Affie had bluffed her way through the previous night, eating dinner with Scover and spending the night in her vast, luxurious hotel suite. As soft as the bed was, she’d hardly slept. Instead she lay for hours calling upon the few memories she had of her parents:

Riding in the cockpit of the Kestrel’s Dive on her mother’s lap, amazed at the beautiful nebula they were traveling through.

Paddling in the pools of Wrea, her father keeping one hand beneath her belly as she learned to swim.

Coming to them after a nightmare and falling asleep between them, feeling safe from any harm.

They wanted to be free while I was still young. The only way to do that was to take on Scover’s dangerous assignments. So they did. And they died.

The wrongness of it galled her, as did the knowledge that there was no way to set any of it right. Her mother and father were gone, just like poor Dez Rydan.

Was there really nothing she could do?

At dawn, she made some highly nonspecific inquiries in information bases, trying to discover whether anything Scover was doing counted as illegal. Probably not, she figured, given how the Byne Guild thrived throughout numerous systems. However, it turned out that the Republic had much more stringent rules about what indentured people could be required to do. Scover wasn’t forcing anyone, but the Republic laws were thorough, indicating that overly hazardous “incentives” could be found to constitute a requirement in the legal sense.

But the penalties were harsh. Jail time? Dissolution of any shipping company found to engage in those practices? Affie tried to imagine her life without the Byne Guild and failed.

We give good work to a lot of people, she rationalized, like Leox and Geode. Most of our pilots are free. How could I force them back into being independents?

It was hard work being an independent pilot, at least one who operated within the law. But it was also an easier question for Affie to ask herself than, Could I ever put Scover in jail?

There had to be another way to stop Scover from endangering her pilots. Affie racked her brain until she realized there was one thing she could do—if she had the guts to do it.

That morning, she scarfed down her breakfast and made her excuses to Scover, who waved her off absently; several of the hoped-for meetings had already been scheduled. That left Affie free to return to the spacedock, walk onto the Vessel’s bridge, and announce, “We have to go back to the Amaxine station.”

Geode was speechless. Leox turned so slowly his beads didn’t even sway, and said, “Why exactly do we have to do that?”

“Other Guild pilots are using that station,” she said. “Indentured people, and anybody else who’s broke and desperate enough to risk their lives just for one of Scover’s bonuses.”