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smiled. “Go ahead.”
    As the bridge fell silent with everyone busy, I had a moment to reflect. In the moment of crisis, the crew had held together. There’d been some bumps, but I quietly thanked the nameless pirate, or whatever he was. He’d inadvertently shown me something important, something that I should have been able to figure out for myself, and that made me feel a little better. This crew needed, above all else, to be busy.
    Oh, we’d managed long skip runs before with not much excitement to break the monotony. But that was when everyone was getting along. With various complications making things awkward and nothing substantial or dangerous to distract us, we couldn’t handle it. We’d all turned to solitary diversions to try and keep our minds off our problems. Rei’s martial arts workouts, Viss’s dogged overhauling of every engineering system. Hirin’s obsession with PrimeCorp and its misdeeds. Yuskeya’s compulsive reading. My immersion in building virtual solar systems on my datapad. Even Baden and Maja—would they have been quite so involved in each other if they hadn’t been trying to avoid the other shipboard disturbances?
    As we scooted for Mars I thought about it. I couldn’t manufacture crises (and wasn’t hoping for more, I swear it), but maybe I could keep them busy. I’d think about it.
    As it turned out, keeping the crew busy would be the least of my problems.
     
     

Chapter 4 – Jahelia
Hunter and Prey
     
     
     
     
     
     
    ONCE MY MESSAGE to PrimeCorp was away and I was sure the Tane Ikai wasn’t following me, I engaged the autopilot, stood, and stretched. The encounter had left me exhilarated and oddly hungry, so I made my way to the minuscule galley at the rear of the tiny bridge and pulled off a mugful of steaming cazitta. I took it and an energy bar to the bridge and settled in my chair, the rich licorice scent of the drink filling the air. I smiled.
    That had been fun.
    “Are we done here?” asked Pita from the bridge console.
    “I think so.”
    “Want me to automate a full report and shoot it off to PrimeCorp Main?”
    “No. I told you, I prefer to write the reports myself. That last message will do for now.” I pursed my lips, annoyed at myself for being annoyed with a machine. Pita is the computer in this lovely little ship that Alin Sedmamin so kindly gave me for this assignment—the Hunter’s Hope . Pita’s a PAREA, which is one of PrimeCorp’s cutesy little acronyms designed to increase their products’ appeal to consumers. PAREA stands for Personality-Attuned Realtime Electronic Assistant, which is simply a marketing-friendly way to say that the programming is “tweaked” for each user. She’s experimental, and yes, I’m letting them test her out on me. The pay for that alone was pretty damn good, for the privilege of letting them take readings from my brain while I looked at pictures and answered questions. A lot of questions. But it did pay well.
    The hardest part of the experiment is having to listen to her, now that she’s installed on the ship. She doesn’t talk like any other computer I’ve ever known—supposedly she talks like me. I’m not sure I like that, or that I agree. But it’s all part of the deal. I’ll admit she’s come in handy a few times, so I can’t complain too much, but she is annoying. That’s why I named her Pita. It’s my own little acronym. Pain-In-The-Ass.
    “I think that went well.”
    “Alin Sedmamin might not approve of your tactics,” Pita said mildly. “I don’t recall any instructions to actually attack the ship.”
    “Oh, let me have a little fun. I’ll worry about Sedmamin later.” The oily PrimeCorp CEO might think he had me in his pocket, but he was only a means to an end, after all. Pita didn’t say anything else about it.
    I grinned now at the memory of the rich male voice filling my cramped bridge. “Unidentified vessel, this is the far trader Tane Ikai , registration port New Cape City,