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relish.
    â€œWe gave them better than they’d have offered us.” Dead revulsion crawled over him, imagining what Silence might have in store for any captives she took. Death wasn’t always easy or quick, after all.
    â€œCome,” Keelah said. “We don’t have long before these two are missed. Let’s find that RC unit.”

3
    Scavenger Hunt
    While Jael and Keelah were gone, Dred felt the walls closing in. The space they’d chosen was barely sufficient for their number, but it was well hidden and defensible. She inspected all the machines to see if there was anything worthwhile, but she didn’t know enough about ship mechanics to be sure. Plus, stripping some vital part in here might compromise the station’s systems, killing them before they were ready to take off.
    Mary, I hate feeling useless.
    So she was beyond relieved when the two returned . . . but Jael was
carrying
RC-17. That didn’t bode well.
    He handed it to her before climbing out of the wall panel, and she checked it for damage. The scorch marks on the casing looked like it had been shot, but she didn’t think any of the prisoners, apart from her crew, had managed to steal rifles or weapons. Dred turned an icy look onto Vost and his men. The shorter merc, Duran, shifted uneasily. Both the grunts were younger than the commander, probably by as much as ten turns. Redmond had curly black hair and medium brown skin while the other was pale and freckled. Duran seemed to be the youngest of everyone, and he exuded a boyish air that was probably what drew Calypso.
    â€œSomething you want to tell me?” she prompted.
    â€œYeah, about that . . .”
    â€œSpit it out,” Vost ordered.
    â€œSorry, sir. When you sent us out to gather supplies a few days back, we ran across that unit. I thought it was scouting for our location, spying on us, so I blasted it.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you say something before?” Jael demanded.
    Duran gave him a dark look. “You know how many cleaning bots I’ve run across up in this orbiting scrapyard? How would I know the one I shot is the exact droid you’re looking for?”
    Tam shifted through the bodies crowded around the broken unit to take a look, and Dred handed the metal carcass to him. With Ike gone, he likely knew the most about maintenance and repair. A few minutes later, he let out a sigh. “The battery’s completely fried. I’ll need to cannibalize another unit to get this one operational again.”
    â€œHow’s the memory core?” Martine asked.
    That was the key bit. If that was damaged, too, they could forget about ever finding Ike’s stashes. And that might mean the end of their escape plans. Dred leaned in, along with everyone else, until Tam motioned them to get out of his light. Sheepish, she fell back a step.
    He poked around a little more before pronouncing, “It looks intact, but I won’t know for sure until 17 powers up.”
    â€œSo before we start scavenging for ship parts,” Redmond muttered, “we have to find droid parts.”
    Calypso sighed at him. “Why is your brain so limited? There are nine of us. It makes more sense to figure out what we need, then divide into search teams.”
    â€œLike a scavenger hunt,” Martine said.
    Jael offered a twisted smile. “Serious sodding hunt, bright eyes. The prize is freedom, the penalty for failure is execution.”
    â€œI always liked a challenge,” Vost put in.
    Since the plan made sense, nobody argued with Calypso. Instead, with heavy input from Tam and Vost, she created a master list for the ship and a shorter one devoted to RC-17. Possibly fixing the bot would lead them to some caches that would tick some items off the other list, but they couldn’t count on that. Dred knew that Ike had been a genius, but he couldn’t predict the future. So his lifetime of accrued treasures would probably