Vera woke with Ryker’s name warm in her mouth and one hand between her thighs.
Morning had reached Ebon Steed only by agreement with the ship’s internal clocks. Beyond the narrow cabin viewport, the skeletal frame of an abandoned relay moon blocked half the stars, its ruined transmitters washing the ceiling in slow bands of crimson light. Vera lay beneath a gray blanket she remembered buying on Pelion because Ryker complained the regulation bedding scratched his ass. Nine years had softened the weave, but it still carried his cedar soap beneath the warm-metal smell of the ship. She’d spent the night in his bed, alone, and had apparently managed to dream up a considerably more satisfying arrangement.
The cabin had changed enough to prove Ryker lived here, but not enough to hide that it had once held them both. Her reading lamp wore a new amber shade. The wall still bore a dent from a smuggled fertility idol and a landing neither of them had been sober enough to attempt. Her dresses and knives were gone, all but one shirt at the back of the locker, beside a small silver star. The same one, he’d said last night. She’d slept in this room for years, usually naked and occasionally upside down.
Vera dressed in the skirt of yesterday’s leather and the white lace shirt from the locker. Repairing her hair took less time than deciding the previous night required no awkward discussion. She and Ryker had done more than kiss without turning breakfast into a tribunal, and she saw no reason to behave like civilized people now. The trouble was that she’d stopped him because she wanted more than his body, then told him so while his mouth was still wet from hers. Wine had much to answer for.
When she opened the cabin door, Ryker sat on the deck opposite, one long leg stretched across the passage. A mug steamed beside his boot. His unbuttoned shirt exposed the hard slope of his chest and the old rib scar she had once followed with her tongue until he forgot how to speak. The romance novel open in his calloused hands showed two nearly naked people embracing beneath a violent purple moon while a temple burned behind them.
His green eye lifted first. The cybernetic one followed with a mechanical click as it traveled over her face, her throat, and the white lace drawn tight across her breasts. Whatever measurements it took, his expression refused to share them. “You were awake for forty-three minutes.”
Vera looked at the folded blanket behind him, the empty mug beside the full one. “Did you sleep in the passage?”
“I slept.” He held out the coffee, keeping one finger between the pages of his book.
She accepted the mug and glanced at the voluptuous heroine, who appeared to be searching for a lost moon temple in a dress that wouldn’t survive a single staircase. “Does that eye spy through doors now? Or were you merely occupied with serious scholarship?”
“She packed badly.” Ryker snapped the novel shut around his finger. “And you pace when you’re lying to yourself.”
The first swallow was dark, thick, and sweet, exactly how she liked it. His memory could retain a sword form after seeing it once and the precise amount of sugar preferred by a woman who had abandoned him nine years ago. Vera drank again while he watched her, then he asked, “What did you hide aboard my ship, Vera?”
She lowered the mug, letting the warmth seep into her fingers. “You lasted longer without asking than I expected.”
“I made coffee first.” He rose, tucking the trashy novel into his back pocket. At his full height, he crowded the corridor without moving an inch closer, his broad shoulders nearly brushing both walls. “It bought you forty-three minutes.”
“Forty-five, if you count the time it takes to drink it.” She handed back the mug and started for the lower deck before he could mention the kitchen table. Ryker followed at a distance just considerate enough to annoy her, his bare feet quiet against the stairs. Ebon Steed knew his weight; the deckplates hummed differently around him.
The cargo hold had acquired new storage cages, a scarred workbench, and painted miniatures drying beneath a heat lamp. Tiny warriors stood among the pigments, each no taller than Vera’s thumb and armed with an absurd broadsword. One wore a red cloak shaded from wine-dark folds to scarlet, with the buckles on his boots picked out in tarnished gold. She bent over the bench to inspect him. “You painted his buttons.”
“Clasps,” Ryker corrected, stepping up behind her. He leaned close enough that his open shirt brushed her shoulder as he inspected the figure. “Buttons would be historically inaccurate for that sector.”
“The sword is taller than he is.” Vera turned her head to look at him and found his mouth within easy reach of hers.
“Heroic scale.” His breath touched her ear as he leaned a little farther over the bench. She could have kissed him without moving her feet. Instead, she straightened and crossed to the storage wall, leaving him with his historically accurate clasps.
The panel she wanted hid behind a rack of coiled cables. Ryker took one end without being asked, and his attention sharpened when she pressed her palm against an ordinary rivet. A narrow section of the bulkhead released with a pneumatic sigh, followed by a complaining chime from the ship’s maintenance system.
He stared into the black seam. “You cut a hole into my ship.”
“I improved your storage capabilities.” Vera shoved her arm into the opening while he glared at the back of her head. “Before Tern, since I can hear that question forming in your jaw.”
The compartment was deeper than her forearm and lined in thick insulation cloth. For one sick instant, her fingers swept through empty air before brushing heavy oilskin and the smooth chill of metal beneath it. She drew out the long, slender bundle and laid it across the workbench, scattering a line of paintbrushes arranged strictly by size. Ryker stayed beside the displaced cable rack while she unwrapped it. He gave her the privacy of silence, which felt far more intimate than comfort and twice as dangerous.
The Cane had belonged to Kallipos for longer than Vera had been alive. Its black shaft narrowed toward a heavy silver tip, fine blue veins running through the metal like light under deep water. A plum-sized sapphire formed the handle, glittering flecks drifting inside like a drowned constellation. Kallipos had carried it into negotiations and rapped the knuckles of anyone foolish enough to reach for Vera without permission.
On quiet nights aboard Neptune’s Nemesis, it rested across his knees while he taught her dead trade languages, court manners, forgery, and the small arts by which a frightened child survived among pirates. He’d complained that she was making the lettering too neat. No customs clerk, he insisted, cared enough about his work to produce such beautiful lies. She’d have given a great deal to have that argument again. Others remembered his fangs and the blue blaze of his cutlass. Vera remembered claw-tipped fingers easing a knot from her hair while his voice, deep as an alien sea, carried another fairy legend toward its bloody ending.
The last time she’d seen the Cane in his hand, alarms screamed and the stars beyond the bridge burned red with weapons fire. Kallipos had shoved it into her arms, turned toward the boarding party, and filled the corridor with blue flame. Keep what is beautiful, little thief. Sell what is merely expensive. Vera traced a deep scratch beside the sapphire where one of his heavy rings had struck it during lessons. Grief had aged inside her, losing its first raw savagery but none of its teeth.
She had meant to carry the Cane onto Tern, but the job required a customs scan. She’d hidden it aboard Ebon Steed and promised to retrieve it when Ryker returned. By the time she reached Nysa’s moon, he and his ship were gone. Her thumb passed over the old scratch. “You never found it.”
“I generally avoid cutting holes in my own walls to look for stolen contraband.” Ryker’s gaze moved from the Cane to the open compartment. “How long was it in there, Vera?”
“You’re welcome, by the way.” He came closer, leaving the cable rack against the wall.
“Kallipos?” He stopped beside the bench without touching the artifact.
Vera nodded. Ryker studied the compartment, then the preserved wrapping beneath her hands. “You put it aboard before the Tern blockade.”
“I did.” She folded the oilskin around one hand as his gaze returned to her.
“And you never told me.” His voice had gone cold.
“You were carrying me through a corporate customs blockade, Ryker. If you didn’t know it was aboard, no one could force a confession out of you.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.” He braced a hand on the workbench beside the Cane, close enough for her to see the white line of an old sword scar across his knuckles.
“It was the last thing he put in my hands!” Vera pulled the oilskin free of her fingers. “I protected it, and I kept you out of a smuggling charge.”
“You decided what I was allowed to know on my own ship, and then you called the lie ‘protection’ after the danger passed.”
“Would you prefer I call it strategy?” She lifted the Cane.
“I’d prefer you stop pretending a clever name changes what you did.”
The argument reached back toward Tern and nine years of unanswered messages. “We’re finished discussing it.”
“We haven’t discussed a single damn thing for nine years.” Ryker remained in the narrow aisle between the workbench and the cable rack. Leaving meant passing close enough to brush his shirt. “You can spare me another hour.”
“I could.” She turned toward the stairs as he reached past her for the rack. His arm swept across her path, and she brought the Cane up between them. Ryker leaned away from the silver tip with a swordsman’s instant reflex. The blow missed his chin, but the sapphire handle struck the iron edge of the workbench with a crack that rang through the hold.
A jagged fracture split the sapphire from base to crown, cleaving the drowned constellation in two. Vera caught the damaged stone between her palms. “Oh, no. No. No, no, no.”
Ryker bent over it, his shoulder pressing against hers. “Let me see.”
“It hit the bench because you moved your head!” She drew the Cane against her chest as he reached toward the fracture.
“I’m fond of where my head is attached.” His fingers hovered near hers, large, scarred, and infuriatingly careful. “Vera, let me look.”
The blue veins along the shaft flared. An invisible touch slid beneath Vera’s leather skirt, beginning at her knee and traveling with exquisite patience along the inside of her thigh. She slapped at the empty air, but the fingers continued upward, finding bare skin high on her thigh and stroking once with enough precision to rip a gasp from her throat. The cracked sapphire pulsed again, and Ryker jerked beside her. His hand clamped around the bench, the muscles in his exposed stomach tightening beneath his open shirt. Whatever had touched Vera had found him too, and for one wicked second she wanted to know where.
Metal segments shifted under her fingers with smooth, expensive clicks. The black shaft shortened, the silver tip divided into three flexible branches, and a velvet ring unfolded beside two curved attachments. A narrow metallic piece began vibrating with such cheerful determination that Vera nearly dropped the apparatus. Ryker studied it with the grave attention he usually reserved for armed opponents. “Kallipos carried that in public?”
“It was a cane!” She held it farther from her body as one of the attachments curled toward her.
“It has higher ambitions.” Ryker pointed at the branches. “State dinners. At least one royal funeral.”
None of this had been visible when she wrapped it in oilskin. Vera was certain of that, though certainty seemed a poor defense against the device vibrating in her hands. A woman’s breathless moan issued from the Cane, and Ryker’s cybernetic eye clicked three times as he looked at Vera. The moan deepened, joined by a man offering inventive encouragement in Old Celestial. Neon blue light burst from the broken sapphire, flooding the cargo wall with an enormous projection of six jeweled people enjoying a sunken bath, several silk ribbons, and one another.
Ryker reached through the light for the markings along the Cane’s shaft. His hand passed through a projected blue thigh and emerged between a pair of silver breasts. “How do you turn this damn thing off?”
The velvet ring snapped around Vera’s wrist, tightening with a plush sigh. She pulled against it while the device swung from her trapped arm. “My past experience with this heirloom is no longer relevant!”
“It’s your heirloom!” Ryker caught the shaft before one of the vibrating attachments could reach her skirt.
“Then show some respect for the dead and stop fondling it!” Vera gripped the shaft below his hand, keeping the broken sapphire upright. On the wall, a golden, muscular man reclined naked across a floating couch while three attendants demonstrated uses for the device that she would have preferred to study without her former lover beside her. Ornate script unfurled above the couch in a shower of gold sparks: WELCOME, HONORED GUEST, TO AUREX’S PRIVATE ORCHARD OF DELIGHT.
The vibration increased, traveling through the velvet ring and up Vera’s arm. She pressed her thighs together as the golden man arched on his couch. “There!” Ryker leaned across her to reach a blue stud beneath the sapphire, his chest pressing against her back. His skin was warm through the lace, and she could smell the coffee on his breath. When he punched the stud, the holographic man’s voice grew louder.
Vera bit the inside of her cheek against the vibration. “A triumph of engineering, Starshadow.”
Ryker tried a silver inset switch farther down the shaft. The padded ring rotated around her wrist while a flexible branch curled toward her skirt. She caught it with her free hand. “You made it spin.”
“I can see that, Vera!” He bent to examine another switch, his arm still around her as he held the Cane steady.
“Perhaps we should establish what that one does before you make me airborne.” She turned the shaft toward him, and his next attempt released a warm spray of perfumed mist over them both. Night-blooming jasmine steeped in expensive liquor filled the hold. Vera’s white lace darkened where it clung to her breasts; Ryker’s shirt settled against the hard planes of his chest. His cheeks flushed beneath his copper beard, and she might have enjoyed the discovery more if the golden hologram hadn’t rolled over and drawn an attendant into a position she knew intimately.
The workbench against her hips made the memory immediate: Ryker lifting her onto it when the paint jars had been ammunition tins, cold metal under her bare skin, his braids over her shoulder while his mouth worked lower. She remembered his hands spreading her thighs and how gently he’d held her after making her scream. His green eye met hers through the blue light, then lowered to the wet lace. Vera watched him look. Neither of them moved to press another control.
Her nipples tightened beneath the damp shirt. His gaze stayed there, and she let him have the view while the device hummed between them. She knew what he could do with the hand braced beside her hip. The memory was clear enough to make her shift against the bench, bringing her thigh against his. When he looked up, she held his eye. “The lower switch,” she said, her voice rough.
He reached past her hand, his thumb dragging along the inside of her wrist before he found the toggle and pushed it down. The moaning stopped, the metal branches sagged, and the bathers vanished, leaving a field of projected blue stars on the wall. The velvet ring loosened enough for her to pull her wrist free. Ryker’s fingers closed around it as she did, resting against the skin the padded ring had warmed. In the quiet, the ship’s engines seemed indecently loud.
“Kallipos knew what this was,” he said.
Kallipos had possessed a locked private chamber aboard Neptune’s Nemesis that Vera had been forbidden to enter under threat of bilge filtration for a month. She looked from the drooping attachments to Ryker’s hand around her wrist. “I think I may owe him a posthumous apology for several things I said about that room.”
“Only several?” His mouth bent up at one corner. Vera turned her wrist in his grip, and he released it so she could rotate the Cane. The star field wheeled with the sapphire handle, thin lines flashing between nine points and disappearing when her hand stopped. She turned it back; the pattern returned, though the fractured stone sent tremors through the light.
Ryker shifted beside her, his attention on the damaged handle tapping an uneven sequence against her palm. Each time a sickly green star appeared, the vibration repeated. “Haptic script,” he murmured, covering her hand with his. Sword families had preserved tactile languages long after most frontier worlds abandoned them, passing coded messages through physical pressure when battlefields were too loud for voices.
“How old?” Vera watched his fingers answer each broken pulse against hers, firm and exact.
“Very. Turn the sapphire slowly.” He steadied her hand as she obeyed, and the scattered lines held their shape. One green star swelled among eight white ones; Old Celestial script gathered beneath it, wavering wherever the crack interrupted the projection. Vera read the first symbol while Ryker supplied what the fracture swallowed through the pressure of his fingers.
“Where dead stars bear fruit…” She pressed the two halves of the sapphire together as the last symbols broke apart. Ryker tightened his hand around hers to stabilize the stone. They stood shoulder to hip, his breath moving the damp hair beside her temple, until the words sharpened. “Take only the poisoned one.”
The map folded inward and began to loop. Vera recognized the crooked arrangement of nine stars from forbidden navigation archives. Every version marked it as an extreme space hazard. Several marked it with literal skulls. “The Gravity Orchard.”
Ryker looked from the green star to the transformed device drooping between their joined hands. “Aurex the Great owned this?”
“He had access to it.” Vera eased the lower toggle farther down. With one last shiver, the attachments folded away and the black shaft lengthened into an elegant Cane. The velvet ring disappeared into the metal, leaving the sapphire cracked and the map turning above Ryker’s shoulder. “The Orchard was one of Aurex’s private estates. It vanished from commercial routes after he disappeared. Ships that go looking for it today find only dead suns, broken gravity, or nothing at all.”
“Comforting.” Ryker loosened his hold on her hand, examining the restored shaft.
“I thought so.” Vera laid the Cane on the oilskin. The same scratch marked the sapphire beside its new fracture. Kallipos had carried this through wars and mutinies, then left her both the Cane and Neptune’s Nemesis. He’d probably have laughed himself sick.
She folded the oilskin around the shaft, leaving the damaged handle exposed so the map stayed on the wall, and tucked the bundle against her side. “I’m going.”
“On whose ship?” Ryker folded his arms, the wet linen stretching across his chest.
Vera glanced at the tiny figurines beneath their lamp, the open compartment in the wall, and the poisoned star over his shoulder. “The convenient one.”
“Ebon Steed goes where I take her.” His eyes followed the bundle as she adjusted it against her hip.
“Then take her to the Gravity Orchard.” She faced him across the aisle with the Cane under her arm and the oilskin dripping jasmine onto his deck.
“Refreshingly straightforward.” He looked at the spreading drops. “You could try asking politely.”
“I could.” Vera stepped around him and started for the stairs. He spoke her name before she reached the first step, and she looked back. His red beard failed to hide the beginning of a smile.
“If that thing starts moaning in the middle of the night, it sleeps in your cabin.” He nodded toward the bundle beneath her arm.
Vera let her gaze travel down his damp shirt, over the leather stretched across his thick thighs, then back to his green eye. “Jealous?”
“Only of the noise.” His eye held hers long enough to make the lie interesting before he turned toward the starmap. Vera waited at the foot of the stairs while he took down the coordinates, then carried Kallipos’s gift upstairs. Behind her, Ryker began plotting their course into the dead stars.