Conviction by Tammy Salyer Page A

coldest void in the galaxy. She doesn’t struggle. In a second, she’s gone.
    Numb.
    The smuggler rises. “MacCready, bring the case.”
    “Fucking mess,” David says. “What a fucking waste.”
    I seek out his green-blue eyes with mine, wondering what happens next. I had it all figured out, but after this nothing feels like it makes sense, not right now anyway. Maybe not ever.
    The blond smuggler steps up to us and drops a metal case, about the size of an ammo box, at our feet. He turns to Rajcik. “We need to split. She may have had time to warn the ship that’s been moving in from nightside since yesterday. It’s probably her ride.”
    Rajcik nods, then says to David and me, “What’s in that box is for the e-craft. A deal is a deal.” He turns back to the man he’d called MacCready. “You and Ortiz take that one. I’ll fly this. We’ll settle them in the bunker for now. Meet us there.”
    MacCready answers, “Got it,” then gestures to the scarred woman, who follows him to the e-craft.
    Rajcik faces us again. “You have five minutes to get anything you want off that ship.” He pauses and stares acutely into my eyes, as if watching the chaos happening in my mind, and liking what he sees. “Or—you can stay on board and fly with MacCready to our depot. My offer hasn’t expired.” He then gives me that mummy-skull smile again and walks past us up the ramp and into the scout.
    I look at Temple, still kneeling over Drew’s body, his tear-wet face a dead gray color, his eyes haunted and bleary. Like he’s already a ghost.
    A deal’s a deal.
    Squatting, I open the case MacCready had dropped. Inside are several thousand marks of common currency. I scoop out half and walk over to Temple.
    “If you’re going to bury him, you better do it before that Corps ship sends down a patrol. You don’t want to be anywhere near here when they find these bodies.”
    Temple doesn’t acknowledge me.
    I kneel and shove the currency into his hand. “Take this and whatever Rajcik paid you, and take your other kid, take Pete, off this rock. Buy him false citizen papers and find him a way to the Obals. Whatever it takes. You have to make sure this doesn’t happen to him. You got it?”
    His fist tightens around the cash, and slowly his eyes meet mine. He doesn’t speak, but I think he does get it.
    I turn back to David. “I’m going with them.”
    David puts a hand up and rubs his forehead hard, as if he’s trying to wipe out all memory and impressions of everything that has just happened, maybe more. I hear him sigh heavily. He bends over, closes the lid on the currency container, and picks it up. Then he walks up to Temple.
    “Here.” The metal case hits the ground with a dry clunk and falls to its side. “I’m so sorry. Let’s go, Aly.”

13
FLAWS AND CONVICTIONS
    Rajcik’s depot is a remote abandoned mine descending so deeply into the planet’s crust that not even the Corps’s most powerful geophysical spectrometer is going to penetrate. The cold, dark hole is a partial luxury right now, a respite from the hell above, but not the hell inside.
    We’re aboard his flagship, the Temptation . Originally assault ships manufactured for Corps use, the line was decommissioned a few years earlier and all the surplus sold as salvage. Rajcik’s made some modifications and reconfigured the hull’s interior to haul more cargo, also building a quick-launch ejection bay for the shuttle carrying the Nagasaki, the retractable long-range orbital that had turned the security patrol into flesh confetti. Though the Corps had yanked out all the weapon capabilities before selling the ships, Rajcik’s overhaul allows it to fight again.
    David and I haven’t spoken much in the last few hours. The fact that he’s come with me tells me all I need to know about what he’s thinking. We’re sitting in a sectioned-off nook in the cargo hold, killing time with canteens of water that are untouched as Rajcik and his crew decide