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what we’re carrying quick as we can, and go back to doing somethin’ we know how to do.” Kell rubbed, and rubbed and rubbed the glass. “C’mon, man… I… we just can’t do what you’re tryin’ to do. We’re not built for it. Men like us don’t fix the shit-holes of this world, Rumer. We’re just… we’re a load a’ pirates.”
    Rumer nodded heavily. “You are right about that,” he said. “I can’t think of what you’d call us but a load of damn, dirty pirates.”
    There was a silence, during which Rumer wondered whether it would be possible to pre-program a route for the shuttle so that it would take her straight to Black Oven. That way, if her food and oxygen held out… and if nobody too bad picked her up when she got there…
    That was when Diallo came in, not grinning. “We have company, Captain,” he said. “They appear to have finally made a decision about us. They want to board.”
    It was a long, slow nightmare run to the bridge. And then Rumer looked on one of the biggest UN squadron ships he had ever seen. Still a ways off, it swallowed up the whole screen like a big, blue open-mouthed whale. “How do they keep finding us? What are they locking onto?”
    “I do not know,” said Diallo, “I have picked off every signal I could find.”
    “I think… I know.”
    Rumer turned. The girl sat in the doorway of the bridge. She was out of breath. Her knees were bloodied. She must have dragged herself from the stern-end utility closet to the bridge, all the way across that steel floor. “Are these them?” she asked. “Are these the kind of officers you’re talking about, who are working for… for somebody?”
    Rumer jerked his head. “Any particular reason why you’re in here, Miss Glass?”
    “I know what’s going on.”
    “I’ll bet you do. You’re very clever at that. But if you wouldn’t mind headin’ back to your little room just now…”
    “I know why the squad ship’s here. I know why they found us.”
    Rumer stiffened, blinked. “Say what you mean, girl.”
    The girl swallowed. “I have… a chip.”
    “A chip?”
    “I’m chipped. In case anything bad ever happens to me when I’m… it emits this low-level signal all the time, so people can find where I am.”
    Rumer glared at her, this pretty, pale girl he once thought too fragile to live, his eyeballs hot. “And this was something you chose not to share with us?”
    “’Course not. She’s got friends who’d pat her head like a good little bitch-hound if she helps land people like us in prison,” said Kell. The way he looked at her even alarmed Rumer, angry as he was.
    “Jesus.” Rumer pressed his palms into his eyes. “Well, you’ve certainly fucked us, kid, if that’s what you meant to do. I’d throw you straight out the airlock if I thought it would do us any good, you hear me?”
    Her green eyes looked frantic for the first time since he’d known her. “No!… I mean, I’m sorry, it’s just, it’s not something I really think about.”
    “Not something you really think about? Is there anything you really think about?”
    The girl got angry at that. “My parents made me get it when I was eight, okay? I didn’t even know what it was supposed to do. It was just something that happened to me, like everything else in my fucking life. For God’s sake, if I really wanted all of you to go down on all kinds of charges… but I don’t!” She took a long overdue breath. “I don’t.”
    “That’s comforting,” said Rumer. “You can tell them what perfect gentlemen we’ve been while they’re thundering all over our cargo bay gathering up our stolen goods to return them to people we won’t be able to get police protection from.”
    “It wasn’t meant to be comforting, asshole.”
    Rumer let out air. “What would you have me do, girl? What is it you’d like to do?”
    “I want to help,” said Margo. The eyes blazed bright, now, not brittle at all. “Let me help.”
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    It wasn’t a