Page 50 of Enthraller

“It was.” Wren met her gaze. “It makes the inconvenience pale into insignificance, doesn’t it?”

“There’s rumblings about the queue, is there?” Lashka looked amused. “I can imagine the administrators are getting a lot of angry comms.”

“Probably.” Wren spread the topping over the cake. She glanced up, saw Trish in the doorway. “Trish here thinks I shouldn’t turn my back on any freighter captains any time soon.”

Ludlow and Lashka Garde turned to look at Trish, and she sneered at them all and then whirled away, stomping off.

“Well done.” Lashka gave her a quick, sidelong glance. “You chased her off. That woman has very strange anger issues. I’m not sure she should be up here.”

Wren agreed. She couldn’t understand why someone as unstable as Trish was allowed to remain on station. “Banks should have already sent her down,” she said.

“Yes.” Ludlow was looking at the door with a sour expression. “She is obstructive in every way.”

That was interesting. Wren had assumed Trish was in on whatever Banks was doing, hence her hostility toward her and the rest of the team, but if she was obstructive to the academicsas well, she might only be tolerated because her instability allowed Banks to get away with whatever it was he was up to.

Someone thinking straight would have reported him by now. Trish was definitely not thinking straight.

Juller—the other maintenance team member—she couldn’t read well enough. He was polite and friendly when he did speak, but he didn’t say much.

She had to believe he knew what was going on here, unless he was someone who put their head down and simply refused to see what was right in front of them.

“You said protective overkill, does the military think those freighters are dangerous?” Jens Ludlow was watching her, but she pretended total concentration on spreading her cake topping and didn’t look up.

“They wouldn’t be wasting two battlecruisers otherwise, Jens.” Lashka’s voice was a little sharp. “But I don’t like how close they are to the observatory, if so.”

There was a flick of sound from Wren’s comms link, and then Bailey’s voice was in her ear.

“Captain Darnell and Captain Fann are ready for us again.”

“Coming,” she said. She gave the cake one last smoothing with the thin metal spatula she’d found in a drawer, and picked up the plate.

“Feeding your team?” Lashka asked.

“Hatch is a bottomless pit,” she said with a grin as she headed for the door.

“He and Ed are heading back in?” Jens asked.

“They are.”

His question sounded reasonable, but he seemed a little too interested, and it made her wary. Still, anyone who was watching the obs station could see they were coming in, so she wasn’t telling him anything he couldn’t work out for himself.

She made her way to the control room and then waited outside the door for a moment, scanning to see if her nanos could pick up a creeper waiting to dart inside with her.

There.

She touched the laslock and stepped inside, finger to her lips as she did.

Bailey had turned as the doors began to open, lips parted to speak, but she pressed them shut and waited for the creeper to crash and burn first.

Wren set the cake on the table and then picked up the smoking bug.

“They must have a whole box of them,” she said.

“It has to be Banks,” Bailey said. “He’s got access to all the electronics.”

“The academics could just as easily have brought them up disguised as equipment,” Wren said. “But it is getting tiresome. After these two checks, I’ll go looking for the motherlode and take them all out at once.”

“Can your device do that?” Bailey asked.

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