“It seems you have solved my problem for me,” Arkial observed as she looked into the stasis chamber. Inside, one of the two thugs lay still and serene in death, his features composed and the majority of his wounds hidden beneath the opaque lower part of the chamber. “I owe you a favour.” Four days had passed since they abandoned the search for the statuette and it was only an hour since they had woken her, but she had already showered, eaten and gathered her things, and was ready to leave.

  “Do you know who they were?” Al Hamra asked her. “It’s good to know who we’ve angered.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve no idea. They were likely just local criminals put on my trail, so I guess you might have a little explaining to do to the Syndicate. Though …” she pointed to the pile of mismatched gear they had gathered together from the bodies, “Judging from that it looks like they might’ve been freelancers. Low-grade bounty hunters, maybe? So probably no follow-up.”

  “How did they find you?” He asked. The Syndicate was a Horizon-wide crime organization, said to have its central command on Coriolis station, or at least within the Kua system. It kept mostly to the shadows, avoiding direct confrontation with the Judicators or any of the other factions, but its tentacles were rumored to spread through many aspects of law, business and politics in all the larger worlds of the Third Horizon. Entanglements with the Syndicate were best avoided, and although they did not usually end in death they could be sticky and expensive to extricate oneself from. If the Phoenix of Hamura had attracted Syndicate attention their lives on Coriolis station, indeed on most of the major systems of the Third Horizon, would become complicated.

  She patted the transparent plastic seal of the stasis chamber, smiling grimly. “I’m very good at covering my tracks in the web, captain, but not so good at the physical stuff. There was probably a bulletin out for me.” She ran her hand through her ragged, messy black bob. “I cut my hair when I arrived here but maybe they recognized me anyway. Some kinds of bounty hunters have those facial recognition implants, very hard to elude.”

  Al Hamra nodded recognition of that problem. “Can you tell us who is following you?” He pressed her, but she shook her head.

  “It’s better you don’t know. I was only passing through here, but I suppose my arrival was noticed by someone. I pre-booked my onward passage, so tomorrow they will be looking for me elsewhere. I doubt they will trouble you again, given the nature of the transaction these men signed up to.”

  “Why are you being chased?” Al Hamra asked her. This was their final meeting before she disappeared, and he wanted to be sure they knew as much as she was able to give them.

  “I stole some information from one of the Factions,” she replied. “Best you don’t know which. It’s worthless now but in about a segment’s time it will be worth a small fortune. I plan to auction it, and pay off a lot of my debts if I survive the process. The Faction want it back before then, so I’m on the run. Moving from system to system until they lose my trail.”

  “Did you know we would be ready to help you before you came here?” Dr. Delecta asked her. She was leaning on the central counter of the stasis room, white doctor’s coat open over dark leggings and a kameez that fell to the middle of her broad thighs. By common consent she was the second-in-command to Al Hamra, the position once called First Officer, and so she had joined Al Hamra for this farewell meeting with their first client. She carried a tablet in one hand, but in the Data Djinn’s presence it seemed stubbornly unwilling to work. “A newly-formed crew in a ship we just bought, who arrived here almost when you did with no money and no work. Seems too good to be true.”

  Arkial laughed gently, a rich and melodious sound that fell dead in the cold, clinical expanse of the stasis bay. “I’m a Data Djinn, Banu, not an actual Djinn. Of course I didn’t plan it. I just used the information available to me. It’s what I always do. And now I must move on, before the information about my presence spreads too far. You know how it is with the portals, information takes a week or two to move out of a system, and I need to stay ahead of it.” She stepped away from the stasis bay and picked up the small travel bag she had brought with her to the ship. “By the way, I have a question.”

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  “There’s something you don’t know?” Delecta asked, raising one eyebrow.

  Arkial chuckled at the suggestion of her omniscience. “I am ignorant of matters of the heart, Banu, which is what this concerns. Can I ask you why you named this ship the Phoenix of Hamura? It’s an unlikely name for a luxury yacht.”

  Al Hamra and Dr. Delecta shared a conspiratorial glance, and Al Hamra smiled at the Data Djinn with genuine warmth. “It was a collective decision,” he told her. “We are the only survivors of the last voyage of the Ghazali, which was torn apart with all hands but us in the Hamura system. We barely survived in a small ship that we claimed for salvage. We put that ship as a down-payment on this one, and we wanted to name it in honor of the events that brought us together. But obviously we weren’t going to call it the Ghazali, that name is cursed now. So, since we rose from its ashes in Hamura, that’s the name we chose.” He looked across to Dr. Delecta, who nodded her appreciation of the brevity of his explanation. Everyone knew of the catastrophe that had befallen the Ghazali and its rescuers but only the Firebirds knew what had actually happened, and they had slipped out of the system through its only remaining undamaged Portal before anyone knew they had survived. They did not think anyone would believe the truth about what happened there, and were certainly not interested in telling anyone about the horrors they had witnessed.

  “Well … I imagine that is quite a story.” She placed one hand gently on Al Hamra’s arm and looked up into his gold-flecked, almond-shaped eyes. “I hope some time you have a chance to tell me the whole thing. But now I must go. Remember I owe you a favour.” She drew a small data tag from one of the pockets of her coat and handed it to Al Hamra, who raised an inquisitive eyebrow as he took it.

  “This is the information on your payoff. Oh, and if you need that favour, you can use this. It has an address. Send me a message with a date, a time and a place, and I’ll do the best I can to be there. Make sure to use the word Ghazali once, and only once, in the message, so I know it is you. I will come to find you as close as I can to the date you nominate. Do you understand?”

  Al Hamra and Dr. Delecta nodded, and Arkial shouldered her bag and walked to the door. At the doorway she stopped to look back at them. “Oh and remember, I’m not an actual Djinn, so make sure you give me time to get to wherever you want me to go. I travel a lot!” And with that she gave them a small, limp-wristed wave, and was gone.

  In her absence Dr. Delecta’s tablet inexplicably flickered to life, and she connected the data tag. The screen burst to life with a series of star maps and documents, detailing the information that Arkial had obtained. “Oh, that’s good!” Delecta muttered as she flicked through them. She showed the tablet to Al Hamra. “Have to confirm with Saqr but I think that’s in this system. Rockhome 3, right?”

  Al Hamra nodded agreement. “I think so. What are the parts?” They flicked around the documents a little until they found the details. “Oh, basic life support system components. Nasty!” Anyone who sabotaged the life support system of an asteroid mining colony was truly plumbing the depths of vengeance.

  Nodding agreement, Delecta flicked around a little more. “I wonder why someone would do that? Money?”

  “Maybe not. You know what these small settlements can be like, all kinds of entanglements.”

  “True enough,” Delecta admitted, scanning a little more. “It’s a shame Arkial didn’t bother to hack the colony’s psych reports. Maybe we could guess who did it if we had them.”

  “Who cares?” Al Hamra asked. “We just need to go there when the clock starts ticking and present our conveniently-arranged goods at a more than reasonable price. Speaking of which, did Arkial collect financial reports? Can they afford a good mark-up?”

  Delecta flicked around a little more until she found some tables. “Hmm, I’m not an expert, but …” She pointed to some columns. “Looks good enough. They’ve got spare birr.”

  Al Hamra scanned the documents and nodded. “Let’s get the star-maps to Saqr and the financial details to Olivia and Siladan, just to confirm. Olivia was a colonist, she’ll be able to tell us how much it’s safe to buy, and Siladan can check the figures. We should move fast before they start sending out distress signals.”

  Delecta nodded and closed the tablet. “Gotta be the first vulture at the carcass,” she observed, and they left the stasis room to make their plans.