“Okay, you can fix things.” The bear crossed his arms. “What the hell got you sent out here? Wouldn’t think you’d need to get in that much trouble to have a pretty good life.”

The weasel snorted, shrugged, and reached for a spanner, putting the access panel back in place. “Do the details really matter? Let’s just say there’s some people who aren’t gonna cause me any more trouble, but I’m not so sure of their friends.”

“All right, all right.” The bear shook his head. “Everyone’s got a past here, and while half of ’em brag about it the other half don’t want to bring it up at all, so you’ll fit right in far as that goes. The stars know we could use a tech who doesn’t have sledgehammers for hands. How ’bout you get on that air scrubber in C block while I tell the Captain you’ll work out all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the weasel muttered. “Just so long as I’ve got a bunk somewhere eventually.”

“Don’t worry about that, Mal,” the bear gushed. “For magic fingers like yours we’ll make room.”

Malachite Tarrie grunted, slipped his tools onto his belt, and stomped off down the corridor, while the bear went another way. The weasel was inwardly anxious, but he needn’t have worried; the bear, also known as Chief Engineer Galorik Chavar, was more grateful for the assistance than he was worried about replacement or suspicious of outsiders.

Besides, Galorik, for all his difficulty fitting into tight spaces, was quite competent. He’d had to be, to keep this bucket of bolts from falling apart months ago. He was just overworked – which was another reason he didn’t need to worry about being replaced anytime soon.

Malachite settled into life in a bandit crew easily enough. There were a few scuffles, but when the other crewmen learned that he could throw a good punch, they left him alone; they didn’t want to risk Galorik’s wrath, and through him the Captain’s, by roughing up an engineer they urgently needed with more than a few bruises, and those bruises came at too high a cost to bother with. Other than that, his involvement in the life was confined to wriggling into crawlspaces and patching things back together.

Galorik might be grateful, but he was no fool; his newest listing was kept well away from the computer and reactor cores. But eventually, when three of his other techs couldn’t fix the long-range comm gear without messing up the gravidar, the bear threw up his hands and sent the weasel in. And that was that; Malachite might not look like the most industrious worker around, but his slow, careful work actually fixed things without causing problems, which was more than the others’ scrambling about could say.

So much got done, in fact, that he could actually send Malachite to get the gutted lifepods back in working order.

When the first pod jettisoned the moment it was brought online, Galorik shrugged. The wonderboy was no computer expert. He was bound to make some mistakes.

Aboard that pod, Malachite, who was really Warrant Officer Cinnabar Dervey, pulled a communicator out of his toolbelt. “They’re all yours, Dak.”

He was much better with computers than he’d let on. The bandits’ sensors carefully ignored the Authority assault shuttle until it was clamped onto their hull.