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scared into hiding by their unceremonious arrival. But since then, the scuffling sounds of small creatures moving about in the underbrush and the tweeting rustle of birds flitting between the trees had returned.
    Tocarra had a population of native gray bears, which weren’t aggressive unless threatened. If they managed to stay out of one another’s way, then the rest of the planet’s fauna shouldn’t pose a threat.
    Now that she’d taken a moment to stop and think, tension crept along her spine and into her shoulders. No emergency transponders, no one knew their location, limited essential supplies, the possibility that Graydon wasn’t human, and the question over who had been the target of that obviously-not-accidental crash and why… She tightened her hand around the MRE.
    Mae didn’t want to sit around and hope for the best. Especially when her commanding officer might not be who he was supposed to be and someone had clearly orchestrated this situation.
    No, she never had been good at letting things unfold. One way or another, she’d find some way to get herself out of this situation—sooner rather than later.

Chapter Three
    Onboard the Imojenna , in orbit around Nadira
    Rian checked the onscreen readouts of the planet below him one last time. Exactly what he’d been hoping for. No official spaceport, no intergalactic trade center, and so little IPC presence, it verified the government didn’t give two scum rats about this out-of-the-way rock.
    When he’d noted the list of planets in this quadrant of space earlier, something about this particular rock had tugged at his shadowed memories. Usually he went out of his way to avoid anything that risked dragging him back down into that particular darkness. But if he was ever going to get anywhere against the frecking Reidar, he couldn’t spend the rest of his life running from any clues or places that reminded him of those lost years.
    They’d been in need of a supply stop, so he’d ordered Lianna to take them down on Nadira. Maybe once he arrived, he’d recognize something that would tell him why this planet had set his Reidar senses tingling.
    “What kind of backwater world have you brought us to now?” his sister, Zahli, asked from where she stood just behind his chair.
    He rotated his seat to face her. “A safe backwater world. We’ll land, re-supply, get some fresh air, and then we’re back onship in twelve hours. We’ve still got a few weeks until we reach Barasa.”
    “ Only twelve hours?” She arched a brow at him, the same way she always did when she was about to launch into an argument. At least these days he wasn’t the only one who ended up on the receiving end of that look. He’d seen her direct it at her fiancé, Tannin, a handful of times. Unfortunately for his ship’s tech analyst, the guy hadn’t quite worked out what that look meant yet.
    “We’ve already been traveling for weeks, Rian, taking the most convoluted, ridiculous route to Barasa I’ve ever seen. We could have been there by now if—”
    “If we wanted to make it easy for the Reidar to follow us and blow our collective asses out of the ether.” He stood and tugged on the thick wristband of beads he wore. “Feel free to take your boyfriend and leave any time you want. If you’re onship, you do things my way. And my way is the one that keeps us alive.”
    She huffed a sigh and spun, stalking out of the bridge and then clomping down the stairs, her muttering drifting back up to him as she went.
    “Lianna, put us on a trajectory to land somewhere near the markets in Liese. It’s the biggest trade center on the planet.”
    “Yes, Captain. But can I just say, Zahli might have a point. We’ve come a fairly roundabout way toward Barasa. I could plot a more direct route from here. It’ll cut the remaining travel time in half—”
    “I know we need to get to Barasa to find out what happened to Tannin’s friend, but we won’t be doing anything if we get caught by the