“I don’t,” Surit said. He carefully stowed his clothes and shut his locker. “I’ve been thinking about it. It would have been very easy to put me in pilot training; it’s not as if the army desperately needs me to command Retrieval Two. They want to transfer you to help the pilot specialists, but they obviously don’t want to transfer me. They just want me to control you from a distance. That doesn’t seem efficient.”

“Maybe they just don’t trust you to drive,” Tennal said flippantly.

Surit sat on the side of his bed and looked down at his clenched hands. “Maybe,” he said. “They offered me a promotion. They never gave my family Marit’s pension; they knew I needed the promotion. I don’t know why they picked me. None of this seems normal.”

Tennal drew his legs up and loosely wrapped his arms around them. “Did I ever tell you how much time it took?” he asked conversationally. “To get me on this ship?”

Surit shook his head.

“Twelve hours,” Tennal said. “Twelve hours for my aunt to get my location alert, arrest me, call her Cavalry connections, find you, prime me to sync, hand-wave my enlistment paperwork, and get me bundled onto a ship. She works fast.”

The back of Surit’s neck prickled. “Your aunt … put you here.”

“How else do you think I got here?” Tennal said. “Don’t blame her too much. I was a nightmare. Am a nightmare. Anyway, the point is, I don’t think that’s the normal way you recruit a fleet reader. She wanted me off the planet that day and had to find someone to sync me. You were just convenient. Once we finish up this mission, they’ll probably stick you in pilot training.”

“Maybe,” Surit said.

“Or the regulators,” Tennal said. “Except I think you’d have to be a lot better connected for that than you obviously are. No offense.”

Surit managed a half smile. Tennal had his measure. And he was probably right: Surit had inherited a bad reputation from his mother, but he’d been given Tennal, and a reader who could help with navigation was an asset. This couldn’t be personal. “None taken,” he said. “Good thing you’re going to escape before it becomes a problem.”

There was a long silence, and then Tennal blew out his breath in harsh amusement. “Yeah,” he said. “Good thing.”

The next day Tennal didn’t mention the conversation. Surit spent the early shift checking on the code patch (successful), the crew (jumpy), and the newly mended drive (radiating innocence, to the extent that hardware could). He could almost forget he was in chaotic space, if not for the way every external viewport had been closed and every screen showed ominous bulges of static.