Zeph stepped out of the engineering room and looked around. Behind him, the j-drive hummed steadily, generating the bubble of normal space that would cocoon the Bedford Moy until they emerged in the Zinziea system, more or less one week from now.

He heard footsteps a moment before Victor and Kat appeared around the corner. “Where’s Alis?” Asked Zeph.

“Pouting in the pilot’s chair,” said Kat.

“As long as she isn’t rampaging, I guess.”

“That’s not her way,” said Victor. “She’ll pout for an hour or two, but by this evening she’ll be back to her old self, ribbing us about our cowardly ‘retreat’ and boasting about how she could have taken all three ships in a single shot.”

“About that,” said Zeph. “She seemed awfully sure that this apparently-unarmed yacht could go toe-to-toe with three fighter craft. Is there something I should know about any additional, erm, hardware?”

Kat looked at Victor, and Victor looked momentarily sheepish. “Mr. Marks had some concealed pulse lasers added. Purely for self-defense.” He spread his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture. ”Pirates. You understand.”

Oh, yes. Zeph knew quite a bit about pirates, having had to deal with them in varying degrees in both the navy and in the Explorers. He also knew that pirates were really only a problem in certain systems. He had to wonder why Mr. Marks would want to frequent those places.

Instead, he said, “That kind of change tends to ripple down. Lasers mean a greater demand on the power supply, which in turn means greater mass, which means larger fuel tanks, etc, etc. If I go looking, will I find that the official manifest differs in a number of significant ways?”

Victor shrugged. “Don’t be so naive, Zeph. It’s standard practice. Mr. Marks is an important man. His person needs protecting.”

“Join us?” Kat asked, gesturing farther down the hallway. Zeph had a feeling she was changing the subject on purpose.

“Are we going to check out our new cargo?” Zeph asked, as he fell in beside them.

“Something like that,” said Victor.

The formal mess was just a few doors farther down, and Victor entered it confidently. It seemed to Zeph an odd place to leave cargo, but when he entered, he realized his assumptions had been wrong.

A man was sitting at one of the tables, dressed in a battered leather jacket over dirty brown coveralls. He had a thick beard, a tousled mop of sandy hair, and two pale blue eyes that twinkled at them when they came in.

“Kat!” He said, standing up. “And Victor! It’s so good to see you both again.”

Kat gave him a quick hug, and Victor shook his hand enthusiastically.

“Coshell,” said Victor. “When I heard you’d been taken by the Tilluma government, such as it is, I was sure we’d never see you again.”

“Now, now, you should know better than to write me off,” said the man. “But here, introduce me to your friend.” He put his hand out toward Zeph. “Coshell Kimbal,” he said.

Zeph took the hand and shook it. “Zeph Massey,” he said. “Ship’s engineer.”

“Engineer, is it?” He looked quizzically at Victor and Kat. “What happened to Samson?”

Victor and Kat exchanged a quick look before Victor shrugged. “He decided to find other work.”

Coshell nodded slowly and looked between them and Zeph. “I see,” he said. “Well, anyway, have a seat, have a seat. I heard the j-drive spin up, so we must be bobbing along in hyperspace by now, yeah?”

Zeph sat down at the table across from Coshell, and wondered about this Samson character who had apparently been the engineer before him. Hadn’t Victor and Roald both said they’d taken turns at the engineer station? Was that before or after Samson?

Kat and Victor sat down to either side of the newcomer, and Zeph brought his attention back to the present.

“Alis?” Coshell asked.

“She’s on the bridge,” said Victor.

“Pouting,” added Kat.

“Let me guess,” said Coshell. “She wanted to dust our pursuers, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Kat with a smile.

Coshel chuckled. “So predictable. But that’s why we love her.”

“So, uh. How do you all know each other?” Asked Zeph.

Coshell spread his arms and grinned. “You are looking at the official archaeologist to the Honorable Gavin Marks.”

“Archaeologist?”

“Among other things.” Coshell put his feet up on the table and leaned back. “I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, honestly. Mr. Marks is a man of…diverse tastes, shall we say? He’s had me on retainer for what, seven or eight years now? Something like that. When he gets the idea that he wants some rare artifact, or item, or creature—a pet, or a trophy, or what-have-you—I’m his man. I’ll go scout it out, learn what there is to learn, and then get him what he wants.”

Zeph looked at Victor and Kat, who were nodding. “But…Tilluma is an airless moon. It has never had any kind of native life. What were you doing there?”

Coshell laughed. “Oh, now, there’s a story I’ve been dying to tell! Maybe we should get us some drinks before I start, though?”

They all took a moment to visit the galley to get something to drink, and returned to the mess with glasses in hand. Once Coshell was comfortably situated, he rubbed his hands together eagerly.

“Okay, so. The tale! This all starts…what? Nine months ago? Ten? I lost track of the time in there!”

“Ten months,” said Victor. “Give or take.”

“Ten months, then. I was en route to Zinziea, to scout out some species of floating pig or something, but when the ship emerged from hyperspace in the Tilluma system, our j-drive up and died. So we landed at Tilluma’s space port—the facility barely deserves the name, I assure you—and negotiated for some repairs.

“Now, you know me. If there’s something I’m not allowed to see, or do—well, it practically eats me up inside. I decided I had to see some of this Tilluma place. All I’d ever heard was that they don’t like visitors, you know—traders who stop there rarely leave their ships, and never leave the star port itself. It sounded like a grand adventure for an old explorer like myself, you know?”

Kat groaned. “You didn’t.”

“Of course I did, dear Kat! For a place that values its privacy their barricades are woefully simplistic. Though I must give their monitoring systems credit—things were pretty touch-and-go for a while there, playing cat and mouse with the monitors, but I prevailed in the end. I spent the next three or four hour touring the city.

“It was surprisingly extensive. I had no idea. I’ve only ever heard that Tilluma is a mining colony, but it was quite large. I estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand people, possibly more.”

“What was it like, then?” Asked Victor.

“Dirty,” said Coshell. “Dirty and run down. They spend at least half of their income just maintaining the place, and it’s still a mess. I don’t know why they bother, honestly. They’d do better to sell it off and move somewhere more pleasant.

“At any rate, I saw quite a bit before anyone noticed me. I don’t know what gave me away, but suddenly there was a siren and everyone scattered. Well, everyone but me, of course. The siren, I later learned, was a ‘go home’ signal, used for clearing the streets in an emergency. It was certainly effective in stripping me of cover, too.

“I went to ground as best I could, but I’d only had a couple hours to explore, and didn’t really know the place too well. They cornered me eventually, and stunned me. The next thing I knew I was in a cell, and not a very nice one, either. My ship left without me once the repairs were done, and the kind government of Tilluma promised me a long and productive life serving the people there.”

“Sounds hard to refuse,” Zeph said.

“Oh, they made sure it was! They gave me a job in the mines, gave me an apartment with three delightful roommates, fed me the most remarkable slop twice a day, and made sure I had an audience at almost every point along the way.”

“How’d you get out, then?”

“Oh, they made it interesting, I can tell you. But—well, let’s save it for tomorrow. We’ve got a week of nothing to do while we make the transit. How about you tell me about yourself, Zeph?”

Zeph smiled, much preferring to listen to Coshell than to talk about himself, but he obliged. And Coshell was right: hyperspace was the most boring part of space travel. It would be nice to have something to look forward to.