They had come to a stop and Rosalyn didn’t notice, lost in thought, and she nearly walked directly into a storage locker at a fork in the corridor. She gasped softly in surprise, then watched Piero and Rayan hobble away and down the left fork, disappearing. As they went, Piero looked at her over his shoulder, face streaked with blood, his right eye split to the bone, where miniscule blue webs were already forming, a spidery net gleaming in the wound. He air-kissed at her and she turned away.

“Vile,” she whispered.

“This way.”

The captain had already started down the right fork. Strangely, he turned up on her AR nav bar. Other users in the system would appear as icons that grew brighter the closer they got, but of all the crew he was the only one registering on her display. That was important, she thought, doubting that the rest of the crew would have forgone the implant for integrated AR. Occasionally she ran into someone way older that had never gotten around to having the procedure or mistrusted the tech, but those folks were few and far between. Integrated AR technology was so convenient and widespread, it was almost a no-brainer to opt in for the implant.

JAX waited until she began to follow. It felt almost like a betrayal, knowing the Servitor was there to keep her in line. This tech was meant to be harmless. Maybe that was an avenue to explore if she ever got a minute alone . . . Rayan had hacked the permissions on JAX once, but that meant it could be done again. She wasn’t necessarily familiar with Servitor tech, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

“I’ll talk to Piero,” the man ahead of her said. “Tell him to watch his mouth.”

Rosalyn didn’t respond. Instead she stared at the back of his head, running silently through the dossier she had read not twenty-four hours earlier. That could work to her advantage, too, she thought, knowing these people. Or at least, knowing who they had been. So far what she had seen made sense—Rayan was a crack biology and xenobiology graduate, top in his class and young for the position and money he was making at Merchantia. Piero was just muscle, and probably the most dangerous—ex-military turned mercenary turned glorified security guard. The samples on these vessels were sensitive and expensive, and piracy was uncommon this close to headquarters but not unheard of.