There was a pressure. She could feel a headache starting, but she didn’t know if it was his or hers or both.

Let me work with it when we get closer. I can’t scan and maintain a connection to you at the same time.

Tasha swiveled abruptly in her chair, jerking Eden out of her connection with Jace. “Talk to me, ’Fino.”

He glanced up, amusement replacing the frown on his face. “Do you have telepathic abilities I don’t know about?”

“Hardly. But I’ve known her,” Tasha said with a nod to Eden, “long enough. That little dip of her mouth, that twitch of her foot—that’s not good. And she was looking at you.”

“Jace sensed something in or on Haven-One,” Eden explained quietly, unsure of what was happening and not willing to push Jace. Yet. “It could be the moons creating a gravitational flux.”

“Or?” Tasha prompted.

“Or it could be a form of energy there,” Jace explained. “And, yes, it could be a residual from a flux. But it feels slightly different. And not,” he glanced at Eden, “overly happy.”

“You can’t be serious—” Kel-Paten’s words halted as Tasha raised her hand.

“It doesn’t like that we’re here?” Tasha asked.

Jace shook his head. “We’re too far away for me to get anything consistent.”

Eden clearly saw the admiral’s disbelief as he turned back to the data on his console. Tasha’s face showed thoughtful interest. Unlike Kel-Paten, she wasn’t going to discount anything, especially not in an unknown, uncharted quadrant.

Jace, please show me the problem. Maybe—

No.

The word sounded harsh in her mind this time, and she started, surprised.

No, sweetling, he repeated, more gently. It’s probably nothing.

And if it isn’t? she asked, realizing that other than hearing his voice, she was getting nothing from him now. That puzzled her.

We’ll handle whatever it is when the time comes, Jace told her.

His we reassured her. Though that time, Eden knew, would come more rapidly than she’d originally thought. Thirty hours of fuel was all they had left. Half that time to get this shuttle stable and functional enough to make a dirtside landing.

The unknown energy pulsation seemed the least of their problems.

Exhaustion was taking its toll, and when Kel-Paten saw Tasha waver in her seat, he ordered her and Fynn—whose stability was equally tenuous—off duty for at least three hours.

“Main cabin. Now.”

“Kel-Paten—”

“Sebastian.” He paused and, in the midst of all their troubles, found the ritual comforting. “Before you fall over. Main cabin. Doctor, you too.” That left him alone with Serafino, but the bastard had been quiet since his ridiculous proclamation about some evil alien energy source inhabiting HV-1. Yes, there were a couple of contradictory readings, including the one relative to density. He knew that before Fynn mentioned them. And there was a gravitational flux pattern he didn’t like and couldn’t explain. Yet.

But Serafino was ever the showman, and his current show, Kel-Paten surmised, was that of Mystical Nasyry. No doubt very shortly the chanting and burning of incense would commence. Something to scare away the evil energy source haunting the planet.

Something to make him appear the hero to Tasha and Fynn, his current audience.

“Looking to murder me without witnesses?” Serafino asked as the cockpit door closed behind Fynn’s retreating figure. The smirk in his voice was unmistakable. He tapped at the dark band barely visible under the edge of his rolled-up shirtsleeve: the bone-regen device. “I’m still wounded.

Easy prey, you know.”

Kel-Paten turned away and bit back an equally snide reply. He would not let the bastard bait him again. He was encouraged by the fact that his fleeting—pleasurable—thought of venting Serafino’s lifeless body out the shuttle’s garbage chute did not elicit a rejoinder. Keeping his mental filters at maximum was cumbersome but worthwhile. “I think Dr. Fynn would be pleased by an improved functionality of our sensors.” He spiked back in and shunted the sensor-recalibration data to the nav station. It would keep Serafino busy and keep him away from his audience.

“Is that an admission you need me alive?”

“It should take you about an hour and a half to get them back to full range. Unfortunately, our current location doesn’t provide us with any workable correlatives.” Because there were no predamage sensor scan reports to use as comparisons on wherever they were. It was an annoying problem but, considering all else, a minor one, in Kel-Paten’s opinion.

“We’re going to have to assume a margin of error.”

“Ah! Not only do you admit to needing me, but you trust me too.” He paused. “Does that mean I’m forgiven for Fendantun?” Kel-Paten couldn’t help himself. He shot a warning glance at Serafino in time to see the bastard theatrically clutching one hand over his heart. “Get to work.”

Serafino only snorted in reply and turned back to his screens.

Kel-Paten did the same. The fuel leak and subsequent contamination wouldn’t be a crucial issue—if they were headed for a space station or miners’ raft. But they weren’t. That altered a serious problem into a potentially fatal one. HV-1 was a planet, and that meant an entry—hot—through that planet’s atmosphere. And it also meant a landing with a craft that had, at best, rudimentary heavy-air capabilities.

Those capabilities would have to be augmented. He checked the Galaxus’s service logs. The ship—only a few months old—had never made a dirtside landing. So here, again, he had no comparative data. Nothing but untested specs to tell him what the shuttle might do as it hurtled through the atmosphere.

He shook his head. Twenty-two hours, eighteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds until they’d reach a workable orbit of HV-1. A month ago, if someone had promised him twenty-two hours with Tasha Sebastian in the small confines of a shuttle, he’d have been delighted at the prospect. Now he felt only desperation.

While part of his mind redacted the information on the shuttle’s shortcomings, the other found the main-cabin video links. The ten high-backed seats in the main cabin reclined fully into cotlike beds, but Tasha’s seat back was angled only halfway down, as if in defiance of his order to rest. He watched her sleep, her arms loosely folded at her waist, her head turned to one side. She looked more vulnerable than he’d ever remembered seeing her.

The desire to pull her into his arms was almost overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to press his body against hers and kiss her until neither of them could think straight.

But that wouldn’t work. If nothing else, his own mind ceased to think straight whenever he got within a few feet of her. Plus he believed that her reaction would be to think him straight to hell.

“Fantasizing again, are we?”

Serafino’s words shattered Tasha’s image in his mind. He spun toward the Nasyry. “Stay out of—”

“That prosti didn’t want you.” Serafino’s voice was soft but had an oily, menacing tone. “Found out what you were. You couldn’t pay her enough to touch you.”

Kel-Paten was out of his chair in one swift move. He lunged for Serafino, who was standing, arms folded across his chest, laughing. He shoved him hard against the workstation’s upper panel, pinning his arms at his sides. Kel-Paten could feel the man’s muscles bunch and tense under his fingers. Narrowed eyes met narrowed eyes only inches from each other.

But one set of narrowed eyes had a distinct and dangerous luminescence.

A muted noise sounded behind him. He ignored it until she spoke.

“What is going on?” Tasha’s question was a definite command for information. She stood rigidly in the cockpit’s open hatchway.

Kel-Paten couldn’t answer her. And he’d kill Serafino if the bastard said one word right now.

It was Eden—following Tasha toward the nav station—who spoke up.

Her words were measured, clipped. “Gentlemen. Now is not the time. We have work to do.”

Kel-Paten spun on his heels and marched through the cockpit hatchway, his only audible response a fist slamming against the hatchway’s frame.

GALAXUS, AFT CABIN

Kel-Paten leaned over the small galley sink aft of the main cabin and splashed cold water onto his face, surprised to find that his hands trembled.

He could’ve killed Serafino.

He wanted to kill Serafino.

But for Tasha and Eden Fynn, he would have.

How Serafino had circumvented Psy-Serv’s best filters and found that deep memory of the prosti, he didn’t know. But Serafino had dredged it up from the darkest corners of Kel-Paten’s mind as if he knew just where to look. Shore leave on Mining Raft 309. He was a lieutenant and alone, as usual. The rest of the Pride of Kel’s crew was off to find what amusements they could in that godsforsaken locale that held a scattering of dirty pubs, two eating establishments that promised a healthy dose of intestinal parasites with the food, and one nighthouse, its crude flashing sign advertising both male and female prostis.

He would never have considered going inside had it not been for a conversation he’d overheard at the dingy bar where he’d sat, bored and restless. There was no casino license on the raft, but there were games. Or, to be more specific, a game. One illegal poker room in the nighthouse.

What he—in his twenty-three-year-old innocence—didn’t realize was that the nighthouse, in order to ensure its profits, routinely spiked the gamblers’ drinks with any cheap and handy pharmaceutical concoction.

When he started winning, the bar manager started slipping drinks laced with Heartsong into his black-gloved hands.

He should have run an antidote program the minute he was aware of his body’s reaction to the drug. But then a sloe-eyed, skimpily clad prosti draped herself in a chair next to him, and the sensation was so pleasurable, he overrode his safeguards, forgot about the stack of chips at his place on the table, and followed the woman down a back corridor and into a musty room that smelled of cheap perfume.

He didn’t care about the cloying smell, didn’t care about anything except removing his uniform and that thin bit of lace sloppily wrapped around her... .

Then she saw the scars on his chest and arms. And as his hands moved to cup her heavily powdered face, she saw powermesh on his palms and the two small ports at the base of his wrists.

She jerked back, her mouth pursed as if she’d just tasted something sour.

“Yer that thing, that ’cybe, ain’t you? Whassyer name?” she drawled.

“Kel-Paten,” he answered automatically, swaying slightly toward her.

“Yeah, thass right.” She looked him up and down. “You may look like real people all right, but they ain’t payin’ me enough to do the likes of you.” Then she snatched her lace robe from the bed and bolted out the door.

He stood there shaking, pained. Shamed.

Killing Serafino wouldn’t have erased the pain or the shame. But it would have helped.

GALAXUS COCKPIT

Eden sat cross-legged on the floor of the cockpit next to the nav station and sipped at her cup of hot tea. Serafino swiveled his chair around, his back to the nav station, Reilly sprawled across his lap. Tasha—very much in the role of captain—had just spent a good ten minutes laying down the law to Serafino and then, with a sigh, ordered him off duty. Everyone was tired, everyone was worried. Tempers were short. Take ten, she’d told him, and let Eden check your broken arm.

So they took ten, during which time Eden removed the regen band and certified him fit for light duty—at least, his left arm was. She wasn’t making any prognosis about his head. Oh, he was still talking to her telepathically. Teasing her. But he shut her out from anything beyond that. She took another sip of her Orange Garden. At least the galley stocked that. She needed some good news.

She glanced at Tasha in the captain’s chair, hunched in concentration over the command console, her aura pulsing tiredness, frustration.

Kel-Paten was nowhere to be seen.

Bringing the admiral’s image to mind—and the hard, frightening edge of anger that rolled over her empathic senses earlier, jolting her awake—she reached out in thought for Jace, nudging his foot with hers at the same time. Did you need to hurt him that badly?

Jace gave a mental sigh.

It’s not cruel, sweetling. Remember, he’s a protégé of Psy-Serv and no doubt the annual winner of the Most Devoted Triadian Officer award.

Until I peel away those impenetrable layers he’s concocted, I won’t truly know whose side he’s on. Whatever happened to him because of Sass opened a hole in his defenses. That’s my only way into his mind and his only way out of whatever programming Psy-Serv embedded in there. Do you understand now?

She did. But it was a frightening and dangerous route he’d chosen. All the more so because he was blocking her view of his path—a path he seemed to enjoy a bit more than she was comfortable with.

It had been almost an hour since the admiral stormed off to the main cabin. On a small ship like the Galaxus, there was no room for histrionics.

But Sass gave Kel-Paten some space because what precipitated his departure had wrenched Eden out of a deep sleep, made her grab Sass and propel her to the cockpit with no explanation other than a frantic “Make them stop it now!”

Sass had stopped what looked to be a spillover from the admiral’s botched interrogation of Serafino. He’d walked out of that too. So she knew he needed time to power down. But when he didn’t return after a reasonable time, she decided to go after him—not out of concern for whatever sparked the tiff, she told herself. What sparked the tiff was Kel-Paten and Serafino in a small ship. And not because she was worried about him. She wasn’t worried about him. He was a ’cybe, and his anger—his love letters to her notwithstanding—was programmed. The fact was, they had to make some important decisions to get the shuttle dirtside. Decisions she knew the admiral wasn’t going to like. Best to get that over with. They were about twenty hours out from a max GEO orbit, at which time additional critical decisions would come into play.

Serafino was placing both his and Eden’s empty mugs into the recyc panel when Sass stood. The two had been suspiciously quiet during their break. She had a feeling—no, she knew—Eden knew what had set Kel-Paten at Serafino’s throat. She trusted her friend would tell her when Serafino wasn’t around. “You have the ’con, ’Fino. I’m going to brief Kel-Paten on our schedule.”

Jace started to head for the captain’s chair. Sass laughed and pointed to the copilot’s chair. “Over there. I’m still in charge here, big boy.”

“Just wanted to see if you’d notice,” he drawled with a wink.

“My ass,” she quipped back, and hit the hatchway release. His laughter followed her as she stepped through.

Kel-Paten was seated in the last row, staring out a small viewport. He didn’t turn when the hatchway opened, or at the sound of Serafino’s deep laughter, or when the hatch thunked closed. He didn’t turn when her footsteps came down the aisle toward him. And he didn’t turn when she sat next to him. It was as if he’d crawled in somewhere deep and dark and locked the door after him. Locking everyone else out.

However, with less than twenty hours of fuel on board and stuck in some gods-forgotten corner of the gods-knew-what galaxy, Sass had no time to mollycoddle him.

“Serafino and I will take the shuttle in,” she announced without any preliminaries. “We have considerable heavy air time, and he has more freighter experience than any of us. And this thing, once we hit heavy air, is going to fly like an overloaded ten-bay freighter.” That got his attention. His face jerked toward her, and she was surprised by the bleakness in his eyes. She expected anger after what had happened in the cockpit. Or perhaps even righteous indignation.

The surrender she saw made no sense. Though his question did shed some light on the subject.

“You think I’m losing my mind, don’t you?”

“Serafino excels at fraying your last nerve,” she said. “And you, no doubt, also fray his. We’re all stuck in a rather small shuttle with very little fuel left. Whether or not you’re losing your mind is the least of my worries.”

“Then why did you decide to have Serafino assist without consulting me?”

She shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t agree. And we don’t have time to argue.”

“Am I arguing now?”

His tone was too calm. It worried her. But she didn’t have time to worry.

“No,” she said.

“Do you think I don’t trust you?” he asked quietly.

She’d thought that for quite some time. Until she read those damned personal logs of his. Logs she tried hard to forget every time she caught him looking at her with that almost pleading look in his eyes.

Like now.

She picked at some nonexistent lint on her sleeve. “I think there have been misunderstandings on both our parts. You and I operate from different command methodologies.” She looked back at him. “I didn’t ask Serafino to fly right seat to undermine you, Kel-Paten. He has the heavy air experience. It’s not like we’re going to get a second chance at putting this bucket down.”

“You made a wise decision,” he told her softly.

She tried unsuccessfully to keep the look of surprise from her face.

“Thank you.”

“If the engines do start to blow, I can do a lot more good hands on than I could in the cockpit,” he continued.

Being in the engine compartment would also put the necessary space between himself and Serafino. “You don’t sound overly optimistic.”

“I’m not. You saw the damage. The Galaxus has only rudimentary heavy-air capabilities. When we hit the planet’s atmosphere, we could encounter additional problems.”

Sass understood now what was so odd about Kel-Paten. It was as if he’d deleted the part of him that was human. His phrasing was automatic, mechanical. And, save for the humanly strained look in his pale eyes, he was all ’cybe. Unemotional. Reporting the facts.

“Are we talking total engine failure here?” she asked.

“Do you want probabilities?”

She had to keep herself from raising her eyes to the mythical Five Heavens. He was definitely in a mechanical mode now. “Why not?” she replied grimly.

“There’s a seventy-six-point-five percent chance of total engine failure.

A forty-three-point-two percent chance we’ll experience more than a fifty percent loss of power upon atmospheric entry. A—”

“Miracle, Kel-Paten,” she cut in. “What’s the percent probability for a miracle?”

He regarded her plainly. “I don’t believe in miracles.”

“I base my life on them.”

He seemed shaken by her statement, a small spark of human emotion flashing briefly in his eyes. “Do you?”

“Bet your ass I do.” She stood, braced one hand on the back of his seat, and looked down at him. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. We’re all going to walk away from this one. I’ll give you a one hundred percent probability on that, flyboy.”

She hadn’t called him that in a long time. He closed his eyes, but not before Sass saw the undisguised heat in them.

She straightened, stepping back. She was so used to interacting on a personal level with her crew, sometimes she forgot and did the same thing with Kel-Paten. Only things weren’t the same. He was a ’cybe. And he wanted her in a way a ’cybe shouldn’t.

She tossed a light parting comment over her shoulder as she headed back to the hatchway. “When we land, you get to buy me a beer, Kel-Paten. And if we don’t make it,” she stopped at the hatchway and turned, “you still get to buy me a beer. In the hell of your choice.” She returned to the cockpit, tried to forget the bleakness in Kel-Paten’s pale eyes. And the exactness of his probabilities: seventy-six-point-five percent chance of a total engine failure.

Seventy-six-point-five percent chance that twenty hours from now, they’d all be dead.

And she’d be sipping hot beer in hell.

22

“Let’s take her in, ’Fino.”

Sass tapped a command into the console before her. The Galaxus responded, her sublight engines cycling off. And, with a slight jolt, the emergency heavy-air engines kicked on. All systems were—if not at optimum—at least showing green. And, equally important, Tank and Reilly were securely stowed in a makeshift survival kennel just outside the cockpit hatchway. Eden came up with the design, and the admiral somehow created it—from what, Sass had no idea—while Serafino took his required three-hour nap in the main cabin. She and Eden had done what they could to keep the two apart in the hours following the confrontation.

The kennel was simply an idea that served double-duty.

Sass glanced at the furzels’ life signs, knowing Eden monitored them as well.

They were annoyed, perhaps, at being cooped up, but fine.

She turned back to the ship’s readouts and coordinated landing data with Serafino. Eden had designated a southern area of the largest landmass as the most amenable area for them to put down. The CMO’s scans showed a sizable freshwater supply, lush vegetation, and, more important, an adjacent mountain range that contained a possible fuel source if they could mine and convert the natural ore. But that was a distant problem. Getting this bucket down was the immediate one.

“Firing thrusters,” Serafino told her. She watched their attitude, speed, and temperature carefully. Coming through the planet’s atmosphere, they could encounter any number of problems, not the least of which would be in response to the damage the vessel had already incurred.

She tapped open the mike on her headset. “Status, Kel-Paten.”

“Holding our own,” came back the reply from the engine compartment belowdeck.

“I’m keeping this line open,” she told him. “First sign of any trouble, you talk to me, got it?”

“Affirmative.”

The shuttle shimmied slightly. Sass glanced over at Serafino. “We’re getting some vibrational feedback from the deep-space shields.”

“Hmm.” He keyed in a few adjustments. “I don’t want to reduce them more than that. Not yet. We need the drag.”

She noted his changes. “Agreed.”

Serafino put the shuttle through the first of a series of S-curves, bleeding off extra speed. His flamboyance, his arrogance, was noticeably absent, and his focus as he handled the bulky craft was almost Kel-Paten-like.

“ETA thirty-two minutes thirty-four seconds,” Eden said from her post at navigation.

“Thirty-two thirty-four,” Sass repeated. “You hear that, Kel-Paten?”

“Affirmative.”

“Talk to me about the drop in coolant level,” she continued. “What’s our rate?”

“Moderate,” came back the reply.

“Moderate, my ass. I need numbers!” Next to her, Serafino adjusted the craft’s attitude as the shimmying started again.

“Your job is to bring this thing in, Sebastian. I’ll keep the mechanicals online.”

“You can be very annoying sometimes, Kel-Paten, you know that?”

“Thank you.”

Serafino raised one eyebrow. “Sometimes?” he said loudly enough for her headset mike to pick up.

“Fuck you, Serafino,” Kel-Paten’s deep voice growled over the speaker.

“You’re not my type, Tin Soldier,” Serafino shot back.

“Enough, boys!” Eden voiced her displeasure before Sass could.

The black starfield outside the forward viewport was replaced by a deeper blue, then a lighter blue as the shuttle hurtled through Haven-1’s atmosphere. Hull temperature increased, not critically but worth watching. Serafino worked the shields, but Sass could tell by the frown on his face that they weren’t responding as he would have liked.

“Thing flies like a rock,” he muttered when, for the third time in less than five minutes, the shuttle shimmied almost out of control, her thrusters straining audibly.

“Worse than a ten-bay freighter,” Sass agreed. She needed to be able to buffer their descent with the thrusters. But given the damage they’d received, she didn’t dare bring them online until she absolutely had to.

Gravity exerted a more potent pull on the shuttle, warning messages flaring correspondingly.

“We have to reduce those shields,” Sass told Serafino.

“I don’t like this, but... ” He made the adjustments.

“I know. Eden?”

“Twenty-two minutes, fifteen,” Eden replied, and wiped her hand over her brow. The interior temperature of the shuttle had increased dramatically in the past few minutes and would get worse as the deep-space shields came off-line.

But it had to be. The Galaxus wasn’t a heavy-air craft. The only way the ship would be able to negotiate in that foreign environment would be to reduce power to the shields and siphon it to the engines and thrusters.

Minutes later, the grating whine of the engines crested, then sputtered.

The shuttle veered sharply to port.

Sass grabbed the armrest with one hand and frantically keyed in adjustments with the other.

“Kel-Paten! Talk to me!”

The response that came back was strained. “Thruster failure... feed lines one and two out... doing what... I can.”

“Shit!” she said. “’Fino?”

He was already rerouting the remaining power feeds. “We’ve just encountered a storm cell. It may not be the smoothest of entries,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Seventeen minutes, ten,” Eden told them over the ship’s rattling and groaning.

They broke through into the cloud layer, the brightness of a flash of lightning almost blinding.

“We’re coming in way too hot!” Sass tried to alter the angle of their descent, with no success.

“Braking vanes will shear off at this speed,” Serafino noted tensely.

As if in response, the shuttle shuddered violently again, prompting a flurry of activity in the cockpit. Sass watched the readouts with a critical eye. She had no doubt they were pushing the shuttle to its design limits.

She was surprised there weren’t more systems shutdowns than the ones already...

Then she knew. She knew what was keeping them together at this point.

Her breath caught.

“Fifteen minutes even,” Eden said.

“Damn him! Bloody fool’s spiked himself in!” Sass unsnapped her harness and thrust herself to her feet, ripping the headset off. “’Fino, you have the con. Just do what you can!” She bolted through the cockpit hatchway, past the kennel, and ran toward the rear of the craft.

Sass scrambled down the ladderway into the engine compartment, one look confirming her guess. Kel-Paten sat on the floor next to the dismantled main power panel, datalinks snaking from the panel to the small ports in his left hand. His head was bowed, his breathing ragged.

She hunkered next to him and grabbed his forearm. “What in hell do you think you’re doing? Spike out now!”

His face was covered with a sheen of sweat, his eyes a bright luminous blue. “Desperate... times.” His voice was thin, raspy.

“Spike out, Kel-Paten, or I’ll rip those things right out of you,” she said harshly.

“Too risky. Systems are... unstable.”

“Damn it, this’ll kill you!”

“No... ”

“I don’t have time to argue.” She reached for the datalines. His right hand clasped her wrist.

“No. Tasha... ” His voice was barely above a whisper, and the hand that held her wrist trembled.

She stared at him. He’d kill himself. She knew that, knew the energy requirements of slowing and landing the shuttle would take every bit of life from him. Suddenly she realized how very wrong everyone’s appraisals were of the man called Branden Kel-Paten. He was willing to lose his life to save hers. To save even Serafino’s.

He was choosing to die. She had to make him choose to live.

She kissed him with a passion born of desperation, fear, and anger, taking advantage of his gasp of surprise to let her tongue probe his mouth.

He leaned into her, wanting more, and she willingly gave it. Because behind her desperation and fear and anger was something else. Something that recognized how empty her life would be without his damnably annoying steadfast presence. His devotion to her—so misplaced, but so very much needed.

Damn him for making her feel this way!

He released her wrist. She broke their kiss, placed her hands on either side of his face. His luminous eyes blazed like a white-hot flame.

“Spike out,” she told him softly, her thumb against his lips, stilling his attempt to claim her mouth again. “Please.”

He closed his eyes briefly, cycled into a shutdown. He pulled out the datalinks before she could. She wrenched him to his feet, and for a moment they stood in an awkward half embrace as the shuttle jerked and trembled around them. Her heart pounded, the solid feel of him reassuring in a strange and bittersweet way.

“Tasha—” he started.

The ship bucked, hard. His arms tightened around her as an alarm wailed briefly, then was silenced. She pulled abruptly away, lunging for the ladderway. He followed, swearing, his voice still raspy.

She clambered back into her seat, raking the safety straps across her chest as Serafino fought to control the bucking shuttle, which seemed to want to do nothing more than drop like a rock out of the skies.

Kel-Paten, at the station behind her, manually adjusted the failing engines.

Sharing a beer in hell was beginning to look more and more like a realistic possibility.

“Thirty-three hundred feet... Twenty-five hundred. Two thousand... ” Serafino read out their descent as he manipulated the controls. Another flash of lightning arced through the dense cloud cover blanking the viewport.

“Eighteen hundred. We’re still coming in hot,” he said.

“Got to chance the braking vanes,” Sass told him.

“Try one more steep bank first.” This from Kel-Paten.

“Hard to port,” Sass said, and the shuttle’s frame groaned under the pull of gravity.

“Eleven hundred,” Serafino said. “Starting landing sequence.”

“Extending vanes,” Sass noted, a lot more calmly than she felt. A lot more calmly than the shuttle reacted.

“Heading corrected,” Eden said for the third time as the craft slipped out of control.

“Hope you found us someplace soft!” Sass managed a tense grin.

“Like a baby’s bottom,” Eden replied.

Suddenly the dark clouds parted. Rain spattered the forward viewport, which was filled with deep greens and browns of a forest and, beyond that, a long wet expanse of meadow below.

The meadow. They had to make the meadow. The shuttle’s power—

—died.

Screens blinked off. Lights blinked out. The rush of air through the ventilation grids ceased.

“Brace for impact!” Sass grabbed her armrests just as the shuttle carved a deep furrow into the soft, green-carpeted ground.

23

HAVEN-1

The sound woke her. A thin, high-pitched keening cry, grating in her ears. Painful and only slightly less so than the throbbing discomfort now blossoming like some crazed, viciously spreading weed running rampant over her back, her arms, her left side.

Something restricted her breathing, her movement. She pushed against it, pain flaring. A click sounded. Then it was gone.

“Tasha?”

Warmth on her face, her neck, her left side. Someone prodded her, but that wasn’t uncomfortable. Even her name sounded nice, though a tad insistent.

“Tasha.”

If only the damned wailing would shut up.

“Hmm,” she said, finding her mouth dry, her eyelids sticky. She fluttered them. Light and dark. The light was hazy. The dark...

A man blocking the light. Her brain recognized the square-jawed face, the luminous eyes. The steadfast, unshakable presence. “Kel-Paten?” Mommy? MommyMommyMommy!

Kel-Paten’s lips quirked slightly, trembling—trembling?—into a small, crooked smile. “Tasha.”

MommyMommy!

“I’m not your mother,” she told him over the shrill wail she now recognized as a ship’s emergency siren.

Kel-Paten frowned. “What?”

She leaned forward, grasping his arm. She—they were on the floor of the cockpit. Her chest ached, exactly where the safety straps would have been.

Kel-Paten was on one knee, his arm around her back holding her upright, the empty copilot’s chair behind him.

Gods’ feathered asses! The shuttle. Haven-1. Kel-Paten’s death link to the failing power panel. The landing, had they, were they—

“Status!” She leaned against his shoulder, trying to stand. Her legs failed to cooperate.

“Easy,” he said, his arm tightening around her. “Take it slowly.” Good idea. She steadied herself against him and remembered the last time their faces were so close together, remembered what he had attempted to do. For them. For her. “You... you okay?” She touched his jaw briefly, concerned about him yet feeling oddly awkward about this new closeness. If that’s what it was.

He nodded as she withdrew her fingers. “It’s you I’m worried about.” She was worried about herself too, but not for any reasons he’d guess.

“And Eden?” It was easier to focus on Eden. She tried to turn her face toward the nav station and received a shooting pain in her neck for the effort.

“Coming around. Serafino survived.” He glanced past her, eyes narrowing. Serafino must be there. “He’s with her. Emergency shutdown completed. Shuttle has some structural damage but no fatalities.” He repeated the last words more firmly.

No fatalities. Everyone was alive. It sunk in.

And the voice began again. MommyMommy!

But Kel-Paten’s lips weren’t moving. And the sweet-sounding, almost childlike tone wasn’t remotely the admiral’s deep voice.

MommyMommy!

“Who’s—” She turned slightly, trying again to stand. Her legs worked this time. Kel-Paten drew her to her feet. “Who’s saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy’?”

“That’s the emergency siren. It’s stuck. I can—”

“No, it’s not.” She limped toward the cockpit hatchway, half pulling Kel-Paten, half leaning on him. “Someone’s crying. It sounds like—Tank?” The kennel was tilted sideways but intact. Through the grated opening, a furry paw reached frantically toward her.

Mommy!

“Tank?”

“I checked their vitals. They’re fine.” Kel-Paten guided her—hands on her waist and arm—as she dropped into a crouch. “I don’t think it’s safe to let them out yet.”

Sass clasped the frantic paw, then pushed her fingers through the kennel’s small opening. A soft ear rubbed, hard, against her.

Mommy! Tank scared. Reilly scared! Bad here! Bad Thing!

“It’s all right,” she crooned, tickling the fidget’s chin. “I know it’s bad being stuck in the kennel. But you have to stay there until we’re sure it’s safe to let you out.”

Safe soon?

“Soon,” she promised.

Food soon?

“Soon.”

O-kay.

Okay. Okay? Oh, gods. Sass’s knees gave out and she sat down, hard, on the decking. She was having a telepathic conversation with a furzel!

Kel-Paten’s concerned face swam before her. “You shouldn’t be moving around yet. Sit still.” His fingers gently probed her neck. “Let me—”

“You didn’t hear him, did you?”

“Serafino? No, I—”

“Not Serafino. Tank. The fidget. He’s calling me Mommy, and then he told me he was scared. And hungry. And that Reilly was scared.” Kel-Paten cupped her face with his right hand. “Take a few deep breaths. You’ve been bumped around a bit.”

“I’ve been bumped around a lot.” Damn but her shoulder throbbed.

Probably tore her rotator cuff. Again. “And I’ve been bumped around a lot worse. But I’ve never had my fidget talk to me before, and he’s talking to me now.”

Kel-Paten frowned, but it was one of those half-condescending, half-sympathetic frowns. Her fist itched to clock him one. “Of course. Just take a few deep breaths. It’ll pass.”

“Branden.” She paused. Deliberately. She glared up at him.

One dark eyebrow quirked up slightly. “Tasha.”

“I can hear Tank. In my mind.”

“Reilly’s talking to Eden.” Serafino’s voice came from behind them, over the siren’s wail.

The dark eyebrow that had gone up now slanted downward.

“How? Why?” Sass asked. If anyone knew anything about telepathic talking furzels, it would be a Nasyry.

“Fynn’s a telepath,” Kel-Paten said in a low voice.

“But I’m not,” she countered. “And I can hear Tank. And he understands me. This is... strange.” She shook her head slowly. She raised her voice. “You didn’t answer me, ’Fino. Why?” She turned slightly, trying to see past Kel-Paten’s wide shoulder and back into the cockpit.

“Don’t know yet,” came the answer.

“Yes, Reilly. Food soon,” Eden called out.

Food? Soon? Food? Tank asked.

Sass pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “This,” she said,

“is going to be an experience.”

It was. For the next hour, disjointed sounds, half words, and odd images bombarded Sass as they worked through the required postlanding checklist, reconfirmed the planet’s habitability factors, and Eden poked, prodded, or patched their various infirmities. Furzel ears were far more sensitive and furzel eyes considerably closer to the ground. Sass became intimately acquainted with Kel-Paten’s and Eden’s boots—through Tank’s eyes. His small, singsong voice floated in and out of her thoughts. Some things— most things—made no sense.

“It takes a while to unravel what they’re saying,” Serafino advised from his seat at the copilot’s chair, where he was keying in a basic repair program, coordinating with Kel-Paten belowdeck in the engine compartment. The engine and power grids had fared the worst. Luckily, they had no hull breeches or major structural issues.

Sass felt talking to TeKrain Namar would have been easier.

“What’s this ‘protect, protect’?” she asked, plopping down into the pilot’s seat. Her back ached. Her knees ached. She’d spent the past twenty minutes hunkered down in the corner of the main cabin, trying to reroute a starboard power line so the exterior rampway stairs would function.

“A result of the bonding process, I think.” Eden was at the small science station, running the final tests on outside air samples. “Something in their nature makes them feel it’s their duty to guard their ‘person.’ I’m getting it from Reilly too, off and on.”

“Because something’s bad here or they just fear anything that’s not MommySass or MommyEden?”

Eden shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. Jace isn’t sure.” She glanced at Serafino, who leaned back in his seat and nodded.

“We were just discussing that,” he said. “Reilly was in that protect mode on the Vax too. I thought... I sensed something then. But there are so many variables, including... ” and he tapped his head, indicating the disconnected Psy-Serv implant. An implant Sass knew she’d have to discuss with Kel-Paten at some point. Now, however, did not seem like a good time.

“Jace may have some residual effects from the surgery we have to deal with,” Eden continued. “The med-panel on board doesn’t have any equipment to accurately test that. And I’m sure getting bumped around during landing hasn’t helped.”

“But it could be this place, this planet?” Sass asked.

“They’ve been confined on a ship pretty much their whole lives,” Jace said. “Any kind of dirtside environment with things like wind or natural sunlight or rain will feel very strange to them. It could be as simple as that.”

It could be, Sass thought, bundling Tank once again into her arms as Protect Mommy! Love Mommy! Protect Mommy! sang through her mind. She stroked his ears, his audible purring replacing his mental pleas.

He relaxed against her as Eden pronounced a decisive “all clear.” Kel-Paten’s agreement came moments later from belowdeck. The shuttle was secure. The planet was safe. They weren’t going to fry from the radiation in its atmosphere or take a breath of the outside air and die.

Perhaps that’s all it was. A new place with new sounds and new smells.

But what if it wasn’t? She swiveled around in the pilot’s chair and gazed out the viewport at the greens and browns of trees and grass and earth.

Dirtside. Tank’s nervousness notwithstanding, she hated being dirtside.

It reminded her of Lethant.

It was a hazy morning, or perhaps early afternoon. Light—broken by the irregular line of tall trees—flickered over the expanse of green in dappled patches, reflecting now and then off small, irregular pools of water. The storm that had accompanied their arrival was nowhere to be seen. The smell of raw, wet earth was pungent. The smell of hot metal and burning plastic, acrid. Coolant, steam, and other fluids hissed and whistled through the various exhaust ports of the leviathan called Galaxus that had dropped from the sky and partially embedded itself into the soft ground.

Tasha marched around the shuttle, datalyzer in one hand, her plump fidget trotting alongside. Every few steps she uttered a soft but insistent

“Damn it!”

Kel-Paten trailed through the damp grass behind them both, bemused.

He should be as upset as she was. The shuttle had damage. Nothing a good spaceport repair dock couldn’t fix, but they had no reason to believe HV-1 offered such facilities.

So the captain’s frustration was understandable.

However, they were alive, and—other than the odd fact that Tasha and Fynn could purportedly communicate with their furzels—they were recovering as well as could be expected from their assortment of bumps, breaks, and bruises.

But their physical condition only contributed to the source of Kel-Paten’s good humor and bemusement. It wasn’t the cause of it.

The cause of it was that Tasha had kissed him. And let him kiss her back. And didn’t flinch at his touch.

Gods’ blessed rumps, she kissed him! Even called him Branden. And ever since then, something changed in the way she looked at him or spoke to him. It wasn’t just his ability to expertly analyze human facial configurations that told him this either. It was... something else.

Something warmer and real and... human.

Even Serafino’s presence failed to completely disturb that.

Tasha stopped at the shuttle’s rampway and ran a hand through her hair, wincing as she moved her shoulder. He could tell she was exhausted.

So were Serafino and Fynn. Even he was tired, and his artificially enhanced endurance level was far beyond theirs. They all had been awake and in crisis mode—save for a few hasty furzel-naps before landing—for almost forty-eight hours. His last-ditch efforts to sub-route the shuttle’s power through his systems had taxed him, temporarily compromising a few functions, but there was no permanent damage. Once they determined the shuttle’s status and secured their perimeter, he was going to order them all off-duty for six hours, and himself for two. That would make Fynn happy. Or at least stop her from scowling at her medicorder so often.

Tasha was tapping the datalyzer’s screen, transmitting her scans to the main computers inside. “Got that, ’Fino?”

“Yeah, got it,” Serafino’s voice replied through the unit’s small speaker.

“Wish it was better news.” She sighed and handed the unit to Kel-Paten.

He dropped out of Tasha kissed me mode and scrolled quickly through the data. The appraisal was more thorough and slightly worse than his initial scans conducted from inside the shuttle, but—given the condition of the shuttle’s equipment—he’d expected as much.

However, key components and mechanicals—engines, thrusters, power grid—were surprisingly intact. The news was bad but not devastating, and he told her so.

She rocked back on her heels and looked up at him, a slow grin spreading across her mouth for the first time in almost two hours. “Then I guess you owe me a beer, eh?”

Whatever rejoinder he could offer was interrupted by the sound of footsteps from inside the shuttle and the appearance, seconds later, of Eden Fynn at the top of the rampway, bioscanner in hand. Which was just as well, because he really didn’t have a rejoinder. His limited social skills went into stasis whenever Tasha smiled at him. Kisses notwithstanding, this was all too new—and he had no data by which to judge it. He had no experience flirting with women; he had no experience with women at all.

He’d never even—

“No known toxins or poisons,” Fynn announced, turning the scanner in a slow half circle. “A few molds and mosses. Pollen spores all register as benign.”

“Any edibles?” Tasha asked.

“Don’t stick anything into your mouth until I run a lab test on it.” The CMO trudged down the short flight of stairs, her furzel at her heels. She’d donned her blue lab coat over her rumpled uniform, and her hair—usually so neatly tucked behind her ears—was mussed. A small med-broche, affixed to her neck just under her right ear, peeked over the edge of her uniform collar, mitigating the effects of her concussion. “I’m also picking up evidence of fresh water. A spring, most likely.” She glanced to her left, squinting, then raised her free hand to shade her eyes. “That mountain range is probably the source.”

It was the same mountain range where earlier scans had showed deposits of sharvonite. Essential if they were to refuel, though refining the compound would prove to be a challenge. Kel-Paten segued back into work mode, though not completely. Tasha was inches from him. He felt her presence like a sun’s heat against the cold metal hull of a ship.

“Fortuitous choice of locations,” he told Fynn, and briefly calculated the odds that they should find, exactly within their limited fuel range upon coming out of a near fatal jump, a habitable planet with breathable air, edible vegetation, and potable water. The odds weren’t staggering, but they were sizable.

When he added to that the fact that Tasha had kissed him—and what were the odds that that would ever happen?—it occurred to him that he might be dead and this was the gods’ Lost Paradise. After all, he never had this kind of luck when he was alive.

“Enough room out here to set up a workable repair bay,” said a voice behind him.

Serafino. So much for his theory about paradise.

“We need to set up the security field first,” Kel-Paten said. He strode several paces away from the shuttle—and Serafino—and analyzed the optimal field layout, then paced off a few more. “Here,” he said, digging his heel into the ground, making a long gash. Six more long paces toward the bow. “Second sensor here.”

Tasha came up alongside him, plucked the datalyzer from his hand. She entered the coordinates as he delineated them, transmitting them back to the shuttle’s computers.

Serafino stared at him for a moment, then, with a shrug, turned back to Fynn.

“What’s out here we should be afraid of?” Tasha asked as they rounded the ship’s bow, putting Fynn and Serafino out of sight.

“According to what ship’s sensors show us, nothing.” No animals, no insects, not even a slitherskimp. Nothing remotely inconvenient, let alone threatening.

“Do you find that odd?”

“I’d not welcome any further problems, but yes. It’s illogical.”

“The furzels agree with you, if that’s any consolation.” She stopped and squinted at the forest on her right.

“I think ship’s sensors are better diagnostic tools.”

“Are they?” She was still staring at the trees, then gave herself a small shake and turned back to him. “If we were in the wilds of Fendantun or one of the worlds in the Far Reaches, I might agree with you. But here... ” And she glanced at him with a challenge in her eyes that was very familiar.

It was admiral and captain again, hashing out issues in his office.

Except now his office was a large green meadow and neither of them had their usual cup of coffee in hand. “Parameters may be different,” he admitted. Then, as he always asked during their meetings: “Your hypothesis?”

A small smile touched her lips. “Coffee would definitely help with this discussion, but since you’ve not offered any, Branden, we’ll just have to proceed without it.”

Branden. Perhaps not the gods’ Lost Paradise but definitely a small slice of heaven. “An oversight. My hospitality skills are lacking.” She chuckled softly, then her mirth faded. She drew a short breath. “Are you sure we’re actually here? That we’re not stuck in jumpspace? You know, lost in McClellan’s Void and hallucinating? I thought maybe that’s why Tank’s so upset.”

McClellan’s Void. Dreehalla. The entertainment industry loved to use that as a setting for its horror vids. Drunken spacers—claiming to have uncovered the secret of the mythical Captain McClellan—loved to use it as a means to cadge another drink. He knew of three planetary cultures that used it as a term synonymous with hell. The Rebashee refused to utter its name, only making an odd protection symbol with their fingers to prevent its noticing them. He knew of no one—no sane person—who had ever experienced it. But that hadn’t diminished the legend of a Captain McClellan, who escaped from an alternate dimension where friends and enemies—some long dead—tortured him through bizarre recreations of his life. Friends he’d trusted betrayed him; women he’d loved spurned him; ships he’d captained imploded under his boots. He was a broken man—shivering and babbling incoherently—when the crew of a passing ore freighter found him and his ship, a hundred years ago. Or so the legend went.

Kel-Paten preferred to think of paradise. Though no paradise of his making would ever contain Serafino. McClellan’s Void, on the other hand, would be just that paradoxical. If it existed. But it didn’t.

“To exist in a layer of nonexistence is scientifically impossible,” he told her.

She stepped closer to him. “I’ve heard of mathematical theories—”

“I wrote three of them.” Because he couldn’t help himself and because he saw the slight glimmer of trepidation in her eyes, he touched her cheek gently, brushing some short wisps of her hair back from her face. “And have disproved those and ten more,” he added.

Her lashes lowered to pinkened cheeks, but she didn’t pull away from his touch.

Dear gods, he’d made her blush! And they were talking about hypothetical equations.

“Well, then,” she said, once again looking up at him. The small smile was back. She tapped him in the middle of his chest with the datalyzer.

“Best finish up before Serafino comes looking for us.” He stepped away from her reluctantly and paced to the next sensor point, just aft of the shuttle’s midsection. She followed, making notations, the fidget never far from her heels.

“And your hypothesis, Admiral?”

“Still in process. We’re working with possibly erroneous data until we get ship’s sensors recalibrated. Certainly,” and he glanced overhead at the now pale blue sky lightly streaked with cottony clouds, “this doesn’t match what I’d expect from this planet’s location in the hab zone or its slower rotation. Other than that storm we came in on, temperatures and vegetation don’t reflect the extremes we should be seeing.”

“You mean it shouldn’t be so perfectly conducive to our needs.”

“Exactly.” He cupped her arm, guiding her along as he paced toward the shuttle’s aft end. She didn’t pull away. Amazing.

“So why is it?”

“We don’t know that it is. We only know this small region has attributes in contradiction to our scientific expectations. We haven’t scanned this entire planet—we may be in an environmental pocket, like an oasis in a desert. We’ve also only been here,” he added, “three hours and forty-two minutes. Ask me again in a week. I’ll know more.”

“Aye, sir. Logged and noted,” she said, then: “What’s your estimate on repair time?”

He’d thought about that. The preliminary damage-assessment list was long. The more thorough, detailed one that would emerge over the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours would no doubt be worse. “A month, easily.

Six weeks wouldn’t be out of the question.”

“The Vax is probably looking for us, along with the Prospector, the Dalkerris, the Nexarion, the Pride—hell. The whole fleet’s probably on alert.”

There was a tone of hope in her voice. But they were far off any chart either the Triad or the U-Cees had. Even the damned Nasyry pirate couldn’t find a fix to work with.

“Tasha—”

“I know, I know. Don’t give me probability percentages, Kel-Paten. I’m too tired to take any more bad news right now.” He gave her the coordinates for the final sensor, then: “There are always miracles, you know.”

She glanced up at him, lips parted in surprise. “You said you didn’t believe in miracles.”

“I didn’t, but... ” A dozen things he’d always wanted to say to her, about what she meant to him, ran through his mind. None came out, because Serafino suddenly appeared around the side of the shuttle, datalyzer in hand. His long hair was haphazardly tied back, strands dangling around his face. His high-collared shirt was open at the neck, its sleeves rolled up unevenly on forearms that showed purplish bruises acquired during landing. A U-Cee weapon still graced his hip. Kel-Paten increased his mental filters automatically, even though he suspected the Nasyry could get through if he wanted to. And even though those same filters made him feel detached from Tasha. He hated that.

“I’m picking up a signal! Very clear readings. It’s an outpost or small spaceport. Damn it all, I get nothing from the sensors inside the shuttle.

We got nothing coming in on entry, but,” and he shoved the unit’s screen between Kel-Paten and Tasha, “here it is.”

There it was. Structures. Power fields. Life-form readings—those were the faintest, but they were there, where nothing had been a half hour before, according to their sensors. Sensors that were—with a broken main power coupling and two bent antennae grids—admittedly not functioning optimally.

Kel-Paten didn’t like it, even though a spaceport could—ostensibly—be very good news.

“You said there were erratic energy pulses while we were still in orbit.” Tasha motioned to Serafino. “Could it be this?”

“Doesn’t feel quite the same, but I’m not going to discount anything.

Not until we get a closer look.” There was a tone of excitement in Serafino’s voice. Clearly he’d found a mission where he could cast himself in the role of hero.

“We,” Kel-Paten said, stressing the word, “need to first finish securing this ship and the perimeters. Then we all need some downtime. That will also give us more time to analyze—”

“It gives them time to make the first move. And we have no idea who they are or what they’re capable of. I’m guessing the reason that they haven’t already come calling is that storm that covered our approach.

Their power grid,” and Serafino tilted the screen so both Kel-Paten and Tasha could see it, “shows some cold spots. Looks like they’re just getting things back online. I’ve put our systems on yellow alert, just in case.” Kel-Paten studied the screen in Serafino’s hand, the hint of technology that could solve many of their problems. “I’m not going to put us all through a forty-five-mile forced march when we have injuries and exhaustion to deal with.” And a forced march it would be. The shuttle had no transbeam unit.

“I’m not talking about ‘us all.’ You and me.” Serafino waved the datalyzer back and forth. “I only took a few bruises on landing, and I logged my downtime in orbit. Sass—Tasha and Eden can finish calibrating the security sensors, then nap in shifts until we get back.” Yes, they could. And as much as it grated on Kel-Paten to admit it, Serafino was right. This outpost did need to be investigated, because it was Kel-Paten’s sworn duty as a Triad officer to return to the Fleet as soon as possible. If this outpost contained the technology and the charts to assist in that endeavor, he had to make every effort to acquire them. He and Serafino were best suited to make the trek, even if Serafino did have more than his admitted “few bruises.” But Kel-Paten didn’t like it, and not because Serafino was more injured than he said or because Kel-Paten had no desire to be in Serafino’s company more than he had to. “I can cover the distance faster than you. If, ” and he stressed the word, “the locals do send a probe ’droid or scout team, I’d prefer the three of you be here to handle the situation.”

“Negative, Tin Soldier. You need me. Unless the natives have some kind of telepathic shielding that I can’t circumvent, I’ll find out far more about them far more quickly than you can with your charming personality.”

“’Fino,” Tasha said, a clear warning tone in her voice.

That heartened Kel-Paten but shamed him too. He didn’t need her to defend him. “Don’t interrupt him. He’s teaching me how to be charming.” Tasha sputtered out a laugh.

Serafino cocked his head slightly. “Very good,” he said after a moment.

“When do we leave?”

There was no way he was going to change Serafino’s mind. He knew that. And the bastard did have a point about the usefulness of his talent.

But he hated leaving Tasha alone with Fynn to guard the shuttle. Fynn was a doctor, not a soldier. He doubted she’d picked up a weapon since basic training.

Plus, he simply hated leaving Tasha right now. Something was happening between them, something he needed to understand. He had so many questions, not just about what he hoped were her feelings for him but about her knowledge of Serafino and her suspicions about himself.

About the mysterious ambush and Fynn’s newly found telepathy. About where they were going from here—and he didn’t mean their eventual destination via shuttle. There was so much they had to clear up, and there hadn’t been a chance since they left the Vax. More questions kept coming.

And he knew of no answers.

A forty-five-mile trek with her would have been an ideal time to obtain those answers. But that was not to be. It felt almost as if his old luck—or lack thereof—had returned.

“How strong is your telepathic link to Eden?” Tasha was asking Serafino.

“In case our comm links don’t work?” he asked. “She’s primarily a touch telepath. But there are ways I can reach her. She just can’t initiate contact with me as easily.”

“How about Tank and Reilly?”

This time Serafino laughed. “I’m not taking your fat fidget on a recon mission.”

“Tank says,” Tasha replied, her eyes closed and a wry smile on her lips,

“that you’re rude.” She opened her eyes. “But I was thinking about Reilly.

Eden told me your link to him is stronger.”

“No,” said Serafino.

“No,” said Kel-Paten at the same time. “Since our preliminary scans of this ecosystem are obviously in error, we don’t know what natural predators are out there. I can’t be watching after him,” and he jerked his chin toward Serafino, “and a furzel as well.”

Tasha shrugged. “Just a thought.”

Somehow Kel-Paten knew she was talking to the fidget, even though he was having a hard time accepting that she could.

“No,” he repeated, giving her a stern look, which honestly had never had much effect in the past.

“Aye, sir. If there’s nothing else,” she stepped back, turning the datalyzer over in her hands, “I need to initialize the program, do a test run before we set the sensors in place.”

The warmth he’d sensed from her before was gone. Because of Serafino most likely. Or maybe because she didn’t want him to leave? Maybe it was time... and the excuse of checking on her test data would be perfect.

He nodded. “I’ll look it over before we go.”

“Good.” She ducked her head briefly in acknowledgment, then turned.

“We need to verify coordinates, put together two backpacks with water and emergency provisions,” Serafino said as Tasha headed back toward the rampway, Tank bounding after her. “That shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”

“Half an hour,” Kel-Paten told him. “I want to replace an external power coupling on the main sensor dish before we leave. Have Dr. Fynn pack a small med-kit.” He fixed Serafino with his “that’s an order” glare. It was bad enough he had to spend the next several hours with the bastard. He needed his next thirty minutes free of him. Because he had something important to do after he fixed the sensor dish.

Calibrating the security-sensor field with a fidget tail twitching across the cockpit’s console screens was no easy task. Calibrating the security-sensor field with a twitching fidget tail on the console, an unhappy CMO in the main cabin, and a furzel-to-fidget mental commentary was getting damned near impossible.

Sass set the security program into a diagnostic loop, plucked Tank from the console, and marched through the hatchway into the main cabin.

Eden had converted one of the cabin’s fold-down seats to a makeshift staging table. She was on one side, arms across her chest. Serafino was at the other, hands on hips. Reilly was hunkered between them, tail thrashing much as Tank’s had. Only his tail thwacked first one half-loaded backpack and then the other.

Sass didn’t need to ask what was going on. She’d been getting an abbreviated furzel’s-eye view for the past fifteen minutes.

“I know it’s risky,” she told Eden when her friend turned to her with a pleading expression in her eyes. Tank flowed from her arms onto the makeshift table with a muted thump. The two furzels touched noses, and a chorus of Friend! Protect! echoed in Sass’s mind. She ignored it as she was learning to ignore a lot of their chatter. “The admiral knows it’s risky.

Serafino’s never struck me as suicidal. They’re not planning to attack the outpost, Eden. Just gather information and return.”

“As chief medical officer, I’m responsible for the health and well-being of the officers and crew.”

“I’m responsible for their lives too.”

“None of us,” Eden went on, as if Sass hadn’t commented, “should be doing more at this point than what’s minimally required. Damn it, Sass, if we were back on the Regalia, I’d have you in sick bay. I’d be in sick bay!” She rubbed her forehead, wincing. “I’m concussed. You have rotator-cuff damage, a collateral ligament tear in your left knee. Jace—” Serafino held up one hand. “I’m Nasyry. I heal faster.”

“I don’t care!” Eden stamped her foot, which signaled to Sass that she cared very much indeed. Eden was not by nature a foot-stamper, resorting to that tactic only when she was down to her last sliver of patience. “Shall I detail your two cracked ribs? Or how about the lumbar sprain? Or—and you!” Eden whirled, pointing at the admiral, who—judging from the footsteps Sass just heard—had entered the main cabin only moments before. “If you’ve run a diagnostic, you haven’t shown me the results. You were damned near half this ship’s power supply for, what, an hour or more? That was a mere four hours ago—”

“Four hours, eighteen minutes, twenty-seven seconds,” Kel-Paten corrected, his voice flat. It sounded as if he was in ’cybe function, but Sass wasn’t about to turn around to find out. Things happened when he looked at her. Things she wasn’t sure she was ready to feel. She vacillated between regretting kissing him and wanting to tear his uniform off and have wild, insane, sweaty sex, just to get him out of her system.

That had always worked in the past.

“I agree with your assessment, Doctor,” Kel-Paten was saying as the two furzels bounded off the table and raced past Sass’s legs, heading for the cockpit, “but these are not ordinary circumstances.”

“Another four hours,” Eden challenged. “We rest, eat a decent meal, spend some time on the shuttle’s regen table.”

“No. Our duty to return to the Triad takes precedence over any personal concerns.”

“Three hours.”

“Captain Sebastian is staying behind. By the time we return, you’ll have her well-fed and completely healed.”

“Two and a half.”

Serafino shoved a small med-kit and a rations pack into one backpack and sealed it. “Ready when you are, Tin Soldier.” He yanked it up to his shoulder.

Sass saw the momentary thinning of his lips. So did Eden or, given their telepathic bond, maybe she felt it.

“See? See?” Eden glared at him. “Those ribs are not healed yet.”

“You worry too much, sweetling,” Serafino answered with a smile.

Eden turned back to Kel-Paten. “Okay, one hour. With him,” she pointed to Serafino, “on the regen table the whole time.” When Kel-Paten didn’t answer, Sass glanced over her shoulder and saw a slight hesitancy in his expression, his brows angled down. Was he considering it or just annoyed at the whole situation?

“The sooner we leave, the sooner we’ll return,” Serafino quipped, edging for the rampway door.

“Twenty minutes,” Kel-Paten said to Eden. “I have to review the security sensors with Captain Sebastian. That gives you twenty minutes to work on your patient.” He jerked his chin toward Serafino. “Everything else will wait until we get back. Sebastian?” He looked down at Sass.

She couldn’t read his expression, so she went with routine: “Kel-Paten.” And paused.

The slightest of nods. “Your presence at the command console, please.” Well, now that was a tone she hadn’t heard in... days. If Timm Kel-Faray suddenly appeared behind the admiral with his usual “By your leave, sir!” she wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

She returned his nod and followed him to the front of the ship, wondering what in hell was going on now?

GALAXUS COCKPIT

Tank watched from his perch on the console as Reilly, nose to the floor, stalked the perimeter of the cockpit. Safe? Safe?

No smelly light, Reilly told him. With a sigh, the older furzel sat on his haunches and took a moment to wash his left whiskers. Outside not safe.

Mommy’s not listening, he said finally.

I try! Tank pleaded. Mommy says all is safe. All is not safe. I try again.

Furzel talk. Human talk. Too different. And JaceFriend is quiet now. And Mommy does not listen to furzel words.

Tank wrinkled his nose. JaceFriend makes MommyEden sad.

JaceFriend thinks he hunts Bad Thing. Silly. Bad Thing here. Outside.

Waiting. Flows ugly in, ugly out.

I know. Tank sneezed. Bad smell.

Time to fix again. Time to Blink. Reilly arched his back, standing.

Tank help?

Friend stay with MommySass. Protect.

O-kay, Tank said, but he was disappointed. He wanted to be the one to hunt Bad Thing. If only he was a big furzel like Reilly and not just a fat fidget.

Protect is important, Reilly told him from the cockpit hatchway. Part of Bad Thing touches this ship. Still smelly. Needs more Blink. One furzel hunts. One furzel protects.

Reilly had called him a furzel! Tank preened in satisfaction. O-kay.

Tank protects. He narrowed his eyes and peered through the neverwhen as Reilly trotted away. Bad Thing touched this ship. Bigger Bad Thing waits outside but won’t get in. Because Tank the furzel is here, on guard.

Tank protects.

24

GALAXUS MAIN CABIN

Jace let the backpack sag slightly off his shoulder as Kel-Paten and Tasha disappeared through the cockpit hatchway. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go into it any more than I already have. I repeat: if and when I have something valid, I’ll tell you and Sebastian. Until then, you’re just going to have to trust me.”

Eden folded her arms over her chest again and fought the urge to start tapping her foot. Jace was wearing one of the best chastised-little-boy looks she’d ever seen on a grown man. It made her want to forget the real issue here and tug off his clothing. She had to ignore that impulse. “How can I trust you when you’re blocking me, blocking Reilly?”

“It’s for your own protection.”

Her protection! Gods’ feathered rumps, how she hated that phrase.

Something was very wrong about the appearance of this outpost.

Something was very wrong with this whole planet. Jace had sensed it when they were still hours out, and she’d picked up on that—immediately.

So did Reilly and Tank. Ever since landing on Haven-1, Reilly had wanted to protect her from something bad, but she couldn’t figure out what the threat was. She wasn’t sure Reilly knew, and until she had facts, she didn’t want to bother Tasha—the captain clearly had enough problems. And trying to talk to Kel-Paten about it wasn’t even a consideration. She didn’t think he gave much credence to furzel intuition.

Jace could help in translating Reilly’s thoughts, but Jace wasn’t talking.

He’d shut her and Reilly out of his mind ever since they neared Haven-1—limiting his mind contact with her to basic, required conversation and, of course, his habitual flirtations. She even took a quick nap, hoping he’d draw her into Novalis. He didn’t, even though she could feel him just on the edges of her mind’s shadows. He was there, reading her, watching her. But he refused to come to her, because she’d start asking questions.

Nor would he tell her why he was so intent on traveling alone with the admiral. That worried her too. Because she knew his sister was always on his mind. Even if she could no longer read it.

She waved one hand toward the back of the main cabin and the small sick-bay diagnostic panel glowing from the wall. “I’ve fifteen minutes to work on your ribs. Strip off your shirt.” She strode to the panel and then initialized the regen program. The multipurpose table slid from the wall as his footsteps came up behind her.

She turned.

“Long as I can keep my pants on,” he said with a grin as he climbed on.

“I still have a fear of those rectal thermometers of yours.” She tapped at the unit’s screen with more force than necessary. “Don’t tempt me, Captain Serafino. Don’t tempt me.”

GALAXUS COCKPIT

Tank sprawled on the command console, his tail and one hind foot obscuring the screen. Protect Mommy! he chirped as Tasha stepped past Kel-Paten. The cockpit door grated closed behind her.

Food? Tank’s large eyes watched her approach.

She swiveled the pilot’s chair around and sat, taking a moment to chuck him under the chin. “Sweet baby. I have work to do.” She pushed his foot, encouraging him to relocate. He rolled onto his back and splayed four furry feet in the air, his tail still across the screen. She lifted it and peered at the data. Good. The program was finished. “I had the computer run a level-three diagnostic on the security field, just to be sure we hadn’t overlooked anything,” she told Kel-Paten as the copilot’s chair squeaked.

She glanced over. “There’s always—”

The words she wanted to say died on her lips, because every trace of

’cybe she’d seen in his face and in the set of his shoulders was gone. He was looking at her again. And looking at her with that something that made her stomach flutter, coated her cheeks with a flush of heat, and made her suck in a slow, careful breath. This was a “come hither” look if she’d ever seen one. He leaned forward, reducing the already small distance between them to mere inches. His pale eyes were half hooded, his lips slightly parted. Even under his dark lashes, his gaze heated and probed her. She felt it as if it were a physical thing. Tingles ran down her spine and pooled between her legs.

Loooove Mommy... Tank purred.

Yes, there was that too. His logs. His love letters to the woman he thought was Tasha Sebastian. Who wasn’t.

She could handle “come hither.” Hell, she was actually looking forward to “come hither” if they could ever get around to it. Hot sex was such a great stress-reliever. But love... she couldn’t risk that. Especially not with Branden Kel-Paten. She liked him too much.

“Tasha, I—”

“Security perimeter’s functional,” she cut in quickly, damning the unexpected breathiness in her voice.

“—don’t want to talk about the perimeter. We need... I need to tell you—”

“About repairs. I’ve worked out a schedule.” Please don’t say you love me! Kiss me, tear my clothes off. But do not tell me you love me. “Want to see it?”

“Tasha, please. I’ve waited a long time to tell you this.” Oh, damn. Here it comes. She needed to do something, fast. Something to keep him from saying what she didn’t want to hear and had no idea how to respond to.

“And I have only fifteen minutes,” he was saying.

The solution hit her. Something he would like. Something she could handle. “Good point. Let’s not waste it.” In two heartbeats she closed the short distance between them by grabbing a fistful of his shirt. Her kiss landed a bit off center—she’d surprised him, she realized—but she angled her face, correcting that slight miscalculation. She flicked her tongue over his lips as his hands found her shoulders, pulling her against him.

She released her hold on his shirt and pushed her fingers through the short thickness of hair at his neck. She nudged his mouth open again and kissed him, her tongue teasing his.

For a moment he trembled under her touch. Then he grabbed her waist, pulling her awkwardly onto his thighs.

Subtle he wasn’t, which was good. Neither was she. She disentangled her right leg from his left, let go of him long enough to push both armrests back, and straddled him. When he groaned in her mouth, she deepened her kiss, clutching his shoulders.

His arms crossed her back, then one hand cupped her rear, squeezing, kneading. She turned her face slightly, her mouth pulling back as she changed the angle of the kiss and the kneading stilled. There was a hesitancy in the way he held her, as if he was unsure she wanted to be touched.

Silly man. Of course she wanted to be touched. To prove her point, she brushed her lips against his and sucked his lower lip.

His breath stuttered. He arched against her, his hands tightening on her waist and hip as he pulled her toward him.

When she kissed him again, his mouth was already opening. His tongue met hers boldly. He stroked her spine, his hand splaying to push her against his chest. She rocked against him, tasting, savoring. The comm panel chimed. Then chimed again.

He broke their kiss with a barely audible “damn!” and, holding her face against his shoulder with one hand, reached out and slapped at the panel with the other. The chair jiggled. “Kel-Paten.” His voice—raspy, deep, and definitely annoyed—rumbled against her body.

“Ready when you are, Tin Soldier.”

“Outside at the rampway. Five minutes.” He cut the link with a tap.

She moved her hands to his shoulders, wanting to straighten, but he held her firmly. “Wait,” he said, his mouth brushing against her ear, his fingers massaging slow circles on her back. “Wait.” He was breathing hard. So was she. Suddenly his breathing stilled, and the next breath was slow and controlled. She did push herself upright this time. His hand slid slowly down her back. His eyes were closed.

When he opened them, they glowed. He was under full ’cybe power.

Because of Serafino, she guessed. But perhaps more so because of whatever waited for them at the outpost.

Loooove Mommy, Tank cooed. Protect.

“Well, that was fun while it lasted,” she said lightly. “I’ll activate the security perimeter after you leave.” He let her go but not without some reluctance, gloved hands trailing down her thighs as she slid from his lap.

He watched as she regained her seat. “Don’t be afraid of me. Ever.” The remark wasn’t what she expected. Did he think that was why she’d left his embrace? She gave him a wry smile. “I’m more afraid for you.”

“I can handle what’s out there.” He folded the armrests down and stood.

Silence descended, suddenly awkward. The quick repartee she’d always shared with Dag Zanorian or any one of her other occasional lovers after a playful, heavy-petting session was noticeably absent. And that’s all this was, right? Stress relief. Fun while it lasted.

“Kel-Paten,” she said finally, when he reached the hatchway. “Check in every half hour or risk a demerit.”

The cockpit door opened at his touch. He glanced through it, then back at her, looking at her in that searching, wanting way. Even the glow in his eyes did nothing to lessen that look’s intensity. He turned without answering her comment, stepped over the hatch tread, then turned back.

“I love you, Tasha.”

He held her startled gaze for a long moment, then was gone.

Damn him.

IN THE FOREST

The gnarled trees towering above them seemed ancient, their moss-crusted trunks thick with centuries of age. Roots twisted and turned through dense underbrush. Detritus on either side of the path was more than ankle deep. The trail itself was inexplicably clear.

Like the appearance of Haven-1 and its almost perfectly matched habitability.

“I don’t want to stay on this route much longer,” Kel-Paten told Serafino, who was scanning ahead of them, listening for anyone or anything. It was almost as if they were being led to the outpost.

“We go too far off course and they’ll know we suspect something. Or they’ll tag us as attackers, intruders. Another hour.” Serafino glanced at the datalyzer in his hand. “We’re not even at the halfway mark.” They’d been moving at a hard, steady jog for almost an hour already and were due to check in with the Galaxus. Kel-Paten could have easily doubled his speed, but there was no way the Nasyry could keep up. And as much as he loathed admitting it, Serafino’s telepathic skills would be an asset coming in to this situation as blindly as they were. If Serafino was honest about what he sensed.

Kel-Paten wasn’t sure about the Nasyry’s honesty. But he had no choice.

He needed to know what they were getting into up ahead at the outpost.

He had no idea what had just happened back at the shuttle.

Not just. It was forty-eight minutes, thirty-two seconds... thirty-three seconds... And the forced, solitary pace of their journey—solitary because, after an initial, perfunctory discussion of tactics, he felt disinclined to make idle chatter with Serafino—left him far too much time to mull over

“fun while it lasted.”

He had been so very sure that this was the time to tell her how he felt.

She’d kissed him, no longer stepped away when he touched her arm, and blushed when he engaged in his—admittedly clumsy—flirtations with her.

So he allocated five minutes to fix the sensor dish. Then he’d get her into the privacy of the cockpit, close the door, and tell her how he’d felt for so many years. And she’d answer that she loved him too. He played that scene over and over in his mind as he marched up the shuttle rampway and finally—with Serafino suitably occupied with Doc Fynn—was able to usher her into the cockpit.

Then someone rewrote the scene.

He fully imagined kissing her again. But he imagined their kiss ending with a declaration of love. Not a pronouncement that it was “fun while it lasted.”

He could almost hear Ralland in his head: After a session like that you’re complaining?

No. The feel of her on him, the taste of her was incredible. For him. For her it was fun.

“Hey!”

Serafino’s shout behind him made him slow down. Deep in thought, he’d outpaced the Nasyry again. Running from my troubles?

“If you need to rest... ” he offered, part of him hoping the man would say, Go on ahead without me, I’ll catch up.

“I’m not even winded.” Sweat beaded on Serafino’s face. He was panting. “But I don’t have rockets in my pockets like you, Tin Soldier.” Kel-Paten stopped, let Serafino close the distance between them, then moved into a hard jog again. Probably would be best to keep Serafino with him. He didn’t trust him at his back.

The dirt trail took them over the crest of a small hill. The trees thinned but still offered cover and shade. HV-1’s sun was no longer overhead but on their left. Kel-Paten judged it to be early to mid afternoon, but the planet’s day might well be longer.

The forest grew denser at the base of the hill. He slowed slightly. Time for their second check-in. He pulled out the small comm link, now discreetly clipped on the inside of his shirt. He had a scrambler running on the shuttle’s communications equipment but no way to verify its efficacy, so his report was brief. “Rover One to base.” He relayed time, coordinates, and status in a truncated, prearranged code.

“Base to Rover One. Copy,” said Tasha’s voice, muffled and soft.

“Acknowledged. Base out.”

And that was it for another thirty minutes. No long conversations, nothing for the outpost to intercept. And no way for him to ask her about

“fun while it lasted.”

GALAXUS COCKPIT

There had to be a way to get the shuttle’s sensors to pick up data on that outpost. Sass swiveled in the pilot’s chair and watched the third test program she’d tweaked into the ship’s computers run through its latest batch of queries. It made absolutely no sense why the handhelds were the only pieces of equipment able to get a fix—and just the basics at that. The powerful sensors on the shuttle could provide so many more answers.

She stopped swiveling for a moment and, leaning back, peered into the dim main cabin. Eden was still asleep. Sass had ordered the CMO off duty right after Serafino and Kel-Paten left, but Eden had insisted on hooking up a small regen unit to Sass’s shoulder first. Her friend had a bruised look under her eyes from stress, lack of sleep, and—Sass suspected—Serafino. Sass’s slight prodding into what might be the issue was met with an exasperated sigh and a terse “Testosterone.” Well, yes, the flamboyant Captain Jace Serafino had never lacked in that area.

So while Eden slept, Sass monitored the scouting party’s check-ins (two so far, right on time) and tweaked the damned sensors, because she didn’t want to think about Kel-Paten’s kisses. Or his parting words.

I love you, Tasha.

It was bad enough to read it in his logs. It was worse hearing it in person, because she could no longer pretend it didn’t exist. His speaking those words gave them life, made them real.

She was cursed and she knew it.

The test program finished its loop and beeped. She studied the screen.

Nothing. All sensors still showed as operating within normal parameters, when she knew damned well they weren’t. They couldn’t be—they’d pick up the outpost if they were.

Mommy tired? Naptime. Tank, sprawled in the copilot’s chair, rolled over onto his back and presented his belly to be rubbed. Love Mommy.

Protect!

At least, that’s what she thought he said. The rub-my-belly pose was unmistakable. She’d figured that out long before his voice—and often disjointed images—ever appeared in her mind. The images were the easiest to understand. His “verbal” conversations tended to be fraught with miscommunications.

Love Mommy, he said just now. But when Kel-Paten had been in the cockpit with her, it was Loooove Mommy. She didn’t know if it meant anything; if she didn’t have such a natural ear for linguistics, she wouldn’t have noticed the difference in tones. It was probably nothing. Tank also had at least four different-sounding purrs.

Other words were simply indecipherable: squeals and chirps and coos that sometimes found their way inside usually decipherable words.

Blank-cooo-ket, Tank had said just before pouncing on Eden’s makeshift bed in the main cabin. Sass had scooped him up so that Reilly could take his rightful place. Reilly...

Sass hesitated. He had been with Eden when she’d ordered her CMO off duty. But the last few times Sass glanced back in the cabin, she hadn’t seen the black furzel.

“Tank, where’s Reilly?”

Friend? Friend hunt-ing. Run run jump. He stretched one hind leg.

Tank protect.

Hunting? Tank’s images in her mind were tinged in browns and greens.

Did Eden awaken to let Reilly go outside at some point when Sass was occupied with a sensor program? She couldn’t have. A double chime sounded whenever the main hatch opened.

She checked the security logs just to be sure. The last time the main hatch was accessed was when she’d gone out for an exterior inspection of the perimeter sensors, just after Serafino and the admiral left.

If Eden had opened the main hatch—or even an emergency hatch—it would be on the log.

It wasn’t.

“Where’s Reilly hunting?” she asked Tank, and pointed out the viewport. “Outside the ship?” She hadn’t seen as much as a slitherskimp.

She couldn’t image what the furzel would hunt out there.

Run run jump! Tank answered. Friend hunt ugly smelly light. Here.

Not here. Bad smelly. Safe here. Tank protect.

Ugly smelly light? Sass tried to decipher the phrase she’d heard so often in the past few hours. Was there something in this planet’s light spectrum that furzels could see and humans couldn’t? Something dangerous, a form of radiation their sensors couldn’t detect? Eden had checked for all known parameters, but so much about Haven-1 seemed to border on the unknown.

“Where is the ugly smelly light, Tank?” She picked him up and held him up to the viewport. “Out there? In the sky?”

There. Not there. Here. Not here.

“Where, Tank? Don’t talk. Show me. Think a picture, if you can.” Think picture?

“When you look at the ugly light, what do you see?” Bright blue with green swirls flowed through her mind. Just color. It could be a blue ball or a blue box or a blue huntership from close up.

Nothing recognizable. Damn.

“So it’s blue. Can you take me to where you saw it?” No ask, please? Reilly not like. Danger to Mommy. Tank protect!

“I understand, but this is important. Tell Reilly that. You have to show me the ugly light.”

Danger to Mommy!

“But you and Reilly protect me and Eden. You’re big furzels.” Tank rubbed his head thoughtfully against her arm. O-kay. Maybe.

Tank protect. He wriggled in her grasp. She let him go. He jumped to the deck and gave himself a shake, then trotted toward the main cabin. She stripped the restricting regen unit off her shoulder and followed, tiptoeing past a sleeping Eden Fynn. Tank stopped at the engine-compartment hatchway and pawed it.

Sass hit the release to open it. “Ugly light down there?” she whispered.

There. Long time. Not there.

Not direct radiation from the planet’s sun, then. She tucked the fidget under one arm and climbed awkwardly down the ladderway, her damaged shoulder protesting. “Where in here?” She put him on the floor.

Plumy tail aloft, he trotted to the far-port bulkhead and a smaller maintenance accessway. There. Long time. On Big Ship first. Leave Big Ship. On here. Now small here. Big out there.

A sick, cold feeling formed in the pit of Sass’s stomach. Big ship. That had to be the Vax. Something that was on the Vax had moved to the Galaxus. Something ugly and smelly and bad. Something the furzels hunted. Something the furzels protected them from.

This was definitely not a problem with an unknown level of radiation.

She pulled the datalyzer from her utility belt, then flicked on its hand-beam function and, squatting down, tabbed open the accessway cover. She played the light up and down the narrow duct and watched readings on the screen, looking for any kind of mechanical device.

Something with a blue screen or light on it. Did this Faction that Serafino so feared have an agent on board the Kel’s prize huntership? Did that agent plant a tracking device, a bomb?

No box, Mommy.

Box? Mechanical device. Tank had seen the images in her mind.

“Okay. No box. What am I looking for?”

Yellow eyes glared at her. Ugly. Smelly. Light! If the fidget had added

“you stupid human!” to his comment, Sass wouldn’t have been surprised.

Okay. Ugly smelly light. She sniffed. Nothing smelled out of the ordinary, but then, furzels had a wider range of senses than she did. She took a deeper breath. Nothing.

Ugly smelly light! Tank shoved past her and, before she could grab him, jumped through the small opening, directly into the narrow ducts that ran behind the bulkheading.

“Tank, no!” Gods’ blessed rumps, it was going to be hell getting him out of there. When she did, he’d be filthy. And if there was something dangerous in there... “Tank, get back here now!” She angled the hand beam in his direction, caught a swish of his—now filthy—tail.

He stretched his short, pudgy body up on his hind legs as if reaching for something. She brought the beam up as well.

Then she saw it.

She had no idea what it was, but she could see something vaguely oval, faintly glowing, pulsing blue-purple-black. It was about the size of Eden’s medicorder or smaller. It didn’t look like a device, but she didn’t discount that it could be. It registered as a complete unknown on her small datalyzer.

Tank poked one paw toward it.

“Tank, get away from that thing now!” She didn’t even try to disguise the note of fear in her voice. Her heart pounded.

Tank protect. Safe.

“You’re not safe. Get away!”

Safe. Small Bad Thing. Fidg—furzel bigger. Blink stronger. Watch! He slapped at the light with his paw. The light skittered sideways, undulating, purple fading to black.

Holy lubashit on a lemon. The damned thing was alive. Sass yanked her pistol from its holster, the datalyzer now in her left hand.

Bad Thing not like Tank, not like Blink. There was a distinct note of pride in his voice.

Blink? Another word she was probably misunderstanding. “Get back here now. Or no more cream. Ever.”

Cream? Food, sweet!

“Jump back up now!”

Jump? No jump. Go Blink!

Go blink?

Tank disappeared. One second he was there, the next he wasn’t.

Frantically, she played the hand beam back and forth in the duct but could find no trace of her fidget. The... thing on the outer bulkhead pulsed darkly but didn’t move. Then something butted her thigh.

She glanced down and saw golden eyes and a smudgy, dusty, furry face.

“Tank!” She hugged him hard against her.

He made a soft ooof noise, then: Tank protect. One furzel hunts. One furzel protects.

“This,” and she motioned with her pistol to the interior of the duct,

“this blue-purple thing. This is ugly smelly light?” Very small Bad Thing. Ugly. Smelly.

“And Reilly... hunts this? He’s down here?” She glanced around. In her surprise at finding the thing in the accessway and her fear for Tank’s safety, she’d forgotten about the older furzel. “Where’s Reilly?” Run run jump!

Greens, browns assailed her. The smell of wet soil, the sound of leaves and branches cracking.

Friend hunt Big Bad Thing. Very big. Very bad. Bad Thing hunts, kills.

Furzels protect.

It took only a moment this time for the scenario and sensations to come together in her mind. And when they did, she didn’t like what she’d figured out at all.

She shoved herself to her feet and lunged for the nearest comm panel.

“Eden! Get your ass out of bed. Reilly’s taken off after Kel-Paten and Serafino. And there’s some kind of nasty creature hunting them all.” Eden Fynn, CMO and Zingaran Healer, shelved her worries about her furzel and—per the captain’s orders—focused on analyzing the small glowing oval stuck to the outer bulkhead. Ugly smelly light. Bad Thing. She couldn’t judge if it was ugly or not, and it didn’t have an odor she or her bioscanner could detect. But it did emit light.

As for bad—she was working on that right now. Empathically.

Telepathically she couldn’t pick up anything without touching it, and there was no way Tasha would permit her to touch it, even if she could somehow manage to squeeze into the narrow duct. Just as well.

Something she couldn’t define told her that touching Bad Thing—which is what she and Tasha agreed was the most useful name for it—wouldn’t be pleasant.

But whether it would be lethal—fatal—she wasn’t sure. Yet.

It was almost dead. That much she did sense, if her comprehension of life essence was valid for its species. That was also in agreement with what Sass could decipher from Tank. Reilly had hunted this smaller piece of Bad Thing and somehow neutralized it.

And now Reilly was gone, run off into the forest on this strange planet.

No, don’t think about that. Find out what this creature is. That’s the danger. Not this place. Besides, Sass was back in the cockpit contacting Kel-Paten and Serafino right now. They’d find Reilly. He’d be fine.

She relaxed her mind once again and probed.

Sensations trickled through her. Weakly, but there. It felt as if she watched a vid from a distance. But, no, wait. Not a vid. She recognized the man. Her ex-husband, his face, lips twisted in a sneer. He was younger, she was younger, a holo-catalog suspended before her. She remembered the dress she wanted to buy, a soft swirl of blues and golds. Beautiful.

“Doubt they make it in a size big enough for you. ” Her ex-husband’s voice. His harsh laugh.

Her shame. His cruelty. She wanted to curl up in a ball and die... .

“Eden!”

Sass, shaking her shoulders. Tank frantically pawing her leg.

“Eden, snap out of it.”

“Huh?”

“That thing just got bigger.”

It took a moment for her to shake off the feeling of unworthiness, of ugliness, the horrid memory...

The purple oval glowed more brightly now. And it was slightly larger, plumper. If light could be said to be plump.

“Gods.” Eden exhaled the word. She understood suddenly. “It was reading me. Feeding off my memory, my emotions.” No, not her memory exactly. But a much more intense version of a minor memory. Her ex-husband’s comment had only irritated her at the time; she’d grown used to them by then. But linked to Bad Thing, the memory was crushing.

Horrible.

And Bad Thing loved it.

“It’s like a parasite, feeding on hatred. Fear,” she told Sass, letting her friend draw her to her feet. “If you can link to it, it grabs something you remember, makes it worse, until you want to die.” She stopped, the import of her words coming to the fore. “That means every empath, every telepath that it comes in contact with is at risk.”

“Maybe not just empaths,” Sass offered. “What if that’s what happened on Degun’s Luck or those other ships before that? Officers and crew on a ship that shows no sign of attack or intruders, all dead from fear.” Eden stared at her, comprehension coming with crystal clarity. “We stopped at Lightridge. Degun’s Luck was berthed there. Maybe this thing killed the crew and then, still hungry, came on board the Vax. Tank told you it was on the Vax, right?” When Sass nodded, Eden continued: “And from there, for some reason, it went to our shuttle.”

“We were headed for Panperra. Big station. Lots of people,” Sass suggested.

“And it can split itself. Or there’s more than one.” Eden grabbed Sass’s arm. “Part could still be on Lightridge, on the Vax. People will die, and no one will know the reason!”

“The furzels know. They hunt it. They trap it using something they call a Blink.”

“Blink?”

Sass nodded. “I pressed Tank for an explanation while you were down here running an analysis on it. He sent me thought pictures of a telepathic energy shield, like a force field. Furzels create it from this Blink space.

Tank and Reilly encased that thing. That’s why it didn’t affect me when I was close to it. But you probed it. Tank felt that, dragged me down here to stop you.”

Eden looked down at Tank, rubbing against her leg. “And Reilly?” Sass nodded. “He went after the admiral and Serafino because the rest of that thing,” she motioned to the glowing oval in the duct, “is out there, after them. Given what those two feel about each other, and given that Jace is a telepath, there’s a lot of hatred for it to feed on. And who knows what else if it gets to that outpost.”

“You warned them—”

“I tried. Pinged them twice.” Sass tugged at the strap of the rifle slung over her shoulder. It finally registered with Eden that the captain had donned her jacket and was dressed in full battle gear. “They’re not answering. Is your telepathy strong enough to reach Jace?” An icy hand closed around Eden’s heart. Jace? Jace!

Silence.

Eden shook her head. “No,” she said. Damn him.

“Get your gear, Fynn.” Sass’s words were clipped, her expression grim.

“Tank’s going to fix that Blink shield. Then we’ve got a long, hard jog ahead of us.”

25

Go Blink!

Sass watched in amazement and disbelief as her fidget disappeared and reappeared before her eyes. It was as if he’d jumped in and out of a hole in the engine-compartment bulkhead—except there wasn’t one. Now she knew how he’d gotten out of her cabin and into Eden’s to visit Reilly when the door was locked.

Go Blink!

With those few movements he repaired the small rip in the shield around Bad Thing, once again a darker shade of purple when Sass cautiously peered into the accessway. Dying. Eden had confirmed that much.

She picked up the purring fidget, holding him close against her shoulder, then climbed up the ladderway to the main cabin and Eden, her thoughts on what might even now be threatening Lightridge and the Vaxxar. Threatening Kel-Paten.

I can handle what’s out there, he’d told her.

She had no doubt the Tin Soldier could. With his cybernetics and Psy-Serv’s emo-inhibitors, he was one six-foot-three emotionless son of a bitch. But he was more than the Tin Soldier. He was Branden. He had bypassed all those emo-inhibitor programs and loved her.

If Bad Thing caught up with him when his emo-inhibitors were off-line, his loving her—or hating Serafino—could well get him killed.

She pushed the fidget through the hatchway and then pulled herself up into the main cabin. Eden was sealing her backpack on top of the tangle of blankets that was her makeshift bed.

“Ready?” she asked the CMO.

“When we find him,” Eden said through thinned lips, “I don’t know what I’m going to do first: kiss him or kick his ass.” Sass didn’t know if Eden was referring to Serafino or Reilly. It didn’t matter. She understood the feeling only too well.

She made one final check of the gear and spare power packs on her utility belt, then hoisted her own backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go.” Run! Jump! Run!

THE FOREST

“Shit.” Jace Serafino stared through the binoculars at the ship sitting on the tarmac on the edge of the small outpost. An outpost that—based on all previous data—should still be a good hour’s hike from here. And a ship that—based on his personal experience—had no possible way of being there. He knew exactly how and when he’d lost the Mystic Traveler to that slimy son of bitch Rej Andgarran. Almost eight years ago. Being ambushed and then trussed up like a kurii hen was far from the high point of his career. Having his ship stolen by Andgarran was even worse. And he’d never had a chance to steal it back, because Andgarran disappeared a few months later and hadn’t reappeared in U-Cee or Triad space since.

But how in hell had it gotten here? The same way the Galaxus had?

He lowered the binocs and studied the readout on his handheld again.

“It’s real. Whatever it is.”

“Having trouble recognizing your own ship?” Kel-Paten asked, his voice low. They were on the edge of a hillside, crouched down among thick bushes and haphazard stacks of felled trees. Trees that, Jace guessed, at one time populated the field now occupied by this unexpected landing site. At the moment, with the deepening shadows of late afternoon, they also provided excellent cover.

“She’s not mine. I sold her years ago,” he lied.

Kel-Paten’s silence irritated him. He wondered if the ’cybe knew the truth.

“And it’s still not the Traveler. ” Or was it?

“Logically, I agree, it shouldn’t be the Mystic Traveler. But even if I didn’t recognize her configuration, there’s her name emblazoned on her port side.”

“Dream about her nightly, do you?” Jace had held back from needling Kel-Paten to this point, but this was something he could no longer resist.

It was one of the reasons he missed the Traveler so much. She was the one ship to take the infamous Tin Soldier down a peg. “Is she part of your sexual fantasies too?”

Kel-Paten shot him a hard look. Jace answered with a raised eyebrow but let it stop there. They had larger problems than his desire to see Kel-Paten squirm. Problems like nonworking comm links that required Kel-Paten to order him to check in telepathically with Eden.

Jace had no intention of taking orders from Kel-Paten and wasn’t about to open any kind of telepathic link to Eden Fynn. There was too much at risk. More so now that he stared at a ship that was but wasn’t his.

So he lied to Kel-Paten about checking in—though he could sense that Eden was alive and well, which was all that mattered.

Kel-Paten returned to studying the sleek ship. Without binocs. He didn’t need them. “So, Nasyry, what are we looking at?”

“A ship someone wants me to think is the Traveler. ”

“And that someone is?”

“I won’t know until we get closer,” Jace admitted. “I can’t read specific thoughts at this distance. I can sense overall emotional levels. I’m not picking up anything unusual.” If anything, things seemed too calm. His experience with spaceports and dock hands was that someone, somewhere, always had his ass puckering over something.

“To have someone provide you with a ship would not be unusual. If they expected you to arrive.” There was a flat, hard tone to Kel-Paten’s voice, and Jace didn’t like it.

“What are you getting at?”

“You brought us here. You were at the controls when the shuttle entered the jumpgate. I found it very unusual that we should just happen to end up, blindly, near a habitable planet. But now we have not only a habitable planet but one with your former ship. Something to warrant a further investigation, bringing us, bringing me, closer to whoever waits on that ship. Or in the hangar.” Kel-Paten shifted his weight slightly, rebalancing.

“Perhaps that blind jump wasn’t so blind. Who owns you, Nasyry? The Illithians? The Cryloc Syndicate?”

“No one owns me.” Jace’s voice was equally hard.

“Your contract with the Triad was a sham. Who put you up to it?”

“Since when is ‘cooperate or we’ll kill you’ considered a contract?”

“The Triad doesn’t—”

“Don’t they?” Jace tensed. If the Tin Soldier made a move, he was ready.

More than ready. This confrontation was overdue and they both knew it.

“Or does Psy-Serv conveniently delete that fact during your weekly tune-ups?”

“You must have forgotten you received two hundred fifty thousand credits. That’s hardly fatal. So someone is paying you more. Is it me they want, or is kidnapping two Alliance officers part of the plan as well?”

“If someone wanted your head on a platter, they wouldn’t have to pay me. I’d do it for free.”

“Wise on your part. You’re not going to live long enough to spend a reward, anyway.”

There was no way Jace could see Kel-Paten move. The ’cybe was too fast. But he sensed it, sensed the surge of power through his aura, and rolled to his left, Kel-Paten’s hand just grazing his shoulder.

He sprang to his feet, breathing hard, laser pistol in hand. But the ’cybe was already there, unarmed, not needing a weapon. The eerie glow in his eyes confirmed he was one. Jace fired into a blur of movement, not knowing he missed until two black-gloved hands slammed against his shoulders, pinning him to the hard earth. The pistol skittered away in the grass.

“Who owns you?” Kel-Paten ground out.

A bizarre sensation of fear surged through him. He tried to push it away as he wrestled against Kel-Paten’s grip. He was too damned busy fighting for his life to be afraid. He blocked the suffocating sensation and dropped again into Nasyry warrior mode. He tensed his body, then bucked against the ’cybe in a move that would have tossed an ordinary man into the bushes. It only managed to dislodge Kel-Paten a few inches, but that was enough. Jace twisted again, ignoring the flare of pain from his cracked ribs. He sprang up into a crouch, catching only a glimpse of a surprised look on the ’cybe’s face over the fact that Jace was still standing and fighting.

But it was a brief, fleeting reward.

The fear—a cold, cutting terror—returned, hitting him with such force that he gasped for breath. Before Jace could take a second, the ’cybe was on him, flattening him to the ground, knee in Jace’s chest, hand on his throat...

Something dropped down from above. Darkness descended, Kel-Paten’s chest smothering his face. A muffled shout. Fear swirled maddeningly through his mind, death beckoning as the only respite.

Then there was light. He could breathe again. The overwhelming sensation of fear faded... no, vanished, like a popped soap bubble.

Jace opened his eyes and struggled to sit up, leaning against—Eden?

“Eden!”

She brushed his hair out of his eyes.

He blinked, looked over her shoulder. Kel-Paten, a few feet away, was flat on his back. Sebastian was sitting on his chest, arms folded, lips pursed.

Lady Sass did not look happy.

Neither did Eden. “Sweetling,” he croaked. His ribs ached like hell.

“You godsdamned son of a bitch.” Eden Fynn balled her fist and smacked him hard across the jaw.

Sebastian snickered. “I thought you were going to kick him in the ass.

It’s on the other end, Doc.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get there.”

JaceFriend! MommyEden not happy.

A strong sense of disapproval on his right. Wincing, he looked down.

Reilly. And beyond him, Tank. The fat fidget looked positively gleeful, even with twigs stuck to his tail.

JaceFriend, Reilly continued. Bad to not talk to Reilly. Bad. Bad.

Oh, hell, the mental block he’d erected to keep Eden and Reilly out of his thoughts was gone. He didn’t remember letting down his guard, but that’s probably how Eden located him—and then came right up behind him without either him or the ’cybe noticing. Of course, they were a bit occupied. He rubbed his jaw and put his telepathic senses on full scan.

The fear slammed into him full force. Biting, cold, gnawing. It knocked the breath out of his lungs, blinded his eyes with its intensity.

He heard a scream—a high-pitched furzel-like yowl—and then a woman shouting his name, hands clinging to his shoulders.

His brain spun in dizzying rotations, and the last thing he remembered before falling into darkness was a small voice giving a very odd command.

Go Blink!

“Eden!” Tasha’s anguished cry tore through Kel-Paten. She bolted upright off his chest, her boot catching his side as she tried to stand. She stumbled forward, arms out toward...

Nothing. Eden and her furzel were gone. The bastard Serafino was gone.

Kel-Paten was already on his feet. He grasped her shoulders, holding her steady. He didn’t know where the two—no, three of them—went, but he suspected a transporter beam. Not from the Traveler but a smaller ship overhead, probably a security skimmer. He fine-tuned his hearing, listening for the low thrum of an engine. If that was the case, the ship could be searching for other biosignatures to lock on to. He didn’t intend for them to find his or Tasha’s.

“Come on!” He dragged her backward a few steps, a flash of black and white at her feet. The fidget. “We have to get out of here before they realize they missed us.”

“But—”

“Move, Captain.” He snatched his backpack and Serafino’s from the ground. “That’s an order!” Or by the gods’ blessed rumps, he’d throw her over his shoulder and carry her.

She moved, or, rather, let him drag her back into the forest, the fidget darting this way and that in front of them.

They needed cover, something thicker than the tree canopy shadowing them on the hillside. Something with other biosignatures to muddy the scan would be ideal, but he opted not to head for the outpost. Whoever hunted them probably had his biosignature, or thought they did. His real one wasn’t in any file Serafino or his ilk could have accessed. He had six others his system could emulate. He triggered that program now as they charged through the brush.

He didn’t think they’d have Tasha’s. He doubted they even cared they’d kidnapped her to this unusually convenient planet. But just in case, he kept her as close as possible to him as they ran away from the unusually convenient path. That, too, should muddy their sensors.

“Wait! Tank says... it’s not... ” She tried to wrench her arm from his grasp.

He held on. “A small ravine. There, at the base of the hills.” The uneven topography promised some outcroppings and overhangs. Good visual cover, if nothing else.

He heard no following whine of an engine overhead. Of course, he hadn’t heard one just before Serafino disappeared, but then, with Tasha perched on his chest, he admittedly wasn’t paying close attention.

He was now. He could not, would not lose her.

“It’s not following us!” she said.

So she didn’t hear an engine either. Good. But he would feel better when they were tucked out of sight. They could regroup, analyze, come up with a plan to get Fynn back.

He ducked under a group of low-hanging branches, his mind working on who was behind this and the attack near Panperra. The problem was twofold. First, who wanted him incapacitated or dead? That list was lengthy. Second, who had the knowledge and resources to enact such a plan of ambush and obfuscation? That list wasn’t quite as lengthy, but it did include the Illithian Dynasty. Those alien fighters that forced them into the jumpgate prematurely could have been an Illithian ploy so Serafino could “pretend” to find this planet by happenstance.

Yet no matter how much he hated the man, he had a hard time seeing him in any kind of relationship with the Irks. But he could see him allying with that Rebashee mercenary, Gund’jalar. Zanorian had. And there’d long been rumors the Rebashee had charts to the far edges of the galaxy, if that was indeed where they were.

“Here.” They reached a narrow section of the ravine. The forest was thick, filled with twisting vines and the jagged outcropping of rocks overhead. “We should be safe here for a little while.” He yanked the backpacks’ straps from his shoulder and dropped them at his feet.

Tasha was breathing hard. She bent over at the waist, resting her hands on her thighs. Tank plopped down on one of the backpacks. “Damn.” Her voice was raspy. “Damn.”

“We’ll find Fynn. I don’t think he’d hurt her. He has her either on that ship or somewhere in that outpost. More likely, they’ll want to trade her for me.” He pulled his handheld out of his utility belt and adjusted the screen’s light as he activated the datalyzer, checking for pursuers. It was late afternoon, judging from the sun’s position. But the foliage shadowed everything. He tilted the screen, better to see the data. Nothing. Right now.

“He doesn’t have her.” Tasha straightened. “It has them. ” He dragged his gaze from the datalyzer and looked at her. Her hair was ruffled, a few green leaves sticking to it. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. But her eyes were clear, steady, and troubled.

He wanted to pluck out the leaves, smooth the dirt from her face, but held back, unsure now of what response he’d get. He helped her untangle her backpack’s strap instead. “It? What are you talking about?”

“It. The furzels call it Bad Thing. It’s here with us and is some kind of psi-based creature. Telepathic. Teleportation too, evidently.” She drew in a breath. “I think it killed the crew on Degun’s Luck and came on board when we made Lightridge Station. Then it hitched a ride on the shuttle, maybe because it wanted to get to Panperra. Or maybe it was after one of us. I’m not sure. But it almost killed Eden after you left. That’s why we came after you. Now it has her and Serafino and Reilly. Tank says they’re alive. He can sense them. But he’s not sure he knows how to get them back without Reilly’s help.”

If it were anyone other than Tasha Sebastian telling him this, he’d discount every word. But that troubled gaze didn’t waver, and her mouth was a thin, grim line. Something threatening had been found on the shuttle—had been on the Vax, if he understood her correctly. And he’d left her and Fynn to face it alone.

“Sit down,” he said, because she looked like she was ready to fall down.

He pointed to a mossy boulder. “Catch your breath, then start from the beginning. Tell me everything.”

She sat and rummaged in her backpack. “You do know,” she said, extracting her canteen and flipping open the top, “that I cannot run as fast as you do.” She took a mouthful of water, closing her eyes as she swallowed.

Damn. He hadn’t run at full speed, but he hadn’t run at her speed either. And he’d hung on to her arm the whole way. “I did think about throwing you over my shoulder. We’ll try that next time.” She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand, and for a brief moment something sparkled in her eyes. Then it was gone. “I’m not sure where to start. So much of what I’m learning about this Bad Thing creature is a jumble of information from Tank. The furzels talk in a combination of images, sounds, scents, and words. Some of this may be wrong. And I might be missing what’s really important.” He eased down on a fallen tree trunk across from her. “Tell me whatever you know.”

She did, starting with the way Tank’s protect, protect always sang in her mind, to finding Reilly missing, to Tank’s revelation of something trapped in the shuttle’s engine compartment. She described the dark glowing oval and what Eden said it felt like to have the thing sending images, sending desolation into her mind, making her want to die.

He thought of the way Serafino pulled the shameful memory of the prosti from his mind. But the shame didn’t make him want to die. It only made him want to kill Serafino.

Tasha glanced at Tank from time to time as she talked, touching his head, stroking one ear. She was listening to the fidget, he guessed. Knew she was when she said, “Tank’s trying to get a clearer fix on them through the Blink.”

“A blink?”

She explained the Blink, how the furzels used it not only as transportation and communication but as a shield. “They manipulate its energy. Eden said the Nasyry have something similar, a place called Novalis.”

“I’ve heard of the legend.”

“It’s not legend. Eden’s been there. Serafino knows far more about it, but he stopped talking to her telepathically once we found this planet.”

“Why?” This psi-creature notwithstanding, he was still mistrustful of Serafino.

Tasha shrugged. “To protect her, he said. We think he knew about Bad Thing. Telepaths and empaths seem particularly susceptible. Which brings me to something else I think you need to know.” She drew a short breath. “Serafino has an implant in his head, courtesy of Psy-Serv.”

“An implant?”

“A telepathic inhibitor. And, we suspect, some kind of data recorder. It was starting to break down and we—she—thought it might kill him. Eden couldn’t remove it, but she did manage to disable it.” He thought of Fynn’s insistence to get Serafino on the med diag table right before they left the shuttle. “She operated on him two hours ago?”

“Um, no.” Tasha looked down at her boots and toed at a clump of grass.

“Couple of days ago. Maybe three. I’ve lost track of time, a bit.”

“Why wasn’t I informed—”

“I’m sorry.” She raised her face. “But we weren’t sure whose side you were on. When Serafino started talking about Psy-Serv corrupting the Triad—”

“You thought I’d be part of that?” His allegiance to the Triad was not only unshakable but irrefutable. But she did arm Serafino. And she did believe he’d sent the alien fighters after them at Panperra. She’d threatened to sell him as scrap.

“Kel-Sennarin is.”

“Impossible.” Her allegations shocked him, and for a moment he was almost angry that she could even suggest such a thing. But then, she was U-Cee. She couldn’t be expected to understand. “He’s a Triad Defense Minister. I’ve known him for years. His reputation is impeccable.”

“Serafino says he has proof.”

“Says,” he countered strongly, but she was still talking.

“That thing in his head is also a recorder. Eden and I suspect that’s why Psy-Serv wanted him brought back in. It’s not the two hundred fifty thousand. It’s his memories. But they didn’t know Eden’s a telepath or they never would have assigned his capture to the Vax. ” Kel-Paten tamped down his annoyance at her allegations about Kel-Sennarin and focused on the information about Psy-Serv. He refused to accept the Triad was behind the ambush. But Psy-Serv had no honor.

“Then the fighters that intercepted us by Panperra were after him. And willing to kill the rest of us in the process.”

“Eden is the only innocent. Serafino said I’ve been on the Faction’s hit list for some time. You weren’t until recently. Psy-Serv feels they can no longer control you.”

“Psy-Serv never controlled me!”

“Can they access you when you’re spiked in?”

He closed his eyes briefly, watched the yellow numbers dance in the lower corner of his vision. He was a ’cybe again to her. And though part of him had started to believe that didn’t matter to her, the rest of him still felt alien. So much less than human. “They can,” he said, watching her for any of the one hundred forty expressions he knew, “upload and download certain information, yes. But they cannot reprogram me.” He hated the word, but it had to be said. He knew that’s what she was really asking.

She nodded. He read acceptance in her features. It was preferable to disgust. “That’s all rather moot, isn’t it? Because they’re on the other side of that jump we made. And we’re now dealing with some kind of psi-energy alien that wants to play mind games with us until we die.” The fidget butted his head against her hand. “Tank’s still searching.” Kel-Paten leaned his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers over his mouth, not really hearing her last comment. Something bothered him about the information she’d outlined. He felt as if he were missing something. Granted, it all had happened so fast—it was only eight days since they’d stopped at Lightridge to let Fynn investigate the deaths on Degun’s Luck. Then there was the vortex, Serafino, Panperra, the fighters, the blind jump. The illogical world they were on. And a mindsucking psi-creature... that could create a duplicate of a bastard pirate’s ship?

“Ask Tank,” he said, feeling slightly foolish even making the request, “if this Bad Thing can manipulate matter.” At Tasha’s slight frown, he continued. “Could it create the copy of Serafino’s Mystic Traveler?”

“The Traveler’s here?”

“What appears to be the Traveler is at the outpost. Could it create an outpost, a ship,” and gods, that was a staggering thought, “this world? Ask Tank if he knows where Bad Thing’s home world is.” She pulled the fat fidget into her lap. “Do you understand what the admiral asked you, sweet baby?” She stroked his whiskers. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “Let’s take this one thing at a time. Bad thing.

Furzels know Bad Thing for a long time, right?” Silence from the fidget. A narrowing of eyes from Tasha. “Where are there lots of Bad Things? Big Bad Things, baby Bad Things, all together. If Bad Thing goes home, where is that? A ship? A cloud world? A green world?”

More silence. More narrowing of eyes. Then Tasha’s eyes closed. “Holy lubashit on a lemon,” she said softly. She looked at him. “Tank says they come from the void. McClellan’s Void. He calls it Big Crazy Silly Space.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“He showed me,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “an image. A Rebashee gesture.” She touched her thumb to her little finger, arching the other three, then made a small slicing movement in the air. “Dreehalla. It appears, Admiral, all your mathematical theories are wrong.” SOMEWHERE IN THE OUTPOST

The fear was no longer nameless, faceless. It was real. And, as expected, it wore the austere purple and black robe of a Nasyry warrior priestess.

He knew they’d find him eventually.

Jace felt Eden’s fingers digging into his arm. So much for trying to protect her from this. One moment they were blinded, clinging to each other as their world shifted from outside in the forest to here, this stark, high-ceilinged room about the size of an average freighter cargo bay. Then his vision cleared and he saw her. Immediately, he stepped in front of Eden—or tried to. It was an instinctive move, which she deftly blocked.

Eden evidently would have none of that. Where in hell are we?

“Hush,” he said softly. “Not now.”

The robed woman standing at the far end didn’t turn or give any indication she knew they were there. There was a long, narrow window or viewport in front of her, shadowy figures shifting in the distance. Window, he decided. Though the room reminded him of a cargo bay, with wide joists curving out from the walls or bulkheads at regular intervals, nothing told his senses he was on a ship.

At least, not one in space.

“Let me handle this,” he told Eden. Then chanced it: If I tell you to run, you run. Don’t look back. He tried to block her from his mind then. He couldn’t raise a block, not even the smallest mental filter. Something was stopping him, something—

Psy-Serv. He recognized that taint of arrogance immediately.

Psy-Serv, here? With a Nasyry Great Lady?

Something was wrong. He took a quick scan. There were others in the room. He saw only edges of shadows in the irregular overhead lighting but felt much more. Six, no seven. Eight, with the Great Lady. Eight against two. No, three. They had Reilly... .

Reilly was gone.

Eight against two.

“Who is she?” Eden whispered.

My past come back to haunt me, probably kill me, he wanted to say, but didn’t. The presence of Psy-Serv puzzled him. But Eden had a right to know the basics. “They,” he whispered back. “Eight. All around us.” And he’d lost his weapon in the scuffle with the ’cybe.

“Oh, Jace! I’m so frightened!” Eden’s voice warbled theatrically. “What do they want?” She clutched the front of his jacket, wailed loudly in his ear. Tucked something into his hand as he moved to dislodge her.

A laser pistol. He hoped she’d retrieved his from the ground and wasn’t giving him hers. He slipped it into an inside pocket. “Ahh, Eden. I really do love you,” he whispered in her ear, unable to keep a slight chuckle out of his voice in spite of the circumstances. Gods, she was a terrible actress.

He wanted to believe she was also armed. Or at least had several useful items clamped to her utility belt. He felt them as she bumped against him.

But if he knew, chances were the other eight knew. Psy-Serv missed little. A Nasyry warrior priestess missed nothing.

Sniffling, Eden let him draw her to his side. He patted her lightly on the rump, then took a half step forward. He was already dead. It would matter little if he violated sacred protocol.

“Great Lady,” he began, his voice carrying clearly. “I acknowledge this unspeakable transgression in addressing you without permission. But I am a lowly saj-oullum, and my crude audacity knows no bounds.” A rustle from the shadows in the room but no response.

Then the woman raised her right arm slowly, stopping when it was about even with her shoulders. Her robe fanned out. A glowing blue orb emerged and floated by her side, expanding until it was about three feet across.

It took a moment for him to access collective memory and identify it.

Bloody holy damn. His stomach clenched. A Ved’eskhar. A legendary monster. Impossible. But this one was real. Now he knew where his psychic block and paralyzing sense of fear had originated. And he knew what had snatched them from the forest to this room. But what was one of his people doing with a Ved? The Ved were parasites, psivampires. A telepath’s worst nightmare. And banished by the Nasyry centuries ago to some unnamed dimension where they would feed upon each other and die.

But they hadn’t, and suddenly with a sickening jolt he knew where he was.

Eden sucked in a sharp breath.

“Ved’eskhar,” he told her quietly.

Eden shook her head. “That’s Bad Thing. Reilly—” She glanced quickly down, looking left and right. Reilly? This time the panic in her voice was real.

Don’t know. He tried to send her reassurances. Reilly was smart. He was probably hiding in here somewhere.

Reilly and Tank killed one of those things on the shuttle.

Killed a Ved? On the shuttle? He didn’t know they could be killed by a furzel. And he sure as hell didn’t know one had been on the shuttle.

One was on the Vax too. And Lightridge. Degun’s Luck. At least, that’s what Reilly told me.

The disturbing undercurrent he’d felt on the Vax. A Ved’eskhar.

Things slowly started to make sense. And then the Great Lady turned and spoke. And nothing made sense at all.

“I will speak now, Jacinto. You will listen. Then, when I’m ready, both of you will die.”

Even if he didn’t recognize the face, the voice, the use of his name was unmistakable. Only one person in his life had ever called him Jacinto. It was her loving, special nickname for him.

But there was nothing loving in her face or tone at all, and her aura seethed with poisonous colors. The brief elation he’d felt upon seeing her evaporated like a drop of water falling on the Riln Marin Desert as he quickly tallied the scene before him: a Nasyry holy robe, a Ved, and the stink of Psy-Serv. All on a world created by the Ved out of the thoughts of humans dragged into the neverwhen.

This time he did manage to push Eden behind him. He faced his sister squarely, pain slicing his heart as a thousand questions whirled through his mind. He voiced only one: “What kind of game are you playing here, Bianca?”

She stepped closer to him, the Ved following, and held out her other hand. He’d always thought his sister had the most beautiful smile. This one carried the chill of the grave.

A small form walked stiffly from the shadows. A boy, almost a young man. Gods, no! Young Jorden. The nephew who had his uncle Jace’s talents. Talents his mother didn’t have. Or did she? Another puzzle.

Jorden took his mother’s hand, and she turned him so the shaved area in the back of his head clearly showed. A long thin stripe to allow easy entry for an implant. With a sickening feeling, Jace remembered his fingers finding his own missing thatch of hair after Psy-Serv did the same thing to him.

“What kind of game?” She stroked Jorden’s dark hair away, just in case Jace hadn’t seen it. “One of control, Jacinto. A game of ultimate control.” 26

Eden paced the small windowless office, looking for anything she could use, any way out. Two male human guards in nondescript gray freighter jumpsuits had escorted her here—at gunpoint—after removing her utility belt and pistol. Then they frisked her for any other weapons.

Three other guards—all human, one a woman—did the same thing to Jace, finding the pistol she’d passed to him.

But he wasn’t in this makeshift holding cell with guards outside the door. Through his telepathic link with her, he flashed her images every few minutes: a long gray corridor, then wide double doors. More guards. Then an examining room that contained an array of medical equipment that, under other circumstances, she’d drool over.

Now it terrified her.

Don’t be scared, sweetling. Use what I’m showing you. He sent her the image of the corridor and its various doors again. Find a way out.

How could she when she was surrounded by Psy-Serv telepaths who were seeing and hearing everything Jace sent her?

They’re not all telepaths. Eden; watch their aura. Those that are have implants like I do.

She stopped pacing. Damn! She reached empathically for the guards on the other side of her door. Only one was a telepath. But wait... yes. There was something in his aura. An odd wiggly red line, very faint.

That’s what the implant looks like?

She felt Jace’s affirmative.

But Bianca—

She’s oullum, he told her. And... he hesitated, and Eden could feel the hurt radiating through him. He loved his sister. But his sister was no longer someone to love. She’s emotionally unstable, and not just from her relationship with the Ved. She hates telepaths, hates the Nasyry for making her feel inferior—

She’s wearing a priestess’s robe.

She fancies herself the high priestess of the Oullums. Jace sounded disheartened but angry too. Frustrated. Eden felt that, felt how difficult it was for him to deal with this.

And that’s why she kidnapped you?

We haven’t quite gotten to that part yet. I have to go. I’ll check back in a few minutes.

And the warmth she knew as Jace vanished.

Damn. Back to the problem of getting out of here. Eden examined the sole desk in the room, large and metal with three drawers on either end. It had also held a data terminal at one point, but that slot was empty. She rifled the drawers. Not even a lightpen so she could stab a guard in the neck. If she could get out of here. Or get them to come in.

Now, that was a thought. Maybe if she started screaming, pounding on the walls, the guards would have to investigate. But what could she hit them with? No chairs. Only the desk, and she couldn’t lift that. She’d tried.

She looked up. A recessed light panel. A plastiglass insert surrounded by a metal frame. Her mind worked quickly. Drag the desk under the light panel, stand on it, and yank down the covering—if she could reach it. The insert would be too lightweight, but maybe the metal frame could be fashioned into something sword-like. Of course, she’d have to break it apart first, but maybe that would provide her with some nice sharp edges.

She went back to the desk, grabbed a corner, and tugged, her hands slipping on its rounded surface. It budged an inch or two. This wasn’t working. Perhaps if she pushed?

She sidled around to the other side of the desk. Pushing gained her another two inches, an ache between her shoulder blades, and a scrape on her palm when her hand slipped again. Her head pounded.

Damn. Maybe if she took the drawers out. She pulled out the one on the top left, but it stopped. A safety-latch mechanism, she realized. She knelt and reached into the open space, feeling blindly with her fingers.

Swearing. Finally, she found it, and the heavy drawer slid completely out.

The door to the office opened, startling her. Three guards, including the woman who had taken Jace away. Jace... gods, how long was it since he contacted her? She reached, sensing him on the edges of her mind. But he wasn’t talking.

The guards stepped in. The woman was the telepath, her aura tinged with red squiggles.

Eden pushed herself to her feet, bringing the long desk drawer with her.

It was bulky, unwieldy, but if she could slam one of them in the head with it...

Three pistols appeared as she lifted the drawer.

“Don’t be stupid, Dr. Fynn,” the taller of the two men said. He had reddish hair, cropped very short, and a nose that looked too small for his broad face.

She lowered the drawer. “Where’s Jace?”

“This way.” Small Nose waggled his pistol.

She recognized the gray corridor. Three doors, a cross corridor, another two doors. All closed. No signs that said Escape This Way. She listened again for Jace or Reilly but heard only silence.

They came to the double doors, and when they opened, she recognized the medical facility. No Jace. “Where’s Jace?” She put a firmness in her voice she didn’t feel.

The two male guards assumed position by the door. The woman kept walking, disappearing behind a single door on the right. It closed behind her.

No one answered her question.

The single door opened again. Bianca strode through, the blue orb floating sinuously off her left shoulder. Bianca the Beautiful Bitch, and her Bad Thing. If Eden wasn’t so damned mad and so damned scared, she might have found the moniker she’d bestowed on Jace’s sister amusing.

“I want to see Jace,” she told Bianca.

“What did you do to his harness?” The woman fairly spat out the words.

Harness? “He doesn’t have a harness.”

“Of course he has a harness. He’s a telepath. They all must have harnesses!” Bianca almost shouted the last few words. The blue orb’s glow increased, pulsing. “They must be controlled. But you... you!” She pointed at Eden. “What did you do to his harness? It’s changed. It’s not responding to commands. Dr. Kel-Novaco will not be pleased.” The implant. Oh, gods. Were they trying to access Jace’s implant? She’d altered it the only way she could: by changing the codes by which it accessed each function. It was still functionally active. It just couldn’t talk to the programs that told it what to do.

“It was malfunctioning. I had to deactivate it or it would have killed him.” Surely Bianca cared if her brother lived or died?

“Of course it would have killed him! It’s an older prototype. But now it’s not responding to basic commands. We’ll learn nothing from it when we extract it.”

Extract it? “Extracting it could cause severe brain damage. Or kill him!” Bianca frowned. “He’s served his purpose.”

Gods. Jace was nothing more than an experiment to her? “He’s your brother!”

“He’s a filthy mindsucker,” Bianca shot back. “The data in the harness is more important.”

“And your son? Your husband?”

She smiled. “Galen’s harnessed. And Jorden listens to me. To us. We,” and she gestured to the blue orb at her side, “know best when their mind habits can be used. Like in bringing my brother to us, so he could be harnessed. We had to play a little game, pretend I was in danger. I knew Jacinto would respond to that. He always has. Dr. Kel-Novaco put an excellent unit into him—at the time. Then it developed problems.

Problems we think we can avoid in future harnesses. But we need to extract it and its data for that.”

Bianca tilted her face slightly. “You’re a doctor. Surely you know the importance of medical research.” Her expression hardened. “How did you deactivate his harness?”

Eden’s mind raced. Bianca would kill Jace. Her only concern was the unit, not her brother’s life. But Eden had watched Sass in the casinos enough times to know that sometimes you had to bluff and bet it all, even when you held only one good card. This, she felt, was one of those times. “I changed the access codes.”

“I want the new ones.”

“No.”

“No?”

Eden crossed her arms over her chest. “No.” The only chance Jace had would be for Eden to be the one to remove the implant. Unlike Bianca, she would do everything to keep him alive. She had to convince Bianca to let her be the doctor in charge.

Bianca motioned to the blue orb.

Fear slammed into Eden. Cold, oily, invasive. Bad Thing crawled into her mind. She was in the cockpit of a shuttle, alone, as it hurtled out of control toward a sun. Then she was a child again. No, older, perhaps fifteen. Yes, fifteen. It was Maridee’s birthday party at the lake. A horrible day. The memory was actually worse than the out-of-control shuttle, because the party was real.

Eden didn’t have the lithe, slender body the other girls did. Feeling plump and uncomfortable with her curves, she wore a shapeless bathing suit. The boys laughed at her. “Drown the fat girl, drown the fat girl!” No, no. They never said that. They just laughed. But it didn’t matter.

They were saying it now. And it felt real. Water in her face. Water in her nose and mouth. Hands, feet pushing her down, kicking her. Water in her lungs. Pressure. Horrible pressure. She wanted to scream but couldn’t.

Fear smothered her. Dying...

Let me die. Let me die. Death is good...

No, sweetling! Don’t listen to it. Hold on to me...

“Bring her back!”

Bianca’s voice jolted her.

Eden found herself on her knees, trembling, bile rising in her throat.

But she’d heard Jace. Warmth flooded her.

“She has the codes,” Bianca was saying. “We need those codes.” Yes, they did. They needed her alive. She struggled to her feet, swaying.

“I will be the one to extract it.” Her voice was raw, raspy. She could still taste the murky lake water. “Or you will not get the codes.” Bianca stared at her, eyes narrowed. “If you were a telepath, I’d order a harness implanted in you. You’d obey me then.” Bianca didn’t know she was a telepath! To her, Eden Fynn was just a CMO. Ship’s doctor on the Vaxxar. An oullum. But surely the Bad Thing knew? Or was it reading her only as an empath because it had no solid form and couldn’t touch her?

“I perform the surgery or no codes,” Eden repeated.

It took several minutes. Finally Bianca nodded and thrust one hand toward the single door. “Your patient’s in there. I want the implant and the codes by sunrise or... ” and she let her voice trail off.

“You’ll kill me?” Eden supplied sarcastically.

“No, Dr. Fynn. But you’ll wish I had.”

THE FOREST

Kel-Paten knew Tasha no longer trusted the data on the handhelds. To be honest, neither did he. But those units and his own cybernetically augmented senses were all they had to go on as night closed in on the forest at the edge of the outpost.

He refused to believe they were in McClellan’s Void or any kind of hallucinatory anomaly. Too many other indicators told him this world and everything on it were real. He even had an explanation as to how Tasha and Fynn traversed the same distance he and Serafino did—in less than half the time. He and Serafino ran at a faster clip. They must have missed a shadowed shortcut, an alternate but more direct trail.

As to why the outpost was not where it was supposed to be, he blamed mechanical error. Something—perhaps the planet’s magnetic field—was skewing their scanners and sensors. They did have the correct direction but the distance was off.

“Then tell me why talking furzels are normal,” Sass countered, her face hidden not only by the twilight but by the binoculars she held over her eyes. They were conducting surveillance on a hillside overlooking the outpost—not the same one from which Serafino and Fynn were snatched or transported or blinked away, but the one closest to the side of the outpost where Tasha said Tank sensed emanations from Reilly.

Kel-Paten took more care in scouting out a better hiding place this time, one less likely to lend itself to a sneak attack or ambush. Although if whatever had kidnapped Serafino and Fynn came back for them—especially if it wasn’t a skimmer with a transbeam but some kind of psi-creature—thick bushes, a solitary narrow access path, and Kel-Paten’s biosignature jamming program would be little hindrance. The fact that nothing had kidnapped them in the past hour, though, seemed an encouraging sign.

“Stress,” he said, in answer to her question about talking furzels. He angled up on his elbows. They were side by side, both flat on their stomachs, watching the lights flickering on below while the fidget alternately paced or pounced around them. Kel-Paten had often dreamed of lying close to Tasha in a verdant grove, stars and a moon or three glistening overhead. He just didn’t picture doing it in full battle gear.

“Under stressful conditions, the body’s senses are heightened and the physical frame is capable of unusual feats—a crewmember lifting a huge section of bulkhead single-handedly to free a trapped friend, for instance.” Tasha lowered the binocs and eyed him skeptically. “Tank isn’t lifting me up. He’s talking to me in my head.”

“Telepathy is a sensory ability. Did it ever occur to you that you might be a latent telepath? The stress of the blind jump in the dirtside landing might have triggered it. Do you have an aunt or uncle who was telepathic or even empathic?”

She raised the binocs to her face again. “I have no idea.” Her tone was flat.

He thought for a moment she was withdrawing from him, then he realized it had nothing to do with him at all but with another friend.

“Tasha. We’ll find her.” He took a chance and brushed her short bangs back from her face, trying to put into his clumsy caress what he didn’t know how to put into his words. Especially since he’d been running on full

’cybe function for several hours now. It made him feel as if he were encased in that metal that comprised his infamous nickname. “I promise you.”

For a moment she tensed, then with a soft sigh she leaned her face into his hand. Even with his emo-inhibitors in place, it was all he could do not to pull her against him, cover her body, her mouth, with his own.

He touched her lips with his thumb. She shook her head slightly. “We have work to do,” she said, and turned her face and attention back to the outpost. “Tank says they’re alive and unharmed. So far. Figured out a way in yet?”

He shouldn’t have touched her. His timing, once again, was so wrong.

“Tasha, I’m—”

“Branden. Please.” Her voice was suddenly raspy. “I’m about thirty seconds from tearing your clothes off. Believe me, I’d like nothing better—but under the circumstances, that’s not an option. And it’s definitely not going to help us find Serafino and Eden.” She huffed out a short, exasperated breath and stared out into the fading light.

He found himself shocked into silence. A dozen familiar fantasies sprang into his mind. She wanted to be with him. More than that, she wanted him. He cleared his throat nervously. “May I take you up on that offer at a later date?”

She glanced over at him, her lips twitching slightly as she fought a smile. Then the binocs came up again. “Sooner’s always better than later.” Sweet holy gods. “Then I guess we better get this rescue operation under way.”

“So how are we going to get inside that building?”

“We’re not.” He pointed to the Mystic Traveler. “We’re going to get inside that ship instead.”

THE OUTPOST

“Ah, my favorite doctor twin,” a familiar voice drawled as Eden followed Bianca through the single door into the smaller room. “But my manners are appalling. You two haven’t been formally introduced. Bianca,” Jace said as his sister stepped toward the diagnostic panel on the near wall,

“may I present my bride-to-be, the lovely Dr. Eden Fynn?” Eden stopped in her tracks, and not only because of his jesting or the hard tone of anger she heard under his words. Jace Serafino—grinning in spite of the deep sense of hurt she felt emanating from him because of his sister’s betrayal—was strapped into a diag bed, shirtless and... hairless.

Not just the stripe that Jorden had. Jace’s head was shaved completely bald.

Bald as a Morrassian Elo Orb, he told her, and she sensed that the lightness in his tone was forced. Bianca got a bit carried away.

Your sister was going to remove the implant and let you die.

Sibling rivalry stinks, doesn’t it? He winked at her and continued.

“Eden, the bitch over there with the blue glowing pet is Bianca Serafino Kel-Rea, my once-beloved older sister. A Faction favorite. Human symbiont to a Ved’eskhar that—although she won’t acknowledge it—is draining her, killing her inch by inch.” His smile faded abruptly, and a wave of weariness washed over Eden. When he spoke again, his voice rasped with emotion. “Damn it, I wish you’d listen to me just this once, Bee.”

“You bore me, Jacinto.” Bianca turned to Eden. “Nando and Mara will assist you.” She motioned to a man and woman standing on the other side of the diag bed. The woman was the telepathic guard who had accompanied her earlier. “Both are experienced med-techs, and they will know if you try to damage the harness.

“Give Dr. Fynn,” Bianca told the pair, “what she needs to perform the surgery. I want the harness safely removed by sunrise. Max and Dr.

Kel-Novaco are waiting for it.”

Her long robe swirled as she turned then exited back to the main room, the door sliding silently closed behind her.

“What do you need, Doctor?” Mara stood rigidly, almost as if at attention. So did the taller Nando.

Sleep, Eden admitted ruefully to herself. About a week’s worth. And a decent hot meal would help.

Sex? Jace volunteered.

Gods, how could he be so teasing at a time like this? But even as she questioned his demeanor, she knew the answer: he was as frightened as she was, but he was not going to give his sister the satisfaction of knowing it. And he was not going to let his fears drag Eden down. She had a feeling the hurt and weariness she felt from him were just a small part slipping past his usual tight controls. Unlike herself, Jace Serafino was an excellent actor.

“Would you happen to have any Orange Garden tea?” Eden asked.

“Then I need all the specs, the schematics on his implant—harness.” For two, three heartbeats the pair didn’t move, then: “I will find some tea,” Mara said. “Nando will send you the required data to this station.” She pointed to a small console and chair in the corner.

They turned almost in unison. Mara stopped at the doorway. “The door will lock behind me. It’s bio-coded. You can’t get out. Don’t waste valuable time trying.”

“Lovely to see you again too,” Jace called out as the door closed. He looked up at Eden. “Such a charming couple.”

The tears she’d been holding back filled her eyes. “Damn you, Jace Serafino!”

“Ah, sweetling. I love when you talk dirty. Here, unhook these straps, will you? I think I need some of Dr. Fynn’s special medicine.” She hit the release button. He sat up swiftly, pulling her into his arms.

She kissed him through her tears, her hands stroking his shoulders, his back, as if reassuring herself he was whole and real.

He murmured soft, sweet words into her mouth, her ear, then trailed kisses down her neck.

“Jace, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “about your sister—” His arms tightened around her, and for a brief moment, a deep, wrenching sense of loss trickled through. Then it was gone.

The door opened. “Your tea, Doctor,” she heard Mara say. Eden didn’t turn around but buried her face into Jace’s shoulder.

“Leave it on the table,” Jace told her.

There was the slight clink of ceramic on metal. “You’re wasting time,” Mara said.

“Doubled up on our bitchy pills today, have we?” Jace shot back.

Mara said nothing. Her footsteps faded.

Eden raised her face, then ran her hand over Jace’s shaved head.

“You’re incorrigible.” She smiled through her tears. And he was still one handsome devil.

“That’s my evil twin, not me. I’m the nice one, remember?” He kissed her nose. “Share your tea with both of us?”

She stepped reluctantly out of his embrace, then returned with the tea.

He angled the head of the diag bed up to ninety degrees. She nestled by his side, took a sip, and let her eyes drift closed for a moment. She was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. “What are we going to do?” she whispered.

Not share our concerns or plans where others can hear them, for starters, he told her.

It’s safe this way? But all the telepaths—

They have implants.

And that Ved thing?

They’re emotional parasites, not telepaths. They’ve not acted on anything I’ve done telepathically.

What have you tried?

Besides flirting with you? I’ve had a few conversations with Reilly.

Reilly? Joy fluttered in Eden’s heart. Reilly’s okay?

He’s one very tired furzel, but he’s okay. And you were right. Furzels can neutralize the Ved. He’s hunting them, one by one. When he passes through overhead ducts, he talks to me in small snatches. He doesn’t have the bond with me that he has with you; our range is limited. If he comes back this way, you’ll hear him. In the meantime, you’d best start going through that data on the implant.

I will not operate on you unless it’s completely safe.

You may not have that luxury, sweetling. Bianca has some powerful friends.

You’ll need recovery time after surgery. How can we make a run for it if you’re unconscious?

There was a long, hard silence.

Jace, if Reilly gives us a chance to escape, I’m not leaving without you.

If Reilly gives you a chance, take it. Go find Sass and Kel-Paten.

Are they alive? Can you reach them?

Another silence. Reilly has seen them through his contact with Tank. It looks like they’re going to make a move on the perimeter guards. But I don’t want to start a psi-trace for them here. The Ved can’t sense the furzels. And they don’t read normal telepathic conversation. They do pick up strong emotional vibrations or psi-energy surges, like a psi-trace. I was in trace mode—and in an emotional upheaval, he remembered— when it grabbed us. I can’t take a chance that one of them might be able to follow a trace to Sass or Kel-Paten. I have to trust Tank will tell Reilly when there’s something we should know.

The Ved don’t just attack telepaths?

They’re parasites, Eden. They feed on anything with the capability for strong emotions. The difference is, with telepaths and empaths, they come into your mind to feed. With oullums —nontelepathic humans—they can’t create as strong a sensation, so they physically bring you into this dimension and play with you, torture you. Like a furzel with a mizzet, you know?

Where is this dimension?

If there’s any truth to the legends I’ve heard, it’s not to be spoken of, Jace said, and sent her an image: thumb and little finger touching, with the other three fingers curved.

McClellan’s Void.

* * *

Reilly Blinked into a section of overhead ductwork and sneezed. His mouth was dry. His eyes watered. His whiskers were filthy. His paws hurt.

But there was still a lot of work to do.

Bad Thing was so very many here. He lay his head down on his paws for a moment, panting. He had to protect MommyEden. He had to protect JaceFriend. But to stay by their side meant he couldn’t hunt Bad Thing.

He almost went to MommyEden when Bad Thing pushed her in the lake. Then Bad Thing pulled back. And Reilly returned to weaving his Blink shields.

Eight so far. Three big. Five small. Eight Bad Things now glowing blue to purple.

But there were so many more.

He didn’t know if he could Blink them all in time.

Tank can help! the small voice said.

Tank protect MommySass. Tank protect BrandenFriend, Reilly admonished. But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t do this alone.

Tank was only a fidget, his shields not as tight and strong as a furzel’s. But there were just too many Bad Things.

He hated—hated!—leaving MommySass and BrandenFriend unprotected. They weren’t mind talkers like MommyEden or JaceFriend.

They couldn’t sense the neverwhen like JaceFriend. They were like newborn fidgets! Helpless.

A blue glow spun through the corner of his sight and disappeared.

Another one. Shtift-a!

Reilly had no choice. Friend?

Friend? Tank ready! Tank help!

Yes. Go Blink now. Help FriendReilly.

The neverwhen glistened, and with a thud, Tank arrived. Hunt Bad Thing! Kill Bad Thing! The fidget danced from paw to paw, sending puffs of dust flying.

Reilly groaned low in his throat, then sneezed again. Fidgets!

27

THE FOREST

Tank go hunt! Love Mommy! Go Blink!

The small voice sounded in Sass’s mind just as she and Kel-Paten neared the base of the hill outside the compound. She stumbled slightly, quickly glancing behind her and under nearby bushes for a flash of white.

The furry fidget that dogged her heels had disappeared.

“Tank?” Her voice was soft but urgent. “Tank!” Kel-Paten turned, eyes narrowed. Calling out for a fidget didn’t engender an aura of stealth. But Sass knew underneath that stern look was also a concern for her safety and her fidget’s.

“He’s gone.” She kept her voice low. They were too far for anyone at the outpost or on the tarmac to hear them but close enough that they might intercept a foot patrol—though they didn’t see signs of any on their trek back toward the outpost.

He put his hand on her shoulder, guiding them both down into a crouch. They were well off the trail, moving as quietly as they could through the thick underbrush. Darkness had fallen and so, correspondingly, had the temperature. Sass had pulled down the sleeves of her black jacket and sealed its front. A black cap covered her pale hair.

Kel-Paten’s luminous eyes were muted, on night vision. Which meant he could see far better in the dark than she could, even with her binocs on ambient. They were generic binocs, not field-spec, because the Galaxus wasn’t stocked as a field-combat craft. On ambient they tinged everything green. Kel-Paten’s enhanced full-spectrum optics didn’t have that problem.

He glanced around carefully, intently, then shook his head. He couldn’t spot the fidget. He leaned toward her ear. “He can’t run that fast.”

“He didn’t run. He Blinked. He said, Tank go hunt. ”

“Not after a slitherskimp, I trust.” His voice was a deep rumble.

“He must be with Reilly.”

Kel-Paten’s grip on her shoulder tightened, turned into a small massage. “He’ll be back.”

She pursed her lips, pushed away the worry. “Yeah.” He stared at her a long moment. “Let’s go.” He pulled her to her feet but kept his hand lightly on her shoulder for the next few minutes.

Reassuring her, she knew. She was very aware of him. Far too aware.

And she really had been very close to tearing his clothes off earlier. Their little bit of fun in the cockpit had not lasted long enough. Godsdamned stress.

They slowed, cutting to their left when the forest thinned unexpectedly, moonlight breaking through the canopy of trees. Without Tank’s constant singsong patter filling her mind, she needed something else to think about other than the fidget’s absence.

She watched Kel-Paten move with an almost sensuous grace through the shadows and let her mind play with what it would be like to be lovers.

She could usually peg most men’s styles after being with them for ten minutes. But Kel-Paten was a mystery and she’d known him more than ten years. He could be forceful and demanding as an officer, but his touch was invariably gentle. Almost... hesitant. Not at all what she expected.

Especially not after reading his personal logs.

Of course, that might be exactly why he acted that way—as a means to tease her, intrigue her. He was, she reminded herself, close with Captain Ralland Kel-Tyra. Rowdy Rall. The good captain had a reputation as an accomplished lover. Did he and Kel-Paten cruise the pubs together on shore leave? Probably not. She’d been with Kel-Paten on liberty. Around his crew, his officers, he was strictly by the regs.

Somehow she suspected that once he was out of uniform and off duty, he’d be anything but. He couldn’t have accompanied Rowdy Rall all these years and not be.

So if they became lovers, would she measure up? Did he like his sex fun and flirty or more elegant and seductive? She wasn’t sure. She could see him in an expensive suite with silk sheets. But she also had a feeling he was equally prone to stop a lift between floors and pin her against the wall, his body hard with passion.

Um, No, No, Bad Captain! for sure.

But when she thought of her pink T-shirt, she thought of the Regalia.

And when she thought of the Regalia, she thought of Tank. Where was he? More than that, was he safe?

She followed Kel-Paten around a pile of fallen trees. She’d learned to move quickly and carefully at night on Lethant. But Kel-Paten could quite literally see in the dark. His guidance was infallible.

He slowed and, with a hand on her shoulder once more, pushed her into a crouch, coming down close alongside her. Their thighs touched, and she could feel his breath on her temple when he spoke.

“One guard on the tarmac. Male humanoid. Armed.” She brought up her binocs. At this distance, she could see the greenish outline of the Mystic Traveler and, beyond that and off to the right, the green glow of floodlights marking corners of the outpost’s larger buildings.

The guard, however, was little more than a dark cipher. But then, she wasn’t Kel-Paten.

“Just one?” She panned, found nothing else, and let the binocs fall on their strap. “Sloppy. Or a trap.”

“Agreed.” He was still scanning the ship and its surroundings.

Suddenly, he tensed, his body going rigid beside her.

She tensed too, not knowing what he’d seen. It didn’t matter. If he didn’t like it, she’d like it less. She put her hand on the pistol on her utility belt but didn’t pull it.

Kel-Paten nodded so slightly she felt it more than saw it.

“Good news, Sebastian,” he whispered in her ear. “We’re not in Dreehalla. And we’re not lost.”

She leaned into him, a small bubble of hope in her heart. “We’re not?”

“There’s also bad news. The guard by the ship is carrying a Zonn-X

Seven.”

A Zonn-X? “That’s a Triad weapon!”

“Not Triad,” he corrected her firmly. “Psy-Serv. Disrupts brain-wave functions.”

Triad. Psy-Serv. Same thing, to her. But not to him, she remembered.

“This is a Psy-Serv facility?”

“I think that’s a possibility.”

“But what would they be doing with the Traveler?” She’d heard a couple of versions of how Rej Andgarran stole the ship from Serafino years ago and then disappeared. Was he so afraid of Serafino’s ire that he went as far off the charts as he could? She almost asked Kel-Paten but then realized that would be admitting to knowledge she wasn’t supposed to have. “And why not confront us directly at the shuttle? They had to know we landed.”

A slight nod again. “I would very much like answers to those questions.” She recognized something in his tone, something that said he’d already formed an opinion. She had heard it often enough in their discussions in his office. She dropped forward on her knees and swiveled to face him.

“You’re still thinking Serafino’s in on this?”

“Prove to me he isn’t.”

“We’re alive. He knows we’re out here. If he wanted us dead we’d already be dead. Plus, Eden would have sensed something from him if he was setting a trap.” But Eden did say Jace was blocking her ever since they found the planet. Gods, she didn’t like this at all. She wished she could see what Kel-Paten saw. Just because the guard had a Zonn—“Is the guard in uniform?”

“Freighter grays,” Kel-Paten said.

“Could be anybody, then. Possession of a Zonn doesn’t mean you’re a Psy-Serv agent. I could name you five sources right now where you could pick one up if you were willing to pay the asking price.”

“A merc stronghold. We could be dealing with Gund’jalar or Zanorian.

All the more reason I’d suspect Serafino had a hand in this.” Sass held herself very still. Two people she did not want to discuss with Kel-Paten were Gund’jalar and Zanorian. But she couldn’t prove this wasn’t one of Gund’jalar’s cells without admitting she had been in touch with the Rebashee merc as recently as yesterday. He knew she was on the Vax. Had this been one of Gund’jalar’s cells, then a rescue team would have been outside the Galaxus before she’d even pulled herself off the cockpit floor. “Cryloc Syndicate?” she countered, hoping to distract him from his options. The Syndicate was on the lunatic fringe. They hated the Triad over some centuries-old incident that no one could even remember.

They bounced hypotheses back and forth—quietly—for the next ten minutes, Kel-Paten intently watching the guard and the ship. The admiral would not make a move until he was relatively sure who they were up against. Pulling a raid on a Psy-Serv facility required different tactics than taking on a Rebashee mercenary cell.

She knew that. She knew exactly how Gund’jalar ran his cells. And this was not any kind of operation Gund’jalar would run. But she couldn’t tell him that without telling him how she knew.

Yet the more he focused on Gund’jalar as the answer, the greater the risk they’d be caught off guard by whoever was really running the outpost.

She sucked in a breath. “Gund’jalar’s people would never leave a ship so lightly guarded.” A ship was an asset. A valuable, expensive one to a mercenary operation. You don’t squander your assets, she could almost hear Gund’jalar telling her. “Psy-Serv is different. They’re not military.

They have an open-ended budget.”

“All the more reason I think this is a Rebashee merc outfit,” Kel-Paten argued, shifting forward in his crouch. “Psy-Serv doesn’t have their own ships, let alone an attack squadron. Their evaluators travel on fleet pinnaces.”

Damn him. He was wrong. “Kel-Paten.”

He looked down at her, the glow in his eyes barely visible. “Sebastian.”

“This is not a Rebashee operation. You go in there expecting merc responses and you’re going to get killed. And then not only we will not get to sooner, we’ll never get to later either.” She pinned him with a hard knowing stare, as much as she could in the darkness. She needed him distracted from the Gund’jalar topic, and if it took a hint of sex to do it, so be it. The fact that her words had to be low, almost whispered, only added to the effect. “We go with the Psy-Serv model. We rescue Eden, Serafino, and the furzels, commandeer the ship. We do that, and sooner could well be on that ship. I’ll bet it has one hell of a well-equipped captain’s cabin.

Silk sheets and all.”

“Tasha—” Kel-Paten’s voice rasped.

“You want to hear my ideas for later? A suite, at one of the casino hotels on Glitterkiln. Three, four days. We might even have time for a hand or two of Starfield. On the last day. Maybe.”

Sometime during her whispered recitation, Kel-Paten’s hand had come to rest on her shoulder. After a teasing offer like that, Dag Zanorian would have had her flat on her back, mouth hard on hers, one hand either up her shirt or finding its way down her pants, while the other would still be on the trigger of his laser rifle, in case the enemy rudely interrupted.

Kel-Paten just gently traced the line of her jaw with his thumb.

Damned emo-inhibitors! He probably had them at full power.

“Tasha,” he repeated. “I’ve been to Glitterkiln. The suites in Tygaris are better.”

She grinned in the darkness. Gotcha. “And that wouldn’t happen to be because they’re Triad owned and operated?”

“Of course.” He was back to watching the ship and the guard. But there was a hint of a smile on Kel-Paten’s lips.

“We’ll go with the modified diversion plan,” he said. “Draw the guard past the perimeter, take him out just after his next check-in. That’s in twenty minutes, from what I’ve seen. That will give us fifteen to secure the ship, bring weapons online. Then we prime the engines, engage the transbeam. The furzels will be easy to find and retrieve. But pinning down Fynn and Serafino’s biosignatures among all the other humanoids will take some work.”

Actually, it wouldn’t. She had them in the data she’d copied from Kel-Paten’s personal files. Eden’s records were appended to her own. And she’d snagged Serafino’s file while looking for implant data. It all resided in the small datadrive now secured in her backpack.

One more thing she couldn’t tell him. She had to find a way to sneak them into the ship’s database or transfer the data to her handheld. It would take only a few seconds.

“If the ship has sufficient fuel,” he was saying, “we should be back in orbit in under two hours, depending on their pursuit capabilities. From there we use the charts on board, which we have to assume would be current to this sector, to get back. If the ship’s low on fuel, we stay in heavy air but make a workable landing this time and go into full defensive mode.”

“Aye, sir. Got it.”

He turned to her, his mouth suddenly a thin line. “Fair warning: if Serafino is allied with the enemy, I will kill him.”

“But—”

He held up one hand. “It will be my call. It has to be.” He hesitated. His tone softened. “You mean the world to me, Tasha. I respect your opinion more than you know. But Serafino is a known problem in the Triad—an immoral mercenary, possibly with ties to Gund’jalar, who still challenges our ownership of the Danvaral sector. The fact that Serafino may have uncovered some suspicious activities doesn’t absolve him of his crimes or his past associations. He is the enemy until he proves himself otherwise.” Or his past associations. And what about hers? She would no longer mean the world to him if he found out.

She nodded in the darkness, her voice strained. “Aye, sir. Got it.” He was silent. She didn’t dare look at him but shrugged off her backpack and knelt stiffly, hands on her thighs, trying not to succumb to exhaustion. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept or ate, but their push through the forest and their discussions—flirtatious and otherwise—kept those issues at bay. Now, with plans decided, her adrenaline dropped and her energy flagged.

His arm slipped lightly over her shoulder. She let out a sigh she didn’t know she was holding in, and he pulled her more closely against him. He was warm. She was chilled from the cold night air and her knees hurt.

“I will try very hard not to kill him,” he said softly.

“I know, Branden.”

“Come here.” He scooted backward on the ground a few feet, then leaned against the wide trunk of a tree, drawing her with him, nestling her between his legs. Her back was against his chest. He wrapped his left arm around her waist, holding her more tightly. She angled her head against his shoulder, skewing her cap. His warmth seeped into her.

“This is against regulations while on field surveillance,” she whispered.

“Screw regulations.”

“If someone sneaks up—”

“I will hear them or see them. Take a ten-minute nap. You need it.” Funny, she thought as her eyes closed. If there was a spare ten minutes with Zanorian, he’d undo his pants and demand a quickie. Kel-Paten gave her warmth and comfort and asked for nothing.

Branden Kel-Paten felt the tension ebb from her body, felt her muscles loosen. Her breathing slowed.

In contrast, every inch of him crackled with awareness. He didn’t lie to her: he would know of anyone coming before they could be considered a threat. He had his ’cybe senses at max, listening, scanning, sensing.

But not just his surroundings. He was scanning, sensing, recording Tasha Sebastian. Memorizing the feel of her in his arms, the warmth of her on his chest. The fine tickle of wisps of her hair against his neck as they escaped from under her dark cap.

The scent of her.

The guard resumed his plodding path around the tarmac. One part of Kel-Paten’s mind worked out angles of attack, noted escape routes, blind corners. The other knew she draped her arm over his, curling her fingers around his hand. It was such a small thing, but it made his heart stutter.

Because it was deliberate. She wanted to touch him. He knew she wasn’t asleep—not really. She’d learned, as most Fleet officers did in boot camp and then later in field training, to snatch a furzel-nap to recharge. You couldn’t survive long missions without it.

Being ’cybe, he didn’t need to do that. He always stood guard, like now.

Except guard duty was never so pleasant before.

He’d wake her simply by saying her name, in four minutes. She’d come fully alert, ready to conquer the galaxy, he thought with a smile.

Why not? She’d already captured his heart.

Tasha woke at the eight-minute mark. She had an uncanny ability to sense the progression of time when she was forced to nap on the run.

Kel-Paten said to take ten. She’d set her internal clock for eight because she honestly wasn’t one hundred percent sure what they were going to come up against at the outpost.

And she’d be damned if she was going to die without kissing him one more time.

It could only be a short kiss, she knew that. But she’d make sure he knew it held the promise of much more. Because she had come to the most amazing, incredible realization during her eight-minute nap.

She loved that annoying, pompous, overbearing, biocybernetic bastard.

She opened her eyes. “Hey, flyboy,” she whispered.

He glanced quickly down at her, slightly startled. Good.

“Kiss me. That’s an order.” She wrapped her arm around his neck as she tilted her face up to meet his and put everything she felt into the kiss.

He responded with a groan, clasping her tightly against him, his mouth hot on hers.

This was dangerous, she knew it was dangerous. But it was only two minutes—and it felt so damned good.

She laid her palm against his jaw as she slowly, reluctantly broke the kiss, pulling back. He leaned forward, his breath still mingling with hers.

He whispered her name, his voice thick with emotion.

The ground beneath them dropped away. She clung to him, panic cresting. They were free-falling, speeding into a black abyss, searing cold raking her skin, sucking the air out of her lungs. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t even think.

Then... nothing. Quiet. No searing cold. She stumbled, realized she was standing, and locked her knees. Closed environment. Warehouse. No, hangar. People. Two ships. Skimmers—short-haulers used to run between stations or rafts and a world. Her mind tallied the scene quickly, impersonally. No overt threat. Still, her heart pounded. She drew in a large gulp of air. She could feel Kel-Paten behind her, saw his arm in the edge of her vision.

She wanted to turn and look at him, but a tall figure—blond male humanoid—moved away from the closest skimmer’s rampway.

Others—two—walked toward her from a servocart on the far left. Her vision was clearing. Details sharpened.

“Tasha... ” Kel-Paten’s voice was low.

“I’m okay. You?”

“No damage.”

“Behind us?”

“Bulkhead. Three feet four inches.”

No threat from behind then, but not much room to run.

“Any idea where we—” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. She knew where they were. Raft 84. What worried her more was the man walking toward her.

Dag Zanorian hooked his hand through the strap of the laser rifle crossing his back as he strode up to her. His legs were encased in his usual dark leather pants, his gray shirt nondescript but—as usual—form-fitting.

His blond hair was about as long as Serafino’s, but he wore it loose to his shoulders. He came closer and his mouth quirked in a smile she remembered well. “Sass. Took you long enough.” Zanorian? Shit. What was going on?

“And you got him. Damn, bitch, but you are good.” The rifle flipped forward and didn’t point at her but higher over her shoulder, at Kel-Paten.

Her hand reached for her laser pistol. It wasn’t there. Damn! She must have lost it in the forest or... in transit. Whatever that was.

It didn’t matter. She knew trouble when she saw it. “Back off, Dag.”

“Possessive are we, little girl?” Zanorian chuckled. “I know it’s your mission. Just having some fun with the Tin Soldier.”

“Zanorian.” Kel-Paten’s tone was flat, but that didn’t bother her as much as the fact that something was wrong here. Very wrong. She wasn’t on any mission with Dag. She hadn’t seen him in over five years.

Two others approached. Humans. She recognized them immediately: the taller, dusky-skinned woman—black-haired, muscular—was her friend Angel Kel-Moro. The shorter, slim man, also carrying a laser rifle, was Jonn Drund. And then she knew what was wrong. Angel was on Panperra, waiting for Serafino. And Jonn Drund had died on Lethant the first month she was there.

Gund’jalar—keeping an eye on her because Ace had asked him to—had killed him.

She looked back at Dag. He had only one scar on his cheek, not two.

And Angel’s left wrist was bare of her lover’s commitment tattoo.

Gods. What in hell was going on?

“Never thought you’d see this day, eh, Tin Soldier? Captured by a rim runner.” Zanorian still trained his rifle on Kel-Paten. Drund raised his weapon as well. “Though my Lady Sass was always more than a mere rim runner.”

“Lady Sass.” It wasn’t a question. And it wasn’t Zanorian’s voice that said her name. It was Kel-Paten’s. And she didn’t like the way he said it, not at all.

“Good catch, Sass!” Angel stepped over, tugged on her arm, pulling her forward.

Sass tugged back. “Wait. Damn it, Dag, put the rifle away. Angel—”

“Time for a beer.” Angel grabbed her wrist this time. “Hey, c’mon. You earned it. We’ll go back to the Windblade and let Dag do the dirty work for once.”

“Let go!” She wrenched free of Angel, not missing the confused, hurt look on her friend’s face. And promptly stumbled sideways into Dag.

He grabbed her, spun her around, and planted a kiss on her mouth.

“You are such a fine little bitch.” She jerked back. He slapped her on the rump. “Go with Angel. I’ll meet you on the Blade after Jonn and I secure the Tin Soldier here for Gund’jalar.”

She didn’t think; she just grabbed his rifle with one hand, lunged forward, and planted a knee to his groin. She thrust the weapon up as he arched toward her. It slammed into his face. Blood spurted as Angel grabbed her from behind.

“You crazy, Sass?” the woman shouted.

A fist slammed against Sass’s face. Zanorian or Drund, she couldn’t tell.

She didn’t care. She had to get a rifle and she had to get Kel-Paten, and they had to get out of here.

If he’d even go with her.

Lady Sass. He knew now. Her past associations.

She fought back, kicking, then landed an elbow to Angel’s midsection.

She held on to Dag’s rifle with one hand. He yanked it—and her—back to him, his face smeared with blood, his eyes blazing. She dropped to a half crouch, kicked his knee. He bellowed in pain, falling.

And let go of the rifle.

She hit the floor with it, rolled, aware of Angel lunging for her, aware of Drund just now putting her in his sights... .

I’m going to die. And I never told Branden I love him.

Fear, hopelessness washed over her like a thick, oily tide. Panic choked her.

She struggled to her feet, swinging her rifle up, but Drund was squinting, finger on the trigger. Then he was gone, jettisoned sideways by a black-clad blur.

Someone grabbed her shoulders. She swung around, slamming the butt of the rifle into a face. Angel screamed, flailing backward.

Gods, Angel, I’m sorry. But this is wrong. Crazy.

Bootsteps on her right. She spun back, rifle coming up.

Kel-Paten. With Drund’s rifle in one black-gloved hand. He stared at her, his expression hard, his eyes glowing with luminescent power. With hatred.

She saw that clearly. So very clearly.

And the heart that she’d so carefully guarded for all those years—never giving it away to any man—shattered. Into a thousand tiny sharp-edged pieces.

A hatchway groaned open. The hangar filled with shouts, boots pounding on the floor. Kel-Paten jerked around, but she grabbed his arm.

“This way!”

He yanked his arm back. “Another trap, Lady Sass?”

“No. I swear.” She’d never felt so helpless. And she’d just taken down two of the best-trained mercs in the business.

Kel-Paten hesitated long enough to make sure she knew he didn’t trust her. But he also had no choice. Laser fire spit overhead.

He ducked. She grabbed his arm again and ran.

28

THE RAFT

They reached the maintenance accessway just as laser fire sizzled on the decking around them. Sass tapped in the override security code she knew by heart. Kel-Paten, at her back, laid down cover fire. He could have as easily turned and killed her.

Part of her wished he would. The pain in her heart was almost unbearable.

The hatch slid open. “Go!” She swiveled, swung her rifle up, and strafed the hangar, then ducked in after him, slapping the hatch closed and locking it. “No time to scramble the security codes. They—” He pushed her roughly aside, lay his hand flat against the back of the locking mechanism. It sizzled, sparked, and went dead. Only then did she realize his gloves were off, tucked into his utility belt. He’d fried the lock shut.

In spite of her pain—or perhaps because of it—she quirked an eyebrow at him. “Damn. Works for me. This way.”

She sidled past him, heading for a ladderway she knew would lead to a central maintenance tunnel. There’d be a half dozen ways they could go from there. And Dag—when he stopped rolling on the floor in pain and cursing her—would spend a lot of time trying to figure out which.

If he could still walk. She thought she’d broken his knee.

They reached the ladderway. She grabbed the gritty metal rung and stopped. “One deck down is the small-skimmer bay. They probably expect us to go there, hot-wire a skimmer or transport, head dirtside.”

“The outpost is dirtside.” His tone was flat, his expression telling her nothing.

“We’re on a miner’s raft off Kesh Valirr.” It sounded crazy even as she said it. “Please. Just listen. We don’t have much time. Three decks up is the main maintenance tunnel. Breaks out to six smaller tunnels. Gives us a lot more choices and a lot better chance to lose them. But the call is yours, Admiral. I know you don’t trust me. So you decide. You want to hot-wire a skimmer, we hot-wire a skimmer. You want to gain a bit more breathing room, a few more options, we go up.” She jerked her face toward the ladder.

“Up,” he said tersely. And that was the only thing he said for the next ten minutes as they climbed, ran down narrow tunnels lined with encased conduit and red-striped piping, and climbed some more.

Three times they had to double back. Someone was coming—legitimate maintenance crew in orange overalls each time. It gave Sass a chance to catch her breath but not to speak, to offer Kel-Paten an explanation. Hell, she didn’t have an explanation.

She didn’t know if one would matter.

She just wanted to live long enough to get this nightmare over with. She wasn’t even sure if they were physically here or if this was some kind of hallucination and their bodies were back in the forest on HV-1. But her jaw ached where Dag or Jonn hit her. She rubbed it. Felt very much as if she was really here.

She thought of the crew of Degun’s Luck and the lifeless bodies strewn about the ship. Were their minds taken elsewhere and tortured while their bodies stayed on board? Or was the entire ship taken, drained of life, and then dumped back in the space lanes?

Emotional parasite, Eden had said about Bad Thing. The dying one had tortured Eden’s mind on the Galaxus. But in the forest, something physically took Jace and Eden away. Bad Thing, Tank told her. A Bad Thing that wasn’t weakened or shielded.

Something to consider...

The maintenance workers’ voices became fainter.

“Clear. Let’s go,” she said, after the exit hatch clanked shut.

Kel-Paten nodded. She trotted past him. They were in an older part of the raft now, built on top of a section of the original cavernous ore-processing plant. Though they couldn’t see them, Sass knew suspended gridways and automated conveyor belts crisscrossed in a dozen layers under their feet, moving the raw ore to the appropriate grinding stations. But this tunnel was inactive, with conduit cobbled together, power panels heavily patched. A lot of overheads had burned out, but that was okay. She knew where she was headed. There should be a row of abandoned offices coming up at Maintenance Access 7714. The whole corridor needed a complete rewire job. Until then, with no accessible power for equipment, the small offices lit only by emergency lighting were useless.

But they could use them. Maybe she could get him talking. Maybe they could figure out where they really were, how they’d gotten here, just what in hell was going on. If not, she knew of one office that had a working sanifac. She no longer had her backpack or canteen, and she was desperately thirsty.

Too bad she couldn’t take Angel up on that offer of beer. Getting trocked up seemed like a nice idea right about now.

She watched for Access 7714. If she couldn’t pick the lock on an office door, Kel-Paten could probably fry it. But she’d never met a lock she couldn’t pick, given enough time. Only...

It was a large coil of black conduit that blocked their path instead, spooled like a bloated snake, blocking more than half the tunnel. Damned thing had to be five feet high. Access 7714 was just beyond it. Sass flipped her rifle around to her front and, putting her back against the metal-paneled wall, pushed against the pile and squeezed sideways by it.

The wall gave way and Sass fell backward, down into darkness and the grinding, chugging machinery below.

A scream caught in her throat. Her arms flailed, smacking something, tangling. It hit her in the face, knocking her cap off, and she grabbed for it instinctively.

It was the conduit. She clawed madly at it, but it slid through her grasp as it tumbled, unspooling as she fell.

She closed her hands tighter and jerked to a stop, almost losing her hold on the slick tubing. Gasping, she clung to it, feet dangling. She didn’t dare look down. Not yet. She was still sucking in huge gulps of air and trying very hard not to throw up.

She should try to climb back up, but what if her movements started the conduit falling again?