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pilot.”
    “Huh,” Baden grunted.
    “What?”
    He turned to face Hirin, eyes narrowed. “He just sent off an encrypted message to a PrimeCorp address.”
    “How do you know that?” I squeaked, then caught myself and held up a hand. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know. Something you ‘picked up’ on Kiando, right?”
    Baden turned his grin on me. “I can’t reveal my program sources,” he said virtuously. “But there’s no love lost between the people who work for Duntmindi Corporation and PrimeCorp.”
    “Sounds highly illegal to me,” Hirin said, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “Don’t suppose you could actually read what it said, could you?”
    “Give me a minute—ah, merde !”
    “What?”
    He hunched over his console, fingers flying over the touchscreen. He didn’t answer me. I waited. With Baden, you might as well not try to interrupt when he was like this. He wouldn’t hear you anyway.
    Finally he sat back heavily in his skimchair and threw his arms over his head. “Cannibalizer,” he said cryptically.
    “Cannibalizer?”
    “If you don’t have the right code to enter on the receiving end, the message basically eats itself when you try to open it. Nice little encryption there; I couldn’t stop it.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “I got two words.”
    “And those were?”
    “‘Location’ and ‘Paixon’,” he said.
    “Hmm. So he definitely knew it was us.”
    “Not many Paixons around,” Baden said, “So what would a supposed pirate, and not a very good one apparently, be doing sending an encrypted message about our location to our Dear Captain’s worst enemy, following a botched attempt to—I don’t even know—bother us?”
    Viss’s voice boomed over the ship’s comm. “Is all the excitement over for now? Seems to have gone pretty quiet up there.”
    “I think so, at least for now, Viss. Want to give us a damage report as soon as you have a chance?”
    “Will do, Captain. But I don’t think there’ll be much to report. Whatever he was firing at us didn’t seem to have much punch.”
    “They were low-end flash-pack torps,” Yuskeya said, all detached professionalism. “But he had a few surprises in shields and engines. I’m transferring all the ship data to you if you want to go over it.”
    There was only a slight pause before he said coolly, “I’d like to see that. Thanks.”
    “Is everything okay?” Maja stood in the doorway to the bridge, pale but composed. “I was in my quarters when things went crazy, and I thought I’d better stay out of everyone’s way.”
    Hirin stood up from the chair and crossed to her, swinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her close. “It’s all right, honey,” he said. “I’m turning the big chair over to your mother and going for a double caff. Want to come, and I’ll fill you in on what happened?”
    “Sure, Dad,” she said, although her eyes went to Baden. He smiled and winked at her, and she relaxed visibly, letting Hirin steer her down the corridor toward the galley.
    “I’m assuming we want to get to Mars as quickly as possible?” Rei asked from the pilot’s console. The angry thickness that had suffused her voice for the past few weeks had thinned out, and the barely-contained rage that had stiffened her movements had relaxed, at least a little.
    “Full speed ahead,” I confirmed, moving from the skimchair into the captain’s chair and sinking gratefully into its familiar shape. “Yuskeya, run that shipdata through the Nearspace Registry, when we get close enough to Mars to get the updated data, would you? I don’t imagine we’ll find anything concrete, but we’ll have our homework done to make the report at Mars.”
    Baden turned to me. “With your permission, Captain, I’d like to try installing some new decryption software—something that might catch a self-destructing message sooner next time.”
    I didn’t ask him where he’d get such a thing. I just