Page 86 of Enthraller

Renard gave a shrug. “All night, most likely.”

“We’re no more than an hour from our freighter. I’m not spending the night here.” Linao turned back to study them. “I’ll go get the freighter and land it as close as I can. We can use the hover stretcher to load the artifacts directly into the bay. I don’t like leaving them out in the weather like this.”

“They’ve been out in weather like this for thousands of years, if this really is an ancestral ship,” Renard said.

“It is.” She didn’t explain how she knew, but Wren guessed Evette Linao was not used to explaining herself to anyone. She looked over at Navar and Fenton. “Watch our two prisoners. I’ll be back in just over an hour.”

She ducked out and disappeared almost immediately.

“Well.” Renard leaned back against a wall and then sank down to his haunches, looking out of the door as if to be sure she’d gone. “She’s not too friendly, is she?”

Fenton and Navar refused to respond.

“Got nothing to say?” Kine asked them, speaking without being spoken to for the very first time.

“We’re SF teams, man,” Fenton said. “We’ve heard about her, but we only met her this morning for the first time. We hardly know a damn thing about her, except she’s in charge.”

Renard gave a snort of derision. “Fine. And what about this one?” He gestured to Ed, who was still sitting on the hover stretcher, arms still restrained in front of him, quietly watching everything. “Who’s Thorakis’s friend?”

Renard didn’t know who Ed was, Wren realized. And he hadn’t asked until Linao was gone, even though he must have been dying to find out.

“He’s SF teams, same as us,” Navar said.

Wren was interested that he didn’t elaborate, didn’t say Ed had only just rejoined, and as a specialist, not a soldier.

“A Halatian in the teams? Don’t they try to make sure you lot don’t get so much as a boo boo on your knee? Being part of the teams would be too high risk, wouldn’t it?” Renard was watching Ed with interest.

Ed looked coolly back. “No. That would be discriminatory.”

“So why are you here? Wrong place, wrong time?” Renard persisted.

“Why you so interested?” Fenton asked, stepping in front of Ed, as if to shield him from Renard’s questions.

And then Wren got it. They didn’t want to talk about Ed, because some time before her nanos had woken her up, Linao, Navar and Fenton must have had a conversation about how they still had a use for Ed when it came to the Guan scanner.

Linao’s threat to kill Ed had been a bluff.

And as she couldn’t know where it was, because it was in a hidden passage in the Gate, she might well need Wren, too. As motivation for Ed to talk.

Something had changed since they’d tried to blow her and Ed up on the space observatory. Maybe now they had Ed as a prisoner, they thought it would be handy to have his skills with the scanner for themselves.

She had done her part. Had led them to the wreck.

Her role was finished.

Now they were going to use Ed.

Which meant they’d definitely flip things around from now. Hold the laz to her throat to get Ed to cooperate.

And just like she had, so would he.

So they had better find a way to escape.

Soon.

33

Ed had thoughthis usefulness to their enemies was in his relationship to Wren.

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