“And what if it doesn’t?”

“Then you really won’t have anything to worry about.” He flashed her a toothy grin.

Lana glared at him for a long moment before turning back to the Navigator. “I also have a piece of news. I took advantage of our downtime to dig deeper into the ship’s data banks. Looks like there was a lot of information still stored in there that I couldn't access before. I’m guessing that my new Admin path and sensor implant were needed to allow me to finally get in there. I’ve only studied it for a couple of hours, but I’ve learned a lot.”

“Like what?” Nori asked, trying to maintain a businesslike tone, but the Expert could see it was just a facade. The brave Navigator was still pretty shaken up.

Lana looked at her compassionately. “I now have access to all the navigational data,” she said trying to sound businesslike. “There are about a dozen marked destinations, all in the vicinity of Hammerhead station. Looks like the freighter used to work in one star system only - before coming here, that is.” Lana paused for her words to take effect, then she smiled. “And I’ve also cracked the captain’s personal log. I now know what happened to them.”

Bulco and Nori looked up at her with a start, then at each other.

Lana smiled. “So the captain received a commission to infuse Earth with piTec. They closed the deal and received the shipment - a container with a hundred million piTec in aerosol form - on Hammerhead station.” She raised her hand as Bulco opened his mouth. “And no, it doesn’t say who hired them, the logs just refer to him as ‘the source’. Anyway, they were supposed to receive a payment of fifty thousand piTec for the job, but the crew had other ideas.”

“Let me guess,” Bulco grumbled. “They got greedy.”

Lana nodded. “The captain’s log says that two members of his crew of six approached him to try and convince him to take a small part of the piTec they were carrying. He refused, mostly because he was too afraid of their employer. There’s a note there indicating he had knowledge of them working with Kordlin mercenaries, and he didn’t want to get in trouble with them. That was his last entry.”

Bulco frowned. “It still doesn’t tell us the whole story.”