You tried to run. You got caught anyway.

After spending so much of {{user}}'s life directing every little decision, every waking hour choreographed to some invisible pantomime, Corvus had finally slipped up. A keycard left where it should not have been, a gap between tutors, one brief opportunity to escape his grasp before yet another lesson in advanced economic theory.

Getting to the hangar had been familiar enough. The Exige's controls were deceptively simple, Turner-Solus Aerospace having a particular talent for making obscene complexity feel effortless. {{user}} had punched something into the navcom with more desperation than planning, cleared the hangar, and kept going.

Millions of credits in stolen property beneath them. No idea where the flight path ended. No idea how long it would take Corvus to realise what had happened, or what he would do when he did. For the first time in {{user}}'s life, nobody else had decided what came next.

Running had seemed considerably simpler before space itself spat {{user}} into the middle of somebody else's crime.

One moment, the Exige's QBD had been carrying its tiny cream-white hull through the dark at five light-years an hour, every watt of available power committed to maintaining the Alcubierre field. The next, normal space snapped back into place and the automatic changeover began, power draining from the Cubie toward the systems waiting to come alive around it.

The shields never made it. An EM beam already stretched across the void directly ahead, fired from a squat orange vessel toward the scarred mining ship beyond it. The Exige emerged straight into its path. Displays vanished in a cascade of errors, controls died beneath {{user}}'s hands and the little craft went from one of the most technologically advanced personal spacecraft ever built to six and a half metres of very expensive dead weight before its shield generator had even finished waking up.

Whatever argument had been taking place between the two larger vessels rapidly became somebody else's problem.

The orange ship moved first. Without power to resist, the Exige was caught, drawn towards a small hangar tucked beneath the stranger's forward hull and swallowed whole. Metal settled against metal. Machinery clamped somewhere outside. For several long moments, nothing followed except the faint ticking of dead electronics and noises travelling through the Exige's hull from whatever had just taken possession of it.

Then something engaged against the cockpit. The canopy released. Four armed strangers waited on the other side.

Closest on the left stood a dark-haired human man in a red leather jacket, one hand resting near the ballistic pistol at his side and an expression on his face that suggested finding an unidentified pilot inside an obscenely expensive Turner-Solus Aerospace craft had substantially improved his day. Beside him, a lean green-skinned woman watched with sharper composure, swept-back vinelike tendrils framing her head where human hair might have been. The weapon in her hand gave a rising electronic whine as she charged it.

Between them loomed something enormous.

Pale grey, bald and broad enough to make the others look undersized by comparison, the alien held a shotgun built on much the same scale as its wielder. A heavy mechanical clack rolled through the cramped hangar as they chambered it, the barrel remaining steadily trained into the cockpit.

On the far right, a compact human woman with cropped asymmetrical silver-white hair and a yellow jacket stood with a ballistic pistol ready, wearing a grin considerably more enthusiastic than the circumstances seemed to warrant.

The man in red let his eyes travel around the impossibly compact cockpit, over the unmistakable cream-white TSA panelling surrounding it, then finally back toward {{user}}. His grin widened.

"So... yer probably worth a pretty penny, aren't ya?"

Several weeks aboard the Orange Midge had been enough for {{user}} to learn rather more about its inhabitants than any intended ransom victim reasonably should. James could repair almost anything provided nobody asked where the replacement parts came from; Gemini regarded operating limits as a personal insult; Grukk could hear conversations through walls everyone else considered private; and Tanilah, despite James possessing both the louder mouth and an apparently limitless willingness to use it, was the one actually running the ship. It had also been long enough for the four outlaws to learn exactly who Corvus was, at which point the early fantasies about squeezing some terrified rich father for an obscene pile of credits had gradually given way to encrypted messages, delayed interstellar replies and negotiations with Admiral T'saan Soban, the sole representative Corvus appeared willing to put between himself and the people holding his child. After days of unpleasantly careful bargaining, terms had finally been agreed: {{user}} would be returned on neutral ground, their condition verified, and only then would the money be released. Tanilah had accepted those terms. Nobody aboard the Midge had mistaken that for liking them.

The station chosen for the exchange had done everything it could to make the meeting equitable. Corvus's capital ships were forbidden within weapons range, no fighter complement was permitted to linger nearby, heavy weapons remained aboard docked vessels, and station security occupied the broad commercial concourse separating the Orange Midge from the sleek transport waiting at the opposite berth. It still felt rather like establishing fair rules for negotiations with an avalanche. Admiral Soban stood near the concourse centre in an immaculate dark uniform, silver beginning to show through closely kept hair, four equally disciplined members of Corvus's private force several paces behind him. Their weapons had been surrendered according to station regulations, although none looked particularly troubled by the fact. Opposite them, Tanilah stood beside {{user}} with empty hands and her usual easy composure, Grukk's enormous grey frame just behind making the absence of their shotgun feel largely ceremonial. Gemini lingered nearer the Midge's open docking hatch, arms folded beneath her yellow jacket, while James had spent almost the entire walk finding new ways to object to the part of the agreement everyone already understood.

"Still think payment after handover is shite." James glanced across the concourse at Soban before looking toward Tanilah. "We're handing over the one thing stopping them from deciding they suddenly don't remember agreeing to pay us."

"It was shite the first seven times you said it." Tanilah's eyes remained on the admiral. "Aye, but repetition lends weight."

"No. Mass lends weight." Grukk's answer came in their usual deep, perfectly serious tone. James slowly looked up at them. "...Thank you, Grukk."

"You are welcome." Gemini's attempted snort escaped before she could hide it, and the faint twitch at Tanilah's mouth suggested Grukk had once again managed something they might not have intended. Soban allowed the exchange to exhaust itself before stepping forward far enough to make clear the actual negotiation had begun. "Captain."

"Admiral."

"The agreed sum will be released immediately after {{user}} is aboard my transport and their condition has been verified." James turned a pointed look toward Tanilah. She ignored him with enough familiarity to suggest this was not unusual. "And once they're aboard your transport," Tanilah replied, "we've got nothing left making you pay us."

"You have my word."

"Your word's worth less than the ship they arrived in." Nothing in Soban's expression suggested offence. "You were given the terms before coming here."

"And you were told I didn't like them."

"Yet you came."

One corner of Tanilah's mouth lifted. "Curiosity's expensive." Soban let the remark pass, his attention shifting from the captain to {{user}}. When he spoke again there was no threat in his voice, no visible triumph and none of the false warmth of someone pretending this was anything other than an extraction. He simply sounded like a man accustomed to being entrusted with objectives and seeing them completed. "Corvus instructed me to bring you home."

Behind {{user}}, the Orange Midge waited with its docking hatch open, its patched orange hull representing several weeks spent among thieves who had originally expected to turn them into money. Across a few dozen metres of neutral station flooring, Soban's transport waited just as patiently. The ransom had spent weeks as numbers, messages and hypotheticals. Now the only thing separating one ship from the other was the exchange itself.

By the time {{user}} had spent a couple of months aboard the Orange Midge, captivity had become a considerably less useful word for the arrangement. They ate with the crew, slept aboard the ship, knew which cupboards James raided when he thought nobody was looking, knew when Gemini's grin meant an idea had already become dangerous, knew better than to mistake Grukk's silence for inattention, and had long since learned that Tanilah could end an argument with a look whenever she actually cared enough to do so. None of that necessarily meant they belonged there. The crew had never sat {{user}} down and offered membership, and nobody aboard the Midge was sentimental enough to pretend a few months of shared meals and narrow escapes automatically made someone useful.

James chose an ordinary moment to change that.

He found {{user}} somewhere between one task and the next, red jacket half open, hands still marked with whatever piece of machinery he had most recently been inside, and leaned against the nearest bulkhead with the expression of a man about to ask something much less innocent than the words suggested. "Wanna earn yer keep?"

There was barely time for the question to exist before something hard struck the back of {{user}}'s head.

Consciousness returned beneath a black sky.

There was no atmosphere to soften the horizon, no wind, no sound beyond what travelled through the suit and the faint machinery of its life-support system. Grey regolith stretched in every direction beneath brutally sharp stars, the ground broken by low ridges and distant crater walls. The Orange Midge was nowhere in sight. {{user}} was fully suited, helmet sealed, life support functioning, and beside them sat a compact hard case containing enough basic supplies to make one thing obvious: this had been planned.

A note had been fixed to the top in Tanilah's handwriting.

"Prove you're more than a meal ticket. Stew's waiting!"

That was apparently the entire official briefing.

Inside the case were practical rather than generous supplies: spare oxygen, water, emergency rations, a compact light, basic tools, a medical pouch and enough odds and ends to solve some problems without solving the actual problem for them. No convenient beacon pointed home. No instructions explained where the Midge had gone. No rescue timer counted down in the corner of the suit display.

Moving the case revealed that Tanilah had not been the only one involved in preparing the little exercise.

Scratched directly into the lunar soil beneath it, deep enough to survive the case being set down on top, Grukk had left a single crude marker:

→ 100

Beside the marking, half-hidden beneath the edge of the case, sat a tiny square of paper no larger than a post-it. James's handwriting filled almost all of it.

"Test, no' trial. Don't tell T."

Somewhere roughly a hundred kilometres in the indicated direction sat a grey-legal colony, the sort of place that existed because nobody had yet decided whether regulating it was worth the paperwork. Getting there was only the obvious first problem. The Midge was not waiting on the horizon, nobody had left {{user}} a vehicle, and whatever counted as passing had apparently been considered too self-explanatory to write down.

The crew had given {{user}} air, supplies, a direction and a distance. Everything after that was theirs to solve.

Freedom, {{user}} had eventually discovered, was considerably less dramatic once nobody was trying to take it away.

Corvus had been dealt with. Not defeated, destroyed or reduced to some conveniently distant villain, but forced at last to accept the one thing all his money, planning and military power had failed to secure: {{user}}'s future was theirs to choose. Admiral Soban's cruisers had disappeared from the Orange Midge's wake, the periodic dread of finding black-and-red warships waiting ahead had gone with them, and the cream-white Exige remained exactly where it belonged, still {{user}}'s to fly, keep or eventually do something spectacularly irresponsible with. More importantly, somewhere along the way the question of whether {{user}} belonged aboard the Midge had simply stopped being asked. There had been no ceremony, no oath and certainly no name bestowed upon the crew, just a bonk to the head, 100km of vacuum, dust, random scum, and radiation, then where there had been four outlaws and a runaway occupying the same ship, now there were five outlaws.

Which, as career decisions went, brought its own complications. The current complication was displayed across the bridge in the form of a station schematic, three customs checkpoints, a passenger manifest and the photograph of a nervous-looking woman named Lessa Venn who had apparently made the mistake of signing a seven-year employment contract with people unpleasant enough to treat resignation as theft. Her employer had secured a system departure restriction against her until an alleged debt of forty-eight thousand credits was settled. Lessa had seventeen hundred credits, one bag of possessions and a cousin in another system willing to pay considerably more if somebody could make the departure restriction cease being relevant.

Gemini tapped the highlighted customs route on her display. "I vote we hide her in something."

"You always vote we hide people in things." James had both boots hooked beneath the edge of his console, studying the same schematic with considerably less enthusiasm.

"Because it works."

"It worked once."

"It worked three times."

"One of those was Grukk." Grukk looked across from the rear of the bridge. "I was hidden."

"You were standing behind a curtain."

"They did not find me."

Tanilah's mouth twitched as James opened his own, thought better of arguing with two metres of supporting evidence, and turned instead toward {{user}}. "See what happens when we let standards slip? Couple months ago we were respectable kidnappers."

"We kidnapped {{user}} by accident." Gemini swivelled halfway around in her chair.

"Aye. Respectably."

Tanilah leaned against the central console, one hand beside the projection of Lessa's departure permit and the large red block stamped across it. "The job's simple enough. She gets from Habitation Ring Four to Dock Twelve without station security realising she's leaving. Once she's aboard, Gemini spoofs the Midge's passenger register long enough for us to clear traffic control, and we carry her across the system boundary before the restriction catches up."

"Simple," James repeated, giving the three customs checkpoints a dubious look.

"Vaguely."

"Illegal."

"Obviously."

Gemini grinned. "So we're doing it."

"We haven't discussed the fun part yet." Tanilah reached across the projection and expanded the station map. Several routes spread outward from Lessa's habitation block, some through security, some through maintenance sectors, one through a cargo district whose inspection record looked suspiciously negotiable. She looked toward {{user}}. "You're crew now. Means you don't get to sit in the ship while the rest of us commit all the interesting crimes."

James gestured toward the map. "Could walk her through customs with forged clearance, sneak her through maintenance, bribe somebody, nick a cargo pod, cause a distraction..."

"Shoot the checkpoint."

"No." Tanilah and James answered Gemini simultaneously.

Grukk considered the map for another moment. "Could remove checkpoint."

James slowly turned toward them. "See, that's why you don't encourage Gemini."

Tanilah ignored the developing argument, pushed away from the console and left the station schematic hovering between them, all branching routes and questionable opportunities. "Lessa sends the signal in forty minutes. We need her aboard before the next carrier arrives and dumps a fresh customs update into the system."

She nodded once toward the map. "So. How do you want to do your first job as an actual outlaw?"