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“Toodle-lo, boys. Nice to see you. Wouldn’t want to be you when Joe finds out you let his prize merchandise escape.”

Winking at them, she stepped out of the closet and sealed the door behind her, leaving them chained to the pipes.

She was light on her feet, all senses on alert as she made her way through the ship. The cargo areas sat two decks down, past whatever passed for crew quarters on this ugly floating turd. She kept to the maintenance-side corridors, moving fast but not stupid. The ship groaned around her, old metal complaining. She knew that sound and the hot, oily tang in the air too.

Bad seals. Bad filters. Bad maintenance.

Yeah, that figured. Joe was just the sort of man who bought gold furniture and let his damn ship rot around him.

At the next junction, she paused and listened.

Voices drifted from the main corridor. Men talking, one of them laughing too loudly. So she went the other way, slipping through a hatch that opened onto the upper cargo gantry.

Then she stopped.

Well.

Joe hadn’t been kidding about the goats.

The hold below was full of them.

Then her eyes narrowed. These weren’t normal goats, not with shoulders like that. Her grin broadened as she made her way down the ladders.

Heavy-grav goats stood packed together behind reinforced bars, their thick-legged bodies covered in coarse grey-and-black fur. Horns curled back from broad skulls, blunt and dark. They were smaller than a cargo loader but built like somebody had shrunk a tank and given it an attitude problem. Their hooves hit the deck with heavy little clacks as they shifted, every one of them watching her.

“Hello, beautiful babies,” she crooned as she dropped to the bottom of the first ladder.

Heavy-grav goats were smart. Not people-smart, maybe, but smart enough to recognize faces, hold grudges, and bite the ever-loving shite out of anyone who annoyed them. More than one station loader had learned that lesson the hard way.

And these ones had been annoyed and then some.

She crouched on the level above them, her smile dropping as she got a better look at them. Cuts marked several flanks. One goat had a dark bruise swelling beneath its fur at the base of its horn. Another had raw patches on its legs where somebody had used restraints too tight.

Her jaw clenched. What kind of assholes abused animals?

“Fucking dickheads.”

A few ears twitched toward her voice. She climbed down the last ladder, boots ringing softly on the metal. The goats nearest to her tilted their heads to watch her approach. A big bastard at the front stomped once, hard enough to make the cage bars rattle.

“Hey, beautiful,” she murmured, stopping a few feet from the enclosure. “How’d you like to get some payback on these assholes who put you in there?”

The goat stared back at her.

Its eyes were amber, square-pupiled and deeply unimpressed. Fair enough. She wouldn’t trust some strange woman in a torn dress either.

Behind it, the herd shifted.

They parted like people making room at a meeting, and a larger goat pushed through them, bigger than the rest by a good head. Its horns were thick, one tip chipped off. A long cut crossed its muzzle, angry and fresh.

Blythe inclined her head. This had to be the Boss goat.

“The asshole who put you in here is meeting his boss,” she said. “How’d you feel about crashing the party and getting payback?”

The goat’s nostrils flared, and it lowered its head once without breaking eye contact. A nod.

“Oh, we are going to get on brilliantly. Let’s get you all out of there.”

The cage lock was an industrial magnetic unit, but Joe’s lot had used a cheap override plate on the outside. Crouching, she slammed the heel of her balled fist into the corner of the small panel, making it pop loose. Then she pulled the small panel open with her fingernails and found the manual release.