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“For you, maybe. Your godfather would skin me alive.” He stares at the Obsidian ships on the sensors. “She used your razor. Did she have a scar?”

If I say yes, he won’t go to S-1392. He’ll try to fight.

“No. No scar,” I say. Then I feel the guilt building. My brain has always been faster than my conscience.

Our ship shudders again, harder this time, and the displays show damage to our starboard thrusters. Cassius winces with each shudder of the hull. It wounds him to see the Archimedes bleed.

“Slag it.” He grips Pytha’s shoulder. “Pytha, set course for asteroid S-1392. Increase engine output to fifteen percent over the redline. I don’t care if they melt together.” In her sync, she does not respond, but the ship does. I sit down as the Archimedes rumbles around us. The gravity pulls on my body as the compensators strain at the sudden acceleration and the Archimedes races for the asteroid. The Obsidians fall behind our sudden acceleration, but slowly they begin to match.

The die is cast.

While Cassius prepares the ship for potential boarders by outfitting the rescued crew with weapons, I return to the medbay to check on the Gold to see if I can draw any more information from her. She’s unconcious still. I watch her for a moment, feeling more protective than I should fo

r a stranger. Tenderly, I cut the rest of her clothing away and begin to clean the oil from her skin with alcohol scrubs. I drape a medical blanket over her to protect her decency. When I look up, her eyes are open and seem to have been watching me for some time. I feel color rising in my cheeks, fearing that she’ll think I was doing something untoward. But her gaze is softer now than at our first meeting. Less animalistic. She looks at the razor on my hip.

“We’re bound for the asteroid,” I say gently. “You said there was help there. What sort of help?” She tries to speak, but her words are too weak to come out. “Salve,” I say, looking at the new layer of resFlesh I used to cover her scar. “Save your strength.” I set a hand on her shoulder. “I should check your wound. May I?”

She makes a small nod with her head. I pull the blanket to the side and examine the angry flesh. My cauterization was sloppy. I find a fresh bandage inside the cabinet and return to her wound. She flinches as I apply disinfectant cream. To soothe her, I recite one of my favorite verses from my mother’s library.

“As from the darkening gloom a silver dove

upsoars, and darts into the Eastern light,

On pinions that naught moves but pure delight,

So fled thy soul into the realms above,

Regions of peace and everlasting love….”

The girl’s fallen unconcious again by the time I finish the verse, and this time I let her alone. All those lives for her. As I leave, I smudge oil on her face to help mask the resFlesh covering her scar and hope that I’ve not lied to Cassius in vain.

—

At full burn we manage to close the distance to the asteroid in under two hours. The cabin is now bathed crimson by the warning lights as our last engine overheats. Our inertia carries us forward, but the Ascomanni are closing, eating up the distance between our ships. Soon they’ll reel us in with magnetic tow beams and burn through our hull. We sit in silence. Pytha’s un-synced with the ship now. Our guns are twisted scrap. Our shields are gone.

The whole ship vibrates as the largest of the Ascomanni craft locks onto our hull with a tow beam, slowing our velocity. Cassius unfurls his razor and I cradle mine. My hand is sweaty. My chest tight and my mouth chalky and dry. I sit with my legs crossed on the floor in silent meditation, letting the fear flow into me so I can be its master when its authors burn through our hull and enter our halls.

Cassius turns to me as he tightens the screws on the gauntlets of his pulseArmor. We’ve both discarded our clunky EVO suits for pulseArmor breastplates and arm gear. “We meet them at the door. I want you to stay behind me. There’s not enough room in the corridors for us to fight side by side. If I fall, make sure they do not take you alive.” He looks to Pytha. “I mean this since…”

His sentence drifts without finishing. I follow his eyes to the RAD sensor display. It warps sideways. The display’s pixels disintegrate into a dancing pattern of blue and black static. Pytha squints. “Someone’s jamming the nav.”

“Can’t be the Ascomanni,” I say. “They don’t have tech enough to compromise our instruments.”

“Who then?” Pytha asks.

“Oh hell,” Cassius murmurs. “Oh goryhell.” I follow his eyes out the viewport to the large, seemingly benign asteroid in the distance. S-1392. Pytha enlarges the visual display. Shadows cloak half the asteroid. The surface is dirty pearl white and riven with impact craters. The shadows stir. Something moves in the dark distance, streaking out from the bowels of the asteroid. It comes into space like a black eel squirming its way from the recesses of a dark sea cavern, flowing out of shadow, eyes glinting with pearly menace. But this eel is not made of flesh and blood. It is made of metal, painted black, and marked with a three-headed electric dragon on its sides.

It is a warship.

In this empty expanse, where no warship has flown for more than a decade, a first-rate destroyer races toward us. One point three kilometers long, brimming with weapons and high-grade shielding. And flanking it are two torchShips of an unfamiliar design. From their hangars depart three squadrons of strange fighter ships that look like deep-sea horrors.

They close the distance in half a minute and speed silently past us to shred the Ascomanni ships without even the formality of a radio broadcast. The fighter squadrons deliver elegant death as they lace the Ascomanni with railgun fire and spit off missiles that crackle silently over the blast-scored hulls of the raiders till each vessel vents oxygen and shivers apart to float dead and quiet into forever space. The engagement lasts less than a minute.

Debris pings against our hull.

Pytha’s voice trembles. “What was that?”

A blinking red light on the com signals an incoming direct transmission from the destroyer itself. It lurks in the distance, not approaching us. Beside me, I sense Cassius’s unease. “What kind of ship is that?” Pytha asks. “Lysander?”