It was funny. No matter how close you got to the stars, they were still distant. You could bare yourself down to the bone and they'd never be really reached.

At least until they swallowed you whole in heat and pain.

Jubal Early sighed and settled himself back. The stars blinked and ever so slowly rotated in front of him and he drummed his fingers impatiently at his thigh.

It did give a man pause to think though.

And it seemed there was only one thing that his thoughts seemed to be wanting to return to.

"You're not well," she'd said.

Now, honestly. He was a grown man. Too old to be scared by a thin high voice and a knowing tone. He'd seen. . . well, he'd seen a lot of things.

She wasn't the first to say he wasn't well. Perhaps in so many words, yes, but not the first to really mean it. But she was the first to seem to be so confident about it.

That bothered him.

Because he was just fine. He was a reasonable man. Reasonable! He'd had that whole ship in his hands as well as the life of every single solitary crew member.

With the exception of one. The one he needed to have in his hands. . .

But he'd not hurt any of them. He'd listened in, gotten their measure. They seemed to be having second thoughts about the girl they'd brought along anyway. Hell, they'd probably welcome her leaving. All except the brother and it seemed like the boy needed to start thinking less of his sister and more of that little engineer girl.

Wasn't healthy a boy fixating on his sister so much, truly.

So he'd locked them away. Except for a few punches, he'd not touched a soul. Well, he'd touched that little engineer girl's soul. Scared her deeply and purely. However, it was still just a scare. He'd had her in the palm of his hands and hadn't even knocked her out to tie her up.

Just felt her trembling and moved on.

There was so much that he could have done, if he were truly the bad man that Ser.River had been saying. He could have rigged the ship to explode. He could have blown that boy's brains