Her nose ridges snapped shut. "Fuk you; I'm support during take-down. That's it. You can do your own serley research."

He wouldn't have trusted her information anyway. "I'll be taking the Heart of Stone out in about fifty-six hours. Be ready."

"If you can't give me an exact time now, I want a four-hour heads up," she told him flatly.

"Deal." In the interest of keeping his fingers, Cho didn't hold out his hand. He watched Huirre watch her leave the Groise. "You know why she hates Humans?"

Huirre snorted. "Why does anyone hate Humans? Pity she won't be part of the revolution. I'd love a chance to sink my teeth into that one. What a pair of amalork."

Only the Krai would get hot about jaw muscles. "She'd have you for breakfast."

"I'd die happy."

Cho rolled his eyes and waved a server over. Krai bar or not, if he left now, it would look like Firrg commanded his movement, and he wasn't having that. "Just as well she doesn't want in on the buy. I wouldn't trust the psychotic bitch not to turn on me the moment she was armed."

"That, Captain…" Huirre reached across the table and drained Firrg's abandoned glass. "… is because you're a very smart man." "You sure you're okay with this?"

Torin glanced up from her slate, more than happy to be pulled away from studying government regs defining legal salvage. "With working?"

"Yeah, because you used to lay about on your arse." Spinning the control chair around, Craig lifted his legs and dropped his heels on the scuff mark at the edge of the panel. "You've called CSOs carrion crows in the past."

"Never to you."

He shrugged. "You were tanked for quite a while after Crucible, and Sergeant Jiir has both a low tolerance for alcohol and a touching belief in the fairness of the universe."

"He'll draw to an inside straight?"

"Every damned time."

Torin thought about asking how many times but decided Jiir was an adult and a sergeant, and if the first time he'd played cards with Craig hadn't taught him to back away slowly, well, that wasn't her problem anymore. As for tales told under the influence…

She set her slate down on the small table. "I didn't like you-collectively you-making money off the dead. Which…" She held up her hand to cut off his protest. "… was pretty fukking hypocritical considering how I made my living. I know. But these were my dead, and…"

"And I wasn't in the club."

"Yeah." It sounded petty and arrogant put like that, but Torin had long since learned to own her shit. "Then there was you, personally…" She rolled her eyes as he flexed. "… and by the time I woke up in that tank, it was clear you and me, we weren't an every now and then kind of thing, so I did a little thinking. When they gave me back my slate in rehab, I did some research. Do you know how many families of military personnel Civilian Salvage Operators have given closure to?"

Craig shook his head. "Nine out of ten times, it's scrap, Torin. Maybe some retrievable tech."

"And that tenth time has added up to three hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and twenty brought home. And counting."

"That's…" He blinked. Frowned. Swung his feet down to the deck and leaned forward, elbows braced against his thighs. "That's a lot."

"Those little gray plastic bastards have kept us at war for a long time. And that number doesn't include the DNA evidence from the Primacy on record. As soon as the politicians stop talking out of their asses, they can go home, too."

Torin watched his mouth move as he repeated the number silently to himself. "That's what changed your mind about salvage operators?" he said at last.

"That's what changed my mind."

"Made it all right for you to throw in with me?"

They didn't talk about what they had between them, so she shrugged. "It didn't hurt that the sex was amazing."

"Was?"

"It's been a few hours, I don't like to apply old intell to new condi…"

She could have stopped him from toppling her off the chair and onto the deck, but as that had been the reaction she'd been trying to evoke, she'd have just been shooting herself in the foot.

A little over two hours later, the alarm went off.

"Ten minutes and we're out of Susumi space." Craig kissed her bare shoulder and sat up. "You should take the controls."

"I should? Why?"

"Because either things are good and there's nothing you can screw up. Or," he continued getting to his feet, "things'll be fukked and we'll die instantly, so there's still nothing you can screw up."

"Or we enter regular space next to a big yellow alien ship that turns out to be the mastermind-masterminds-behind centuries of inter-galactic bloodshed."

"Yeah, right," he snorted holding out his hand. "Like that'll happen. Again. Come on."

Scooping her shirt off the floor as she stood, Torin tossed it onto the pilot's chair before she sat down. She checked the runout on the Susumi equation, then she posed her hands over the thruster controls in case they needed to avoid the unexpected.

Promise counted down from ten, then the stars reappeared in the small front port.

"Another trip where we didn't come a gutser," Craig patted the bulkhead. "I count that a win."

"Navigation says we're right where we're supposed to be," Torin told him as the forward thrusters came on and they began to brake. Half her attention on their speed, she asked, "So where are we?"

"Just on the edge of an old debris field. It's big but well picked over. There's definitely nothing left here but chunks of metal and plastic for the recyclers. No tech. No DNA. I figured it'd be best for your first time out." Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him skimming back into his shorts. "Of course, that was before we had our talk. Maybe you'd rather…"

"Scrap for a first time out is fine."

He reached over Torin's shoulder, and activated the long-range sensors. "There should be another ship out here. Old guy named Rogelio Page has been working this patch for years."

"He won't mind that we're here?"

"The debris field is big enough for two tags. He has first tag but second tag is open. He'll appreciate the company, tell us what sector we can clear, and be backup if something goes wrong. And it'll give me a chance to check on him. He doesn't come in much."

"Oh, yeah. Rugged individualists," Torin muttered. "Alone and independent."

"What was that?"

"Nothing. I just…" A sudden alarm from her implant cut her off. She tongued the volume down and frowned. "Strange. I've picked up another implant."

"Picked up?"

"Turns out the upgrade the techs put in when they rebuilt my jaw has a finder in it." The techs never left a scar. Torin rubbed at her jaw anyway. "Nice of them to tell me."

"You didn't read the documentation?"

"No one ever reads the documentation." An alert from an implant shot down Craig's belief only scrap remained out here. "I can link with Promise, give her the coordinates."

"So what are you waiting for?"

She worked best under a hierarchy, knowing where to push and knowing where it was best to give in. This equal partners thing took some getting used to.

As Promise brought them up to the new coordinates, Torin expected to find a piece of jaw, overlooked in the vastness emptiness of space, not an entire naked body, cartwheeling slowly against a backdrop of stars.

Even before bringing the body on board, two things were obvious.

The Marine hadn't been dead long.

And he'd been tortured.