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  “That’s what I’ve been saying, sir.” Silky’s voice was rasp with irritation.

  “Silkster the readings are too perfect. Look at the data on the freighter. No glitches. No anomalies. No random variations. Does that look like a ship just off the assembly line to you?”

  “It’s older than you, sir.”

  “And well used, I’m sure. I can’t find a single energy leak anywhere in the scans.” Siv zoomed in on a chart. “Look at the way the system’s background radiation is bouncing off the freighter’s hull.”

  "Spank me blind, sir. The patterns are repeating and predictable as if they're stuck in a loop."

  “Exactly. The data is perfect. Which means they’re broadcasting what we’re expecting to see, to hide what they don’t want us to discover. And by the time we get into visual range—”

  “It will be too late. My apologies, sir. I can’t believe I missed it.”

  Silky activated the red alert and switched to the comm. The controls panels glowed red, and a light above them on the bridge pulsed.

  “Ready evasive maneuvers! Weapons armed! Shields up!”

  8

  Kyralla Vim

  Kyralla placed her right hand on the control stick, her left on the accelerator. In her first battle, she had allowed the ship full control over their speed. This time, she was ready to join in on that function.

  She had one significant advantage that made her an excellent pilot, despite her lack of experience. When she was relaxed and living solely in the moment, she could see what was about to happen a fraction of a second before it occurred.

  She dropped her active thoughts, allowing her conscious mind to meld with the ship’s AI. Though the ship could fly itself, even in battle, the circlet she wore would combine her neural patterns, her creativity, and her intuition with the ship’s automated routines, calculations, and data analysis to create a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. That was the goal, anyway. The sensation of working in concert with the ship still felt far from natural though.

  As her bond with the ship’s AI deepened, her mind recoiled, and her focus faltered. Her lack of experience already made the meld less efficient than it should be. All of their lives were on the line here. She could not afford to lose focus. She began mentally reciting the Fibonacci sequence, starting at one. Silky had recommended the method in their previous battle, and it had worked well.

  “What’s going on?” Oona asked.

  “It’s a trap,” Silky said.

  “What kind?” Mitsuki asked.

  “We won’t know until it springs,” Siv replied, “which will probably happen in a few minutes, just before we get into visual—”

  Kyralla “saw” the attack half a second early. By the time Silky yelled—“Incoming!”—she already had the ship in motion. She rolled the Outworld Ranger leftward, and a double-pulsed laser beam skipped across the bottom of the ship’s force field.

  “Shields down to ninety-five percent,” Silky said.

  Kyralla rolled the ship to the right, pulling up as she did. A second pulsed beam burned past, just missing them.

  “I need max speed,” Kyralla said distantly.

  “Overriding safety protocols,” Bishop responded over the comm. Octavian bleeped angrily in the background.

  “I need a target!” Mitsuki called out.

  “Working on it,” Siv said.

  “Just beneath the freighter,” Oona said. “That’s where the first shots came from.”

  “I don’t have a fix,” Siv replied. “What are you seeing?”

  “I don't see anything,” Oona said. “I’m sensing it.”

  “Confirmation?” Mitsuki asked.

  “I haven’t countered their masking signals and jamming sequences yet,” Silky said, “so I can’t confirm.”

  Kyralla pitched the ship downward and rolled through two more pulsing laser shots. “Trust her.”

  “Okay then,” Mitsuki said, “I’ve got a shot lined up for an undetected target just below the mining freighter.”

  “Take it,” Siv said.

  The Outworld Ranger recoiled as its railgun launched a twelve-centimeter, diamondine-tipped shell.

  Kyralla, or maybe the ship’s AI, she had no idea who did what now, adjusted for the recoil, and their course stayed true, taking them toward their enemy as fast as possible.

  “Shouldn’t we withdraw to the breakpoint?” Bishop asked.

  “Two ion missiles inbound!” Siv said.

  “Flak cannons ready,” Mitsuki said.

  A flash of light appeared in the distance.

  “Good shot, Wings!” Silky said. “Masking signals are down. Enemies ships detected. Two T—XS starfighters and an armed DL-2 cruiser with a masked transponder. The railgun caused heavy damage to the cruiser. Its shields are down.”

  “Positions coming online in your HUD’s…now,” Siv said.

  “Shouldn’t we retreat?” Oona asked, repeating Bishop’s question.

  “Those T-XS starfighters are crazy fast,” Silky said. “We can’t outrun them to the breakpoint. However, they’re poorly armed and have bad maneuverability. And that cruiser, though surprisingly well equipped with defensive gear, is a piece of donkey crap intended for sightseeing tourists.”

  “Ion missiles have locked on us,” Siv said.

  Following the ship’s guidance, Kyralla reduced speed and veered right. The missiles followed and closed in.

  “Two seconds to impact,” Silky announced.

  Intuitively understanding what the ship wanted, Kyralla slammed the accelerator into max-speed and wrenched the side-stick left and forward. The Outworld Ranger plunged and rolled in the opposite direction.

  Slowing down as their maneuvering thrusters activated, the missiles cut a wide arc to compensate. The flak cannon on top of the ship opened up and nailed them both.

  Mitsuki stretched her arms then cracked her knuckles. “Let’s get the bastards, then.”

  The two starfighters appeared as red dots on the three-dimensional starship locator in Kyralla’s HUD, while the cruiser was a red oval with a yellow dot in the center.

  The starfighters and the cruiser stopped hugging the mining freighter and zoomed toward the Outworld Ranger, the starfighters quickly outpacing their sluggish companion.

  “Focus fire on the cruiser,” Silky said. “It has the laser battery.”

  “Lining up a shot,” Kyralla said.

  She slowed the ship as she maneuvered into position. She wanted to have a surprise burst of speed available against the starfighters when needed.

  The ship apparently agreed with her. Or maybe she agreed with it. She lacked the experience to tell the difference.

  “What about the ion missiles?” Bishop asked. “Where did they originate?”

  “Those were the only two the cruiser had,” Siv said. “The starfighters are armed with small-caliber, dual-shot plasma cannons.”

  Mitsuki unleashed a burst of shots from their medium-caliber, quad-plasma cannon. The cruiser dodged poorly, and one of the shots glanced along its right side, burning deep gashes into its hull.

  The starfighters opened fire. Using the ship’s programmed maneuvers, Kyralla deftly weaved between the flaring white plasma bolts as she anticipated each shot.

  “The DL2’s lasers are at ninety-five percent charge,” Siv announced.

  The ship again recoiled as Mitsuki fired the railgun. Kyralla compensated too slowly, and a plasma shot glanced them.

  “Shields to seventy-four!” Silky said.

  The cruiser slid up and away from the railgun shell Mitsuki had fired. While it had successfully dodged the shot, it had exposed its underbelly. Kyralla jerked the Outworld Ranger hard left to line up a shot and slammed the accelerator all the way.

  “Now!”

  Mitsuki opened up with the plasma cannons. Eight blazing plasma bolts struck the underside of the cruiser. For a few seconds, fire spurted out from the holes the missiles had punched into the DL-2's hull. The
n the ship exploded into a brief burst of flame, scattering metal fragments.

  Unfortunately, the Outworld Ranger was speeding toward those fragments.

  The starfighters overshot them, as Kyralla had intended when she’d maxed their speed. One of the starfighters began to turn, having to take a wide arc due to its poor maneuverability. The other activated its thrusters to spin around so it could face them, even while zooming away.

  That happened to be Kyralla’s plan as well. She cut the engines and activated the starboard thrusters, rotating the ship counterclockwise.

  The Outworld Ranger performed its one-eighty much faster. Mitsuki cackled gleefully as she unleashed the quad cannons and decimated the spinning starfighter.

  Kyralla threw the accelerator forward, countering their inertial movement toward the small debris cloud and the freighter. They were all thrust back into their seats as the inertial dampeners struggled to compensate.

  A few pieces of debris struck before they could reverse their momentum and accelerate away, taking the shields down by two percent.

  The last starfighter had nearly turned around. Kyralla swept away from it then cut back in hard, rapidly closing on it at a ninety-degree angle.

  With the plasma cannons still cooling after the last few bursts, Mitsuki fired the railgun as soon as their course straightened. It was a tough shot, estimating where the starfighter would be and adding enough lead for it to connect. Working in tandem with the ship's AI, Mitsuki judged it perfectly.

  The shot pierced the starfighter’s cockpit, going cleanly through one side and out the other. Fragments of electronics and a dismembered body, some of its parts still recognizable as they closed in, scattered into the void.

  Kyralla blanked out the sight, not wanting to think about how they had just taken at least three lives, probably more.

  Behind her, Oona gagged then ripped the circlet off her head. "I'm going to be sick," she muttered as she ran off the bridge.

  Siv leaped up from the sensors and switched to the command chair, donning the circlet. “I’ve got her covered. Seneca, please check on Oona for me.”

  Seneca had been waiting in the galley with a med-kit. He didn’t have Octavian’s extensive medical programming, but like all advanced cogs with limbs, he had more than adequate first aid skills.

  Kyralla wasn’t worried. She knew Oona would be okay once she recovered from the shock of what they’d done, the same shock Kyralla was working hard to suppress until she had time to deal with it.

  “Starfighter affiliation now confirmed,” Silky said. “Star Cutters. No ID on the cruiser.”

  The Cutters were the second-smallest of the criminal guilds that had chased them.

  The Outworld Ranger notified them of an incoming message from the freighter. Siv accepted it but had their camera focus solely on Mitsuki, who was the one who had bargained with the captain.

  Projected holographically at the front of the bridge was a middle-aged man with a bald head and a scraggly beard. He was dressed in overalls with a company insignia on the pocket.

  "Thank you for rescuing me from those pirates," he said. "Your help is much appreciated."

  “You’re welcome,” Mitsuki said. “Permission to dock and come aboard?”

  “Granted,” the captain said before ending their connection.

  Kyralla turned to the others. “Well?”

  “Take us in slowly,” Siv said. “But be careful. I don’t trust him anymore.”

  “Aha!” Silky said. “I just bypassed another signal projector located on the freighter. And without them knowing that I’ve done so. Quite clever of me, I must say.”

  “Out with it!” Mitsuki snapped.

  “Humph! We’ve got the seven miners we expected, but there are four other, armed men with them.”

  “So it’s another trap,” Kyralla said.

  Mitsuki groaned. “And even though we know about them, they’ve still got the advantage. As soon as we enter the docking tube, they’ll open fire.”

  “Could we lure them over to us?” Bishop asked.

  “I don’t think they’d be stupid enough to take that bait,” Mitsuki said. “We’re at an impasse.”

  Kyralla turned to Siv. “What do we do?”

  He smiled his sneaky, somewhat adorable smile, and said, “I’ve got a crazy idea.”

  “My favorite kind, sir!” Silky said enthusiastically.

  9

  Siv Gendin

  “Kyralla, fly us in for docking,” Siv said. “But slowly. Take your time.”

  “Okay then,” she replied dubiously.

  “Sir, according to Seneca, Oona retched up her last meal but is otherwise fine.”

  Siv relayed that information to the others.

  “I’ll look in on her,” Bishop said, his voice shaking, probably because he was disturbed as well.

  Killing someone the first time, even in self-defense, wasn’t an easy thing to handle. It had taken Siv months to recover after he’d had to take out a kidnapper on a botched rescue mission. He could still picture the guy perfectly, the moment before he shot him, and afterward as he lay dead in an alleyway.

  It hadn't even helped that on that mission he was saving an innocent person whose family had paid for a rescue. That was also when he'd learned procurement was more his thing than extraction. Up until then, he'd assumed they were fundamentally the same.

  He suspected the weight of what they’d done would hit Kyralla soon as well, but hopefully not before they were out of this situation.

  “Before you start telling us your no doubt elaborate scheme, I would like to point out that leaving the system is still an option,” Kyralla said.

  “I think this is our best shot,” he replied.

  “Siv, you know I like the way you think,” Mitsuki said. “But we could be facing eleven enemies in there. No clever scheme’s going to counter that.”

  Oona staggered onto the bridge, her face white. “Only six bad guys onboard. The other six are innocent.”

  “Those numbers don’t add up,” Silky said. “There are only eleven people onboard.”

  Oona shook her head. “Twelve. Four criminals, a miner who’s working with them, and the evil woman.”

  “Are you certain?” Siv asked. “Because the scans are only showing eleven, and none of them are women.”

  Frowning, Oona sat in the chair at the sensor station, swiveling it around to face the others. “When we…did what we did, my empathy surged out of control, and I got…readings…on the people aboard the freighter. The captain’s clean, but one of his miners is a snitch, the one with the mustache. The bad woman is with the criminals.”

  “What does she look like?” Mitsuki asked.

  Oona shrugged. “She was in the shadows, and I couldn’t quite make out anything about her. It was almost like she was a ghost or something.”

  “Silky, could you…”

  “Already on it, sir.”

  “I could meditate and try to scan the ship,” Oona said. “Maybe I’ll pick up some more info.”

  “Can you handle it,” Siv asked.

  “If you need to know, I can do it.”

  Oona pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged in the chair. She closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply.

  “I’ve finished another thorough scan,” Silky said, “using every parameter I could think of and countering every strategy I know of that might interfere, but I still only detect eleven people onboard that ship.”

  “What about the nearby vicinity?” Bishop asked, “like in a spacesuit just outside the ship, or something like that.”

  “I’ll broaden the scan,” Silky replied. A few minutes later he added, “Still only picking up eleven.”

  Oona opened her eyes, with a puzzled look on her face. “I’m getting the same information as before, except the woman is missing.”

  “So just eleven crew members?”

  She nodded. “Four criminals, the mustachioed snitch, and the miners. The woman must have been a
n apparition.” She shrugged. “Maybe an echo of the priestess or…”

  Her voice trailed off, but they all knew what she was thinking. That it had something to do with her upcoming Trial of Corruption. When she’d connected briefly with the priestess on Ekaran IV, she had seen a dark presence.

  “See, that’s not so bad,” Siv said. “Just five bad guys to deal with.”

  "Those are terrible odds, given they have the advantage," Kyralla said.

  “Does the freighter have a stardrive?” Mitsuki asked. “If so, then capturing it would more than make the risk worth it.”

  “Just an ion drive for in-system use,” Silky answered.

  “Then I’m opposed,” Mitsuki said.

  “Me, too,” Kyralla said.

  “I think we all are,” Oona added.

  “You haven’t even heard my plan yet!” Siv argued. “Besides, we got those miners into trouble. What will happen to them now?”

  “The Star Cutters will take the ship,” Mitsuki said. “And they’ll try to blame the captain and his crew on their failure, to save their skins. Star Cutter bosses are not a forgiving lot like the Shadowslip.”

  “Exactly,” Siv said. “I’m not going to turn my back on them and miss out on an opportunity. Especially when we can interrogate the Star Cutters for information.”

  “Fine.” Mitsuki sighed. “Reveal your clever scheme.”

  “I’m going to get into the ship’s spacesuit and—”

  “Nope!” Mitsuki said. “Don’t like it.”

  “As we pull up to dock,” Siv continued, “Silky will jam their sensors. The freighter doesn’t have any sophisticated detection equipment, and neither do the criminals, just jamming and masking gear, so that should be easy enough, right?”

  “Or easy left, sir. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Does he ever focus?” Kyralla asked, rolling her eyes. “Seriously, how do you put up with him in your head?”

  Siv smiled as Silky blew a raspberry at her.