“Why is this statue so important to these people?” Saqr demanded, hauling herself up onto the air hockey table and almost falling as her shaking hands slipped on the edge. She maneuvered herself around so her deck-booted legs were swinging loosely off the table, looking around at the rest of the group.

Adam, calm and solemn as if they had simply been in a particularly complicated meeting, grunted as he began pouring beer for everyone from the sputtering dispenser. “It’s just money,” he called over his shoulder. “Some kinds of people do these kinds of things for money, and we just took all of Merez’s loose birr.”

As Adam spoke Al Hamra cast a handful of tags onto the coffee table in front of the sofas. He, too, showed no sign of reaction or fear. “We were chasing a gangster’s money. What did you think would happen?”

“Well, it was nothing compared to the Ghazali,” Saqr pointed out. “And we didn’t see anyone being eaten alive, or crushed, or electrocuted, or blown out of their escape pod. But I still want to know why that statue matters so much. I guess we can wait to ask Siladan?” Siladan was in the larger of their ship’s two medlabs, having his injured leg treated by Dr. Delecta. There had been a lot of groaning, screaming and blood by the time they got him back to the Phoenix of Hamura, but it seemed like he was not going to lose his leg.

“I think I have an idea why they want it,” Al Hamra told them, pulling out his tablet and connecting the tags to it. Numbers flicked up on the screen. He let out a low whistle of appreciation when they had stopped auto-calculating. “Another twelve thousand birr,” he announced, eliciting a small and ragged cheer from Olivia and Saqr. Olivia leaned next to Saqr on the air hockey table, and they clicked beer glasses together in salutation. Her foot had mostly healed, and she stood gingerly on it now, flexing it occasionally as if she did not believe it could be working again so soon.

“Twelve thousand!” Olivia repeated. “That’s enough to pay our first month on this beast, and set ourselves up to take passengers and cargo.” She slapped one hand on the edge of the table. “We’re up and running!”

“It’s also enough to get Merez back on our tail,” Adam pointed out. “That’s a lot of money, and now he doesn’t have his statue.”

“How many bodyguards can that greasy gandu have?” Saqr asked rhetorically. “And does he have any money left to hire more Cellar thugs?”

“Captain, you said you had an idea?” Olivia asked, waving Saqr to quiet as she tried to drag Al Hamra back to the topic of the statue. “What are you thinking?”

Al Hamra put the tablet down on the table next to the tags, leaning back on the sofa with a sigh of satisfaction. “I think that statue has some connection to Mystic powers,” he told them. “I felt something on the bridge when we first found it. I don’t know what, I’ve never felt anything like it before. But there was something there.”

“Is that why they got attacked by creatures from the Dark Between the Stars?” Adam asked, fiddling with a control panel for the window. The screen flickered from subtle pastel patterns through starscapes and several natural landscapes before finally clearing to give them a view of the Neoptra spaceport. The port’s ceiling hung far above them, a network of gantries and walkways interspersed with bright lights, drones weaving between the mess of cables and spars. A heavy crane moved slowly across the ceiling, on some freight delivery mission. “Were they guarding it?”

“Maybe,” Al Hamra conceded. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before, but I don’t really know anything about Mystic powers. Only what I can do myself.”

“Wow, so you had to learn everything about it yourself?” Saqr asked, and he nodded.

“Sort of,” he replied.

“Does the statue do something for your powers?” Olivia asked him.

He shook his head. “No idea. I just had a feeling. I’ve never thought about my power connecting to a physical object before. I don’t know what to do or how to do it!” He sighed. “You have no idea how confusing it is to have this feeling inside you.”

“But if we get the statue back you could experiment?” Saqr asked.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Adam told her. “What if he does something and some of the things that attacked Lavim come out of it? You saw how much blood he had on him. We don’t want to deal with that.”

“Can it be worse than a team of desperate Nekatra?” Saqr countered, and they paused to think about that.

“She’s right,” Olivia said finally. “We survived the Ghazali. We can survive anything.”

“Doesn’t mean we have to play stupid games with anything that comes our way,” Adam pointed out reasonably. “Even if we get this thing back, I don’t think our captain should be playing with it until Siladan’s had time to do some research.”

“First we have to get it though,” Olivia reminded them. “Captain, can you find it now? If it’s been stolen, someone might be trying to move it now, and we need to get in quick before it gets out of reach.”

Al Hamra sighed, leaned back and closed his eyes. After a short period of silence, during which everyone else watched him intently, he opened his eyes again, sitting forward suddenly. “It’s in the spaceport!” He exclaimed.

“Whoever stole it must be preparing to ship it out,” Olivia suggested. “We need to get it back now!”