Montar kept cackling softly, yanking open drawers and slamming them shut. They sounded like pistol cracks. Each yank and slam added to a pile of mixed junk she assembled on the counter.

  Key cards. Com bracelets. Multi-tools. Cutters. Shreds of clothing. A piece of space ship deck plate. What looked like a rolled up analog drawing wrapped in string. And guns.

  I've never seen such a badly assembled assortment of weapons. When you're a gunslinger, you find your weapons, the ones that meld with you, that feel like they were made just for you, and you stick with them. That's how I feel about my M3, my Chimer, my Hurmer, my magerifle. Even my foil feels right when I hold it, for all that I hate it.

  A collector will specialize. Guns of a past era. Marksmanship rifles. Royal weapons, or military surplus, or anti-ship cannons. Even gun runners limit their selection to what they can sell.

  Montar's junk gun collection was beyond eclectic. All of them were pistols, but that was the only thing they had in common. What looked like a brand new limited edition Arc-Tan with the burnt-in holographic serial lay beneath a micro-bore pistol so badly corroded I couldn't even tell if it was a three or four millimeter. A drum-fed bullpup lay beside something that looked like a home-made muzzle loader. At least it didn't have any visible breech.

  "What's this?" I said. It came out grouchier than I wanted. Twisting the void using only my mind had given me a headache.

  Montar raised her head above the counter, green hair flying, astonishment on her face, as if surprised to see me standing there.

  "The end of plausible denial," she said, diving back down into her drawers. "Let the Trade Inspectors take them."

  I glanced at Hao. She shrugged. No idea there, either, so I shut up and let Montar dig.

  She dug out a plain, black bag the size of my torso, and started shoving her junk into it. She must have had remarkable arm strength, because she managed to hold the bag in one hand until all the junk was gone. Then she zipped it up and slapped it onto the counter.

  It didn't rattle, like I expected it to, but smacked into the steel like a slab of wet meat. Some form of hydrogel bottom, likely.

  "This is what you are going to do," Montar said, shoving the bag across the counter.

  "Stop," I said. "Do what, why?"

  Montar's glare could have stripped the wards off a Fed Navy corvette.

  "You are going to steal a ship," she said. "The Belithain."

  Things were moving way too fast. I had expected to force Montar into getting us a ship, but she had been ready. All that junk in the bag. Knowing what ship she wanted. Something was definitely going on, and it had been going on for some time already.

  "Wait," I said. "We don't even know the ship exists and-"

  Montar's Caravel moved. Slightly. A mere shifting. But when the thing shifting is an assault shotgun, you notice.

  Once again, I shut up. Let her talk. Being quiet would get us out of void-land and back to saner territory. If anything on Rimont could be called sane.

  Montar continued in a rapid staccato almost too fast to follow. It was like she'd been reciting this to herself for so long that she didn't have to think about it, just let it pour out of her. I hoped Hao was getting more of it, because I was missing the details, and details are what gets you killed.

  And yet the plan seemed workable. The Belithain was a major ship, larger than a cruiser. The way Montar described it, it was capable of making several hundred c fully loaded, had been the property of some relatives of Montar's who'd run afoul of a patrician on Rimont. They'd been swindled out of their money, and got the ship impounded for unpaid docking fees, then hauled away by Rimont station security. It was legally Montar's ship, but was now docked at a patrician-owned shipyard, racking up charges until the patrician could claim it in lieu of payments.

  Private shipyard. No Rimont security. No Trade Inspectors. Security was shell only. Bypass it, and we could make it to the ship without anyone being the wiser. There, we'd use the hard-coded override access Montar would supply us with, and fly away.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I noticed the word ‘would.’

  "Nothing's free on Rimont, boy," Montar said. "You will do me a favor."

  "What kind of favor?" I said.

  Montar grinned, the kind of grin a void wyrm would make before swallowing your ship.

  "There are private recycling vats connected to the docks," she said. "You will break into them. You will cut open the intake vents, and dump the contents of this bag into them. Once I verify it, the overrides are yours."

  Montar fell silent. My ears kept vibrating with her words, my brain trying to make sense of everything. All I could remember was the final words, about the vats, and dumping a load of old guns into them. She could have dumped that junk into any vats anywhere, or upstream if she'd wanted them in that particular vat. And she was giving us a ship in exchange for hand-delivering them.

  Montar had smiled into the void, and the void had smiled back. Crud.

  She must have seen my mind changing.

  "You have no ship," Montar said. "I have a ship. You will get it, and the family will rest quietly."

  "What fa-" I began, but Hao elbowed me in the ribs, shutting me up. She gave me a glare to rival Montar's.

  "You'd better know what you're doing," I whispered to her, but she didn't reply, merely grabbed the bag and hoisted it over her shoulder with a grunt.

  We nodded at Montar, and exited the storefront by the same door that had gotten blown up less than ten minutes earlier. Apart from two burnt-out wards and some scorch marks, it looked the same as before. Montar knew some half-decent warders, that was for sure.

  "What just happened?" I said, once we were a safe distance away from Montar Trading. I hadn't seen any cameras at the loading dock but that didn't mean they weren't there.

  "She has slipped beyond the dunes," Hao said. "Crudmunching crazy. But that was a station map, and there are access codes written on it."

  "Written access codes?" I said. That made no sense.

  Hao lowered the bag enough that I could look down into it, and unzipped the top, lifting the still rolled-up drawing and smoothing out a piece of the sheet. It crackled softly, old and dry, Hao's finger rasping over it.

  "Blue lines are vectors," she said, pointing to a row of underlined glyphs visible on the outside of the roll. "Those triple letters, those are key settings. A way to transfer an encoding algorithm by vocals. You learn part of it, then someone else learns part, and the recipient knows how to combine the two to decode something."

  "Sounds unsafe," I said. A dollop of lukewarm water splashed down on the back of my head. I slapped it away as best I could. How did they always manage to hit me? I should have brought my hat.

  "It is unsafe," Hao said. "Failure rates must be enormous. But it's a good way of making sure that your codes can't be gotten by plain hacking."

  "Unless they grab the drawn roll and run away with it. What do we do now?" I said. "You remember anything of what Montar said?"

  We came to a street and I glanced both ways before crossing. You never know when a vehicle is going to come barreling down on you. Everything was empty.

  "Most of it," Hao said. "I say we signal the Downbelow-towners and ask them what they think of this. If you approve, captain."

  That last she said with a raised eyebrow, which I'd come to understand as her way of saying that I'd be a crudmunging idiot to do otherwise.

  I'm not, and we had enough helion in our pocket to rent a public com console at an empty cafe.

  The Belithain existed. She was a long-hauler, docked on the second level. Registered for a crew of a hundred, meaning that she'd be a major ship, used to haul a lot of cargo. Not a pusher barge, though. The Belithain was a real hauler, everything stored inside a truly massive hull.

  The registry entry said eight hundred meters, with a three hundred meter cross-section, and eight engines. I did a quick calculation. Large and slow, nowhere near a hundred c even on eight warpstones. But the space would be more than adequate for ten thousand people. They could each get their own swimming pool, with room to spare.

  We'd found a ship. All we needed to do now was dump Montar's guns into the vats and steal it.

  And figure out what those guns meant, before whatever plot Montar had in mind triggered and trapped us inside together with whomever it was she wanted to kill.

  No, not kill. You don't dump a load of guns in the trash if you want to kill someone. Montar wanted revenge. That was the logical explanation. She wanted someone humiliated, or jailed, or deported.

  I tapped the com readout, bringing about the Rimont station public registry.

  Sure enough, the second level docking yard was owned by the Huragian Corporation, which served the Huragian family, which was led by Jarot Huragian the twelfth. Who'd been dockmaster when the Belithain last arrived at Rimont.

  Made sense.

  Jarot swindles Montar's family, impounds the ship. Probably tries to pressure Montar to sign it over. Montar turns stubborn and now the ship remains in dock indefinitely.

  But Montar hadn't wanted the ship.

  That I couldn't figure out. If it was her family's ship, why didn't she want it back?

  Unless it was too close to her past. Maybe it contained too many memories, held too much pain. That might explain why she didn't want it for herself. She just wanted it gone from the Huragians.

  Made sense. But something making sense didn't automatically mean it was true.

  I ran my ideas past Hao. She sipped her glass of complimentary water the cafe had provided her with, and raised both her eyebrows at me.

  "I do engines," she said. "Electronics. The occasional assault cannon. People and pets are the captain's business."

  "I kill people," I said.

  "Still people," Hao replied. "What you do with them is your business. Ask me about engines and you'll get an answer."

  "You're getting voidmunchingly free with the chain of command."

  "Remind me when you find it, captain, and I'll make sure to pay my respects."

  I laughed. Sometimes, all you need is someone who doesn't take you too seriously. If only I could find a swimming pool and a good garlic stir-fry, I'd be set for life.