When Juliet got to the cargo bay, she found Shiro moving giant spools of cabling into position by an enormous winch mounted near the rear wall. The spools had to weigh several tons each, but, in the light gravity and with the assistance of the forklift, he’d already loaded one of them and had two more ready. The winch had mounts for all three spools, and Juliet wondered if it could turn them all at once. “It has to . . .” she said, trying to picture the cables in action—would it work if it only pulled one at a time?

Bennet and Aya were hunched over a portable console near the personnel airlock, presumably going over the drone footage of the drive cones. Aya had several types of drones, from little flying insect-like mini swarms to a magnetic, track-driven bot that could crawl along the ship's hull. Juliet would have put money on them using that one; it was slow but very unlikely to get lost, even if Alice had to maneuver the ship.

Juliet walked over to the tool cabinet near where the pair were working and dug through the magnetically sealed drawers until she found a thick roll of all-purpose tape. She’d turned to the EVA crate and was heading that way when Bennet called, “What’s up?”

“Well, I’m getting ready for a firefight, I guess.” She paused, wondering if she sounded bitter, and added, “How do the drives look?”

“We’ll need to replace one of the cones and weld in some patches on another, but they’re going to be fine until we get to the shipyard,” Aya answered for him. Bennet was still frowning at the transparent display on the console, and Juliet knew it was feeding his AUI a lot more information than would fit on that little window.

Juliet lifted one of the EVA suits out of its cradle and started to step into it while asking Angel, “How long can I survive in the radiation out there in this thing? I mean on Dione.”

“The suit has an active radiation shielding membrane sandwiched between its top two layers, but the single battery in the pack is responsible for powering it, the air jet nozzles, and all of the other electronics in the suit. The higher the radiation, the more quickly the battery will drain. I estimate that each EVA suit is good for between eight and thirteen minutes outside the Kaminari Kowashi if the battery is fully charged.”

“And the ship? How long can it sit out there?”

“With an H-3 fusion reactor powering the active shielding built into the hull plates? As long as the fuel lasts—months or years.”

“What about the welding rigs?” Juliet asked, stepping into the EVA suit and pulling it up around her waist. She’d set her SMG and the extra magazines on the ground next to her tape, and before she started to pull up the top half of the suit, she ripped short strips of tape off the roll, applying one to each of the magazines.

“The rigs have the same limitations as the EVA suits—battery life. Though they have far more robust batteries, their every movement also drains them.”

“So, out there, on the moon, if the pirates have similar tech, we could be having a gunfight with a really serious time limit. Do you think they’ll wait till we hook up the salvage and then try to rush the cargo bay?”

“If I were going to try to ambush some salvagers, I’d probably try to snipe as many of them from range as possible.” Angel sounded clinical, but Juliet blanched at the idea, remembering how dangerous a good rifle was—Hot Mustard and White had both taught her that much.

“Right. They’ll use rifles, try to kill us while we’re hooking up these cables, then load up fresh batteries and storm the Kowashi for survivors. That’s what I’d do. I wish I could last longer out there . . .” Juliet glanced around the bay, her eyes settling on the two beat-up, orange and black exoskeletons of the welding rigs. “If we do land, and Alice gives you data on the salvage site and our landing position, how accurately do you think you could predict where the pirates might land?”

“Considering their motivations and their desire to approach unseen, and depending on the variabilities of the landing site, I believe I would have a good chance of making that prediction. I’ll need to see the data before I can give you a reasonable guess at a percentage of accuracy. It would help to see the wreckage site prior to landing; I could help Alice choose a landing position that would limit the options of the pirates.”

“Shiro,” Juliet called, turning from the crate, stepping out of the EVA suit, and walking toward the man. He was still on the bay's far side, working with the big winch mechanism.

He looked up from his toil and said, “Yeah?”

“What exactly are you guys expecting from me? I mean, with the potential pirates swooping in?”

“Expect you to do your job,” he grunted, putting all of his—significantly reduced—weight behind a thick, red torque wrench, pushing it down on one of four bolts that held the cable spool on the winch arm.

“Just trying to clarify what that means,” Juliet sighed. “You want me to try to take out this pirate crew or what?”

“Dunno,” he said, moving to the next bolt. “Depends how big the crew is and how persistent. What we need, bare-bones, is for you to keep them off us long enough to grab the salvage.”

Juliet mulled that over, rubbing at her jawline. “If I told you it might help us survive an encounter with our potential pirates, how willing would you be to take some extra time hooking up the salvage? I mean, if my plan limited you to using only one of the rigs?”

“If it gets us the salvage and off this shiny rock in one piece, I’d be fine with that. Bennet’s gonna have to stay behind anyway. Let’s me off easy, too.”

“Aya’s going to hook up the chains?”

“Yep. I was going to help, but I can hang back in the bay and help Bennet organize stuff as we pull it in.”

Juliet looked around the cavernous cargo bay and the plasteel crates stacked neatly along one wall. “If the wreck really is a Hector class or whatever, how big are those things?”

Shiro grinned, pushing down on the wrench, and said, “Thirty-two meters from nose to tail. Only eighteen meters from the port thruster to the starboard, though.”

“Whew!” Juliet said, surprised; she’d pictured a single-seat, sleek, jet-like fighter with big guns on the wings when Alice called it a gunship. “Will that thing even fit in here?”

“The bay is thirty-three meters square, so yes. Tight, though, coming through the bay doors; if that thing’s in one piece, we’ll probably drag it in and load it diagonally. If it’s worth keeping in one piece, like, not a total wreck. Otherwise, we can chop it into chunks.”

“Gotcha,” Juliet nodded, trying to imagine how long it would take to pull something like that into the bay. She supposed it depended a lot on the ship’s condition and location. Her thoughts reminded her of the other reason she’d come over to speak with Shiro, “Oh, hey. I wanted to ask if you and Alice could share the data on the landing site with me ASAP when you get it.”

“That’s all Alice. Just message her on comms.” Shiro turned to get back onto the forklift, and Juliet decided to quit pestering him. She walked back toward the EVA suit and her extra ammo and then selected a private comm channel with Alice.

“Hey, can you talk a sec?” she asked, leaning against the cool, pale-blue plasteel crate.

“What’s up? Just watching this moon grow slowly larger while my PAI goes over the scans.”

“If you find anything, can you send it to my PAI? If you let me help determine your landing position, it’ll help our security outlook.”

“Well,” Alice blew out a breath, making a soft sound through her lips, “I could take offense, insisting I’ll do just fine without your guidance, but we hired you for security, and that would be dumb, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not trying to imply anything . . .” Juliet nervously twisted a few strands of hair, pulling her ponytail over her left shoulder.

“Yeah, I know. Nah, it’s fine. I’ll send you the data, assuming we find anything.”

“Cool. What about that ship? Any movement?”

“Nothing yet. They’re smaller and probably faster than us, so if they wanna catch up to us when we start to dip around the curvature, they’ll be able to.”

“Does this happen a lot?”

“Pirates? Yeah, but usually, we’re third or fourth on a site to start salvaging, and the stuff worth killing for is all gone. There’s a reason pirates don’t fly salvage class ships; they’re not looking for plasteel plating and wiring harnesses. They grab up the components—the expensive stuff, like scanners, guns, generators—you know, all the good stuff.”

“So, the Kowashi just avoids conflict?” Juliet frowned.

“Yep. Not many pirates want to do the hard work of cutting down hulls for scrap value. This is our first shot, at least in my experience, at a possibly untouched wreck. Anyway, I should be helping Hank. You’ll hear it if we spot anything.” With that, Alice cut the comm connection.

“Well, Angel, I guess I should get dressed.” Juliet stepped into the feet of the EVA suit again and pulled it up, this time all the way to her shoulders, shrugging her arms into the sleeves. She flexed her hands in the rubbery gloves and frowned. Before messing with the helmet, the pack, or her magazines, she walked over to Bennet and Aya. They were standing by the airlock, apparently waiting for it to cycle so they could retrieve Aya’s drone.

“What’s up, Lucky?” Aya asked brightly, looking her up and down, taking in the EVA suit.

“If I’m going to be shooting, swapping mags, etcetera, I’d like to have a bit more manual dexterity than this suit allows. Do you guys think it would be all right if we cut the right sleeve off this one? At the elbow, I mean.” Juliet held up her arm and pointed as if to illustrate. “We could bond the material to my plasteel arm to keep it from leaking.” Bennet frowned, and Aya opened her mouth but didn’t speak, so Juliet pressed on, “If we’re careful, it will be repairable when we’re done.”

“Yeah.” Bennet shrugged, then continued, “I don’t see why not. I’ve got some strong adhesives we could bond it with, and I’ll put a shrink-tie over the cuff for good measure. You wanna do it now?”

“Well, we could be heading down any minute.” Juliet shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t think of this until just now.”

“Right. Aya, can you finish with the drone? I’m gonna run down to my shop and get some Griptite.”

“Griptite?” Aya twisted her lips and wrinkled her nose. “Why not some poly adhesive like we used to repair the glass on Alice’s console . . .”

“Cause Griptite isn’t going to fail no matter the temp or how hard Lucky rolls around out there, and it has a solvent that will allow me to fix the suit if she doesn’t get it shot full of holes.”

“Right. Makes sense.” Aya offered Juliet a grin, perhaps trying to compensate for Bennet’s grim imagery.

“Be right back,” Bennet said over his shoulder as he started walk-hopping through the cargo bay on his black, plastic walking boot. He’d printed it himself from some specs he’d gotten off the sat net.

Juliet smiled at Aya, then returned to her crate, where she began to tape her extra magazines onto herself. She taped two to each of her thighs and two to her chest, ensuring the adhesive strips were on the bottom half of the mags so they wouldn’t interfere when she had to rip them off herself and jam them into the gun. In all her practice at Grave, Juliet had always held her gun with her right hand and swapped magazines with her left. She figured she could still do that, even with the thick glove on her left hand, but, just in case, she practiced swapping mags with her right hand, holding tightly to the SMG with her left hand.

She’d been at it for a few minutes and was applying fresh tape to the mags she’d been practicing with when Bennet returned. When Juliet saw the laser scalpel in his hand, she was reminded of her vibroblade, and, figuring she’d have to pull her arm out of the suit anyway, she unsealed the front to get her sheath off the belt of her pants.

“I see you’re expecting to shoot a lot of bullets,” Bennet chuckled, looking at all the magazines taped to her body.

“It feels crazy. Between you and me, if I think about it too much, I know I’m gonna lose my shit and go hide in my quarters, so let’s not talk about the fact that I’m about to go out onto a tiny radioactive moon and try to deal, violently, with a bunch of pirates.”

“Jesus,” Bennet said, stopping short. “Now you’re making me worried. You’ve been so cool and sure of yourself. I was starting to think you were some kind of super soldier ‘cause, I’m not gonna lie, I think this shit’s nuts. No salvage is worth getting murdered. We don’t fight over scrap, never have before. We haven’t had a good score in a while, though, and I’m afraid Shiro and Alice are getting a little desperate.”

“Well,” Juliet sighed, not wanting to be the catalyst for dissension, “I’ve got a plan. We can do this.” She forced a brave smile and punched him in the shoulder. “Come on; fix up my sleeve, will ya?” Bennet nodded, taking up her loose, right sleeve. While he worked, dialing the scalpel down so he could be precise in his work, Juliet asked, “Didn’t Alice used to be a fighter pilot? Why don’t they put some guns on this beast?”

“Alice got outta that line of work for a reason—she’s got some serious PTSD. The way I hear it is that she and Shiro agreed a long time ago that putting guns on a boat like this was just asking for trouble. Any ship actually built for fighting would fly circles around her. Nah, Alice didn’t want any part of that; they agreed that ship battles wouldn’t be part of the equation.” He frowned as he pulled away the cut-off section of Juliet’s EVA sleeve and added, “Which is why this whole thing is weird to me. We’ve never hired anyone for ‘security’ before. Makes me wish I had a stake in the company so they’d have to share the financials with me.”

“It’s just them? Shiro and Alice, I mean, in the company?”

“Believe it or not, Aya’s got a share. She’s Shiro’s cousin. Still, they always pay me a fair share of each haul. I’m not complaining.” He pulled her suit up over her shoulder and said, “Push your arm through, and I’ll glue this sucker down.”

“Make sure you leave me plenty of slack to bend my elbow and stuff,” Juliet said, pushing her plasteel arm through the shortened sleeve.

“Yep,” Bennet said, then he opened a canister of very foul-smelling adhesive, and Juliet turned her head to keep the fumes out of her eyes. “This stuff’ll hold through anything, and it comes off like water if I spray their patented solvent on it. Pretty cool. Why you doing this anyway? Probably safer, easier gigs for operators back on Luna or the big cities on Earth.”

“Honestly?” Juliet sighed, then said, “I needed a ride to Titan, and commercial lines are expensive and slow. I mean, the ones I can afford.”

“Seriously? What’s on Titan?”

“A friend. She’s in trouble, and you guys were the quickest ride I could get when I found out.”

Bennet paused in his work and frowned. He looked at Juliet, squinting his pale gray eyes, and said, measured and serious, “Hey, I feel like I owe you plenty, so if you need help with your friend, just say so. Let’s talk about it after we get this salvage loaded, okay?”

“That sounds good, Bennet. Thanks.” Juliet nodded, then looked away quickly, worried her emotions would make her say something stupid.

After Bennet finished gluing the EVA sleeve to her arm, he set down the adhesive and slipped a shrink-tie around his work. He pulled the cord’s activation tab, and it constricted around her arm, about two inches below her elbow, firmly holding the suit in place.

“You need that if the glue’s so good?”

“Better safe than sorry. That stuff’s supposed to dry in seconds, but I feel better with the cord holding it tight.”

“Cool,” Juliet said, flexing her arm, bending the elbow, and swinging her shoulder. “Seems good! One more favor?”

“Sure.”

“Can you tape my vibroblade sheath to my left arm here?” Juliet held her left arm out for him, and Bennet smiled, reaching for the roll of tape she’d used on her magazines.

“Gonna be prepared, huh?”

“Oh yeah. Wait ‘til you see the rest of my plan.” Juliet stared at one of the welding rigs pointedly. Bennet just chuckled and wrapped some tape around her arm, securing her sheath to her forearm. Juliet reached for the blade with her now-naked plasteel hand and yanked it free, then shoved it back into the sheath with a nod. “Yep! Glad I got that rubber glove off.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, actually, do you have an extra claw attachment for those rigs? I’d like to have two claws on the one I’m using instead of a torch.”

“Yeah, we have all kinds of attachments. What are you planning to do? Not fight with a rig, I hope, cause they’re not bulletproof and they make great targets . . .”

“No, I’m going to do a little digging.”

“Shit . . .” Bennet’s eyes narrowed, and his forehead creased in thought, but then he grinned madly and said, “I think I’m seeing what you’ve got in mind. Why don’t you use the breaker bar attachment?”

“I’m not familiar . . .”

“It’s like a big pneumatic prybar. We use it to bend metal and plasteel. I think it’ll be perfect for what you’ve got in mind.” Bennet walked over to a plasteel crate near the tool cabinets and hefted out a big metal attachment that looked like it, once upon a time, used to be painted orange. It was about three-fourths of a meter long and thicker than Bennet’s wrist. The bar had pneumatic tubes hanging off it, meant to attach to the rig.

As he walked past her with it, Juliet followed and watched him remove the welding attachment from the nearest exoskeleton and attach the breaker bar. “It’s easy as hell to use,” he said. “Just use the waldo like you do on the welding attachment, but it only has two modes—on or off. Jam it where you want and then turn it on, and it will vibrate and pump back and forth, breaking up whatever you've stuck it in.”

“I feel like I should make a sex joke . . .” Juliet grinned, exposing her teeth and glancing away at Bennet’s shocked expression.

“Yeah, you missed a golden opportunity there,” he laughed. “Anyway, if you’re not using the welding attachment, I’ll remove these gas canisters; it’ll make the whole thing lighter and easier on the battery.”

“Perfect.” Juliet moved to help him, very familiar with the process.

They’d taken off the tanks and were stowing them in an equipment crate when Alice’s voice cut through the comms, shrill and excited, “I found it! It’s here and mostly intact!”