Outrageous Fortune-Errant Freight Book One

Chapter 25

While Rory revisited his past and Eitan made himself acquainted with the floor of the tram, and Jagati and John got to know the Al Karim family, Galileo Kane stood in the middle of John Pitte's cabin.

If the man's room was anything to go by, the Errant's captain was an orderly, efficient, and unutterably dull individual.

The most interesting object in his quarters was the pocket-watch Galileo found sitting in a little wooden bowl atop the desk. The bowl, along with the writing box and its contents, were now on the deck, half-buried in mattress batting.

Pitte's logbook and ledgers had ended up on the far side of the bed, after Galileo threw them into the bulkhead.

Clothes he'd torn from the closet lay scattered wherever they'd fallen, and the few books Pitte kept in his room now lay in shreds, victims of Galileo's rage.

Now he stood in the midst of the disarray, running his thumb over the watch's brass cover, on which a celestial map was etched.

Possibly Pitte held on to the object for its artistic value, as the timepiece itself didn't run.

"Not completely efficient, then," he said aloud, letting his dark eyes wander the small space. "Nor particularly orderly anymore," he added, looking at the wreckage which spilled into the cabin's bathroom.

With a twitch of the lip Eitan would have recognized as a sneer, he tossed the pocket-watch onto the floor, taking a small sliver of pleasure from the muffled crack of the crystal breaking.

A small compensation for Pitte's duplicity with Mary, who'd already radioed with the news of the disaster at the house on Donne Street.

Nowhere near enough compensation for what Galileo had endured during his next radio conversation to his backer, the one who'd not only paid for the research and development of the calculator, but for Mary and Colin's services in the retrieving of it.

He had been disappointed in Galileo's efforts thus far, and Galileo was not accustomed to being considered a disappointment. Or failing.

Nor would he now, for he would find his calculator and be back in his patron's good graces by the suns rise, and everything would be crystal and comb.

Bolstered by his own determination, he stepped into the corridor and moved aft, towards the last cabin.

He'd already been through two of the Errant's six decks since he'd broken in, cursing his way through the bact-tanks and plumbing works in the lower bilges before tearing through the fifth deck's mostly empty cargo bay and crammed-to-bursting machinist's room.

In addition to a souk's worth of tools, spare parts, and salvage, the machinist's room held in abundance the odor of graphite and allusteel, which he recalled smelling on Rory back in the alley.

What it didn't hold, however, was his calculator, so now he was on the fourth deck, combing through the crew quarters, still burning with the anger first kindled on discovering he'd been conned by Eitan and his skinny friend, for the pack he'd taken from Rory held nothing but a dysfunctional pressure gauge.

His jaw tightened as, again, he recalled the mechanic lying to him, both face to face and mind to mind.

And Eitan... Leo's breath hitched as he recalled his old lover's touch, and the ease with which he'd, once upon a time, been able to know every thought.

Not so tonight. Not even after Leo shoved him—physically and psychically—into the gutter. The Eitan who came upon him in the alley possessed walls which he'd not possessed during their time together.