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Cadan didn’t speak again. He gestured instead, one of the universal, easy-to-read signs Elissa knew they used for signaling across distances outside the ship.
Proceed without me
.

Elissa looked away as the crew left. Trepidation prickled down her spine.
How will Cadan run this whole ship without his copilot and his crew?
But overriding that unease was a wrenching pity she knew she shouldn’t show.
What must this be like for him, seeing his crew leave him? Knowing they
—
like Stewart
—
think of him as a traitor to his own government?

She listened to the last pair of feet go down the steps, but she, Lin, and Cadan were not alone. Elissa looked up.

Three of the crew hadn’t yet gone. Ivan the chef. Markus, who’d come earlier to the flight deck. A tall fair-haired woman, one of those who’d helped defeat the pirates.

Cadan cleared his throat. “You’re free to go, all of you. I believe Mr. James will be coming with you, and he’ll take charge of the sLissa, you have to listen—”, chuttlebug. It’ll be set for Charonial, of course, but if it needs piloting—”

Ivan gave the other crew members a glance. “Looks like we’re staying, sir. To offer our services on the
Phoenix
.”

“The
Phoenix
’s not going to need your services.” Cadan’s voice was flat, all expression ironed out of it. “I’m going to be right off-grid. I don’t even have full plans yet—”

“We can see that.” Ivan interrupted him. “I’m telling you, if there was anyone who looked as if he had
less
plans I wouldn’t want to let him have charge of a ship at all, let alone two runaways.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Way to help his confidence.” For the first time Elissa noticed her properly. She had very angular features and skin so pale it was almost translucent, both marking her out as not a native-born Sekoian.

“Wait,” said Cadan. “What are you talking about? What are you doing?”

“We’re staying.” The woman gave him a brief smile. “We’re staying to help.”

Cadan’s shoulders slumped. “You can’t, Felicia. All of you. I explained. I’m making myself a fugitive, as well as Lissa and Lin. I don’t even know how I’m going to do it—I’m going to be on the run from the bounty hunters. Possibly, if Lissa’s right, even SFI themselves. The ship’s damaged and we can’t yet use the hyperdrive—”

“We know,” Felicia said. “That’s what we’re helping with.”

Cadan’s eyes moved from her to the others, then back to her. He looked completely thrown, a million times more than he had been by Stewart’s reaction. He’d braced himself to do this, to dismiss his crew and watch them leave, and now here were these crew members, determined to stay with him. Out of nowhere a thought crossed Elissa’s mind.
Sometimes finding you can trust someone is as devastating as finding you can’t.

“But why?” he said. “I—look, I know you’re supposed to treat me no different from a captain you’ve served with for years, but this is . . . You hardly know me. I haven’t done anything to deserve your loyalty.”

Ivan folded his gorilla arms across his chest, his expression deadpan. “You think you need to have gone through pilot school to have ethics of your own, Captain?”

“
No
. God, no. I just—”

Felicia laughed. “He’s messing with you, Captain. Ivan, be nice.”

The hint of a smile narrowed Ivan’s eyes. “Nice? Who’d recognize me if I was nice?”

Markus had been standing near the entrance of the bridge,
arms folded. He’d been looking weirdly calm, and Elissa had wondered if he was as shocked as Stewart had been, if any minute he was going to explode with the same disgust the copilot had showed.

He moved now, a tiny jerk of a movement, and Elissa saw what she hadn’t grasped before, that his fingers showed white and bloodless against the dark blue of his jacket, that his face was so tense, the skin seemed stretched taut over the bonesnonhuman human-sourced entityArt beneath. Then he spoke, and she realized he wasn’t calm. He was violently angry.

“
Why
, Captain?” he said, so much suppressed anger in his voice that it felt as if it would shatter something. “I would have thought the real question was
why not
?” He cast a glance around the bridge. “A crew of sixteen, and only four of us willing to stand against something like this? God, I
knew
it. I
said,
you start with the sliding moral scales, and you’ll find you can justify every freaking obscene thing some insane scientist comes up with.”

Felicia put a hand out. “Markus, this isn’t the time—”

“Yeah, I
know
.” His jaw clenched, then he looked across at Cadan. “I’ve been protesting the cloning laws since I was sixteen,” he said. “I’m in one of the groups that forced the interplanetary ban on continued research into full-body cloning. We’ve been asking for tighter laws on existing cloning for years. And some—some freaking megalomaniac sadists—they’ve chosen this way of getting around the ban?” He took a breath, looking as if he were going to continue, then shut his mouth hard, waiting for a second before speaking again. “All right. I’m done. I’m done.”

“About time,” said Ivan drily, and laughed when Markus threw him a knife-edged look. “Captain, you want more
grandstanding, or you want us to get on with something?”

Cadan gave his head a shake as if to clear it. Then he straightened, his shoulders going back, snapping back into role. He sent Felicia and Ivan to oversee the evacuation, and Markus to run an extra safety check on
Shuttlebug Two
. Elissa knew it was against all sorts of safety protocol to deliberately leave a manned ship with only one lifeboat—the least Cadan could do was make doubly sure the one they had left was ready for emergency use.

She watched the crew as they left. Markus’s jaw was still rigid, and Felicia had her lips pressed tightly together. And on each of their faces—Ivan’s, too—was a look of set determination.

They weren’t leaving. She didn’t know if Ivan and Felicia were driven by the same feelings as Markus, or whether they had their own, different reasons for staying with a captain who was rebelling against SFI. But they’d heard the full story. They’d heard what Lin was, what Elissa had done, and they were staying. They weren’t leaving. They were going to help.

Twenty minutes later Elissa watched in the viewscreen while the shuttlebug detached itself from the dock low on the
Phoenix
’s flank and dropped slowly away from the main ship. Its booster rockets flared. Cadan cleared the viewscreen, and the shuttlebug became no more than a steadily blinking dot on the enviro-scan.

He didn’t speak, just moved his hand to the controls, taking the ship back up to speed. Lin leaned on the rail behind him, watching the numbers climb. Her face held none of the strain that Elissa knew showed in her own expression. It was as if knowing that they were, for the moment, safe had
wiped the terror of the previous hours out of her head.

Elissa sat carefully out of the way, watching CadanLissa, you have to listen—”, c’s hands on the controls, watching the side of his face that she could see. His face was as calm as Lin’s, but calm as if, in his case, the strain had been not wiped away but deliberately pushed down until he had leisure to deal with it.

She’d learned to do something similar over the last three years, pushing away hurt she wasn’t yet ready to look at. But she’d only managed it by shutting off completely, like the button-snails on the cliffs near her house that could draw themselves up smaller and smaller until they fit into the smooth flat shells that looked like buttons stuck to the cliff face. She’d never managed to withdraw and still remain as calmly competent, as focused, as Cadan was now.

If his last few years
—
all his time training
—
had come as smoothly, as easily as I’d thought they had, how did he learn to do that?

He’d set their course for the closest habitable body—not a planet but a moon, Syris II. The planet it orbited was not eligible to be terraformed, nor was its larger moon, but Syris II was in the second stage of the process, meaning that it would be bleak and inhospitable, but with breathable air and no immediate danger to human life.

They had to get somewhere they could repair the ship as quickly as possible, Elissa knew that. But going to the very closest place, the place Stewart must know they’d be making for . . .

“Cadan?”

“Yes?”

“Stewart—he’ll know where we’re going.”

“I know,” Cadan said shortly.

“Won’t he . . . tell someone?”

Cadan’s jaw clenched, and his fingers moved, suddenly jerky, on the controls. “I’m sure he will.”

Elissa swallowed. “Then shouldn’t we go to a different place?”

Cadan swung around on her. “For God’s sake, Lissa, will you stop talking and let me do my job?”

“I’m just saying—”

“There
is
no other place! The ship’s running at over five percent damage. I’ve got a whole sector shut down. If I don’t get her patched up so we can use the hyperdrive, we’re no better than floating wreckage waiting to be picked up. Whoever it is who’s after you can track the ship. Our only chance is in not staying still long enough for them to catch up with us.” He shut his teeth hard on the last word, took a deep breath. “Now, please, either stay quiet or go away.”

They touched down on the surface of the moon two hours later. Cadan told Elissa and Lin to strap themselves in even before he brought the
Phoenix
into orbit, and entering the atmosphere was a stomach-dropping ride, with Cadan fighting to keep the ship stable. They landed with a last sideways lurch that kicked Elissa’s heart up into her throat.

She’d known the
Phoenix
was damaged, but after that landing she couldn’t help but wonder if the ship would even make it back into space.

If the repairs didn’t take too long—if they could be madeLissa, you have to listen—”, c at all—the ship could stay ahead of their pursuers. If not . . .
We’re no better than floating wreckage waiting to be picked up
.

Cadan stood, clipping his earpiece over his ear, checking the reading on his wrist unit. “There are padded jackets in that cupboard,” he said, pointing. “The atmosphere is thin
enough to be pretty cold, but you might as well save the ship’s oxygen by breathing what’s outside.” His voice was curt, and his gaze skated over Elissa. He had the right to be angry, she knew that, but allentment crept up inside her. She’d apologized for what
she’d
done, and it wasn’t her fault Stewart had turned out to be such an ass.

They came down the ramp of the cargo hold onto gray sand so fine, it was like ash. It puffed up around their feet as they stepped onto it. A thin breeze licked an icy damp tongue over Elissa’s face, and she pulled the jacket hood around her head and shoved her hands into the deep pockets.

Cadan strode away from the ship, then turned so he could get a clear view of the damage. His face tightened.

When Elissa caught up with him and looked, even she could see that it was bad. A mangled scar ran across the
Phoenix
’s smooth silver hull.

Markus had followed Cadan and the twins. He was no longer taut with anger; his face showed nothing but focused attention on the problem at hand. “At least the auto-repair worked.”

Cadan rubbed a hand across his face. “All too well. It’s going to be a hell of a job pulling the metal back out.”

“What’s wrong?” Lin asked Elissa, her voice low. “I thought the auto-repair was a good thing?”

“It is. But it’s, like, just an emergency fix. The metal clamps tight, seals it all off, but then, if you want to get it back to how it was, you have to peel the metal back up and fix it back in its original place so it can cope with hyperspeed. They have these massive machines that do it at home.”

“We have the equipment to do it here,” said Markus, overhearing. “Or a good enough job, anyway. It’s getting the equipment up there that’s the problem.”

“Can’t you reach it from inside?” said Lin, her face interested and curious.