Kel and Lynn returned to the ship looking like someone had kicked their puppy. It didn’t take much effort to guess how the negotiations had gone. Lynn dropped into one of the lounge chairs with a heavy thump, tossing her datapad onto the table with more force than necessary.

  “He wants five kilos,” she said flatly.

  “Of Telk?” I asked, hoping if only faintly that maybe they used some other currency out here. “I could do five kilos of grass if they needed it.”

  She nodded once, then let out a dramatic sigh that might’ve been funny if the mood weren’t already in freefall.

  I double-checked my internal estimates. Ran the math again. “For the lander?”

  “For that lander,” she confirmed. “The one we priced at two. Two and a half if we wanted premium chairs and cup holders.”

  Kel leaned against the wall, arms folded. “It wasn’t a real offer. Just a polite way of telling us to get lost.”

  Not that polite, to be honest. More like duct-taping a ‘GO AWAY’ sign to our hull and pretending it was customer service.

  Five kilos wasn’t a negotiation. It was a message.

  I’d been monitoring station traffic while they were gone. The local fleet was a sad parade of scavenged hulls and limping cargo hauliers. More rust than metal. Not exactly a place that could afford to turn down trade.

  So why push us away?

  Something stank. Not literally since I don’t have a nose but if I did, it would be twitching. Actually, what is my sense of smell connected to?

  Fortunately, Laia saved me before I fell down that rabbit hole.

  She flew to the central table, wings fluttering with visible agitation, her expression the virtual equivalent of someone bracing to break bad news with a smile.

  “So,” she said with suspicious cheer, “you’re all going to want to sit down for this.”

  Kel didn’t move. “We are sitting.”

  “Emotionally,” she clarified.

  Then she dropped the real bomb.

  She’d hacked into the station’s security network—because of course she had—and uncovered an active bounty. On us.

  Not your garden-variety “destroy and collect the wreckage” sort of bounty, either.

  “No,” Laia said, tone shifting. “This one’s for a full recovery. Ship and crew. Intact.”

  That was worse. Way worse. It meant someone wanted us alive and whole—systems untouched, passengers breathing, hardware undamaged. A collector’s order. A claim.

  Kel’s expression darkened. “So that’s what the price hike was about.”

  Lynn nodded slowly, eyes narrowing. “A silent warning. He wanted us gone—just couldn’t say it out loud.”

  The bounty wasn’t local. That explained why we weren’t immediately swarmed. But it had arrived via courier drone, part of the slow-but-steady trickle of interstellar data. If we’d docked a few days earlier, we might’ve slipped through unnoticed.

  But the sneakernet had finally caught up to us.

  “There’s more,” Laia added, voice quieter. “Someone’s already flagged the alert. Marked themselves as an informant.”

  I pulled up the logs. The most likely culprit? Our charming contact. The one who’d smiled during the handshake, then handed over a price tag big enough to build two ships.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “He must’ve recognised something,” I muttered. “Hull signature, Laia’s signal, or just got a gut feeling.”

  He hadn’t even tried to keep us around. Just marked us, priced us out, and stepped aside. Efficient. And deeply disappointing. I checked our systems, we had everything and could pull out at any time but I kinda wanted that lander. I’d hoped this stop would be progress. A chance to breathe.

  Instead, it felt like the universe had leaned in close just to remind us what we were. An experiment that belonged to the corporations. And how far the whispers were spreading.

  Laia’s voice was quiet. “We should assume we’re visible now. Everywhere.”

  Silence followed.

  Then Lynn stood up, already reaching for her datapad. “Let’s prep for departure.”

  Kel pushed off the wall. “To where?”

  “Laia?” I prompted.

  She didn’t hesitate. “To the planet the scientist mentioned. If they had tech capable of tracking those energy creatures, they might’ve left more behind. It will help if we head to Alliance space.”

  “Before we go,” she added a beat later, “we should acquire a lander. Even a standard one. It might not be our dream ship, but we’ll need something reliable on the surface.”

  There was a pause.

  I tilted my focus slightly. “When you say acquire...”

  “You mean pay for it,” I continued, “or are we talking about your version of shopping?”

  Her wings flickered innocently. “We’ll see what the opportunity allows.”

  I sighed.

  I asked Stewie to help me pick out a lander from the station’s online marketplace. I could’ve done it myself but I wanted him involved as it would be his job to upgrade it and maintain it. Besides, I trusted his instincts.

  “Main priorities,” I told him, “are adaptability and immediate availability. We need something that flies now, not six months from now.”

  He took the assignment seriously, eyes narrowed in concentration as he scrolled through listings. The others were busy prepping the ship and coordinating false trails but Stewie just sat with his holopad, cross-legged in the crew lounge, muttering specs under his breath.

  Eventually, he found one.

  An old cargo tug converted to a lander. Ugly as sin, looked like someone bolted a fridge to a tugboat. But the specs were solid.

  Decent shielding. Advanced sensors. A rugged power plant that could run on almost anything. No warp drive, and no other advanced systems, but there is plenty of space to retrofit. The best thing was it was cheap.

  Lynn was sceptical. She didn’t say no, but the way her mouth tightened said everything. “We don’t have time to be picky,” she muttered, arms folded.

  Stewie defended it immediately. “It’s simple, reliable. Doesn’t have a dozen proprietary subsystems that’ll break down the first time we land on something rough. I can upgrade it over time.”

  He was learning. Taking responsibility.

  So I put in the order. Not to be delivered to us, of course. No sense in painting a target on our backs.

  Laia had a plan.

  We’d have the lander delivered to a nearby haulier it was an old ore transport registered to a mining syndicate. We knew from station logs it was launching soon, headed toward a supply depot on the outer edge of the system.

  We just had to intercept our new lander in transit.

  The plan was tight.

  Laia tracked the haulier’s route through the station’s public traffic net. It was scheduled for a standard supply run across the system, hauling processed ore and a small cargo crate marked as “custom delivery—non-perishable.” That crate was ours.

  We waited until the ship was deep into its transit arc, there was a quiet stretch between relay stations where sensors were weakest and no patrols ran regular sweeps. Every ship has blind spots. We just had to slip into one.

  I shadowed the ore haulier from a distance, matching speed and course. We stayed out of their sensors by the narrowest margins, using their own radiation wake to mask our signal profile.

  Once we were close enough, Laia took over the systems handshake.

  She mimicked a local drone relay and sent a friendly signal, requesting automated docking permissions to "perform routine delivery verification." Standard traffic fluff no one checks in low-security zones.

  Two of our drones detached silently, gliding across the void like shadows.

  They latched onto the cargo module with smooth precision, magnetic clamps hissing as they disengaged the locks.

  The drones opened the crate and let the container float in space. They quickly carried our new ship over and docked it with our cargo bay as it was too big to fit inside.

  Kel whistled the moment the docking procedure was complete. “She’s a beast.”

  Lynn raised a brow. “She’s a brick.”

  Mira grinned and shrugged. “Chunky’s a kind word.”

  I didn’t hang around for anymore comments. I kicked us into the slipstream and jumped out of the system.

  The haulier kept crawling toward its destination, none the wiser.

  We didn’t go straight for the ruins. Laia insisted we make a detour to one of the unclaimed systems buried in the old probe data. Quiet, off-grid, uninhabited. The perfect place to catch our breath.

  And more importantly, the perfect place for Stewie to get to work.

  The lander was docked snugly in the cargo bay, still scuffed and weathered from years of cargo duty. Stewie was on it the second we stopped with tools in hand, sparks flying as he pried open a panel with more enthusiasm than caution.

  He was muttering about engine rerouting, modular controls, external brackets for extra sensors. He began barking orders at the other three. It seemed he had a plan for this lander.