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“Course he would have. He’d have gutted a hundred lowColors to save one Gold life. Today, you killed how many…a dozen?” I see their mouths frothing in fear. Their eyes wide like a dying horse’s. All white. “Was it worth it? You could have helped them,” he says sorrowfully. “But you went for her! One person!”

I take the punishment. It’s earned. But he’ll forget today. It’ll be diluted by time. For me I know it will not. My memory will trap me with those screaming faces even as I lie on my deathbed. I will see their cracking nails against the mesh. Smell the urine on the deck. And I’ll wonder how many I could have saved if I’d had more sense.

Our ship shudders again as another projectile hits us. Our kinetic shields send it ricocheting off into space. If they were aiming to kill, they’d use missiles, but they’re aiming for our engines. “They want us alive,” I say.

“Of course they do. They saw that we’re Golds. They’ll rape us and kill us when they get bored of it.”

“And they’ll eat us,” I say. “These ones are cannibals.” He catches the fear in my voice. “How long can the engines last if we overburn?” I ask, knowing the answer, but knowing too where I need to push him.

He glances down at Pytha. “Not long. Maybe an hour, two. Then we’re dead metal. But where would we go? Nearest asteroid city is five days out.”

“The Rim.”

“The Rim, he says. You forget your last name? My last name?” He lowers his voice, looking back down the hall. “Your grandmother ordered the destruction of one of their moons and their docks.”

“So they say.”

“They think I personally stomped in the head of Revus au Raa.”

“The Ascomanni won’t follow if we make the Line. They fear the Rim more than we do.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“The chance they’ll have a warship even six days away from where we enter is negligible.” Our ship shudders again. Pytha jerks in her seat. Blood dribbles down her lips. She’s bitten her tongue. Her mouth guard wobbles on the console. I pry open her teeth and push the thin slip of plastic in. “I made a mistake in there. But this is a matter of probability. We can slip over the Line, shed the Ascomanni, fix our engines, then…”

“No ship has crossed into Rim Space in ten years. I won’t risk starting a war.”

“Then what’s your plan?” I ask.

“We turn around and fight. We can get inside one of their ships. Turn the guns on the other corvettes. I’ve seen men do it.”

Fight. Of course that’s his answer.

“We’re not those men,” I say. His warrior vanity looks wounded. “And we don’t have a launch tube on the rear of the ship. We’d have to pivot the ship starboard. And then we’d fire back into a fusillade of railgun fire. And if we make it through that, adding their current velocity to the velocity of the spitTube we will hit their viewports with…” I pull from my memory the detailed report and analysis my grandmother had me make on Darrow’s mathematically suicidal assault on the Vanguard. “…potentially nine times the velocity used to breach the Vanguard. Our bones will be indistinguishable from our urine.”

“Really?”

“Care to wager?”

“Shit.”

“What about S-1392?”

“The asteroid?”

“It’s the one the Gold bought passage to.” I reference the sensors. “It’s two hours away. Three hours closer than the Line. Before she fell unconscious, the girl said that help was there.”

His eyes narrow. “When exactly did you have time to have a conversation with her?”

“In the medical bay.”

“We don’t know who she is. We don’t know where she’s from. Do you even know what kind of help she meant?”

“No,” I confess. “But opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

“Don’t quote Sun Tzu at me like it was your idea. Her ‘help’ could be anyone. It could be the gorydamn Ash Lord himself.”

“That would be a boon for us.”