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halo. John zoomed into the star map—their current most probable location.
    “OK, Jerri, check for a match,” John said and leaned back in his chair with a smile. “Say, did we get the score on the outbound?”
    “Fourteen to nine, final,” Steven said. “Socket wins the pool.”
    Socket smiled but kept her head down.
    Jerri pulled John’s data to her station and matched the major stars by their spectra and red shifts. “There we are,” she said. Their actual position lay just outside the original sphere. “Mass was wrong.”
    “Are we hauling military?” John asked.
    Steven frowned and nodded. “They’re gonna get someone killed.”
    “Who’d know?” Jerri said.
    “Time seven thirty-one. Eight minutes. Remember that if someone asks,” John said with a smile and cued up a text to Meriel.
     
    To Hope: 8 min.
     
    “Stick around to check my course corrections,” Jerri said.
    “Sure,” John said. He grabbed the visualization goggles, leaned back, and put his feet up.
    Steven walked up to John, threw his coffee in a recycler, and knocked his feet off the console. “This is Meriel’s first post as cargo chief, John,” he said softly, “so don’t eff it up, OK? And don’t startle her. She’s qualified marine-three.”

Cold Case
    “I’m parking the Cruiser ,” Meriel said to Lev Tyler, her cargo-3, who waved back at her from the cargo-bay console. She backed the power loader to the bulkhead, secured it, and put the servos on standby. With a half-liter thermos of coffee wedged into the power loader’s cage, she watched Lev complete the data-integrity checks on the ship’s memory cargo.
    Twenty-one days and I don’t have a clue, she thought and played with the sim-chip on her necklace. “It’s all here,” her mother had said ten years ago. But it wasn’t all there. The files were unreadable after the police returned the chip to her. She rubbed the medal, a symbol of the Church of Jesus Christ Spaceman, between her fingers. Is this what she meant? Have faith? No . Esther believed, but Meriel was sure she meant the sim-chip. They would have to try again.
    Meriel thumbed a text to her only nonspacer friend, a hacker named Nickolai Zanek on Enterprise.
     
    To nz:
    Panic. I need your help. I’ve got twenty-one days to prove the Princess was not a drug boat, or we lose her. Forever. We need to bang on the sim-chip again. There has to be something there. See you on Enterprise.
    Love, M
     
    It would be a week before she could see him. What could she do until then?
    She scanned the schedules for the other kids. Tommy Spurell’s ship, the Jennifer Edwards , would dock at Enterprise about the same time as the Tiger would. He was twenty now and stable as a rock. She texted him.
     
    Let’s touch base on Enterprise. M.
     
    What else ? she thought. There’s gotta be something we’ve missed all this time.
    The police filed the case as “unexplained,” but that left everyone with only the wrong explanation—that their cargo was contraband, and contraband meant drugs. Meriel knew it could not be true, but the slander would stick if she just walked away.
    OK, then. Space is huge. How could pirates have found the Princess in deep space? Aunt Teddy might know, but she’s not here. How about a navy guy ?
    Meriel pulled up the display on the cargo loader and keyed in a search of the crew and, specifically, marine qualifications. Let’s see, she thought, marine-2, another two, a six. Meriel whistled aloud. Wow, a marine-6 as chief of security. Sergeant Major of the Marines, Charles Cook. That’s fleet class. How’d this little ship get somebody that good ? She left to visit the security office and find Sergeant Cook. Instead, she found a note that said, “At the gym.”
    ***
    The Tiger’s gym was unusual because it had open mats and did not smell like stale sweat. Meriel found a big man with short blond hair demolishing a training droid. Faster than his bulk , she thought and went to the mats and