Four long days, but not long enough. He didn’t want them to end.
Not because there was trouble waiting for them on the other side. The Monterian ship would be only hours behind them. The Launceston might well feel compelled to enforce the law. There were many bad things that would start happening once they left the node. But those were not the reasons Kyle found himself resisting the passage of each hour.
Being with Prudence, a part of her crew, a part of her ship. A part of her family. They were together without friction, without suspicion. For the first time in his life, Kyle wasn’t playing a role, wasn’t trying to present the image he thought others wanted to see. There was no reason to try. Jorgun didn’t care, and Prudence couldn’t be fooled. And the absence of Garcia drew them together, like a hole in the ground that needed to be filled.
He wanted to win through to the next node for the most selfish of reasons. Because then he would have more time in node-space. Only two and a half days, but beggars could not complain.
The ancients had been right. Heaven was a place in the sky, where nothing bad could touch you. But not for long; never for long enough.
“Listen to that.” Prudence played a warbling hiss for him through her comm console. She’d been analyzing the data on his blue pod for the last five hours. He’d helped her with the technical settings, but mostly he’d sat next to her and soaked up her presence.
“I’m not a computer,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to the computer, either. But it shouldn’t be there. It’s not cosmic radiation or planetary comm. And it’s at the right time. This signal was sent out by the invading fleet, on a wide beam, throughout the whole system.”
“Why would they broadcast their presence?” He kept asking why a lot. Everything these monks did was ass-backwards and upside down.
“I don’t have a clue. It’s an encrypted signal. But Altair should have computers that can crack it.”
“I’ll hand it over to the Launceston, then. They’ll get there sooner than we will.”
“Yes, they will,” she said cryptically.
A yellow light on her console turned on, accompanied by a gentle but insistent tone. It was the worst sound Kyle could imagine. It signaled the end of their vacation.
“Normal space in fifteen minutes. Put on your best smiles, boys. You need to convince the Launceston to give you a ride.”
A cold panic washed over him. “What?”
“Think about it, Kyle. I can’t stop that patrol boat from catching us. What I can do is put Jorgun and you on the Launceston, out of their reach. I’ll surrender, and take the Ulysses back to Monterey. It will be four more days before they find out they were swindled. You’ll be safe by then.”
“I’m not leaving you, Prudence.”
“It’s not your choice.”
“You can get on the Launceston with us.”
She turned her face partly away. “I’m not leaving my ship.”
“It’s just a ship! It’s not worth dying for. With the information you have to sell, Altair will buy you a new one.”
“Kyle, it won’t work. If I’m not on the Ulysses, they’ll know something is up. They’ll attack the Launceston.”
“So what? It’s armed. It can fight.”
“But it might not win.”
Kyle stared at her, unable to rationally cope with the prospect of losing her.
“Kyle, we can’t take the chance. You have to warn Altair before it’s too late. You don’t understand. You don’t understand.”
“Psychotic clones are trying to take over my planet. What part do I not fucking understand?”
She stared past him, into some distant memory.
“The monks think they won’t kill anyone. But when they have complete power, they’ll forget. They’ll get impatient. There will be problems … and genocide will look like a solution. In twenty years, Kyle, there will be ovens.”
He reached out, to hold her, but she pushed him away, tears pouring down her face.
“I can’t lose you and Jorgun that way. I can’t lose another family to the fire.”
“You can’t stop it by dying!” His fingers were numb, all feeling and strength gone out of his hands.
“They might not kill me right away. And if you win, then you can rescue me. You can be my knight in shining armor.” She said it with a wan smile, the kind of smile that would have comforted Jorgun. It didn’t comfort him.
If wresting Monterey from its orbit and casting it into the sun with his bare hands was what it would take to win Prudence back, he would do it.
But there had to be an easier way.
“Fake a malfunction. Let the Ulysses drift. While they’re boarding we’ll escape on the Launceston.”
“They’re not that stupid, Kyle. For Earth’s sake, stop making it hard on me. On us.” Jorgun was whimpering at his station, confused but understanding enough to know something bad was going on. “This is the best plan. I’ve thought about it for days. It’s what we have to do.”
“I can’t do it, Prudence.”
“You have to! They will kill you, Kyle. They’ll turn you over to Rassinger, and he’ll kill you, whether Altair wins or loses. And what hope would I have then, locked in my cell, alone on Monterey? How could I bear the days, knowing you could never come for me?”
Stop it. Stop saying that. He thought the words, but could not speak.
Impossibly, she dried her tears. Impossibly, she stood without breaking, while the world spun around Kyle, colors and shapes turning harsh and unreal.
“Go pack your bags. That’s an order.”
Jorgun went, unable to disobey her. Kyle had nothing to pack. Everything he wanted would be remaining on the Ulysses.
“Take care of Jorgun for me,” she whispered.
The light turned red, and they were in real space. It didn’t feel any different. The evil had already touched him.
Stanton, of all unlikely sources, gave him a reprieve. The Launceston didn’t want to play along. When Prudence hailed them to arrange a passenger transfer, Stanton refused.
“I’m not going to abandon my assigned patrol route to ferry your passengers, Falling. Monterey can’t board you for a few questions. If they want to talk to you, they can bloody well follow you to Altair.”
She tried reasoning with him. “Captain, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. They won’t take no for an answer.”
“This is neutral space. Altair law is as equally valid here as Monterey law. If they want to pick a fight, I’ll give them one.” Stanton obviously had spent too much time floating around in empty space looking for something to shoot at.
“They will pick a fight, Captain. We know something they don’t want you to know. At any cost.”
Now she had his full attention.
“What would that be, Captain Falling?”
So she told him.
He was too professional to display any reaction over the comm link. As a soldier, he was supposed to be used to bombshells. “Do you have any proof?”
“Not a lot.” Prudence looked flustered.
Kyle shook his head in sympathy. Obviously she had expected her mere word to be sufficient to shake governments. A short vid of a man in a mask on one planet, and a tall tale of the same man in a different mask on another planet, and she thought Fleet would follow her anywhere.
Luckily, she had a well-trained police detective on her side. Kyle held up the mask he’d ripped off of the monk, safely bagged in plastic. He’d already gone over it with a magnifying glass and found what they needed. One single hair, stuck on the inside of the mask. A slender thread to drag a fleet by, but DNA did not lie.
“Yes,” Prudence answered the radio, relief in her voice. “We have some vid files, and the physical evidence to back it up.”
“Let me see those files now.” Stanton was still suspicious, as he should be. Between that and the way Stanton had bailed them out of Monterey, Kyle was struggling to maintain his dislike of the man.
Prudence offered them all her secrets. “We also have a recorded signal we could transmit to you. It was taken from a solar observation post on Kassa, at the time of the attack. We don’t know what it means. Maybe your comp can break the code and tell you something useful.”
“Acknowledged, Captain. Send it all over while we close for boarding.” The Launceston had already matched their velocity and was drifting only a few kilometers away, but it would take another hour to safely close the gap with the ships. “I suggest you prepare to abandon ship, Captain Falling. We can’t afford to let you fall into enemy hands. We’ll be taking you and all your crew onboard.”
Tapping her console, Prudence sent all of their hard-won data over in an instant. Before Kyle could start breathing again, she started arguing.
“If they see the Ulysses drifting, they’ll know to focus on the Launceston. I could distract them, make them think you don’t know yet.”
Stanton didn’t answer, presumably watching the vids she had transmitted, so Kyle argued for him.
“Prudence, they’ll assume we talked. There’s probably a dozen ships burning through that node right now. It will only take one to hunt down the Ulysses.”
She shrugged him off, speaking into the microphone. “Stanton, I think you should reconsider.”
Still no answer.
Her jaw took on that subtle hardness it wore when something was wrong. Kyle was elated that he could see it now, that he knew every line and curve of her face so well. The emotion jangled with his grief and fear, clanging discordantly.
“Launceston, reply please.”
Silence.
On the screen that showed the depths of space, a white light flared and died.
“Launceston, reply. Ulysses hailing the Launceston. Reply, damn it!” Prudence tapped furiously at her console.
Kyle ran over to Jorgun’s console and started working the comm controls.
“They’re still there,” Prudence said. “If they had blown up, there would be debris and gas. They’re still in one piece.”
He couldn’t raise anything on any channel.
“I’m going to take us closer.” Prudence started moving the ship, nudging it towards the Launceston’s last position. “If they have casualties, they might need us.”
Two frantic minutes passed, but Kyle didn’t stop checking every possible wavelength. And then he found something, a single quiet voice in the dark.
“Pru—I’ve got a signal. It’s a suit microphone. Somebody in a space suit wants to talk to us.” He flicked it to her chair.
“This is the Ulysses. Do you read me?”
“Captain Falling. How nice of you to wait.” The voice was faint. Kyle turned up the volume.
Prudence let her worry show. “Stanton, are you okay? What happened?”
“Don’t you already know, Falling? Wasn’t this part of your plan?”
Now she bit her lip, angry, confused, and scared all at the same time. Kyle wanted to hold her, to wrap his arms around her. Instead, he listened.
“What on Earth are you talking about?” she asked.
“You’ve disabled us, Falling. Right down to the life support. Not that it matters. On this vector, without course corrections, we’ll pass our turnaround point before our air runs out. We’re doubly damned.”
“Stanton, stop being an idiot. I didn’t do anything to you!”
“That recorded signal you chose to share with us, Falling. It’s a viral code. It burned through our boards like acid. Every system on the ship went haywire until we pulled the emergency plugs. It even tried to trigger our self-destruct sequence. But I disabled that months ago, when that idiot Daspar came on board. Didn’t want my ship blown up because somebody wanted an asinine League officer dead. Never got around to reconnecting it, sorry to say. It’s a regs violation. Be sure to include that in my file, Falling.”
So Stanton had finally met a regulation he didn’t like.
“I didn’t do that.” Prudence looked ready to cry again, and Kyle watched helplessly, wanting to comfort her. Knowing that he could not. “I mean, I didn’t know it would happen. Damn it, didn’t you listen to my story? Why would I tell you all that if I was working for them?”
Stanton had his own question. “Why didn’t your ship burn out when that virus went through it?”
Finally, something Kyle could say that would matter. He pushed his microphone button. “Because this ship wasn’t made on Altair. You know that. You remarked on it back at Kassa.” And an unkind remark it had been, looking out across that field of refugees to the homely little freighter with ungainly lines.
“Daspar.” Stanton let his displeasure at the ironic coincidences of the universe show through in his tone. “Of course you’re there, too.”
“He’s on our side.” Prudence defended Kyle, making him feel warm inside. “The League tried to kill him. Several times. You can trust him, Stanton.”
Kyle bathed in the feeling, enjoying it despite the terrible circumstances. Prudence was defending him. Prudence. Him.
Out there, in the dark, Stanton was wrestling with momentous decisions, trying to decide who to trust. “So that’s why they didn’t disable us on the other side. You filed landing papers; they knew their trick wouldn’t work on your ship. And I was too close to the node.”
There wasn’t anything they could do to help him, but Prudence tried. “We can match your vector, Captain, and take you and your crew on board. And then make a run for it…”
“Negative, Captain.” Stanton’s voice was strong again. He’d made his choice. “That plan has a zero percent chance of success. Your ship is not fast enough. I was lying, earlier, about how bad it was. Trying to buy time. We have physical backups on board. Regs call for us to be prepared to purge and reprogram our system in six hours. We can do it in three.”
For once, Kyle appreciated the man’s obsession.
“We can’t run, Falling. We’ve lost the vector for that. But we’ll be ready for a fight when they come through that node.”
“What if they send a fleet?” Prudence, who had moments ago been prepared to stay behind and face the enemy alone, was trying to talk Stanton out of it. Kyle thought that was very sweet of her. Futile, but sweet.
“They don’t know you have that recording. So they don’t know we’ll be immune by then. They’ll try to disable us, first, with a radio beam. That will cost them at least one ship. The rest will have to fight us honestly, and that will buy you time.”
“How are you going to become immune in three hours?”
Stanton chuckled. “The old-fashioned way, Captain. I’m going to take a hammer to our external comm feeds. We’ll be incommunicado after that, so don’t expect us to say good-bye.”
“I don’t feel right, leaving you in a disabled ship.”
“Don’t worry about us.” His voice was stern. “There’s something vastly more important you need to do. Half of Altair Fleet is hanging off of Kassa, waiting for the aliens. If they attack with that viral code, the fleet will be destroyed. You have to warn them immediately. Even three minutes of warning will spell the difference between battle and disaster. The enemy could already be on their way, from some other node.”
Half of Fleet destroyed in a single battle? The government would collapse. Dejae would be given any powers he asked for.
“Will they believe us?” Prudence asked. Kyle smiled in appreciation. She only made mistakes once.
“Yes, they will, because they already have reason to. We all noticed something while they were handing out duty assignments. They sent the experienced ships, of course, and kept back the new ships, the ones with noncitizen crews. But they also kept back the ships with League officers on them. We knew they were sending the rest of us to the front lines to die first. We just thought it would be a fair fight. The half of Fleet at Kassa isn’t just any half, Captain Falling. It’s the half that is still loyal to Altair.”
Like all criminals, the monks had finally outsmarted themselves. They had gathered all the uncontrollable elements together and sent them into exile, where they could destroy them with one blow. But they had not expected Prudence.
Stanton sent his last transmission. “Go and save my brothers, Captain Falling. Save Altair.”
The Ulysses crossed the system in dreadful silence. They had no way of knowing if or when the enemy had come through the node. Or how many. Their sensors were not powerful enough to scan across the entire system. And the Launceston was in self-imposed comm blackout, so it could neither send them warning nor boast of victory. The life-and-death drama behind them would play out invisibly.
Likely they would not even see their pursuers until seconds before they died.
Prudence drove Jorgun and Kyle like a slaver, making them transfer every nonessential piece of equipment to the main cargo bay.
“Don’t we need this?” Kyle asked, shoving on a squat, dense air recycler.
“Not if there are only three of us.” Prudence was right next to him, so close they could not help but touch now and again. The sensations kept Kyle going, long after his muscles were ready to quit.
Jorgun pulled from the other side, putting the dead weight back in motion.
“Are we going to leave this at the spaceport?” The giant wasn’t entirely clear on this “flyby” concept.
“I think she’s going to give us a break, Jor. She’s going to dump it in space. So we can just open the cargo doors and let it float out.” At least, he hoped that was the plan.
“No,” she said. “I’m going to dump it while we’re in the next node.”
Kyle stopped pushing. “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
“Not as much as screwing with our mass during the entry.”
Jorgun pouted. “We won’t be able to play volleyball with all this junk in the cargo bay.”
“We’re going to seal off the cargo bay, Jor. And vent it. Air is mass.”
That meant they would spend the rest of the trip confined to the living quarters. Kyle couldn’t really complain. It would mean more contact with Prudence. She wouldn’t be able to sneak off and brood like she was prone to do.
“It’s not that much mass, is it?” Kyle asked. Not because he was objecting, but because he was trying to show he could learn about space travel.
“I’m not just going to vent the cargo bay,” she admitted. “I’m going to take a torch and cut it off.”
Kyle was stunned. “What?” She might as well cut off her own arm.
“It’s mass. Every kilo we lose is three seconds less travel time to Kassa. I can accelerate faster, and decelerate from a faster velocity. It adds up.”
“You’re going to cripple your ship?” He was surprised at the level of his own outrage.
“It’s just a ship. It’s not worth dying for. I’m hoping Altair will buy me a new one,” she parroted at him.
He’d been studying spacer manuals since he came on board. “Won’t dumping mass in the node fry us?” Things that didn’t go through the node with exactly the right velocity came out the other end as a spray of cosmic particles.
“Stop pretending to be a pilot. The scrap won’t deviate from our velocity enough to matter. Once we leave the node we’ll accelerate away from it. And it won’t be making course corrections, so it will pass out of the system and be lost to space. So take a good look around. This is the last time you’ll see any of this junk.”
She spoke like a surgeon about to remove diseased organs, but she could not disguise the way she gazed on the bits and pieces of her home.
“It’s going to look kind of funny without a cargo bay.” Kyle tried to imagine it from the outside, and failed.
“It will fly faster. That’s all that matters.”
The physical labor kept them occupied. It was a surprise when the alarm sounded, warning that the next node was imminent. Kyle found himself grinning with anticipation. For the next sixty hours, they would be safe again. And wonderfully close.
Prudence spent most of those hours in a space suit, in the cargo bay, with the doors locked. She wouldn’t let Kyle accompany her.
“Somebody has to stay on the bridge in case of an emergency,” she said. “And it can’t be Jorgun.”
So Kyle spent all his time on the bridge alone while she and Jorgun dismembered her ship. During the six-hour breaks she allowed herself for sleep, she locked herself in her stateroom. Mealtimes were monosyllabic.
Kyle tried not to feel rejected. This had to be hurting her emotionally, in ways she wasn’t ready to share yet. After this system flyby they would have five days in the final hop to Kassa. The work would all be done, the danger would be past, and they would have time to talk. To make plans. To think about a future without spiders and clones.
He was almost excited when the alarm turned yellow, and Prudence dragged herself wearily to the bridge. True, there was some risk that the enemy would catch up to them here, but they had changed the parameters of the game. They had a fighting chance.
Watching through the screen as the real world came back into focus, the light reaching their sensors no longer distorted by the physics of the node, he marveled at the serene majesty of the starry sky.
Then he frowned.
“What was that?”
A star had winked out. He was sure of it.
Prudence looked up from her calculations.
Another star blossomed, a tiny light in blackness, and died in a heartbeat.
“A course correction,” Prudence said. “That was a course correction.”
Another. Then two more, far apart.
“We’re too late. Their fleet is in front of us.”
There was nothing they could do. Kyle knew enough about piloting to see that for himself. The enemy was halfway across the system, heading for the only node the Ulysses could hope to enter. Prudence could not change her mind now. Her course had been calculated and set days ago. Even with the ship stripped to the bone she had too much mass to turn around.
They could not hope to remain undetected. Prudence had to run her gravitics at full power or accept certain death at the hands of a null-vector. They could not hope to evade. The enemy had fusion boats. They were not ruled by the distant whims of planets and stars.
Out of the majestic black sky came the ugly voice of their defeat. “Prepare to be boarded. Any resistance will be met with lethal force. Instantly.”
That the enemy had sent a ship to capture them, instead of simply sending death, was not particularly comforting.
“Let me do the talking,” Kyle begged. “I can try to make a deal. I still have contacts in the League.”
Prudence said nothing, small and still on her useless command chair.
“I’m scared,” Jorgun said.
She went to the giant and put her arms around him.
The ship lurched, clanging with contact. The enemy was not gentle. They would never be.
The sound of the air lock cycling. Boots tramped in the passageway. Kyle stood on the bridge, between the entrance and Prudence and Jorgun, trying to shield them with his body.
Men in uniforms came in. Men with guns. Ugly men, without masks. Not clones, but refuse, bits of trash recruited from the cesspits of many worlds, selling out their own kind for a paycheck and a chance to hurt somebody.
“Get down! Get down on your knees and put your hands in the air!”
There was no need to make Kyle kneel. He presented no danger to them, and they knew it. They did it because they could. Because they enjoyed it.
Kyle knelt. “I am a League officer. Do you understand? These people are working for me, on League business.”
The lead soldier struck Kyle in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him to the deck. He could taste blood in his mouth. The negotiations had not started well.
The men swarmed past him, pulled Prudence and Jorgun apart. They beat Jorgun to his knees.
They stared at Prudence.
“This was worth the trip,” one of them said.
The leader grinned. “Let’s have a better look.” He stepped forward and grabbed Prudence’s shirt, tearing it open.
“League officer!” Kyle tried to scream, but the soldier guarding him kicked him in the gut.
Prudence stood like a statue. Beautiful. Immobile. She looked past the men, to some distant, invisible place.
Then Jorgun, simple Jorgun, stupid Jorgun, had to see the last puzzle piece.
“These are the people that took Jelly away, aren’t they?” he asked Prudence.
“Shut the fuck up!” screamed the guard standing over him, beating down on the giant with his rifle.
Prudence turned away from him, tears in her eyes. Kyle tried to lie for her, to tell Jorgun to shut up and be still, but he was still gasping for breath.
“Stop that,” Jorgun said to the man beating him.
The man shrieked in outrage, and beat harder.
“Earth, just shoot him already,” said their leader.
“You hurt Jelly,” Jorgun said.
The man beating him stopped and turned his rifle around, bringing the barrel to face Jorgun.
Jorgun stood up.
The man unconsciously paused, disoriented by the giant’s height.
Jorgun picked him up by the head and shook him like a rag doll. Kyle could hear bones snapping like toothpicks.
“Do something!” screamed the leader.
Two men leapt on Jorgun. One bounced off like he’d hit a wall. The other one stuck, trapped in Jorgun’s arms.
Screaming a mindless, blubbery wail, Jorgun ran across the deck with the man in his grasp, charging the knot of soldiers. The leader dodged out of the way, and Jorgun and his passenger collided with the wall, bouncing off of it and into a heap on the floor.
The man he had been carrying flopped in unnatural ways, emitting a strange quiet keening sound.
The leader started kicking at Jorgun. The rest of the soldiers piled on Jorgun like wolves on a deer, trying to separate him from his impromptu battering ram. Only two men remained, one by Prudence and one looming over Kyle.
Prudence stood perfectly still. Immobile. The man guarding her could not help himself. Inexorably his attention slipped away from her, to the battle raging on the deck. Kyle kept coughing, even though he didn’t have to anymore. He very carefully did not look at Prudence, but looked away, at the fight.
And then she moved. One quick step. She reached out and touched the guard’s head, and the man fell silently, a marionette with its strings cut.
Kyle’s guard noticed. As he swung his rifle around, Kyle scrambled over the ground to his feet. He hit the man below the knees with his shoulders, sending him crashing to the deck. Two heartbeats and he had climbed on top. While the thug was still getting his bearings, Kyle struck. One punch and the man’s head bounced off the floor. Disappointed that he did not have time to hurt the man more, Kyle sprang to his feet.
A burst of gunfire peppered the wall above the knot of fighting men. A warning shot from the rifle in Prudence’s hands. But the tangle of men was inseparable. She could not shoot without killing them all. They ignored her.
The tramp of feet, too many feet. Through the entrance stomped a spider, huge and hairy and grotesque. Where its mouth should be were twin barrels. Grimly, mechanically, it sprayed the wrestling men with needle-fire, reducing them to hamburger.
Prudence unleashed her fury on the monster with deadly aim. The needles ricocheted futilely off, cutting only rubber and cloth, revealing gleaming metal underneath.
Kyle wrestled the gun out of Prudence’s hands and threw it to the deck.
“We’re unarmed! Don’t shoot!”
He hugged her, covering her. Waited for the storm of needles.
Someone else came into the room.
“What made you think the spider would show mercy?” he said, in Veram Dejae’s voice.
“I knew you were controlling it remotely.” Kyle’s answers were all that could save them. He forced himself to let go of Prudence, to turn around and face the clone.
The Dejae wore a mask, a glittering affair of gems and gold, but it could not hide his annoyance. “How did you deduce this?”
“I saw a spider, on Baharain. When you let the machine drive, it walks smoothly and quickly. When you have to make it do something intelligent, it moves like a robot.”
“Intriguing. Stand away from her.”
Kyle obeyed, instantly.
More men came into the room, looking shocked.
“Strip them. Bind them. Put them on the ship. Can you handle that?” The Dejae’s voice was dangerously casual.
“Yes, sir.” The new leader leapt to obey. But as he and his men approached Kyle, they were careful not to block the spider’s line of fire.
“I wanted to do it all with robots,” the Dejae explained to Kyle, while two men tore his clothes off and a third glared at him from behind a rifle barrel. “I was outvoted. I was told that human judgment was still invaluable. When I find servants who can successfully carry out a simple task like killing two unarmed men and a girl, I’ll consider changing my opinion.”
“Good help is hard to find,” Kyle agreed. He realized he was trying to keep the Dejae talking, so it would think of him as human. A wasted effort. The clone already thought of Kyle as human. That was the problem.
The men wrapped his wrists in sticky tape. Like the idiots they were, they bound his hands in front of him, not behind his back. But he wasn’t going to do anything. Being naked was a kind of binding on its own.
The men moved to Prudence, ripped the clothes from her body. Kyle tried not to look. He could not bear to see how beautiful she was.
Kyle offered more from his dwindling supply of facts. “We’re wanted on Monterey, for questioning.” When he had nothing left to give, they would kill him.
“You do get around. But you can relax for a few days. We have some business to deal with before we return home.”
They marched them past the bodies, his feet squishing in the blood. They dragged them through the blasted air lock, threw them to the floor of their fusion transport. He caught Prudence awkwardly as she fell. She lay in his arms like a sack of potatoes.
Men stood around them, glaring. The Dejae ignored them, his spider marching at his side. At least the Dejae was not going to let them rape her.
Yet.
Kyle wondered if the Dejae would keep her for himself. Kyle began to hope he would. It would be better for her.
The ship moved underneath them.
“Target is cleared for attack,” the Dejae said from the bridge. A wall-sized screen showed the Ulysses drifting in space as they accelerated away from it. The freighter did not look as ungainly as Kyle had feared. With the cargo hold shorn off, it looked like a dragonfly, lumpy and angular but rendered delicate.
Lights sparkled around the Ulysses, and then steam as its air was vented from a thousand holes. At the same time a dark, tubular shape streaked through the screen’s vision. A fighter, making a close pass.
In its wake the Ulysses came apart in pieces, like shredded lettuce. The main generator exploded, a ball of flaming gas welling up from the remains. When it cleared, there was nothing left. The corpse of the Ulysses had been dismembered and cast upon the void.
With Jorgun’s body. And Kyle’s dreams of home and family. And maybe Prudence’s soul.
She still had not spoken, not a gasp, not a whisper.
Ridiculously, he feared for her state of mind.