Jinx fled A-Deck before Dem could collar her. She ignored her dull headache and the growing tightness in her chest; she wasn't thinking about what had happened to her on the barge. She had limited time before that's all she'd be thinking about.

Hurrying up a set of metal stairs and along a floating walkway, she tuned out the abuse being hurled at port staff from the public concourse below. Blown schedules and unfair dock prioritisation were the last things she gave a damn about, even if her decision to quarantine the Bullhead had made the situation worse, hampering repairs.

Four large roach vessels were now on or orbiting the planet—a number that would have breached treaty rules except the roaches claimed to be on a salvage and rescue mission. What had they lost in the planet's wastes that warranted that kind of response?

She needed details.

After dropping off a sample of her soiled shirt at the materials analysis lab, she headed for the port's Data and Communications Centre. Locating a shabby set of doors marked 'staff only', she pushed through them.

And found herself in synthetic-coffee- and sweat-scented chaos.

The open-plan area was wall-to-wall with arm-waving people and banks of screens. The noise was unusual. On a standard day, people would have been slouched at their workstations messaging silently and occasionally tossing a junk food wrapper at a workmate. Today, people talked directly to one another.

Not a good sign.

Jinx's nerves ratcheted up. Ducking past arguing staff and tech-laden desks, she searched for the one person on Tirus 7 who could get her any data she wanted—legally or illegally. Spotting a shock of ash-blond hair, she headed for it.

Unknown to most, the unruly mop hid impressive implanted tech, the kind only the truly wealthy could acquire. Its owner, Lenton Solaris, had been an elite brat and overachiever in a past life, prior to his father going bankrupt.

Four years on, he slouched in a frayed, taped-up chair in front of budget screens, no evidence of his highbrow education in sight, no sign of any fancy clip-in tech to enhance both his implant and social status. His primary claim to fame was the cold-blooded slaughter of gaming avatars on the local battle sims. A plain white singlet and loose grey pants covered his lanky body. He wore no shoes.

Jinx frowned as she approached. Even for Lenton the outfit was très casual. She reassessed the crappy day Data Coms was having. Her friend had serious bed hair and appeared to be still in his PJs.

"Looking good this morning, Smarty." Following her usual protocol, she backhanded a stale Caf-X cup into a desk-side recyce port and sat on the edge of his desk, avoiding gadgets and snacks. "Broken capillaries and caffeine really bring out the sparkle in your eyes."

"Piss off, Jinx." Those eyes she admired—an intense blue—moved quickly, tracking three screens of reeling data, neurotech enhancing their analysis. "Go harass some lowlifes on C-Deck or something. This prissy academy graduate has a totalled satellite array, malfunctioning sensors, and a priority inventory search to deal with."

"The term you're looking for is 'prissy grad-boy princess'." Jinx recalled their last bloody simulated battle. Her victory speech had been less than complimentary, but Lenton's only real mistake had been to ask her to supply refreshments. The guy owned serious gaming tech, could use it brilliantly—until the tequila came out. "So, you're still pouting, then?"

An elevated digit was her answer.

"I need a favour, Smarty. Don't make me crawl for it. It'll get ugly." She took in her friend's bloodshot eyes again. "Okay, fine, I'll crawl. You are a god among men, a tower of intellect. I worship your five shiny higher degrees and lust after your tight, tight, tight—"

Lenton swung about on his chair to level tired, pissed eyes at her. "How do I get you gone soon as possible?"

"Ground sector three." She got up and faced his screens. "Give me a summary for the last twenty-four hours—ground, aerial, and orbital."

"Why?"

"Ask me again in a minute, after you tell me everything you know."

"I'm drowning in system errors. Why exactly would I help you?"

"Because you love me, duh."

"You're a pathetic dropout with the attention span of a zormet bug."

"Yeah, tell me something I don't know—preferably about sector three." Jinx tapped one of his screens, forcing the analyst to turn back to his data to slap her hand away.

"You know most of our satellites are dead, right? This isn't a damn work tea party we've got going on here."

Jinx jerked her head up to eye the chaotic room then looked back to Lenton as he started dredging up her data. "You don't mean the whole array?"

"Yeah, pretty fucking much. Got hacked into useless pieces of space junk last night. No signals are being received or sent. Repair teams are due up now."

"Shit, I heard there'd been a serious issue, but was just told to expect disruptions to port traffic." She suddenly understood the room's sour scent of stale Caf-X and sweat.

Lenton grunted. " 'Serious' as in we lost control of billions of credits worth of tech. We're pretty much blind and relying on ship-source data."

"What happened?"

"My guess? Fucking scavs. Six months ago, we lost a few satellites and found they'd been hacked then gutted."

"They're getting that bold?" The idea of a criminal crew taking out multiple satellites hitched another knot in Jinx's gut. Port disruptions would just be the start of the mess. "It's a major move taking out a planet's array, even the pathetic one around this rock."

"Yeah, and you'd think the bastards would have enough trashtech to salvage around here without targeting our goddamn functional assets. The void is a dump, and this rock is covered with disused tech and crash carcasses. Why mess with our equipment and piss off the mine corps? Seravo Inc. is already talking about hiring mercs to clear the scum from the local system."

Jinx tapped her teeth then straightened. "I can think of one reason to take out the array: the bastards want us blind. What were the flight readings around the satellites you lost first, just prior to losing contact with the tech?"

"A couple of craft in the area. ID info incomplete—surprise, surprise." Lenton shook his head. "Most of the legit traffic was backed up by the storm and holding in low orbit, waiting for clearance. We haven't had time to work out what vessels might have been involved in the hack. We've been too busy fighting fires and responding to ridiculous demands about getting the long-range coms online."

"Great day for some roaches to land."

"Yeah." Lenton tapped an icon on his far-left screen with a little too much vigour and brought up a time-ordered list of files and graphs. "Okay, it looks like we've got satellite data up to around zero three hundred hours for sector three, and raw ground sensor readings."

Jinx put aside the issue of scavengers for a moment, refocusing on her alien problem. "Show me."

Lenton dredged up a satellite picture unrelenting in its gritty sameness. "That's the most recent image we have from orbit—low-light, obtained during the night, just prior to losing the array. The sector's a massive dust bowl. Only a few roads. Nothing noteworthy."

"Ground sensors?"

"Just those for geo and weather research. Currently, they're reporting normal wind conditions and temperature."

"They log anything of interest over the last twenty-four hours?"

Lenton rolled out the relevant records. "Limited ground traffic. Only a couple of prospector droids in the area. No alerts, apart from storm warnings. The geo sensors logged minor earth tremors, but they're nothing unusual in that sec..." He trailed off, paused to bring up more detailed data. "Huh. We've got a cluster of events at grid sector three delta-eight-zero."

"What sort of events?" Jinx leaned in to skim the sensor readings, getting the gist even as Lenton gave her the dumbed down version he thought suitable for an academic failure.

"One ground sensor reported a dramatic increase in particulates over a short time. Probably a sandstorm—although, look, the wind readings were generally low during that period. There are just a couple of strong gusts recorded. Very strong gusts." He leaned forward, his attention well and truly on his data now. "At about the same time stamp, there was a slight seismic event. A minor tremor. Shallow. Most likely a disruption at the planet's surface. There was also a spike in the ambient temperature. It rose near instantaneously then dissipated over a minute or two."

Jinx reeled through the data, seeing it in her mind now, not the analyst's screens. "There's next to no time between the events. Smarty, if the first gust's point of origin was that seismic event..."

"You're thinking impact and shock wave—an explosion."

"Yeah. It fits."

"If scavs are active in the area that could mean anything—downed tech, a ground attack. That event cluster happened about fifteen minutes after the array went down." Tearing his eyes from his screens, Lenton met her pensive stare. "What put this sector on your radar today?"

Jinx paused a beat before answering. She was most likely looking at a coincidence. The ground sector covered a large patch of the planet's dirt.

She shook her head. "The Xykeree are claiming they need to recover debris from that area. But losing a chunk off their barge wouldn't explain these readings. Also, according to Soh, their ship's externals look intact. This event cluster is either unrelated or the roaches lost something more interesting than a hatch plate out there. Some kind of missile tech might explain the sensor data."

Lenton jammed a hand into his hair and stared at his screens. "The Xykeree? Shit. Tell me we are not about to have armed cybo-bugs crawling all over everything."

"The Bullhead is currently quarantined. If the aliens do get retrieval rights, they'll go straight to their debris then back again via shuttle."

"You sound sure of that."

"Legal and management will overrule some of the current restrictions, but the roaches don't need to be given access to the port or the whole planet, and I don't think they'll want it. The bugs aren't fans, Smarty." The scorp's reaction rose in her mind before she shut it down. "I think humans make them twitchy."

"Wait a sec." Lenton whirled on his chair to face her. "You went on their vessel? You inspected it?"

"Who else does Dem hate that much?"

"Way to bury the lead, Jinx." It should have been flattering how completely the analyst lost interest in his scripts, but having that amount of intellect directed at her made her cringe. "What did you see? What tech were they using? You got video?"

"Senior Analyst Lenton Sebastian Solaris, are you suggesting I'd film a crew without their consent, without justifiable cause, without a warrant?" Jinx lifted her eyebrows. "Wow. I'd love to see the number of knotted knickers in Legal after that."

"Yeah, you're a regular Girl Scout, Jinx. What did you goddamn see?"

She blanked her mind before it could cascade in response to that question. Her heart pounded a little faster. She couldn't afford another serious loss of control. Nor could she afford to tell Lenton everything. He had enough to worry about.

Pushing up her uniform's sleeves, she hid the remaining dried blood on them. "You want a summary? It was dark and it smelled crappy." She held up a hand, silencing his next question. "Alcohol, Smarty, lots and lots of alcohol will be needed before I talk about it."

Lenton eyed her, his vivid stare making her want to squirm; then he relented, leaning back in his busted chair. "In other words, you want to get me drunk again and take advantage."

"You're too pretty for me, but..." She glanced over his lean frame, a much-needed distraction for them both. "I guess I could raise my standards for a night."

"How about lifting them for longer?" One blond eyebrow rose. "What was that last guy? A mech-enhanced cage fighter with puree for brains? You date total losers, Jinx."

"I like my men uncomplicated." Forgettable. Unlikely to give a shit. She killed the thought and turned back to the data on screen. "Those crews you're sending up. Have them avoid sector three for now. This event cluster might have nothing to do with the roaches, but, regardless, they could react badly to anything they perceive as interference."

Lenton's stare grew grim. "They dangerous?"

"They're not friendly—understandable if you believe their story about being attacked by pirates."

"You don't?"

"Let's just say it bugs me that Soh hasn't spotted any external problems, and why would a predator crew attack a large military vessel?"

"Pirates, scavs..." Lenton grimaced. "The roaches claimed to have been attacked in our system by some outlaw group, and we have a hacked array? Could we be looking at the same group of miscreants?"

"They'd have to be serious overachievers." Jinx straightened. "Talk to your team lead. Keep your people clear. Until you geniuses get the long-range coms online and we can get a military presence here, we can't afford any misunderstandings."

"Tacha is going to bludgeon me with her data pad when I bring this to her." Lenton swung back to his screens. "The last thing any of us need right now is to have to dodge pissed off aliens and outlaws while trying to fix multiple outages and—" He stopped, peered closer at some data.

Jinx leaned over his shoulder. "What is it?"

"Hang on." He brought up a graphic showing what looked to be multiple vessel trajectories. "Oh, this you're going to love."

"Please, make my damn day."

Lenton expanded the view and tapped a vessel symbol with an unfamiliar call sign. "We've been scraping traffic data from inbound and outbound vessels to supplement our coverage while the satellites are down. A local ore carrier has just reported that one of the three Xykeree ships in local space has gone into stationary orbit over ground sector three, grid sec delta-eight-zero."

"Shit. So much for a coincidence."