Rukan Otalak was deeply irritated. Anyone who had ever worked for Rukan would say that this was his typical emotional state. They would be wrong. Rukan enjoyed berating his employees and complaining about the cost or amount of time that repairs and work might take. He figured everyone was having fun, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  Rukan was deeply annoyed because berating people and complaining had, so far, accomplished nothing. Even offering to pay people, which was Rukan’s last resort, had accomplished nothing. Or it had accomplished almost nothing.

  The pirates who had caught Rukan in the woods had been willing to take his money in exchange for bandaging the cut on his hand, and for getting him something that resembled a bed to sleep on.

  Unlike Laila, Rukan had had his phone on him when the Friendship went down. Unlike Laila’s phone, even if it had survived the crash, Rukan’s phone could still get enough signal for him to access his bank accounts and pay the pirates for the luxury of not having to sleep on the floor or starve.

  Thus far, no amount of berating, complaining, or offering to make a deal had been enough to actually get him out of his cell in the pirate compound. And Rukan was deeply irritated about that.

  From what Rukan had seen of the pirate compound as he was dragged in, it was fairly large, fairly well populated, and had a massive landing pad for the pirate ship that had shop down the Friendship. The people were well armed and quite disrespectful. And it was in the middle of nowhere.

  Rukan had exactly one survival skill: his phone’s working GPS. He was confident that it would have been enough to get him to the small town that was broadcasting planetary signal from some hundred and fifty kilometres away. His basis for that confidence was that Rukan had never had to trek anywhere in his life, and had never listened to anyone who may have tried to tell him about the difficulties of doing so.

  As it was, Rukan had been denied the opportunity to test his amazing survival skills when, about eight hours after leaving his crashed bunker with phone, warm clothes, pistol, and first aid kit that he didn’t know how to use, he had been ambushed by pirates.

  The pirates would have said that Rukan walked straight into them and demanded that they help him get to civilisation, but Rukan would have insisted that they were lying.

  The truth was anyone’s guess.

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  And so Rukan was laying on his so-called-bed, in his cell, and frowning intently at the stock market on his phone. From time to time, food and water would be pushed under the door of his cell and Rukan would shout a new offer to pay them for his release, and they would ignore him.

  Woldan Szarkan, who really insisted that you call him Woll, felt distinctly guilty. He also felt a great deal of pain, but he was choosing to focus on the guilt in the hope that it would distract him from the pain. It was working remarkably well.

  Woll felt guilty because the person he could rely on to tell him not to feel guilty wasn’t there, and he was wishing that she was. Despite all contrary evidence, he couldn’t help but think that if Laila were here, she would be able to get them out.

  He felt guilty for wishing that sort of fate on Laila. And he felt guilty for not believing that Shae, who was there, would be much use getting them out. And, when he managed to focus past the pain, he felt guilty for wishing that someone else would get him out of this rather than trying to find a way to get himself out of this.

  Woll couldn’t move his left leg, right arm, six of his fingers, or his neck. Every time he breathed it felt like someone was stabbing him in the chest. Despite this, he was doing his best to feel guilty about leaving the burden of finding an escape to Shae, who was almost completely unharmed.

  Shae Gallager, who had most of the fingers on her left hand splinted together and some massive bruises on her right shoulder and hip, was taking the burden of finding an escape very seriously.

  Unlike Woll, Shae considered the fact that she was almost exactly half Woll’s size and almost exactly a quarter of his weight to be nothing but an advantage when it came to finding an escape.

  In fact, it was because of her size that Shae was nowhere near as injured as Woll. She hadn’t made it back to the bridge by the time the engines exploded and the ship spontaneously disassembled itself in the upper atmosphere.

  She had ducked into the nearest room, which had fortuitously been the breaker room. Shae had been disappointed, if anything, to find herself in a room with a bunch of pokey switches, but it had turned out to be a great stroke of luck.

  The breaker room did not have thicker walls or a better seal than any other room. What it had was a slightly higher quality of construction, and a wide gap between the inner and outer walls.

  When the breaker room had hit the ground at great speed, Shae pressed up against the pokey switch wall, the outer wall and the cushion of air between it at the inner wall had absorbed an impressive amount of the impact force. That, combined with Shae’s general sturdiness, meant that her main source of injury was several of the breakers ejecting themselves from the wall quite forcefully.

  So, as Woll lay on a bed almost identical to the one that Rukan had paid a lot of money to get, Shae paced the small cell and considered her options.

  She had spent quite a while considering her options over what she figured was the span of about a day, and was still coming up with nothing.