Chapter 27 · The Debt Comes Due

The alarm cuts through everything. Not the breach alarm. Not the proximity warning. This one's older, deeper in the hull's registry. A forty-second interval pulse that means someone just filed a legal claim beacon.

Briar yanks the jack out of my skull. I'm still tangled in the memory of my own handwriting, that sorry scrawled at the bottom of a four-hundred-year bill of sale. My head's splitting. The contract timer's still counting in the corner of my vision. One minute eighteen seconds.

"They're not cutting in," Briar says. She's already moving, pulling her sidearm, checking the charge. "They're filing. Vey called them."

I try to stand. My legs don't answer right away. The new personality's still fighting the old one for motor control, and neither of us is winning. "He wouldn't. The contract doesn't need—"

"He's making sure." She hauls me up by the shoulder. "If the hunters board before twenty-two hundred, they can claim you as contested salvage. Voids the auto-transfer clause. He loses the ship."

The comm crackles. Vey's voice, calm as vacuum. "All personnel, stand by for customs inspection. Do not interfere with incoming enforcement craft. This is a contractual matter."

Briar's jaw tightens. "Customs.