The amount of information available to an engineer who knew how to look was staggering. Since the ability to communicate with the world outside the ship was limited, long distance cruisers were treasure-troves of encyclopedic knowledge. When mixed with a haphazard grasp of ethics, Inrit was able to gather almost all of the information she needed.

Some might have called it a gross invasion of privacy for her to access Max’s personnel file. She called it shoddy information security. If he got mad, she’d apologize. But it didn’t matter if he ended up hating her.

She couldn’t let him die.

If Inrit was right, the problem with Max was simple and easily fixable. She had the skills to do it, though a doctor versed in cybernetics would be the better choice. A deep well of anger had opened up within her as she read more and more about glitch issues and their resolutions.

The Consortium didn’t give a shit. Rather than work with their soldiers, they used them up until they fried and stripped them for parts once they were no longer useful. None of the leaders on any planet cared enough to take up the cause of rights for cyborgs, and many soldiers who chose to undergo the treatments weren’t given detailed information about what exactly they were doing to themselves.

Though Max’s personnel file didn’t list each of his upgrades or the class of cyborg that he fell under, from his age and the symptoms she knew he had, Inrit suspected that a malfunctioning governor was to blame. The small piece of tech was used as a last line of defense in case something went wrong. Some cyborgs just snapped and with the governor, they could be stopped without doing any harm.

The only problem was that the devices were prone to failure. And when they failed, so did the rest of the system.

Worst of all, the governing device contained a suppressor which prevented Max from seeking treatment for his affliction. It was meant to stop him from applying dangerous upgrades without supervision, but now it was killing him.

For the first night since she’d boarded the ship, she was waiting for Max when he got off his shift. When the door slid open and he walked in, his face lit up and her heart lifted.

They’d stolen moments over the past days, including a very memorable, if ultimately unsatisfying, ten minutes in a maintenance closet outside the armory. But neither of them were passengers on this ship and as crew, their responsibilities kept them beyond busy.

The door slid shut behind him and Max engaged the lock. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here tonight,” he said. He wore combat gear, heavy leathers, and a blast resistant chest plate. He must have come from a training session.

As he began to unstrap the bracers on his forearms, Inrit stepped up to him and covered his hand with her own. “Allow me?” she asked. She hadn’t planned on seduction, but he got near and her brain lost all focus.

Max turned his arm over so she could see the straps. “By all means.”

The synth leather he wore was dark with a rich red undertone. The red of her own hands blended nicely as she worked to free him. When she revealed the cloth shirt he wore under the armor, she switched arms, working her way up and removing each individual piece.

Max’s armor was old-fashioned. The newer style was completely connected and fused with a leather-like material that almost seemed alive. It could stretch and gather all over the body to give better protection where needed, but it also had a nasty habit of fusing with skin when the wearer was injured.

Inrit released the chest plate and let it drop between them. Underneath Max wore a simple white long-sleeved shirt that tucked into the leathers of his leg guards. When she was young, she’d asked another soldier why he wore white under his armor and he’d told her that it made it easier for the medics to identify wounds. She assumed Max did it for the same reason, if he had a reason.

“Do you have plans for when we make land in a few days?” he asked as she undid the ties of his leg guards. He reached down and covered her hand when she would have moved lower. “I’ve got the rest,” he said raggedly.

She might have felt rejected if her own heart wasn’t beating out of her chest and arousal hadn’t begun to pool. They needed to behave. For now.

So Inrit took a step back until she could view all of him. He was so tall, so broad, so damn handsome that her heart ached even as it swelled. “There are supposed to be these beautiful cliffs outside of the city,” she answered Max. “It’s only an hour out by rented vehicle. I planned to enjoy the view after I finish up my ship errands. Do you have security duty?” Guarding them was his job, after all. She tried not to be prematurely disappointed. They’d have more time together. Especially after tonight.

Max flicked his eyes up from where he was working on untangling a nasty knot. He grinned. “I’m free the entire afternoon.”

She felt stupid for how good his silly grin made her feel. And she was grinning right back at him like a fool. Was this infatuation? Love? The denya bond pushing them to consummate the match? Inrit didn’t know, but she didn’t want it to end.

Even so, she knew that it must.

Max finished undressing and hung up his armor in the small closet they shared. The bulky pieces took up most of the space, but neither she nor he had that many belongings in the first place. Besides, if she needed any extra room, there was plenty in the engineering quarters. Max closed the closet, pulled on a pair of casual pants and a hooded top, and picked up his reader before sitting down on his bed. There wasn’t space in the room for both of them to remain standing with any comfort for long.

Inrit sat down on her own bed and faced him. The small satchel of tools beside her pillow practically radiated heat. She’d snatched them from the engineering bay, though she wasn’t sure that their quarters were the best place to do what needed to be done.

“I did some research on the glitching,” she said. She was looking so intently at Max that she caught the exact moment he stopped breathing, and several seconds later she saw when he started again. “If I’m correct, it’s a common problem that I can fix in less than an hour.”

He clenched his reader so tightly in his fist that she was concerned he would snap it in two. He seemed to echo her fear and forced himself to set it down. “This can’t be something that’s easy to fix,” he denied. “I would have known about an easy fix.” He didn’t quite look at her while he said it and from the half of his face that she could see, she saw the warring dance of hope and denial.

“I didn’t say the fix was easy,” said Inrit. Hope tried to surge in her as Max’s gaze shifted, but she had to keep coolly practical. She could be wrong. She had no specialty in cybernetics. “And even if you’d found the information, you wouldn’t be able to apply the changes yourself.” She let that sit for a beat. “Was there anyone on Tarni you would trust enough for a full power down?” Would you trust me?

Max’s eyes snapped to hers, silver bleaching out any other color. He looked more machine than man, the rigid lines of his face so stark they could have been metal rods. “I haven’t powered down since my final upgrades,” he said. “It leaves me completely vulnerable for hours.”

“I know.” Basic maintenance could be performed while Max was fully conscious. He could even undergo full surgery without powering down his systems. The power down turned off every bit of added machinery in his body. Because of the weight and fragility of so many of the pieces, he’d barely be able to move for two hours or more while the system slowly came back to life. And if anything went wrong with the power down or power up, Inrit might not be able to fix him. “There might be a doctor on the next planet who could perform the procedure.”

Max swung his feet over the side of the bed and sat with his elbows resting on his legs and his head cradled in his hands. Inrit’s gut clenched at the raw emotion he was barely keeping contained. “I wouldn’t trust a doctor I’ve never met before.” All tone had dripped out of his voice; he spoke with no inflection. He tilted his head up to look at her again. “How sure are you?”

She wished she could give him certainty, but she wouldn’t lie about this. “Fairly certain. The main concern I have is that you’ll glitch as we power you down. And the pain.” He wouldn’t be able to use any of his pain suppressors and she didn’t have access to any strong medication.

“I can handle pain.”

But she didn’t want him to hurt. Inrit pushed that aside. Soft emotions were useless if she wanted to keep her mate alive. “I know this is a big decision. If you don’t want to find a doctor on Vrinli, there will be others. You don’t need to rely on me for this.”

“Where’s this part located?” he asked, giving no indication about what path he’d choose.

Inrit rested her hand over the spot on her body. “It’s in your chest plate. No need to cut into flesh. If I were to do it, I’d extract the governor and reroute some wiring. From the diagrams that I’ve seen, it’s not complex. I’ve seen clocks that are more complicated.”

He sat completely still, his chest barely rising and falling with each breath. Inrit clamped her tongue between her teeth to keep from saying anything else.

“When could you do it?” he asked so quietly it almost got caught in the hum of the engine.

“As early as tonight.” She had the tools, they had the privacy. Time was the only other obstacle.

“Where?”

Inrit nodded back towards his bed. “We can do it in here. You just have to say yes.”

***

Max wanted to run. The need pushed him to his feet and he paced back and forth in their cell-like quarters. Three steps in one direction, pivot, three more steps, repeat. His mind rocked with possibilities and anger. He’d been dealing with the glitching for more than a year and Inrit thought she could solve the problem after two days?

Impossible.

But memories niggled at the back of his mind. After the first glitch he’d started to consult a medical text on the system wide information net. At the last moment some task had pulled him away and he’d never gotten back around to checking the information. Another time he’d met a cyborg traveling to an Earth colony. He’d thought to ask vague questions, but each time he opened his mouth to speak, something else had come out.

Could his own body be designed to stop him from healing?

He didn’t like how plausible that seemed. After all, cyborgs weren’t meant for greatness. They were cogs in a machine. He’d risen as high as he could hope to rise in Nina’s ranks and he’d never seen a cyborg hold command for as long as he had. So Inrit’s claim that he’d somehow been programmed to avoid fixing this problem rang truer than he wished.

As he saw it, he had three choices. One: wait for the glitching to go critical and be destroyed like a faulty piece of machinery. Two: find a doctor willing to operate on an unknown cyborg and hope he was trustworthy. Or three: trust Inrit to perform a procedure she’d never done before while he lay helpless in their tiny little room.

It was no choice at all.

Max reached back and pulled the shirt he was wearing over his head. He tossed it in the corner of the room and turned toward Inrit. “What do you need me to do?”

Her eyes flashed with triumph for a moment before her expression returned to the calm determination she’d been exuding since he stepped inside. She gestured to his bed. “Lay down, keep the shirt off, and expose the metal plate in your chest.” As he sat, she stood and unfurled a cloth container filled with more than a dozen small instruments that could be used on his body.

She could kill him and he was lying down to let her.

But that wasn’t a threat that Max actually entertained. Given the choice to trust Inrit or any other person in all the worlds, he trusted her first.

He laid flat on the bed and reached over his chest to expose the skin plate. It hurt—consciously he knew that he wasn’t tearing a hole in his skin, but even after so many years, his brain rebelled at what he was doing. It wasn’t natural.

The exposed chest plate spanned the length and width of his hand and sat right over his heart and upper chest. If he’d been a poet, he might have made a comment about that, but he wasn’t about to tease the woman who held his life in her hands.

Inrit strapped a small light to her head and pulled up a folding stool right next to the bed. She laid out her tools beside him and strapped on a pair of germ resistant gloves. “I need you to hold absolutely still,” she told him. “I want you conscious while I’m doing this.”

“Very well.” Max let his arms fall naturally and tried to relax. It was easier said than done when he lay so exposed. “Have you operated on a cyborg before?” Maybe he should have asked before this began, but right now Max just spoke so he didn’t focus on what she was doing.

He didn’t think Inrit would respond, but after a moment while she carefully selected her first tool, she did. “Not quite. But almost,” she said with the vagueness of a professional riddle-master. 

“Almost how? And where did you meet cyborgs?” Though Morvellan traveled with one, his kind was more likely to be found in civilization where upgrades and maintenance were plentiful. The only cyborgs out on the edge were like him. Broken or near to it. Though he supposed they must also exist in the warring space fleets.

Inrit hunched over him and began to work while Max spoke. He couldn’t get a good view of what she was doing from the angle she was sitting at, so he didn’t try. With his systems still functional, what she was doing didn’t exactly hurt. But it was quite unpleasant.

“I flew with pirate crews for six years,” she said absently as she finished unscrewing the guard of his breast plate.

Only his memory of her command to keep still kept him in place. If he hadn’t been at her mercy, he would have jumped out of bed at the news.

Inrit? A pirate? No, that was impossible. He could never… care for a pirate as much as he… cared for Inrit. He would have sensed something, some tell. By all the gods, he’d been in charge of Nina Station, he knew every cut-rate knave with too much ambition and not enough coin that passed through.

They all had the same cagey look about them, eyes always half closed, back tight as a screw, and jumpy as hades. Some may have appeared wealthy or cultured, but they all had a tell.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. She might have sounded like she was telling the truth, but it just couldn’t be. “You’re trying to distract me.”

She flicked her eyes up and they burned red. For a moment she quirked a brow before ducking her head again and switching out her tool for something more delicate. “You’ve known me for less than a week. How can you be so sure of my character?”

“I’m your mate.” The words ripped out of him. Her hands froze for the barest second, but it was long enough for Max to see that he’d misstepped. He was her mate.

His heart ached for her and it had nothing to do with the maintenance. She bared the darkest part of her past while saving his life and he called her a liar? No matter who she’d been, he was not worthy of her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

She made a dismissive noise and didn’t glance up.

“Everything I’ve seen of you has shown me that you are good,” he said. He could accept Inrit, whatever her past, but he would not change his position on the act of piracy. He’d seen too many innocent people broken by it. “So why did you do it?”

She didn’t visibly relax. But Max could feel some of her tension leech out. He would dedicate his life to studying her every minute tell until he knew her better than he knew himself. The desire to take every bit, every detail, of her inside himself beat at him. Sitting still and letting her work was the hardest torture he’d ever felt.

“I was apprenticed out to a ship when I was thirteen,” she began. Some people couldn’t talk and work at the same time, but Inrit didn’t seem to have that problem. Her hands never wavered as she spoke. Perhaps in some way it was easier to tell this story while she worked; getting too emotional would put him at risk. She continued evenly. “I was meant to be an engineer, but as I told Kayleb, I also studied under our doctor. The work was hard, but rewarding.”

“And this wasn’t on a pirate cruiser?” Pirates didn’t take apprentices.

“No, a regular merchant ship.” She paused as a bright blade of light shot out from her instrument. Max felt nothing while she worked, not even a hint of pressure. It was surreal.

“A little more than six years ago we were attacked and boarded by a band of pirates. The fighting lasted for hours and the ships were too evenly matched for either one to win. So they called a ceasefire.” An old emotion crept into the back of her throat and she took a moment, pausing for several seconds to contain herself.

“The pirates offered the captain a deal. If he surrendered all of the women on the ship, the pirates would let the men leave. The pirates were just that much stronger than my crew. If they fought to the death, the pirates might have survived, but my own ship would have perished. All crew, all passengers, everything.” She took a deep breath. “Still, I was young then. I expected the captain to hesitate. So much of the security force was made of women, nearly half the crew and passengers were women. But he struck the deal without a second thought. Some of the security force tried to mutiny, but the pirates and the rest of the male crew teamed up to herd us off the ship. When the pirates figured out I could act as both engineer and doctor, my value skyrocketed and I avoided… certain fates.”

The sound that escaped from Max’s throat belonged to a big cat and not a man. Given the chance, he would rip out the throat of anyone who even looked askance at Inrit. “Are any of them still alive?” he demanded.

“Most of the pirates, I assume. I left that crew after two years. As for my old ship, they died.”

“How?”

She sighed and looked up, eyes blazing the hot red of strong emotion. “The pirates turned on them almost immediately. With so much of the security force gone, my original crew didn’t have the resources to fight back. A few made it to escape pods and ended up on a nearby planet. Everyone else was spaced.”

Never trust a pirate. It was the first lesson of space travel. “How did you get out?” he asked. Some said once a pirate, always a pirate, but clearly Inrit had left the life behind her.

She placed a small sheet over the open hole in his chest and grabbed his hand while she spoke. She kissed each of his knuckles in sequence and he squeezed tight. “I bought my freedom at the end of a blade,” she explained. “With our captain dead, I took volunteers. Anyone willing to take on legitimate work was welcome, the others I abandoned on a livable planet.”

“You marooned them?” Her skin felt so soft under the callouses of his fingers, it was a miracle. He never wanted to let her go.

“It was that or kill them. I couldn’t let them come after us.” And with those words, even more understanding dawned. Inrit had a core of goodness running deep inside of her, but piracy had changed her, twisted it into a corrupted kind of honor. The worlds were harsh and cold and pitiless, and she’d learned how to navigate them and survive with her essential self intact.

“How did you end up in The Consortium?” He didn’t need to ask why she’d stopped working on him. Her hands trembled and the emotion was too fraught. She spoke now because they both knew that something could go wrong once she started to remove pieces of him. She didn’t ask for absolution, but Max would give it freely.

Inrit grimaced. “Word in several stations was that General Droscus needed discreet help. No details, but enough whispers for me to understand that someone with my skill set would come in handy.”

Max knew of Droscus’s schemes. He’d been hiring pilots to smuggle precious stones off of Tarni. When he was discovered, he sicced a pirate crew on one of the pilots and left him for dead in an empty pocket of space. Max’s friend Dorsey had been the key to cracking the whole plot open. She’d discovered the body of the pilot, Lex Omacnaron, and Lex’s wife had received a vid-message which revealed the gems. Droscus had tried to silence Dorsey and her mate, Tyral NaRaxos, but Max had been able to smuggle the mated pair off of Nina Station before the worst could happen.

“You worked for Droscus?” he finally asked. He couldn’t keep the scowl out of his voice. Nina was hard and could be cruel, but he knew which side he’d choose in any war.

“I tried to work for Droscus,” she corrected. “Things didn’t go as planned. That little mission made me realize that The Consortium is no longer the place for me. Maybe it never was. A friend was able to find out that Captain Morvellan needed an engineer. And that’s my long story of how I went from crew to pirate to crew.” He thought she was done talking when she picked up a tool and uncovered her work. But after a moment, she added, “I thought you should know. Who I am, I mean. Before… well, I want you to make an informed decision. About everything.”

Max didn’t know how to respond. Since the first moment they’d seen each other, they’d been hurtling forward to an obvious end. The bond would be sealed. They already were mates. But for some reason, at every turn Inrit tried to give him an out. They could have sealed the bond after Kayleb was injured, but she pulled back. The moments since then had all been short and stolen, but Max was clever, motivated, and flexible enough to have made it work.

He wanted her so much that it hurt. He couldn’t keep his hands off of her when she was near, and he would lay down his life for her without a second thought. Yes, it was fate that had brought them together, but sometimes that tricky bitch knew what she was doing.

“I can still stop, if you want me to,” she said when he was quiet for so long. “We can find someone else.”

Was she talking about the procedure? Or them? “Get it done. And once this is over, I’m going to make love to you until we both forget our names.”

She drew in a ragged breath. “That’s quite a promise.”

“Let me keep it.”