Page 46 of Enthraller

Now she could see two. The Aponian military behemoths hung, intimidating and lethal, with the recalcitrant freighters between them.

Wren could see six ships herded into a group, not five, so a sixth trader had obviously tried to duck out of line.

The freighters varied in size, from small, private runners to larger commercial ships. The only thing they had in common was that they’d ditched the queue and cancelled their Aponian entrance permissions.

Ed and Bailey were out walking the line, and she and Hatch stood together in the control room, observing it all. Above and a little behind the obs station, out of sight of the front viewing panel where she stood, was the Protection Unit’s runner, ready to assist if Ed found something interesting in his scans.

“Freighter Two,” Ed said over the comms. “Freighter Four and Freighter Five.”

“Shit.” The military captain who’d led the first round of searches, Captain Trin Darnell, broke into the transmission, clearly annoyed.

“No shame in it, Darnell,” Ed said cheerfully. “They’ve been tricky.”

“And the other three?” Captain Violet Fann of the Protection Unit asked.

“Clear.”

“There you go, Darnell, only a fifty percent fail rate,” Violet Fann said.

The comment seemed particularly inflammatory to Wren, but Hatch laughed softly. “They never pass up a chance to needle each other, the military and Protection. It’s built in.”

“I thought the competition was between the SF teams and the military. And Protection.” Wren thought about it. “And C&E.”

“Yes,” Hatch said, shrugging. “We’re the envy of everyone.”

“Or the problem,” Wren said, and Hatch turned to give her a sour stare.

“It’s never us. It’s them.”

“That’s what someone who’s the problem always says,” Wren told him.

“You’re part of the teams, too,” Hatch reminded her. “So you’re part of that same problem.”

He had her there.

They waited for Ed and Bailey to come back in, and then, just like last time, she, Hatch and Ed went over to check out Freighter Two. The Protection Unit runner and a military runner containing Captain Darnell and his hand-picked team joined them, so they had to juggle to find space for three runners to land in the small loading bay.

A military officer, left on board after the initial search to watch the crew, met them.

He saluted Darnell as he stepped out of the military runner. The captain turned out to be of medium height, wiry, with sharp cheekbones and brows that slashed upward like dark wings, hair cut brutally short. Next to him, Violet Fann, with her curly hair pulled back in a loose bun, with her curves and her plump lips, looked like his complete opposite.

Wren wondered if their differences fueled their game of one-upmanship.

Whatever was between them, there was a crackle of tension in the air when they nodded to each other in greeting.

“Report,” Darnell snapped at the officer who met them.

“As ordered, I didn’t mention that the Guan scanner had picked up an anomaly,” the officer said, his gaze flicking to Ed. “I said we’d chosen some ships at random for a second search.”

“And the response?” Darnell asked.

The officer shrugged. “Unconcerned.”

That meant most likely this freighter was not the one they were looking for. Wren was sure whoever they were hunting knew Ed was using a Guan scanner, and they would also know she and Ed were stationed on the observatory.

They would have understood what was about to happen when they were ordered forward to the obs station.

She felt a sudden wave of relief at the thought of the massive battleships on either side of them. Whatever the people they were hunting knew about what was happening, they could do nothing about it while the might of the Aponi military looked on.

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