Chapter 12

"Flight rations." Bren stared down at the food that Sophia put in front of him, his voice neutral, but his expression impossible to mistake. "Been a while since I had to eat these."

"So it'll be just like old times." Sophia retorted as she slid back into the navi's chair, swinging it around so that she faced him across the surface of the temporary table. "It has all the required nutrients to keep you going."

"And none of the taste. Alright, alright. I'll eat it. Thank you." He took the fork gently from her fist where she'd made a motion to stab him. Sophia was still feeling on edge, and she looked down at her hand with a frown as Bren cracked the package open and sighed in obvious resignation. She had only meant to threaten him playfully with the fork, but her body was taut with strain and it showed in the way she'd reflexively clutched at the fork.

It wasn't just that she was finally going to get the information she'd needed for six years. That was a large part of her inability to relax. But there was the not insignificant feeling of sitting in her own ship across from someone who could legitimately claim to be an equal when it came to the Warlock. She'd repaired and run the ship single-handed from the day she'd bought it, even though it was originally designed to be a two-seater. Lucky for her, it had already been altered to be run by someone sitting in the pilot's seat.

"Did you rig the Warlock to be a single-seater?" She asked him, the suspicion blooming suddenly in her brain.

He looked up from his food to meet her gaze, and there was a spark of humor in his green eyes. "You're welcome." He said gravely.

Sophia sat back in her chair, even more unsettled. Every time she thought her life had been changed by luck it kept coming back to this one man. Was it chance that she was attracted to him as well?

"Tell me about the assignment." She said, determined to have the information she had risked her reputation, life, and ship for, before she got her head turned yet again by the man.

He chewed methodically and swallowed, "If I'd known I was going to be eating flight rations, I would have told Head to leave the crate. So what do you want to know about the assignment? There didn't seem anything strange about it at the time. It was a relatively high-profile courier assignment, but we'd just broken into some more lucrative contracts so it wasn't out of the ordinary."

"Who contacted you?"

"Lexington Dispatch. We were using a centralized system then. Mmm. Reheated carrots. Once tasted, never forgotten." He tapped his comm and ordered Banks to bring the rest of the beer up to the Warlock. Sophia rolled her eyes as a short argument ensued. The other mechanics had already drunk the rest of the beer, so a new crate had to be opened.

"Forget it, then." Bren grumbled and opened a channel to the cafeteria to send down some beer before turning his attention back to Sophia. "What else do you want to know?"

She breathed in deeply, "Did anyone ask for Carolina by name?"

"All the time."

"What?" She stared at him. He gave her an amused look.

"Think about it, Sophia. A chance to order around the next Queen of Anatoray like one of your own employees?"

She gave him a smile that flickered in and out of existence, "I see. Then you have no idea who the original client was? I've read the job logs at Lexington dock; I know the assignment was to courier a diplomatic message from a company in Kyr to one in Tarawa, but the logs don't state what companies or whether there were special instructions for the assignment."

Bren shrugged, "No idea. When you use a dispatch system for assignments, it's all set up so that no one knows who's doing what. It's a security precaution. Safer for everyone that way."

Sophia stared at him, "So what you're saying is you don't know who gave you the contract, and you never bothered to find out? Even after your pilot crashed your ship and died?"

He pinned her with a green-eyed glare. "You may be older now, but you still aren't grown up. The moment I heard that she was confirmed dead, I knew Sikandar would come after me. I ran, and I never looked back. If I hadn't run, you'd be talking to me in the basements of Kyr Castle right now, or I'd be rotting in an unmarked grave somewhere."

She locked eyes with him over the table, trying not to condemn him in her own mind for fleeing, but it was impossible. He'd abandoned her sister, alive or dead.

There was a beep from Bren's comm and he tapped it, listened briefly, then went to open the canopy. They hadn't yet brought many systems online so he still had to lift it up manually. He did it a lot more easily than she could. "Thank you." He said to whoever was outside the ship, lowered the canopy, and came back to the table with a carry-all in one hand. When he put the carry-all down on the table, she could see the necks of several bottles of beer inside.

Bren pulled out one bottle and popped the top with an easy motion, then raised his eyebrows at her in challenge. "Would you like one, or are you too busy judging me for a situation that you were never involved in?"

Sophia shook her head wordlessly, and accepted the bottle he handed her. He popped the top off a second bottle and took a long drink, grimacing as he washed down the bland taste of the rations. Finally he put the bottle on the table. "It was a long time ago, and it was ugly all-round. There's the truth you're looking for. That's it." He spread his hands briefly as if to apologize for his words, but then he went right back to his dinner.

That wasn't the end of it, but he was right. And he was, at the heart of him, an honorable man. Sophia put aside her immediate reaction and watched him eat, reaching out for the thousand questions that had driven her to chase the Silvana.

"So there was nothing out of the ordinary about the assignment itself. Did anyone approach you about it after you received the message but before Carolina took off?"

He shook his head, his mouth full of food.

"No one mentioned it at all? And you had no other contracts running? No different cargo? New equipment?" She gripped the beer bottle as she interrogated him, searching for some crack in the shell that protected the past from her eyes.

"Nothing unusual. We were always upgrading as we got the money to do it, so there was always new equipment here and there. Why are you determined to find someone at fault for the crash? Things break. You should know that."

Sophia sighed once, agreeing with Bren in theory, but not in the least deterred from her goal. "Ignoring the way the newscreens rhapsodized over my sister, how would you describe her ability to fly? Good? The best you've ever seen?"

It was in his eyes. He could see what she was getting at, but he didn't like it. He nodded once. "The best." He said softly. "She was driven."

"Given that she was the best pilot you've ever seen, is it at all likely that she had a catastrophic failure of systems on the Warlock without managing to land him safely or even send out a comm signal?"