Things never go smoothly. For that reason, I kept waiting for something to go wrong. Nothing bad happened to the ship. I reinstalled the camera into the head near the captain’s quarters, and we locked our prisoner in there just like I had been. For the most part, he sat there and waited. I kept waiting for him to escape. I kept waiting for his friends to find us and attack. I kept waiting for system authorities to come after us. Meeting the system authorities, or more specifically, one of the ships run by the Sentinel Mercenary Company went off without a hitch. We sent them a brief description of what happened along with the guy's name and a picture, and they simply set up an intercept where we could rendezvous and hand them over. I brought the guy into the cargo hold, the two ships locked, and as nervous as I had been, they just took him and left me with nothing more than a ‘thank you’. We also gave them the telemetry on where the pirate ship was. To be fair in this, we didn't actually give them the correct telemetry. X-Talia created a fake entry which would put the pirate ship in a fairly large area of space, giving us plenty of time to get back to said ship and take it for ourselves. If you're gonna be a pirate, you might as well pirate the pirates that try to pirate you. Again, every fucking thing went off without a hitch. I felt like some figurative version of Karma was gearing up for battle and loading all its weapons to be brought down against me. Getting into the pirate ship and taking over its controls wasn't even hard. I found myself for the next three days deep in the Neuro helmet running simulations on how to land said ship onto Rixa-3. This is where I figured things would go wrong.

Murray's junkyard was the shadiest place I could find in the system willing to take a fully intact ship with no questions asked. The problem was that it was on Rixa-3 and I was gonna have to get the damn ship down there. The damn ship itself had the capability of landing on a world up to one standard gravity. Three days of simulations was apparently more than enough to prepare me for this trip. A planet with no atmosphere and low gravity turned out to be a cakewalk. I had to put planetary landing capability on my list of things I wanted my new ship to do. For all the stress and agony I felt well, actually trying to do the maneuver was simple. Arguing with Murray over a price was considerably more difficult. I was perfectly honest about it being a pirate ship and how we got it. Murray used my honesty to start the price off so low that I was tempted to fly it back up, until he finally relented at 15,000, which was fucking pennies, and 5000 in credit for shit in his junkyard. I accepted primarily because his junkyard had a few working mining drones and there was no fucking way I was going back out to an asteroid and trying to cut away with the damn mining laser again.

I spent my time on Rixa-3 waiting for something to go wrong because something was gonna have to go wrong. This was too easy. X-Talia docked the Res-a-tesseract at the top of an elevator and I made my way up the shaft. A two hour long ride followed by an additional hour to get my baggage, a full pallet of stuff. A replenishment order of food and the like was coming to the Res-a-tesseract via station chandlery, but I was pulling the two mining drone units, several collector limpets, a charging station, some extra server racks that X-Talia needed in order to control everything had a couple odds and ends that the AI requested. We loaded everything up and by some miracle, we were left completely unmolested. Something had to go wrong.

***

Sam's eyes flicked over towards the head again. My assumption was that she had to pee. I also assumed that once we'd finished this hand, she would excuse herself for a minute and actually go. Of course, you know what they say about assumptions. She shuffled the cards again, pressed her lips together and set the deck of cards we had been playing with aside.

"Grant?"

I cocked an eyebrow at her. "Sam?"

She seemed to hesitate for a moment before opening her mouth to speak. "I want to discuss something, but I don't want to make it weird again."

I took a moment to consider that, but she had said that there was something she wanted to discuss and now it had to be done whether it was gonna make things weird or not. "Well, now you better spit it out."

She nodded and took a deep breath, no doubt preparing herself for whatever was on her mind. "I want to discuss our relationship."

“Relationship?” I took a quick glance over to the tablet. It had been left there so X-Talia could join us, but at the moment, the screen was empty. There was no doubt in my mind she was still listening in, but apparently controlling the drones took some extra processing power.

"Yes, our relationship," she inhaled again. "I consider you at least my friend and I'd like it to be more."

Stolen novel; please report.

Well, shots fired. She opened up with a quick volley on her flyby and left me reeling, trying to figure out whether I should counter her attack or just raise shields and dive through it. I loaded missiles and retaliated. "I assume that's just because you're stuck on the ship and I'm the only person around that you don’t need to worry about attacking you."

Her eyes went slightly wide, and she leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. Clearly, shields were up, but my words had been loaded with a dose of high explosive truth. She wasn't just gonna be able to deny that. "Yes, I know you due to forced proximity, but that doesn't mean I can't like you."

An admirable deflection. In many ways, it was a fair point, but I had to bring my forward guns to bear and return fire. "You have no other people with which to compare me with. I'm not even close to an ideal person."

"You're just scared of relationships."

I opened my mouth to retaliate, but that shot had dug deep. Also, why was I thinking of this verbal sparring match as ship combat? She was right though, I barely knew how to handle her just because I didn't know how to handle a friend, let alone someone I was attracted to. Sam picked up the cards again and shuffled them once more. I think she was trying to give me time to think of a comeback. I didn't have one.

"You're right."

She opened her mouth to speak, her ember eyes returning back to mine before her face shifted as though she had expected me to say something else. "Yeah. I am. Have you considered trying a relationship?"

Short answer was no. "What do you want?"

"I want things to stay vaguely as they are, but perhaps with a little more… intimacy."

"Like what?"

Her eyes returned to the head, “like occasional shower sex, but I'd settle for movie night. You know, we could try something."

I stared at the girl in front of me. The hot goth succubus doctor chick wanted the mostly useless, completely average-looking idiot that kept getting himself in bigger and bigger messes. It was only due to the fact that I was the only one here.

"I guess I can try."

Sam gave me a pleased smile right before X-Talia said, "Finally." Both our heads turned to the screen displaying the little avatar girl. She was standing there, arms crossed and looking smug. She then turned her attention to me and stated, "You have a message."

"I have a message?"

"That's what I said."

"From who?"

"Uh, David Sullivan."

I had no idea who the fuck that was. "Ok. Play it."

X-Talia shook her head. "It's text only. Do you want me to read it to you or do you think you can read it yourself?"

I glared at her, grabbed the tablet, then said, "Just show me the message." The tablet switched over to a text-only document, and I started reading. Only to notice Sam pushing her way across the table and trying to look down at the tablet at an awkward angle. I looked at her, waved her back, and started reading out loud from the beginning.

"To Grand Takata. I caught that little trick you pulled with the pirate ship. Unfortunately for you, the local pirate gang and the Sentinel Mercenary Group are in a bit of an incestuous relationship. You pissed a lot of people off and you're gonna have a few more people looking at that price that's on your head. Attached is my com ID. Let me know next time you're on the Freelight Mining Consortium station around Azore; we should talk. I'm not with the mercenaries, pirates, system authorities, or any bounty hunter affiliation. So no worries. Public venue, come unarmed. See you soon. David Sullivan."

I looked up at Sam and cocked an eyebrow. She shrugged. We both looked at X-Talia.

"X-Talia, can you scrape the local net for any type of reference to David Sullivan?"

"Already working on it."

We were far enough out into the planet's rings that it would take a while to query the net and get some data back. It also might cost a couple credits or Sen, presumably that would be a tight beam. I sat back in my chair and scowled to myself. "So the mercenaries and the pirates are working together."

Silence fell between the three of us, and it wasn't the comfortable, companionable kind.

"I got something back," X-Talia said, "but it's nothing I would call useful. A couple charges, some court dates, and several business listings. Scanning the listings, they all seem a bit sketchy, but I can't quite place why."

"Ok. Well, this is a problem for when we wanna start heading back. How's the cargo hold at the moment?"

"Not even a quarter full."

"Well, that's still better than me out there with a mining laser trying not to become a pincushion," I said.

X-Talia chuckled. Sam looked slightly concerned, and my leg throbbed.

The message had killed whatever mood Sam was trying to go for, and neither of us really wanted to continue playing cards. We laid out my betting in the galley and propped the tablet up against my gaming chair. With the cargo hold depressurized, we were limited only to the galley, the bridge, and the head. Sam and I watched a movie, then two. I have to admit, it was actually kind of nice.