Page 27 of Enthraller

Hatch settled down, but Bailey kept watching her.

“How did you do it?” she asked.

Wren knew was she was asking. “Smoke and mirrors,” she answered.

“Hmm.” Bailey finally looked away, back to the control panel in front of her, but Wren didn’t think she’d convinced her. Nothing she could do about that. And she certainly wasn’t going to explain, even though Ethan Hyt had assured them that these two were loyal through and through and squeaky clean into the bargain.

The loyalty certainly seemed to check out.

“How long until we reach the station?” Wren asked.

Bailey tapped her wrist. “Half an hour. You should see it soon. Out the left window.”

Wren turned and sure enough, the sunlight touched the large, dark gray nearspace observatory. It wasn’t big enough for anything larger than a runner the size of the one they were using to dock, but it looked like it could comfortably house twenty or more people. She had assumed they would be the only ones on station, but looking at the size of it, she wasn’t quite sure where she’d gotten that impression.

“How many are in residence?” she asked.

“Eight,” Hatch said. “Five academics on some research project, and the usual three maintenance staff.”

“We’ve checked them all out,” Bailey said. “They seem clean, but the captain has let us know this goes very high up, so someone could have scrubbed anything dodgy out of their file.”

Everyone was still a suspect, then. Wren didn’t sigh, but she felt like it. This was how she’d been living for the last four months.

Things were finally happening, though. She could live this way a little longer. And now that she had people around her who believed her, it was actually better than before.

“What project are the academics involved in?” Ed asked.

“Signal identification, I think.” Bailey waved a hand, like it didn’t matter.

“Signal identification.” Ed said it slowly, and everything in Wren came to attention, including her nanos.

Signals.

She had spent every moment she could since she’d escaped the Har Met Vent on Ytla researching ancestral spaceships, and signals kept coming up.

It was a signal that had led the criminals who used to run the Core Companies to the ancestral spaceship on Fynian. A signal that had led the Raxian Expeditionary Force to find the ancestral ghost ship floating in space. If there wasn’t such a problem on Faldine with magnetic fields, most likely they would have found the ancestral spaceship via a signal there, too, rather than having one of their military pilots more or less crash next to it.

Had someone detected a signal from the downed wreck on Ytla?

She looked over at Ed and he gave a tiny nod, as if his mind had gone to the same place as hers.

They would need to watch their new neighbors.

The information suddenly made her feel better about coming here.

She’d wanted to confront Harden with Ethan Hyt but she understood why he preferred her to be out of it for now. So while they were up here, with Ed scanning incoming freighters for whatever it was that someone was trying to hide, she could snoop around and see what the academics were up to.

The observatory was now a massive structure hanging above them and Bailey focused fully on maneuvering them up close to it.

Wren felt the thump as they connected to the dock and saw mechanical arms come out to clamp them more securely.

“The runner’s staying here?” Ed asked.

“Yes. It’s for our use. Captain Hyt wanted us to have a way off the station whenever we need it.” Bailey sounded pleased about that, and Wren had to agree.

If she wanted to get back to Aponi, she didn’t want to have to wait hours for a runner to come up and get them.

When they stepped through the connecting tunnel, each carrying their own bag, she was surprised to find no one was there to greet them.

---