used the crawlers to bring them back in,” Stevie continued. “There were three, but one blew, taking out the crawler and that drone. But we got these two.”

B’s jaw tightened. So while she’d been in bed with the pilot⁠—

Nope. Not doing that. She’d been ordered to rest, and she’d done exactly what she’d wanted with that time.

“Tracking device,” Rann said suddenly.