“Can I help?” Tennal didn’t ever recall offering that before, but, he reasoned, he had a vested interest in surviving this mission. “If the software’s wrong, someone didn’t check it. I can still read people.” Basavi shifted uncomfortably, but it was too late to take it back.

Surit looked at him as if he took the offer very seriously. His intent brown eyes bored through Tennal, apparently noting the signs of pain, the lingering chill, and the bewilderment Tennal couldn’t shake after his recent out-of-body trip. Tennal was admittedly not at his best right now, and Surit could see it. Tennal gave half a sardonic smile to distract him, but Surit’s gaze was like an auger, drilling through every defensive layer of bullshit. “You could sit down for ten minutes and not die of overexertion,” Surit said. “That would help. Private Istara?”

“Basavi and I have got him, sir,” Istara said callously, while Tennal was still reeling from the brief moment of Surit’s full attention. “I’ll knock him out if he moves.”

CHAPTER 12

“I don’t understand, sir,” the Retrieval Two mechanic said. He and Surit had scrambled through to the engine niche in the nose of the shuttle. The operations room was noisy and exhausted behind them, the pilots keeping the shuttle on course, Tennal a hair away from collapse by their console. Surit wasn’t ready to think about what he had just felt Tennal do. “We should have known if the alert system was going wrong. It has fail-safes.”

Surit had seldom used his wristband to keep track of what he had to do. Instead he carried a list in his head, and right now a good half of it was bright red and flashing. “It’s not your fault, Private.” He didn’t understand how the shuttle had been in such bad shape without him noticing. He’d spent the two days before this carrying out every standard check. But he’d been using data from the alerts themselves. “Let’s get this stabilized and worry about the root cause later.”

Even if they hadn’t nearly died in chaotic space, and even if Tennal hadn’t just tried to throw himself out of his body like a missile with its own self-destruct button, the past hour of frantic patching would still not live fondly in Surit’s memory. If they couldn’t rely on their shuttle, they were in trouble.

And not only that. Surit couldn’t forget their coordinates, like a constant running set of sums he could not make his brain stop performing. They were close to where he’d once calculated the wreckage of his mother’s ship must be. Surit was not going to die of an accident near the same place his mother had blown up her ship. It would be the worst kind of irony.