Eternal Frontier

(The Eternal Frontier, Book 1)

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Anthony J Melchiorri

November, 2016

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Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier, Book 1)

Copyright © 2016 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

First Edition: November 2016

http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

Cover Design: Illustration © Tom Edwards, TomEdwardsDesign.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Also by Anthony J Melchiorri

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

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Purple and green waves of plasma coursed around the hull of the SRES Argo as it exited hyperspace. A long, metallic groan resonated through the ship. Planets loomed into existence out of the darkness of space, and a fiery star greeted the crew, welcoming them to a new solar system. Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer had joined this exploratory mission with the Solar Republic of Earth’s Navy precisely to witness such a sight. He had spent long nights dreaming of traveling among the stars. The allure of discovering the undiscovered, exploring the wild abandon of the universe, stepping foot on a land that had never borne witness to the human race, and the potential of contacting new life on distant planets evoked a heart-thumping excitement in Tag that could be rivaled by no other experience.

And he was missing it.

As the chief medical officer, he bore the responsibility of carrying the ship’s biomedical science mission forward. The urge to fulfill his duty called to him at every waking hour. Now was no exception.

Tag sat at a lab bench in the medical bay and used two fingers to gesture on a holoscreen. His movements manipulated a remote-controlled microscope behind the protective barrier cordoning off the laboratory. The remote-controlled scope allowed him to monitor his ongoing experiments in real time while reducing the risk of contaminating the cells and tissues growing inside the refrigerator-sized incubators in the next room. So instead of studying the gleaming stars outside the Argo, he was stuck looking at the microscale world contained in tiny plastic dishes.

He wondered if he would have a chance to study any living cells from the planet they were set to visit. Studying new life...that would make these long hours in the lab worth it. That would make his entire career worth it.

Tag pushed aside those distracting thoughts and willed himself to focus on the scope’s view. Various numbers marched across the holoscreen to report the current temperature and humidity within the incubators. Another scrolling set of numbers reported the minute voltage fluctuations taking place in a dish full of neural tissue. Tag couldn’t help but grin at the sight. Months of work had gone into achieving those small changes, indicating the tissues might actually be forming a functional neural network—a brain of sorts.

So far, so good, Tag thought.

The med bay hatch opened, and Tag almost jumped from his holoscreen in surprise. Curtis Morgan, Tag’s medical assistant, stood at the entrance.

“You’ve got to check out one of the viewports,” Morgan said. “If you’ll pardon my brashness, I bet it’s a fair bit more interesting than whatever you’re looking at.”

“Can’t. Too much work to do,” Tag countered.

“I expected as much from you.” Morgan sauntered over to the holoscreen and leaned on one of the counters. He wore a mock pleading expression. “Dr. Brewer, come join the rest of us. I promise to work double time to make up for whatever you’re missing.”

Tag sighed and held up his hands in a supplicating gesture. “Fine, fine. I need the break anyway.”

The duo exited the med bay and walked down the corridor to the mess hall. The benches along the tables were filled with crew members sharing drinks and staring at the massive viewport. It showed a glimpse of what lay outside the ship via the hull-mounted cameras. A glittering display of distant stars shone behind an enormous globe burning with fire and gas.

A marine standing with her arms crossed nodded a greeting at Tag. “There’s Eta,” Staff Sergeant Kaufman said, gesturing toward the solar system’s sun. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Gods, yes,” Tag said. It had been years since he had seen a star this close. The last time had been Earth’s own sun, shortly after starting this mission. Eta might be a good eight or nine light-minutes away, but he could practically feel the star’s warmth on his flesh and found himself wishing he could step off the ship, if only for a brief spacewalk.

Another planet inched into existence from the cam’s periphery. Icy white, it shimmered in the display as if a fine mist covered it. Three moons orbited it like circling gulls.

“And there’s Eta-Five,” Tag said then looked at Kaufman. “I’m jealous. You get to set foot on her. I just sit in the lab and wait patiently for you all to bring me samples.”

“Jealous? That planet is colder than space. Ice everywhere. Storms. It’s not exactly going to be a pleasant stroll on the beach.”

“All the same, you get to step off this rig,” Tag said.

“I promise I’ll bring you some nice souvenirs to make up for it.”

“That’d be appreciated.”

“Maybe some alien blood samples or something.”

“Even better, bring back the whole alien,” Tag said.

Kaufman laughed. “We’ll see what we can do.” She guided Tag and Morgan past a couple of awestruck engineers. “How are the experiments going?” She was one of the only crew members aboard the ship that showed interest in Tag’s work, and he enjoyed their conversations on both his work and the scientific theories involved.

“As good as always,” he replied. As much as he wanted to talk science with her, the sight of the viewport kept all thoughts of microscopes and cellular biology at bay. Morgan had been right. This was a good deal more interesting than the neural cells, and he couldn’t help staring at the beautiful images swirling before them.

“Here. Saved you both a couple of seats,” Kaufman said. She sat on a bench next to a marine with a Mohawk and another with arms as thick as Tag’s torso. The other half-dozen marines at the table passed around an unmarked bottle, pouring and throwing back drinks.

The marine with the Mohawk looked Tag and Morgan up and down. “What? You bring us a couple of snacks, Kaufman?”

“No room for science geeks here,” the other, Williams, said with a derisive scoff. “This table’s reserved for the big boys.”

“Make room and show some respect.” Kaufman shoved Williams. Tag squeezed in beside her, and Morgan sat across from them. “When we get down on that planet and some alien blows your brain out, these guys will be the ones that put it back in.”

Williams brushed a hand over his shaved scalp and winked. “Aren’t you growing fresh brains in that lab, Dr. Frankenstein?”

“He sure is,” Kaufman said before Tag could answer.

“Though I’m not sure you’d understand how we do it,” Morgan said with a smirk.

“All I was looking for was a ‘yes,’” Williams said. “I don’t care about all the science mumbo-jumbo.” He downed another glass of whatever he was drinking and leaned closer to Tag. “If I lose mine, why don’t you just grow me a new one? Or better yet, grow me a spare so it’s ready to go when I get back.”

Kaufman eyed Tag knowingly. “Afraid the doc can’t do that. It takes months to grow a brain, so that’s no dice for you.”

“Don’t be too hasty,” Tag said. “You’re half right.” Kaufman’s expression dropped. “It takes months to grow a normal-sized artificial brain. But if all I have to replace is one the size of Williams’s, I think I can get that done in a day or two.”

“That’s cold, Doc. Ice cold.” Williams grinned then poured a drink and passed it to Tag.

He threw it back. The drink, whatever it was, burned the back of his throat, and he pinched his lips together, refusing to cough in front of the others. It took him a moment to recover as he watched the viewport.

Something new caught his eye. Not a planet. Not a star. A shadow moved into the outboard cam’s view. The dark silhouette slid over snow-covered Eta-Five like a lurking barracuda.

“What is that?” Tag said, rising from the table. His pulse quickened.

Kaufman’s eyes went wide. “Three hells, I thought we were the only ship out here.”

“We are,” Williams said. He paused for a beat. “Or, we were.”

Tag’s heart climbed into his throat. The ghostly ship moved to the edge of the cam’s view. For a brief moment, he held his breath. An itching sensation crept into the back of Tag’s mind. The ship loomed larger, closer, then disappeared under the cam’s view.

This isn’t right.

“How did we miss something like that?” Morgan asked.

His question remained unanswered. A huge clanging sound reverberated through the mess, and the Argo shook.

“All hands to battle stations,” Captain Weber’s voice boomed. “I repeat, all hands to battle stations.”

Kaufman and the other marines shot from their seats and rushed to the exit. A tide of people flooded between the tables and spilled into the corridors. Startled voices called all around Tag. He looked for Morgan, but the man was already gone.

A distant explosion echoed through the Argo. The outboard cams went dark, and the viewport crackled then went blank. The ship jolted as if the engines had kicked in again, and it started forward. But the acceleration was short lived. A deafening bang sounded somewhere on another deck, and more yells sounded out. Tag pushed through the other crew members and made his way out of the mess.

Metal screeched, echoing in the passageway, accompanied by the unyielding wail of klaxons. Malicious red lights spun over the faces of men and women, their expressions wrought with a mixture of panic and gritty determination. Their voices cried out, creating an incomprehensible cacophony in concert with the thunder of heavy footfalls as they dashed to their battle stations, churning around Tag. He needed to get to the medical bay, but he prayed the crew wouldn’t need him there.

They’ll be fine, he thought as he spotted a contingency of marines donning full power armor rushing through the corridor. But a sinking feeling in his gut told him he was wrong.

Very wrong.

CHAPTER TWO

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Tag slammed against the bulkhead, knocked off his feet by a tremor resonating through the ship with a growling roar. Pain coursed through his head where his skull had impacted the shining alloy, and his hand instinctively shot to the site of the injury. He could already feel the knot of bruised tissue that would push up against his skin. But his concern over the contusion gave way to a new threat.

A robotic voice droned through the ship’s comms, “Unauthorized boarding. Unauthorized boarding.” While hell erupted all around him in the SRES Argo, Tag recovered and sprinted for the medical bay on instinct, his mind racing as fast as his feet could carry him.

“What the hell’s going on now?” Tag yelled out, but he received no answers.

There weren’t supposed to be any other vessels in this sector of space. No known spacefaring species and no human ships. Yet the warning continued: “Unauthorized boarding.” Whatever—or whoever—was in that mysterious ship had taken them unaware and unprepared.

The Argo shook more violently than before. Tag fell again and crashed into a nearby engineer wearing a grease-stained coverall. His jaw cracked against the engineer’s shoulder, and his teeth bit down hard on his tongue. The taste of blood flooded his mouth, and his vision blurred. He grabbed a stanchion to brace himself. With fresh pain rattling his skull, he stood on shaky legs then sprinted down the passage. People thronged past him as he pushed forward, ignoring the flashing lights and screaming alarms.

A new noise pierced the din. An unhealthy grinding sound bellowed through the wide hatch at the end of the corridor. Tag winced, holding his hands up to shield his face, then willed his thumping heart to settle. A dangerous curiosity tugged at him, urging him to peer through the hatch. The open hatch led to the expansive cargo bay, and Tag guessed that was where he’d find the purported unauthorized boarders forcing their way onto the ship. As if to confirm his suspicions, a squad of marines rushed through, clad in gleaming power armor suits and bristling with weapons. The hatch slammed shut behind them. More men and women flowed down the passageway, and Tag was swept up in the current. The crowd started to disperse as the medical bay hatch appeared in the bulkhead to his right. A marine shouldered past him as he made it to the hatch and opened it.

“Dr. Brewer, I’m back here!” The gruff voice of Morgan cut through the chaos. What in the three hells is he doing in the patient regen chamber? The cylindrical chamber’s blue glass doors slid open, revealing a host of tubes and straps to hold patients in. Morgan stepped out before Tag could vocalize his concern.

“Just resetting the biosensors,” Morgan offered.

“Good. Let’s get ’em all prepped!” Tag said.

He and Morgan rushed to the other chambers. The regen chambers were designed for life-threatening injuries, internal bleeding, missing limbs, and other horrible maladies. Tag primed the pumps that would deliver painkillers, nanofiber mesh bandages, and engineered cells designed to supercharge the healing response in a patient’s body. They’d only had to use them once when a mechanic on a spacewalk neglected to engage the safety on his hull drill. The man had lost a fist-sized chunk from his calf, but a week of regen chamber treatments had restored the destroyed muscle and tendons. Tag feared the chambers were about to see a great deal more use.

“What is going on out there?” Tag shouted over the grating sounds bouncing in from the passageway.

“I don’t have a goddamned clue,” Morgan yelled over the alarms. “Must be pirates or something!”

“This far out?” Tag replied, nonplussed.

“Hey, I didn’t exactly have time to stop someone and ask!”

Tag primed the last regen chamber and strode to the middle of the bay.

“Set up triage stations,” he ordered.

“You got it.” Morgan was already digging through a cabinet full of supplies. With a stack of polymer-infused bandages, tourniquets, and other goods in his arms, he spun and dumped everything on a table bolted onto the deck. Then he nodded to another set of crash couches with built-in IV chambers for patients.

“If anyone—” The ship’s violent shaking interrupted Morgan.

The sudden motion threw him against Tag, and they both tumbled across the deck. Boxes clattered off the table, and rolls of gauze bounced away. Tag winced as he heard the sound of shattering glass behind him. He twisted to find its source. In the adjoining laboratory, beakers and graduated cylinders fell from the busted-open drawer of a lab bench and broke against the deck, flinging crystalline shards everywhere. A cell incubator door flopped open, threatening to spill its cargo of live, experimental artificial organs and cells. The chaos exploding around him drained away as a burgeoning sense of dread overtook him. The contents of that incubator represented the culmination of a decade and a half of research. Not that it couldn’t be replaced with more hard work, but the synthetic brain resting in there alone had taken him almost two years to fabricate and even longer to design.

A nearby explosion annihilated those thoughts, and his mind raced instinctively back to the task at hand. He braced himself against the table as the ship rocked and sent Morgan sprawling across the deck. Tag offered him a hand. The fellow medical officer accepted his grasp and stood, rubbing his head.

“I’ve got a feeling they’re going to need us pretty damn soon,” Tag said. He turned to a humanoid silver droid tethered to its charging station. “M3, on duty.”

The droid buzzed to life. Digital displays—its “eyes”—shone black and white, and it lurched forward.

“With me, M3,” Tag commanded. The silent droid followed with a steady, mechanical gait.

More protesting metal from the passageway accompanied the klaxons. It sounded like a hatch being forced open. Tag peeked into the corridor, and sure enough, someone or something fought to pry the hatch open from the other side as marines rushed to bolster the hatch with a blockade of loose crates.

Another dozen marines formed a half-circle perimeter around the barricaded hatch. Tag felt their palpable anxiety as nervous fingers twitched near the trigger guards of their pulse rifles. The narrow passage prevented the lines of marines from stretching more than three or four across; they stood several rows deep. Another low rumble sounded from within the cargo bay, and the hatch door gave way, knocking over the wall of crates like so many tumbling toy blocks. Thick black tendrils of smoke billowed out, clogging the corridor, and the acrid scent of burning plastic stung Tag’s nostrils.

An audible whir buzzed on behind the persistent alarms. The air filters had gone into overdrive, sucking at the smoke and desperately cleaning the pollutants out of the ship’s atmosphere.

But smoke wasn’t the only thing pouring in from the cargo bay. Flashes of arcing blue light zipped through the dense black clouds. They looked like pulse rounds but shone more brilliantly and proved more devastating than any Tag had ever seen. A torrent of the incoming blue pulsefire burst against the bulkhead around the marines, leaving burns and fissured alloy. One round slammed into a marine’s chest armor. The polymeric chest plate cracked, and she flew back with splayed limbs. Her head snapped against the bulkhead as the others around her fired into the mushrooming fog.

“I got her!” Tag yelled to Morgan. He ducked under the barrage of gunfire, ignoring each devastating round whistling past, and sprinted, dodging between the stanchions along the passage. Before he reached the marine’s limp body, another shrieking azure round pierced the visor of a nearby marine. The helmet—head still inside—flew off the man’s body and bounced along the deck like the most macabre kickball Tag had ever seen.

Professional coldness and practiced medic instincts took over Tag’s mind, and he ignored the devastating fatality as he leaped over the now-headless body. He dodged under another fusillade, then dove to the first injured marine. Her fingers trembled in spastic clenching and unclenching motions as he grabbed her wrists. The busted power armor added an extra fifty pounds to her already-muscular frame, and he grunted, dragging her to the med bay as more rounds ricocheted through the passage, whining over his head.

Unflinching marines returned a deluge of orange pulsefire to the attackers, who were still sheltered by the smokescreen. Their return fire did nothing to quell their unseen enemy. Another marine went down in a flurry of blue pulsefire, and Morgan dashed to help the man. Even while the marine’s blood pooled out from a massive hole in the glove over his right hand, he fired into the cargo bay, holding his kicking rifle with his good hand.

“M3, help!” Tag shouted, lugging his charge past another motionless casualty.

The droid rushed down the passage, past Morgan and the marine with the injured hand. Its metallic face was devoid of any outward signs of fear as it reached Tag and his patient, and it wrapped its thin, pearly fingers under the injured marine’s legs. Incoming pulse rounds singed an open hatch, barely missing the duo as they hauled the marine into the med bay. Tag gave the M3 droid a slight nod, and it let go of their patient. Hot crimson liquid pumped out of her chest plate. He unlatched the suit near her neck, and the hissing, automatic servos finished the job. Armor plates around her arms, torso, and legs split open and slid back, revealing the woman within the armor. The face shield retracted. Sweat coursed over his forehead, and his fingers trembled. He recognized the wounded staff sergeant.

“Kaufman,” he said. “You there? I’m going to take care of you, okay? You’re going to be all right.”

Kaufman’s eyes remained closed, and the color had already begun its slow march from her face. Charred fabric outlined a wound in her sternum; lifting it revealed a gory mess. All of Tag’s medical training still didn’t prevent the pang of squeamishness turning his stomach over at the sight. He grabbed a spray of coagulating agents and doused the wound in chemicals to staunch the profuse bleeding. Nearby open regen chambers hummed as they awaited their patients. Thank the gods he and Morgan had prepped all of them. Even so, he wasn’t sure if Kaufman would survive the short journey from her armor to an idling chamber. Still, he reached under her armpits, warm liquid oozing over his fingers from her wounds, and, with the droid’s help, hoisted her from her mechanical shell.

“Stay with me, Kaufman. Please, stay with me.”

Her breathing waned in increasingly shallow, staccato gasps. Three hells, he was surprised she was breathing at all. He and the droid slid her body into the regen chamber, and then his hands flew over the holoscreen next to it. With practiced ease, he selected the proper emergency treatment protocols and stood back while the chamber did the rest. He let a long breath escape his lungs and wiped his perspiring forehead with the back of his hand.

She’s safe.

If the gods had any mercy, the regen chamber might breathe life back into her.

More agonized screams echoed from the passage. With his hands still covered in crimson, he hurried back to wade through the carnage once again. He was a meter from the hatch when he saw Morgan. The medical assistant was dragging an unconscious, maimed marine just outside the bay. Streaks of red marred the medical assistant’s clothes, but Tag couldn’t tell if the blood belonged to Morgan or the marine.

“Help me out here!” Morgan cried.

But before Tag reached the hatch, another robotic voice came over the ship’s comms, replacing the repeated warning of an “unauthorized boarding.” This one simply said, “Emergency containment activated.”

The hatch slammed shut.

CHAPTER THREE

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Tag Brewer hadn’t lost a single crew member during the ship’s decade of service. But that had all changed in several fiery seconds. The clamor in the passageway grew ever more tumultuous with shrieks of pulsefire, inhuman screams, and the incessant pounding on the hatch.

And Morgan was trapped out there.

Tag punched the buttons on the hatch release panel, but the hatch didn’t budge. Open! Tag silently willed. But the hatch did no such thing: instead, an error message pulsed across the panel. He pulled down a lever on the hatch marked Emergency Override and waited for the door to hiss open.

“Come on, damn it!” he yelled, kicking the door in frustration. “M3, get this door open!”

The droid walked to the hatch and attempted to pry it open. M3’s servos whined and its hinges squeaked, but its efforts proved no more fruitful than Tag’s. Then the droid stood straight, froze, and toppled sideways. Its eye screens went blank.

“M3! Reboot!” Tag cried.

The droid ignored him. It lay like a fallen statue across the med bay deck.

“Damn it!”

His jaw clenched, and heat crept into his cheeks as he yanked unsuccessfully on the hatch. In response to his vain efforts, a hollow pounding echoed through the reinforced steel. Morgan. The poor man, trapped in the passage, hammered a frantic rhythm. Tag tried to leverage the door open, desperate to let his assistant and his patient in. Screams of pain and defeat echoed through the metal and into the med bay, sending a tumult of frustration pummeling through Tag. The heavy door muffled the dejected voices, but each agonized howl physically pained him. Each voice signified another casualty, another marine, another crew member he couldn’t help.

He yanked the emergency release lever again and again until his muscles burned. Nothing. Tapping on a nearby terminal, he called up the ship’s AI management system.

“Computer, release med bay hatch main,” he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. No robotic voices uttered an incorporeal “affirmative.” No hatches unlocked. Nothing happened. “Computer, release med bay hatch main,” he commanded again, more urgently.

Again, the computer refused to respond.

“What the hell?” He punched the door. Pain radiated through his knuckles, and he shook his fingers out. “Computer, release med bay hatch main!”

The terminal flashed a dull red and returned to its stasis mode as if no buttons had been pressed and no commands uttered. He stamped in another code to access the ship’s comms.

“Med bay to bridge, med bay to bridge, this is Lieutenant Commander Brewer. Do you read?”

He waited with bated breath. No response.

“Med bay to bridge, do you read?”

Again, nothing. The pounding on the hatch ceased.

“Morgan, you okay?” Tag yelled through the door.

It was a stupid question. He knew it. And he feared he knew the answer, but he didn’t know what else to say or do. Instead, he turned back to the terminal and punched in a few commands until the ship’s internal cam views fizzled to life on the nearby holoscreen. The first view showed the passage outside the med bay. A yellow haze had replaced the dark smoke. Ominous shapes swam through the vapor like shadowy sea monsters lurking under the water’s surface. The pirates? A shiver crept through his spine. He switched to the view of the cargo bay. The same yellow fog blanketed the entire chamber, where more humanoid silhouettes flitted through the smog between stacks of crates.

Next, he looked at the bridge. Captain Weber and a few of his officers stood near the chart table. Flecks of crimson spray speckled one officer’s uniform, and another limped backward, aiming a pistol at an unseen enemy. Clouds of yellow fog encroached upon Weber as he leveled his pistol, shooting into the smoke and shadows. For a brief moment, Tag thought, That should be me. He should be the one making a last stand on the bridge and going down with the ship. If it weren’t for his time at Atlantis Station, it would’ve been him commanding the SRES Argo. He wondered if things would have gone any differently. If he’d have been able to avoid the pirates attacking them now. But regret and bitterness wouldn’t do anything to save his life or anyone else’s now.

Captain Weber and the bridge officers fired pulse rounds into the shapes wading through the fog. Several rounds splashed against the shadowy figures. But the figures didn’t crumple and die. Instead, the pulsefire crackled and sputtered against what looked like ... energy shields? The attackers simply absorbed the incoming fire and then cut down Weber and the other bridge officers with disciplined ease then faded back into the fog.

Tag took a step back from the holoscreen. He shook his head slowly, hardly able to believe the horrific tableau. It wasn’t just the ignoble deaths that shocked him. Energy shields were a standard defense for ships, but as far as he knew, the SRE hadn’t figured out how to miniaturize the tech or integrate it with power suits for ground troops or marines. These pirates possessed technology he hadn’t even known existed.

He flipped to the galley view and was met with the same ethereal image of masked shadows pushing through the yellow miasma. He returned to the view outside the med bay, but the image flickered.

“Focus, focus,” he said, tapping the buttons. The image stabilized then went dark. The entire ship shuddered for a second, and he flew forward, carried by momentum as the ship bucked and abruptly decelerated. The whine of the impellers resonated through the bulkhead as something threw the Argo into reverse thrust and the inertial dampeners fought to keep up with the sudden change. One of the regen chambers creaked, straining against the bolts holding it against the bulkhead. Then the ship’s reactors went quiet. All the wall holoscreens crackled off, and the lights sputtered before going black. An eerie silence, punctuated only by distant creaking, took over.

No more gunfire. No more churning engines. No more alarms. No more flashing lights. No more screams.

Complete darkness enfolded Tag, as if his senses had all simultaneously failed. Cold snaked through his flesh. He wondered if this was what being flung into space felt like. The sudden chill, the nothingness of vacuum. But then he sucked in a breath of clean, pressurized atmosphere, which provided mild reassurance that he still lived, for now.

Ghostly red emergency lights emanated from the floor panels and along the steel bulwarks ribbing the bulkhead. One red light flashed softly, catching Tag’s attention. This one blinked from one of the regen chambers. Kaufman’s regen chamber. A single message glinted across the red panel: “Nonfunctional.”

“No, no, no!” Tag yelled.

The biomonitors reported the patient within had no pulse, and the automated healing of the marine’s torn blood vessels and shredded organs had completely stopped. Tag ran to the malfunctioning chamber. Morgan’s assistance, anyone’s assistance, would be immensely helpful right now. He had no idea what had happened to the rest of the crew or if any were even left. A persistent thought gnawed at the back of his mind as he reached Kaufman’s regen chamber. Some pirate might reactivate the computer systems and access the med bay hatch at any time. And if that happened, he would be as good as dead, just like everyone else.

But he was alive now. And he’d be damned if he would let Kaufman die. If he could just save one life, any life, her life, he’d do it. He might not be captain, but he hadn’t joined the Solar Republic of Earth’s Navy to let others die on his watch. And if Kaufman perished...

Gods, he had never felt like such a failure.

A quick punch on the emergency release sent the door of the glass chamber sliding back. He thanked the gods that whatever had affected the main comp systems hadn’t locked the regen chamber—or maybe the ship’s power outage had done the trick. Either way, how it happened wasn’t his concern at the moment. Kaufman was.

With a hiss, the second, inner acrylic shield retracted. Tag released the harnesses on Kaufman’s arms and legs, and her body slumped forward. Catching her, he lowered her gently to the deck. It seemed as if she weighed less than before. Maybe it was just the adrenaline pumping through his vessels. But all the strength he had once seen in her seemed like a distant memory now. She seemed fragile and weak.

He swallowed hard as he catalogued her injuries and triaged them: a torn artery, a network of internal bleeding, a shredded stomach, broken ribs, and undoubtedly a greatly increased risk of infection thanks to the gaping wound. The chamber had barely started its automated diagnostics and healing procedures. He tried to push aside emotion so he could focus on helping her rather than mourning her. His medical officer training took over once again, and he set to work on her body like an engineer repairing the Argo’s fusion reactor power plant, emotionless and professional.

The air in the med bay grew humid and suffocating as he toiled. He figured the induced power outage had caused the change in atmosphere and prayed that their attackers hadn’t shut down the ship’s life support completely or else all his efforts to save Kaufman would be in vain.

Ignoring their potentially impending doom, he ran to a meter-tall silver door by one of the dormant coolers and took out a syringe filled with a cell-based therapy. He returned to Kaufman, injected the therapy into a vessel in her arm, and gave her manual chest compressions to keep her blood flowing. The lack of help from the lifesaving regen chambers standing uselessly next to him forced him to resort to surgical methods only slightly better than battlefield medic tactics. He glanced at the supplies Morgan had gathered earlier while he pumped. A circular black battery-powered cardiac support device jumped out at him, and he rushed to retrieve it, leaving Kaufman’s side for only a moment. He placed the small device over her chest. Its electric pulse maintained a slow, steady rhythm. Yet even as her heart beat, her breathing grew shallower. Judging by her strained breathing, Tag guessed she’d suffered a punctured lung.

From an emergency supply cabinet, he snagged an oxygen supply mask and situated it over Kaufman’s face. Then he grabbed a synth blood bag and a saline IV. He inserted the needles running from each into her veins. As he struggled to keep the bags up and cauterize another bleeding wound, he eyed the body of the crumpled M3 droid. He wished the damn thing was up and working, if only to hold the IV bags.

But he’d have to do this on his own. He hung the bags on a neighboring exam table then snatched a tube and large-bore needle, preparing to drain the excess air from her punctured lung. A loud grinding reverberated through the bulkhead and made him jump. The ship groaned, and the strong pull of acceleration grasped at him again. It felt like the ship pushed almost two-g before the inertial dampeners kicked in. Overhead lights flickered back on along the wall holoscreens, but Tag had no time to rejoice in the restored power. He plunged a large-bore needle through Kaufman’s chest and into her lung. Red liquid flowed out, and after several agonizingly long seconds, her breathing stabilized.

She would live. For now.

Tag couldn’t guess how long either of them would survive if the pirates investigated the med bay. Help must be out there. Someone else must still be alive on the ship with some idea of what was going on. He dashed to the hatch. The red error message still shone on its panel. A quick survey of the room revealed the regen chambers flashed the same warning lights as before, and the M3 droid remained a limp pile of metal limbs and inactive servos.

What in the gods’ names had these pirates done to the ship? Tag turned on the intraship cams again to see if the passages were any safer than before. With a couple of button taps, the holoscreen near the hatch panel revealed views of the passageway again. The yellow haze still hung thick in the air, obscuring the huddled shapes beside the ribbed bulkhead that Tag guessed were bodies. He prepared to check the bridge view when a low hissing sounded near the regen chambers.

Spinning on his heels, Tag saw tendrils of yellow smoke reach through grates along the bulkhead like the ghostly tentacles of some unseen beast. With the ship’s fusion reactor supplying power to all decks again, the life-support fans had reengaged, spreading purified air throughout the passages and chambers. But whatever that yellow smoke was made of hadn’t been filtered out yet. Tag didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t good. It curled out of the grates and twisted to the deck, drifting toward the regen chambers.

Toward Kaufman.

CHAPTER FOUR

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There was nowhere to go. Tag and Kaufman were stuck in the medical bay, doomed to suffocate and die in the throes of that ominous yellow fog just like the rest of the crew. He didn’t even bother trying the manual release on the hatch again. What was the point? All he would accomplish was letting in more of that toxic-looking gas. He ran to Kaufman and then dragged her body away from the menacing smog. He wouldn’t give up on his life—or hers—yet. Not while they still had inches to fight for and seconds to conjure a plan.

He looked down at her closed eyes and the long blond hair soaked in blood. Sweat trickled across her forehead, washing away some flecks of dried blood, and her breath steamed up the inside of the oxygen mask.

Tag’s heart thumped wildly. Maybe, just maybe, he could buy them some more time. He grabbed one of the emergency masks for himself and placed it over his face. Finally free of the acrid smell of burning plastic saturating the atmosphere, he sucked in a fresh breath of compressed oxygen.

The yellow fog rolled in closer. He might have clean air, but he still didn’t know if the chemicals within the fog could be absorbed through the skin. A nerve agent or engineered volatile gas might soak straight through his flesh and into his bloodstream, even with the mask over his nose and mouth.

He continued pulling Kaufman as the shut-down M3 droid disappeared under a carpet of yellow fog. It sucked up the regen chambers next, then the patient crash couches. Soon the fog would fill the med bay. Tag scanned the bay, desperately looking for another escape, another way to keep them alive just a bit longer.

Finally, an idea struck him. He pulled Kaufman to the airlock of the laboratory attached to the bay then twisted the manual lock on the sterilization chamber’s hatch and squeezed Kaufman in. Holding it open with his foot, he reached and grabbed one of the medic kits Morgan had set out on the nearest table. His fingers wrapped around it right as the table succumbed to the yellow haze. A wisp of it rolled over his hand, and a sharp, biting sensation traveled up his flesh. He winced and bit his bottom lip to refrain from yelping in pain. Still grasping the medic kit, he drew his hand back.

“Come on, Kaufman,” he said. “Stay with me. We’re almost safe.”

He slammed shut the hatch to the sterilization chamber. It was only meant for one person, and he had to awkwardly stand over her as he activated the sterilizing washes. When the nozzles started spraying, he half expected yellow gas to pour over them. Instead, he was rewarded with clean, white sterilizing gases. The hissing sterilization process soon stopped, and the inner chamber door opened, releasing them into the interior of the cramped laboratory space.

Normally, Tag wore a biosafety suit working in here. It felt unnatural, almost wrong, to be in here like this. But no matter; at least they were safe. He wasn't worried about contracting a dangerous pathogen from his research. Rather, he was afraid of passing a pathogen on to the subjects of his work.

He snapped the door shut on an incubator that had fallen open during the attack. Within the roughly two-meter-high hot box lay a plethora of medical-grade, synthetic tissues. Organs and tissues modeled after the human body grew within that chamber. Each contained a mixture of cells grown in the lab experimentally combined with microcomputer components. Once again, Tag was reminded of the decades of work he’d put into that pet project, doubting it would ever stand a chance of seeing fruition now. Since the artificial organs had no working immune system, he was now risking all kinds of contamination by exposing them to the air he exhaled through his mask.

But saving artificial organs didn’t matter now. Saving real ones did. Especially real ones belonging to Kaufman.

He set to work on her wounds again, cauterizing bleeding vessels and constantly monitoring her breathing, heart rhythm, and blood pressure. Yellow haze continued to flow into the main section of the med bay. It rolled against the acrylic partition separating the bay and the lab like a slow-moving tidal wave. The lab not only provided a physical barrier from the fog, but it also used a separate oxygen supply and atmospheric life support independent from the rest of the ship to maintain the sensitive experiments within it. It was Tag’s only respite from the acidic fog until he figured out how in the three hells he was going to get out of here.

He finished patching Kaufman’s wounds. There was nothing else he could do. It was up to the cardiac support system and her own body to continue living.

A deep exhalation escaped him, and he stood, wondering what he should do next. There had to be someone else alive aboard the ship. Maybe someone still fighting the pirates. On one bulkhead, between snaking tubes and ports, there was a small terminal. He approached the terminal, all the while keeping an eye on Kaufman. Holding his breath in anticipation, he tapped on the terminal. It buzzed on, and its holoscreen lit up normally in a sea of greens and blues. A tingle of relief filtered through him.

His finger hovered over the intraship comms system. He thought to call the bridge again but realized that might be a mistake. After everything he’d seen, the crew had probably lost control of the bridge. For all he knew, there might not be any crew left. Alerting his captors to his and Kaufman’s presence wouldn’t save anyone.

Instead, he revisited the onboard camera display system. He was greeted with the familiar images of the passage and the bridge. The yellow haze had lessened. There was only a slightly opaque screen of fog instead of the dense, rolling barrier it had been before. The air scrubbers must’ve been back online and were catching up with the poisonous clouds. As the scrubbers worked, they revealed the remnants of the battle. Tag panned over the views of the casualties. A deep pit in his stomach threatened to swallow him whole, growing ever wider as he viewed each macabre scene. There were the broken and shattered power armor suits lying still across the passages. Singed and lifeless bodies of crew members, some in emergency EVA suits and others in their standard shipmen’s uniforms, were sprawled throughout.

On the bridge, Tag viewed the carnage of Captain Weber’s last stand. Yet as Tag tallied the lives he hadn’t saved, the lives he couldn’t save, he paused. Where were the bodies—any bodies—belonging to their unidentified foe? Fear crept through his vessels like a late winter storm blasting any hopes of spring. Had these pirates already removed their injured and dead? Or had they so overpowered the SRE marines and crew that there simply were no casualties on their side? The thought of these space pirates with more advanced equipment than an SRE military science ship was almost unfathomable.

He switched to the cargo bay view. The docking hatch, which had originally been forced open, was now closed. He could see severe scorching across the bulkhead and scattered bits of metal from destroyed cargo cases. Tag hadn’t spent much time in the hold, but even he could tell there were several cases missing. The hold was mostly empty, just like the rest of the ship. A small glimmer of hope flickered in Tag like a dying candle flame.

Maybe the pirates had found what they’d come for and left. If they were gone, maybe he could make it safely around the ship and check for other survivors. There might be others he could help as soon as the yellow gas was fully scrubbed and filtered. He moved to the final cam view, looking down the passage from the med bay’s hatch. With a flick of his wrist, he adjusted the cam until he saw the area directly in front of the med bay. He couldn’t help himself from gasping.

There was Morgan, his hand still reaching for the hatch as he lay sprawled over the deck. His other hand was locked in the collar of a downed marine. Morgan’s chest didn’t expand or deflate, and his skin was a sickly pale. His eyes were frozen open. He was gone.

Tag looked away, steeling himself. That emerging bit of optimism wavered in him before crashing against the hard, rocky face of reality.

“Kaufman,” he said, “I think we might be the only ones left on this damn ship.”

She didn’t respond. Her cardiac support unit droned on quietly. Several seconds of silence passed as Tag mulled his next move. Then, as if in delayed response to his earlier statement, Kaufman’s cardiac support system emitted a wailing beep. She had stopped breathing.

CHAPTER FIVE

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Tag huddled over Kaufman’s body. He readjusted her oxygen mask to ensure it was still working properly. When air hissed out of it, he put it back in place. He snaked a long tube down her airway, hoping to keep it open and force the oxygen into her lungs, but her lungs weren’t rising and falling anymore. The cardiac support system continued sending little jolts of electricity to her heart, urging it to pump.

But Tag had been a medical officer long enough to recognize the subtle signs of approaching death. And these signs weren’t so subtle.

He grabbed a handheld magnetic sensor array. It worked like a miniature MRI, and he’d often used it to gauge the neural activity of the synthetic brain he’d developed and stored in the lab’s incubator. Now he measured Kaufman’s neural activity with it. The handheld MRI sent an image to a nearby holoscreen. The dark, simulated projection that displayed across the screen sent a wave of despair over Tag.

She was losing brain function.

What should have been a vibrant image of colors flashing over the projected brain to show neural activity now appeared as dull shades of black and blue. There was almost no sign of energy, no sign of life beneath her skull. The cardiac support system would help pump blood through her vessels until its battery eventually died. But there would be no point if her brain didn’t survive this ordeal.

Tag vowed not to let her die on his watch. No way in three hells would he let her die. If she did, he would be the owner of the last beating heart aboard the SRES Argo. And he couldn’t continue on this ship alone. Logic told him he was already alone, that she was destined for death, but a reluctant voice deep in his mind cried for him to hold on to hope. She might still make it. She had to make it.

And he might not be alone in this battle to save a life.

Surely Captain Weber had sent an SOS to the SRES Montenegro, the capital ship from which they’d originated. The huge ship, with its top-of-the-line medical facilities and ship repair bays, would be full of thousands upon thousands of crew members ready to help. No lone pirate ship could take out the Montenegro, even if they had overpowered the Argo. The Argo was only an Odyssey-class corvette meant for scientific expeditions, dwarfed when compared to the gargantuan capital ship.

But the Montenegro was over ten light-years away. Tag’s heart sank. Any automated lightbeam relay message would take ten years for the Montenegro to receive. Definitely not good enough. Hopefully the captain had launched a courier drone before his defeat. The drones, with their miniature T-drives, could take advantage of hyperspace travel. That would be Tag’s only chance. A single courier drone, flying through hyperspace, rocketing toward the Montenegro. If the drone flew out without a hitch and the pirates hadn’t shot it to bits of alloy, then it might take four days or so to reach the Montenegro. And once the capital ship mustered and sent a rescue squad, it would be another four days before the rescue party reached the Argo.

For now, he would have to sit in this floating metal tomb, alone in space.

Kaufman’s cardiac support system continued to beep. Maybe, maybe, even if the sensors had said she’d experienced neurological damage, she wasn’t as doomed as he’d initially thought. The Montenegro might yet be able to restore neural function. Yes, they had to be able to do just that! Their synthetic tissue and organ replacement systems were far superior to the meager regen chambers aboard the Argo. Tag decided to leave her fully intubated, alive through the force of mechanical devices alone. But if she stood any chance of rescue, he needed to ensure Captain Weber’s SOS had been sent.

His fingers tapped on the terminal. A few swipes and slides brought up the comm log, and he filtered out the intraship comms as he scanned to the most recent intership channel comms. Scrolling down the list, he looked for logs timestamped near the time when they’d been boarded. He reached the bottom of the list and found normal status update reports. Past those there were a few logged attempts of an automated SOS at 1500 ship standard time. But the log reported the messages couldn’t be sent.

Tag recalled his own frustration at trying to call the bridge. He’d had no luck. Had both their intraship and intership comm channels been compromised by the pirates? Again, such technological skill surprised him. He recalled the massive quakes that had shaken the ship during the initial attack. Maybe the comm system arrays had been damaged by the physical impact of the boarding ship. That made more sense. The pirates’ ship seemed to have come out of nowhere, and such a feat meant it had likely been an expensive stealth ship. He’d thought such ships were relegated only to elite, covert military units, so the idea that a ship like that had found its way into pirates’ hands alarmed him. He definitely needed to ensure the Montenegro was aware of this situation.

Tag checked the status of the courier drones next. The drone logs were kept in a separate AI operations folder. Tag selected the drones’ folder and saw a command had indeed been issued with an SOS reporting the Argo’s status and the boarding. The command had been executed at the moment of attack.

His fist pumped in victory. “They sent for help, Kaufman!” He wanted to hug her in joy, but her diminishing state shattered his elation at once. The sight of her body struggling to maintain any semblance of life was an all-too-somber reminder of what the entire Argo was like. A vessel barely clinging to life.

He pressed his hand against the lab’s clear acrylic partition. The air was looking remarkably clearer. Soon, he hoped, it would be fresh and clean again, wiped of whatever toxins had floated through it. It would be back to the slightly plastic smell of the scrubbed and filtered atmosphere.

But even at the sight of this progress, something else bothered him, tickling the corners of his mind. When the ship had restarted, there had been an undeniable change in direction. The acceleration had thrown him off balance. And judging by the state of the bridge, it hadn’t been Captain Weber executing any kind of course-correct. It must’ve been the pirates. They’d altered the ship’s trajectory. But to where and why?

His heart beat in his chest like rapid pulsefire. If they sent the ship careening into space, there was the distinct possibility that the Montenegro’s rescue mission might not find them. He couldn’t risk adding days or weeks to their rescue. While he might survive, Kaufman wouldn’t stand a chance. Any semblance of neurological recovery relied on getting her to the Montenegro within a few days—if she even had that long. He scrolled through the ship’s navigation reports. The last log simply showed their original trajectory. It was a path that took them on the historic path of the lost generation ship, the UNS Hope. The ship had sailed out almost three hundred years ago, before the Solar Republic of Earth existed. They’d never received any colonization reports from the massive ship, and the SRE had decided the Argo would relive the UNS Hope’s journey while completing years-long missions started by other research vessels in this galaxy. But thanks to the ferocity of the acceleration change, he doubted the ship was actually headed along its original course.

“Computer, calculate current trajectory.”

The terminal was silent.

“Computer, calculate current trajectory.”

Again, he was met with no response. Another computer system mysteriously down. His apprehension levels began to creep up again. He scrolled across the terminal and manually selected a map. A glimmering blue holoprojection of a solar system appeared before him with a central star burning bright in the center of this celestial oasis: Eta.

It was two-thirds through its core’s hydrogen-fusion lifespan. The star was older than Earth’s sun but was still capable of supporting life for billions of years on several of its orbiting planets. This was the reason the UNS Hope had been sent to Eta centuries ago and why the SRE had followed up with another ship, the SRES Hanno. In fact, one of Argo’s missions was to pick up an extraterrestrial anthropologist on one of Eta’s planets, Eta-Five, who’d been left there five years ago by the Hanno. The anthropologist, Lieutenant Sofia Vasquez, had been studying the planet’s native biological lifeforms and whatever sentient species might be found there. In typical anthropologist form, she’d insisted on doing the mission solo to better immerse herself in the local population. Contact with her had been sparse because Eta-Five’s atmosphere apparently blocked all normal lightbeam and radio comms, along with lidar and radar from probing the planet’s surface. She’d only been able to contact the fleet via a few courier drones to provide updates and confirm the five-year anniversary rendezvous with the Argo. A blip on the holoscreen showed the anthropologist’s last known location in the Eta system on Eta-Five.

Another little blip appeared on the holoscreen. It was labeled SRES Argo. The computer couldn’t respond to Tag’s commands, but the holoscreen at least provided the current speed and direction of the Argo. A small dashed line projected straight from the bow of the ship, showing where it was headed. Tag felt the tight grip of nausea around his stomach.

The dashed line cut straight through the fiery core of Eta.

CHAPTER SIX

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Anger burned through Tag like a T-drive revving into hyperspace, and sweat coated his palms as he tightened his hands into fists. The pirates had done this. It seemed exceptionally cruel to send the Argo straight into the hellish bowels of the raging star. But as Kaufman’s cardiac support system continued its rhythmic beeping, he realized the action was hardly contrary to the barbaric way they’d treated the ship and its crew so far. He calmed himself, fighting through the initial panic. His first thought was to determine how much time he and Kaufman had left.

Without the ship AI’s help, he would have to make a rough estimate on his own. It wasn’t too difficult to estimate their distance from Eta. Given their steady acceleration and current speed, he calculated they’d reach Eta within the day. Of course it would be less than that before they’d be fried by the star’s radiation and intense heat.

There was no time to delay.

“Can’t wait in here all day, can I?” Tag asked Kaufman. He looked at her still form and wished he had found just one more crew member alive to help with this predicament. He wished she was alive and able to help. But wishes couldn’t save lives. Only fast thinking and real action could do that.

The remnants of yellow fog still swirled in the med bay, far thinner than before, but still, to Tag, no less dangerous. A quick review on the terminal showed the haze had dissipated somewhat from the outer passages, too. There was no telling how long it would be before it was completely scrubbed. Tag had a feeling he couldn’t afford to wait and find out.

“Kaufman, if I don’t get us out of here alive, I apologize.” He pressed a hand to the acrylic partition separating the lab and the med bay. “But I’m going to do the best I damn well can. I promise you that much.”

He snatched an emergency oxygen mask and placed it over his mouth. Smashing down the airlock button, he stepped into the decontamination chamber, let the gases hiss over his body, and took another deep breath as the airlock released him into the med bay.

Waves of the dissipating fog seemed to surround him and reach out like a living creature as he pushed through the light haze. Every bit of exposed skin stung. His flesh turned red. The pain wasn’t as bad as the first time he’d touched the fog when it was at its full strength, but it was steadily intensifying. Sweat trickled across his forehead, and his senses slowly distorted. He gasped another breath of oxygen through the mask, but he could feel his throat starting to constrict. Maybe the poisonous fog was leeching through him, tunneling into his bloodstream. His mind became muddled by the invisible fire crawling over his skin and through his nerves. There would be no way he could make it to the bridge and reroute the Argo under this kind of duress.

He stumbled and fell. Fatigue crept into his muscles as he tried to push himself up. He found he couldn’t do it. His breathing was growing shallower, weaker.

Come on, Tag. Kaufman needs you. The Argo needs you.

He crawled forward to a cabinet along the bulkhead. Leaning against it, he slowly lifted himself to his feet and opened it, his vision growing even more dizzied and blurred. He reached, swinging his hand through the air, until he grasped crinkling plastic. His fingers wrapped around a swatch of plastic fabric, and he pulled a biosafety suit from its place in the closet, then toppled backward, the suit flopping over him. Darkness crept into his vision, and he could only see a narrow tunnel before him. Palms and knees flat on the deck, he dragged himself back to the airlock.

Hold on to the suit. Hold on to the suit. He had to repeat the mantra over and over. Or was he saying it aloud? He wasn’t sure.

His vision went completely black, and the threads of an unforgiving void wrapped around his mind, threatening him with unconsciousness, but he persevered past those enveloping coils and continued crawling.

Kaufman needs you. The Argo needs you. Hold on to the suit. The suit. Suit. The words echoed against the inside of his skull and slurred over his swollen tongue.

His head knocked into the bulkhead. Had he reached the lab side of the med bay? Again, forcing energy into his exhausted muscles, he pulled himself upright. His hands played across the bulkhead, searching for the airlock’s manual release, numbness spreading through his fingers and hampering his movements.

But he thought he felt it. The lever. He pulled down.

Somewhere, in the shadows of his mind, he recognized the whoosh of air and hiss of an opening hatch. He tumbled inside, clutching the biosafety suit to his chest, and then slammed his hand randomly against the interior of the airlock over and over, searching for the button. Finally he heard the satisfying punch of a depressed button, and the hatch hissed shut. Decontaminating gases poured over him, and the air in the chamber was sucked out, replaced by fresh bursts of clean oxygen washing over him.

But the yellow gas had already done its damage. He could no longer keep the encroaching darkness from his mind. It swallowed him whole.

As the inner hatch to the airlock opened, he crumpled, sprawling across the deck of the lab. He reached out, his numb fingers trembling in the air, a final thought whispering through his mind: I’m sorry, Kaufman. I’m so sorry.

He fell into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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“Pod ejected.” The robotic voice echoed in the lab.

A pang of piercing agony shot through Tag’s head. His eyelids opened slowly. Light filtered in, stabbing into his retinas like scorching daggers and exacerbating his pounding headache. It was worse than the most debilitating hangover he’d ever endured.

“Pod ejected,” the robotic voice repeated.

Faint recognition burned through the cloud of Tag’s headache. The voice. Was the ship’s AI running again? Optimism cut through his muddled thoughts like Earth’s sun parting through storm clouds. But with his returning consciousness came brutal reality. Standard announcements, like “unauthorized boarders” and “pod ejected,” were not the reaction of any AI system. They were simple statements, programmed to go off in response to various events—whether it was the captain sending the ship into full alert or, in the case of the “pod ejected,” one of the ship’s escape pods being flung from the ship.

But if escape pods were being ejected, that meant—

Tag sprang to his feet. Someone else was still alive on the ship. Or at least, they had been on the ship.

Were there others hiding from the pirates, waiting to escape at the last moment? He scrolled through the lab’s terminal to view the map of Eta and the surrounding planets. Sure enough, two little blips pinged on the projection near the Argo. They appeared to be careening toward the planet, Eta-Five, where Lieutenant Sofia Vasquez was supposed to be. On the comms menu, Tag selected a command to open a channel with the pods.

“Pod One, this is Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer, chief medical officer of the Argo. Do you read?”

No response. No static. Nothing.

He tried the second pod. “Pod Two, this is Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer, chief medical officer aboard the Argo. Do you read?”

Again, no response. He checked the comm log and saw both messages had failed to even make it off the ship. Whatever the pirates had done to the ship’s comms was still in effect. Through the holoscreen, Tag watched the pods rocketing away. Kaufman and he needed to be on one. He started to put on the biosafety suit he’d almost lost his life dragging in here. There was one more pod left. He could grab a suit for Kaufman and take her to the pod. They might be able to catch up with the other two, or at least land near enough for a rendezvous.

He finished slipping on the white biosafety suit, and the self-cinching seams closed over his back. Then the ship shuddered. A blue beam traced across the map of the Eta solar system, signifying an energy weapon. It had seemingly come out of nowhere.

But then Tag realized what was happening.

The pirates were still near the Argo. Damn it. Tag remembered that they’d evaded the Argo’s radar and lidar in the first place. They were virtually invisible to the ship’s sensors, and their stealth ship wouldn’t show up on the solar system map.

The energy beam connected with Pod Two, and the blinking dot disappeared. Tag’s heart sank. More death, more destruction. He waited for another beam to fire from the stealth ship and catch Pod One, but instead, the Argo rumbled a deep, throaty growl. It had fired its own weapons. A chain of concentrated pulse rounds flew across the holoprojection from the Argo’s single energy cannon. The rounds lanced into the small blip representing Pod One, and it too disappeared.

Had the pirates reprogrammed the ship to fire on its own escape pods? Or worse, were they still on board the Argo?

“No,” Tag said. “No, no, no, no.”

He ran his fingers through his sweat-matted hair. Now, he feared, if he and Kaufman boarded the remaining pod, they would be shot out of space like Pods One and Two. And even if they somehow evaded the fire of their commandeered ship and that of the pirates, they would crash-land on Eta-Five alone and with no way of getting off the damned globe. He glanced at the map of the Eta system once more. They were mere hours from reaching the overpowering grasp of the star. The ship’s radiation shields could only endure so much before he and Kaufman became shipboard stir-fry.

There was only one surefire way to save them. He had to pilot the Argo. It had been decades since he’d been at the helm of a ship, and technology had advanced since his ill-fated days of flight officer training school, but he had no choice.

He put the biosafety suit’s helmet and mask over his head and, before leaving the lab, considered what he was up against.

For some reason, the pirates hadn’t simply obliterated the Argo with their cannons or a well-placed torpedo that would have turned the ship into a cloud of debris floating through space. To Tag, that could only mean one thing. They wanted no evidence that this ship had ever existed—not a single shard of discarded alloy. He wondered if this was what had become of the UNS Hope so many years ago. It too had vanished without a trace and, so far, no sign of the ship had been recovered. Whoever these pirates were, they seemed to want to turn this part of the universe into a figurative black hole.

But maybe there was hope of somehow evading the pirates. After all, at least the Hanno had made it through the Eta system unscathed to drop off Lieutenant Vasquez.

He shuddered. The pirates possessed better firepower. Their ship was stealthier and more advanced. And they were still coasting alongside the Argo. Even if he did gain control of it, what then? How would he escape the cannon fire that had decimated Pod Two?

He needed to compartmentalize this. One thing at a time. First things first: he needed to get to the bridge and ensure he could control the ship. The blasts from the Argo’s energy cannon worried him. It meant the pirates were somehow in command, which might explain why the AI didn’t seem to work. Maybe the pirates had gained remote control. Tag sighed in frustration. He was no hacker or computer specialist and wasn’t sure how he’d break their stranglehold if that was the case.

He performed a final cam survey over the ship’s passages and bridge then drew away in shock. At least now he knew the ship wasn’t being controlled remotely.

A trio of pirates was in the bridge. One sat in the captain’s crash couch while another worked weapons, and a third sat at the pilot’s terminal. Each wore sleek black mechanized suits. Glowing orange visors obscured their faces, and tubes snaked from their helmets into ports along their backs. Gun barrels were mounted on their forearms, and additional sidearms were holstered at their hips. Tag had no idea how he would get past this obstacle blocking his path toward escape, saving Kaufman, and warning the SRE fleet of these bastards.

Tag punched the button for the airlock and let the decontamination process repeat itself for the third time that day. He left the safety of the lab, and the biosafety suit’s air filtration system kicked in. Air whooshed in and out, reminding Tag of what it sounded like to breathe underwater when diving. His suit rustled as he strode across the med bay’s deck and picked up Kaufman’s pulse rifle. The weapon felt heavy in his hands despite the polymeric shell. The small fusion core in the device was weighty enough, and the weapon was usually handled while the user wore power armor. There was no way he could fit into Kaufman’s idle armor still lying on the deck. Even though she was broader and more muscular than him, built like all the other marines, she was also half a head shorter.

Ah, well, he thought morosely. The armor hadn’t saved her or any of the others from the pirates’ rounds. It won’t save me.

He puffed out his chest, primed the rifle, letting it hum to life, and punched the manual release for the med bay’s hatch. This time, to his surprise, it hissed open, and he crept into the passage, cautiously stepping over Morgan’s outstretched limbs and avoiding his fallen crewmates. Winding through the slightly hazy corridor, he snuck toward the bridge. Every step he took, he was plagued by a single, relentless thought: If these pirates had made it past the marines, how was he, a medical officer, supposed to bring down three of them?

CHAPTER EIGHT

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Tag shouldered the rifle and peered down its optic sights. He peeked around the corner and aimed at the hatch leading to the bridge. There were no pirates in sight. Slowly, he crept to the hatch. Every nerve in his body tingled, and a nagging voice in the back of his mind kept telling him this was suicide. He wanted to ignore it and end this battle against the pirates in a swift, surprise spray of pulse rounds.

But it was those impulsive, impetuous urges that had once sabotaged his career trajectory as a flight officer and landed him in the ship’s med bay instead of the captain’s seat. He paused and let that nagging voice speak a bit louder. The pirates’ armor had appeared unscathed when he’d observed them over the ship’s cameras. And he hadn’t seen a single dead pirate amid the corpses of the Argo’s crew. There was something about the pirates he’d missed. Something the marines had missed. There was a reason the pirates hadn’t taken a single casualty.

Then Tag realized he held that reason in his hands. The marines had, of course, been using their standard-issue pulse rifles. But not a single round seemed to have connected with the pirates. It almost seemed too obvious to him now when he considered how much more advanced these pirates seemed to be. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the shields shimmering around the pirates’ armor again. Their armor was somehow able to generate enormous power to dissipate incoming energy rounds through suit-bound shields.

Energy rounds—pulse, laser, whatever—wouldn’t pierce them. Once again, his mind raced to the ship’s armaments. The Argo was equipped with a pair of Gauss cannons capable of launching depleted-uranium rounds. When an enemy ship’s energy shields prevented pulsefire, good old-fashioned kinetics-based weapons often did the trick. Tag retreated slowly from the bridge and crept to the armory. His suit rustled with each movement, no matter how quiet he tried to be. He was almost there when footsteps clanged down the corridor.

The armory was at the opposite end of the passageway, and the footsteps sounded too close. Whoever they belonged to would be on him at any moment. He ducked into the nearest hatch: Engineering. As carefully as possible, he closed it. The sound of footsteps rounded the corner just as the hatch shut. Tag backed into the rear of the bay. Dull amber lights glowed over the space and illuminated the bodies of three more fallen crewmates, no doubt suffocated by the yellow haze. Large pipes and wires spiderwebbed across the room, connecting ducts and equipment Tag only vaguely recognized.

With the hatch closed, he couldn’t hear where the footsteps had led, and if he went back to the passageway, he might run into a pirate. Even though he hadn’t made it to the armory, engineering wasn’t a bad second option. A glance around the space revealed all manner of tools scattered on the workbenches—chem-catalyst welders and cutters, sensor arrays, idle repair bots. He set the pulse rifle down and looked for something to replace it.

There was nothing Tag found that would prove an adequate kinetic projectile weapon. The closest thing he uncovered with any long-range utility was a chem-catalyst welder. But if pulse rounds were absorbed by the pirates’ shields, he wasn’t sure how well the welders would fare. He only had one chance at finding a working weapon, and any modicum of doubt was enough to pass by a possible candidate. With all the available tools, he figured he could put together some kind of weapon.

But while tools were something he had in spades, time was not. Instead, he examined the spare disc-shaped repair bots with their tentacle arms. The small bots and their limited AI were used for repairing things like hull damage or malfunctioning sensor arrays. Their reinforced plating, meant to withstand space debris, might help prevent damage to Tag. He picked up a drone. It was light enough to lift with one hand. With his other hand, he hoisted a heavy wrench. He felt hopelessly prehistoric wielding the improvised weapon and shield, but if luck would have it, he wouldn’t meet a pirate on his way to the armory anyway.

Inhaling deeply, he positioned himself by the hatch. He tapped on a terminal and brought a bulkhead-mounted holoscreen to life. The limited intraship cam views allowed him to see partway down the corridor. There was no sign of the pirate he’d heard before, but he might be lingering in the cam’s blind spot.

But Tag couldn’t wait any longer to find out. He inched the hatch open and winced as it groaned. Peeking out, he surveyed the passageway. Except for the bodies of his former crewmates and the slowly diminishing haze, it was clear. So far. He gently closed the hatch and sprinted through the corridor. The armory hatch appeared before him on his left. The door hung open, letting the soft glow of lights filter from the small gap between hatch and bulkhead, and Tag crept toward it.

He held the wrench back, ready to strike, listening for any sounds of a pirate within. With his shoulder pressed to the hatch, he pushed the hatch open and stepped inside. Bright white lights washed over him. Weapons and pulse mags littered the deck, as did discarded pieces of armor. Marine locker doors lay open to reveal holopics ranging from landscapes of unfamiliar planets to seductive pinups to smiling families and loved ones. Tag tore his eyes from the sad sight and snuck between the lockers to the gun storage. He heard the clink of metal against metal. Holding his breath, he leaned around a locker.

An armored pirate crouched over a row of weapons and ammunition crates. He sifted through the various armaments, and Tag wondered what the pirate could possibly be looking for—but most of all, he wondered how long he’d have to wait for him to leave. A few tense moments passed, with Tag keeping his breaths shallow and standing stock-still. He’d have to kill the man eventually, but he wanted a better weapon. Soon the pirate’s rustling quieted. He listened for the telltale click of the metal boots against the deck.

But all he heard was the whoosh of his biosafety suit’s air flowing gently over his ears and the shifting groans of the Argo as she traveled ever closer into Eta’s deadly grasp. He counted to ten, waiting and listening. When he heard no other indication the pirate was there, he curled back around the row of lockers. The armored pirate was indeed gone. Tag crept toward the ammo crates and racks of weapons, peering cautiously around as he did. On one rack, he spotted a mini-Gauss rifle. The weapon was not normally used in intraship battles since its kinetic slugs were capable of piercing the bulkhead and penetrating the inner hull. But if his theory about the pirates’ armor held true, an accurate shot would punch through their armor, too, and he had no problem risking damage to the Argo.

If the mini-Gauss didn’t kill the pirates, he’d be dead anyway.

Tag approached the gun rack, ready to discard his repair drone shield and the wrench. A distinct click of metal against metal sounded to his left. He spun in time to see the glowing orange visor of the armored pirate staring directly at him. The pirate didn’t say a word as he raised an arm.

A blast of blue burst from his wrist-mounted weapons, aimed straight at Tag’s chest.

CHAPTER NINE

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Tag held the repair bot to shield himself from the incoming blast. The bot absorbed the blue pulse rounds, and scorching heat radiated from it. Slag sprayed off the bot as the pirate fired another burst. The impact of the rounds pounding into the bot sent powerful vibrations resonating through the meager shield and into Tag’s arm. He fought to hold it up against the relentless assault.

The pirate brought up his other wrist and fired another slew of blue bolts. More molten metal oozed off the bot, and smoke sizzled up from its fried circuitry.

With a heave, Tag tossed the half-melted drone at the pirate. The pirate held up his hands to block it, and red-and-orange metal smashed against the armor on his forearm. Tag followed up with a heaving swing of the wrench that connected with the pirate’s arms. Bits of the wrist-mounted weapons flew and pinged off the lockers.

Tag brought the wrench up for another blow, but the pirate ducked. Instead the wrench slammed into a locker and crushed the door. The pirate landed a kick that sent Tag flying backward. A snap reached Tag’s ears, and pain screamed through his ribs. He ignored the agony and rolled as the pirate leveled his remaining wrist-mounted guns once more. The pulsefire missed and sliced into a rifle on one of the gun racks. The gun barrel melted, dripping from the rack.

More rounds splattered into the deck and bulkhead as Tag dodged. He threw the destroyed rifle at the pirate. The pirate shielded his helmeted face again. The move gave Tag a brief second to pick up the mini-Gauss. He swiveled, aiming the heavy weapon across the pirate’s center of mass. With the stock firmly against his shoulder, he squeezed the trigger, imagining the look of horror behind the pirate’s glowing orange visor. Victory.

But to his astonishment, the rifle clicked uselessly. No slug flew from its barrel.

“No!” Tag yelled.

The pirate dove for Tag’s feet. His shoulders careened into Tag’s shins, and Tag fell hard. The pirate’s fingers wrapped around him and tore at his biosafety suit. It ripped, and the remnants of the yellow gas fought to enter against the air whistling out from the positive-pressure suit. He ignored the tear and smashed an elbow into the back of the pirate’s head, but his bony elbow thudded uselessly against the man’s helmet.

The blow hadn’t fazed the pirate, and he spun on Tag. The pirate dragged him across the deck. At point-blank range, he aimed his wrist-mounted weapon at Tag’s face.

Adrenaline poured through Tag. He clasped his hands around the pirate’s wrist. His muscles burned in desperation-fueled power as he fought to aim the weapon away from this face. A round went off next to him. Heat cut through his biosafety suit’s helmet. More air blew past his face and out of the singed suit. His ear started to tingle, seared by the pulse round or the last waves of the biting gas, he wasn’t sure.

He used every bit of his flagging strength to roll out from under the pirate. Another round cut into the deck beside him. He picked up the dropped mini-Gauss. He started to heave it back, like a battering ram ready to fly, aiming the barrel into the orange visor.

A thought flickered through his mind. It had been far too long since he’d actually used a firearm. Medical officers were more accustomed to saving lives than taking them, but his decades-old training kicked in now. He switched the manual safety off the bulky rifle and pulled the trigger.

The rifle jolted back, stock slamming into his shoulder. The coils alleviated some of the recoil, and it didn’t hit with the same force as an ancient firearm, but the energy still had to go somewhere. He’d barely had time to steady it, and it slipped from his grip with the impact. Diving, he scrambled for the rifle and then brought it level with the pirate’s face again, panting all the while.

But the pirate didn’t move in for a second attack. The first shot had been enough. Fracture lines emanated from a hole in the middle of the pirate’s orange visor. Dark liquid seeped out of the visor, tracing across its smart contours.

Dead, finally.

Tag gasped for air, and a tingling sensation crept up Tag’s leg from where the suit had been ripped. It must’ve been the lingering yellow gas biting into his skin. It was nowhere near the strength of his first encounters with the stinging fog. He didn’t know if this pirate had warned the others, so he figured there was no time to patch the suit up now. Dispatching the other two would be more crucial to saving his and Kaufman’s lives. He sprinted out of the armory, clutching the mini-Gauss.

Avoiding his fallen comrades littering the corridors, he dashed to the bridge, then slowed. He doubted he had the element of surprise anymore, but he crouched anyway and crept into the bridge. The mini-Gauss’s barrel was still hot as he brought it to bear. No one was at the pilot’s terminal nor the captain’s chair. He pointed the barrel at the weapons station, but no one was there either. Where had they gone?

Then, as if in answer to his question, a beam of blue flashed out of his periphery.

He hid in time for the round to splash across the bulkhead behind him. A charred hole formed where his head had been, and he rolled to a new position, sighting up at the pirate responsible for the shot. The pirate stood brazenly in the open and aimed his wrist-mounted weapons at Tag. No doubt, with his energy shields impenetrable to pulsefire, he had grown arrogant after taking down the marines.

Tag fired. The kinetic slug caught the pirate square in the chest, punching cleanly through the armor plates. The pirate flew backward and crumpled against the chart table.

The other pirate dove behind the chart table, apparently learning quickly. Tag bore the mini-Gauss on the table and waited for an opportunity to fire. The pirate peeked around and shot a salvo of flashing blue pulsefire that sliced into the bulkhead. Tag fired off another slug. It went high and crashed dangerously close to the bridge’s forward viewport.

More blue pulse rounds flew back in response. The pirate had better cover and, with the bridge’s viewport behind him, the threat of mutually assured destruction should Tag miss again. Pain seeped into his flesh, deeper and more fiery from the gas. He exchanged fire with the pirate in spates, but they were locked in a battle of attrition now. There was no easy way for Tag to get a better firing angle, and the pirate evidently fully realized the debilitating power of the mini-Gauss slugs.

Tag squeezed off another round that punched into the chart table. It tore through the table and left a wide hole in its support structure.

Maybe, he thought.

He fired again and heard what sounded like a yelp of surprise. Of course! The mini-Gauss was powerful enough to rip through the bulkhead with the wrong shot, so why not blast apart the chart table?

Tag lined up another shot as he guessed where the pirate might be hiding. A flurry of blue pulsefire splashed around him, forcing him to recoil. The pirate seemed to know his chances for survival were dwindling. He leapt over the chart table, firing desperately. Tag let loose another few slugs that went wide and slammed through the pilot’s chair. He stood and retreated, aiming the rifle for another shot. But the pirate ran low, headed straight at him, and he couldn’t bring his rifle around in time.

The pirate hit Tag at full force. His fingers splayed, and the mini-Gauss rifle skittered away. His head cracked against the bulkhead and rang out with a hollow thud. His vision blurred for a second as red waves of pain coursed through his skull. A fist pounded against his jaw, and his teeth chattered. Another armored fist came at his face. He turned in time to receive only a glancing blow.

The pirate pummeled him. He struggled to block each devastating attack. Pain undulated through his ribs, his jaw, his head, his leg. The dual assault from the gas and the pirate overwhelmed him. Stars glimmered in his vision, only he knew it wasn’t the distant reaches of space he was seeing. His hearing rang, and the coppery taste of blood trickled over his tongue. This was going to be it. He’d come so close and failed.

Sorry, Kaufman, he thought as he absorbed another blow. Her closed eyes and near-lifeless body flashed through his mind in rhythm with the pirate’s beating. But then a strange sensation poured through him.

Kaufman was relying on him. And what about the anthropologist they were supposed to pick up on Eta-Five? What about the members of the SRE navy sitting aboard the Montenegro? If they did eventually send a rescue crew, they needed to know what they were up against. Otherwise they’d be blindly rushing into their own slaughter.

Their lives depended on him.

Tag surged upward and butted his head against the pirate’s, his helmet cracking into the pirate’s orange visor. He rammed him again, sending the pirate off balance. Fissures formed in the visor. Tag ignored his own sweltering pain and used his forward momentum to send the pirate sprawling. They locked in a vicious struggle as the pirate fought back, his strength augmented by his powerful armor suit.

But Tag had the advantage of being a cornered animal. Fierce, beastly instinct overrode any inarguable logic telling him he’d already lost this battle to the death. He delivered blow after blow against the pirate’s cracking face shield. The pirate scrambled out from under Tag and crawled away. Tag pounced. He tore at the small hoses and tubes along the suit’s back. Air and gas hissed out. One leaked black fluid in a steady stream, and another sprayed the oily liquid across the deck like a severed artery. As the suit bled out, the pirate was getting weaker. Much, much weaker. Tag stood and lugged the pirate over the deck. The man’s hand flailed in a desperate attempt to grab on to anything. He aimed one wrist-mounted gun at Tag, but a swift kick knocked his arm away. The round splashed against the bulkhead harmlessly.

Tag retrieved the pirate’s dropped sidearm and turned the weapon on its owner. He pulled the trigger, and a spray of blue pulsefire cut across the suit. An energy shield shimmered green at first, blocking a few rounds, before crackling and disappearing. Whatever damage he’d done to the suit seemed to have disrupted its shield. The pulsefire punched into the pirate’s legs, torso, arms, then helmet.

The man’s limbs twitched then went still.

Steam coated the inside of Tag’s visor as he gasped to catch his breath and sealed the bridge’s hatch. There hadn’t been any other pirates when he’d checked the cams earlier, but if there were more than the three he’d dispatched, he didn’t want to be taken by surprise again.

He peered at the pilot’s seat, where a hole through the middle of it had left chunks of the adaptive foam puffing out of the torn seat like a wounded animal. Settling into the seat, he was finally ready to see how rusty his piloting skills had become. And as soon as his fingers flicked on the controls to gain control of the ship, a red light flashed across the terminal before him.

The blood in his vessels chilled as he read the message: “Weapon lock detected.”

A holoscreen showed the Eta-Five solar system and the Argo’s location within it. The ship continued to draw nearer to Eta. And as it did, a glowing spot indicated where the weapon lock had been detected. The telltale glow of a charging energy weapon sparkled on the holoprojection above the chart table.

The death of the pirate trio hadn’t gone unnoticed by the stealth ship.

CHAPTER TEN

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Tag wrapped his fingers around the control systems without bothering to strap himself in.

“Come on, baby. We got this.” He patted the pilot station’s terminal.

The weapons lock warning glared across the holoscreen like a menacing animal waiting to pounce. Any moment, the pirate ship would let loose its cannon, tearing into the Argo and sabotage his efforts to save himself or anyone else. Maybe he could at least make it harder for those monsters to kill him.

His memories of training pouring quickly back, he shoved the manual throttle forward, and the ship blasted into full-thrust. The intense g-force pressed him into the contoured seat as the main impellers roared, shifting gravity around the ship. He turned the ship hard to starboard, but at this close range, it wouldn’t be hard for the pirates to find a new firing solution, even if they chose to do it manually.

His mind raced over his options. The medical-officer portion of his brain came alive, triaging that which was most important, most crucial to saving lives the quickest. Shields. He needed shields. He swiped on the terminal to bring up the Ops interface. Panic struck him as he searched for the commands to restore the energy shields, and his fingers shook as he desperately scanned the holoscreen.

“Come on, come on, where are you?” he yelled.

So many commands, buttons, and words sparked distant, vague memories.

Then he found it. He punched the proper commands, and the holoscreen reported all energy shields reengaged at 100%. That should buy him some time. Even if he couldn’t maneuver out of the way of the pirate’s first shot, he might escape merely rattled instead of obliterated. He flicked another command on the terminal that blasted the pirates with radio and laser chatter. Those tactics might help throw off their targeting systems, but he still needed to put more distance between them to make it effective.

Even as the Argo accelerated with full impeller thrust, the pirate ship’s charging cannon never strayed off target. Tag turned the ship hard to port and blasted with all impellers. The change in acceleration shoved him deeper into his seat, and he tightened his grip on the pilot’s controls. At the same time, flashes of blue and green lit up around him like an electric storm. The Argo shook like a wooden sailing ship caught in a typhoon.

The pirates had fired.

Tag held his breath, waiting to see how well the Argo stood up to the frightening technology of the pirates. The shields absorbed the brunt of the charged pulsefire, but the Argo still trembled and groaned. With each passing second, the shaking and bucking grew worse until the shimmering energy shields disappeared with a sudden electric shriek.

A bevy of warnings flashed across the holoscreen reporting the shields were down, overwhelmed by the massive assault. The incoming energy had been too much, and the shield generators were dead.

Tag wouldn’t get a second chance to absorb another direct hit of that magnitude. Three hells, any energy weapon a fraction as strong would pierce the Argo’s hull, tearing into it like a tin can. He threw the ship into full thrust again and rocketed forward, away from the blinding radiance of Eta and, hopefully, away from the pirates.

But he truly had no idea if he was avoiding them at all. The Argo’s sensors couldn’t pick the pirate ship up when it wasn’t charging weapons, and it disappeared again. He did his best to spiral the ship through space in a weak attempt at evasive maneuvers by flying in awkward zigzags, dropping and increasing relative altitude as unpredictably as he could.

A bright dot glared on the holoprojection once more, no more than a hundred klicks from the Argo. It was farther than Tag would’ve guessed but not far enough for him to be pleased. A chain of dots started accelerating from the pirate’s ship, headed his direction.

Pulsefire.

He weaved and dropped relative altitude, ducking under a heavy barrage of blue pulse rounds. Another salvo of bright lights flew past the bridge’s viewport as he blasted the ship’s port and starboard impellers to rock the ship sideways.

The huge white globe of Eta-Five appeared before him. A livable planet. The one where the Argo was supposed to meet Lieutenant Vasquez. Doesn’t seem likely now, Tag thought grimly. He gritted his teeth and leaned forward in the seat, urging the ship onward even as he felt the planet’s gravitational force pull him in. If he couldn’t coax the ship to accelerate more rapidly with impellers alone, he’d enlist Eta-Five’s help. If he could speed around the planet, he might be able to put enough distance between himself and the pirates to calculate a T-drive jump into hyperspace and get out of here for good so he could contact the Montenegro.

“Computer, calculate orbital trajectory.”

No response. He hadn’t really expected one. He had already figured he was the only intelligent form conscious on this ship, AI or human. More rapid pulsefire careened past the Argo. But this time the ship didn’t come away unscathed. Several rounds bit into the hull, sending shockwaves reverberating through the bulkhead, causing a bank of lights on the bridge to spark and go dark.

“Pressure loss, cargo bay,” an annoyingly calm robotic voice claimed.

At least the AI would show more emotion than these damn prerecorded response and emergency messages. Sweat beaded over Tag’s skin as he tried to settle into orbit without the AI’s guidance. He gazed at the holoscreen’s relative altitude displays and manually locked in Eta-Five as his new target. He pulled up hard as another blast of pulsefire grazed the ship.

Metal screamed and groaned from the change in acceleration and the connecting rounds. He needed to move, to get away from those pirates. The increasing acceleration pressed him into his seat, and nausea curled its fingers around his stomach as the ship’s inertial dampeners fought to keep up. His muscles felt weak. Dizziness threatened to overtake him. But he forced himself to stay aware—to stay awake.

As he managed the shaking controls with one hand, he tapped on the Ops display on the terminal. He tried to get the weapons AI to provide a bit of return fire, but a single message reported no firing solutions from the ship’s AI. Just as he’d expected.

Instead, he manually fired the ship’s Gauss and energy cannons over the Argo’s stern and watched a trail of pulsefire shimmer behind the ship on the holoprojection. He had little chance of scoring more than a lucky hit on the pirates, but he’d be damned if he didn’t at least try. Anything to distract them or keep them on their toes was fine by him.

Tag pulled back on the controls, guiding the ship into an orbital trajectory around Eta-Five. The holoprojection gave him a rough estimate of where the Argo needed to be to enter orbit. Using the planet’s pull, the ship started to slingshot around it. More rounds zipped by him, disappearing below the ship and into Eta-Five’s cloudy atmosphere. The energy pulses seemed to dissipate when they hit the mass of white, arcs of lightning cutting horizontally across atmosphere wherever they collided with the curtain of swirling clouds.

Odd, Tag thought. The strange energy anomaly emanating from this planet appeared to affect more than just comms.

Arcing fire cut over the bow, dashing Tag’s thoughts, and he jolted the ship to starboard. The maneuver threatened to shake him from orbit, but he pushed into the controls until the acceleration crept up again.

“Don’t worry,” Tag said, staring down at the planet, thinking of Lieutenant Vasquez stuck down there somewhere. “We’ll be back.”

He scrolled through the terminal as he maneuvered the ship, avoiding another incoming salvo. Warnings still flashed across his screen from the damaged cargo bay. He ignored them and switched on the T-drive. The drive spooled in preparation for a jump to hyperspace.

“Computer”—he stopped, realizing his mistake almost immediately, then continued with only the faintest of hopes—“Computer, calculate hyperspace route to the last known position of the SRES Montenegro.”

No response. His plan of leaving the pirates behind had hinged on making the jump. It was his only chance at escaping the bastards sending volley after volley of energy rounds coursing through space at the Argo.

But jumping through hyperspace was a risky affair. One wrong move, one tiny collision with space debris, and the whole ship would go up in a ball of unleashed plasma. The ship would not make the jump without a carefully plotted course. And Tag couldn’t plot the damn course himself. He needed the AI. Even trying to throw in a random coordinate, chart a haphazard path, and hope for the best was too complicated and ridiculously dangerous when he was simultaneously piloting the ship and operating the weapons.

Another blast rocked the ship. It was followed by a second, lower explosion. From the bridge’s viewport, Tag watched blue plasma jut into space. One of the attitude impellers on the port side had been damaged. He wrestled with the controls, wrangling with the ship, but the jutting plasma pushed it off course, and he fell out of orbit. With the whole vessel bucking like a wild mustang, there was no way he was going to outrun the pirates now. There was only one thing to do.

One very crazy thing.

Tag put the ship into full reverse. His body flew forward, but he fought to maintain his grip on the controls. He swiveled the Argo around on its axis and spun to face the pirates.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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Blue rounds twisted and curved through empty space, zipping over the viewport and across the bow. Tag shot up, sending the Argo over the spiraling laces of pulsefire. The Argo was no destroyer, but Tag was sure going to treat her like one now. It might be his only option. Kaufman’s only option. This maneuver could make or break their chances of survival.

He flipped on the point-defense system in conjunction with the Gauss cannons and targeted a set point directly in front of the ship. There was no easy way he could simultaneously fly and guide the kinetic cannons, as they automatically launched uranium-depleted rounds and powerful kinetic slugs in rapid fire. I'm going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, he thought, like some ancient World War I biplane pilot. The recoil from the cannons echoed through the ship’s bulkhead with a constant, rhythmic whoomph. Tag pitched the ship’s prow up, toward the pirates. The cannons’ bright-orange, beady fire followed wherever the Argo pointed.

For the first time, he got a good, lengthy look at the pirates’ ship. The vessel was no bigger than a cutter. Its sleek black design was similar to the armor the three pirates had worn aboard the ship, and its elegant curves and dark shading enabled it to almost seamlessly blend into the murky void of space. A small viewport glowed orange, glaring with the brilliant light radiating off Eta. Tag was at first surprised that they’d sent such a small craft to intercept the Argo, but just as quickly he realized they hadn’t anticipated using anything more drastic when they had the advantage of both stealth and far superior firepower. And no wonder his plan of outmaneuvering the vessel hadn’t worked; it was much spryer than the Argo. There’d be no outpacing it now.

He punched a command to charge the energy cannon. A progress bar slid across the terminal, displaying the rising strength of the charge. He jostled the controls, avoiding the spiraling cords of incoming pulsefire. Like an adept dance partner, the cutter moved in concert and brought its weapons to bear on the Argo with each slight adjustment in the ship’s relative altitude, attitude, and pitch. Tag’s fingers trembled as he pulled back, then pushed forward, then twisted the controls in response, constantly trying to stay a step ahead of his lethal dance partner. All it would take was one wrong move, one minute mistake, and this standoff would be over.

“Maximum charge achieved,” a robotic voice announced from the terminal. The energy cannon was ready.

The cutter zipped back and forth, deftly avoiding the kinetic fire coming from the Argo. The small ship presented a difficult target for the rapid-fire weapons, and it was going to be exponentially more difficult for Tag to line the ship up in his sights and score a hit with the single fire blast of the energy cannon to bring down its shields—exactly like they’d done to him. I'm not going to have another shot at this, Tag thought. I've got to make this one count. He smiled grimly. And all this while doing the jobs of a three-man crew. He had to decrease the probability of a miss somehow. Tag rocketed toward the cutter, his jaw clenched instinctively, as he dodged the incoming pulsefire and narrowed the distance between the two ships.

He ignored the alarms, the quaking bulkheads, and the warnings on his holoscreen, dead set on bringing these pirates down. If there was no running away, if there was no getting out of this alive, the least he could do was take them out with him.

As the pirates’ cutter grew larger through the viewport, he realized that this could very well end up being a suicide run. It should be monumentally emotional. Maybe brazenly heroic. But right now he felt only the unrelenting pangs of intense anger. He leaned forward until he was almost completely off the pilot’s seat. More pulse rounds skimmed the bow of the Argo, and he jockeyed the controls to steady it.

“Just a bit more,” he said through gritted teeth.

The Argo’s point-defense system and Gauss cannons continued firing. Glowing orange rounds from Tag’s ship twisted through space to meet the winding ropes of blue blasting from the cutter. The Argo shook and tremored violently, but so far, it hadn’t exploded into a ball of plasma and debris. That was all that mattered to Tag. He concentrated on his evasive maneuvers, steering the ship through the onslaught of incoming fire.

Closer.

Closer.

The cutter almost blotted out the bridge viewport. Several uranium-depleted rounds from the point-defense cannons drilled into the pirate ship, and Tag hooted as small flames flickered then were sucked out by vacuum. Clouds of debris geysered from small holes in the ship. The rounds had actually breached the hull! It didn’t seem as though the shots had debilitated the cutter, but it was proof the ship was no god, it wasn’t invincible. It bled, too.

A chain of pulsefire ripped over the prow. One round splashed against the hull near the bridge.

“Hull breach detected,” the terminal said in its irritatingly calm voice.

White gas condensed and plumed out of the small opening in the Argo. It was enough to obstruct Tag’s line of sight. But he was too close to give up now. Too damn close. He tried to guide himself by the ethereal blue rounds slashing at the ship.

More quaking, more warnings. Another hull breach.

“Hold yourself together!” he yelled, his voice echoing in the empty bridge. The pain in his leg from the yellow haze seemed to have dissipated. Whether it was from the ship’s last dying efforts to clean the air or the adrenaline barreling through his vessels, Tag couldn’t be sure. His mind felt as if it was on fire, as if he’d been ready for this moment his entire life. As if it hadn’t been years since he was training on a bridge like this, working his way up to earn his place as captain, instead of being forced into this seat by disaster.

The spewing white gas cleared from the viewport, and an inky-black hull appeared before him again. The cutter. Spikes of debris and gas still jutted from the piercing rounds he’d sent through it. A bright purple glow emanated from beneath its hull. Its impellers were lighting up, propelling it away from the Argo at the last second.

“Too late!” Tag punched the button to unleash the fully charged energy cannon. A brilliant fiery blast exploded from it, and the ship shook. No more blue rounds chased the Argo. It had been a direct hit.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Tag pumped his fist in the air.

But the Argo’s shuddering became more violent.

Any sense of victory he’d felt evaporated as quickly as life in the vacuum of space. The explosion around the cutter continued as if in slow motion with flashes of orange and red and white, cut through by green arcs of what looked like lightning.

But no metal debris. No bodies of pirates flung across his bridge viewport. Instead, the blast of intense energy dissipated and fizzled out. More crackles of green lightning illuminated the invisible energy shield protecting the cutter. Except for the few already bleeding wounds in its hull from the Gauss cannons, she came away from what should have been a devastating blast unscathed. The shields didn’t go down like Tag had hoped. They were too strong.

Unadulterated terror coursed through Tag. Energy weapons weren’t going to cut it. He fought his panic and directed the Argo to send a volley of uranium-depleted rounds into the belly of the cutter, where more pinpricks appeared in its hull as the rounds slammed into the pirates’ ship.

More jutting gas, more debris.

But it wasn’t dead yet. It just wouldn’t die.

A glowing indicator on his holoprojection ensured he knew that. The pirates were charging their main energy cannon again. A shot this close couldn’t be missed. Tag went into reverse thrust. He continued firing, hoping against hope that he’d score a lucky hit and his enemy would explode into a million pieces before their energy cannon fired. But the cannon continued to throb a dull blue. His palms grew sweaty around the controls as he focused more gunfire into the cutter’s hull. It was no longer moving. No longer trying to avoid the incoming slugs.

The glow beneath the pirates’ keel had ceased. Maybe he’d knocked out the cutter’s main impellers. He dropped the Argo underneath the enemy ship to maneuver into the pirates’ blind spot and fired another salvo into its hull. A small explosion ripped through the port side of the sleek ship.

Tag grimaced as he watched larger chunks of debris get sucked out. The orange viewport flickered, and several small explosions rocked the stealth ship. The main impellers were surely dead by now. But its weaker altitude and pitch adjustment impellers were not, and the cutter rocked unsteadily, bringing to bear its charging energy cannon. Tag stared at it, agape, then threw the Argo into full thrust forward.

The violent change in direction caused unhealthy shaking throughout the ship. An explosion blasted somewhere along the keel, and the ship lurched. A warning glared across his holoscreen, proclaiming the Argo’s main impellers and thrusters had failed, leaving the ship as vulnerable as the pirates’. Tag cursed himself. This was why he hadn’t become a pilot. Demanding too much of his ship. Too much of himself. Not knowing the limits of man or machine.

And this time, the mistake had cost him his life.

More, smaller plumes of plasma spouted from the cutter like fountains. The ship vibrated as alloy panels rocketed off from its hull, carried by blasts of venting gas and tongues of plasma. Then the energy cannon fired.

CHAPTER TWELVE

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A blue flash of light became white and swallowed the Argo. Tag wondered if this was the afterlife. If this was the tunnel to the gods, the final beam through space that would take him to a land without suffering.

But he had no such luck.

The light dissipated as plasma permeated cracks around where the energy cannon was fixed to the pirates’ cutter. The ship spiraled, end over end, away from the Argo. The main thrust of the energy beam had missed, but it had been close enough to batter the Argo with its wake, and the Argo rocked, its bulkhead groaning as if it was about to be torn apart. Tag fought the concussive force overwhelming him with the Argo’s functional altitude and attitude adjustment impellers. But it wasn’t enough.

The Argo accelerated toward Eta-Five as the planet’s gravity tugged the ship from its failed orbit. Tag clenched his fingers around the controls, barely keeping the ship in an upright position relative to the planet.

As the Argo dropped, he watched another explosion separate the cutter from its energy cannon. The ship buckled, splitting in half and freezing for a second, then debris and cargo spilled from the ruptured hull like the guts of a battlefield casualty. The cutter had pushed itself too far. Firing a blast like that when the ship was already damaged had been a mistake.

Whoever’s in charge over there isn’t so different from me, Tag thought.

A final blinding blast tore through the cutter, and it disappeared in a rolling ball of plasma, sending a storm of flotsam flying from the blast. Pieces of the cannon’s barrel, shards of the orange viewport, and fragments of alloy spread to envelop the Argo. One panel, flipping end over end, crashed into the Argo. A loud thud echoed through the bridge, and Tag watched it deflect after tearing into the outer hull. The pirate ship was almost as deadly now as it had been when it was intact.

In a barely controllable descent to Eta-Five, Tag used the weak adjustment impellers to dodge the largest pieces of broken ship careening toward him. Smaller bolts and unrecognizable hunks of slag couldn’t be avoided. They rained across the Argo, pinging and flying off in other directions, every little piece transferring momentum that only served to accelerate the ship’s unavoidable new trajectory.

As the ship plummeted, Tag knew there would be no escaping Eta-Five now. The adjustment impellers on the Argo were nothing compared to the unrelenting pull of the planet. The best he could do was use the impellers and inertia to guide the ship. He focused on the holoprojection glowing in front of the terminal, searching the planet and gesturing over it to rotate the image. The dot signifying the Argo blinked red. Nothing he didn’t already know. He was looking for something else.

There! He spotted another crimson marker. It signified the location where the Argo’s crew was supposed to meet Lieutenant Vasquez—that is, if she was still alive. It had been months since the SRE received her last courier drone scheduling their rendezvous.

Unexpected green light flickered around the Argo. The holoscreen reported the ship’s hulls were heating, approaching thermal limits. Friction tore at the Argo as the ship fell through the thick mesosphere, threatening to finish the job the pirates had started. Tag gave the adjustment impellers everything the ship had left, trying as best he could to push the falling ship toward the rendezvous point and slow the plummet. The atmosphere outside the viewport suddenly became white and hazy, obscuring any hope he had of seeing where he was headed. Every sensor was going haywire, undulating in a bevy of colors and singing in alarm. The holoprojection of Eta-Five flickered. One moment the ship appeared to be near the rendezvous point. The next it seemed to be almost a thousand klicks away.

A long groan reverberated through the ship. Then everything quieted.

Almost everything.

The alarms that had been wailing before the tumultuous descent still screamed. But the sensor readings were back to normal, and the holoprojection of Eta-Five stabilized. The ship had fallen past the blanket of white and gray clouds and the sparking emerald electricity of the upper atmosphere.

A new landscape was rising up to meet the Argo. Tall, craggy mountains pierced the horizon. Clean, white carpets of snow covered everything. Ice sparkled from the few rays of dull light shifting through the dense overhead clouds. In the distance, a dash of green lightning flashed. Snow fell. Big, soft white flakes danced and curled past the Argo. Ice started to freeze and obscure the bridge viewport.

Tag tried to ignore the frigid landscape and turned back to the holoprojection. He was still over eight hundred klicks from the site of the rendezvous. He pushed full thrust to all impellers, slowing the descent as much as he could and hoping forward momentum would be enough to close the distance.

Seven hundred klicks to the rendezvous point, and the ground was rising up fast. Six hundred and he passed the first mountain peak. Five hundred and the horizon disappeared. All he saw was a wall of towering, icy mountains. Four hundred, and he knew he wouldn’t make it. At three hundred klicks, he no longer watched the holoprojection. He wrestled with the controls to avoid slamming into the mountainside. Blankets of snow and ice obscured the features of the already uniformly white landscape, making any contact with land potentially disastrous.

He steered hard to port. The ship banked, and the keel scraped against a massive chunk of ice. From his periphery, he saw the chunk fall, carrying with it a small avalanche. The tumbling snow and ice built into a tidal wave as he tried to keep the prow up, urging the Argo to fly however far it could. Suddenly another face of ice and rock appeared through the curtain of snowfall—Tag yanked the controls hard to his right, avoiding the obstacle cleanly this time. But this was no time to gloat about a successful maneuver.

More rock. More ice. More snow. Pressure built in Tag’s head. His nerves stirred with electricity, and his vision became tunneled. All senses became tuned to the route ahead. He heard no more alarms. Saw no more flashing lights. Just the rising mountainsides, dropping valleys, and perilous ice formations ahead.

He careened through a deep crevice between the mountains while swirling snow obscured the viewport. Knowing he would hit the ground soon, he looked for a better place to crash-land. The rocks and boulders along the mountainside would tear into the Argo’s already-bleeding wounds, and as far as he knew, it was the only vessel capable of getting off this godforsaken planet. He couldn’t risk destroying it completely on landing.

Suddenly he was blasting through clear sky again. He’d shot out over a cliff.

Directly in front, several long spires of ice jutted from the snowbanks like the claws of some frozen devil.

The Argo slammed into the first of the spires. Ice shards clinked against its hull, and it barreled through the next. Ice rained all around as the spires toppled. Others burst as the ship crashed through them. Between the chunks of flying ice, Tag saw another pillar protruding from the snow.

This one wasn’t ice. It was hard, gray-and-brown-speckled rock.

He pulled back hard on the controls and diverted all the power he could to the weakened impellers. The rock pillar grew closer, looming before the bridge viewport.

“Come on, you can do it!” Tag screamed at the ship.

The Argo’s belly scraped against the rocky formation as it curved to port just enough to avoid a direct hit. Screeching metal echoed through the ship, and Tag could tell the drastic turn had decimated his forward momentum. The ship plummeted.

There was no use in attempting to adjust its trajectory any longer. A huge plain of snow met the ship’s keel, and a heavy jolt shuddered through the Argo. Puffs of white exploded outside the viewport, and Tag was thrown from his seat. He slammed spine first into the bulkhead, and his head hit after. Pain shot through his body as he blinked away his dizzied vision. But as rough a landing as it had been, it could’ve been worse if he had smashed into the rocky mountainside.

Thank the gods for snow-covered planets, Tag thought glumly.

Snow fell around the viewport in soft waves. Deceptively peaceful. He rubbed the back of his head then steadied himself, grabbing a terminal to bring himself to his feet. The rips in his biosafety suit had grown larger, so there was no point in wearing it any longer. He slowly stripped out of the shredded plastic and set it aside. The white glow of the ice and snow outside put him in awe. He approached the viewport in reverence and placed a palm against the polyglass, where he could almost feel the cold seeping through and into his flesh.

His mind drifted back to Lt. Vasquez, stuck somewhere out there in the icy wilderness. In only about a week, the scheduled rendezvous with the extraterrestrial anthropologist would pass. He wasn’t sure how he’d find her or if venturing out of the ship would even be worthwhile. For all he knew, the snow and ice had already swallowed the anthropologist, just like it had the Argo.

A thought trickled through his mind like a burgeoning ice melt: Who in the three hells would choose to spend almost half a decade studying alien species on this planet?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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Tag looked around the bridge as snow and ice continued to accumulate on the viewport. The warnings still flashed, telling him the cargo bay had sustained damage and was drastically underpressured. He punched a button on the terminal to silence the alarms. Red lights still pulsated across the deck, intermingling with the blue glow emanating from Eta-Five’s atmosphere. The cargo bay would have to be dealt with later, especially if he planned on getting off the planet. But he doubted he’d be able to make the repairs himself. He needed to bring the repair bots back online. He also needed to figure out what was going on with the ship’s AI and to send a warning to the Montenegro.

He turned away from the viewport and studied the mess in the bridge. The two pirate bodies were lying still. Neither had moved since being tossed by the crash landing. But he didn’t want to take any chances. For all he knew, those high-tech suits of theirs might have simply put their injured bodies in stasis. He couldn’t risk letting them surprise him. His footsteps echoed in the vast bridge as he crossed the deck to the first pirate, and he bent over the man’s body. Tag could tell the pirate was exceptionally tall, even with his body crumpled on the deck.

The orange visor stared back up at him, cracks and all. He listened for any sign of breathing. Maybe a respirator moving air in and out. But thankfully he heard nothing.

Crouching over the pirate, he wrapped his gloves under the chin of the helmet and tried to pry it off, but the helmet wouldn’t separate from the rest of the armor. Maybe it was like the marines’ armor. There must be some way to release the pirate from the suit. He brushed his fingers along the chest piece. It was smooth, following the contours of the body within. There were no mechanisms to open it that he could find. With his boot, he rolled the body over. Besides the tubes and hoses connecting various segments, there was no obvious seam.

“Fine. Stay in there,” Tag said. “I’m still making sure you’re dead.”

The mini-Gauss glinted from where it still lay on the deck. Tag eyed the weapon. He could put another few slugs straight into the pirates’ heads. That would ensure they never bothered him again. But then another thought seeped through his mind, squeezing past the effects of adrenaline, finally settling and letting his rational, scientific mind resurface. Making sure these pirates were dead would protect him for the time being, sure. But on the other hand, he didn’t know where they’d come from, and the SRE could use whatever information they might have if the suits had indeed kept them in stasis. So if there was a chance they were alive, even just remotely, it might be worth his while to keep them that way. Even with an unconscious but alive pirate, the scientific staff aboard the Montenegro might be able to work their magic and salvage enough data from the pirate’s dying brain to prove helpful.

“On second thought, I’m going to throw you in the damn brig.” He grabbed the mini-Gauss and strapped it over his back. “But if you do wake up and try something, I’ll make sure you’re down for good this time.”

He wrapped his fingers around the pirate’s wrists and started dragging the body. To his surprise, he felt little resistance. The body and full armor were much lighter than he expected. In fact, the pirate in his full assault getup seemed to weigh less than Kaufman when he’d taken her from her armor. With that, his thoughts whirling to the woman still barely clinging to a shred of life, he picked up his pace. The pirate’s body bounced along the deck until he made it to the brig. Once through the hatch to the brig, a clear polyglass partition greeted him. He punched a command into the external terminal, and a small opening formed in the polyglass.

With a grunt, Tag heaved the pirate through. He turned his back to leave then thought better of it. The pirate still had his wrist-mounted weapons. Should the pirate let those cannons loose on the polyglass, Tag wasn’t sure if the brig would be able to hold the man. He unstrapped his mini-Gauss and slammed the heavy stock into the small gun barrels on each of the pirate’s wrists. It took a couple of blows to bend the barrels and crack the mechanisms Tag assumed made the firearms work.

Satisfied, he shut the brig behind him and left to retrieve the next pirate. Instead of returning to the bridge, he set off for the armory, which was closer. Again, he dragged the surprisingly light pirate into the brig and heaved him in. A brief sigh of relief escaped Tag when he saw the other hadn’t moved. The devastating cracks in their visors and armor should’ve been enough to assuage his anxiety. But so much had changed in the past day that he no longer knew what to expect.

Runner lights along the deck guided Tag to the bridge. He was almost there when an alarm beeped on his wrist terminal. One glance at the small holoscreen sent his heart pounding anew, and he forgot about the pirate’s corpse waiting for him by the chart table. Kaufman.

His boots slapped against the deck as he sprinted to the med bay. He flung open the hatch then dashed to the lab where Kaufman’s body lay. The decon hatch opened agonizingly slowly, and the lab’s automatic safety mechanisms wouldn’t let Tag through without enduring the entirety of the sterilization process. Gas hissed over him then was sucked away. He waited for it to clear. The inner hatch finally opened and let him spill into the protected lab.

There, on the deck, lay Kaufman’s crumpled body. She’d had little protection from the fierce changes in acceleration, and her restraints had come undone. A split in her scalp and bruises along her bare arms evidenced where she had collided with the bulkhead when Tag had been engaged in space battle with the pirates. The wounds worried him, but they were superficial compared to the message still blaring at him from his wrist terminal.

The cardiac support system had come undone during the ship’s crash. It lay askew across Kaufman’s chest. The electrical signal still fired from it at fierce regularity, but without its probes in full contact with Kaufman’s flesh, the signal must be attenuating before it hit her cardiac muscles.

Her heartbeat had ceased.

“No!” Tag pressed the support system back over her skin and pushed the probes down. “Stay with me, Kaufman. It’s just you and me.” The support system chimed each time it delivered an electrical pulse. “You can do it. You’ve got this.”

But her heart didn’t seem to hear him. Her EKG signal, delivered to his wrist terminal, maintained a flat line. No blood was pumping through her vessels. No oxygen was being delivered to her organs. She was dying.

Tag pressed his palms in a triangle over her ribs. He pumped. One, two, three. “Come on. Come on.”

Still, her heart didn’t respond. He continued pumping. His medical training told him it was long past time for him to declare her dead, but he couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t believe he was the last living soul aboard the Argo trapped on some frigid planet. That everything and everyone he’d known had been ripped from him by some damned pirates.

He couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept that.

He hoisted Kaufman’s limp body in his arms, her limbs hanging limply and her head cradled against the nook of his elbow. The cardiac support system whined, and his wrist terminal screeched she was already gone. But he ignored it and carried Kaufman through the decon chamber. The outer hatch hissed open and let them out into the med bay. His eyes grew watery and his vision blurred, but he ignored the harsh reality breathing down his neck. He ran, cradling Kaufman’s body, and deposited her into one of the regen chambers. He secured her in and slammed the chamber shut. His fingers tapped across the chamber’s terminal.

But the regen chamber didn’t begin glowing, nor did it hum to life. Instead, the terminal’s holoscreen stared back at him with a singular message: Offline.

He hurried to the neighboring terminals and checked them. None would respond to his commands. Panic swelled in him like he was a boiler fit to burst. The damn machines still wouldn’t work, and Kaufman was going to die.

No, a voice in his head said. The one born of medical training and logic. She’s already dead. It doesn’t matter anymore.

He pounded his fist against the chamber where Kaufman’s body lay drooping against the polyglass. Rage poured through him, directed at the pirates. At the carnage they’d caused. For no goddamn good reason. What had they wanted this badly? And why? What could possibly justify this massacre?

Uncontrollable sobs wracked through him, and he fell to his knees in front of the chamber. He continued to pound the glass until the nerves in his fingers went numb, and he could barely breathe. Gods be damned, now the last person on this ship besides him was gone.

He slumped, gasping for breath. He had to stay in control. It was the only way off this planet. Maybe the rest of the crew was gone, too, but there were so many more lives at stake. Any rescue crew sent by the Montenegro to the Eta system would almost certainly be decimated by the ruthless pirates. And if the pirates started seeking revenge for their downed cutter, would they mount an attack against the Montenegro?

Either way, Tag needed to ensure he somehow got a message to the rest of the fleet. He would mourn later. Who knew how many other exploratory vessels might unknowingly venture into pirate-infested territory?

He stood, clenching and unclenching his fists. A brief memory of his early career, when he was back at Atlantis Station, returned to him. It had been shortly after he was taken out of the flight deck officer training program. He’d locked himself in his quarters with nothing but a bottle of station-distilled gutfire. The drink had been aptly named, and Tag had drunk himself to the point that his body felt as sick and tortured as his mind had been. For the duration of his training, he’d been so focused on studying manuals on bridge etiquette and procedure, star charts and navigation, ship AI systems, and weapons operations, he’d ignored all the calls from his parents and friends. He’d devoted his time so fanatically to officer training that everything else seemed to be of no importance and at best a mere distraction from achieving his deserved success at the bridge.

But in the middle of his gutfire bender, he had finally capitulated to his flashing terminal and accepted a call from his father. His father, a scientist at an SRE-sponsored research institution, listened with patience as Tag unleashed a fiery tirade. He had taken it for granted at the time, but almost a decade and a half later, he admired how the man had listened to Tag lambaste the flight officer training program, blaming the officers and his classmates first. It took some time before he finally realized that maybe it was his own shortcomings that had led to the disastrous flight. His father had merely listened, waiting for Tag to come to this realization on his own. But once Tag had admitted his hotheadedness had risked the lives of his crew and earned the ire of his superior officers, his father spoke for the first time.

“Is your career with the SRE navy finished?” he’d asked.

“No,” Tag said. “But there’s no chance they’ll let me on the bridge again. They might as well have me discharged.”

“But there is a chance you’ll be reassigned.”

“There is. But what does it matter? It’s over for me.”

“What does it matter?” his father had asked with incredulity. “You have a choice. You always have a choice. And as long as they don’t take that away from you, it isn’t ever over.”

“Sure,” Tag had said.

“I mean it. You’re on a highway, son. You’ve got so many exits in front of you. And if you don’t like ‘em when you get off the highway, you can just get back on until the next exit.” It was just like his father to use an outdated, land-based analogy. “Each exit is there because of all your interests and talents. You’re not a one-trick pony. No alley boy like most of these SRE junkies. Too many men and women join the navy and are only good at one thing. That’s all they’ve got. A single alley, a single road. An unavoidable dead end. But not you. No, Tag, you’re on a highway. There’s always another exit, another choice.”

Tag had lost the will to debate with his father, an Earthbound scientist who’d never known what it was like to stare in awe at the marble of blue and green from a ship headed for distant solar systems or travel at speeds faster than light through hyperspace as tendrils of blue and purple plasma swirled outside the ship, knowing the delicate balance of physics and technology that had come together in such elegant precision to make such a moment attainable.

There was no chance Tag would ever command his own starship.

But he couldn’t leave the stars behind. And with time, he’d realized his father was right. He did have other skills, other choices. He’d chosen to train as a navy medic instead. His devotion to his education and his previous studies in the officer training program had turned out to be a boon, propelling him along a medical officer training path. He had picked up an MD and a PhD, specializing in advanced bio-AI interfaces, and he had never taken his eyes off the stars, finally finding his place among the SRE’s exploratory division of the navy.

It had all led to this moment.

Alone on the Argo, his father’s words resonated with him now more than ever. You always have a choice. And as long as they don’t take that away from you, it isn’t over.

Wiping a tear from his eye, he left the lab, headed for the bridge to take the final pirate’s body to the brig. As he reached the hatch to the bridge, a loud roar shook the passage. The Argo shuddered, and he grabbed a stanchion to prevent himself from falling. What in the three hells?

It sounded as though the fusion reactor was powering up, ready to supply the damaged impellers with an influx of power.

He ran onto the bridge and gaped, looking for the reason the ship’s engines were rearing to go. He soon discovered it. The third pirate’s body was nowhere to be found.

It turned out his father had been right. And Tag wasn’t the only one to take his old man’s advice. The last pirate he’d assumed was dead had choices too, and he’d chosen to keep fighting.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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Tag unstrapped the mini-Gauss and scanned the barrel across the bridge. The pirate was nowhere in sight. The terminal near the pilot’s crash couch was blinking, and he ran to it. A progress bar showed the fusion reactors had been ordered to run at maximum capacity, but the power wasn’t being diverted anywhere. The main impellers were still offline.

Pangs of worry gripped Tag as if someone was wrapping their fingers around his stomach and twisting. The surviving pirate was still hell-bent on ensuring the destruction of the Argo. Without any power diversion, the fusion reactors would initiate meltdown. Normally, the ship’s AI system would act as a failsafe and shut down the reactors if the power couldn’t be diverted, but the power levels continued to rise past the safety shutoff thresholds. Tag input a terminal command to shut off the reactors, and the command was manually overridden almost immediately.

Tag knew what that meant. There was one other place to shut off the reactors now. He sprinted through the passage and jumped down the ladders to the lower decks. There, a narrower corridor took him to the reinforced hatch leading to the power plant, and he pulled down on the manual hatch release. But the hatch didn’t budge even as he tugged on it, throwing his body weight at it.

The hatch remained staunchly fixed, and the ship started to shudder. Warmth started to permeate the hatch, making the handle hot to the touch. Tag didn’t have long. Panic surged through him, urging him to hurry.

But now was not the time for rashness. His mind spun, searching for answers, searching for a solution.

A thought sprang to him, and he ran to the engineering bay. He searched for the tools he’d passed up earlier, and he snagged a set of chem-catalyst cutters. A sustained groaning echoed through the corridor as Tag ran back to the reactors. He turned the cutters on, and a spike of hot blue plasma spurted from the tool. Clenching his jaw, he directed the tongue of plasma into the lip of the hatch. Sparks flew and sputtered as it cut through the thick metal.

Another loud rumble shook the ship. Tag was almost halfway around the hatch. With his brow furrowed in determination, he fought to steady his hands and finished cutting around the hatch. He set the cutters aside and wrapped his fingers around the manual release again.

With a grunt, he yanked it with all the strength he could muster. Metal screeched as the edges of the hatch scraped, held in place by friction alone. His muscles burned, and he continued pulling as the hatch inched out. It finally fell free, and he jumped to the side as it slammed against the deck, clanging loudly. Almost as soon as it hit, a spray of blue pulsefire spattered against the bulkhead.

But Tag had been ready. He ducked under the pirate’s gunfire and peeked above the edge of the fresh hole shorn into the reactor chamber. Boiling waves of heat rolled over him, and the din of alarms singing in an unholy chorus hit him just as hard. More pulsefire grazed the opening, but Tag wouldn’t be stopped. He spied the pirate barricading himself behind the control panels in the power plant, beyond the two huge central drums that were glowing orange. The pirate’s wild pulse rounds smacked haphazardly against the reactors and the bulkhead.

Tag’s only solace was the fact that the reactor chamber was built to withstand all-out naval assaults. Everything from the bulkhead to the reactor shields themselves was reinforced to withstand all manner of kinetic and energy rounds slung from enemy ships. They could endure a fair amount of abuse before crumpling to such weapons. Small-arms fire might not even dent the damn things.

Tag shouldered the mini-Gauss and sighted the pirate through his optics. He fired. The pirate ducked, and the slug slammed into the bulkhead. He used the opportunity to jump through the hatch. After hitting the deck and rolling, he brought the mini-Gauss up to fire another round. The pirate flinched but this time fired both wrist-mounted weapons. Rounds whizzed by as Tag sprinted between the reactors and dove behind a wide pipe. The reactors themselves started to vibrate, and the din of reverberating metal filled the room, drowning out the sound of the alarms.

He crouched for a moment, recollecting himself and his thoughts amid the chaos. But there wasn’t time to deliberate. There wasn’t time for a well-thought-out plan.

There was only time for immediate action.

Tag burst from behind the pipe, pulling the trigger rapidly. A salvo of rounds flew past the terminal and the pirate, his wild shots missing as he ran. But he didn’t care. The pirate had ducked, and that was all that mattered. Tag made it to the ladder leading to the control platform and jumped to it, firing all the while. The recoil of the rifle shuddered through him over and over.

Once at the top of the ladder, he continued his assault on the cowering pirate. He stooped under a fresh blast of returning pulsefire then leapt at his adversary. His arms wrapped around the pirate, knocking him backward, and they rolled onto the deck together in a jumble of limbs. Tag smashed the stock of the mini-Gauss against the pirate’s helmet, and the man’s head twisted violently. He battered the pirate again and again until the visor cracked and spiderwebbed.

“Don’t you ever give up?” Tag snarled.

The pirate struggled to raise his wrist-mounted weapons. His arms trembled as he aimed. Tag kicked one of the pirate’s shaking wrists and easily dodged the other weapon as it fired. He took a step back, directed the mini-Gauss at his enemy, and eyed the largest hole in the pirate’s chest armor. Black fluid leaked from the busted plating. It was the spot where Tag had shot him earlier, back on the bridge. Whatever damage he’d caused had only been enough to wound the man. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He pointed his rifle at the pirate’s head again then fired. Rounds lanced through the cracked orange visor. The black power armor went still as the pirate within it let out a long, rasping death rattle.

Strapping the mini-Gauss over his shoulder again, Tag twisted to the controls. The reactors thrummed louder now and glowed almost white hot. His fingers tapped across the terminals, searching for some kind of emergency shutdown. The malicious red alarm lights swirled around the increasingly hot room. It was as if Tag was in the very bowels of hell. Damn, he thought once again. I need that AI working!

The holoscreen gauges reported increasing temperatures within the fusion reactors, far beyond safety thresholds now. Soon enough, the core would burn through its containment shielding, and it would melt straight through the belly of the ship, spilling intense, devastating radiation everywhere and causing a chain reaction of explosions that would send pieces of the Argo back into orbit. His eyes searched the terminals. Finally he spied a button labeled MANUAL SHUTOFF. He pushed it, praying it was the right one.

He waited several seconds as the heat and power continued to build. They started to level off. But the alarms still wailed, and the emergency warnings still flashed on the holoscreen. Eventually the intense heat and power would dissipate, but the longer the containment shielding of the fusion reactor was above safe limits, the more Tag put himself and the ship at risk of destruction. He needed to divert the rest of the power.

And there was only one way Tag knew to unleash so much.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Tag ran back through the passageway. He felt a twinge of guilt leaping over the bodies of his fallen crewmates. But there was no time to pay respects. The passage led into the bridge, and Tag jumped into the pilot’s seat once more. A corner of the display flashed the continual warnings from the fusion reactors.

His heart pounded harder against his ribcage with each passing second. Sweat matted his hair, and his shirt clung to his back. The heat from the reactors was permeating the rest of the ship.

Not good.

The most efficient way to burn off the excess power was to activate the T-drive. But Tag was in no position to fire the Argo into hyperspace. Setting off a T-drive so close to a large mass like Eta-Five would be devastating to the planet, and the debris from the force it took to bend space-time could just as easily crush the already injured ship. Instead, Tag eyed the controls for the impellers. The altitude and attitude adjustment impellers were fully functional, but the small impellers were meant only to make slight course adjustments or aid in docking. They stood little chance of sending the ship airborne against Eta-Five’s gravitational pull. The only impellers capable of pushing out enough g-force were the three damaged mains.

But Tag wasn’t looking to fly anywhere. He just wanted to divert energy, and the damaged impellers would only dissipate so much. And if Tag wasn’t careful, siphoning off so much power from the reactors into the impellers might ruin them for good, eliminating any chance of him getting the Argo off this planet.

Well, being marooned here is certainly better than disintegrating in a fusion reactor meltdown, Tag reasoned. And at the very least, he owed it to Kaufman to make it out of this alive. Someone needed to stop those pirates, to warn the SRE so others didn’t end up like her.

He threw the ship into full thrust. The Argo vibrated. Power coursed through the impellers as the ship rocked against its icy tomb. The main impellers whined, and the Argo jumped from its position before it belly-slammed against the snowy ground again. A massive roar resonated through the bridge, piercing Tag’s eardrums. Then all he could hear was a high-pitched ringing. But a message across his terminal told him what had happened. One of the three main impellers had blown.

The other two continued to vibrate, sucking up power. Tag imagined them glowing a fierce purple, trying desperately to lift off, but instead of creating the gravity waves they usually used to direct the ship through space, they would expend the energy through heat.

The ship lurched to port. The second impeller was about to blow. But a quick glance at the fusion reactor reports showed the power levels were still dangerously high, and Tag kept the power churning at full blast.

Water surged around the ship, and the Argo dropped. The intense heat emanating from the broken impellers was melting the ice and snow encasing the ship, and it dug itself deeper into the white blanket covering Eta-Five. But to Tag’s great fortune, the more the Argo embedded itself in the frozen environment, the faster the impellers dissipated heat.

After several agonizing minutes, the warnings flashing from the fusion reactors disappeared. The temperatures and power levels had returned to below the safety thresholds. Tag kept the two remaining impellers going but reduced the power to them. He disengaged the adjustment impellers, and the ship settled, no longer being shoved back and forth by them.

Tag caught his breath. He hadn’t realized how much the anxiety and adrenaline had taken from him as he slumped in the pilot’s seat. With the back of his hand, he wiped a bead of sweat rolling across his forehead.

He had done it yet again. He had forestalled his death and that of the Argo. But what now?

With his thumb and index finger, he massaged his temple. His eyes traced the deck of the bridge until they caught Captain Weber. The man’s body was still crumpled near the viewport after having sacrificed his life for only the gods knew what. Tag needed to find a way off the planet’s surface and return to the Montenegro. But he had no idea how he would accomplish that. He could use the third and last escape pod to shoot himself out through the deluge of snow and ice, but he doubted it would even fire off with enough thrust to make it beyond the planet’s atmosphere.

And even if it did, what then? Drifting in space waiting for the pirates to return and finish him? Or hoping that a rescue squad from the Montenegro eventually came? Even if they did though, they would have to fare better than the Argo against the pirates that had come to claim this part of the universe as theirs.

Maybe he could send a lightbeam message to intercept the Montenegro’s rescue squad as soon as they came out of hyperspace. It might be a long shot, but if he put an encrypted distress message on repeat, the rescue ship could be warned of the pirates before they ever ran into the assholes.

Then Tag’s heart dropped.

He recalled the electrical anomaly coursing through Eta-Five’s atmosphere and the inability of comm systems to pierce it. He slammed his clenched fist against the pilot’s terminal again. There’d be no way to send a warning through that shield.

But another courier drone maybe. He could shoot one off now with his warning. Surely it could propel itself out of the atmosphere and then hit hyperspace on its own. If he launched it fast enough, it might reach the Montenegro not long after the one Captain Weber had sent did. That would of course be the simplest and smartest course of action.

Tag logged into the courier drone interface via his terminal. He activated the drone’s AI to plot a course off the planet and into hyperspace, but when he tapped the Execute button, the drone didn’t acknowledge the command. The terminal simply reported the drone was offline.

“What’s wrong with you?” Tag tapped at the terminal and reentered the command.

Still, no luck.

The pieces started to click together in Tag’s mind. The rudimentary AI on the regen chambers didn’t work, the ship’s course-plotting AI hadn’t responded, and the ship’s network AI had stopped receiving commands.

He brought up the AI logs. All AI-driven components aboard the ship were now offline. He tried to cycle them, but they remained offline. At once he knew what had happened. The pirates had somehow subverted all of the Argo’s AI systems. Every last system relying on a modicum of AI had been sabotaged.

He combed his fingers through his hair, desperately fighting the urge to send his fist through the terminal’s holoscreen. While he could—and had—piloted the ship himself, he could never engage the ship’s T-drive without it. There was no way for him to manually map out every subtle calculation necessary to travel faster than light through hyperspace. Hence, the name of the T-drive, or Turing drive, so named after the godfather of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing. Without AI, Tag couldn’t get the Argo to the Montenegro.

As he scrolled through the logs, the painful knot around his stomach only tightened. A single line reported the SOS courier drone Captain Weber had initially launched had gone offline. And worse yet, it had never reported a jump into hyperspace. The last report before Tag had crashed through Eta-Five’s atmosphere stated the drone was still floating somewhere above the planet. It was completely lifeless.

No one knew the pirates existed. No one knew the Argo had been attacked. No one knew the ship needed saving.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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Without the ability to repair the AI systems on his own and no idea of how to contact anyone beyond the Eta system, Tag resigned himself to a single hope: finding the extraterrestrial anthropologist. He had about a week before the scheduled rendezvous with Lieutenant Vasquez. Maybe, just maybe, she’d have a surprise courier drone waiting for use—or maybe the species she’d studied had some alternate means of communication they could use. It wasn’t much to hope for, but it was all he had.

In the meantime, he had no idea where she was, and no intraplanetary comm system responded to any hail attempts. He didn’t want to risk getting lost in the unforgiving arctic environment of Eta-Five in a fool’s errand of a search for her. Instead, he would wait until closer to the preordained date to take the Argo’s exploratory air car to meet her.

For now, he had plenty to keep him occupied aboard the ship.

There was one particular task that stood out above the rest. He picked his way through the corridors of the ship, barren of life but filled with the bodies of those he’d known. Morgan and his charge outside the medical bay. Engineers with whom Tag had shared many a conversation, ranging from cryopreservation for long-term stasis to the ethics of manual genetic manipulation in humans to the future of faster-than-light travel. The bridge with its officers who’d valiantly made their last stand at the helm and passageways full of marines who’d died trying to prevent the ship from falling in the hands of their captors.

Tag couldn’t simply ignore them as he tried to make what repairs he could to the vessel. He returned to the medical bay and took one of the hover gurneys. Without the med bay’s M3 droid, he had to load each body himself. The work was grueling, both emotionally and physically, and he had trouble finding a place to put all the bodies. The thought crossed his mind that he could leave them planetside where the extreme cold would keep them preserved for an eternity, but no one in the crew deserved such an ignoble fate. The men and the women of the SRE navy had earned a proper burial in space, and he vowed to get the Argo spacebound. If for nothing else, he wanted to pay the proper respects to all those who had given their lives. Ultimately, he decided to store the crew members in the torpedo bay for the time being.

From a terminal within the bay, Tag adjusted the local environment to chill the air. Once the temperature dropped, the space was cool enough to work like a vast morgue. There was also plenty of room for the storage. Too much room, Tag noted inwardly. There was no sign of ordnance anywhere within the bay, which was empty except for the two defunct torpedo-loading drones near the launcher tubes. Tag had never found a reason to spend any time in the bay, as it was off-limits to most crew members, but he was surprised to find no torpedoes of any kind. Maybe the pirates had taken whatever the Argo had carried.

Regardless, the large space and lack of ordnance provided ample room for the deceased crew. If the Argo made it off this godforsaken planet, Tag would launch them out of those tubes as befitted their honorable deaths.

It took the better part of a day for Tag to transport the crew to the bay. He made his rounds from the bridge to the crew quarters to the galley and everywhere in between to ensure he hadn’t missed a single member. Stowing Kaufman’s body proved to be the hardest. He fought the illogical urge to check her pulse just one more time. His eyes brimmed with tears each time he looked down at her still form, and he brushed away a lock of her blood-matted hair.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he whispered to her.

Before he set her down beside the rest of her downed marines, he kissed her forehead and closed his eyes, desperately collecting himself for the monumental tasks ahead.

Once the morbid task was complete, he walked dejectedly to his quarters. He took a long shower, letting the warm water rush over him. His eyelids felt heavy, and the thought of crashing into his bunk tempted him. It would be a blessing to wake up and find this entire tragedy was no more than a nightmare.

But that would be too easy.

Instead, Tag trudged to the galley and made himself a cup of strong coffee. He gulped the hot liquid down, praying it would allay his exhaustion. After stuffing away a dehydrated nutrient packet, he went back to work. Like all members of the research vessel, he had an EVA suit for off-ship missions. He grabbed it from his cabin. From the armory, he gathered an additional mini-Gauss and several loaded magazines. He scrapped a field scientist’s suit for the navigation sensors and attached them to his own suit. It would’ve been much easier to take one of the field scientists’ suits for his own, but of the three researchers, none shared a body type remotely tall and thin enough to fit him. Likewise, the marines’ EVA suits were customized to fit each wearer exactly, and most were fitted for individuals much shorter than him. Those marines that had been his height sported a more chiseled physique that, despite Tag’s best fitness regime, he simply couldn’t match without their considerable genetic enhancements.

From one of the marines’ EVA suits, he took the holsters for sidearms and attachments for ammunition storage. With a fair bit of effort, he secured all these extraneous components to his own suit. The only thing he couldn’t salvage from the marines’ suits was the built-in armor plates. The thought of running into pirates—or even something far worse—on Eta-Five made that fact hard to swallow. But there was little he could do.

Back in the galley, he grabbed a few containers of water and dehydrated nutrient packs. He ensured he had enough food for a several-week journey should some unforeseen disaster occur, which he deemed rather likely given the events so far. He lugged all these supplies back to the corridor near the cargo bay. The rupture in the inner and outer hull around the cargo bay meant he wouldn’t be able to safely access the bay without donning his EVA suit. He peered through the porthole in the hatch. Ice sparkled over bits of torn alloy, and snowdrifts piled against various crates and over the boxy, jagged shape of the air car. The car would be his mode of transportation to Vasquez, but loading it could wait. With everything ready to go and waiting by the cargo bay hatch, it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get his supplies into the vehicle.

Now the most important task was attempting to restore the ship’s AI. Even though he’d studied the basics of AI on ships in his navy education, he feared he didn’t have the acumen to effectively diagnose and repair the massive damage the pirates had managed to inflict on the computers.

But he did have one idea. One almost quixotic idea. It was one he’d worked on for years, and there was no better time to run his first real-world experiment.

An unavoidable yawn signified that the effects of coffee were waning as he padded back to his quarters. Exhaustion crept into his flesh. The turmoil of the day had taken its toll on his body, and what he had in mind would have to wait. He needed his brain operating at one hundred percent. For now, the only thing he could do was sleep.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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Tag woke, gasping for air. His pulse pounded in his ears. But there were no alarms. No flashing lights. No sounds other than the creaking of the ship. He sat on the edge of his bunk and listened for a moment. But he didn’t hear the pirates scouring the ship for signs of life, nor did he catch the telltale footsteps of his crew preparing the ship for flight.

He was well and truly alone.

As anxiety faded, the pain crept into his body. His head pounded, and his bones felt weak. A mottled bruise had formed along his ribs, and he imagined that the soreness in his cheekbones bespoke black eyes and bruised skin from the prior day’s battles. He slid from his bunk, and the cold deck met his feet, sending chills through his goose-pimpled flesh. He donned his clothes and slipped his boots on then left his cabin.

The lights in the passageway greeted him. He rotated his arms. His joints seemed to click, and a throbbing pain in his left calf forced him to walk with a slight limp. A constant fire burned in his ribs, flaming with every breath. Tag wondered how he hadn't noticed any of this yesterday. Probably too busy trying to stay alive, Tag frowned, and then preparing the crew for a space burial.

He continued his hobbling gait to the brig. There he made sure the three pirates’ bodies, including the one he’d taken from the reactor room, remained unmoving. He considered trying to pry their armor off again but thought better of it. It had been difficult enough the first time, and what did it matter who these people were? He wouldn’t recognize their faces. It would be a waste of time. And he couldn’t help the half-paranoid thought that they might have booby-trapped their armor to explode should some unauthorized person start tampering with it. After the ferocity and desperation he’d seen in these people in their attempt to rid the universe of all evidence the Argo existed, the thought didn’t seem so farfetched.

Satisfied the dead were still dead, Tag trod to the medical bay. He looked through some of the portholes on his way there. All were covered in snow. It was a somewhat reassuring sight. The atmosphere of Eta-Five should protect against probing radar or lidar, and if an enemy ship did decide to venture through the strange atmospheric barrier, the snow would provide a formidable visual obstruction, concealing the Argo from prying eyes. As long as he didn’t start up the impellers—and it didn’t look like he’d be able to—anytime soon, it would be difficult for anyone to happen upon the ship even with the most sensitive of sensors.

Of course, that meant if for some reason a rescue party ever came, it would be just as hard for the Argo to attract their attention. Tag wondered if the same fate had befallen the UNS Hope generation ship that had been lost in this sector of space so long ago. He could now see how such a huge ship might escape the efforts of the past exploratory ships trying to find it. Three hells, he thought, maybe the Hope is somewhere on Eta-Five.

But finding lost generation ships wasn’t his major concern. Getting back to his fleet was, and in order to do that, he’d need some help. Some AI help.

The M3 droid was still slumped where he’d left it in the med bay. Tag grabbed it and placed it atop a patient exam bed. Due to its caretaker-like role, the droid was one of the more humanoid bots aboard the ship. The SRE navy’s researchers had claimed the thin frame and silver arms, modeled after a human’s, were more comforting to the injured than a more utilitarian bot such as the tentacled, octopus-like droids responsible for ship repairs. He started to strap the bot into the exam bed’s safety straps out of habit, then stopped himself. They weren’t hurtling through space, and the dead droid wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway.

At least, not yet.

Tag assembled a set of surgical and normal hardware tools. He stared at the droid’s face. Its designers had given it visual sensors that looked like blank, unstaring eyes and a mouth that actually moved when it spoke. But they’d given the rest of its face a distinctly machine-like appearance so as not to frighten patients by venturing too far into the uncanny valley.

With a bit of cutting and unscrewing, Tag withdrew the panel along the back of the droid’s “skull.” There he found a mostly empty space. The main processor was housed in the droid’s torso. But he needed to make sure there was plenty of room within the head of the unit for what he had planned.

“If I only had a brain,” Tag half sang to himself. He started whistling the ancient Wizard of Oz song, half amazed at the longevity of 2D films in the era of VR holos and entertainment that absorbed all five senses. There was still something mythical and mystical about a flat-screen movie. He laughed aloud, half mad. If all these efforts failed, he’d have plenty of time to watch all the 2D films he liked stuck on this damn ship buried in the snow.

He carefully undid the main chest plate of the bot. There, the proverbial heart of the droid rested. Thin wires emanated from a central processing unit that performed all the robust calculations needed to sustain the droid’s AI. Tag found a small manual restart button within the hardware and pressed it.

Several seconds passed. He hoped to see the droid whir back to life. With a fresh restart, maybe whatever virus or command the pirates had inflicted on the Argo would be vanquished from it.

But the M3 droid remained dormant. Two more attempts to restart it were met with the same fruitless results.

Tag eyed one of the ship’s intranet ports. He could hook the droid up and scour the code that gave it life. But such a task, even for someone who knew their way around these systems, would take weeks, maybe years. Time that Tag didn’t have if he wanted to warn the Montenegro.

Besides, the virus or whatever the pirates used might still be sitting on the ship’s intranet, ready to sweep back into the droid and make it lifeless once more. There was nothing he could do in the digital realm of the ship to reverse the damage to the AI systems.

It was time for surgery.

With slow and careful movements, Tag undid the wires around the processor. He pulled it from the droid and set it aside on a nearby table. He labeled each wire so he remembered which provided sensory input or controlled the droid’s navigation systems. The tedious process took several hours. Minutes seemed to bleed by as Tag succumbed to tunnel-vision focus on the project. His dissection ended after he felt certain he’d taken all the components that gave the droid its AI.

A slight feeling of guilt swept through him. It was as though he’d torn the brain and heart out of a human. He surveyed the array of wires, chips, and other electronics on the table next to him. This had been the soul of the droid.

Now for the most crucial part of the experiment.

He unlocked the exam table the droid’s shell lay on and rotated the table vertically, with the droid strapped in, to fit in the decon chamber. The table’s wheels squeaked as he pushed it into the decon chamber. Once in, white gases hissed over him, then the chamber opened and let him into the lab. He walked to the terminal, and his fingers danced over its input display. The lights glared more brightly, and he focused them on the droid’s table to give the space a makeshift surgical-suite appearance.

The air in the room had already been contaminated when he and Kaufman had sought shelter here before, but Tag hoped that wouldn’t compromise what he was about to do. He opened the incubator at the far end of the laboratory. The door opened with a release of hot, humid air, and he gazed on the small object that represented years of work and toil. Years of dedication as a medical officer and researcher. A culmination of everything he’d worked toward.

He wasn’t scheduled to begin experiments with this item yet. And the first few experiments would’ve been more ... subdued and simple than what he had in mind. But as he donned a pair of surgical gloves, he decided there was no better experiment than trial by fire.

His fingers wrapped around the polyglass container, rotating it slowly, and light hit the object, making its half-synthetic, half-biological flesh glisten. This was what he’d devoted himself to after realizing his career wouldn’t lead him to the bridge. But maybe this was fate telling him it had turned out better after all.

He peered at the object, rotating it gingerly. This was it. This was the first live synth-bio brain to go into a droid.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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Tag gingerly placed the polyglass container with the synth-bio brain on the table with the lifeless droid. This certainly wasn’t the first experiment he’d wanted to start on the Argo. But now it would have to be.

The combination of biology and computers was not Tag’s idea. The many researchers that had come before him shared the common objective of adapting one of the most sophisticated computers known to man in the pursuit of artificial intelligence: the human brain. The field’s historical roots dated back to the early twenty-first century. Researchers had developed brain-computer interfaces by using isolated rat neurons to control miniature drones and even fighter jet simulation programs. These advancements progressed slowly but surely and led to savvier brain–computer interfaces.

But leaps in more traditional computer technology had made the field of synthetic brains almost obsolete. These half-biological, half-mechanical processing units cost far too much more in time, labor, and money than the standard mass-produced computer unit. And most experimental synth-bio brains were still restricted to basic, single-minded tasks, like guiding missile systems, that didn’t require the same tremendous processing power as steering a ship through hyperspace did. Besides, those simple tasks had already been conquered with the more ubiquitous hardware-based computer and AI systems, making synth-bio brains both less efficient and redundant.

At least that’s what everyone else thought.

Tag placed the polyglass unit with the synth-bio brain in the skull of the droid with reverence. He planned to literally and figuratively breathe new life into his vision of what synth-bio AI could be. Sure, a purely software-based AI could do its job well. But there was a certain vitality that machines lacked. Humanity hadn’t evolved from stone tools to spaceships capable of interstellar travel by being able to perform calculations well.

No, it had always been the ability to dream, to believe, to inspire, to feel, to intuit. Those were the properties that separated humans from the most advanced AI. And that was why he hoped to combine the best of both these worlds in his synth-bio brain. That’s what he’d always told Kaufman, and she’d been his most adamant believer.

He felt a little like Dr. Frankenstein as he connected the conduits and wires of the droid’s sensor arrays and servos to the synth-bio brain unit. The entire unit and all its connections fit comfortably in the droid’s head. The location of the brain unit wasn’t solely to mimic human anatomy, but it certainly didn’t hurt to make this droid feel more lifelike to Tag. Due to the biological component of the synth-bio brain, it was necessary to fit a miniature life-support unit into the droid. The torso, now devoid of the processor and other unneeded components, was a prime spot for holding the life support mechanisms. These mechanisms pumped nanoparticles that served as artificial blood cells, delivering all the nutrients, oxygen, and even immune system-mimicking molecules that the living part of the synth-bio brain needed to survive.

The life-support unit also generated and delivered power to the droid. In a way, the heavy, tube-shaped device in Tag’s hand was a synthetic replication of most human organ systems, scaled down and built with electronic components. He inserted the canister into the torso and spent the next couple of hours connecting wires and tubes, then checking and rechecking them.

His stomach growled, but he ignored his own body’s needs. He was too close to seeing this one come to life. Anticipation lit his nerves on fire, but he willed himself to remain calm and unhurried as he grabbed a terminal and hooked a diagnostic tether to a port in the bot’s torso. One by one, he powered up each of the droid’s systems.

First, he checked that the life support’s batteries and miniature fusion center were able to generate, receive, and store power. Green lights on the terminal’s holoscreen signified they worked properly. Then he ran a quick diagnostic on the materials within the artificial bloodstream loop. Everything was there and accounted for. He moved on like this, meticulously debugging any unexpected results.

His heart fluttered when he sent a small burst of power to the synth-bio brain. He simulated an auditory sensation through the terminal’s connection with the droid: the sounds of birds chirping. A smile tore across his face. The appropriate lobes of the synth-bio brain lit up. Then he delivered a visual cue. The sun. Earth’s sun. Several different portions of the brain glowed on the display, signifying neural activity.

Next he delivered a more abstract cue. One humans knew well but computational AI had no concept for other than a rote dictionary definition. Pleasure. A dopamine effect rushed through the synth-bio brain, and he watched the holoscreen’s image of the brain light up in a bevy of neural sparkles like distant stars across the universe. Now happiness spread through Tag like a warm tide. Had he done it? Had he actually created the SRE’s first synthetic-biological lifeform?

He continued quizzing the synth-bio brain with more restricted simulated senses and emotions. It was working. It was truly working! A hoot of victory escaped his mouth, and he pumped his fists in the air, dancing around the lab—but then his elation evaporated. There was no one to celebrate with him. Yet a small spring of hope trickled up through his despair. Out of all the tragedy and death aboard the crashed Argo, new life appeared ready to emerge.

The testing continued for some time, with each result ending up in a notebook he labeled “Experiment: Alpha One.” He prayed there would be no Experiment: Alpha Two, Three, or Four, much less a Beta series. This had to work. He lost track of the seconds, minutes, and hours, too enthralled by his invention. Finally, when his fingers started to twitch and his vision blurred, he stepped back and took several deep breaths in and out.

This was it. This was everything he’d worked for.

The time on the Argo was supposed to be for the development and growth of more synth-bio brains based on this original unit. But he hadn’t had time yet for any of those nascent experimental brains to mature. Most were still squirming neurons replicating and dividing in cell culture plates. This was the only one he’d ever completed, and now it was time to see if his work would make the SRE navy proud—or if it was all a foolish embarrassment.

Emotionally he was ready to turn the whole unit on. But his hunger continued to nag at him, and his eyes were feeling heavy once again. There was no telling how the droid would react to its environment once it was fully untethered. He needed to be prepared, mentally and physically, to welcome his creation into the world.

Tag dragged himself to the galley, where a large holoscreen displayed the current Earth time. He had been working for almost twenty hours straight. The digits glowing across that screen seemed to break the dam holding his exhaustion back, and he barely mustered the strength to down a quick meal before returning to his bunk.

But when his head hit the pillow, his mind went into full gear. He slept in bursts and spurts, waking frequently, unable to tame the excitement surging through him long enough to get a restful night’s sleep. After five hours of tossing and turning, he jolted from the bed and headed to the lab.

He rushed through the med bay and the decon chamber. His work lay sprawled over the exam bed like a half-finished surgery. He closed the droid’s torso and secured the head panel shut. The tether still traced from the torso port to the terminal he’d been working on, where the holoscreen glowed, beckoning to him. A single command now appeared before him: Initiate All Systems.

His finger hovered above the holoscreen, and his heart climbed into his throat. He tried to think of reasons not to power up the droid. Maybe he’d missed something during diagnostics. Maybe he hadn’t attached the sensor arrays properly. Maybe the synth-bio brain technology just wasn’t mature enough, and so much information overload would fry it.

He shook his head. “You trying to psych yourself out, Tag?” He closed his eyes, inhaled slowly, then stared at the Initiate All Systems command again. The screen felt almost warm to his touch when he pressed the button, and a second prompt asked him to confirm his choice. He selected Yes.

A humming sound echoed through the torso of the droid. The silver shell started to vibrate, softly at first, then increasing steadily. Tag prepared to perform an immediate shutdown via the terminal, but the vibrations stopped. A few graphs blinked on the holoscreen with reports on the droid’s version of vital signs. The life-support system had activated properly and was pumping the synth blood to the brain.

The droid’s mechanical fingers twitched. Tag cautiously approached the droid’s side, peering between it and the terminal readouts. Something flickered behind the droid’s eyes. The glowing black orbs swiveled, and for a moment, Tag could feel those eyes pierce his own.

It was alive.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

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“Alpha One, you’re awake.” Tag placed a hand over his chest. “I’m Tag Brewer. Can you understand me?”

The droid jolted upright, causing Tag to jump back. He tried to maintain a stoic, calm expression, but he couldn’t stop the nervous perspiration or the excitement in his voice.

“Can you understand me?” he repeated.

The droid gawked. Its head tilted, and the black eyes dug into him. Alpha One’s mouth opened and closed as if it was trying to vocalize something. It raised a silver hand in front of its face and rotated it. All five fingers clenched and unclenched, and it studied the flexing digits.

Tag took a careful step forward. Alpha One’s gaze shot toward him. Its metallic lips straightened, and it stared silently, frozen.

Tag held out his hands in a welcoming gesture. “How are you, Alpha One?”

The droid gazed at him quizzically then resumed its emotionless expression. Tag almost laughed aloud. Of course it looked emotionless. Did he expect the thing to be happy? Or maybe grateful to be alive? It almost certainly didn’t even know what it was, much less how it should feel.

He didn’t want to take his gaze off the droid, but he looked away for a moment and glanced at the terminal’s holoscreen. All readouts appeared normal. The model of the synth-bio brain on the holoprojection lit up in waves of rolling colors throughout the artificial organ. Alpha One was full of neural activity, even if it was standing like a statue.

“Alpha One, do you know what you are?” Tag asked in a soothing voice. He took another step. It seemed as if the droid tensed. “I’m very happy to see you awake and alert.”

He cautiously took another step. The small whine of servos accompanied Alpha One cocking its head, and it studied Tag as he sidled up beside it.

“You may need to lie down and rest while your sensors adjust to all this new input,” Tag said, placing a hand on Alpha One’s cool alloy shoulder.

That was a mistake.

The droid grabbed his wrist, yanked it away, then threw itself at Tag in a fury, arms flailing clumsily. Tag dove out of the way, and it crashed to the deck, tripping over its own legs.

“Please, I’m not going to hurt you,” Tag said.

The droid teetered and tried to stand. Its eyes locked with Tag’s, and it rolled, arms stretched. An electronic clicking sounded from its open mouth as if it were letting out some kind of growl.

“Alpha!” Tag said, grabbing the droid’s wrists to help it up. The droid struggled in his grasp, twisting and bucking, its eyes remained locked on Tag’s, and the strange growling grew louder. With a yank, it freed itself from Tag’s grasp and stumbled backward, then thudded against the bulkhead. The impact resonated up through the shelves above it. Boxes of labware clanked together, and Alpha One spun. It shielded its face with its hands, though nothing fell.

“You’re all right,” Tag cooed. “You’re all right.”

The droid charged. Its weight slammed against him. The blow knocked the breath out of him, and pain ricocheted through his already-beaten body. He doubled over, gasping for air, and held out a hand weakly to ward off the raging droid. Alpha rammed him again. It grappled Tag, but it still hadn’t achieved full motor control, allowing Tag to escape its grip and leap to the terminal.

He scrolled through the commands to get to the emergency shutdown button. Another lurching force hit his side before he could press it, and he went down hard, his head cracking against the terminal. Cold metal fingers wrapped around his neck. He gulped but couldn’t breathe.

Beady black eyes stared into his. Alpha’s face no longer seemed so stolid and unreadable. Instead, Tag thought he saw a glimmer of fear in those eyes. He leveled a kick at the droid’s legs, and Alpha tumbled.

The half-living machine should be strong enough to parry his attacks and kill him with ease. Before the pirates’ assault on the Argo, the droid had lifted patients and been responsible for moving heavy equipment throughout the med bay. But it seemed unable to harness that strength now. The synth-bio brain was still getting used to its body. It was like a child, a baby, slowly learning what its fingers and toes were for.

That’s it! Tag thought.

But he didn’t have time to explore the idea further.

Alpha struggled to its feet. It launched another attack, and Tag ducked a swinging silver arm. The droid wobbled toward him, launching a salvo of clumsy punches and halfhearted slaps. It had no real concept of how to fight. Tag was thankful he hadn’t preloaded any such skills into the synth-bio brain.

That had also been part of Tag’s mistake, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it.

The droid pitched forward, and Tag dodged its assault. It clanged into the exam table and knocked the table over. Tumbling over its own legs again, Alpha One fell against the closed lab incubator. It shot a hand out to break its fall. Its metal fist plunged through the polyglass, and cracks spiderwebbed around the hole. The droid pulled its hand back, but it was stuck up to its wrist.

Now Tag could definitely see a panicked expression cross the droid’s face. It yanked and twisted. Metal groaned and popped. One of the safety bolts holding the incubator in place against the bulkhead broke loose, and the incubator slowly tilted then crashed over Alpha. The droid tried to roll away, and the tether connecting it with the terminal snapped free from the port on its torso.

Other plastic dishes and small cylindrical tubes full of synth-bio tissue samples spilled from the incubator. The dishes and tubes broke and rolled across the deck. Tag’s stomach dropped as he watched his experimental subjects burst and wither outside the safety of the incubator. Most were crushed under Alpha’s body as the droid writhed, trying to escape from the bulky incubator. It would take months of labor to replace the synth-bio tissues Alpha One was wrecking now.

“No!” Tag yelled. “Stop!”

He watched in horror. His only viable experiment, Alpha One, was now on the loose. An immature synth-bio brain in a powerful body threatened to destroy everything he had left aboard the Argo.

The droid’s free arm pushed and shoved, still struggling to free itself from the fallen incubator. Its hand smacked against the bulky device over and over.

Tag’s mind sped back to his earlier thought. Anger started to give way to sympathy. This droid wasn’t trying to wreak havoc. It hadn’t really tried to kill him out of malice—it had growled first, given him an animalistic warning. The synth-bio being was frightened. It must feel alone, scared, desperate to survive. Like him.

And its mind was somewhere between the awareness of a newborn unaccustomed to its new world and an animal acting only on instinct. But regardless of the sympathy he felt, it needed to be stopped.

CHAPTER TWENTY

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Tag rushed to Alpha’s side. He scooped up the tether but realized there was no way to reach the port in Alpha’s torso to plug it in. The port was hidden under the incubator, which meant he needed to free the droid in order to connect the tether and shut Alpha down.

Releasing the droid would be a gamble. Every second it spent growing accustomed to its body meant it would be stronger, faster, smarter. The varied emotions gracing its face now were enough to show Tag it was already learning how to sync the biological inputs and outputs of the synth-bio brain with its mechanical exterior.

The incubator shuddered. Alpha’s palm pressed flat against it, and the droid pushed upward. It no longer flailed in desperate, ineffective swipes at the machine—it was learning. The incubator rose a centimeter, and Alpha’s arm shook as it lifted the machine.

But its hand slipped, and the incubator crashed hard on its torso again. Tag was certain the droid didn’t have any type of pain response, but Alpha’s face contorted in a seemingly agonized expression. Frustration and fear seemed to be getting to it. The droid’s mouth opened and closed as more electric chirps and beeps emanated from it.

Tag wasn’t sure if it was crying out or asking for help. He approached the droid, and the chirping went wild. Maybe it was warning him off. He ignored it and curled his fingers around the edge of the incubator, then lifted, his muscles straining. Alpha began pushing with its free arm. The incubator slowly rose, and Alpha squirmed out from under the machine. Its other arm remained stuck in the polyglass. Tag gave the polyglass a solid kick then another and another until it broke around Alpha’s wrist. The droid pulled back its arm and scuttled away.

The incubator was too heavy for Tag to handle alone, and he dropped it. More polyglass shattered and clinked along the deck. Mental anguish rippled through him as he imagined the other experiments demolished by the crashed incubator, and he winced.

A slow whirring sound caught his attention. Alpha was lifting itself back to its feet. This time its legs didn’t wobble. They moved slowly, naturally. It looked at Tag and seemed to size him up.

Maybe this gesture of helping the droid had been enough. Maybe now it understood Tag wasn’t trying to hurt it.

“You’re okay now,” he said. “See? I helped you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

He gathered up the loose tether from the terminal again and took another step. Alpha didn’t cower or click.

“I’m going to hook this back up. This is for your safety.”

Alpha’s head tilted to the side, but it didn’t give any sign it understood him. He reached out warily with the tether, and Alpha’s gaze dropped to Tag’s outstretched arm.

Tag glanced between the droid and the port on its torso. So far, so good. The plug clicked into place, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

But his relief was short lived. The small click ignited Alpha’s fury, and the droid leapt at him again like a falcon swooping down on a hapless rodent. This time its hands weren’t so shaky or unsure when it grappled him. The two struggled, crashing against the bulkhead and the toppled exam table as they wrestled in a tangle of mechanical and biological limbs. Pain rocketed through Tag’s preexisting injuries and the new welts and bruises as Alpha battered him. Something about the tether had unleashed the beast within.

He wasn’t sure what was going through the droid’s mind. But he didn’t give it too much thought as he held his arms up, trying to deflect the metal hands flying through the air aimed at his face. Alpha threw its weight at him, and he fell, trapped under the barrage of metal limbs. A left hook connected with his cheek, sending his jaw chattering. Clicking and chirping erupted from Alpha’s mouth. Tag rolled to his left and escaped a vicious knee aimed at his chest. The violent clang of metal against metal echoed as the droid slammed against the deck. It twisted and righted itself, aiming for Tag once again.

The terminal was behind Alpha. The tether had remained attached throughout the ferocious struggle. Tag knew he had no choice. It was either destroy Alpha or shut it off. He couldn’t bear to kill his creation, but if it wouldn’t let him near the terminal, his hand would be forced. Several strewn tools glinted around the deck. A soldering gun lay next to a tumbleweed of wires. Then he eyed a screwdriver. It might be the best option for a weapon he had.

Alpha barreled forward with its arms outstretched. Tag ducked to his right, dove, and rolled. He picked up the screwdriver and deflected another blow from Alpha with his free hand. His fingers wrapped around Alpha’s wrist, and he tried to hold the droid’s arm back. Fire burned through his muscles, his arm shaking with effort. In his other hand he held the screwdriver, ready to strike. A single blow straight through Alpha’s chin and into the synth-bio brain would end the droid’s attacks for good. The droid didn’t seem to know what was coming.

Tag swung the screwdriver up, and it connected with the screeching of rending metal.

But he hadn’t aimed for Alpha’s head.

The screwdriver stabbed through Alpha’s palm, and Tag drove the hand back. The end of the screwdriver jutted from the other side of Alpha’s hand. Tag took advantage of momentum and speared the screwdriver into the side of the incubator. Alpha stared at its hand, now secured against the incubator. The droid yanked on it.

It wouldn’t hold for long, but it might buy Tag some time. He rushed to the terminal. Alpha thrashed, and the screwdriver popped free. It clattered on the deck. Tag’s fingers danced on the terminal as he searched for the shutdown command. Heaving, clanking footsteps sounded as Alpha loped after him.

The red shutdown command glared on the holoscreen. Tag’s finger shot toward it right as two metal arms wrapped around his torso. He flew back, and his body slammed into the bulkhead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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Tag gasped, his head pounding from where his skull had cracked into the bulkhead. Each breath seemed to ignite the pain in his ribs. He stared at Alpha and waited for the droid to continue its assault.

But the droid remained motionless, lying across him. Its heavy weight crushed into his chest, making it harder to breathe and worsening the agony. Grunting, he shoved the droid off and took shallow, rapid breaths to avoid the intense fire raging in his ribs.

A low laugh escaped his lips. Then another. Another and another came out until he was laughing maniacally. Like a crazy hermit. Each guffaw was like kindling to the flames burning in his chest. But he didn’t care. He was alive enough to appreciate the irony of his exploits. He’d barely escaped the pirates by acting like a marine, pilot, and captain all at once. Roles he hadn’t been trained for. Yet the very thing he was supposed to be an expert in—science and medicine—had almost spelled his doom.

The laughter soon faded. He still had plenty of time to kill himself searching for Lieutenant Vasquez. No need to end himself here before Eta-Five had its chance.

With one hand grasping the terminal, he pulled himself upright and hunched over the display. A small status report stated that the synth-bio unit’s shutdown had been completed successfully. He thought about scrapping his plan to bring Alpha to life, but he still needed an AI system alive on this ship to restore the repair bots and the T-drive.

This time, he’d try a different tack. He dragged Alpha’s unwieldy body across the deck. After setting the exam table upright, he pulled Alpha over it, one limb at a time. He secured Alpha’s hands and feet to the table with metal latches, all the while chiding himself for not trying this before.

Back at the terminal, he studied the holoscreen. He wouldn’t bring the whole unit to life again. Instead, he activated the data upload link to Alpha’s brain through the tether and initiated the upload of all the Argo’s intranet data. Everything from manuals and documentation regarding ship functions to research reports and literature and films began to transfer from the ship’s enormous database to the synth-bio brain.

It was a lifetime—multiple lifetimes—of knowledge being stuffed into Alpha’s mind.

A progress bar blinked across the holoscreen. The estimate indicated the upload would take almost three days. By that time, Tag hoped to be off the ship and headed to meet up with Vasquez. He was disappointed by the slow speed, but he had expected as much. From his preliminary tests, he knew the limitations of using biology-based computers prevented Alpha from downloading, uploading, and processing data as fast as standard hardware-based computers.

Still, he hoped his plan would work. The extra days connected to the tether would give Alpha’s brain time to mature and sort through the information. Maybe it would be able to gain enough self-awareness to understand what it was and to realize Tag truly didn’t mean it any harm. Maybe it would unravel the complexities of the T-drive and the Argo’s repair systems. That might be hoping for too much, but Tag had no idea what to realistically expect of Alpha’s capabilities.

In case Alpha’s brain was finally able to grasp English, Tag typed out a note on the terminal to the droid. He explained his actions in their first encounter and why he’d attempted to breathe life into the synth-bio droid. He wrote about the pirates’ attack and the world they’d found themselves on, along with his mission to find Lieutenant Vasquez and, hopefully, a way back to the SRES Montenegro. It felt strange. Writing this note was like penning a letter to a child he’d never had.

He left the lab. Once in the med bay, he locked the hatches to the lab in hopes that the extra security measures would stand up to Alpha if the droid woke in an uncontrollable rage and tore itself free from the manacles holding it to the exam table.

The next couple of days went by in a steady blur. Tag spent his time checking and rechecking his equipment for his adventure into the wild tundra of Eta-Five. He ensured his EVA suit’s wrist terminal was loaded with all the necessary information on Eta-Five, which turned out to be a disappointingly meager amount. From the Argo’s data stores, he scrounged up a rudimentary map and a pointer indicating where he would meet Lieutenant Vasquez. But other than that, he found little on expected weather patterns or the flora and fauna of the planet.

One look outside the bridge viewport made him think that maybe there was no such information to be had.

Weather: frigid, constantly.

Life: nothing except for a stranded medical officer and a killer synth-bio unit he’d created. Plus, he guessed, some crazy alien species Vasquez had foolishly decided to study here.

He shook his head. But the SRE navy wouldn’t have sent an anthropologist out to study a desolate planet full of some creatures strange enough to call this arctic paradise home. There must be something else here of interest that she hadn’t reported—or maybe it was just classified. Right?

He trod to the cargo bay and the pile of gear he’d gathered near the hatch. After donning the EVA suit he’d scrapped together, he took a deep breath and opened the hatch. The change in pressure threatened to pull him from the passageway and into the compromised cargo bay. He braced himself then rushed to drag the crates of emergency food and medical supplies, along with his weapons, into the cargo bay before sealing the hatch once again. Small gauges on his heads-up display within the EVA suit reported the air was a balmy -55 degrees Centigrade.

Snow and ice had blown in from the ruptured hull. He recognized a particular snowdrift as the air car, buried under the white fluff. The sensor arrays stated the oxygen concentration was 11.5 percent. That meant mental impairment and unbearable fatigue should Tag lose access to his EVA’s oxygen supply.

A shiver snuck through him. He wondered what would be worse, freezing to death or dying a slow death from oxygen deprivation. Neither seemed particularly intriguing. He forced himself past his morbid thoughts and unburied the air car. One by one, he loaded each of the crates and bags within the car.

Once the car was ready, he could delay the inevitable no longer. Vasquez, if she was still alive, would be waiting for the Argo. She’d no doubt be disappointed at the lackluster rendezvous committee, but at least Tag wouldn’t be abandoning her on Eta-Five. Who knew? Maybe she’d prefer to die with him aboard the Argo rather than being stuck out there in the snow and ice.

Tag ducked into the air car and started its engine. The car growled to life and pushed itself off the deck, hovering about a meter above the snow and ice blowing through the bay. Another push of a button activated the doors to the now-purposeless airlock of the Argo’s cargo bay. He drove into the waiting chamber and initiated the automatic depressurizing process. It didn’t take long given the ruptured cargo bay atmosphere already matched the low atmospheric pressure on Eta-Five.

The hatch opened, parting sideways. Snow and ice blew against the windshield, and Tag swore he could feel the icy chill despite the controlled atmosphere within the air car. Blue light flooded in, tinged by the strange clouds drifting overhead. Tag throttled the air car and burst out of the Argo, through an accumulating snow bank, and onto Eta-Five’s surface.

A small holoprojection glowed red near the windshield. It displayed his location along with that of the rendezvous point almost three hundred klicks away. He started the air car forward. Harsh winds shook and jostled the vehicle. His grip around the wheel tightened, and his arms strained as he fought against the strong wind’s attempt to throw him off course.

“Here I come, Vasquez,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “I hope you’ve got better news for me than I have for you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

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Through the polyglass windshield and windows, Tag gawked at the landscape expanding before him, where tall spires of rock and ice broke the waves of white snow drifts stretching to the horizon. Tornadoes of snow and frost spun under the green and blue flashes of lightning cracking from the blanket of clouds. Spears of sunlight from Eta periodically pierced through the dense cloud coverage, appearing like pathways straight to the heavens.

Each time a gust of harsh wind buffeted the air car, he struggled with the controls to keep the vehicle pointed toward the rendezvous point. He was helpless as a fly caught in a thunderstorm, but even surrounded by this dangerous new place and whatever mysteries it held, he couldn’t help feeling awe at the alien environment around him. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed a sky. It might not be filled with the azures and whites of an earth sky, but it was still a sky, not ribbed alloy corridors, bulkheads, and the occasional porthole with a view of distant stars.

No, for the first time since he’d left Earth on assignment with the Argo years ago, he was no longer trapped inside a spaceship or a space station. He was back in the wilderness. True, unadulterated wilderness.

Against every logical part of his brain telling him it was foolish, he wanted to jump out of the car and into that snow. He wanted to watch the white fluff trickle between his fingers. He wanted to know what it was like to have his boots on the ground. Real ground.

But his want to stay alive was stronger, and he remained in the air car, fighting against the wind.

Ice crystals pinged on the windshield. The constant tinkle of the little crystals and the howl of wind were his only companions as he drove between two towering spires. Their shadows loomed over him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching him and guarding this planet from intruders. That at any moment, they might come tumbling down to bury him in ice and rock.

A sigh of relief escaped his lips when he passed them without incident. Before him was an enormous, wide river. Its surface was frozen, but the ice was so clear he saw water moving far beneath it. The river snaked across his path. He guided the air car over it. Unsheltered by the ice and rock formations, the car shuddered. A strong blast of wind knocked it off course, and the car spun sideways.

Tag held tight to the controls while throttling the car. It shook and bucked, as if it were a living thing telling him to give up. To give in to the wind. That this planet would win any fight, any attempt to survive.

Adrenaline continued surging through his veins, making his fingers shake. He reminded himself to unclench his jaw, and he corrected his course once again to point westward, where a line of mountains protruded along the other side of the river. A small tributary led from the mountains to the river. It seemed to wind under the rock and ice spires near the mouth of a canyon.

He drove, following the tributary, and plunged into the canyon, taking shelter from the winds. His anxiety settled as the drive became easier and he could breathe normally again. He continued on for some time until he grew accustomed to the relative peace and loosened his grip on the steering controls. The small patches of sunlight that trickled through the clouds refracted through the icy formations that stretched over Tag like a tunnel. The light cast a blue, ethereal glow. It was a striking, beautiful vista. He couldn’t help wondering what all this would be like should the ice melt and the rivers flow free.

A distant rumble caught his ears, ending his daydreaming. He craned his neck, searching for the cause of the noise. But with the ice and rock stretching above him, he couldn’t see outside the narrow perspective granted to him at the bottom of the canyon. The rumble growled louder. His heart thundered against his injured ribs, and his nerves lit up. The rumble turned to a roar. It was as if Eta-Five was a giant waking from its slumbers, and it had found him, an intruder, lurking in its midst.

“What now?” Tag said, still looking for the source of the din.

Then he spotted it through a crack in the ice and rock. Distant plumes of soft white spurted into the blue, gray, and green sky, and he saw the tops of the mountains. They were shifting, moving. No, not the mountains. The snow.

“Avalanche!”

He saw no nearby shelter from the incoming snow and ice tumbling down the mountainside. There were only two options. Race back to the safety of the Argo? Or risk going forward, making progress, and closing the gap to the rendezvous?

Tag didn’t spend time deliberating and put the car in full throttle. The vehicle shot forward, racing between crags of ice and rock through the ravine. The roar of the avalanche grew louder and louder. Almost deafening. Ice and snow zipped past him in a blur of white and blue. He hunched over the controls, sweat dripping over his forehead, but he didn’t take his hands off the controls to clear it, choosing instead to race on.

A massive crack echoed around him. It sounded as though lightning had blasted into the ground near him. But this was no arc of electricity. A tidal wave of snow exploded through the ice and stone formations along the tributary. The avalanche quickly filled the gully behind him and rolled after him.

And it was gaining.

He curved around a rock sticking up from the frozen river. Every time he maneuvered to avoid an obstacle, he lost a bit of forward velocity. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make him worry.

Snow and ice piled behind him. He kept the car at full throttle. The edge of the tsunami of snow, ice, and rocks was meters from the rear of the car.

He stared through the windshield before him, ready to dodge the next obstacle. But when he could, he stole a glance through the towering ice and rock structures, looking for any exit. Any way out. Anything to avoid being devoured by Eta-Five.

Then he heard something else—an almost deafening explosion and a flash of light.

His pupils adjusted to the rapid change, and he twisted the controls when he saw a boulder sitting in his path. The side of the car scraped against the rock, letting out a jarring noise. The air car bobbed, knocked off its hovering trajectory.

Another blast echoed over the ravine, through the tunnel of snow and rock, and pierced the cacophony of the avalanche. Whatever was responsible for that explosive sound, Tag hoped he didn’t have to face it. He had enough to worry about with the oncoming avalanche.

The meager headlights of the air car illuminated his path forward, no longer shining over solid, craggy rocks.

There it was! An exit from the icy tunnel!

The jumble of snow and ice was still chasing him, rumbling. He dodged another icy stalagmite and a patch of sharp rocks. Then the tunnel spit him out. Snow and ice sprayed behind him as the power of the avalanche dissipated, and it spread over the terrain Tag found himself in. He was free from the avalanche, free from its hungry chase.

But it didn’t take long for fear to etch its way into his mind again. He saw now what had caused the deafening blasts and what must have been responsible for starting the avalanche in the first place.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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It was the most terrifying thunderstorm Tag had ever seen. Arcs of blue and green lightning webbed across the sky as if the whole atmosphere was cracking and falling apart in shards. The vicious light show exploded in volleys over the tundra, followed by deafening, throaty rumbles that seemed to crash on Tag from all sides at once. He pressed on through the terrifying display.

The occasional mammoth stalagmite of ice and rock broke the rolling landscape. Snowdrifts rolled over the terrain like ever-shifting sand dunes. It was almost as if the canyon had delivered him to a brilliant white desert.

Wind howled over the air car, carrying with it a strange mixture of fist-sized hail and snow. Tag winced each time an ice chunk slammed into the car. The vehicle was made to withstand small-arms fire and take a beating exploring unknown territories, but he still found it difficult to believe it would survive the pounding it was enduring now.

Each smack of hail against the car echoed in the cabin like the concussive blast of an energy cannon. Still, those noises paled in comparison to the roar of thunder tearing through the heavens as another barrage of lightning danced across the tundra. The thunder resonated through the car and into the wheel, shaking Tag’s fingers.

Or maybe it was just fear causing his fingers to tremble. This display of raw power terrified him almost more than the pirates had. He watched icy spires fall apart in the blasts of wind as more waves of snow shifted, falling in sheets from the mountains behind him.

His eyes scanned the holoprojection from the air car’s terminal. He needed shelter, protection. Anything.

The bare-bones map hardly gave accurate contour lines. It was next to useless. All he really saw was the glaring red dot that signified the rendezvous point with Vasquez, giving him nothing else to do but point the car in that direction.

A gust of wind caught the car, so powerful and harsh that it threw the vehicle onto the ground and off its hovering path. The crunch of metal against ice made Tag wince, and he braced himself as the wind picked up the car and tossed it toward a crumbling stalagmite. He strained against the relentless winds. But he found he couldn’t fight it. The effort was futile.

Instead, he directed the car perpendicular to the wind’s vector. As it pushed him sideways, at least he could move forward or backward enough to dodge the formidable ice and rock formations. He continued like this, battered by the elements, making slow progress. When the winds died down—which they seemed to do infrequently—he powered the car across the snowy plain, desperate to reach some modicum of shelter. Somewhere to wait out this storm.

It appeared as if the tundra would never end. Nor would the storm. More lightning exploded overhead, and thunder assaulted his eardrums. He almost let out a maniacal laugh, barely containing his own sanity. Who in the three hells is Vasquez trying to study on this planet? he wondered. How could anything live here? Eta-Five was like a hungry animal itself, ready to chew life up and spit it out.

Tag wondered if he’d ever actually find Vasquez alive. Maybe she’d been buried by the snow and ice long ago. There would be no evidence she’d ever been here. Maybe everything was pointless.

But as he pressed on, struggling and desperate, the storm soon gave way to a strangely peaceful calm. Snow still fell, but only in gentle waves. Winds carried the snowflakes, allowing them to dance across the car’s windshield. And gentle snowflakes were the only things the winds seem to carry now. The gusts became soft whispers over the car, no longer intent on smashing it against the impressive stalagmites. The cloud cover remained but dissipated enough to let that characteristic Eta-Five ethereal blue glow of light bathe the planet.

From hell to heaven in minutes.

Tag chugged onward, wondering how long his luck would hold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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The allure of being under an open sky and outside a cramped ship no longer held the same power over Tag. Eta-Five had attempted to kill him too many times in the past several hours for him to enjoy the solitude of night settling over the planet.

The light filtering through the clouds slowly dissipated. One of Eta-Five’s three moons peeked through a small gap in the cloud coverage, casting a ghoulish glow over the tundra. Tag’s stomach growled, and his eyelids drooped. Without adrenaline surging through him, every muscle seemed fatigued and cramped from his constant battle against the elements.

And still, he had more than one hundred klicks to go until he reached the rendezvous point. He couldn’t let exhaustion defeat him. He didn’t know what dangers lurked in the night. Trying to steal sleep here on the snowdrifts meant a storm could catch him unaware. It would only take a few seconds for those powerful winds to dash the air car against a spire of rocks and ice.

The snow seemed supernaturally bright. Almost beautiful. Almost. Tag was now well accustomed to the dangers that lurked within that beauty.

He increased the intensity of the car’s headlights, and swathes of light broke through the murkiness in front of the hovering vehicle. He drove on, listening to the hum of the engine and the whistle of the wind. As he stared off in the distance, the drive became almost hypnotic, the landscape blurring together.

His head drooped and nodded forward, his chin tucked to his chest. He jolted himself awake and tried to shake the sleepiness off, but his aching limbs and injuries urged him to rest. Instead, he parked the air car, allowing it to hover in place. He told himself he wouldn’t stand still for long. He dug through his supplies and found a packet of dehydrated swill the SRE navy generously called coffee.

He emptied the packet into a self-heating thermos and then added water. The first sip of coffee started to revitalize him. Warmth spread from his esophagus and stomach through his chest and limbs as he downed the hot drink.

“Why did you come here, Vasquez?” he asked Eta-Five, shaking his head.

Most extraterrestrial anthropologist missions were shrouded in secrecy. Who knew what new technologies or races existed that the SRE navy might be able to adapt for its own uses? It seemed the policy was to study new lifeforms—or investigate the possibility of new lifeforms—on distant planets and only tell the general populace what they’d found if the aliens or technologies turned out to be useless to the SRE. Tag knew it was a sad state of colonial expansion, but what could you do?

He took another gulp of coffee.

Too many groups had tried to rebel and splinter off from the SRE precisely because they’d found some ancient alien technology or found new alien allies they could use to defeat the SRE. In fact, that was how the SRE had subverted power from the United Nations. The discovery of a ship with faster-than-light capabilities changed the face of interstellar exploration, communications, and warfare in one fell swoop. The SRE had been the lucky lottery winners to find the ship, develop the technology for human ships, and use it to overwhelm the UN on Earth. The UN had had no choice but to let the SRE envelop them.

And the SRE had certainly suffered its fair share of strife. Plenty of smaller colonies and corporations, especially those that thought they were safe at the outskirts of distant solar systems, had tried their hand at rebellion. Tag wondered if the pirates he’d encountered were part of some group determined to antagonize the SRE through guerilla warfare. They could just as easily be profiteering vagabonds, but their power armor suits and weapons seemed to indicate they were more advanced than that. Maybe they too had found some powerful alien technology. They might be gearing up for a war against the SRE.

Tag’s eyes searched the distant gray horizon as the car pushed forward. A wind picked up, jostling the vehicle sideways. But it wasn’t a tenth as strong or frightening as earlier. He settled back into his seat and took a sip of coffee.

Three hells, maybe those pirates had discovered something on Eta-Five. Something here that they didn’t want the SRE to have—or even know about. That might explain their ruthless determination to destroy anyone and anything SRE when they attacked the Argo. A sinking feeling threatened to overwhelm him. He prayed they hadn’t already gotten to Vasquez.

His thoughts whirred between these theories cropping up in his mind. Why were they here? He still saw no evidence of anything remotely useful on this planet other than the anomalous atmospheric shielding. Maybe the planet itself could be used as a goddamned weapon. Lure travelers and explorers to its surface and let the unforgiving weather do its business.

Tag laughed. In between the mixture of exhaustion and caffeine, he found the thought more humorous than he knew he should. But then a light glimmered in the distance.

He squinted, leaning forward in his seat. Was that a star just above the horizon?

No, no. It was too low for that. There, again! His heart leapt. Definitely a light. A bluish-purple light. It wavered and swayed. Maybe it was just the snow and moonlight playing tricks on his eyesight.

He gave the car more power. He shouldn’t be racing so quickly through the dark, even with the aid of his headlights. But curiosity urged him on.

The blue-purple light became larger as he approached. Excitement coursed through him. Then he cursed at himself and killed the headlights.

Damn it, Brewer, he thought. Letting curiosity get the better of you.

Maybe that light belonged to the pirates. To whatever they were hiding out here. And here he came, driving over the shadowy landscape with headlights glaring. He could see the blue-purple light easily enough, so there was no reason someone or something hadn’t already seen him. He slowed the air car on his approach. The eerie glow seemed to be emanating from between a couple of icy stalagmites. As he grew closer, he spotted what looked like steam rising from the glowing spot. Then he realized the glow wasn’t coming from a light source he could readily see.

Rather, it was light flooding from an opening, like the front door of a house open in the middle of the night. He eyed the map. He should turn back. Give this strange spot a wide berth. He still had some ways to go to hit the rendezvous point.

But what if the map was wrong? What if this was the rendezvous point? Maybe Vasquez had set up some kind of signal. Undoubtedly she knew how difficult it would be for a search crew to find her in the intermittent blizzards sweeping across Eta-Five.

Tag decided caution would still be best. Instead of driving straight up to this tunnel, he paused farther away. He scrounged a pair of binoc lenses from his supplies and took a closer look.

As he’d suspected, the tunnel jutted from deep underground. He had been surprised the snow didn’t simply clog the entrance to this glowing underworld, but the steam rising in wispy twists gave some possible explanation. Wherever that tunnel led, it was warm. Hot, even. Tag continued his path around the tunnel to see if he could find a good vantage point. Maybe if he found the right position, he could get a better idea of where it led.

He started the hover car up the side of a large snow drift.

A loud bang shook the vehicle. His head slammed forward into the wheel. His vision blurred, and the car smashed into the snowbank. White fluff exploded everywhere and rained down over the windshield. The car stalled. Tag unlatched his restraints, and he stood, wobbling, ready to figure out what had happened.

Was this a storm picking back up? He hadn’t felt the winds.

Blue lights pulsed outside and splashed against the car. The vehicle shook, and Tag fell, crashing to the floor. This wasn’t a storm. This was an attack.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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Tag dug through his pack and grabbed one of the mini-Gauss rifles. He strapped a few extra magazines to his EVA suit. Another volley of small-arms fire walloped the car, and a light flashed on the car’s HUD warning that the engines had died.

“No shit,” Tag said, gritting his teeth. So much for the air car standing up to small-arms fire. He took shelter behind a few of his supply packs. The space was cramped, but without the normal ten-man crew the vehicle could accommodate, he still had room to maneuver around the cramped hold area. He peeked out of the rear window.

The gunfire had ceased.

No telltale muzzle flashes signaled the whereabouts of his attackers. He considered his options. Stay in the car: the vehicle might crumple under more fire, and he’d be a sitting duck. It wasn’t going anywhere now. But running on foot wouldn’t be great either; he'd be leaving most of his supplies behind, and trying to lose his ambushers in the snow would probably make him lose his own bearings.

Screw it, Tag thought. I didn’t make it through everything else to die in a damn air car.

He stormed out of the vehicle and pressed the mini-Gauss’s stock to his shoulder, scanning the horizon with his barrel as he tried to sight up his enemies. A flash of blue fire shuddered from near the base of a stalagmite. He squeezed the trigger and returned a volley.

Slugs lanced into the spire. Sheets of ice fell and exploded on the ground. Shards flew, deadly as any manmade shrapnel. Tag rushed to the cover of another spire. He tried to peer through the darkness and sought any moving shapes or more gunfire but found nothing.

Dashing across the tundra and continuing toward the rendezvous point would mean he’d have to run straight through patches with almost no cover. But what else could he do? Go into that tunnel?

Streams of pulsefire peppered the stalagmite he hid behind. A slow groan grew louder, and the pillar started to topple sideways. He jumped and dove into the snow to avoid it. His grip loosened around his mini-Gauss, and it skidded away from him, burying itself in the snow. The spire hit the ground with a whoomph. Snow and ice sprayed up in a frosty cloud. Fragments of rock and ice pinged against his EVA suit. The ground trembled.

Then he heard something else—footsteps crunching over the snow. He scrambled to recover his weapon, his gloved fingers stretching, desperate to reach the gun. Blue bursts melted the snow around him, and he ducked behind the fallen stalagmite. If he couldn’t grab the mini-Gauss, he was at least thankful he’d ransacked the Argo marine’s EVA suit. He pulled out a pulse pistol from his holster.

Jumping up from cover, he wheeled the gun around on the first moving shape he spotted. He squeezed the trigger in rapid bursts, orange pulsefire cutting through the darkness. Most of the rounds sputtered uselessly into snow and ice. But one hit his target.

The attacker fell, holding their leg, and Tag was aiming for a finishing blow when an incoming volley spattered the stalagmite. He crouched and crept to another point. These people wouldn’t finish him off without a fight. If they weren’t going to let him run, they would go down with him.

He peeked around another broken chunk of ice, and he saw someone rushing to aid the fallen attacker. Sending a spray of pulsefire, he warded them off. A responding barrage hit his position.

Then a sobering thought surged past his adrenaline-fueled anger: he’d cut down someone with pulsefire.

The pirates’ armor had easily withstood such small-arms fire aboard the Argo, as his crew had found out with devastating results. So why had he so easily sent that person sprawling with a weak pulse-pistol shot?

It felt as though an icy arrow had stabbed through Tag’s heart. Who were these attackers? Did they belong to the group of pirates but have less advanced technology for some odd reason—or were they someone else entirely?

He gasped in shallow breaths, confusion eating at his mind. It would be yet another ironic twist for his terrifying adventure if he’d actually attacked people who were going to help him. If Vasquez had been sent to this planet, there must have been some friendly groups somewhere.

More gunfire cracked into the stalagmite. He crawled behind it, staying out of sight. The shots were wild, desperate. Things started to click together in his mind. Another possible explanation crept from amid the confusion even as more blue pulses screamed through the air. These people were trying desperately to keep him from something. Maybe, just maybe, they were on the lookout for those armored pirates just like him.

But how could he know for sure? He peered through a crack in the ice and trained his pulse pistol on one of the dark shadows moving across the snow. With doubt weighing so heavily on his mind, he couldn’t squeeze the trigger. His conscience nagged at him, begged for him to confirm he wasn’t just shooting down people trying to defend themselves against the same foe the Argo had fought.

He twisted and peered at the tundra behind him. Running was still an option. He might get lucky. They might not see him running over the tundra. They might not pursue him, and their shots might miss at such a range. But then what would he do for food and water? He could die of dehydration out there before ever even getting close to Vasquez’s rendezvous point. All of his supplies, all of his equipment were aboard the wrecked air car.

Taking a deep breath, Tag puffed out his chest and holstered his pistol. Maybe he’d die like this, too. But if he was going to die anyway, at least he’d get some answers first. These people might turn out to be allies, and if not, there was always the possibility of negotiation.

Tag clicked a button on his EVA suit so his voice boomed out of an external speaker. “This is Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer of the SRES Argo. I want to talk.”

Silence. No more gunfire. Could it be as he’d thought? It was time to face these people: friend, foe, or somewhere in between. With his hands raised, he slowly stood.

“Let’s settle this peacefully. I am—”

An arc of blue flashed. A wet pain struck through Tag’s shoulder, and he went down hard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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Air whooshed out of the singed hole in Tag’s suit, and he desperately threw his gloved hand over the puncture. Atmosphere and steam bled out between his fingers, freezing in contact with the frigid air. It looked like a shower of icy sparks sputtering from his EVA suit. Blood seeped out over his shoulder, oozing out in dark, crimson streaks that trickled over his chest and upper arm, hardening like cooling lava with the frigid air.

“I ... am ... not ...” He tried to yell into his mic again. But his voice was sucked out of him by the intense cold permeating his suit. It turned out he was going to die anyway. I failed you, Vasquez.

Through the whistle of escaping air, he heard crunching footsteps. To finish me off, he thought. With one hand clenched over the injury, his fingers crept toward his holstered pistol. He curled his fingers around the pistol’s grip and pulled it unsteadily from the holster. It wavered in the air before him. Painful tremors shook his limb as he tried to hold the weapon straight. A slight pinch bit at his flesh as the EVA suit administered a low dose of painkillers. Enough to reduce the pain, but not enough to stop it. A dose of anticoagulants and regen-flesh stimulants flowed through the needle next, and he prayed they would work fast enough to stop the bleeding and begin the healing process. Let him at least fight off whoever dared take him down.

The first person showed up at the end of the fallen icy spire. Tag leveled his pistol and squeezed the trigger. The bright pulse shot went high. The person continued their approach, aiming their own weapon. They barked something at him. Something incomprehensible. It sounded more like radio static than language.

Tag crawled closer to the stalagmite so his back was against the ice. He pulled himself upright, and the additional bracing helped steady his arm. He aimed at the attacker once more.

But a flash of pulsefire crashed into his pistol. The weapon rocketed from his hand, spinning through the air, and landed uselessly several meters away. His fingers trembled from the impact, but he held them in front of his face. All five were still there.

A hand grabbed his uninjured shoulder, and someone thrust a pistol into his face. He turned to see two more individuals staring down at him over the barrels of their weapons.

He looked upon the victors’ faces, and his whole body went weak before flushing with anger. He recognized those orange visors and the black armor. The leg pieces and arms weren’t as thin or sleek as those of the invaders on the Argo, but there was no doubt that the armor worn by these people had come from the same place. The pirates.

A curse echoed through Tag’s mind. He’d taken mercy on these people because of his damned conscience. And what had that accomplished?

His vision started to blur. His nose was numb, and he was losing feeling in his fingers. A mixture of sweat and tears from the cold froze along his face. Two of the pirates lifted him to his feet. Another stood in front, holding his leg, limping. The one he’d shot. There were three total. That was it. He could’ve taken them. He could’ve ended this.

The one limping hissed static at the other two. They in turn hissed their own static-like responses. It seemed like they were actually having a conversation. But Tag couldn’t hope to follow it. Maybe he was delirious, losing oxygen. The limping one holstered its weapon, and the trio began dragging Tag through the snow.

Tag resisted and writhed in their grip. He pried at one of the pirates’ gloved fingers around his shoulder. But his strength was flagging. None of his struggling or twisting seemed to perturb them. He continued fighting, but his hope started to fade as he watched the trail his body left in the snow. The air car, crashed in the snowbank, was now bleeding slow tendrils of smoke and atmosphere.

He’d failed. He’d never make it to the rendezvous point in time. Vasquez would be stuck out here, marooned like him. Left to wonder what had happened to her promised exit from this planet. If her years spent on Eta-Five were anything like Tag’s past couple of days, she’d be dying to leave—maybe even literally.

His captors paused near the tunnel glowing blue and purple. The winds here died down. Sensors on Tag’s suit reported the temperature had already risen to a considerable -15 degrees Centigrade at the tunnel’s entrance. He forced himself to his knees, ready to sprint. One of the pirates let out another burst of static. The other two responded in kind, and one shoved Tag back to the ground. The one with the limp bent in front of Tag. The man held a small device, shaped like a pistol. He held it out and rotated it for Tag to examine.

Tag cocked his head, unsure what the pirate was trying to demonstrate. “What do you want? If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”

The pirate let out a burst of scratchy noises in response.

“I can’t understand a damn thing you’re saying.”

The pirate shook his head, then pressed the small pistol device to the hole in the shoulder of the suit. He pulled the trigger, and Tag cringed, ready for another pulse round at point-blank range. Instead, the device sprayed some kind of sticky polymer over the hole. The individual strands melded together and clotted the atmosphere-leaking hole. Pressure levels in the suit returned to normal, and the temperature stabilized.

“Keeping me alive to torture me later?” Tag asked.

The injured pirate made a barking sound that sounded like laughing. Tag was growing more and more nervous about the lack of communication between himself and his captors. Technologies existed to encrypt friendly voice comms so enemies couldn’t understand. He wondered if that was what they were using. Maybe they intended to use him as a hostage or prisoner. A spark of hope shimmered somewhere in the dark recesses of Tag’s mind.

It made sense. They probably did plan on letting him go—or at least bargaining for his life. They wouldn’t want him to run away with any secrets, which was why they were encrypting their comms now.

They’d had the entire Argo and its crew at their disposal. And they’d been hell bent on destroying all SRE life aboard the ship.

Tag didn’t have long to consider before he felt the jab of a pulse pistol in his back. One of the encrypted voices of the pirates uttered a command. He didn’t need to make sense of the words to understand the man wanted him to move. They marched him through the tunnel.

But what use was he to them, really?

“What do you want from me?” he demanded.

Again, they ignored him as they trudged deeper underground.

Small rocks glowed blue and purple on the wall. The more he studied them, the more he realized they weren’t rocks at all but rather, some kind of strange, puffy plant or mold. Each shone brightly and gave the tunnel the ephemeral appearance he had spotted from several klicks away.

Larger glowing plants blocked segments of the tunnel like curtains. The pirates pushed past the multicolored fronds and continued. Tag felt his jaw go slack at the sight of each. If he hadn’t thought his life was in peril, he might’ve taken the time to admire the luminous flora guiding their path. His sensors reported increasing temperatures, until they’d surpassed the freezing point. Even the oxygen levels were rising the deeper they went. His shoulder throbbed in pain, more and more, as his adrenaline and shock wore off. After they’d been trudging for long enough that the novelty of the glowing plants had worn off, he felt ready to beg these pirates for some kind of painkiller. The EVA suit’s dosage was enough to jumpstart the healing process. But the suit was built to keep its user aware, carefully regulating what it administered so as not to render its user senseless and high. It wouldn’t administer any more painkillers unless he was allowed to override the controls.

He thought of all the emergency supplies he could use sitting aboveground in his air car. If only he could take these three down. He eyed the limping pirate’s holstered pistol. It wouldn’t be too hard to subdue him, but how would he deal with the other two? Especially with his injury—he wasn’t sure he could prevail in hand-to-hand combat.

They carried on through the hanging, bioluminescent plants through the tunnel. Tag mulled over various plans, lost deep in thought. But when a warm wind rustled his suit, all plans of escape and worries about his injury dissipated. His eyes went wide, and even his heart seemed to stop.

What he saw next he never would’ve expected on a planet as frozen and dead as Eta-Five.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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A soft beep within Tag’s EVA suit signaled that the atmosphere here was amenable to human life. Oxygen and temperatures were at acceptable, in fact comfortable, levels. But it wasn’t the suitability of the environment that shocked him.

The tunnel opened into a vast chamber. No, not a chamber. Another world entirely. The landscape sloped deep into the belly of Eta-Five, and Tag couldn’t even see the end of this mammoth cave. Huge, tree-like plants sprouted in columns taller and wider than Earth redwoods. Their leaves, like those of the plants hanging from the ceiling or growing along the ground, glowed in light blues, dark purples, and vibrant reds. Wind whispered through those bright, enormous leaves. And the breeze wasn’t the only sound.

Calls, vaguely like Earth birds’, sang out in melodic choruses. Some birdsongs came across as lonesome wails, while others were high-pitched sopranos rising and falling along musical scales. Somewhere in the distance came the rush of a waterfall and a river coursing over rocks. Tag thought he heard a more rhythmic noise, like that of a drumbeat. Low and steady.

A bird broke through the tree canopy, squawking and flapping six wings. A long, feathery tail drifted behind it, and its white feathers seemed to reflect the glow of the multicolored leaves it passed. Everywhere Tag looked, there was a strange insect or intriguing plant beyond his earthly imagination. The place was teeming with life. An underground jungle with sufficient bioluminescence to make it seem like day and more than enough biodiversity to rival the most beautiful of Earth’s rainforests.

A pistol jabbed at Tag’s back and broke him from his awestruck trance. The harsh realities of his captivity and injury flooded back. He held his injured shoulder, and the pirates guided him through a path between the enormous tree trunks.

“What is this place?” he cried.

He was met with more responses from his captors that sounded like hisses and static.

Maybe, if he took off through the shrubs and tangled roots, he could lose the pirates in the dense foliage. But one of them seemed to sense his thoughts. The pirate grabbed his upper arm and forced him to continue with them. They soon made it to a clearing. A multitude of metal structures had been constructed around the glowing plain. The structures were squat and square shaped, lined up in rows like a miniature city, decidedly out of place and crass in the woodland. A few vehicles, strangely shaped, were parked on the waving grass. Dark shapes moved between the vehicles and structures.

Tag thought they were wearing suits like his captors.

As they drew closer, he realized he’d been mistaken. Most weren’t wearing full armor suits.

And they weren’t human.

His knees buckled, and he almost crumpled. The pirate holding his arm tugged him and barked at him in his shrill, incomprehensible voice. The people around him weren’t any kind of people Tag had ever seen. They wore fitted black pants, but their bodies were covered with a short layer of black fur.

And their limbs. Each arm seemed to bend at angles that made Tag cringe. No human, without considerable genetic modification, could ever exhibit that flexibility. Their fingers were long and thin, moving as if they were jointed like a snake’s spine.

He wasn’t the only one that was staring. They gazed back at him, pausing whatever they were doing, their yellow lizard-like eyes calmly measuring him up. A shiver snuck through him. Their faces appeared almost reptilian, except for the fur. No external ears poked off the sides of their skulls—just small holes in the sides of their heads. They had no prominent noses, though Tag spied slits he could only assume were nostrils. Long, thin lips cut across their faces. They looked like some peculiar amalgam of human and snake.

One of Tag’s captors waved at an approaching snake-person with a single working eye. The other eye appeared glossy and scarred over, along with the rest of its battered face. The scarred snake-person opened its mouth, and something between a hiss and a series of clicks echoed out.

The pirate took off its helmet. Its face appeared just like that of the other people milling around this underground base. It shoved Tag forward, and the scarred snake-person caught him. He hissed then turned, leading Tag abruptly away from the three suited people. The other two had taken off their helmets and trudged back to one of the dark metal buildings.

“Where are you taking me?” Tag asked the snake-person, his voice coming out raspy.

The snake-person looked at Tag with its one good eye narrowed. It gave no vocal response but continued guiding Tag. It motioned for him to remove his helmet. But Tag didn’t trust these people, and he didn’t trust the sensors. Just because there was enough oxygen in the air didn’t mean there wasn’t some unknown poison waiting to kill him.

Yet as the snake-person guided him away from the base and onto another path, Tag got the feeling this person didn’t want to harm him. The snake-person had one hand on his shoulder, but it didn’t squeeze. There was no pistol pressed to his back.

Something else bothered him. He felt eyes watching him from between the branches and vines. But everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but glowing plants or large insect-like creatures meandering over the underbrush.

While Tag heard more birdcalls, buzzing insects, and gurgling water, there was another sound growing louder. It seemed like the rhythmic drumbeat he’d heard earlier was becoming more intense and furious with each step they took.

The pounding of the drums grew louder. Each beat reverberated in his chest and made him wince. The roar of a waterfall grew in concert with the drumming. The cacophony became loud enough to pierce Tag’s EVA suit, and he cringed, wishing he could put his hands over his ears. He almost thought about taking off his helmet so he could do just that, but he couldn’t bring himself to trust this snake-person, or the atmosphere.

They soon passed by the noise’s source. Tag expected to see the snake-people situated in some kind of odd drum circle. Instead, there was only a giant machine. Primitive, really. It was constructed of timber that appeared to have been cut from the luminescent trees of the underground rain forest. The waterfall powered a wooden water wheel. As the wheel spun, it activated a large arm with a counterweight. The arm acted as a drumstick and pounded against a massive leather hide stretched taut. The entire drumhead seemed at least eight meters across. Tag’s mouth went agape—the hide consisted of a single piece of leather. He'd hate to run into the creature that hide had come from.

The snake-person didn’t seem a bit distracted by the contraption. He guided Tag onward as they trudged over fallen leaves and snaking roots. They left the racket of the drum-machine behind and started winding through a narrower path. Tag definitely felt eyes on him now. He could see shapes flit between the trees. But these shapes were shorter and squatter than the snake-people.

Must be another alien race, Tag thought. His senses and mind were overloaded by so many new sights and sounds. He was certain the scent of this foreign environment would overwhelm him should he finally take his helmet off.

But every foreign creature and plant he’d seen so far hadn’t prepared him for what stood waiting for him at the end of the path.

A woman. A real, human woman.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

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She stood there with a half smirk and wore a standard-issue SRE bodysuit with the sleeves and legs cut short. Dried white paint with red stripes covered her skin, and she peered at him with gleaming brown eyes beneath the face paint. Her coffee-colored hair was tied up, presumably to cope with the heat of the jungle. Tag felt an almost unquenchable urge to run to her, as if they were old friends. He hadn’t expected the overwhelming emotions flooding him at the sight of another human being, alive and in front of him. But he restrained himself.

“You’re the anthropologist. The lieutenant. Dr. Sofia Vasquez,” Tag managed.

“Yeah, that sounds a bit pretentious. Just call me Sofia.” With no EVA mask of her own, he could clearly see the shallow furrows in her brow when she said, “Welcome to the Forest of Light on Eta-Five.”

“Aptly named,” Tag said, still in shock.

“Sure is. There’s no such thing as day or night down here. It’s like staying at a hotel in New Vegas on the main strip. And as much as I’m looking forward to getting back to Earth and doing some vacationing, I thought I had another two days before rendezvous. Or did I not properly keep track of the time?”

“Yes ... yes ... that’s right,” Tag said. Words jumbled over his tongue as he struggled for what to say next. So much had happened, and he had so many questions. But he figured he’d start with the most immediate. He turned to the scarred snake-person and then back to the woman. “These people tried to kill me. Are they friendly to you?”

The woman laughed. “Friendly isn’t the word I’d use to describe them in the colloquial sense.”

Tag stepped back from the snake-person.

“But don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll hurt you.”

“They already shot me!” Tag said.

The snake-person’s mouth opened, and he emitted a series of rushed noises that sounded vaguely like words. Vasquez’s eyes went wide as if she understood what he was saying. She held her hands out in a supplicating gesture. “Ah, there must’ve been some mistake then, yes?”

The snake-person’s nostrils flared, and more mangled words escaped his lips. Tag stared at him with his brow scrunched. He tried to discern the snake-person’s intent to no avail.

Vasquez must’ve seen his expression. “Ah, wait a second.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small device. “Still got a few backups. No good ET anthropologist leaves home without one.”

Tag held out his gloved hand, and she dropped the tiny device into it. He recognized its purpose.

“Need to take that helmet off first,” she said.

The moment of truth. Tag undid the latches under his helmet and lifted it. He took a timid breath. Just enough to test the air. Nothing tasted poisonous, and Vasquez seemed to be fine. He sucked in deeper and almost choked on the sweetness. All the smells of the foliage and fresh water and rich soil overwhelmed him, and he coughed.

“Ah, I never forgot my first breath,” Vasquez said. “Intoxicating, isn’t it?”

Tag tried to nod as he recovered from his coughing fit. Once he breathed normally again and realized he wouldn’t suffocate, he placed the small device Vasquez had given him in his ear canal. It fit snugly and, once in place, emitted a short hiss of static. Then it went quiet.

“Is this thing working?” he asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me, human,” the snake-person said, glaring at him.

Tag almost jumped in surprise. He calmed his hammering heart and looked back at the snake-person. “Can you ... can you understand me?”

He thought he saw the snake-person roll his good eye. “Of course. Our technology is far more sophisticated than yours. It’s simple enough to pick up on the primitive nuances of human languages.”

With that settled, Tag’s mind raced. “What do you intend to do with me?”

The snake-person held a slender hand over his narrow chest. “Me? I’d prefer to have nothing to do with you. But Sofia insisted we bring you down as soon as we realized you were a human.” The snake-person shrugged. “Surprised to see you here at all, to be honest.”

Tag looked for a further explanation, but the snake-person didn’t give him one.

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” Sofia paused, cocked her head, and squinted at the name badge on his EVA suit. “Lieutenant Commander Brewer, chief medical officer. Not a name I recognize from the rendezvous committee.”

“Like you said, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” Tag was ready to start his story, but Sofia held a hand up.

“We really can’t get into this now.” She motioned to her painted body. “If we don’t make our hosts happy, there won’t be time to tell stories.”

“But—”

A sardonic grin crossed her face, and she nodded at the snake-person. “No, really, we can’t leave them waiting. Just ask Coren how he got his scars.”

The snake-person, Coren, made no reply, staying straight lipped and serious.

Tag couldn’t tell if he should believe Sofia. “I take it you didn’t come to this planet to study his people.”

Coren let out a gruff exhalation that sounded derisive to Tag. “Study us? Ha, not on this damned planet.”

“Then—”

“Come on,” Sofia said, leading them on. She gave Tag a grave look. “You need to be quiet from here on out. Not a goddamned word unless I tell you. Got it?”

Tag nodded. “Understood.”

“There’s a catch to you being here. And the only way you’ll live is if you do exactly what I say.”

Tag frowned at Coren. “I thought you weren’t going to hurt me.”

“Not me. Not my people,” Coren said.

“Let’s move,” Vasquez said. “We don’t have much time, and I’ve got to introduce you to the Forinths.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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A low humming sounded around the woods. It was like the buzzing of insect wings, but Tag swore it was coming from the round shapes shadowing them from the trees. He tried to get a better look at these beings, but they seemed to fade into the foliage every time he thought he’d spotted one. As they walked, he worked on the wrist terminal interface of the EVA suit, overriding the controls for the healing salve and painkiller doses. The cool wave of both concoctions flowing through his vessels made his shoulders relax, and he sighed with relief. But his mind continued whirring at a breakneck pace.

He had questions, so many questions, for Sofia and Coren. But the expression on Sofia’s face had made the warning quite clear. He trudged behind her, holding his aching shoulder and wondering when he’d finally get some answers.

Tag walked near Sofia. She grabbed his upper arm, puffed out her chest, and marched with determination.

From the corner of her mouth, she spoke. “This is going to be weird. You’re going to be scared. But just don’t say anything or scream or anything. Don’t protest. Don’t struggle. They’re going—”

She stopped mid-sentence and started humming a low, sweeping melody. Coren joined in, looking straight ahead.

Tag was confused but attempted to display only stoicism in his expression and gait. The song Coren and Sofia sang was accompanied by several other voices. Through his periphery, Tag tried to identify the source of the swelling chorus, but once again, he saw only shadows moving between the tree trunks and shrubbery.

The other voices grew and bolstered the haunting melody. Goosebumps formed along Tag’s skin. It wasn’t from the temperature. Gods, no. Definitely not the temperature. As they marched on, as the voices began to crescendo, the air grew thick with hot humidity and the rotten stink of sulfur. Sweat matted Sofia’s dark hair, and beads rolled down her neck. But she made no move to wipe them. Perspiration dripped over Tag’s face. An instinctual urge begged him to clear the sweat, but Sofia’s warnings echoed in his mind. He carried on, silent and anxious.

Soon the pathway opened to a clearing. The wide space wasn’t illuminated by luminescent grass or glowing fronds. The soil was barren and dark. In the middle of the open circle was a single mound. But it was no innocuous bump in the dirt. A hole, at least ten meters across, belched steam and yellow gas. Orange and red light flickered from it like a fire was burning from within.

A volcano, Tag thought. Small, sure. But a volcano nonetheless.

Tag had to remind himself to breathe. He sucked in a mouthful of air. It was wretched. A metallic taste lingered in his mouth with each inhalation. The closer they came to the incipient volcano, the louder the music from the woods became. Soon it was no longer humming but unbridled singing. The melodic voices rang out with a rich range, from the deepest lows to the highest highs. The music almost carried Tag away, threatening to put him into a stupor.

But he reminded himself he was in danger. Whatever beauty might be found in this music was outweighed by the threat to his life Sofia had warned about.

Sofia and Coren came to a stop. Both still humming in tune with the ghostly choir, they motioned for him to stand between them. He took a single step and stood, frozen and silent.

The entire clearing shimmered. Tag fought back a surprised gasp. Glowing red eyes appeared first, then the shimmering settled like falling snow. Creatures seemed to teleport around him all at once.

No, it wasn’t teleportation.

He realized these creatures had been here all along. But they were like chameleons, capable of altering the color of their flesh to blend in. Their bodies were slender and small, and they had bulbous heads. Each eye shifted colors as they all stared at Tag. He felt unprotected and naked despite his EVA suit. Their hypnotizing, color-changing eyes flashed, trance-like. Then their entire bodies lit up in bursts of fluorescent colors.

Tag wanted to laugh and scream in horror at the same time. Was he still on the Argo? Had he overdosed on painkillers?

But the bite of the sulfurous air, the now-fervent voices, and the bright flares of color were all too real. This was no dream, no nightmare.

He guessed these creatures were the Forinths.

Sofia and Coren raised their arms slowly, fanning them. The creatures responded. Except instead of two arms, they raised eight each. And each arm had no hand. Rather, they appeared to be tentacles. The Forinths looked like evolved terrestrial octopuses. All at once the voices quieted. The people closed their beak-like mouths, and their arms froze. Their skin went white with red stripes.

Just like Sofia’s body paint, Tag noted.

One of the Forinths stepped forward. Its skin turned a shocking blue. All the others pointed their tentacles at it, and the blue Forinth glided toward Tag, Coren, and Sofia. It aimed one tentacle at Sofia.

She took a deep breath, then belted out a series of high notes with the timbre of a practiced vocalist. The blue one sang something in response, and Sofia made a sweeping bow, then gestured toward Tag.

Once again, the color-changing eyes all locked on him. It took every ounce of control he had to remain still. He pretended that he was standing at attention, ready to receive an admiral aboard the Argo.

Sofia crooned another short melody, and the blue Forinth faded back into the crowd. Just then, a staccato, off-key note sounded from a Forinth. The crowd parted, and each stared accusingly at the offender. The blue one marched to the singled-out Forinth and grabbed them. The offending Forinth’s colors shifted wildly, pink, then purple, then green, then yellow. The shifting colors conveyed a distinct feeling of panic to Tag.

He watched in silent horror as the blue one lifted the color-changing Forinth above its head. It walked to the nascent volcano. All the voices rose in a fast-moving song, hammering Tag’s eardrums. He clenched his jaw, and his whole body felt tight as the blue one tilted its head back. Its beaked mouth opened in a primal, gut-wrenching yell, and it threw the color-changing Forinth into the volcano.

The plummeting Forinth let out a pitiful screech. Its scream echoed, piercing the song of the others for what seemed to Tag like minutes. It may have only been a matter of seconds, but he was too shocked to tell the difference. Then the blue one turned to him. Its eyes seemed to narrow, and it padded along the dirt, careening for him.

Sofia’s hands clenched into fists, and she started singing louder, staring straight ahead. The blue one wrapped its tentacles around Tag’s shoulder. It was surprisingly strong, even through his EVA suit. He winced as the creature tightened its grip around his injury but bit his lip to refrain from uttering any sound. The blue one guided him to the center of the clearing. It lifted Tag above its head.

Tag wanted to yell. To struggle out of the Forinth’s grasp—but one glance at Sofia told him not to. The blue one held him above the hole straight to Eta-Five’s hell. Waves of intense heat washed over him. He could hear the growling belly of the planet through this volcanic vent, and the sulfurous odor irritated his eyes and assaulted his nostrils. His body went rigid, wondering if he should still heed Sofia’s warning.

If he was going to fight back, this was his last chance.

CHAPTER THIRTY

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The blue Forinth unraveled its tentacles and let Tag go. Hot waves of sulfurous air rose from the depths of the volcano, buffeting Tag. In that moment, anger and despair flooded through him, but he gritted his teeth, refusing to scream like the Forinth they’d sacrificed. He wouldn’t give them any pleasure in his death. Then almost as soon as he’d started plummeting to the fiery bowels of Eta-Five, something grabbed him under his arms. A tentacle.

It tightened around his chest, pushing the air out of his lungs, until his bruised ribs ached. The single tentacle retracted and yanked him from the volcano. What game is the animal playing? Tag thought. He wrapped his fingers around the sinewy tentacle, refusing to let the monster drop him again. Screw whatever Sofia had said about playing dead and letting these Forinths treat him like their plaything. The blue Forinth hoisted him above the sweltering pit and raised him in the air once more. Tag opened his mouth to protest, his face already heating more from rage than from the volcano, but the boa constrictor-like grip the Forinth had on him prevented him from uttering so much as a miserable squeak.

The Forinth’s eyes caught Tag’s, and a soft melody drifted from its beaked mouth, almost like a lullaby. Bemused but wary, Tag clenched his fists, his muscles tightening. Still, something eerily comforting in the blue Forinth’s song crashed against the embattled emotions thundering through Tag’s mind. His fury gave way to a strange sense of comfort, as if he unconsciously knew he stood among friends and family. His fingers unclenched, and his muscles relaxed. The Forinth set him down. Tag fell into a trance as if he’d been slipped a sedative, all thoughts of danger and alarm drifting out of his head. The Forinth dipped its tentacle in a shell of some sort that another Forinth held. When it withdrew its arm, the tip was covered in red paint, and it smeared the paint over Tag’s face.

With the painting done, the Forinth’s mouth closed, and its song ended. Tag’s survival instincts returned, and he began to back away from the Forinth. His shirt clung to his back with sweat, and his fingers trembled with the surging adrenaline. He held his hands before him like a wrestler, ready to do battle with the blue Forinth.

But the alien didn’t pounce on him. Instead, it waved its tentacles toward Sofia and Coren as if to urge Tag to return to them. He did so with tentative steps, never taking his eyes off the creature. When he joined Sofia and Coren, they each bowed deeply, and the entire Forinth host dissipated into the woods, their flesh sparkling like fireflies until they disappeared entirely, blending into the trees and foliage. Their invisible retreat into the forest sounded not like a tribe of creatures stamping over dry branches and leaves but more like the soft whisper of a breeze through tree limbs.

Sofia shot Tag a meaningful look with her brows furrowed and lips pursed, no doubt a simple gesture to indicate he should remain silent. The trio departed the clearing and left the sulfurous air and insufferable heat behind as they marched over the path they’d traveled on. Once they’d walked for more than a klick, Sofia finally broke stride and slowed. She used the back of her hand to wipe the sweat off her brow and let out a long exhalation.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“We can talk now?” Tag asked, his eyes wide.

“Yes, we can.”

“Goddamnit, what just happened?” He couldn’t restrain himself. Here he’d come to whisk this anthropologist off the planet, and she’d subjected him to some kind of tribal social experiment. He’d always been interested in meeting intelligent life as a kid, reading about both fictional and nonfictional adventures of scientists in the field, but he’d had enough. No more so-called intelligent life for him. “I didn’t come down here to have some crazy species sacrifice me to their damn gods.”

“No, you didn’t,” Sofia said, a slight grin breaking across her face, irritating Tag more.

“What’s so damn funny?” His mouth went dry.

“Your reaction.”

“My reaction? I almost died.”

“No, as long as you did what I said, you were good. They don’t normally kill newcomers anyway. Right, Coren?”

The snake-person seemed to give her an exasperated look. “No, they wouldn’t exactly kill you. But you’d damn sure wish they threw you into that pit.” He gestured to his scars. “I fought back. Sofia told me not to when I first came to this planet, but I didn’t listen. And this is what I got for it. Those tentacles pack a lot of punch, as Sofia so often says.”

She nodded and held back a frond blocking their path. “They have small bone-like blades at the end of each. When they want to hurt you, they have no qualms about it.”

“And they’re strong,” Coren said. “Stronger than our power suits. Some of my people learned that the hard way, too.”

Tag had so many more questions. His head began to pound with confusion as he glanced between Coren and Sofia dubiously. One thing at a time, he reminded himself. Compartmentalize and proceed. “None of that really answers my question.”

“No patience,” Sofia said, indicating for them to follow a turn in the path. “They were holding what I’ve come to call a balance ceremony. They recognize that the resources in the Forest of Light might look vast, but they’re limited. And if the population grows too large, they threaten to upend the balance they’ve achieved over generations of living here.”

“Balance ceremony,” Tag muttered. The pieces started to come together. “So that sacrifice was because there’s new life down here?”

“Precisely,” Sofia said.

A spring of guilt bubbled up in Tag. “The one that died—that was sacrificed—was that on my account?”

Sofia laughed, and Tag scowled at her. How could she be so brutally callous about a species and culture she was studying?

“No," she said. “Don’t be so arrogant. They don’t care about our species. A new baby was born to one of the family units—another thing far too complex for me to explain now. When a baby is hatched, one of the old ones has to go.”

“That’s it? The oldest? Doesn’t matter if they’re important or not?”

“Right,” Sofia said. “Very straightforward, no-frills tradition, huh?”

“I’m not sure about no frills.” His body still felt like it was overheating. He pulled at his EVA suit’s collar. “What was my role in all of this?”

“The Forinths insist on introducing each Forest of Light newcomer to their gods. I went through it, Coren went through it, and all his people went through it. Once you’ve been dropped into the volcano and they let you dangle there, they seem satisfied to live and let be. You don’t bother them, and they’ll no longer bother you. But don’t mistake that for being ignored. You never know when they’re watching.”

“Right, that color-changing flesh. Remarkable. But as interesting as they are”—Tag stared daggers at Coren—“I want to know why your people attacked me.” He’d been so distracted by the Forinths and the strange power their music had over him that he’d almost forgotten the reason he’d found himself here in the first place. His hand instinctively inched to the empty holster on his suit, and he wished he had some weapon, any weapon.

“We thought you were hostile,” Coren said. His expression remained stolid, unexcited. “It’s as simple as that.”

“I don’t buy it. You don’t just massacre a ship full of people without warning because you thought they were hostile!”

Coren’s good eye twitched, narrowing slightly. “A ship full of people? There was no one else in your air car.”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Tag said, frustration welling up in him, “because everyone else was already dead before the Argo landed on this planet. You can’t tell me all that was a mistake, too.”

Coren glanced between Tag and Sofia. His statue-like seriousness began to fade, replaced with something that looked akin to worry. “Your ship was attacked?”

Suspicion crept into Tag’s thoughts. It was difficult to read this alien’s sincerity, but it certainly appeared as if he was shocked. “Yes, that’s exactly right. By a cutter-sized vessel with your people aboard.”

“You’re certain it was my people?”

“They boarded us. I saw them, face to face. Or at least, their armor. They wore the same black armor and orange visors I saw down here on your people.” Tag recalled the attacker he’d taken down outside the forest. “Only theirs seemed to have working energy shields.”

Sofia held a hand up to stop Coren from responding then indicated a small shack constructed of thick logs and branches. “This is my place. Should we go inside?” She eyed the trees around them suspiciously. “Sounds like we have a few things to discuss.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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The interior of Sofia’s shelter proved hardly more alluring than its exterior. A holoprojection module sat on a crude wooden table next to a collection of comm equipment and pieces of a sensor array she appeared to be in the middle of working on. A picture—an actual printed 2D photograph—was pinned to the wall. It showed an older woman and man with Sofia. They all shared the same ruddy complexion.

Before Tag had long to study it, Sofia motioned for them to sit around the meager furniture. Tag took a worn canvas chair, and Sofia sat on the edge of her SRE navy-issued cot. She caught Tag eying it.

“Yep, it’s still as uncomfortable as training.” She grabbed a cloth and began dabbing at the paint on her skin. “Cheap and portable enough for missions like this, and just stiff enough to make you wonder if you’d be better off sleeping on the ground.”

The little bit of humor did nothing to buoy Tag’s dour mood, and her smile soon vanished as Coren settled on a log repurposed as a stool. Tag undid his suit enough to scratch at the now-healing wound on his shoulder. Sofia, eying the singed flesh, dug into a pack and took out a first aid provisions pack. She tossed it to Tag, and he caught it.

“Thanks,” he said then started rummaging through it.

“Did you see others?” Coren asked.

“Others? You mean besides your people?” Tag shot back. He pulled a tissue-regen patch from the pack and taped it over the wound.

“No, just the one cutter? No larger ships? No fleet?”

Tag shook his head, setting the pack down. “Just the cutter.”

Coren’s good eye closed. The lid on his scarred white eye fluttered as if it was trying to shut. A long exhalation escaped his thin lips. “Good.”

“Why’s that good?” Fresh heat flowed into Tag’s cheeks. His knuckles went white as he clenched his hands into fists. “Every single person aboard the Argo died. We had a much larger ship, a well-trained crew, and that little cutter boarded us and then sent the ship headed straight to Eta to burn.”

Sofia’s eyes went wide, and she stopped wiping the paint from her arm. “You mean they didn’t let you go?”

“No, of course not.” Tag was aghast. “They seemed to have every intention of killing me.”

“That’s—that’s almost unbelievable,” she said. “Their technology, their ships ... even a small cutter could take on an SRE light cruiser and win.”

“Tell me something new,” Tag said.

“How did you escape?” Coren asked.

“Why do you want to know?” Tag asked, his brow furrowed. “So you can make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

“No.” Coren smoothed out the short black fur along his scalp and neck. “Like Sofia said, that’s quite the feat. Luck or skill, you’ve somehow survived an attack I doubt many of your comrades could.”

“And how in the three hells would you know that?” Tag gritted his teeth, leaning forward in his chair.

“I used to be an engineer aboard a research vessel about the size of one of your battlecruisers.”

“Used to be?”

“Our ship and its crew of two thousand landed on Eta-Five.” His eye traced the dirt floor. “It’s as far as we made it.”

“The more you talk, the less I understand about all of this. Why did I watch people like yours murder my crewmates? I deserve a proper explanation.”

“Don’t we all,” Coren said. He sat straighter. The pointed ends of his fingers drummed over the log. “Let me try to put this all in context.”

“Please do,” Tag said sardonically. He folded his arms over his chest.

“Tag,” Sofia said, rubbing a spot of stubborn paint on her leg. “I get your skepticism. But I assure you Coren and his people, at least those on Eta-Five, are not the same ones that attacked your ship. You’re going to have to believe me and Coren on this one. Try to keep an open mind.”

The flames of anger flickered over Tag’s mind again. Flashes of Kaufman and Morgan and Captain Weber appeared there. All the crew members he couldn’t save. The people he was sworn to protect, to heal. Their lives spilling between his fingers like flowing water.

“Fine,” was all he said. It was impossible to dismiss the memories and emotions surging through him, but he kept his lips straight and shut, willing to at least listen to Coren. Maybe he’d actually learn something useful about these monstrous people.

“Thank you,” Coren said. “You will need to, as your people say, bear with me.”

Tag grunted.

“First, when you arrived here, we thought you were a threat.”

Tag opened his mouth to protest. Coren held up a hand, trying Tag’s patience. But he saw the look in Sofia’s brown eyes and closed his mouth again, using every ounce of self-control to listen to this snake-person. Once he forced his countenance to appear amenable again, she handed him the cloth. He took it and wiped the paint from his face.

“Go on,” Tag said. “Why did you think I was a threat?”

“I’m speaking of your arrival in the air car,” Coren said. “I believe the ship you ran into was our enemy as well. The people here are all that remains of my ship. And”—Coren paused, a sorrowful expression etching his slightly reptilian features—“we may truly be the last free members of our society.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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“Let me start at the beginning. My name is K’renojadajo,” Coren said. “The name seems to be hard for Sofia to pronounce, so I go by Coren for her benefit, and, I assume, yours as well.”

Tag tried to mouth Coren’s full name silently, but it felt clumsy.

“Like I said, Coren is fine.” He waved a long-fingered hand dismissively. “I’m originally from the planet Meck’ara, which is the homeworld for the M’jar Emtoradajo—my species. Again, the intricacies and nuances of the words cannot be replicated by your vocal cords or anatomy, so I’d advise you not to bother.”

“I’ve already tried,” Sofia said. “Coren is patient, but if you mispronounce their proper name to another, they don’t take kindly to the offense. It’s better just to call them by a nickname.”

“She’s correct,” Coren added.

“I call them the Mechanics,” Sofia said. “While my primary mission focused on the Forinths, when the Mechanics arrived, I got a chance to immerse myself in the study of two completely different species and cultures.”

“Happy to be a test subject,” Coren said with a hint of what sounded to Tag like sarcasm.

“You know you like the attention, Coren,” Sofia said, cracking a mischievous smile. She faced Tag again, and he saw a fiery passion light up as she spoke. This was likely the first time she’d spoken to another human about any of her findings or experiences over the past years. “I nicknamed them the Mechanics because they truly are evolved to work with their hands. More so than us humans. We’ve got thumbs, but they have triple-jointed limbs, and their fingers are so flexible and strangely jointed that each of the six can function like pseudothumbs. You should see their natural adeptness with all things technological.”

“I appreciate the flattery,” Coren said, although Tag could tell he didn’t appreciate it at all. “But technology is crucial to our survival.” He sighed. “Our bodies aren’t so strong, and, I regret to say, evolution didn’t empower us with the endurance and strength you humans and these Forinths share.”

Tag had never felt human beings were particularly strong compared to other lifeforms on Earth and some of the alien species they’d encountered. But he wasn’t about to argue the point. Coren’s limbs were extremely thin, as was his torso.

“Technology was our only mechanism of survival,” Coren continued. “But it wasn’t enough. My ship was on duty, investigating Eta-Five.”

“Why did you need an entire cruiser-sized vessel for a research expedition?” Tag asked, not buying the story.

“As I said, technology is crucial to us. Not just on our planet but beyond. Space has not been friendly, and neither have its inhabitants. Most we have dealt with through brute force. Our power now comes from lessons learned over a millennium of space travel and exploration. Our people prefer to be careful. That’s why our research vessels are well armed, though our troops aren’t quite as well outfitted as our warships. You saw how our ground troops don’t have energy shields like the marines that belong to our warfaring vessels do,” Coren said.

“May I?” Sofia asked, looking at Coren. He nodded and looked away. “It was hard to get this out of Coren, and no other Mechanic would speak to me about it. But their population is in decline. Their resources in nearby solar systems were depleted by war, and the truth is, they can’t lose expeditionary vessels and science vessels. They can’t take the risks we can.” A glimmer of pity crossed her face. “From my estimates, their culture and species are endangered.”

“And that was before what we call the Mutiny Incident.” Coren nodded somberly. “We were several light-years away from Meck’ara.” He paused, staring at some unseen spot in the distance. An expression of grief filled his face. His thin lips twitched. His good golden eye shimmered. “So we never knew what happened until we were on the last leg of our return to the planet.”

“Was this the Incident?” Tag asked.

“Yes.”

Tag could sense the sincerity in Coren’s words. Maybe the Mechanic was good at manipulating human emotions, but Tag wanted to believe him. He forced himself to remain skeptical. This all might be a trap. But then again, what did they want with him? He’d be dead if they really wanted him to be.

“Once we arrived in normal space, we were inundated with distress calls. Our normal docking station orbiting Meck’ara was wrecked. Spewing atmosphere. Chunks of debris. Even bodies frozen in vacuum.”

A shudder crawled through Tag at the grisly imagery. “And these distress calls? They were coming from the station?”

“Not just the station but also the ships, broken and shattered, floating lifeless next to the station. The distress calls were on automated repeat.”

“The rest of your species was eradicated then.”

“No,” Coren replied, standing. He started pacing the small room. “The distress calls mentioned exactly who the attackers were.”

“Who?”

Coren paused. “Us.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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“I don’t understand,” Tag said. “Was there a civil war?”

“There wasn’t when we left my planet,” Coren said. “Instead, according to the distress signals we received, almost a quarter of our people turned hostile. We saw no signs of vessels from other species, destroyed or otherwise.”

“Turned hostile?”

“It was some act of rebellion. Only there was no clear reason why. There was internal conflict within ships, between ships, on the planet.” Coren’s thin nostrils flared. “On our approach to Meck’ara, we saw one heavy cruiser drifting, mostly undamaged, from the orbital station. When we saw it wasn’t sending out any distress signals, we hailed it.

“They returned a single message asking, ‘Where does your loyalty lie?’ My captain said, ‘to the M’jar Emtoradajo,’ of course. And with that, they opened fire on us. Our ship couldn’t withstand the onslaught. The bridge was destroyed almost immediately. Pulsefire riddled our sidewalls before we could even get our energy shields up. Due to that single attack, as the chief engineering officer, I became Captain of the MES Stalwart, a duty I neither wanted nor deserved.” Coren tucked his chin against his chest. “At that moment, I knew we wouldn’t survive long against them. I directed the Stalwart to retreat to the safest place I knew. Here.”

Sofia nodded. “Eta-Five’s atmosphere is both our boon and bane. The Mechanics were interested in the planet for the same reason the SRE was—it’s not just about the Forinths. There’s something in the atmosphere—the strange gravitational and energy fields—that masks all communications and signals. It muddles every sensor array the Mechanics and humans have developed.”

“Yes,” Coren said, “and since I hadn’t reported that information back to Meck’ara yet, I had hoped to use those phenomena to my advantage.”

“So far, we haven’t caught any Mechanic ship probing the planet,” Sofia added. “And thankfully, we’re shielded underground from any curious scout ships that might venture to the planet’s surface.”

Tag mulled over the reluctant captain’s story. “I still don’t understand why your people turned against each other or why they attacked me.”

“I regret to say that even though we’ve tried to figure that out”—Coren’s expression appeared vaguely human, almost remorseful—“we still aren’t sure.”

“Coren granted me access to the data they had left,” Sofia said. “We scoured the recorded distress signals and comms together.”

“The best explanation we came up with was also one of the strangest,” Coren added.

Sofia booted her holocomputer. “This is one of the vid-comm messages we recovered.”

An almond-shaped head floated on the holoscreen with a face much like Coren’s. Only when this one spoke, the voice sounded distinctly feminine through Tag’s translation device. “Captain N’Dreen of the MES Gallant. Almost a third of our crew has mutinied. My XO was killed when he met with the mutineers. They have no demands and no interest in bargaining. I am locked in the bridge with only four of the original twelve bridge crew. Five officers attempted to overtake my watch, but we prevailed. I cannot be certain what happened to incite such violence. Medical Officer B’jir suspects some kind of virus. But we have been unable to verify these assumptions.”

Sofia gestured over the holocomputer. No vid-comm images appeared. Instead, a haunting voice shouted over the tinny sounds of explosions and gunfire. “They’re like drones. They don’t respond like normal people. Something’s wrong with them!”

Sofia paused the recording. “That message is why we call the mutinous Mechanics Drone-Mechs.”

Another recording played. In this one, the voice came out like a whisper. “The best way I can describe these people is that they’re acting like robots. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen them demand to know, and I quote, ‘Wherein does your loyalty lie?’ They blew several officers away in pulsefire when the officers didn’t give them an answer they liked. I ran, and I’m hiding here in life support on the MES Lancer. If you should see our ship approach, proceed with caution!”

Sofia clicked off the computer. “There are more recordings like that. Similar occurrences on other ships and orbital stations, along with broadcasts from Meck’ara.”

“Bizarre,” Tag said. He searched his mind for reasons for such abhorrent behavior. The SRE had overtaken Earth by sowing discord within the UN and pitting individual member states against each other. Could this be similar? Had something or someone manipulated the Mechanics? “Have your people been in contact with any new species?”

“No,” Coren said. “None that I’m aware of.”

“Of course, you can’t account for the time between your trip to and from Eta-Five,” Sofia said.

“True,” Coren said. “There would’ve been a limited time during our expedition here and through hyperspace when any communications, emergency or otherwise, regarding some sort of invasion or interaction would’ve been lost to us.”

“And at the same time,” Sofia said, “not to play devil’s advocate, but we didn’t exactly uncover anything about a new alien species in any of the emergency distress comms. You think that’s something most people might mention if it was a cause for concern.”

“You’d think,” Tag said, eying Coren suspiciously. No explanation offered so far proved Coren was innocent in all these matters. It seemed lucky—too lucky—that the Mechanic had escaped such a violent uprising and return to this planet to meet him here.

Coren seemed to sense his skepticism and let out a long exhalation. It came out almost like a whistle through his flat nostrils. “I’m afraid the cutter you ran into was not from the Mechanics you see on this planet. We’re the victims, the survivors. As far as I know, we’re the only ones left who haven’t been converted or turned into drones or infected or whatever has happened to the rest of my people.” He leaned forward, holding his hands in a pleading gesture. “Despite what you might think, the Mechanics are not a warfaring people. We protect our own. We defend ourselves when threatened. But the sneak attack on your vessel is unlike us. It is a dishonorable tactic. It is absolutely disgraceful to attack a research vessel, military or not, and massacre its crew without so much as a warning.”

“It’s true,” Sofia said. “Everything I’ve seen in their ship’s data library seems to support that notion. Granted, I haven’t had time to go through a fraction of all the information stored there, but by every indication, they’re an honorable, proud race. Deceit doesn’t play such a large role in their history as it does ours, which makes the whole rebellion situation doubly strange.”

“I don’t mean any offense to you or your profession,” Tag started, “but one anthropologist’s claim regarding a species she’s only known about for—” He looked to her for an answer.

“Roughly six months,” she offered.

“Roughly six months. That’s not enough for me to be convinced of anything. Especially after what I saw.”

“I understand,” Coren said. “You have every right to be dubious, and I wouldn’t respect you if you weren’t. I sincerely apologize for our assault on your air car. Our guards have been jumpy ever since we crash-landed here.”

Silence hung in the air as Tag studied Coren and Sofia. He tried to run through scenarios in his mind, figuring out what game these two—or maybe just Coren—were playing at. Why would they leave him alive? Why would Coren concoct this elaborate scheme?

Coren sat on the stool again. “I’ve failed my people. I was never meant to captain that ship. And without a working ship, it’s hopeless. We’ll die out here, with no chance to reclaim our planet or our honor.”

“We might have a working ship now.” Sofia’s cot creaked as she leaned forward. A glint shone in her eyes. “Tag, you didn’t just transport out of nowhere. Tell us about the Argo.”

The ship, Tag thought. Of course, that’s what they want. Coren needed that ship to get his people off the planet. Undoubtedly the relentless snow, ice, and wind had covered the Argo by now. It would take months, if not years or decades, for the Mechanics to dig through the snow and find it. Tag was the only living being who knew where the ship was buried.

Coren wanted the ship. That was the only reason Tag was still alive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

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“I can’t give you the Argo,” Tag said. “Nothing you do to me will convince me otherwise.”

Coren cocked his head, and his velvet fur creased across his forehead in shallow furrows. “I don’t mean to abscond with your ship. You must believe me.”

“Believe you? I’m not falling for any of this treachery.” Tag stood. “Sofia, I don’t know what he’s said to you with that snake tongue, but I’ve seen the Mechanics’ true colors. They gassed my crewmates. They slaughtered them in the passages. They tried to drive the ship into Eta. They aren’t good natured or honorable. Far from it.”

Heat coursed across Tag’s cheeks. He wasn’t sure when he had clenched his fists, but his knuckles were white. The Argo didn’t hold just the bodies of his crewmates but also the coordinates of the Montenegro and the rest of human civilization’s roots in the stars. Giving the Mechanics the Argo meant giving them the keys to humanity’s destruction. With his teeth gritted and eyes narrowed, he stared into Coren’s good eye. “I don’t know what kind of ruse you’re trying to pull here. But kill me if that’s what you want. Torture me. I will not let you finish the job your people started. With my last dying breath, I’ll defend the Argo.”

“Tag!” Sofia said, getting up from her roost. She took a step between Tag and Coren, but the Mechanic gestured her away.

“How arrogant, human,” Coren said, his voice dripping in measured calmness. “Your skepticism has bloomed into paranoia. I’ve told you only the truth, but I can see there’s nothing more I can say or do to prove that to you. It’s a shame. Truly. I’d offer my help to get you off Eta-Five.”

“Sure,” Tag said with a hint of derision etching his voice. “And you’d ask nothing in return?”

“It would be foolish of me not to. I would hope a gracious gesture would be repaid in kind. Surely the SRE could help us.”

“I told him I’d do what I can when I returned to the Montenegro,” Sofia said.

“You told him about the Montenegro?” Tag asked in disbelief. Now he realized he needed to get the Argo spaceworthy as soon as possible. The capital ship had to be warned of the Mechanic threat immediately. “This snake probably reported its location to the rest of the Mechanics, and they’re closing in on it as we speak. It’ll be destroyed just like the Argo.”

Coren shook his head. “I assure you—”

“No, Coren. Your assurances mean nothing to me.” Tag’s mind raced. He’d wasted enough time enduring supposedly mistaken attacks on his air car and participating in tribal sacrifices. Then a new thought struck him. When he’d been brought here, he had been so distracted by the strange sights of the Forest of Light and the looming threats to his life that he’d been disoriented. “Sofia, do you know the quickest route to the surface?”

“We’re not running away,” Sofia said.

“Please, Lieutenant Commander,” Coren said, “I insist you hear me out.”

Tag grabbed Sofia’s arm. “Come on, we—”

She evaded his grip and pushed him. His mouth fell open in shock, unable to believe she’d been fooled by this snake-person. “Tag, I understand what you’ve gone through, but we need to help them. It’s not right to leave them here like this.”

Tag was ready to protest, but he gazed between Coren and Sofia. They outnumbered him, and he’d waste even more time by trying to convince Sofia his skepticism wasn’t misplaced. But even so, he wouldn’t let himself be outwitted. “Fine. If you’re true to your word, you’ll let us go, and we’ll send an aid envoy back.”

“It was never my intention to make you stay,” Coren said.

Tag’s eyes turned to slits as he evaluated Coren. The alien maintained an unreadable expression, better than any human poker player, making any attempt to discern truth from fiction almost impossible. Without being able to read Coren’s true intent, Tag realized his life was still in the Mechanic’s hands. He reminded himself to stay cautious.

“Is the Argo spaceworthy?” Sofia asked. “You said it was attacked.”

“No,” Tag said. “But with a few repairs from our bots, we can be flying again.”

“It’s not just about repairing the damage, though, is it?” Coren asked as if he already knew the answer. “I’m afraid you can’t rely on any bots or AI. I’m guessing those Drone-Mechs that attacked the Argo inflicted an AI subversion routine on your ship’s comm systems. They tried to do that to the Stalwart, but I managed to establish working firewalls in time to ward them off. It sounds like from your story you weren’t quite as successful as we were.”

“That’s true,” Tag said reluctantly.

“I’m well aware this will only seem to support your hypothesis regarding my motives,” Coren said. “But I’d ask you to let me aboard your ship to fix what the Drone-Mechs have done.”

A plethora of reasons stormed through Tag’s mind, reasoning why he should refuse this proposition. But what did it matter? Coren was right. Tag didn’t know how to restore the ship’s AI. But then again, he had attempted his own fixes. “I’ve already created a new AI to monitor our repair bots and navigation systems.”

Coren’s good eye widened, and his mouth opened a bit, forming a recognizable look of surprise. “A new AI system? That seems a rather difficult procedure. One person developing a functional AI is an enormous feat of engineering. Something that would impress even us.”

Coren’s tone conveyed that he didn’t intend to sound derisive despite the slight barb.

Tag went on. “It wasn’t truly my original design. I used biology.” While keeping the finer details to himself, he summarized his initial hypotheses on the self-maturing AI of synth-bio technologies and his work with creating an artificial brain. Coren leaned forward, visibly impressed.

Sofia, in contrast, pursed her lips. “It sounds feasible. But I think we both know how unreliable biology can be. You might design the perfect system, but tissue differentiation, epigenetics, or the normal learning process can drastically affect your expected outcomes.”

The truth in that statement stung, stitching doubt through Tag’s mind. Even in simple cellular experiments, he had often observed his synth-neuro networks took unexpected growth pathways and made connections he couldn’t have predicted. The development of synth-bio truly had been difficult to manage, and his memories of his last encounter with Alpha One were all too supportive of Sofia’s conjecture.

“How about this?” Sofia asked. “Coren goes with us. If your synth-bio AI works, then he comes back here. No questions asked. If we still need a little help, he stays and does just that.”

“You’re really going to trust him?” Tag asked.

“I’ve learned to since the Forinths welcomed them into the forest. I have had no choice but to trust them, and they’ve done nothing to abuse that trust.”

Tag wanted to say no. Letting the enemy aboard the Argo was a surefire way to ensure he didn’t make it to the Montenegro. And since the Mechanics already knew about the ship, he had little time to waste. A plan started to hatch in his mind. It was crude, almost philistine, but it would have to do. He’d let Coren fix the ship—and if Coren didn’t repair the AI systems or proved treacherous in any way, he’d hold the Mechanic prisoner. He prayed it didn’t come to that, but it gave him some insurance against failure.

“Fine, come with us to the Argo,” Tag said. “Get us back into space.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

––––––––

“I promise,” Coren said. “I will repair the damage the Drone-Mechs inflicted.” He held out a six-fingered hand.

Tag grasped the Mechanic’s fingers. The alien didn’t shake with the same gusto Tag was used to from other humans. Coren’s grip barely clasped Tag’s, feeling more light and delicate than Tag had expected. Truly, this was a species that needed its technology. Tag realized he would not have any problem overpowering the Mechanic as long as the alien didn’t don his power suit. He felt a slight sense of ease knowing this. And if worse came to worst, he’d already dispatched three of them in armor. He could handle this one. He stood straighter, ready to lead them back to his ship.

They just needed transportation to get there.

“My air car’s a wreck now,” Tag said. “Do you have any vehicles we can take?”

“We have a few transports,” Coren said. “But we won’t need them.”

“There’s no way we’re getting to the Argo by foot.”

“Don’t worry. I plan on having the air car repaired and ready to go.” Coren ducked out the door and departed without another word before Tag could respond.

“How long’s that going to take? The car was leaking atmosphere when I left it.”

“My guess is not long,” Sofia said. “There’s a reason I call them the Mechanics.”

Tag couldn’t stand leaving their fate to an alien species he still distrusted. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

“If I’m leaving this planet, I’ve got to say goodbye to the Forinths,” she said. “They’ll want to know of my departure, along with yours and Coren’s. Want to come with?”

Tag gave her a noncommittal shrug. “They won’t be hoisting me over a live volcano again, will they?”

“No. That’s a one-time treat.”

She led him from her hut and into the forest. Humidity hung thick in the air, reminding Tag of the suffocating midday heat in his native Houston, Old USA, in the SRE. Only instead of towering structures of glass and steel, the evanescent glow of the plants, enormous trees, and other lifeforms surrounded him. Sofia’s and his boots slapped the damp earth on a sodden trail. After a while, Tag forced thoughts of Coren from his mind, and the haunting images of the damaged Argo and her dead crew faded away for a brief moment. The short reprieve proved long enough for him to find himself wishing he could revel in this new world. It was a landscape built from the seeds of dreams and grown in the garden of an artist’s mind.

But the faraway thump of the massive drum prevented any revelry from taking hold.

“Do they ever turn that thing off?” Tag asked.

“No,” Sofia said. “You get used to it.”

Tag cringed as they drew nearer to the waterfall and the enormous drumhead again, retracing their path from earlier. “I can’t imagine spending much time near it.”

“That’s the idea,” Sofia said. “Wouldn’t ward off the ice gods if it wasn’t loud.”

“So that’s the myth, huh? The drum keeps the cold outside.”

“Not exactly,” Sofia said. “The Forinths know the volcanoes bring in the warmth. But they tell me it’s not the temperatures they’re worried about. The ice gods supposedly would be perfectly happy in a sauna if you’d let them in. But the Forinths say the drums keep the gods in the cold. So the icy world outside is their prison.”

“You ever seen an ice god?” Tag ducked under a low-hanging branch. He expected Sofia to laugh, but her face remained serious.

“No, and from what the Forinths tell me, I pray I never do.”

“Think the ice gods are as dangerous as the Mechanics?”

“The Mechanics aren’t dangerous.” Sofia paused in the middle of the path. “Not these ones. Far from it. They’re on our side, or rather, they want to be on our side. You must believe me. You’ve got to believe Coren.”

Sofia turned around, and they carried on in silence. Was her assessment of the Mechanics at all true? Maybe her lack of human interaction had left her wanting in the social relations department, and it had been easy for Coren to manipulate her to believe his story.

Tag wasn’t sure what to make of the woman. Her hair, though long, appeared brushed and untangled. Flecks of paint still clung to her skin as she strode over a rotting log. She might have spent years in this strange, expansive cave ecosystem, but if she scrubbed the paint off, she could fit right in aboard an SRE ship. She hadn’t adopted any exotic accent or foreign mannerisms. For all Tag knew, she’d communicated only with aliens since her arrival on Eta-Five. He’d heard fleet-wide stories of extraterrestrial anthropologists who became so engrossed in the cultures they studied that they’d refused to reintegrate into human society.

But Sofia didn’t seem to be one of them. She seemed well adjusted, resilient. His initial suspicions that she might be easy prey for Coren’s manipulations were contradicted by Sofia’s professional demeanor.

He found himself wanting to understand her better, see if setting her at ease with him would prove more fruitful. Breaking the silence, he tried a new tack. “Will you miss Eta-Five?”

“This planet, no,” she said, “and as much as I enjoyed learning about the Forinths and spending my days talking to the Mechanics, I’m ready for human interaction again. Plus, I’ve got about a billion books I could write on these people now.”

“Will you?”

Her brow furrowed, and some of the remaining white paint flaked off with the deep creases. “I suppose I really should. Who knows what the SRE plans to do with this planet once I submit my reports.”

“And after they find out about the Mechanics,” Tag said.

“Yeah,” Sofia replied, almost dreamily. Her eyes glazed over as if she were lost in introspection. A soft melody drifting from the trees seemed to break the spell.

Tag watched her lips press together, and she hummed three long, haunting notes. An equally eerie song whispered back, and a nearby tree trunk appeared to flicker as a Forinth’s chameleon-like skin shed its camouflage coloring. It took a step forward and reached out four of its arms. A melodic song flowed from its beaked mouth as two large sacs under its head billowed and shrank with the ephemeral music. Sofia stretched her arms to meet the Forinth, and her voice rose in chorus with it. Several more appeared, gleaming into existence, and their songs joined in with each other, producing truly otherworldly music.

Something tickled in Tag’s chest. Reverence, nostalgia, and other strange feelings flooded him. The music overcame him, trickling past all his defenses, and he cursed himself at once for succumbing to the tune. He tried to remain stolid and unmoving but found it almost impossible. His thoughts and emotions were like computer software, and the song of these people provided the programming. Finally, their voices quieted, and all but one melded into the woods, once again unseen and unheard. The remaining Forinth glided forward over its multitude of tentacled legs, holding out a leather hide.

A perplexed expression crossed Sofia’s face. She took the hide, clutching it close to her chest, and the Forinth disappeared. Her face retained a shell-shocked look as she spun and walked next to Tag. Birdlike chatter sounded overhead, the distant pulse of the giant drum continued, and water gurgled nearby, but Sofia said nothing.

“What just happened?” Tag asked. “That music ... it ...”

“It affected you, didn’t it?” It wasn’t really a question, and Tag didn’t need to provide an answer. She knew. “Their language is unlike any we’ve documented in other species. Instead of letters or syllables, they use rhythms and notes and tones.”

“Music,” Tag offered.

“Yeah,” Sofia said, a half grin on her face. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Sure. Also a bit disconcerting.”

“It took me a while to get accustomed to it. But you were probably feeling the same emotions the Forinth conveyed when we spoke.”

They reached her makeshift home. She ushered him inside and draped the hide over the table.

“So what did he say?”

“He wished me well on my journey. He warned me the planet’s spirits were getting restless.” She nodded toward the leathery fabric. “And he gave me an incredible gift.”

Tag pinched a small fold of it between his thumb and forefinger. The hide changed colors to a bright blue, and he let it go in shock. “What is it?”

“The hide of what the Forinths call a spirit ox. Eating the animals is what gives the Forinths their color-changing abilities. There’s some enzyme in the flesh that—”

The door to the hut opened, and Coren burst through. This time his face no longer looked so stern and statue-like. His eyes were wide, and he seemed to be panting. “We need to leave. Now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

––––––––

Tag’s heart jumped at the Mechanic’s earnestness, but he couldn’t help the skepticism pouring through him. What if this was a trap? A ploy by Coren to throw him off guard? “What’s going on?”

“One of our scouting teams’ sensor arrays caught the grav signature of a small vessel.”

“You mean a ship slipped through the stratosphere?” Sofia asked.

“Exactly,” Coren said. “If I had to guess, they’re looking for you.” He pointed an accusing finger at Tag.

“You’re sure about this?” Tag asked.

“Absolutely. The signature matches that of one of our exploratory vessels. Similar in size to your Argo.”

The implications rang clear in Tag’s mind. A small cutter had blasted the Argo from space. A Mechanic ship as large as the Argo would ensure the Argo never returned to space. “Would it be safer waiting for the ship to get bored and leave? We’re safe underground, and the Argo’s probably buried deep enough to escape a sensor read.”

“Maybe your ship would escape human technology,” Coren said derisively, “but the same can’t be said for Mechanic tech.”

Tag wanted to glare. But everything he’d experienced told him Coren probably wasn’t bluffing. “Fine. What’s their location?”

“They’re about two thousand klicks south of here. If we leave now, we might be able to return to your ship undetected. I’ll restore your AI, and we can get the repair bots functioning. Then we’ll return to your people and send a rescue fleet back here for mine.”

“I can’t make any promises about a rescue fleet. I don’t speak for the rest of the SRE,” Tag said.

Coren nodded, twisting his fingers together. “I understand. But we won’t be able to find out for sure until we get off this planet. With luck, we’ll be in the air within the day.”

Coren’s words lingered in Tag’s mind. With luck. Luck had barely been on his side so far, and he wasn’t sure how much longer even that would last. “Then let’s not waste any time. Sofia, are you ready?”

Sofia grabbed a small bag and scooped several data cubes into it along with the spirit ox hide. “Let’s go!”

Coren raced from the hut, taking long, loping strides. Tag struggled to keep pace. They reached the Mechanics’ makeshift village, and the gleaming metal of the air car caught his eyes. The damaged rear quarter panel had been replaced with silver sheet metal. It looked almost seamless, blending in with the rest of the car except for its color. “It’s repaired already?”

“Told you.” Sofia leapt into the open side door of the car. “Mechanics, through and through.”

Tag settled into the driver’s seat, his EVA suit crinkling as he did. He placed his helmet at his side, and Coren hopped into the front passenger seat. The Mechanic had already stowed his suit and several weapons beside him. The sight of those guns made Tag nervous.

“You really need those?” Tag asked.

“You don’t know what we’ll run into out there,” Coren replied.

“Maybe not, but at least I’ll know what I’m dealing with in here,” Tag said, his voice short. “I don’t trust you bringing weapons aboard the ship. The last Mechanics who did that massacred the crew.”

“I get it,” Coren said, “but—”

“We don’t have time for this!” Sofia said, her cheeks flushing red. “Let’s go, Tag!”

Tag stared at her for a second, wondering how she could let Coren endanger them so easily. All the same, he relented to keeping an eye on Coren. “Where’s my pulse pistol your men took?”

“In the back with your rifle,” Coren said, nodding back to the weapons rack within the car.

As he’d said, the mini-Gauss and pulse pistol were secured in pegs on the rack.

Coren grabbed the pistol and thrust it at Tag. “Take it.”

Tag snagged it from the Mechanic’s hand and stowed it.

“Happy now, boys?” Sofia asked.

Neither Coren nor Tag said a word.

“Let’s get going then, shall we?” she asked, irritation clear in her tone.

Tag pumped the accelerator for the air car. It pushed off from the ground, and the Mechanics watching it stepped back, clearing space for the vehicle. He unleashed the throttle and rocketed forward, careening toward the exit of the forest. Tree branches and dangling vines scratched over the roof of the car, and bright fluorescent organisms blurred by. The air car flew through the tunnel, and Tag gritted his teeth, steering with deftness. His shoulder still throbbed slightly from his injury, but it was only a small distraction now. The car soon burst from the tunnel, and the glowing purple, blue, green, and pink lights of the forest were replaced with blinding white and gray. Snow and ice swirled everywhere. They blew past the frigid, towering structures of the tundra, kicking up a snowy wake. Tag stole a sideways glance. Coren stared straight ahead, his lips pinched. He seemed frightened at Tag’s speed and frantic maneuvers over the perilous terrain.

Good, Tag thought. Let him be scared.

The mountains grew before them, and they drew nearer to the site of the avalanche that had almost crushed Tag. Green lightning zigzagged through the sky, and winds tugged against the air car.

An echoing rumble shook the car. What in the three hells? Tag’s fingers wrapped tighter around the wheel. Coren gripped the armrests of his seat, and Sofia grabbed an overhead handhold. He focused on closing the distance between them and the canyon. A little rolling thunder wouldn’t frighten him. He’d survived worse.

But the rumbling continued, even when the violent electricity cutting through the sky ceased.

“What is that?” Coren asked.

Tag said nothing, facing forward. A drop of sweat trickled over his brow and across his cheek. “Doesn’t sound like a storm. Sofia?”

“I have no idea,” Sofia said.

“None?” Tag asked. “You’ve been here for five years.”

“Underground. In that jungle. I haven’t been rolling around on the surface making snow angels!”

The rumbling growled louder until the air car shuddered under its power. Vibrations traveled up from the wheel and into Tag’s arms. He eyed the top of the canyon, studying the cliffs and peaks overlooking it. His palms grew clammy, and worry bubbled through him.

“Another avalanche?” he offered weakly.

But he saw no falling snow, no tumbling ice, no crashing rocks. Fear wrapped its frigid fingers around his heart, squeezing it until it felt as cold as Eta-Five.

“It’s the Mechanics, isn’t it?” Tag asked from the corner of his mouth.

Coren shook his head vehemently. His single golden eye portrayed an uncannily human-like terror. As much as Tag distrusted the man, nothing but sincere, unadulterated fear showed in his expression. “No, we would’ve seen a Mechanic ship by now. This sounds nothing like—”

The rumbling and shaking became deafening. An explosion of ice shards and broken rocks spewed in front of them, and Tag swerved to avoid the exploding debris. A roar broke across the landscape more frightening, more menacing than the charged fire of a battlecruiser’s energy cannons.

They all saw it. The source of the din, and the almost-assured imminent cause of their deaths.

Sofia answered the unspoken question on all their minds. “An ice god.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

––––––––

An enormous creature burst through the cloud of snow, ice, and earth, baring a drill-shaped maw full of gnashing teeth and fangs thick as tree trunks. Sharp edges and fierce lines along its jaw and snout gave it a shark-like appearance, but instead of two beady black eyes, it had clusters of them around its head. Snaking tendrils, maybe antennae, hung from its pointed skull like a mane. The rest of its long, snake-like body slithered from the tunnel it had been digging, revealing blue and white fur covering the length of its torso, making the behemoth blend in with the stark terrain of Eta-Five.

Tag froze in awe for only a brief second. He rammed the air car’s throttle forward and stiffened his grip on the controls, curving madly around the monster.

Maybe, maybe if he got to the canyon, they’d lose the beast in the tight turns and narrow passages.

The monster slammed onto its belly, scrambling on at least a dozen muscled legs. Its tail whipped, and its jaw opened, unleashing another roar. The resulting bellow rocked the air car with a gust that rivaled the stormy winds in strength.

“We need to move faster,” Coren said, strangely calm now.

“I’m trying!” Tag shouted back.

The monster’s teeth loomed larger, and its tongue tickled over its fangs. Its antennae, much to Tag’s dismay, bent forward, reaching for the air car. He wasn’t sure what those appendages did, but he wasn’t eager to find out. The entrance to the gorge still appeared miniscule on the horizon, too far away for Tag’s comfort, and the monster’s typhoon-like breath rolled over them from mere meters away.

They couldn’t outrun it. Not in a straight-out sprint like this.

Tag veered to the left. Sofia and Coren slammed against the side of the car, unprepared for the maneuver. The ice god slipped, carried by momentum, and crashed into an icy pillar. The structure gave way, shattering and falling in a million broken pieces as the creature scrambled to correct its trajectory and continued its dozen-leg gallop at the air car.

“Get ready!” Tag shouted above the rumbling growls of the creature. He twisted the controls hard right, and they shot in a new direction. This time the creature didn’t succumb to clumsiness. Its whole body curled, cornering on the ice with gracefulness befitting a practiced dancer. A hundred-thousand-pound, carnivorous dancer.

Its flesh rippled with the flexing and stretching muscles powering the creature’s limbs. Teeth snapped. Antennae grasped desperately for the car, missing by mere meters.

Tag swerved the vehicle hard to the right, abruptly changing course between a couple of snowdrifts each larger than the Argo. Again, the monster followed, plowing through the drifts and sending a spray of white into the air. It threatened to close the gap between them and followed his every move as if it could tell where he was going. Quick turns and winding between ice-and-rock stalagmites wouldn’t thwart it—the creature followed or simply plowed through obstacles that would’ve left the air car a fiery wreck.

The canyon grew closer, but not close enough.

Tag eyed the mini-Gauss racked in the car. A desperate plan coalesced in his head. He wracked his mind for better solutions but found none with the ice god figuratively and literally breathing down the backs of their necks. “Sofia, you ever drive one of these things?”

“Maybe a decade ago.”

“It’s easy enough. Throttle here, turn here,” Tag said, nodding to the controls.

“You serious?”

“Deadly. Take the controls.”

Sofia undid her harness and grasped Coren’s and Tag’s seats to steady herself in the rocketing vehicle.

“On my count, we’re switching,” Tag said, still staring straight ahead between the stalagmites. “Three, two, one, now!”

He jumped from the seat, and Sofia flopped in. The air car shuddered, shaking and curving to the right. Sofia overcorrected the vehicle, and they skimmed a stalagmite. The edge of the car chipped off a light spray of ice, but they didn’t crash. The car straightened, and Sofia’s eyes narrowed. Her jaw clenched as a vessel bulged across her forehead.

“Keep heading to that canyon,” Tag said, pointing straight ahead. “We need to get through it.”

“Whatever you say,” she replied.

A quaking jolt almost sent Tag sprawling. The creature had pounced but came up short, with only snow and ice crunched between its teeth. It had been only meters away from smashing metal and flesh between those fangs.

Tag used the overhead handholds to guide himself to the weapons rack. “Coren, you want to prove those guns you brought are useful? Grab your EVA suit and come on.”

The Mechanic snatched his rifle. Tag clicked his helmet into place, and Coren latched his on.

“You have a plan?” Coren asked, his voice tinny through the suit’s comms.

“Aim and fire,” Tag replied. He closed the driver’s chamber to the car, and the front cabin, along with Sofia, was separated by a shutting polyglass shield. Then he pushed open the top hatch of the air car. Freezing air rushed in around him, and his HUD reported plummeting temperatures in flashing red numbers. He poked out of the open hatch, and Coren joined him. Wind rushed against the helmet, threatening to pull him out of the car. He braced himself against it and wondered if this was all a terrible mistake.

But he ignored those thoughts of self-doubt. Pressing the stock of the mini-Gauss to his shoulder, he sighted up the ice god. It wasn’t difficult. The colossal beast blotted out any view of the horizon beyond it.

“Fire!” Tag yelled. He squeezed the trigger, and a slug whistled from the barrel. The round punched into the creature’s flesh, but the monster made no indication it had even noticed the slight injury.

A salvo of bright pulsefire flew from Coren’s rifle. The rounds splashed against the ice god’s hide, bursting like fireworks and leaving black singes marring its fur. But none pierced the scaly white flesh beneath the thick pelt.

Tag fired a flurry of powerful slugs that sliced into the creature and punctured the scales. Thin rivulets of blue blood trickled from the holes, but each wound seemed no more than a pinprick to the ice god. No amount of fire from either of their weapons persuaded the monster to turn around. Tag glanced over the front of the car. At their speed, the canyon still stood a minute, if not more, away from them.

An enormous roar shook him, reverberating deep in his bones. The creature’s hot breath washed over him as it snapped at the air car, and Sofia jerked right. Tag lost his hold and fell, slamming into the roof. Pain burned through his ribs, and he started to slide over the back of the car. Coren shot out one skinny arm and yanked Tag back into position then promptly resumed firing.

“Watch yourself,” Coren said.

Tag grunted and shot another useless slug into the creature. “It’s like we’re throwing pebbles at the damn thing.”

The creature kicked up snow, ice, and rocks as it continued biting and slashing at the air, its antennae brushing over the rear of the car. The monstrosity raced close enough that Tag could make out each individual strand of fur, each crack in its serrated teeth, and every haunting black eye.

Those dozens of eyes now locked on to Tag. The beast’s jaw opened wider, its whale-sized tongue tickling the roof of its mouth as if to tease Tag and beckon him to jump into its grinding maw.

“What do we do?” Coren said, his voice strangely emotionless, as if he had resigned himself to the increasingly likely chance they were about to die.

Tag readjusted his grip on the mini-Gauss. The ice god let out another rattling bellow, and globs of spittle splashed over the air car. But Tag’s determination only grew. This monster might be a god to the Forinths. But he knew better. He was a medical officer, a trained scientist.

This was no god. It was a creature. A monster. A beast.

And those things didn’t live on indefinitely, meddling in immortality.

No, those things died. And Tag would make sure this one did.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

––––––––

“Go for the eyes!” Tag yelled, readjusting his aim. He sent a salvo of slugs flying for the creature’s craven eyes.

Several shots punctured the white scales covering its skull. But more connected with the small black orbs. Each hit with a sickening pop. Viscous fluid oozed from the wound, and the creature winced. For the first time, it had shown a reaction to the puny fire from Tag and Coren. Tag’s confidence swelled. It was mortal after all. It felt pain. It feared death.

Coren straightened, his orange visor glowing against his black suit, and he fired a long volley of pulse rounds. The rounds spattered the creature’s face, burning fur and bursting eyeballs. The monster recoiled and tumbled over its muscular limbs. Another roar flew from its mouth. But this one sounded more agonized than angry. Its head twisted, and it renewed its charge, but the firing had afforded the air car precious seconds.

“More!” Tag commanded, squeezing the trigger again and again. “More!”

No vocal acknowledgement came from Coren’s comms. Instead, the Mechanic dropped his rifle. Small barrels protruded from his wrist-mounted guns, and he raised his arms. Each gun exploded to life with a stream of screaming rapid pulsefire that formed craters in the ice god’s eye sockets.

More black liquid gushed from its sightless eyes and stained its fur. Each connecting shot made the creature falter. Its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth, and its steps grew staggered. It wasn’t dying. Tag was sure of that. But it was hurting. He recognized the actions of the predator. Its simple mind was contemplating the benefits of continuing the pursuit of prey or rushing back to its underground home to lick its wounds.

It settled on the former.

Its legs pumped faster, and its body waved. The ground shook under its heavy, galloping gait as ice and rock spires exploded when the beast slammed through them. The air car sped closer to the canyon, now only seconds away, and still the monster caught up to them again.

“No,” Tag said, sighting the ice god. “Not today.”

The monster opened its mouth to bellow or snap. Tag wasn’t sure, and he never gave the creature a chance to show him. He fired a half-dozen slugs. The rounds punched through the roof of the monster’s mouth, sending its jaws slamming shut, and it fell face first. Carried by its momentum, the creature’s body crashed forward, gouging up earth and ice. The air car shot onward to escape in the safety of the gully.

The ice god shook itself off, sending small quakes rumbling through the canyon walls, and threw itself against the entrance of the canyon. Snow and ice tumbled over the car, but with the recent avalanche, most of the loose debris had already piled on the canyon bed. The creature crashed against the canyon’s entrance while it let loose a frustrated roar. Sofia pushed the air car forward, never letting up on the throttle, and the slamming and roaring were lost in the distance.

Tag and Coren slipped back inside, and Tag punched a button to close the top hatch. He racked the mini-Gauss.

“Nice shooting,” Tag said to Coren. He might not trust the Mechanic, but the alien had at least helped them survive for a bit longer.

“The honor is equally yours,” Coren replied in his slightly stilted accent.

Another button push opened the driver’s compartment, and Tag undid his helmet from his EVA suit. Coren started to settle into one of the rear passenger seats.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Tag said, gesturing to the front seat. “I’d rather you not be sitting at my back with a gun.”

Coren stared coldly at Tag but took the front passenger seat anyway. Tag stood behind Sofia and Coren, gripping an overhead handhold. The car swerved back and forth around piles of dumped snow and rocks, winding between the stalagmites.

“It’s a bit rougher than when I first came through,” Tag said.

Sofia pulled back on the controls, and the car climbed a new hill that had been formed by boulders and snow from the avalanche.

“No kidding,” she muttered with tight-pressed lips. “Wrecking the landscape and angering the ice gods. Eta-Five will be a better place when we get you off it.”

Coren’s thin lips seemed to curl slightly at the corners. A mischievous grin, maybe.

“Didn’t the Forinths warn you about the ice gods before we left? Are you sure they didn’t know something?” Tag asked.

“They warn everyone about the ice gods. I told you that drum wasn’t just a superstition. I’m betting it heard that little shootout between you and the Mechanics. Probably decided to wait around outside for something to show up again.”

“Great,” Tag said. “Any chance we’ll find one by the Argo?”

“Sure, there’s a chance,” Sofia said. Then she glared at Coren. “Might be a better chance of slipping around unnoticed since you don’t have trigger-happy Mechanics firing on your car, though.”

Tag grinned this time. Sofia’s ire wasn’t indiscriminate in its target.

“We thought he might be a Drone-Mech scout,” Coren said.

“Your guards mixed up a lowly human vehicle for one of your all-powerful, far-superior technologies?” she asked, her tone dripping in condescension.

They continued silently. Snowflakes drifted and curled around them, dancing on the wind. Hazy light shimmered through the cloud coverage and gleamed off the walls of sheer ice, tingeing them in a slight blue glow. Green lightning cracked, followed by distant waves of rolling thunder. The tension between the trio was as thick as the perpetual storm encompassing Eta-Five.

Tag realized his mistake in those silence-filled moments. He’d been so skeptical of Coren that it had been difficult to appreciate the Mechanic’s importance. And despite Tag’s distrust, Coren had come to the Argo alone, with no protection from his comrades, placing his fate in Tag’s hands, just as Sofia had.

Even if he didn’t yet trust them, they’d demonstrated their confidence in him. His thoughts whirled back to the empty bridge of the Argo, back to the days when he’d lost his chance at flight-officer training. He might not have had the training necessary to take the helm, but he had learned enough to know at least one crucial element of leadership.

A leader worked with the team he had with the goal of unity, not division.

And all he’d done to his small team was break it apart. Pit them against him, pit them against each other. That wouldn’t help him get off this planet. And most importantly, it wouldn’t help him return to the Montenegro and warn the SRE of the lurking dangers in the Eta system.

He straightened as the car exited the canyon and flew over the open, rolling tundra. A small map on the holoscreen indicated their position in relation to a single red, glowing dot labeled Argo. Soon they’d be back aboard the ship, and Tag knew things needed to change with his ragtag crew.

Coren tilted his head. His brow furrowed over his good eye. “I’m getting a transmission.” He listened for a few more seconds. “Reports indicate another ship has entered Eta-Five’s atmosphere.”

“This isn’t good,” Tag said.

“Not at all,” Sofia agreed.

“Scratch that. It was a mistake,” Coren said.

Momentary relief washed through Tag. “Good. Was it a sensor error?”

“Yes,” Coren said. “It wasn’t one ship. It was six more.”

Dread bored its way through Tag, replacing any semblance of transient relief. Things needed to change with his crew. Fast.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

––––––––

“Three hells,” Tag said, watching their dot on the holoscreen drawing nearer to the Argo at a painfully slow pace. “Any ships headed our direction?”

“Looks like it,” Coren said. “But we should reach the Argo before they reach us.”

“But it’s not like that’s any safer,” Sofia said. “The Mechanic sensors can still find it.”

“Correct,” Coren replied. “Does your ship have any antilidar or -radar measures?”

Tag nodded. “Of course.”

“Even if they’re rudimentary, I should be able to throw together a quick masking algorithm that makes the Argo look like a chunk of rock rather than a starship. I don’t promise that it will be perfect, and we should prepare for a potential boarding, but it may, as you say, buy us some time.”

“Any time you can give us is time we didn’t have before,” Tag said. He thought to try his new tactic of bringing his unexpected team together rather than driving them apart. “Thank you.”

Coren cocked his head quizzically, regarding Tag with his single golden eye. He seemed surprised at the appreciation. Tag didn’t acknowledge the alien’s shock. It had been difficult enough to utter a thank you to the man from an alien race that had slaughtered his crew.

Tag gestured over the holoscreen’s map, and it zoomed out to allow an expanded view of Eta-Five. “Can you have the coordinates of the ships transmitted to us?”

“Of course,” Coren said. “We can make that happen.” He relayed the request through his comms. A moment later, seven red dots—six representing the recent batch of ships and one for the original search vessel—glowed on various spots of Eta-Five.

None appeared on a direct trajectory to the Argo.

Coren, seeming to sense Tag’s relief, gestured to the nearest ships. “It appears we may have more than enough time for me to execute the camouflaging algorithms. That is, if your computer systems cooperate.”

“AI is completely down, so the whole ship is one big dumb computer. You’ll have free rein.” Tag wondered whether that would be a good thing or not.

“Look at you two,” Sofia said. “Getting along now. All it took was an ice god to bring you together, huh?”

“We’ll see,” Tag said, staring straight ahead through the air car’s windshield.

They glided past more towering structures. The wind calmed, and although the dark skies remained covered in dense gray clouds, no more green lightning flashed. The remainder of the trip to the site of the crashed Argo went smoothly, and soon they sat on top of the spot where the map indicated the ship should be.

“You sure you left her here?” Sofia asked, gazing over the white expanse.

“There might be a bit more snow on her than when I left,” Tag said.

“I’m not one to turn down a hard job, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to shovel our way out of this one.”

Coren adjusted his wrist-mounted weapons. A small pilot light sparked from one. “I can melt a way through.”

“You got a goddamned flamethrower on that thing?” Tag asked, unable to hide his surprise. Guilt trickled through him at his unabashed admission of admiration for the Mechanic tech.

“Absolutely. Standard armament.”

Tag pushed aside his boyish enthusiasm for the weapon. As much as he would like to see the flamethrower in action, logic proved too powerful a force to ignore. He knew a more effective way to cut through the ice and snow, and he’d already done it once with the Argo. “Sofia, I’m going to need that seat back.”

“She’s all yours, Captain,” Sofia said, giving him a wink.

Tag took the seat. He almost ignored the slight ribbing. But Sofia was right, he actually was the captain of the Argo now. He was the highest-ranking—not to mention only—officer left on the ship’s manifest. It was his ship now, and he didn’t want to waste time melting snow with a small flamethrower before fulfilling his duty to its repair and, hopefully, impending flight. A quick switch on the air car’s dash let Tag engage the miniature fusion reactor overrides.

“What are you doing?” Coren demanded. “You’re going to kill us.”

“Tag, I know you don’t like Coren, but you don’t need to bring me into the middle of this,” Sofia exclaimed, alarmed.

“Trust me,” Tag said.

He let the small reactor overheat. A red emergency warning flashed across the car’s holoscreen, and alarms screeched.

Coren pressed his thin hands over the ear holes in the sides of his head. “What are you doing? Turn off the manual override!”

“Hold on,” Tag said, waiting as he watched the temperature readings spike. Then he punched another command. The reactors vented all the overcharged power to the miniature grav impellers the car used to float above the ground. The impellers were only a miniscule fraction as strong as the Argo’s, but they still provided the desired effect. The extra energy coursing through them released as thermal energy, a safety mechanism to prevent catastrophic overloading. As they heated, the snow underneath them melted like an ice cube in the desert, and the air car started to fall as the snow and ice gave way. Gravity took hold, pulling it down, and Tag felt his stomach flip. They plummeted for a second, then abruptly came to a stop.

The car had pierced through a twenty-meter layer of snow and ice. Beneath them lay a sheet of silver gray. The Argo’s hull. Tag squinted, examining the smooth alloy, and tried to imagine what the rest of the ship looked like, guessing where the hatch to the cargo bay might lie.

“Coren, maybe it’s time to use that.” Tag indicated the wrist-mounted weapon.

“Delighted to do it,” Coren said. His expression certainly didn’t appear delighted, but he stood and locked his EVA suit’s helmet back into place.

“Sofia?” Tag clicked his helmet back on, and Sofia took his spot in the driver’s seat.

Once again, he closed the driver’s compartment and then unlatched the upper hatch of the car. He and Coren climbed out.

“Ready?” Tag asked, his voice emanating through the suit’s external speakers.

Coren nodded, and Tag pointed to a swath of snow slightly to the left of the car. A tongue of white-hot fire rolled out of Coren’s wrist-mounted gun like dragon’s breath. It made short work of the snow, clearing away a tunnel.

“Good,” Tag said. He slid off the top of the car into the freshly cleared patch. Water dripped overhead, pattering against his suit and the Argo, and he pointed to another section of snow. More flames cut through it to reveal another shining segment of the Argo. More water streamed over him and the ship. He whispered a silent prayer to himself that the tunnel they were digging wouldn’t collapse in on itself and bury him with his ship.

“There,” Tag said. More flames, more gleaming hull. The red, orange, and white glow of the flamethrower reflected off the Argo’s smooth curve. Light from the flames soaked into the snow around the tunnel Coren formed, casting the whole area in the shades of a brilliant sunset. Then the rounded edge of the Argo appeared. He faced the air car’s windshield. “Sofia, you ready?”

“Ready and waiting,” her voice called back through the comms.

“Bring her forward.” Tag motioned with his hands to guide the air car through the narrow space.

Coren continued spurting flames to make room for the vehicle. Wind funneled through the tunnel and howled around them, and snow groaned, shifting overhead. More water splatted over the air car, and the side of it ground against one wall.

“Careful!” Tag shouted.

But it was already too late. Snow poured in behind the car, and the tunnel collapsed behind them. Darkness enveloped them, and Tag crouched, his hands over the back of his neck. Pangs of anxiety twisted in his gut.

The sounds of shifting snow quieted. He was still alive. He breathed a shallow sigh of relief, and stood, his knees shaking. Bright lights washed over him. Sofia had flicked on the headlights of the air car.

The tunnel in front of them hadn’t crumbled.

Her voice came over the comms and echoed in Tag’s helmet. “Well, at least I covered our tracks. The Drone-Mechs are going to have a hard time finding us now.”

Coren slowly stood, unraveling his lanky frame. The pilot light on his wrist-mounted guns sparked to life again. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

CHAPTER FORTY

––––––––

The pilot light burned menacingly, flickering over Coren’s face and giving the power-suited Mechanic a ghastly appearance.

Tag’s heart pounded faster as he wondered what Coren had planned for them. With a shudder, he reached for his holster. “What do you mean?”

“Twenty meters of snow isn’t enough to throw off a Mechanic ship’s radar or lidar. A hulking piece of alloy like this”—he stomped on the hull of the Argo for emphasis—“is going to shine brighter on the enemies’ holoscreens than any plant in the Forest of Light.”

Tag’s hand inched back from his holster, and his heart settled, contemplating the Mechanic’s choice of words. Already referring to the unidentified ships as enemies without even bothering to contact them. Either he was dedicated to this ploy, or he really had lost hope in the fate of the rest of his species. “Then let’s get you inside. Cargo bay hatch should be right there.”

Flames billowed from Coren’s wrist-mounted weapons and melted through the snow where Tag had indicated. Once the slush had given way, he leapt down, and his boots sank into soft snow and puddles of water, already refreezing. Sure enough, the hatch stood before him. He punched in a command on an external terminal. The doors hissed open. “We’re in!”

He trod into the compromised cargo bay, still filled with snowdrifts from the punctures in the hull.

Coren came in next, and his orange visor swiveled, panning across the darkened ship, taking in the ice-covered crates and pipes. “Looks like the cargo bay took some damage during your fight with the Drone-Mechs.”

“It took all your Mechanic intellect to figure that one out?” Tag asked.

Coren let out an audible grunt that echoed from his helmet’s speakers.

“You know, we’ve really got to get your comms synced to ours,” Tag said. “I’d rather hear your disgust through my helm comms than echoing out into the hold.”

Coren held up a hand in a dismissive gesture.

“Sofia, you ready to bring that car down here?”

“Copy,” her voice called backed. “Am I clear for landing?”

“Clear,” Tag said.

“Geronimo!” she called.

The air car dropped. Its grav impellers caught the snow, but the fall was too great. The bottom of the car smashed against the snow and sent a wave of white clouds pluming around it. Its headlights lit up the hold, and once its impellers sent it hovering again, Sofia guided the car in. Tag closed the hatch after the air car shut off and settled on the deck. Sofia climbed out from the vehicle and joined the other two.

“Welcome to the Argo,” Tag said, when she joined him and Coren. “Don’t have time for a tour, so let’s get to the bridge.”

“Agreed,” Coren said. “Reports indicate we’ve got only a couple of hours before the first contact reaches sensor proximity.”

Tag led the trio up the ladders and into the passageways. Once inside, he punched a command on a nearby terminal. Lights buzzed on and illuminated the gleaming bulkhead and deck. He took his helmet off and sucked in a breath of clean, life-support-scrubbed air. Sofia removed her helmet, as did Coren.

“It’s strange to breathe without smelling the flora and fauna of the jungle,” Sofia said as they jogged through the passage. “So sterile. Reminds me of home on the Dorado station.”

Coren’s nostrils dilated. “I smell blood on the air. You weren’t exaggerating the death here.”

“No, of course I wasn’t.” Tag didn’t smell anything. The scrubbers had seemed to take care of freshening the air enough for human standards, but he supposed the Mechanic might have a more refined sense of smell. It fit his snake-like countenance. They reached the hatch to the bridge and filed in.

“Where’s your Ops station?” Coren asked, scanning the terminals and displays.

“There.” Tag pointed to a chair in front of a holoscreen.

Coren settled in.

“Need me to log you into the systems?”

Coren let out a huff that sounded like a pedantic chortle. “No, I’m already in. This should be a relatively short procedure. But before I begin, I want to keep watch on our friends in the sky.”

A holoprojection glowed to life in the center of the bridge. It glimmered, coalescing into the massive globe of Eta-Five. Red dots indicated the positions of the Drone-Mech ships. Wider circles formed perimeters around each, demonstrating the estimated sensor reach of the ships.

“Can you tell me how long this will take?” Tag asked.

“Without AI help, it’ll be at least an hour and a half, maybe two hours.”

“That’s cutting it close,” Sofia said. “And I’m guessing it’ll take even longer to reverse the AI virus the Drone-Mechs installed.”

“That would be accurate,” Coren said. “It’ll take me much longer to unravel the mess they made. So trying to restore the AI systems in order to expedite the antilidar and -radar system adjustments would be counterproductive.”

“Fair enough,” Tag said. “Get to work.”

His eyes were fixed on the holoscreen tracking Coren’s work. Words, numbers, and commands flew through the display. Tag tried to follow along, but his rudimentary programming skills from working with synth-bio AIs weren’t enough. Coren seemed to have no problem wading through the human-created algorithms and software. All six fingers on each hand worked the terminal with determined speed. If this adjustment took Coren almost two hours, he hated to guess how long it would take him and Sofia to fudge through these changes, even if they knew what they were doing.

Sofia didn’t seem quite as impressed as Tag was. She wandered around the bridge, examining different displays. Kneeling, she picked up a shred of cloth. It looked to be from a bridge officer’s uniform. She pinched it between her fingers, rolling it up.

“Can’t believe they’re all gone,” she said. “It’s one thing to hear about this, but being here makes it seem so much more real.”

Tag didn’t say anything, still too interested in supervising Coren’s work to engage in fruitless conversation. As the minutes passed, one of the Drone-Mech ships continued its search pattern. It was drawing dangerously close to the Argo. They had an hour now before they would be in sensor range. He hated relying on Coren to save the ship and them. There had to be something he could do, something to ensure they’d escape the probing lidar and radar of the Drone-Mechs.

“You said an AI system could speed things up?” Tag asked Coren.

“Almost certainly.”

“Okay, I might have something for you then. Be back soon.”

Coren merely nodded, his fingers dancing across the terminal and his eyes locked on the holoscreen. Tag felt Sofia’s eyes on him until he reached the hatch then jogged down the corridor back to the med bay. Back to where he’d left Alpha One. The hatch to the bay opened, and he leapt in, rushing to the lab and enduring the lengthy air wash of the decon chamber. Once the hatch opened, he scanned the space. It was exactly as he’d left it. Terminals buzzing. Lab equipment spilled and smashed from his struggle with Alpha One. Cables stretched to upload data into the synth-bio lifeform.

But those cables led nowhere. Alpha One was missing.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

––––––––

Tag rubbed his eyes, unable to believe what lay in front of him.

“No,” he muttered. “No, no, no!”

The cables he’d linked to Alpha One’s data ports dangled uselessly from the terminal. The wrist and ankle restraints were splayed and ripped. He spun, searching the small room, but saw no sign of the bot. Where had it gone?

He exited through the decon chamber and scoured the med bay for some clue, but again, no evidence of the silver droid appeared anywhere. His heart climbed into his throat as possible explanations circled his mind. He felt at once helpless and slightly frightened. Had someone come aboard the ship while he was stuck in that underground jungle? Maybe the Drone-Mechs had already found the Argo, and this whole thing was a setup. Three hells, for that matter, maybe Coren had sent scouts to the ship prior to their arrival.

No, no, he tried to assure himself he was being paranoid, but his self-assurances did little to assuage his pounding heart and the adrenaline already pumping through his veins. The Drone-Mechs had fooled him once, and anxiety proved too strong a persuader against the logical voice telling him they were dead, he’d killed them, made sure of it, and they weren’t coming back. His apprehension got the better of him, and he rushed through the passageways and skittered down the ladders to the brig. Sweat matted his shirt to his back, and he panted, breathing heavily. He punched in the commands to open the brig, and the hatch hissed back, revealing the polyglass chamber where the three suited bodies of the Mechanics still resided.

All three still appeared dead, soaking in puddles of their own blood.

Good, Tag thought, catching his breath. He combed his fingers through his sweat-matted hair. But one question still haunted him. “Alpha One, where are you?”

He racked his mind for answers, but none came. None until the ship’s comms buzzed.

Sofia’s voice, uncharacteristically nervous and timid, broke over the intraship speakers. “Tag, we need you on the bridge.”

An uneasy feeling overcame him. He feared they’d already found Alpha. All his bruises and injuries from his struggle with the unevolved AI system seemed to radiate with fresh pain as he ran through the passageway, and each loping step sent shudders through his aching jaw and battered ribs. He’d barely been able to subdue the droid before. What would he do now that he’d uploaded an entire ship’s worth of knowledge into the monster he’d created?

The answer came soon enough.

He burst into the bridge. Coren was standing in submission, his thin arms raised in the air. Next to him, Sofia mirrored his pose. Neither looked in his direction. Instead, they stared fixedly at something else, something he couldn’t see yet. He took a few more timid steps, reached for his sidearm, then pulled out his pulse pistol and held it before him. His heartbeat thumped in his eardrums with the heavy beat of the Forinth drum used to keep the ice gods out, and he sucked in a deep breath as he spun to face what Coren and Sofia were surrendering to.

Alpha One.

The silver medical droid had a mini-Gauss shouldered and aimed at Sofia and Coren. It peered down the rifle in a distinctly human fashion, while its faux eyes and mouth remained motionless.

Tag raised the pulse pistol and pointed it at Alpha One’s center of mass. The droid didn’t seem to notice him. “Put down your weapon, Alpha.”

“Captain,” the former med bay droid said in crisp, clear English with a distinctly feminine voice. “We have intruders.”

The pistol never strayed from Alpha, but a tingle of curiosity—and pride, maybe—coursed through Tag. His creation was calm, collected. A far cry from the writhing, angry monster it had been before. “These are welcome guests, Alpha.”

“Are you certain, Captain?”

Not exactly, Tag thought, considering Coren. But all he said was, “Yes.”

Alpha’s weapon wavered slightly, but its aim moved to Coren and remained on the Mechanic.

“Are you sure this one is not an enemy?” Alpha said. “According to your reports and the bodies I found in the brig, this lifeform matches those of the pirates.”

“I understand, Alpha,” Tag said, willing his voice to stay as calm as the droid’s. “But this one is helping us.”

Alpha took a step forward, and Coren tensed. Then the droid lowered its weapon, slinging the strap around its shoulder, and closed the distance between the Mechanic and itself. Its hand shot out, and Coren winced.

“I am Alpha One,” it said, offering its silver digits for a handshake. “I apologize for the misunderstanding. I am very pleased to meet you.”

Coren took the bot’s hand timidly. “Coren.”

Alpha swiveled to Sofia. “Alpha One.”

“Sofia.”

“Great.” Tag clapped his hands together, his nerves still barking from the tense excitement. So many questions flowed through his mind, but none were more immediate or crucial than the one he asked. “Coren, how’s progress?”

“I was doing fine until it”—he gestured to Alpha—“interrupted my work.” Coren paused. “Interesting creation.”

Tag wasn’t sure if he detected sarcasm or actual admiration in Coren’s tone. He decided it wasn’t important either way. “Get back to it then.” The nearest Drone-Mech ship was now only a half hour from sensor detection distance.

“I am not an it,” Alpha chimed in.

“Sorry?” Tag said.

“I am not an it,” Alpha said, more decisively. “The cells you used in my synthetic organ system contain the XX chromosomes typical of a human female. Thus, I am a female. And if I am to understand your intent, I am a sentient being. As such, human custom dictates other sentient lifeforms regard me as a person, not an object. The proper pronoun would be ‘she.’ Coren should say he was doing fine until she interrupted his work.”

“Duly noted,” Coren said. “My apologies, Alpha.”

“And thank the gods,” Sofia said. “We could use another woman around here to deal with these two dunces.”

Alpha glanced between the others, evidently not quite understanding Sofia’s implications.

“Don’t worry about it,” Tag said to Alpha. “I’d really like to talk with you more about what you’ve been up to. I have a lot to ask you, but right now we’re trying to escape from some very dangerous enemies.” He summarized their plight with the Drone-Mechs and their certain capture or death if they didn’t ensure the ship was concealed by the antisensor strategies. Each moment he spoke he grew increasingly impressed by the intelligence emanating from the droid’s understanding eyes. “You think you can help Coren?”

The droid nodded. “I believe so.” She stood behind the Mechanic and watched him for several minutes in silence. Anticipation swelled in Tag as he waited for her to do something, anything to expedite their escape from the encroaching Drone-Mech sensors. Then she sat next to him in a neighboring seat, and her fingers dashed across the terminal. “This is correct, isn’t it?”

Coren’s good eye went wide. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

The two worked in tandem. Coren hunched over his keyboard, rewriting code and redefining algorithms. His velvety fur became slicked and matted to his head by sweat. Alpha showed no signs of distress or urgency other than the rapidity at which her fingers worked. With fifteen minutes until the Drone-Mechs reached sensor range, Alpha and Coren’s commands and inputs still sprinted across the holoscreens. The silence, interspersed with the rattle of fingers against terminals, dragged on as Tag and Sofia stared intently at the map on the holoprojection.

“We’re looking at imminent first contact,” Sofia said. She paced near the rotating holoprojection, her eyes glued to the blip signifying the Drone-Mech ship.

“What’s the status on the antisensor systems?” Tag asked.

Coren didn’t say a word, too engrossed by his work. He seemed to be working more frantically, with his jaw clenched and his back hunched as he typed and gestured over the terminal. His good eye scanned back and forth over the lines of code.

“We are minutes from completion,” Alpha said, her voice conveying only rigid coolness.

“Good, because minutes are all we have left,” Sofia said. She wrung her hands together. “Should we arm the Argo’s weapons?”

Tag shook his head as he scrolled through status reports at the captain’s station. “Doesn’t look good. Torpedo bays are empty right now. Energy and Gauss cannons and point-defense systems might half work, but they still need repairs. Even our main grav impellers are nonfunctional.”

“Damn,” Sofia said. “We’re basically dead in the water?”

“There’s no ‘basically’ about it,” Tag said. “We’re fried. Coren, Alpha, you hear that? Three minutes to go.”

“I hear that, Captain,” Alpha said.

Coren remained silent.

There was nothing left to be said or done. This had to work. This was it. The sound of Alpha and Coren’s tapping continued. One minute. Sofia’s chest swelled in nervous, deep breaths, and Tag chewed his bottom lip.

“Executing changes,” Coren finally said.

“Successful reintegration with ship systems,” Alpha said. “However, debugging remains incomplete. I have not validated the integrity of this new code.”

“Understood,” Tag said, watching the holoprojection. The perimeter of the sensor detection limit of the closest Drone-Mech ship intersected the Argo. An alarm went off at the captain’s terminal, and Tag silenced it. It still flashed red, bleating: Enemy lidar/radar detected. The Drone-Mech ship drew closer. Tag imagined the sensors probing the landscape, boring through the snow and ice to see what lay hidden in Eta-Five’s clutches, where all four members of the ragtag crew, heaved together by happenstance and misfortune, gazed warily at the map.

This was the moment that their gamble paid off—or the moment their lives ended in a barrage of pulsefire.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

––––––––

Tag held his breath. Every nerve in his body coursed with pent-up energy as he watched the Drone-Mech ship intersect with the Argo on the holoprojection. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the sleek ship bristling with advanced weaponry, its energy weapons priming, charging, then firing in flashes of blazing blue accompanied by salvos of megaton warheads pounding the landscape and exploding in debilitating radiation, releasing energy as kinetic rounds riddled holes in the charred ruins of the hull and bulkheads, cutting through metal and whatever sinewy remains were left of their bodies.

He gulped.

Still seated, Coren looked no more confident. His snake-like pupil dilated, and his thin lips stretched taut. Sofia closed her eyes, and her lips moved silently, restlessly, muttering some unheard prayer or chant. And Alpha One watched, her head cocked, devoid of emotion. Tag wondered if thoughts of mortality filtered through her half-biological, half-computer brain like the rest of them. Did she share in their fear? Did she understand apprehension and death and life and joy? Did she understand how short her life had been and how short it would be when they were snuffed out by the Drone-Mech ship?

His questions went unasked and unanswered.

The dot representing the Drone-Mech ship blinked, continuing on a straight path as if it hadn’t sensed the Argo. It soared on, scanning and scoping out the planet, and the warnings glowing on the captain’s terminal disappeared.

No pulsefire rained from above. No warheads detonated. No kinetic rounds cut through them.

Sofia hooted in victory first and wrapped her arms around Coren, then forced him to dance with her in jubilation. He looked uncertain and surprised, but a smile broke across his face, and an audible sigh of relief escaped his scaly lips. Tag let out a long breath, tension flowing from his relaxing muscles, and approached Alpha.

He clasped her cold shoulder. “Thank you. You helped save our lives.”

“The honor is mine,” she replied. “You gave me the gift of life. It is only in recompense that I must preserve yours.”

Tag couldn’t help the almost delirious laugh that shook through him. “I’m glad you say that now. You tried to kill me when you first woke!” He wasn’t sure where his joy came from. The irony of it all or just the thrill of escaping a tense, near-death experience.

“I apologize,” Alpha said, her digital eyes and mouth conveying remorse. “My neural connections were not yet mature. And I was operating on base animal instinct alone, not yet fully aware of who or what I was.”

“No apologies necessary,” Tag said, wrapping his fingers in hers in a friendly embrace. “It was my fault for expecting you to instantly understand the world around you. It can take us humans decades before we ever really become mature or self-aware enough to do what you’ve done for us today.”

Alpha smiled a little at that.

“And some humans never really grow up,” Sofia said. “So you’re really better off than the lot of us flesh-and-blood buggers.”

“Unfortunately, if we’re going to see any of those flesh-and-blood buggers again, we need to get off Eta-Five,” Tag said. “I know you just finished saving our asses, but you think you two can do it again?”

“Absolutely,” Coren said. “Do you believe me now?”

Tag studied the Mechanic, understanding his intent immediately. He wanted to know whether this small victory had been enough to prove his allegiance. “I’m still deciding. But I’ll be more convinced if you can restore our AI systems. Then we’ll have a chance in hell of going somewhere.”

Coren let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine. What systems should I start with?”

“Repair bots first. There’s structural and engine damage to fix before we can make it out of Eta-Five’s atmosphere.” Tag faced Alpha. “Can you perform the astronav trajectory calculations for hyperspace travel?”

“No, sir, I cannot,” Alpha said. “I’m limited by my biological half and do not have the calculation capabilities of the AI navigation systems.”

“Fair enough,” Tag said. “Coren, that’s the next priority. After getting her spaceworthy, we need to be able to make the jump to hyperspace.”

“Can do,” Coren said.

“What about weapons systems?” Sofia asked.

“Those can be repaired last. I’m more worried about getting out of here than exchanging any fire.”

“A wise decision,” Coren said. “Even if we get the ship running one hundred percent, it’ll be outclassed by the Drone-Mechs. If we stick around to take on seven of their ships in a head-to-head battle, we’ll stand no chance.”

Alpha’s feet rang against the deck as she approached Tag. “Captain, if I may make a suggestion, you might consider restoring the med bay regen chambers.” She pressed a cool hand to his shoulder wound.

He recoiled slightly, but her touch was gentle. “The ship is more important right now. I’ll live.”

“Captain, your injury causes me concern. Will you at least join me in the medical bay? I may be able to offer some assistance without the aid of the regen bay.”

“Fine. Sofia, Coren, will you be okay for the moment?”

“Happy to help as needed,” Sofia said.

“I’ll be occupied for the next day or longer with restoring the AI systems,” Coren said.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tag said before following Alpha One to the medical bay.

Once there, she scoured the cabinets for autoheal gels. At Tag’s side, she peeled away the blood-soaked fabric around the energy-round wound. Tag winced slightly, but the pain proved more bearable than he’d anticipated. The nerves had mostly been burned to a crisp, helping numb the area, and his earlier use of tissue-regen bandages had allowed the first layer of collagenous tissue to form. Plus, he had the added benefit of the painkillers the EVA suit had automatically administered. Alpha probed the scabbed tissue with care, as if she was a practiced doctor.

Three hells, he figured she was. Though her mind was new, as the M3 droid, she’d assisted him with about every injury and illness he’d treated on the Argo. And there was no telling how long the med bay droid had been serving in the SRE before working with Tag. But this was the first time she’d had the self-awareness and capability of administering treatment of her own volition.

She gently applied the autoheal gel, and Tag, still amazed the synth-bio brain had actually worked, internally lauded her choice. The gel contained a cocktail of proteins and nascent, immune-privileged stem cells that would induce rapid healing of the charred and damaged flesh in his shoulder. She then placed the bandages that would hold the gel in place and eventually dissolve, eaten away by his healing cells. Soon his shoulder would be whole again.

“Is that better, Captain?”

“Much.” Tag rotated his shoulder slightly, testing the bandages. “Very good for your first autonomous treatment.”

“It was easy to learn from the medical texts, videos, and demonstrations available on the ship’s intranet.”

“Easy, huh?” Tag let out a soft chuckle. “You realize humans need almost a decade of specialized training before they treat patients on their own, right?”

“Yes, of course. I do recall that fact.”

Tag found it difficult to fully accept that this gentle droid had once tried to kill him. But his past week so far had been fraught with surprise—mostly bad—so he supposed it wasn’t too strange to see such an abrupt change in the synth-bio droid.

Still, he hoped to limit future surprises. “Listen, Alpha, we need to make it to the Montenegro.”

“Yes, I understand, Captain.”

“I need your help.”

“I am happy to execute my duty as a crew member of the SRES Argo in any capacity of which you deem I am capable.”

“Very good. I appreciate your enthusiasm. But as you adeptly pointed out earlier, Coren is not a human nor a member of the SRE. I’m not sure yet if we can trust him.”

“But why would you let an enemy of the SRE aboard the Argo?”

“The answer is kind of complicated. However, the simplest explanation is that he might be the only one of us able to reverse the virus preventing us from getting our AI systems back online.”

“So you have granted him access to these sensitive components of the ship’s infrastructure in hopes that he will be true to his word? Yet you are not sure if he will subvert the ship’s systems or cause you and Sofia harm.”

“That about sums it up.”

“I see. Complicated indeed, Captain.”

Tag locked eyes with Alpha. In her shining face, he could see his own reflection. “That’s where you come in. I want you to keep an eye on his work. Should you have any questions or concerns, if you think maybe he’s sabotaging our systems instead of fixing them, alert me at once.”

“I can do that, sir.”

“Thank you. It may be best that you don’t let him know about this conversation. Is that clear?”

“Very much so. Is there anything else?”

“No. Let’s get back to the bridge, shall we? We have a ship to fix.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

––––––––

Tag escorted Alpha to the bridge, where they found Coren still hunched over a terminal, transfixed by the code flying across his holoscreen. Unable to contribute to the coding efforts, Sofia seemed bored as she rested in a crash couch with her legs splayed and her hands behind her head.

“Captain Brewer has asked me to assist you,” Alpha said to Coren, taking her place at a neighboring terminal.

Coren simply huffed and continued working.

“Anything I can do, Skipper?” Sofia asked. “As titillating as it is to watch these two hack up numbers and letters, I’d like to do something a bit more useful.”

Tag felt much the same way. He needed something to keep his mind occupied. His station as medical officer called to him, and he had an idea to help him allay his suspicions of Coren and the Drone-Mechs. “I might have something for us.”

Sofia hopped out of the crash couch. “And it doesn’t involve swabbing the decks, right?”

“No, not at all.”

“Good. Because this place is a wreck.” She followed Tag into the passageway. “It’d take longer to clean this ship up than it’s going to take for those two to get the AI systems back in order.”

“There’s more truth than fiction to that joke.”

“Oh, I wasn’t joking.”

They padded down the passageways and climbed down a set of ladders.

“So, Skipper,” Sofia said, “I love that droid’s enthusiasm. I got to admit, I’m impressed. You did a damn good job bringing her to life. Have you always been in the medical service?”

“Pretty much.”

“Since your compulsory service?”

“Ah, not quite,” Tag said, recalling his short stint in the flight officer’s training program. “But for most of my service, yeah. How about you? Were you always in the science division?”

“That’d be a hard negative,” Sofia said. They paused at a hatch. “I started on a capital ship. Piloted fighters.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. Lost too many friends that way, though.”

“Lonely being a pilot?”

“Only when you’re in an active war zone,” she said. They trod on in silence for a beat as the implications soaked into Tag’s mind. “I got tired of seeing us used as cannon fodder and decided to take a new path to get me out of all the dogfights.”

“Any chance you can still fly?” Tag asked.

“Want me to pilot the Argo?”

Tag nodded.

Sofia lifted her shoulders in a noncommittal gesture. “Size of the bird isn’t as important as how she handles, wouldn’t you agree?” She gave him a knowing grin.

“Whatever you say, Lieutenant,” Tag said. “But if you’re not too rusty, I’m happy to hand over the controls to you on the flight out of here.”

“Can’t promise the ride will be smooth, but I’ll give it my best.”

“That’s all I ask.” Tag ducked into the med bay. He scoured one of the storage cabinets with Sofia looking on then pulled out a pair of biosafety suits. Holding one out to Sofia, he said, “put this on.”

“You know I’m an anthropologist, right? I’m not some kind of epidemiologist or something.”

“Yep,” Tag said, already cinching his suit over his limbs. As soon as he finished, he grabbed a black body bag from another cabinet. “But you’ve got two arms and a pair of legs. That’ll be good enough for now.”

Sofia shot him a quizzical look as she adjusted her gloves. “You got another synth-bio experiment you want to show me?”

“Not exactly.” Tag led her back into the passageway and down another set of ladders. The corridor led to another hatch, where Tag punched in a code, and the doors drew into the bulkhead with a hiss, and he stepped through. “Welcome to the brig.”

“You throwing me behind bars?”

“Far from it,” Tag said, gesturing to the Mechanics’ bodies locked behind the polyglass shield. “I was thinking we might release a prisoner.”

Sofia pressed a palm to the polyglass. “All right, this is getting a little strange.”

Tag unlocked the door to the cell. “This might seem a bit morbid, but you and Coren seemed so convinced that there was something behind the psychological changes in the rebelling Mechanics.” He bent over one of the bodies. “If there’s truth behind that hypothesis, we might find an underlying physiological change responsible for this.”

Sofia sucked air through her teeth then stepped into the cell. “Gods, I suppose you might be right. You are the medical expert on the ship.”

“Alpha might have that honor now, but I’ll be damned if I let the droid steal my job.”

A slight laugh escaped Sofia’s lips. “So are we taking this guy up to medical?”

“Yep. I want to do an autopsy. Test for any contaminants, biological or otherwise. Implants, mini-drones, parasites. Whatever. If you and Coren are right, we’re going to find the explanation, and I want to make sure this isn’t something that’s going to affect our Mechanic buddy on the bridge.”

They pulled the body bag over one of the Mechanics, and Tag admired the engineering behind the busted orange visor across the alien’s face. Even after a kinetic slug had pierced it, some kind of polymer held the broken polyglass shards in place. He zipped the bag up over the Mechanic’s helmet and sealed the bag to prevent any alien pathogens from leaking out. The ship might well already be contaminated, but he figured he might as well start being more careful now that Sofia and Coren had clued him in as to the dangers of the Drone-Mechs.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready.”

Sofia wrapped her hands under the dead pirate’s shoulders, and Tag grabbed his feet. Together they hoisted the body up the ladders and back to the medical bay, where they laid the corpse out on an examination table and wheeled it into the laboratory. They each underwent the decontamination spray. With Sofia’s help, Tag used a chem-catalyst cutter to remove the busted pieces of armor and helmet from the Mechanic’s body until they revealed the lanky, fur-covered body.

“You familiar with their biology?” Tag asked.

Sofia brushed the fur, matted in blood, near the Mechanic’s neck. “A little. Coren lent me some data chips on their species. Most of it was on culture and history, but I’ve got some info on their anatomy. Be back soon.” She departed the laboratory, shed her biosafety suit, and ran off into the corridor, leaving Tag alone with the skinny, dead Mechanic. When Sofia returned, she paused outside the laboratory and held up a data chip. “May I?”

“Be my guest.”

She placed the data chip over a terminal, and the holoscreen glowed. A quick swipe across the screen transferred all the data to a terminal within the laboratory, and Sofia put her suit back on and joined Tag once again. Numbers and progress bars reported a slew of downloaded data transferred from the chip for a couple of minutes, glowing on the holoscreen. With a gesture, Sofia loaded one file. A holoprojection of a Mechanic appeared. It floated in the air between them and radiated a soft, ethereal blue.

“Perfect,” Tag said. He manipulated the holoprojection with his gloved hands. Layer by layer, he peeled away different portions of the holoprojection like an artist cutting away clay to reveal the intricate cardiovascular and nervous systems wrapped around the organs of the simulated alien. “It looks vaguely human.”

“Mmhmm,” Sofia said, entranced by the glowing 3D image.

“I’m thinking I should take a sample here and here.” Tag pointed to segments of the brain. “If something affected their neurological chemistry, that’d be the best place to start, don’t you think?”

“You’re the doc,” Sofia said.

Tag turned away from the holoprojection and examined the dead Mechanic’s skull. Much of the fur along its scalp was covered in dried blood, and its nasal cavity was burst inward from its ill-fated fight with Tag. “Before I get too far into this, is Coren going to be offended by this? I mean, do they pay their dead any respects? I don’t want to have to deal with another raging Mechanic on this ship.”

“They only respect the living. To them, the universe is a machine. Even living beings are mechanisms based on chemistry and biology. Consciousness and sentience are no more revered than complicated computer programs to them. They’ve got their share of religions, but most share a common belief that the dead belong to the universe. Bodies are simply matter, and there’s no need to waste space or time on them once life has left them. Short answer to your question: You aren’t going to piss Coren off. In fact, everything I’ve read in their medical textbooks points to the fact that studying dead bodies is a worthwhile pursuit to understand the biological mechanisms behind life.”

“That’s awfully practical—and a little depressing,” Tag said. “But glad to hear it.”

“Besides,” Sofia said, “I’m positive Coren’s going to want to know what’s turning Mechanics into Drone-Mechs. You find that out, you’ll win a friend for life.”

“Sounds like you’re still convinced he’s on our side.”

“Yep. And if we find something in this Drone-Mech of yours, will that be enough to convince you?”

Tag prepped a large biopsy needle and selected a spot in the Mechanic’s flesh to insert it. “If we find something here, the only way I’ll be convinced is if it isn’t in Coren, too.”

“You can’t very well do an autopsy on him.”

“Then we better hope it’s easy to detect.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

––––––––

The needle went in with little resistance. Tag pulled back on the plunger, and the device captured a small piece of the Mechanic’s brain tissue. He repeated the procedure three more times in various regions. When he finished, he deposited each sample of pink tissue into individual vials.

“Ready to go,” Tag said.

Sofia peered into one of the vials. “Wait, that’s it? I thought you were going to have to open up the whole damn skull thing like a melon.”

“Gods, no,” Tag said. “I like to think medical science is a little more advanced than that. We have imaging equipment if we want a peek inside.” He handed her a small wand-like device. “Handheld MRI. Trace this over the body, and it’ll create a holoprojection image. We can compare this Mechanic’s internals with the model of a healthy Mechanic you have on the data packet.”

“Okay, I can handle that.” Sofia started scanning the Mechanic with the handheld MRI. “So if there are any weird devices or anything, we should be able to spot them.”

“Exactly. While you do that, I’ll run mass spec and a few other analyses. I want to see if there’s anything microscopic or nanoscopic in nature that might impart neurological changes.”

“Whatever you just said, it sounds good,” Sofia said, waving the wand over the Mechanic’s slender chest.

Tag loaded the samples into an automatic tissue processor. It turned the samples into tiny slurries before the terminal-sized machine began humming and buzzing as it identified various components within the tissues. Results scrolled across the holoscreen. Genetic matter, cellular organelles, enzymes, and other proteins. All constituents strikingly similar to the makeup of a human body, yet with enough variation to demonstrate their alien origins.

“Finished,” Sofia reported, handing the MRI to Tag.

He stowed it in a cabinet full of other medical devices and then entered a command on the terminal. A new holoprojection model of the dead Mechanic floated next to the holoprojection Sofia had provided. The two bodies appeared similar in most regards, although several glaring differences were immediately apparent.

Tag gestured over the holoprojection to examine their specimen. Pockets of pooled blood shimmered in dark blobs—evidence of internal bleeding. Fractures traced long lines throughout the thin bones in the Mechanic’s limbs, and fragments of cartilage and bone were scattered in the flesh along its face. All signs of its struggle with Tag. But as he delved into this MRI-based simulation, he found no obvious devices or other anomalies that might indicate the cause of the Drone-Mech’s violence against its own people and Tag’s crew.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Sofia said. “At least, nothing that sticks out to me.”

“Me neither,” Tag confirmed. He had been hoping they would find some obvious answer, some indisputable reason for the Drone-Mechs’ behavior. “But then again, I have no real idea of what I’m looking for.” He checked on the status of the tissue analysis. “We have a while before this is done. Check on the other two?”

“I could use the walk.”

They shed their biosafety suits and returned to the bridge. Coren was still hunched over a terminal, exactly where they’d left him, working at a feverish pace. Alpha stoically and determinedly toiled at her terminal.

“Status report?” Tag asked.

Coren jumped and let out a surprised gasp. He composed himself and wiped his fur-covered brow with the back of his hand. “Repair bot AI systems are online.”

“Excellent.”

“Hull integrity of the cargo bay is eighty percent of normal,” Alpha said. “Bot work will begin on grav impellers soon.”

“Can I get you two anything to eat or drink?” Tag asked. He needed something else to occupy himself as he waited for the results of the tissue analysis, or else the anxiety would drive him mad. “It looks like you could use something.” In truth, he wasn’t sure what either of them consumed. He figured Coren must be at least as famished as him, and the biological components of Alpha’s synth-bio system necessitated sustenance much like a normal human organ system, albeit at a lower caloric demand.

“Water and whatever deplorable protein you have available,” Coren said. “I’ve tasted Sofia’s food, and it’s not particularly suited to my palate. But it’s edible.”

“And edible is what I strive for,” Sofia chirped.

“Alpha?”

“Water, as well. I’m at seventy percent of optimal hydration. Sustenance of at least three hundred calories should suffice for the remainder of our time on this planet.”

“Sure,” Tag said. “Consider it done.”

He and Sofia left, headed for the galley.

“Never been on a ship where the Captain was the medic, steward, and chef,” Sofia said.

“If you haven’t noticed, we’re a bit short-staffed at the moment. Although I just got three new crew members. One of ’em is a bit annoying. Thinking of assigning her to the galley full time to keep her off my back.” He gave Sofia a playful look.

“Come on, Skipper. That would be most unkind to Alpha One,” Sofia said, parrying his ribbing. “Besides, she’s not that annoying.”

The two scoured the preserved food stores to create a fresh meal. The one good thing about being shipwrecked in an exploratory vessel was the sheer amount of goods available to them. The ship was equipped to handle a decade-long journey for a crew of near one hundred. With only three normal lifeforms and a droid with the diet of a sparrow, it would take centuries to go through all their supplies.

“Looks almost good enough to eat,” Sofia said when they’d finished reconstituting the freeze-dried meat and vegetables.

“Don’t know what kind of fresh produce you got in the jungle, but you better get used to this stuff.”

“Didn’t mean to offend, Chef,” Sofia said.

Tag shook his head as he led them from the galley. It felt strangely soothing to be there with another human. It felt safe. Almost like normal if he pushed all the crowded memories from the past several days from his mind. He was no longer alone. But he vowed not to resign himself to complacency. After all, this was likely the calm before the storm. They might be safe for a while under the snow and ice of Eta-Five, but it wouldn’t last forever.

He and Sofia delivered the food to Coren and Alpha. The droid offered her thanks, overly polite and gracious. Coren merely nodded, silent and focused.

Tag’s mind still reeled at the thought of this temporary peace ending, upheaving their safety once again when they made their flight back to space, back to the Montenegro. He returned to the med bay with Sofia. A high-pitched chirp from the tissue-processing machine caught his attention. Instead of wading through the decon chamber once again, he opened the results on a terminal in the med bay. Results and data spewed forth like a crashing waterfall over the holoscreen. Most simply reported the normal biological matter—like proteins and DNA—present in the Mechanic’s tissue.

Then a single anomaly glared in red. Everything else in the lab faded away as Tag’s eyes focused on the report. He couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. The implications stabbed through his mind with an almost physical pain. He was taken aback and glanced at the screen again, desperate to find something that contradicted what he had read.

“Oh, gods,” he muttered.

“What? What is it?” Sofia asked.

“Not good.” Tag pulled his hands through his hair.

No, this momentary peace would be over sooner than he’d thought.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

––––––––

“What is it, Skipper?” Sofia repeated, leaning over Tag’s shoulder.

“This doesn’t make sense.” He backed away from the holoscreen, blinking. As if that would change the unexpected results. When he examined the anomaly again, his stomach twisted into a tight, painful knot of anxiety.

“Tag?” Sofia asked, worry evident in her tone. She grabbed his shoulder. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I ... I’m not sure how to explain this.” He pointed at the chemical structures glowing in the holoscreen. “Silica-alloy complex nanites.”

“Silica-what?”

Tag recoiled from the terminal as if it were a raging fire, threatening to burn him. “Nanites.”

“I heard you, Skipper,” Sofia said, peering at the chemical structures and descriptions next to them. “But you look like you just watched someone die. What does this stuff do? And where’d it come from?”

“I have no idea.” Tag inhaled sharply, willing himself to control the mixture of confusion and worry clamping his brain, as he tried to reason away the presence of these nanites by considering weak hypotheses that, maybe, just maybe, another alien species could’ve developed them or come across this technology in an enormous coincidence, because surely, surely, his darkest suspicions couldn’t be true.

That’s got to be it, he thought. Right?

But the evidence presented by the results proved far too damning to dismiss by coincidence. “These nanites share a ninety-nine percent match with technology developed over three hundred years ago.”

“Before the SRE?”

“Before the SRE.”

“How do you know?”

“This is human technology.”

He watched the grim realization sink into Sofia. She shook her head as if she, too, didn’t want to believe what he now suspected to be true.

“Look.” Tag pointed to some of the text displayed beside the nanite models rotating on the holoscreen. “These types of weaponized nanites were outlawed by the UN and classified as illegal biological warfare. It was supposed to be eradicated.”

“And what was the nanites’ purpose?”

“Mind control,” Tag said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. What, are these things like little parasites or something?”

“No, nothing so complicated. Here.” He gestured over the holoscreen, and a 3D model of a brain fizzled to life. “The nanites find their way into the bloodstream. It doesn’t matter how. Ingestion. Injection. Passive absorption through flesh. Whatever. They’re made to target neural tissues.” Millions of tiny blue particles flowed into the simulated brain. “And once you get a high enough concentration of them, this happens.” The blue particles started to coalesce into structures, forming miniature, perfectly shaped spiral galaxy clusters. “The nanites turn into—”

“Antennas,” Sofia said, rotating the holoprojection brain with one hand.

“More or less. And these ones here are supposed to respond to grav waves. I thought they were only theoretical, but ...” He let the words trail off, still struggling to grasp the enormity of their discovery.

“So you can send signals from, my gods, light-years away and still control the nanite victims?”

Tag nodded. “The Drone-Mechs ...”

“The Drone-Mechs really are being controlled by something. By human technology.”

“I’m afraid you were right,” Tag said. He reluctantly corrected himself. “You and Coren were right.” All at once a white-hot ball of rage coursed through him. His fingers clenched into a fist, and he slammed the terminal. The holoprojection shimmered, shaken by the impact. “Who would do something like this?”

Sofia stood, still entranced by the holoscreen images of the nanites. “You think the SRE did this?”

“I don’t want to believe it. I mean, I can’t believe it,” he said. “The SRE, as far as I know, doesn’t have the ability to communicate via grav waves. So how did this happen? How did this technology get into the hands of aliens? And why would they do this to the Mechanics? Why would they have the Mechanics attack us?”

Sofia leaned against the bulkhead. Her hands were flat against the alloy walls. “Gods, I wish I knew the answers to any of those questions.”

Tag cradled his head in his hands, wondering why an unknown alien race would do this. Typing the commands, controlling the Mechanics like they were pieces of unintelligent software. “When you spoke to Coren and the others, did they ever mention another race who had contact with humans before?”

“No,” Sofia said. “None that he knew of. In fact, he said they hadn’t ever even heard of humans until me.”

“Then who took our nanites? Who is using them out here?”

“Maybe no one else is. Maybe it’s us.”

Tag shook his head. “You think we controlled the Mechanics? Grav wave comms are just a theory on Earth. We haven’t even developed them. Besides, I’ve never heard of any current operations in these sectors. And what strategic value would we gain by using a banned weapon like this to enslave a species and use them against ourselves? Against the Argo?”

“I don’t know.” Sofia slumped onto a stool. “I don’t know.”

Nothing made sense to Tag, and he could see Sofia suffered from the same cognitive dissonance coursing through him. Had humans unbeknownst to them used such an ignoble technology against an entire race? The mere idea of enslaving a sentient race like this flew in the face of every oath Tag had ever taken in the SRE. He couldn’t believe that his government, his people, had been behind this.

But the fear, cold as ice, flowing through his vessels wasn’t just for the unanswered questions about conniving governments and interstellar warfare. It had a personal root, too. He’d spent his time doubting every word Coren had spoken, and he’d made his distrust known at every opportunity.

And now he had evidence that maybe Coren shouldn’t be seeking help from the SRE. The real enemies weren’t the Mechanics. They might be—

“I have to tell Coren what we’ve found,” Tag said.

“Don’t.”

Tag was surprised by her answer. She’d been such a vehement proponent of the Mechanic, and now she wanted to conceal what Tag thought must be the definitive explanation for what had caused the species-wide mutiny. “He deserves to know.”

“But if you tell him now, he might not trust us. He won’t help us get off this planet, and we won’t be able to get back to the Montenegro to send for help.”

“It’ll be worse for any hope of future Mechanic–Human relationships if he finds this out on his own.”

“Agreed,” Sofia said. “This is your ship now, Skipper. Your decision. But at least wait until the AI systems are restored and we’re off Eta-Five.”

Tag could see the logic in that. She’d been right all along about the Mechanics, and he knew her relationship with them and Coren gave her an advantage at predicting how he would react to this type of news. “Okay. We wait until we’re off Eta-Five.”

He waved his hand across the holoscreen and uploaded the nanite data onto the handheld MRI. With it, he should now be able to detect the nanites in any Mechanic, including Coren. He set the handheld MRI down and stared back at the dead Drone-Mech lying on the exam table in the lab. It looked more menacing than ever. Tag wasn’t afraid of the deceased alien but rather of what it represented. A pirate attack—nothing particularly unusual in and of itself—had turned into the beginnings of an interstellar, interspecies conflict. And the Argo was right in the middle of it, alone and helpless.

“Captain,” Alpha’s voice called over the intraship comms. “Captain, we have news from the bridge.”

Tag punched a button on the bulkhead. “Go ahead, Alpha.” He expected more news of online AI systems and progress in repairs. But he wasn’t ready for what Alpha said next.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

––––––––

“We have an additional seven contacts,” Alpha said calmly over the ship’s comms as if she was reporting nothing but a water-pipe leak in the heads.

“I’m on my way,” Tag said. He and Sofia sprinted out of the med bay. The bulkheads and passageways became a blur as they raced by. Once on the bridge, the massive holoprojection of Eta-Five grabbed his attention. Fourteen red dots, identified as Drone-Mech ships, circled around the planet.

“Why?” Tag asked.

“I wish I knew,” Coren said, still focused on the terminals. Almost as an aside, he muttered, “Repair systems reporting full hull integrity reestablished and engines are operational. Astronavigation AI should be online within minutes.” He straightened his long body. Sweat trickled through the gorges of scars across his face. “We’ll be ready for a jump to hyperspace as soon as we’re out of Eta-Five’s atmosphere.”

“Good,” Tag said. “Looks like we’re going to need to move sooner than expected.” He plopped into the captain’s station crash couch. “Where are these ships coming from?”

“I am unable to provide an adequate answer for that inquiry, Captain,” Alpha said. “I apologize for these shortfalls.”

“It’s not necessary, Alpha,” Tag said. “Any idea, Coren?”

“No. I can’t tell whether they’ve made separate hyperspace jumps to Eta-Five or if there is a fleet in orbit sending these search vessels down. It’s impossible to tell with the Eta-Five atmospheric anomaly blocking all extraplanetary sensor readings.”

“Of course,” Tag said. “Once we make the jump, we’re going to need to let the Montenegro know that hostile forces are mustering here.”

“I’m not sure what you did to incite their fury,” Coren said, “but when you destroyed that cutter, they must’ve taken it personally. To have this many ships searching for you, it’s almost as if you stole their Holy Grail.”

Tag cocked his head, perplexed by Coren’s use of the human expression.

“I taught him that one,” Sofia said.

Coren faced Alpha. “Do you think you can finish this last batch of code?”

“I believe I can indeed handle this,” Alpha stood.

With a nod, Coren paced to the captain’s station. He stretched out his multi-jointed limbs, bending them in ways that made Tag cringe. “It feels good to get out of that damned human-sized seat.” He let out a long exhalation then licked his lips with his fork-like tongue. “Captain Brewer.”

The title still felt strange to Tag. “Yes?”

“I completed my part of the deal and restored your AI systems.”

“And I appreciate that.”

“I told you I would be happy to return to the Forest of Light after I completed these tasks.”

“You did.”

“I’m afraid I will no longer be able to uphold that end of the bargain.”

“Because of the search vessels?” Tag asked.

Coren nodded.

Tag drummed his fingers on the crash couch’s armrest. He’d already suspected this would be the case before the newest seven Drone-Mech ships joined the search efforts. “Makes sense.” He glanced at the holoprojection with a flurry of blips showing the locations of the Drone-Mech ships. “I’m afraid we couldn’t risk the intraplanetary flight to drop you off, and you’d be risking your life if we let you go out alone with so many ships scouring the planet’s surface.”

“It’s not my life I fear for,” Coren said, wrinkles forming across the unscarred portion of his brow. “It’s the lives of my people. I don’t want to lead the Drone-Mechs to them. They might be looking for you, but if they find me, I don’t want to give away the location of the other Mechanics. We may be the only members of our species who haven’t suffered from whatever scourge has ravaged our people and turned them into monsters. I could not bear to be responsible for my people’s enslavement or butchery.”

“Understood. Will you accompany us to the Montenegro then? You’ll be a free representative of your people, and you can help us in your request to assist the Mechanics here.”

“I would relish the opportunity.”

“Very well. Alpha, how’s progress?”

The droid stepped away from the terminal. “Code implementation and debugging complete. Astronavigation online. Repair estimates state that weapon systems will be fully functional within the day.”

“But astronav is ready to go?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Tag gave Coren a meaningful look. The Mechanic couldn’t possibly know the mix of emotions and thoughts roiling through Tag now, but he seemed to appreciate the gesture. Guilt still crushed him, knowing humans might’ve played some part in the Mutiny Incident plaguing his people. He needed to help these Mechanics. Not just to keep an oath to Coren but because it was the right thing to do. The evidence he’d seen in the med bay was enough to convince him of this, and the longer they waited here on Eta-Five, the more the Drone-Mechs would intensify their search efforts and the less chance the free Mechanics stood of a successful rescue.

“Queue up the astronav systems, Alpha. We’re leaving immediately,” Tag said. “The Mechanics are relying on us.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

––––––––

“Sofia, you’re flying,” Tag said. She gave him a salute and dropped into the pilot station. “Alpha, you’re on Ops. You might have the best handle on navigation and engineering.”

“That is true. I now have quite the advantage with those tasks.” She settled into the crash couch at the Ops station.

Tag looked at Coren last. “You’re on weapons. We don’t have much, and the AI systems should be able to deal with most point-defense and targeting procedures. But it’s always helpful to have the intuition of someone with intelligence at the controls.”

“I’ve had a little time to acquaint myself with your systems. Rather basic compared to Mechanic standards, though, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“Are you sure you want me here?” Coren asked. Tag understood the Mechanic’s reservations. The alien couldn’t believe Tag had asked him to be in charge of the ship’s firepower after the tense relationship they’d shared. But Coren still didn’t know what Tag had discovered about the Drone-Mechs. And if all else failed, Tag could easily override any weapons control from the captain’s terminal.

“Yes,” Tag said. “Positive.” He offered no further explanation, and Coren sank into the seat. “Alpha, chart us a course off the planet. Avoid sensor range of all contacts if possible. As soon as we break through the atmosphere, have the AI chart a hyperspace jump. Do not wait for my command to set the trajectory and be ready when I give word to activate the T-drive. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain,” she said, already working at her terminal.

“Coren, have weapon systems online. But lay off the energy cannons. I want to reduce our energy signature. Have point-defense systems prepared to go at the first sign of any incoming torpedoes or warheads.”

“At your word, Captain,” Coren responded, his twelve fingers tapping at the terminal.

“Sofia, we’re at your mercy. I barely crash-landed this heap of singed metal into a snowdrift. Take us on Alpha’s course and off this frozen hell. Get those grav impellers online.”

“You got it, Skipper,” Sofia said. Her fingers worked quickly, and she pulled back on the controls. A low whine shuddered through the ship as the reactors churned, powering up the impellers. “Just like a fat, bloated fighter,” she muttered as she fed the impellers more power.

The shaking of the thrusters and impellers sparked a twinge of nervousness in Tag. “Nothing breaking down on us yet?”

“Everything is reporting typical function,” Alpha replied.

“Sofia, slow lift until we’re clear of the snow, then take us to space.”

The Argo shook as the impellers pushed it. Snow and ice sloughed off the bridge viewport, and the ship climbed out of its frigid tomb. The gray clouds and barren landscape of Eta-Five appeared before them. Jagged mountains broke over the horizon, their silhouettes appearing with the occasional burst of green lightning tearing apart the distant sky.

“Grav impellers at full strength,” Sofia said.

“Alpha, coordinates, please,” Tag said.

“Transferred.”

Tag couldn’t help the slight grin as he watched a projected trajectory glow across Sofia’s holoscreen. No SRE officer in their right mind would assign a ship’s command to this crew of misfits. But it didn’t matter now. They were actually melding together as a cohesive, functional team.

“Full ahead!” he commanded.

The engines roared, resonating through the bulkhead, and the resulting thrust pressed Tag into his seat. It took a second before the inertial dampeners kicked in, and the clouds blotted their view of anything else as the ship pitched for the sky. In mere minutes, they’d reach the thundering waves of clouds and pierce through Eta-Five’s atmosphere.

A warning flashed suddenly on Tag’s holoscreen. The message he read there obliterated his confidence in their escape like an asteroid striking an unaware space station outpost.

“Incoming weapons lock!” Coren shouted.

“Initiate lidar and radar chatter.” Tag gripped the side of his terminal and watched the holoprojection. From the nearest Drone-Mech ship, three small red dots blinked and flew toward them.

“Sensor subversion isn’t working,” Coren said. “We’ve got incoming torpedoes.”

Time to test just how well his ragtag team worked under stress. More Drone-Mech ships began descending on their position, racing from various points on the planet’s surface. Most didn’t stand a chance of catching them before they reached cloud cover. But all it took was one to take them down.

Tag clenched his jaw. “Fire chaff, and ready point-defense.”

Coren executed the commands with rapid-fire precision. A storm of flak spewed from the Argo, ready to catch incoming torpedoes.

“Sixty seconds until we clear the atmosphere,” Sofia reported.

“Energy shields up,” Tag said.

Alpha tapped on her terminal. “Shields are at one hundred percent.”

They rocketed toward Eta-Five’s cloud cover, but the torpedoes accelerated far faster than the Argo, closing the gap between the Argo and the Drone-Mech ships at a rapid clip.

The first torpedo approached the three-thousand-meter mark. It detonated, exploding against the screen of chaff. The blast glared blindingly white through the viewport, and the ship lurched to port. Sofia struggled at the controls, and her knuckles turned white as she fought against the concussive force.

“That was close. Too close,” Tag said “We’ve still got two more incoming. Point-defense, now!”

A chain of fiery depleted-uranium slugs cascaded from the cannons. The rounds cut through the air until a distant explosion was followed quickly by another. The roar of the blast and its tidal wave of force slammed against the ship. Tremors snaked through the Argo, but a slight grin spread across Tag’s face.

“Nice job, Coren,” Tag said. His joy was short lived.

Alarms chirped, announcing the arrival of more torpedoes on the holoprojection. A dozen of them. Tag forced himself to breathe at a normal pace, trying to maintain a Zen-like calm in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Coren continued to pour point-defense fire at the incoming ordnance, but the torpedoes were approaching at an alarming rate. Computer estimates predicted their impact before the Argo reached the dense blanket of electrical storms covering Eta-Five’s upper atmosphere.

The point-defense cannon fire collided with several of the torpedoes. The blasts rocked the vessel, but they were still safe, still alive. Tag’s confidence grew with each distant ball of billowing fire and glaring flash of light, signaling another torpedo down. They’d make it off Eta-Five yet. Only five more torpedoes shimmered on the holoscreen, homing in on the Argo within intercept distance.

“Five more, Coren,” Tag said. “Five more. That’s it, and we’re home free.”

“Take these down and we’ll make it yet!” Sofia shouted with a victorious air.

The point-defense cannons boomed, and Coren adjusted their firing solutions as pinpricks of light appeared through the viewport, heralding the approaching torpedoes.

Then the cannons went quiet.

“We need point-defense!” Tag leaned forward against his harness. “What’s going on?”

Coren pounded the terminal. “Cannons have overheated!”

Damn the gods, Tag cursed inwardly. This was the sacrifice of having to leave the planet before the weapon systems had been fully repaired. And now it looked like they wouldn’t make it off the planet at all.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

––––––––

The five torpedoes glared on the holoscreen, descending on the Argo like birds of prey after helpless quarry. Sofia had the Argo at full acceleration, and the force was enough to make Tag feel as though his bones were about to collapse in on themselves despite the inertial dampeners. But still, they wouldn’t hit Eta-Five’s atmosphere in time. Every passing second the point-defense cannons remained sickeningly overheated meant another second closer until Tag and the rest of the crew found themselves engulfed by the unquenchable maw of an exploding torpedo.

“Flak alone won’t stop those torpedoes,” Tag said. “Sofia, let’s shake the rust off those fighter-pilot skills.”

She didn’t bother responding. The Argo took an abrupt turn, and they cut across the tundra, still thousands of meters above the planet’s surface. She put the vessel into a barrel roll, and the two nearest torpedoes adjusted their courses, spiraling after them.

Tag’s fingers dug into the edge of his crash couch. The intense g-forces pressed against his rib cage, and another warning light flashed on his terminal: Inertial Dampeners at Limit.

“Sofia, careful! Don’t get us blacked out.”

“Not my fault if you can’t handle the ride!” she shouted over the resounding roar of the churning impellers. As the torpedoes closed in, she sent the Argo into a steep nosedive. They careened to the planet’s surface.

Two torpedoes nipped at their tail, and the remaining three accelerated, blinking ever closer to the Argo’s location on the holoscreen’s map.

Individual ice pillars and snow drifts loomed larger through the bridge’s viewport. The ground was fast approaching. Then the ship shuddered as Sofia swerved neatly so they skimmed Eta-Five’s surface. They plowed through a snowbank and then curved between ice and rock stalagmites, and a plume of white spray kicked up behind the ship as it left an icy wake.

One of the nearest torpedoes plunged into the snow where the Argo had straightened out. It disappeared silently, sending a small wave of white into the air like the restrained splash from an Olympic diver. Then a ball of orange and white fire exploded, instantly melting snow and ice and throwing fragments of rock. The Argo bucked as the wave of concussive force caught up to the ship.

“Energy shields absorbing blast,” Alpha said in her even voice.

The invisible shields glowed blue and green across the viewport as fire rolled over them. The shields soon stabilized and vanished. Sofia wound the Argo between towering pillars and massive snowdrifts. Another torpedo crashed through snowdrift after snowdrift, losing precious acceleration. It burst from another snowbank, and Sofia curved the Argo around a prominent tower of perfectly clear ice encasing a column of rock. The torpedo slammed into the spire. Tendrils of fire and debris exploded from the detonating torpedo like the reaching tentacles of a Forinth. A rolling cloud of rubble and flame encompassed the ship. Sofia jockeyed the controls. Tag said a silent prayer. The energy shields flickered.

“Shields are draining,” Alpha said.

The ship continued to buck and quake. It was as if they were caught in the undertow of a tidal wave, and they thrashed side to side. The hull smashed through a gargantuan mountain of snow. They lost precious momentum.

“Pull up!” Tag said.

Then the gray clouds of Eta-Five’s sky appeared again, and Sofia directed the ship upward.

“I have one point-defense cannon back online!” Coren said.

“Fire away!” Tag cried.

A savage barrage of rounds burst from the Argo. Another torpedo winked out of existence from the holoprojection. It was far enough to only impart a slight tremor through the ship. But two more torpedoes still followed, and now a new batch of torpedoes doggedly surrounded the Argo.

Coren let out a frustrated yell and glared at his terminal. “Overheating again! Damn this human technology!”

“Adjust flight pattern?” Sofia asked, still focused on the blanket of clouds ahead.

“Negative,” Tag said. She might pull another lucky maneuver to lose the two nearest torpedoes. But doing so would give the rest of the incoming torpedoes enough time to come within closing distance. There was no scenario, no matter how much he believed in miracles, in which Sofia could shake two dozen torpedoes. They needed to make it past the sensor-cancelling storm around Eta-Five and reach space. Only then would their sensors and AI systems be able to calculate a hyperspace jump trajectory, away from the projectiles and rapidly encroaching Drone-Mech vessels.

“Use the energy cannon, Coren,” Tag said. “Target those torpedoes as best you can.”

Coren complied, but Tag knew it was an almost certainly fruitless effort. The point-defense cannons functioned on sheer quantity of flying rounds rather than precision and accuracy, and the slower and more precise energy cannon was more adept at bringing down a single large target. Trying to hit two rocketing torpedoes was like trying to shoot a gnat with a pulse pistol at a hundred meters. It was damned near impossible, and Tag could see his crew understood that. But they carried on, determined to grasp at any chance for escape, and energy shots lanced from the cannon. Tag watched the rounds pepper Eta-Five’s surface, plunging into a vast, frozen lake. But he saw no explosion, no sign they’d connected with a single torpedo.

At least not yet.

Soon enough, he knew he’d see a torpedo explode. But he was afraid they’d be inside the blast when it did.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

––––––––

“Captain, I have an idea,” Alpha said.

“Let’s hear it.” Tag was open to just about anything.

Coren still fired the energy cannon, and Sofia kept them glued to their seats, pressing the limits of the inertial dampeners.

“If these torpedoes are similar to SRE designs, they are primed to explode when reaching a designated proximity with their target so that a difficult, direct impact is unnecessary. That means primary damage would stem from the kinetic and thermal energy discharges produced by the exploding torpedoes. I can overcharge the energy shields to absorb such a blast. After the first hit, I’ll blink the shields to conserve energy. The ship should be able to withstand the rest of the blast, and then I can reactivate them to counter the second torpedo.”

“And if the blast is too great for the shield, we’re helpless against the second explosion?”

“Correct. Would you like to hear the odds of success?”

“No,” Tag said. “Prepare for impact.” The only odds that mattered to Tag was the fact that there was a one hundred percent chance of failure if they did nothing. “Coren, is Alpha full of crap, or do you think we’ve got a shot?”

“Better shot at her plan succeeding than relying on our nonfunctional point-defense cannons.”

“Good enough for me,” Tag replied.

“First torpedo is closing in,” Alpha reported. “Energy shields are engaged. Beginning overcharging.”

The ship vibrated, and arcs of blue electricity sparked across the shield.

“Captain, I’m not able to draw enough power for sufficient overloading,” Alpha said.

“Coren, cease fire,” Tag said. “Divert energy from cannons to shields.”

The Mechanic reluctantly carried out the orders, and the cannon went silent. No pulse or cannon fire stood in the way of the torpedoes now.

“Alpha, how are we looking?” Tag asked.

“Power levels sufficient. Incoming torpedo. Three. Two.”

Tag braced himself, fighting every instinct in his body to pinch his eyes closed, and watched the viewport.

“One,” Alpha finished.

A deafening blast overtook the bridge. Intense light cracked like lightning through the viewport. The ship shivered, sounding as though it might fall apart at any moment. Waves of orange and white and black rolled over the shield as it glowed and shimmered.

Then the shield blinked off. An earsplitting chorus of wailing klaxons and quaking bulkheads accompanied the roar of fire rolling across the bridge’s viewport. The tremors, more powerful than an ice god pounding the ground, threw Tag back and forth against his restraints, and his skull smashed against the headrest. Coren shook just as violently. His head, too, slammed into his seat, and he went unconscious, his limbs falling limp. Sofia still clutched the controls in a white-knuckle grip, vessels throbbing across her forehead. Alpha seemed to be the only one unaffected, and she reengaged the shields when the upheaved ship started to settle.

“Second torpedo incoming!” her voice called out, shrill over the sound of alarms and groaning bulkheads.

The shields shimmered once again as blinding light flooded the bridge. This explosion seemed more ferocious than the first, and Tag thrashed in his harness hard enough that he bit his tongue and tasted blood. The scent of burning plastic permeated the air, adding to the chaos, as Tag realized something had fried, something else must’ve gone wrong. Sofia cried out something incomprehensible, her words buried in the din. It was as though the ship was clenched in hell’s clutches, full of anger and fire and pain.

But still the Argo pushed spaceward.

The shaking settled; the groaning bulkheads quieted. Pain still hung over Tag, threatening to pull his mind into a fugue, as they careened through the clouds, and all shipboard sensors went dark. He forced his eyes to remain open and glued to the viewport and holoscreens. Each screen showed only blank charts and reports, flickering occasionally with a screen of static. Cracks of green lightning burst around them for several long seconds.

Then the rattling ceased. No more tongues of flame or violent explosions. No more torpedoes blinking on the holoprojection.

They were back in space, outside Eta-Five’s malicious grasp, escaped from the torpedoes and search vessels. Tag watched the planet grow smaller as they accelerated away. He said a silent goodbye to the world that had tried to kill him over and over.

“No more incoming torpedoes,” Alpha said.

“Very good,” Tag said. His voice sounded muddled. A ringing in his ears persisted, and he punched a command to silence the alarms on his terminal. “Calculate trajectory for hyperspace. Back to the last-known coordinates of the Montenegro.”

“Yes, Captain,” Alpha said.

Sofia wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and leveled out their relative altitude. She kept the ship at full acceleration, putting as much distance between the Argo and any pursuing ships as possible.

“Coren, are you okay?” Tag asked.

The Mechanic didn’t respond, but Alpha answered for him. “My sensors indicate his heart rate has returned to normal for his species. He is alive, though he remains unconscious.” Then Alpha looked up from her terminal. “Captain, we have new contacts.”

The bridge’s central holoscreen lit up with a chart of the Eta System. A storm of red dots blinked around them. More red dots than there was snow on Eta-Five. Hostiles. Everywhere. An entire Drone-Mech fleet.

The outboard cams showed a lurking carrier drifting in open space. Smaller escort destroyers and a couple of battlecruisers coasted near the large ship, looking like enormous wolves waiting for prey. A flurry of lights glowed and cut through the space between the ominous ships, signifying shuttles zipping between the warships of the impressive fleet. Tag ruefully thought that the phrase “out of the frying pan and into the fire” had never been more accurate.

Sofia let out a long sigh. “I guess this answers where those search vessels came from.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

––––––––

Tag knew there would be no surviving any barrages of fire from these ships. No outmaneuvering. No survival in open combat. Running was their only option. “Let’s get that calculation on the hyperspace trajectory, Alpha!”

“I am encountering obstacles to our progress,” Alpha said.

“What do you mean?” Sofia asked, her tone curt. “There’s no way I can fly around these guys. We need to jump!”

Already several fighters blinked on the holoscreen on a warpath to the Argo.

“Screw those damn obstacles!” Tag yelled.

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. I’ve discovered strange data streams trying to insert foreign code into our AI systems.”

“Damn it! Of course!” Tag bellowed. The Mech-Drones were at it again, subverting the Argo’s AI. The ship had been protected by the Eta-Five atmospheric anomaly before, and the smaller search vessels didn’t seem to have the same capabilities as whatever fleet ships were infecting their computer systems now. “Can you hold them off?”

“I’m working on it,” Alpha said. “But I’m finding it difficult to both calculate a trajectory and defend against the barrage of cyber-attacks.”

“Skipper!” Sofia said. “Incoming fire. At least three dozen torpedoes, and by the looks of the grav signatures, several nuclear warheads. They’re looking to obliterate us.”

Tag undid his harness and raced across the bridge. His heart thrashing against his ribs like a bird fighting to be free of its cage, he grabbed Coren’s shoulders and gently shook the unconscious Mechanic. “Come on, buddy! We need your help right now.”

Blood trickled from one of Coren’s ears. The Mechanics’ bodies truly were weaker than those of humans. Combining his more fragile anatomy with a safety harness and crash couch fit for shorter, wider humans, Tag understood why Coren had suffered the worst during their escape from Eta-Five. But understanding wouldn’t help rouse him now.

“I know you’re hurting, but we need you.” Tag tried to stir him more earnestly, shaking more fervently. He might be able to fill in for Coren on weapons, but they needed the Mechanic awake for his cyber expertise. Without Coren... Tag hesitated to think about their chances should the incoming Drone-Mech virus succeed.

Coren’s good eye blinked slowly. “Wha ... what ...”

“There’s an attack on our AI systems.”

Coren’s slack expression tightened, and he sat straighter. One hand grasped the side of his head. His long fingers smeared the blood in his short fur. “We’re in space?”

“We are. There’s a fleet of Drone-Mechs breathing down our neck. Fighters, torpedoes, everything is headed our way. The only way out of this is a hyperspace jump. Got it?”

“Okay, okay,” Coren said, appearing more lucid with each second. “My head.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Tag said. “I’ll get you treated as soon as we make the jump. Deal?”

“Captain, I’ve been making deal after deal with you since I met you. No more deals. This is about our survival. I’m part of your crew, whether you like it or not. I’ll make sure we get to hyperspace safely.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Tag raced back to his crash couch and buckled himself in.

“How long do we have?” Coren asked.

“Sixty seconds until contact with enemy fire,” Sofia said.

“Adjust course forty points to port, away from incoming fire,” Tag said.

Pinpricks of light glowed blue and red in the distance, brighter than the stars, growing ever closer. The torpedoes were in sight. Coren toiled at his terminal, and Alpha worked at hers. Tag clenched the armrests as worry flooded through him, tightening his grip on the crash couch. Come on. Come on.

“Thirty seconds,” Sofia said, pulling hard on the ship’s controls.

“How’s that trajectory coming?” Tag asked. He fought to keep his voice calm.

“I believe we’ve almost reestablished our firewall against the incoming Drone-Mech AI viruses,” Alpha said.

“I’m not asking about the AI. I want to know how soon before we jump.”

“AI systems are now stable enough to initiate trajectory calculations.”

“Just now?” Tag asked.

“Fifteen seconds until first impact,” Sofia said. A beat of tense silence followed. “Ten seconds.”

“Trajectory solution found,” Alpha said.

“Initiate hyperspace jump!” Tag roared.

Alpha pressed a button on her terminal.

“Five seconds!” Sofia shouted.

The glowing thrusters of the torpedoes and warheads lit up the bridge. It was as if all the stars in space were falling on them in that moment.

The T-Drive screamed for a second until its high-pitched shriek settled into a low growl, and the Argo exploded forward. Inertial dampeners fought through the transition into hyperspace, and Tag’s stomach flipped over, the throngs of pain throughout his body intensifying as g-forces slammed against him.

Then it stopped. All enemy contacts, all incoming barrages evaporated from their star charts. Green and purple waves of plasma crackled against the viewport like waves lapping the shore.

They were in hyperspace. Safe at last.

Tag stood, stretching. His pulse still thundered in his ears, and he felt the lingering touch of adrenaline in his twitching fingertips. “Alpha, damage report.”

“Point-defense cannons are down. One grav impeller is at seventy percent of functional from the torpedo blast. Hull integrity is adequate for continued hyperspace stress, but repairs to the cargo bay may be necessary. Onboard sensors report the energy shield generators are nonfunctional.”

“Thank you. Have the repair bots triage and fix the damage. Start with the defensive systems.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Sofia let go of her controls and let the AI systems handle the flight. “We’ve got four days of hyperspace travel before we reach the Montenegro. I could use that many days of sleep.”

“Feel free to find yourself a cabin and make yourself at home.”

“Thanks, Captain.” Sofia cracked her knuckles as she left the bridge.

“Coren, you want to follow me into the med bay?” Tag asked.

“I hope you have painkillers compatible with my biology.” Coren massaged his temple with his fingers. “And we should get that crash couch refitted.”

“Plan to stay long, do you?” Tag asked.

“As long as this mission takes.”

“Alpha, you have the bridge,” Tag said.

“Yes, Captain,” she responded.

They trod into the passageway and began the walk to the med bay. “And if these past few hours are any indication, it’s going to be a while.”

When they reached the medical bay, Tag realized in all the madness of escaping Eta-Five, they hadn’t done anything with the Mechanic body in the lab. The hatches opened, and the dead Mechanic was still strapped in where he and Sofia had left it, visible through the polyglass barrier between the lab and the rest of the med bay.

“Ah, did you find anything out?” Coren asked. He acted as if seeing a body mid-autopsy was as normal as if they were simply walking by a civvie drunk on gutfire and sleeping one off in a space station passageway.

“I did.” Tag let his muscles unwind but remained on guard. Coren may have reacted calmly toward the deceased pirate. But he feared the news he was about to share wouldn’t be taken so kindly.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

––––––––

Tag traced Coren’s skull with the handheld MRI. “We were in the middle of a few tests. Once we fix you up, I’ll show you everything.”

“Sounds fair.”

Coren waited patiently as Tag analyzed the images he’d taken of the Mechanic’s brain and skull. But Tag wasn’t only looking for symptoms of an injury. He had reprogrammed the handheld MRI to search for any indication the nanites had a stranglehold on the Mechanic’s brain. The holoprojection glowed across Coren’s face as he looked into his own mind, scanning the medical images with Tag.

“Does everything look good?” the Mechanic asked.

“No internal bleeding. No fractures,” Tag said. The heavy weight of apprehension lifted from his shoulders as he studied the holoprojected brain. There was no sign of the nanites. Coren wasn’t, as far as he could tell, a Drone-Mech. “Probably just a concussion.”

“Good. Any of your human painkillers work to block out my pain receptors? My head feels like an ice god is sitting on it.”

“Let me check.” Tag ran the med bay’s pharma AI systems. The AI used the data from the autopsied Mechanic’s brain to assess any matches with human medicines, running compatibility and efficacy simulations. After a few seconds, several candidates glowed on the holoscreen. “Perfect. We’ve got some good choices.”

He felt Coren’s single working eye on him as he cycled through the dispensary’s holoscreen. He wished he could give Coren more powerful painkillers. Something to knock him out or numb his senses, making him more docile for what he was about to tell him. But he knew the Mechanic deserved better than that. He needed to do this fast. Like downing hyperspace sickness pills. You didn’t want to suck them down slowly lest they dissolve on your tongue, letting their bitter, bile-like taste linger too long. Swallow them quickly and get it over with. But no matter how quickly you downed them, they still left a lingering pang of nausea residing in the gut.

Tag expected telling Coren about the nanites would leave him feeling sicker than a whole pill bottle of hyperspace sickness meds. Guilt already ate at his conscience, and he feared it would only be intensified when he became the target of Coren’s ire.

But it had to be done. He warranted it was better than the alternative. Better than letting Coren figure it out on his own. As if he wasn’t going to be suspicious enough about the humans.

“So can I get those pills, Captain? Doctor? Whatever you’d prefer I call you.”

“Tag is fine.”

Coren laughed. An actual, throaty laugh. “Not fine by me. You deserve a little more respect than that. Without you, we wouldn’t have gotten off Eta-Five.”

“I’m not sure about that.” Tag selected a pair of synthoids from the dispensary. Two purple pills spit out of the machine and into a small plastic cup. “You, Sofia, and Alpha were just as important, if not more, than me.”

“Ah, but that’s where you owe yourself more credit. You brought Alpha to life. You survived Eta-Five to bring Sofia here. And you gave me a chance. You learned our strengths quickly enough to take advantage of them. Most crews train for months together before their first flight. At least Mechanics do.”

“I suppose humans aren’t much different.” Tag brought the pills to Coren and dropped them into his outstretched, skinny hand. The Mechanic had no idea of the real cause of Tag’s diffidence, and it made the guilt weighing on Tag that much heavier.

Coren swallowed the pills unquestioningly. “You let us play to our strengths. That’s the best thing you can ask of a leader. A captain. One who recognizes what his crew can and can’t do.” He patted his belly as he continued. “Most novice captains will find the faults in their crew. They’ll run simulations and countless hours of training trying to correct those weaknesses. But what they neglect are their crew’s talents. They neglect their strengths. And even the brightest crystal dulls without consistent polishing. A good captain understands his crew’s imperfections, but he doesn’t dwell on them. Instead, he knows where they belong on the bridge. He knows how to assign them the right roles to escape an ice god, get them off Eta-Five, and avoid a fleet of hostile spacecraft when all the odds are stacked against them.”

The flattering words hit Tag like radiation leaking from a fusion reactor. He wanted to be energized by them. Any other day, they would heedlessly swell his pride. But now it only made him feel remorseful. And for what? It wasn’t as if he had personally enslaved the Mechanics through these nanites.

But he was the human that had to tell Coren about them.

“What I’m saying,” Coren continued, “is that for a medical officer and technologically inferior human, you performed admirably.” A crease formed in his fur-lined brow. “And you shouldn’t be so humble. Humility can be a becoming trait to my species and, as I’ve come to understand, yours as well. But you must also learn more confidence. You seem very uncertain right now.”

Coren was right, though the Mechanic had mistaken the reason for Tag’s reticence. Tag stepped over to a terminal and beckoned Coren to join him. “I need to show you something.”

“Please.” Coren folded his thin arms over his chest.

A holoprojection of the nanite structure appeared before them, magnified a billion times.

“This is what I think is responsible for the Drone-Mechs’ actions.” Tag clicked another command on the terminal, and the nanite shrank, then disappeared. The holoprojection of a Mechanic brain materialized, along with a diagram of the process depicting the nanites’ self-assembly into an antenna. “These nanites are turning your people into remote-controlled droids.”

“Grace be to the machines,” the Mechanic muttered, his good eye widening. He leaned toward the projection. “What a feat of engineering. I’ve never seen such technology.” He manipulated the holoprojection and scanned the data Tag had compiled. “This is rather intriguing. The chemical structures indicate this may be based on rather primitive nanoparticle technology, but this is the first time I’ve encountered nanites capable of self-assembly with the purpose of controlling another organism.”

Tag stood silent, letting the Mechanic soak in the ethereal radiance of the holoprojection.

“Such technology would be characteristic of a ruthless species. One baffles at the implications of species-scale enslavement. It’s almost tantamount to genocide.” Coren shook his head slowly. Tag looked up at him and saw both the bemusement and sadness in his single intelligent, golden eye. “If it’s our first time coming across something like this, it must be yours as well. So I don’t expect you to have an answer, but you don’t have any guesses as to the source of this material, do you?”

“Actually”—Tag gulped—“I do.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

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Tag mustered all the confidence he could. It wasn’t much. “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m going to ask that you at least hear me out.”

“Of course. One does not destroy the courier-drone if one does not appreciate the message.”

“Good. Let’s keep that in mind.” Tag rubbed at the stubble under his chin, trying to figure out where to begin. His mind whirled back to his hyperspace nausea medicine analogy. Best just to get to the point and get it over with. “These nanites are of human origin.”

Any lingering trace of confusion or sorrow in Coren’s face melted. His expression turned as frozen and solid as the ice on Eta-Five.

Tag continued before the Mechanic could say anything. “This technology was banned and was supposed to have been eradicated by our government over three hundred years ago. In fact, it was the old Earth government, the United Nations, that prohibited it. The SRE has never, as far as I know, pursued this type of nanite weaponization.”

“But humans developed the original technology.”

“Yes,” Tag said with reluctance. “I’m afraid so. But I want to assure you, as a medical and science officer, I’ve never seen any projects bordering on this kind of barbarism. And to top it off, we never even knew of your species’ existence. The only ships that ever passed this way are the UNS Hope and the SRES Hanno. We lost the Hope, and the Hanno never reported anything about aliens other than the Forinths. So it would be extremely unlikely that the SRE has been pursuing this project to enslave your people and turn them against your species.”

“As far as you know.”

“Sorry?”

“As far as you know,” Coren repeated in a menacingly calm tone. He jabbed a long finger into Tag’s chest. “You are only a medical officer aboard a small research vessel. Is it not possible that another group, somewhere in your fleet, was pursuing these technologies unbeknownst to you?”

“I suppose, but—”

“And is it not possible,” Coren said, louder and more forcefully, “that someone in your government or military did know about our species? And if so, they would have no reason to tell you. Especially if they had organized a campaign with the enslavement of our people in mind.”

“Yes, but that isn’t—”

“Now you’re bringing me to your capital ship. You bring not only me but also the knowledge of where the rest of our free civilization is sheltered.”

“And another species might be responsible for the nanites,” Tag said. “Something or someone neither of us knows about could be using this technology.”

“Do you believe that? Do you truly think that’s the case?”

Tag could no longer lie. His mouth went dry. “No, no.” He hung his head. “The nanites share an almost perfect match with the technology that was banned on Earth centuries ago.”

“I believe you humans have a term for such a dilemma as this. Occam’s razor, no?”

“Right,” Tag said, knowing full well what the alien referred to. The principle stated that the simplest explanation was often the correct one. None of the complicated scenarios, in which Tag had imagined another alien species stealing these nanites without a trace or developing them independently, held up to Occam’s razor. “But I assure you, I have nothing to do with this. I want to help you. I want to help the free Mechanics.”

“A fine, convenient thing for you to say. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. It is the intentions of the humans I have not met, the intentions of your SRE fleet, that worry me.” Coren slammed his fist against a nearby exam bed. “I should be with my people. And here I’ve left them practically defenseless and unwarned.” His lips peeled back into a snarl. “Maybe you were right. Maybe I should’ve stolen your ship and absconded with the rest of my people.”

Coren stomped out of the med bay and disappeared into the passage, leaving Tag reeling and alone in the med bay. He wanted to run after the Mechanic, to beg him to listen to him, to believe him. But he’d been hard pressed to show Coren the same respect before, so why should he expect anything different from Coren now, especially after what he’d revealed to him?

Another set of footsteps, heavier but less rushed, sounded. Then Alpha wandered through the hatch.

“I apologize for leaving my post, Captain, but I heard what I inferred to be a fight. You asked me to tell you if Coren might harbor any harmful intentions. I believe his current mood suggests that he does.”

“Thank you, Alpha. Your assessment is all too accurate, I’m afraid.”

“Shall I throw him in the brig?”

“No, no. Don’t do that.”

Alpha cocked her head. “Are you certain?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Very well then. I’ll note your response. My assessments would suggest the pragmatic action would be to restrict the movement of a potentially dangerous lifeform within the ship. Though, I suppose I have much to learn about human logic and thoughts. I will devote this time in hyperspace to reviewing the human psyche. Is it all right if I observe and implement the mannerisms and thought processes you and Sofia exhibit?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Maybe a thorough study of human history and behavioral psychology is in store for me.”

“Just be careful,” Tag said. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the nanites again and the depravity of humans that had led to their invention. “On second thought, maybe hold off on integrating all that into yourself. From what I’ve seen so far, you’re an intelligent lifeform. Don’t go mucking that up by trying to be too human.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

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Enough tension filled the next several days in hyperspace that Tag figured he could replace the energy shields with it. He had tried to reason with Coren, to tell him there must be a good explanation for everything that had transpired.

But Coren had refused to listen. Instead, the Mechanic relegated himself to fulfilling his duties and nothing more. He spent most of his hours in a small cabin he’d claimed as his own. Tag wondered if the only thing preventing Coren from taking the Argo straight back to Eta-Five was the vow he’d made before they’d left. He had proven time and time again that he was true to his word. The alien was bound by honor to a fault, and it pained Tag to have a crew member serving his role aboard the ship as no more than a husk of his former self. Every bit of personality, energy, and determination that Coren had once exuded—no matter how infrequently the Mechanic had shown emotion before—now seemed to have disappeared faster than light sucked into a black hole.

Tag couldn’t fathom being in Coren’s position. Couldn't imagine what it must be like to know he was headed into the hands of what he must perceive to be the aliens who had conquered and enslaved his own species. Knowing that he might have inadvertently already given up the last free remnants of his society to those same enemies.

But still Tag wanted desperately to extend an olive branch, something to win back favor with the Mechanic. He wasn’t yet convinced the SRE was behind this. He was willing to concede that the nanites had come from humans, but maybe it was a faraway colony or splinter group that bore the responsibility for the horrifying genocide. Tag couldn’t imagine that any of his SRE flag officers, on hearing about the Mechanics’ fate, would react with anything less than disgust and outrage. Surely, not only would a good admiral offer to shelter the Mechanics, but they would also begin an aggressive campaign to root out any malcontents within the human race who had decided to reawaken this forbidden nanite weapon.

“How’s research going?” Sofia asked, striding into the med bay with a cup of coffee and dashing Tag’s thoughts.

The aroma of the hot drink called to him, reminding him of the heaviness dragging down his eyelids and the exhaustion seeping through him. But he couldn’t rest. Not now. “We’ve characterized how the nanites affect the brain.” He gestured to Alpha, standing stern over a terminal, her eyes scanning it in rapid movements and her alloy fingers in a frenzy inputting commands. “Rather, Alpha has done most of the characterizing. I mean, good gods, soon enough she won’t need any of us on this ship. She can damn well do everything on her own.”

“That isn’t quite true,” Alpha said. “You all serve as admirable companions and provide me necessary social interaction. That is something I cannot do alone.”

Sofia grinned. “Eh, I’m sure if you try hard enough, you can find a way.” She set the coffee down on the terminal, and her expression grew serious. “Any progress on finding a way to reverse the nanite damage?”

Tag scrolled through the numerous simulations and experiments he and Alpha had run. As if that would help him find what couldn’t be found. “No. Nothing.”

Alpha didn’t look up from her work but started to speak. “Everything we’ve discovered points to permanent changes in the neurological tissue of the Mechanics. Not only that, but we have discovered that the nanites fundamentally alter the DNA of their hosts.”

“For what reason?”

Even Alpha appeared forlorn when she looked up and locked eyes with Sofia. “As far as we can tell, it is a failsafe mechanism. Should the nanites malfunction or an outside party attempt to remove them from their host, the host will die. The genetic alterations made by the nanite induce apoptosis—or programmed cell death—in all tissues. This leads to complete organ failure and neurological destruction.”

“There’s no way to bring the Mechanics back?”

“No,” Alpha said. “Our work demonstrates such recovery is highly unlikely—in fact, near impossible, given access to any and all SRE technology that is available to us.”

“Surely there’s something we can do,” Sofia said, tracing the edge of her coffee cup with a finger. “I refuse to believe the only solution is to kill the Drone-Mechs.”

“I wish we could,” Tag said. “But the genetic-engineering prowess required to alter the Mechanics’ DNA is incredible. There appear to be special protective enzymes and additional nuclear and cellular membrane-bound glycoproteins that—”

“Pardon me, Skipper, but can I get that in English?” Sofia asked.

Tag paused. The intricacy of the biological underpinnings of the technology they’d uncovered had astonished him. He imagined it felt to him what it must be like for a primitive human tribe encountering an airplane or spaceship for the first time. He could see the intent of the technology, but there was no way he could imagine understanding it in his lifetime. “Basically, whoever developed these nanites has a grasp on synthetic biology beyond anything I’ve ever thought humans on Earth were capable of.”

“But you said there was a very high probability these were manmade.”

“I did. And that’s why I’m afraid there’s something else going on here. I’m really hoping someone in the SRE has some answers.”

“Me, too,” Sofia said, gazing away distantly. “For Coren’s sake.”

A robotic voice—the ship’s AI—came over the intraship comms. “Normal-space Fidelity Sector ETA thirty minutes.”

Thirty minutes. The words echoed in Tag’s mind. Soon they’d be on the Montenegro. They would pass on word about the Drone-Mechs and the attack on the Argo. And Tag would find out if Coren was still on their side.

“Prepare for transition,” Tag said to the other two.

They nodded, and the trio made their way to the bridge. Sofia readied the manual controls should anything surprise them on their transition into normal space, and Alpha loomed over the Ops station to monitor their trajectory. Tag sat in the captain’s station and harnessed himself in.

A slight twinge of relief bubbled through him when Coren entered. The Mechanic gave him only a perfunctory nod—the same noncommittal mode of communication he’d employed over the past four days spent in hyperspace. He wore no expression but sat rigidly in the weapons station with the weapons unarmed and offline. Tag considered Coren with a nervous glance. On one hand, he liked being able to keep an eye on the alien, and he wanted to prove he now trusted and understood Coren’s dilemma. But he also wasn’t confident the alien’s intentions were completely innocuous toward himself or any other humans for that matter.

Tag eyed the weapons override from his terminal. If Coren decided to turn on him, Tag was prepared to lock the Mechanic out of being able to launch a barrage against the Montenegro or any other human ship. He shared a silent, knowing look with Alpha. He’d asked her again to watch Coren. Thanks to her med-bay droid body with its biomonitoring sensors, she could sense even a minute mood change in Coren that might predicate any malicious actions.

“We’re approaching normal space,” Alpha reported.

The wisps of purple and green energy waves, characteristic of hyperspace travel, that had been visible through the viewport dissipated. Normal black space, distant pinpricks of glowing stars, and a nearby planetoid coalesced around them.

But those weren’t the only things welcoming them back to normal space.

Alarms rang from Alpha’s Ops station, and warnings blinked on Tag’s terminal. His mind immediately raced, churning with an instinctual fight-or-flight response.

“Captain, unidentified contacts!” Alpha said.

“Sofia, prepare for evasive maneuvers,” Tag said, sitting straighter in his seat, willing himself to appear the confident leader he didn’t quite feel like.

“You got it.” Sofia grabbed the manual controls, sweat glistening over her forehead.

“EVA suits engaged,” Tag said. Each crew member locked their helmet into place. In case of depressurization or significant damage to the Argo, at least they’d be protected from the unforgiving elements of open space. That is, unless enemy fire cut through them first. “Sofia, bring us forty points around port.”

The ship turned, almost too slowly for Tag. His palms grew clammier as more stars and other distant planets appeared across the viewport. He watched the holoscreen at his station light with all the contacts they were about to face.

“Give me a more precise status report, Alpha,” Tag said.

“Projections put us at approximately sixty contacts,” Alpha said. “Most grav signatures indicate fighters or cutters. I’m seeing a large grav signal belonging to an SRE ship caught in the middle of the others. Maybe another five to six dozen SRE signatures, although they too are mostly coming up as fighters.”

“Label the map for us.”

The live battle came into view through the viewport before the labels even popped up on the holoscreen. The blue glow of impellers marked the sleek black ships Tag knew must be the Drone-Mechs. Even from this distance, with the zoomed-in views provided by the holoscreen, he could see the menacing orange viewports of the fighters and larger warships.

A few Drone-Mech destroyers and battlecruisers circled in the distance. One massive Drone-Mech ship slowly circled the perimeter of the battle. It dwarfed the other ships at nearly three times the length of the battlecruisers. Hundreds of cannons and guns bristled from its hull, and its side lit up as relentless blasts of energy and kinetic rounds spewed from its thumping broadsides.

“A dreadnought,” Coren said in reverence.

SRE fighters swerved and veered through the maelstrom of Drone-Mech fighters. But they were no match for the technologically superior craft. Tag watched in horror as fighter after fighter exploded in a sea of shrapnel and energy fire.

“Gods, no,” Sofia muttered.

In the midst of the raging battle lay one giant SRE ship. It listed as if its pitch impellers had malfunctioned, and blue plasma vented from gaping holes in its sides. Debris clouds, full of metal fragments and what Tag feared must be bodies, sprayed into space as its cannons and torpedo bays launched round after round in a desperate attempt to fend off its attacker. It looked not like the impressive piece of war machinery Tag once thought it had been but rather as if it was a bleeding animal lashing out in the desperate throes of death.

They had found the Montenegro.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

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Time seemed to slow. Silent explosions ripped through the fighters and smaller ships surrounding the Montenegro. Volleys of energy and kinetic rounds, exchanged by Drone-Mechs and SRE vessels alike, left brilliant streaks through space, ripping into the sidewalls and hulls of ships with brutality on a scale Tag had never seen in person before. Several Drone-Mech signals blinked off the holoscreen as they perished under the fire of SRE fighters desperate to defend their capital ship. But the onslaught was too much. Tag could see the humans were already losing the battle, fighting against insurmountable odds and an overwhelming force.

Tag knew the meager firepower of the Argo wasn’t going to turn the ill-fated direction of this unfair battle. The SRE fleet should know by now that death was inevitable, so why hadn’t they already jumped away?

“Hail the Montenegro,” Tag said. “See how we can assist.”

Alpha nodded, and her silver fingers tapped at her terminal. “I’m unable to reach them.”

Then it struck him. The SRE fleets’ comms were down, and they hadn’t jumped. Of course! He’d been through this before.

“Goddammit. Their AI systems are infected. Make sure our new firewalls are up. Do not let the Drone-Mech AI viruses infiltrate our systems.” He glanced at the holoscreen again. Fighters of both sides swerved around each other in a morbid dance, trading volleys of glaring pulsefire and kinetic rounds. Six of the Montenegro’s escort destroyers lashed out at the swarming Drone-Mech fighters with everything they had in a frantic effort to defend themselves, and Tag imagined the confusion, fear, and frustration no doubt permeating their bridges like a debilitating disease. Plasma spewed from one destroyer even as it launched a fusillade of torpedoes, energy rounds, and Gauss slugs into the abyss of space and buzzing flock of Drone-Mech fighters. Two destroyers already floated silent and useless, with enormous gashes in their sidewalls and chunks of hull and cannons suspended around them in a silent memorial of a futile battle. They lay forgotten and defeated as the single Drone-Mech dreadnought lurked beyond them like a waiting shark. Its broadside cannons sent devastating volleys into the overwhelmed SRE fleet.

“Alpha, how long until the T-drive is spooled and ready for a hyperspace jump?” Tag asked.

“Ten minutes.”

Sofia almost leapt from her seat. “You’re not just going to—”

“No, we’re not going to run from this. But we need to be realistic.” Tag leaned in, examining his holoscreen. The zoomed-in images of the slaughter were too much. He had brought his limping ship back from the dead. He’d flirted with death, been closer to it more times than he had ever been before. And now the reward for his efforts was the depressing tableau unraveling before him now: utter destruction of the Montenegro, his closest link to humanity.

“They cannot possibly prevail,” Coren said.

“Who?” Tag asked, his voice shaking. He couldn’t tell whether the Mechanic had condemned the Drone-Mechs or if he had stated a fact that Tag could already see too clearly—the SRE forces were already standing with one leg in their grave.

Coren’s hands twitched over the weapons terminal. “The Drone-Mechs. We cannot let them do this to your people, too.”

The surprise must have been evident in Tag’s expression even through his EVA suit’s helmet.

“Just because I think there may be war criminals within your species and government does not mean I condone genocide,” Coren said in a tone bordering on offended.

“Good to know,” Tag said. Yet a lingering doubt resurfaced in Tag’s mind. Sure, he had shown the nanites likely caused the strange behavior of the Drone-Mechs, but how had the Drone-Mechs located the Montenegro? He stared at Coren, uncertain, wondering if his initial suspicions had been right all along. But then he recalled the three boarders he’d killed before he crash-landed on Eta-Five. He considered asking Alpha to check the ship’s logs and see if any secured data had been accessed by the Drone-Mechs. That might explain how the Drone-Mechs had discovered the Montenegro’s existence.

But a wailing alarm interrupted his thoughts.

“Captain, three fighters breaking off and heading our way!” Alpha said.

Tag found it difficult to swallow the lump forming in his throat. He inhaled deeply. Running was not an option; they were stuck here until the T-drive spooled up, and the enemy had already spotted them. He had thought the escape from Eta-Five had tested his scrappy crew, but now he feared they were about to run the real gauntlet. A fleeting sense of dread grasped at his insides, turning them to mush, but he fought past his internal turmoil. His crew needed him on point now.

“Coren, point-defense ready,” Tag said, maintaining a collected, confident air. “Arm the Gauss and energy cannons.”

Unflinchingly, the Mechanic prepped the weapons. The cannons hummed to life, and Tag half expected Coren to send rounds careening at the SRE forces. He tried to shake the paranoid thoughts, praying Coren would prove true to his earlier promises.

Confidence, Tag. Confidence, he reminded himself.

“Fighters have launched missiles, Captain,” Alpha said in her monotone voice.

Tag glanced at Sofia. “Evasive maneuvers. Keep our distance from the melee for now.” He needed time to think, to figure out a plan. There must be a way out of this mess—a way to save their hide and the Montenegro’s.

She gave a single nod and sent the Argo rocketing forward. The whole ship twisted as inertial dampeners and grav generators struggled to retain relative gravity. The heavy weight of thrust forced Tag into his seat. Bright flashes of raking fire cut across the prow, while stars and barrel-rolling fighters spun across the bridge’s viewport as if it was an oversized kaleidoscope. Sofia directed the ship away from the incoming rounds, and the energy shields safely absorbed the few rounds that did connect.

“Return fire,” Tag said.

Without hesitation, Coren activated the targeting on the point-defense systems. Blazing orange rounds marked the cannons’ spray as Gauss slugs fired in concerted waves. Rounds peppered one of the fighters. Its energy shields provided no protection against the kinetic rounds, and dozens of new holes appeared in its opalescent hull. Gas escaped from the freshly shorn wounds and froze instantly in space. A brief second passed before the fighter exploded in a plume of fire, almost immediately quenched by vacuum, and shards of polyglass and fissured alloy sped through the stygian expanse of space.

One down, Tag thought. His confidence swelled slightly after the successful maneuver, but the fighters screaming near the Argo kept his ego in check. “Bring us to bear on the second.”

With all adjustment impellers straining, the Argo twisted and spun on the Drone-Mech fighter. Coren wasted no time lighting it up with kinetic fire even as the Argo’s energy shields coursed and flashed, absorbing incoming rounds. The fighter came away unscathed, and Coren shook his head, muttering to himself in disappointment.

“How are we holding up?” Tag asked.

“Shields still stable,” Alpha said. “But I will need to divert more power to withstand the Drone-Mechs’ fire.”

“Which will increase the spool time on the T-drive.”

“That is correct.”

“Do it.”

Sofia continued jockeying the Argo around the two fighters. Despite her best efforts, they still whipped and buzzed relentlessly near the ship like flies on a horse. Her piloting skills could only go so far in the comparatively less maneuverable Argo. If they were going to swat those two insects out of the air, it was up to Coren.

The Mechanic continued to lay down streams of persistent fire. But the two fighters, after witnessing the demise of their compatriot, seemed to be coming in more cautiously, bombarding the sidewalls of the Argo and zipping away to reengage.

“I’m having a hard time locking these two down,” Coren said.

Orange point-defense rounds and powerful kinetic slugs sprayed into space. The rounds faded into the distance, swallowed by blackness, still not connecting with the nimble fighters. While the Argo’s crew found it difficult to land a hit on their enemies, their opponents had no such trouble. Another successful strafing round crackled against the Argo’s shields, and a pained groaning reverberated through the bulkheads.

“I can’t shake them!” Sofia yelled, frustration in her voice.

Tag’s mind raced for answers. There was no way he’d let two pathetic fighters take them down. Not when they were so close to the Montenegro. They’d be no help to the capital ship if they were blown to pieces before they even reached the main battle. But even after these fighters were done in, what in the three hells would they do next when faced with a goddamned dreadnought and its supporting fleet?

He steeled himself and took a deep breath. For a moment, he wished he was back in the medical bay, dealing with patients. But even then, when casualties flowed in, when dealing with the most hopeless of injuries, he didn’t give in to the overwhelming pressure threatening to crush him. He triaged. He dealt with one thing at a time.

Restore cardiac function. Stop the bleeding. Suture the wound. Rinse and repeat.

That’s what he needed to do now. The two fighters drew near enough he could see the orange glow of their viewports again.

There had to be a way to stop them. Survive this engagement. Then figure out the next step. Take this battle one step at a time.

“I’m afraid I have more bad news,” Alpha said. “We have six more contacts incoming. More fighters.”

“No worries,” Tag said. “Just six more problems to solve.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

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The two fighters came in hot with cannons pumping steady waves of pulsefire that splashed against the Argo’s energy shield. Bright flashes of green crackled where the rounds hit, and each incoming round dissipated in miniature lightning strikes, obscuring the bridge’s viewport.

The brilliant display of exploding energy gave Tag an idea.

“Coren, I want a full charge on the energy cannon,” Tag said.

“But even at full charge, it will be useless against their shields. Mechanic technology is—”

“Trust me, I know how to make it useful.”

Coren shot him a dubious look but set the energy cannon to charge anyway.

“Sofia, keep us on a straight path toward the dreadnought. When these two come around again, bring us to bear ninety degrees to port.”

“You got it,” she said.

“Alpha, keep an eye on those shields. We’re going to be taking a lot of fire.”

“Yes, Captain.” Alpha hunched over her terminal. Concentration seemed to be etched into her metallic features.

The two fighters loomed in the bridge viewport again as they flew on parallel paths. Their formation made it seem as if they were two fiery eyes belonging to an enormous beast barreling through space. But as Tag had proved with the ice god, even the most fearsome of monsters feared death.

“Get a firing solution on the first fighter,” Tag said.

“Yes, Captain,” Coren said.

Tag’s holoscreen lit up, confirming Coren had locked in the fighter. The two small vessels drew closer and closer. Coren looked at Tag anxiously, and Tag steeled himself, waiting for the right moment. A spray of energy rounds flickered and sputtered against their energy shields, and the fighters started to separate.

“Port, now!” Tag said. “Fire energy cannon!”

The Argo turned, keeping one of the fighters in her line of sight. At the same time, the energy cannon boomed off a single powerful pulse that connected with the fighter. As Coren had warned, the energy shield on the fighter absorbed the blow. But as a consequence of dissipating all that energy, green flashes of light shimmered and burst around the no-longer-invisible shield in a dazzling display.

“Point-defense and Gauss, now!”

Orange rounds coursed through open space toward the fighter while its shield continued to crackle and spark, still working to dissipate the enormous overload caused by the fully charged energy round. With the crackling shield blocking the pilot’s field of view, the Drone-Mech couldn't see the kinetic slugs flying toward him. Rounds chewed into the fighter’s sidewalls, and holes vented instantly freezing gas for a moment before the fighter exploded in a spreading globe of fire and plasma.

“Yes!” Tag pumped his fist in the air. “See how we have to do this, Coren?”

“I saw, Captain,” the Mechanic said with little joy in his voice.

Tag restrained himself from celebrating further. He reminded himself the Mechanic was engaged in a losing war. Even if he lived and saved the Montenegro, it meant he bore responsibility for the deaths of thousands of his enslaved former comrades. Tag didn’t envy the awful predicament the Mechanic had found himself in.

“The remaining fighter is joining the other six,” Alpha said. “They will be within firing range in ten seconds. My calculations suggest we will not be able to withstand direct fire from all seven at once.”

“Sofia, let’s stay moving on this one.” Tag said, gripping his armrests tightly. “Coren, splash energy rounds across their shields for now. Blind ’em, then knock ’em out. Put that on repeat.”

“Can do,” Coren said. He fiddled at his terminal more robotically than Alpha, undoubtedly turning off his emotions and focusing on the targets approaching their vector.

Sofia pulled back on the controls, and the Argo curved past the brunt of the incoming fire. Enough rounds crashed into the Argo to make the shields light up like Eta-Five’s stormy skies. The ship groaned and shook all the while, and Tag braced himself, holding tight to his crash couch. But still he stared intently at the holoscreen.

Coren, too, didn’t let the incoming fire distract him. The energy cannon shuddered as it fired pulse rounds at a rapid clip. The rounds burst against the shields of a couple of fighters, and he used the pilots’ momentary blindness to blast them with the kinetic weapons. Another two fighters tore apart, their innards exposed to unforgiving vacuum. The field of destruction was close enough for Tag to see one of the pilots’ bodies hurtle into space. He winced when he saw Coren spot the dead pilot—another reminder to the poor Mechanic of who his enemy was. To his credit, Coren didn’t let up. As Sofia brought the Argo to bear on two more of the fleeing fighters, he whaled on them with the pounding cannons. One arced away unscathed, but rounds lanced into the grav impellers of the second. A few long seconds passed as the fighter soaked in the fire, then it vaporized in a brilliant wave of light and chunks of smelted alloy.

Sofia yanked at her controls, and the Argo veered from the pieces of the broken fighter. Several fragments of the vessel still collided with the side of the ship.

“Damage report?” Tag asked.

“Nothing major to report, Captain,” Alpha responded.

The fighters resumed their relentless assault while they veered and swerved from the path of Coren’s fire. Sofia did her best to avoid the onslaught, but still rounds connected with their shields and shook the ship, rattling them like they were an ancient Earthside roller coaster.

“Shields are at fifty percent!” Alpha said. For the first time, alarm seemed to have seeped into her mechanical voice. “They’re continuing to drop!”

Sofia twisted and turned, forcing the Argo to act in an ill-suited role as a fighter, but there was only so much evading she could do, being outnumbered by the smaller, more agile craft. And as Tag watched the shields drain on his holoscreen, another three fighters broke off from the main battle to intercept them.

Before these reinforcements could arrive, Coren managed to bring down another two of the fighters already attacking them. The deaths of those fighters provided sufficient reprieve to allow the Argo’s shields to shimmer and start to stabilize. Enough power had already been diverted to them that they began to creep back up to forty, then forty-five percent strength.

Maybe they could take these incoming fighters. Maybe they could survive the next wave.

But it wasn’t those fighters that concerned Tag. Distant bursts of cannon fire and energy rounds broke up the darkness of space before them, and several more SRE-labeled dots blinked out from his holoscreen. A massive SRE destroyer split into thousands of hurtling pieces as a blinding flash of blue spread like a halo from its center. The cloud of debris enveloped another nearby destroyer, and tumbling pieces of cannons and sidewalls pinged off the Montenegro. The SRE capital ship would go down before the Argo even reached it. Without the aid of AI systems or shields, the behemoth of a ship was as defenseless as a junk cargo vessel.

As the Argo bucked and fought against the teeming fighters, Tag studied his holoscreen. If only they could somehow make it to the Montenegro. He wished he had some way to port into their systems and transfer their firewalls to the Montenegro’s intranet. Maybe he could if they somehow made it past the wall of malicious fighters and ships pounding the SRE fleet, but too much fire was concentrated in that direction. It would be like trying to run in a rainstorm and not get wet.

No, no, there had to be another way. Tag drew his focus away from the failing Montenegro and toward the other leviathan in this fight.

“Coren, what are our chances of making it to the dreadnought alive?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

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“Make it to the dreadnought? Alive?” Coren asked, his good eye wide with disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.” Tag met his gaze.

“Alive, well....” Coren turned his attention to the holoscreen projecting the three-dimensional map of the battle. “Assuming most of their fighters are trained on the Montenegro, we’ll still have to avoid their point-defense systems.”

“There’s got to be a blind spot we can use in our approach.”

“A blind spot? There are no blind spots on an Integrity-class dreadnought.”

“Give me a weak spot then,” Tag said. “Come on, the whole ship can’t have twenty-twenty vision.”

Coren seemed perplexed by the expression but didn’t bother voicing his concern when the Argo shuddered under the hail of fire from two incoming fighters.

“Come on, boys!” Sofia said. “I’d like to head some direction other than into enemy fire!”

“Yes, yes,” Coren said. “Point-defense systems are less concentrated around the cluster of main impellers along the keel. If you stay under the dreadnought, there might be only a dozen cannons with firing solutions at a given time.”

“Only a dozen?” Sofia cried. “Well, gee, this will be as smooth as a shot of gutfire!”

Tag didn’t have time to respond to Sofia’s sarcasm. The ship jerked as she ducked the Argo under a salvo of energy rounds, and Coren finished off the fighter responsible for the incoming fire in a blaze of energy rounds and Gauss slugs.

“Once under the keel, is there somewhere we can board?” Tag asked Coren.

“Yes, there are several fighter bays along the port and starboard. We should be able to get in one.”

“Good,” Tag said. “Alpha, let’s get a full-ship scan of the dreadnought.”

“Consider it done, Captain.”

In a few seconds, a holoprojection of the giant ship floated in the middle of the bridge.

“Coren, mark the locations of the fighter bays. If one is open, we’re going for it.”

On his terminal, Coren used a slender finger to identify the fighter bays. Circles appeared on the holoprojected ship. The holoprojection shuddered as a fresh volley stung the Argo, and Coren shot back a reply burst, but this time the assaulting fighter came away unscathed.

“Shields are back down to forty percent,” Alpha said.

We’ve got to hold out just a bit more, Tag thought, steadying himself in his crash couch. They weren’t going to last much longer fighting out in the open against the Drone-Mech forces.

“I assume you have a plan once we board them,” Coren said.

“Yes,” Tag said. “I want you and Alpha to use the anti-AI virus against the Drone-Mech fleet.”

“I suppose I can, but it’s not as simple as uploading something to the dreadnought’s intranet and leaving.”

“I assumed it wasn’t. But you’re the engineer. You’re the one that’s been spouting off about your superior technology.”

“That’s all true, but this won’t be easy.”

“Didn’t expect it would be. But between you and Alpha, I want it done. We’ll subvert the Drone-Mech firewalls and screw their AI systems. See how they like it. I want to take down their shields, too.”

“That’s going to take time, Captain.”

“Sofia and I will give you time. You just focus on getting it done.” More rounds sliced across the Argo’s bow and slammed into the ship.

Alpha’s voice piped up again. “Shields at thirty-five percent.”

“All right, you heard her.” Tag leaned forward in his seat, studying the holoprojection of the dreadnought. “Let’s do this! Get us in there, Sofia! Full thrust!”

The initial acceleration shoved Tag into his chair. After a moment, the inertial dampeners caught up to the forward acceleration, but they couldn’t keep up with the constant side-to-side movements of the ship as Sofia dodged intercepting fighters. Soon enough, Tag no longer needed to look through his terminal’s magnified view of the dreadnought to see the ship. The entire terrifying vessel appeared before him in the viewport, decked out in sleek black armor plates and cannons spewing streams of energy and kinetic fire. Tag could practically hear the boom from each gun. He wondered how many asteroids and planets had been mined to fabricate such a monstrous war machine.

But his admiration was short lived as the dreadnought’s point-defense systems blazed and incoming fire burned through space toward them. The Argo jerked and twisted, avoiding fighters, missiles, and pearly laces of cannon fire alike.

“Shields down to twenty percent,” Alpha said. She was quiet for a beat. More fire lanced into their ship, and groans echoed through the bulkheads. “Now fifteen.”

“Come on, Sofia!” Tag said.

“Think I already got the message!” she yelled over the din.

Smaller cannons along the dreadnought’s hull whirred on and spun to aim. Blue fire sprayed in front of them, then impacts resonated through the bridge and into Tag’s crash couch as alarms screamed and red lights flashed.

“Shields down to five—”

A ball of fire and white light blinded Tag. His ears rang, and his head shot forward, then slammed back. He struggled to keep his eyes open as pain flooded his entire body. His EVA suit responded with numbing painkillers, but it could do little to stop the blackness overtaking him. His vision seemed to shrink until he saw only out of pinholes where intense light pierced his retinas.

Then the ringing died down, and the sound came back. He forced himself to stay awake, to stay conscious against the concussive pain pounding through his head and limbs.

“Status report!” he yelled to no one in particular. The drone of the alarms barking through his suit’s comms drowned out his muddled voice. Shock stabbed a painful knife through his gut as he surveyed the state of the bridge, and he slammed a fist on his terminal to mute the sirens.

He didn’t need the ship’s systems to tell him they were screwed.

A gaping hole in the bridge did that for him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

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“Hull integrity compromised,” Alpha said. She steadied herself as the atmosphere equilibrated with open space.

The deafening, vacuum-induced silence of the cannons and fighters still firing on the Argo seemed unreal. The only sounds he heard were those of his crew through their EVA-suit comms. Sofia was cursing. Her hands were still wrapped around the controls in a death grip as she maneuvered the Argo along the dreadnought’s keel. Coren grunted and groaned, firing impotently at swooping fighters.

Damage reports flashed across Tag’s holoscreen. The repair bots, already pushed to the limits with several lost to the deluge of incoming fire, stood no chance of keeping up with the considerable damage the ship had sustained and continued to endure.

But it didn’t matter. Tag was set on one goal: make it to the fighter bay. The Argo could fall to pieces for all he cared as long as he made it into that damned bay.

“There!” Tag yelled. “See that one? It’s open!”

The fighter bay appeared like the ominous, hungry maw of a giant beast. A cavernous interior, gleaming with harsh yellow lights and rows of small spacecraft, called to them, teasing them. Several fighters took off from it, flying directly at them, and the bay doors started to close.

“Give her everything she’s got!” Tag yelled.

“I’m trying,” Sofia’s voice rang out through his helmet’s comm. “But she’s limping like an old lady with gout!”

“Limp or not, we’re getting in there.”

“I estimate we only have two hundred meters of clearance,” Alpha said. “And we are currently ten seconds from the bay doors.”

More fire scraped the Argo. Another report flashed across Tag’s terminal. One of the main impellers was out.

“We’re losing acceleration,” Sofia said. “Come on, baby. Don’t give up on me now!”

“Fifty meters clearance,” Alpha said.

Coren directed the point-defense system at a fighter hurtling across their path. Rounds punched into the smaller craft, and it screamed into the hull of the dreadnought, trailing flotsam and fire. The fighter exploded into thousands of alloy shards. Several of the pieces flew from the site of the crash and careened at the Argo.

“Straight ahead!” Tag yelled.

“Twenty meters of clearance!”

Pieces of wings and cannons and engines from the destroyed fighter bounced off the Argo’s hull. A snake of wire, thick as an arm, whipped through the massive hole in the viewport, slamming into an empty bridge officer’s chair and tearing it from its bolts. The wire and the chair smashed against the rear of the bridge, bouncing around, as more deadly shrapnel hit the fractured viewport. Cracks formed like spiderwebs around the hole, threatening to turn the whole viewport into a storm of daggerlike polyglass shards.

“Five meters of clearance!” Alpha reported, ever vigilant.

A thin slice of light marked the narrow opening in the cargo bay doors, and Sofia twisted the controls, shooting for the ever-tighter gap. She let out a whooping yell as the prow burst into the cargo bay. The Argo shuddered as the rest of the ship scraped against the edges of the doors. They slammed shut behind the Argo, and the bay’s atmosphere began to restore itself, evidenced by sensor readings on Tag’s holoscreen reporting increasing pressures and atmospheric content. The Argo screeched across the metal bay deck, grinding as Sofia applied reverse thrust. The ship twisted and crashed into lines of vacant fighters, smashing them under thousands of tons of protesting alloy. Several Drone-Mechs ran from the sliding Argo with terrified expressions etched on their snake-like faces. But they were too slow, and their bodies disappeared under the ship.

Momentum carried the Argo onward as it tore apart catwalks lining the bay, sending more Drone-Mechs flying. Finally, the ship collided into the back wall of the bay with a sickening crunch. Dust, loose debris, polyglass shards, and metal fragments flew through the air as if a bomb had gone off. Tag was thrown forward. His harness dug into his EVA suit and pressed on his ribs. Air rushed out of his lungs. When he flopped back into his seat, he fumbled to undo his harness. Alpha was already up and helping Coren from his.

Tag gasped for air, pain still flaming hot waves through his body, and ran to Sofia. His heart leapt. A huge piece of scaffolding jutted into the bridge. It had devastated the top half of Sofia’s chair.

When Tag got to Sofia’s seat, she was gone.

“Sofia?” Tag yelled. He spun on his heels, searching over the deck. A thick, viscous fluid dripped from a busted pipe connected to the dreadnought. Sections of a torn ladder lay crumpled over what remained of the Argo’s chart table, and several dented and battered barrels from a broken catwalk leaked some kind of unknown, glowing blue liquid over the weapons terminal.

“Sofia?” Tag cried again. “Where are you?”

“Here!”

He twisted to see her body crumpled against the bent and destroyed wall of the fighter bay. Blood trickled across her forehead under her suit’s visor.

“You okay?” Tag asked, ducking under a pipe. “Can you feel your limbs?”

He climbed over one of the barrels and then knelt by Sofia’s side. Not wanting to risk worsening any injuries she might have, he didn’t want to move her and instead gingerly touched her shoulder.

“I think so.” She wiggled her feet then her hands. With evident effort, she pushed herself to her knees.

“Take it easy. Don’t force anything if you’re hurt.”

“Whether I’m hurt or not, I’m not missing out on the fun. Give me your hand.”

“You sure?”

“Don’t paint me a liar, Skipper.”

“All right.” Tag held out a hand, and she took it, dragging herself to her feet. She held her side as she stood and grimaced. For a moment, she wavered, tightening her grip on Tag’s hand. Tag returned the grip. He’d almost lost her. He’d almost lost the whole crew. Even though he’d only known them for a few short days, he realized that he deeply cared for them. What’s more, he couldn’t imagine trying to carry out this self-assigned mission alone.

As his heart settled, Sofia finally let go of his hand, and the pained expression on her face started to subside. Undoubtedly her EVA suit was pumping her full of chemicals to lessen the blow.

“Sure you can do this?” Tag asked.

“No. But I’m going to try anyway.”

Tag guessed those words held true for the rest of the crew as he and Sofia joined Coren and Alpha at the bridge’s hatch. The odds were certainly not in their favor, and small-arms fire was already pinging against the Argo’s hull. They’d jumped from one disaster right into the next. But all they could do was keep moving forward. He owed the crew of the Montenegro that. They had to try.

“Armory first,” Tag said. The group rushed down the ladders and down the passageway. “Coren, you got an idea of where the nearest terminal is with access to the ship’s intranet?”

For the first time, Coren grinned as they sprinted through the corridor. It was an unsettling, almost dastardly grin. Maybe he was half crazy after realizing what they’d gotten themselves into. “You put me in front of any damned terminal, and I’ll give us unrestricted access to the intranet.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Tag threw open the hatch to the armory. He unlocked the cabinet full of mini-Gauss rifles and passed them out to Alpha and Sofia. Coren took one of the Mechanic-made rifles he’d brought aboard. The group sprinted for the cargo bay next, where crates lay broken and spilled, and the air car was a dented wreck, mangled by several steel crates that had come loose and smashed against it. Tag wound between the broken supplies and made his way to the hatch.

“Ready?” he asked.

The three others, holding their weapons, nodded. Gunfire thudded against the bulkhead and slammed into the hatch as Drone-Mechs yelled outside, their voices permeating the breaches in the Argo’s hull. Tag punched a button to unlock and open the cargo bay hatch. Half bent and damaged, the door whined as it shuddered open. The doors screeched and finally ground to a halt. A wave of incoming pulsefire singed the deck and crates.

Tag shouldered his rifle and crept to the opening. This was it. “Let’s move!”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

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Tag crouched and leaned through the open hatch. He aimed at the first orange visor and black power-armor suit he saw. The mini-Gauss opened up, letting three slugs fly and send the Drone-Mech flying backward with fresh holes punched through its chest plate. The mini-Gauss’s fire didn’t go unanswered, and several other Drone-Mechs replaced their fallen comrade, sending a blazing salvo of rounds Tag’s way. A burst of pulsefire sliced past Tag’s head, close enough he could feel their heat, and he plunged behind a crate. The pulse rounds ignited something within the crate and started a small fire. Tendrils of smoke snaked from the blasted crate. Coren and Sofia joined Tag, and together they unleashed a violent fusillade that sent the Drone-Mechs diving for cover.

The fire crackled behind Tag, but he ignored the conflagration, readjusting his aim to bring down another shooting Drone-Mech, then took a second to survey the fighter bay.

Shredded sheets of alloy and jumbled fighters were strewn across the deck. Fires raged over a couple of the fighters, and a haze of smoke drifted from them, starting to cling to the ceiling of the bay. Large gouges down the center of the bay leading to the hatch marked the Argo’s landing path. Several crane-and-pulley systems hung overhead. One had fallen and smashed three fighters, with the mangled remains of catwalks and Drone-Mech bodies draped over it. A web of catwalks still crisscrossed the expansive bay, leading to hatches on other decks, and already Drone-Mechs occupied two of them, firing down on Tag and his crew with pulse rifles.

“I’m moving! Cover me!” Tag sprinted to a nearby fighter and ducked behind its swept-back black wing. He fired enough rounds at the catwalks to make the Drone-Mechs duck.

“Coren, help me out here!”

The Mechanic strode from the Argo, firing and landing shots on the Drone-Mechs in rapid succession. Two fell over the catwalk’s railing. Their bodies cartwheeled through the air then smacked sickeningly against the deck. Alpha and Sofia ran out next, both with rifles blazing.

A squad of Drone-Mechs took position behind some other destroyed fighters. A storm of pulsefire screamed around the bay. They might’ve had the element of surprise, but they were quickly losing their advantage to the Drone-Mech reinforcements. They needed to move—and fast.

“Where to, Coren?” Tag yelled over the whine of Drone-Mechs’ weapons.

“There!” He pointed to a hatch near where several Drone-Mechs were barricaded. “The passageway behind that hatch leads to one of the ship’s repair-bot control stations. I should be able to gain access there.”

“Alpha, Sofia, give us some cover fire!”

The Drone-Mechs popped over the wing of a fighter near the hatch. Mini-Gauss rounds sprayed into the Drone-Mechs’ position, punching through metal and power armor. Two of the Drone-Mechs went down, and the other two took shelter. Now was Tag’s chance.

“Coren, on me!” Tag sprinted to another fighter then followed the length of a fallen catwalk. Coren’s footsteps echoed behind him.

The two remaining Drone-Mechs near the hatch burst up. They sent a wave of fire at Tag and Coren. Tag dove behind a chunk of broken metal, and Coren slid next to a crumpled piece of latticework. Pulsefire kicked up globs of slag around Coren. The Mechanic was pinned down, and two more Drone-Mechs were running across a catwalk. They’d have a perfect vantage point on Coren in a matter of seconds.

Tag tried to sight up the two Drone-Mechs on the catwalk, but they sprinted out of his line of fire. He needed a better angle. “Alpha! Sofia! I need more cover!”

A pair of affirmatives echoed over his comm link as a flurry of overhead shots convinced the Drone-Mechs by the hatch to hide again. Heart pounding, Tag sprinted for a new position behind what looked like a busted troop transport vessel. The flanks of the Drone-Mechs on the catwalk were now perfectly visible. They were so focused on Coren, Sofia, and Alpha that they had missed Tag. Knowing that he would only get one good salvo on them before they realized where he was, he sighted them up slowly, holding his breath and rocking his finger back gently over the trigger. A few well-placed slugs from the mini-Gauss riddled the Drone-Mechs’ suits and sent them toppling over the catwalk, their pained screams piercing the din of pulsefire in the expansive bay.

“Thanks!” Coren said.

Tag gave him a brief salute, still catching his breath from the running. The wound in his shoulder was starting to ache again. He knew adrenaline would only last so long, and he was surprised they’d fared as well as they had so far. It had been hell trying to take out the three Mech-Drones aboard the Argo. And now they were facing a whole dreadnought’s worth of hostile aliens.

The telltale rattle and scream of more pulsefire broke his thoughts. He wheeled around the transport and delivered another salvo over the catwalks almost blindly. Rounds pinged and cracked through steel pipes and latticework, then hatches opened at the ends of the catwalks. Two new squads of Drone-Mechs poured in. Tag refused to succumb to the dread threatening to swell in him at the sight of the reinforcements. His mind focused on the only thing that mattered: get Coren to the passageway. Then escort him to the terminal. Then finish these Drone-Mech assholes once and for all.

“Alpha and I are pinned down!” Sofia said.

Tag spied the glint of their EVA suits as they peeked over what looked like a hover forklift knocked on its side. They were only ten meters from the hatch and Coren.

“Coren, can you get that hatch open?”

“Yes, but I need to access the lock. Which means I can’t get shot in the back while trying to open it.”

Energy rounds pinged off the bulkhead around him as if to emphasize his point. More stomping boots overhead. More small-arms fire. Tag glanced at the three people—Mechanic, synth-bio droid, and human—who’d banded together for this moment with him. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and had no more chance at surviving this than water had at not freezing on Eta-Five.

But these people had trusted him. A medical officer who had no reason to be a captain. No reason for being in charge of the Argo except for extremely unfortunate circumstances.

The Drone-Mechs’ defensive efforts intensified, evidenced by the sheer downpour of rounds plunging into the smelted alloy of crushed fighters and singed deck panels. Tag could hear his crew breathing heavily through the comms, each desperately clinging to their respective shelters to avoid the gunfire for a moment longer. To live a moment longer.

Tag wouldn’t let it end here. He eyed the myriad of half-broken fighters and transport spacecraft littering the bay.

“Coren, how easy is it to start up one of these fighters?” he asked.

“Not so easy,” Coren said. “The controls respond only to individual pilots, and you can’t—”

“Okay, fine.” Tag eyed the rectangular black vehicle he was hiding behind with its rows of seats apparent through a gaping hole in the rear of it. “How about the troop transport?”

The comm line went quiet for a few seconds. The silence was punctuated by rapid-fire pulse rounds beating down on their positions.

“That might work. Troop transports fly using AI. You start them out and give them a trajectory, and they go.”

“I’m going to need you to walk me through that process.” Tag walked in a crouch to one side of the transport vessel he was hiding behind, closer to the wide gash in it from the Argo’s crash landing. He slipped through it as pulsefire spattered and singed the vehicle. Clambering over tossed and unfortunately empty weapon racks, he made it to the front of the transport. “I’m looking at two dark panels. What next?”

“You’ll need to—” Coren paused, and Tag watched through a porthole as he fell to his stomach, hiding from a fresh burst of incoming fire. He began again. “Just press both hands to the screens at once.”

A barrage of rounds cracked against the transport. Tag recoiled, but the small-arms fire wasn’t enough to break through the windshield or pierce the sidewalls. He pressed his palms against the two display screens, and to his surprise, they flickered to life in a dull blue glow. Strange characters scrolled across the screen. “I can’t read this. What am I supposed to do?”

“One of the command lines starts the AI systems,” Coren said.

“Which one?” Tag looked at more than twenty different lines. It was impossible to decipher the enigmatic letters, and the pulsefire hammering the transport wasn’t helping his concentration.

“It may be the third or fourth line from the top.”

“Is this something I can guess at, or am I going to kill myself if I choose the wrong one?”

When Coren didn’t answer immediately, Tag figured he knew the answer. He needed Coren in the transport, but the Mechanic was drawing far too much fire to move. If he stood, he’d be cut down before he took a single step.

“I’ll help!” another voice chimed in over the comms. Before Tag could reply, Sofia was already sprinting to the transport as Alpha provided a barrage of cover fire. The droid’s shots were clumsy and sporadic, but it was enough for a few Drone-Mechs to take pause.

Still, gunfire rained down on Sofia. Rounds burst around her, trailing her every move. She zigzagged across the deck then leapt into the charred hole in the rear of the transport. Her shoulder slammed into an empty seat, and she rolled, landing in a sprawl near Tag. He bent to help her up, but she brushed him off and strode to the two displays.

“Let’s see ...” She eyed the screens. “My Mechanic is still a bit basic, but I’ve picked up a bit from Coren.”

“Better have picked up more than me,” Tag muttered. “You got this?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll cover the rear.” Tag knelt near the hole. He sighted up a Drone-Mech sneaking toward them and sent a flurry of slugs punching through the attacker’s body. Several more returned fire, and he was forced to stoop back. “You almost got this bird flying?”

“I’m trying!” Sofia yelled as she studied the displays then pressed one of the display commands. “Got it—I think.”

Then lights buzzed on within the transport. It growled as its thrusters rumbled to life. A haunting, eerie howling filled the cabin.

“What is that?” Tag asked.

“I guess it’s their alarm system,” Sofia said. “You know, since there are so many warnings flashing across this screen. Can’t read them all, but I recognize a few words like ‘fatal’ and ‘destruction’ and ‘immediate.’”

“Great,” Tag said. “Can it fly?”

Sofia lifted her shoulders uncertainly. “Don’t see why we can’t try!” She punched at a few commands, and the transport rocked, shaking off some of the debris piled on top of it. It shuddered for a moment, and Tag feared they were about to find out what the warnings were about. But then the transport lurched into the air. It hovered at an unhealthy tilt and started slipping sideways.

“So I guess the answer is not really! What do you want me to do about it?” Sofia yelled over the grinding and growling noises coming from the transport’s thrusters. Rounds pummeled the front and sides of the shuddering transport.

“You think we can safely pick up Alpha without crushing her? I want to set this thing down as a barricade in front of the hatch.”

“I can try.” Sofia punched a few of the commands. The transport rocked backward then slammed into the deck. It crushed another fighter and sent several crates flying into the bay bulkhead. Whatever damage the transport had sustained had wrecked any hopes they had of controlling it. “Not going to work, Skipper!”

Tag glanced out the back, studying Alpha’s and Coren’s positions. Dozens of new Drone-Mechs were posted along the catwalks, their rifles chattering and spraying a typhoon. The relentless assault kept Coren and Alpha from going anywhere. It wouldn’t be long before one of them perished due to the enormous volume of pulsefire alone. All it would take was one stray round. Tag shuddered, his mind racing for another solution, another way to protect his crew from the Drone-Mechs raining terror from the catwalks.

“This is one wild stallion I’m afraid I can’t tame,” Sofia said with a sigh. “Got another suggestion for me, Skipper?”

“Yes,” Tag said. “Let’s run this thing straight into the ceiling.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

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“Can you say that again?” Sofia cried over the gunfire. “Sounded like you said you wanted me to ram this thing into the ceiling.”

“That’s right,” Tag replied. This was going to be a risky move, but it was better than letting the Drone-Mechs maintain their upper hand in the battle. “Send the transport on a suicide run. We’ll hop out back. Use the distraction to get to the hatch with Coren. Alpha, Coren, you hear all that?”

“Copy, Captain,” Alpha responded.

“Ready when you are,” Coren replied.

“Sofia?” Tag asked, looking toward the front of the cabin.

She gave him a silent nod, punched in a few commands, and the transport shook. Its nose started to point up, headed for the tangle of catwalks.

“She’s off!” Sofia yelled.

“Then abandon ship!” Tag commanded.

Sofia ran at Tag. He prepared to jump as the transport shuddered. More pulsefire slammed into the vehicle, and Sofia tripped. Her boot was tangled in a harness from one of the destroyed passenger seats. The transport vibrated as its thrusters began carrying it to the ceiling. Tag leapt toward her and fired his mini-Gauss into the harness at point-blank range. The slug punched through the harness and into the vehicle, shearing a hole straight out to the bay. He pulled Sofia free, and they tumbled out the back of the transport as it rocketed up. Sofia landed atop him in a jumble, and pain flamed up in his healing shoulder.

“Thanks,” Sofia said as she turned her head to watch the transport.

The vehicle curved to its left, slamming into the nearest catwalk. It ground several of the Drone-Mechs into the ceiling and scraped a long gouge into the metal. The vehicle continued forward, crashing into other catwalks, tearing them apart and sending Drone-Mechs fleeing.

“Better get moving,” Tag said. He pulled Sofia up, and they sprinted to Coren. Alpha was already at the Mechanic’s side, and the two were working to unlock the hatch.

Metal screeched against metal as the transport picked up speed, its engines roaring as it tore mindlessly along the ceiling. It scraped forward, the screech almost deafening, until it careened into the closed bay doors. The vehicle crumpled. Pieces of already-shredded metal plates flew from the impact, and ragged passenger seats tumbled through the air. The thrusters glowed a bright blue then white. A sudden flash of light overwhelmed Tag’s vision, followed by a deafening blast, and shrapnel flew across the deck. The rest of the transport disappeared in a blaze of rolling fire. Flaming, unrecognizable chunks of the transport bounced off the walls and fell across the remaining few Drone-Mechs that had stubbornly refused to die.

“We’re through!” Coren yelled. The hatch slid open. He led the other three into a corridor then punched a command into another terminal in the passageway. The hatch doors slammed shut and drowned out the alarms and crackle of fire from the fighter bay.

Tag studied their new surroundings, his chest heaving and desperately sucking in air. Sweat trickled across the inside of his helmet, blurring the intense lights blinking along the passageway. Clean white struts made graceful overhead arcs, and identical hatches intermittently lined the bulkhead. It gave the place a sterile, almost hospital-like quality—a far cry from the menacing curves and shadowy appearance of the dreadnought’s exterior.

Coren sprinted down the corridor, glancing back and forth to examine the small labels on each hatch. Tag could discern no difference between any of the labels or hatches and placed his full trust in the Mechanic. He was finding it easier and easier to follow the alien without reservation now, the distant echoes of paranoia lost to the Mechanic’s show of valor throughout their adventure so far. The passage soon branched into others, and hurried footsteps echoed in the distance, breaking Tag’s thoughts.

“Are we close?” Tag said.

“I believe so,” Coren replied.

But they weren’t close enough for Tag’s comfort. The footsteps grew louder until four Drone-Mechs rushed from an intersecting passage. His heart leaping into his throat, Tag immediately let loose a wild barrage as his crew pressed themselves tight against the bulkhead, sheltering behind the struts. One Drone-Mech crumpled, its body peppered with mini-Gauss slugs. Alpha and Sofia sent another fusillade to send the Drone-Mechs scattering and searching for cover.

Tag kept up the suppressing fire. His aching shoulder injury lit up in agony. Each shudder of the rifle resonated through him, igniting the pain just a bit more.

Alpha leaned out from a strut and squeezed the trigger once. A Drone-Mech’s visor exploded in a web of fissures, and the alien went down, limbs sprawled and weapon clattering away.

“My targeting algorithms are improving,” she said.

“Great!” Tag boomed. “Let’s keep that up.”

More footsteps bounced down other corridors.

“Keep shooting, and let’s move,” Tag said. “We’ve got to get to that damn terminal!”

They moved from strut to strut, firing and sprinting, leapfrogging each other until Coren stopped at a hatch. “This is it!”

His fingers tapped along a small panel, and the doors hissed back. Coren brought up his rifle and began firing before Tag could even see where the door led. He jumped to reinforce Coren but saw the few Drone-Mechs in here had already been subdued. Sofia and Alpha swiveled in next, and Coren slammed the hatch shut. Tag gasped to catch his breath. Sofia’s chest heaved as she leaned against the bulkhead, and Coren dropped his rifle to his side. He plodded to a central terminal in the vast space. Alpha seemed like the only one unaffected by their physical duress. She strode confidently to Coren and examined the terminal.

“This language is still foreign to me,” she said. “I’m not sure how much assistance I’ll be.”

“We’ll figure it out as we go.” Coren hunched over the terminal and began working, appearing right at home.

Gunfire thudded against the hatch, but it didn’t open. Sofia kept her rifle trained on it as Tag took a look around. Dozens upon dozens of sphere-shaped bots sat idly in racks. Tag figured these were the dreadnought’s repair bots. A series of small hatches—too tight for a Mechanic or even a human—dotted the bulkhead. He guessed each was a chute or dedicated passage for the bots.

A buzzing caught Tag’s attention, and he spun.

A huge holoscreen display glowed on the bulkhead. It showed the scene of the ongoing battle. The Montenegro continued to endure its relentless pummeling. More bleeding wounds had formed in its sidewalls, and fighters zipped around it in desperate orbits, struggling to defend the seemingly doomed capital ship. Small explosions dotted the field of view, more numerous than the surrounding stars light-years away. Drone-Mech destroyers and battlecruisers unleashed barrage after barrage, encroaching on the steadily diminishing SRE forces.

“Thought we might want to know what’s going on out there,” Coren said.

Tag wasn’t sure he wanted to watch the deaths of so many desperate humans. But he reminded himself they still had a chance. They could still pull this off and turn the tide of this seemingly hopeless battle.

More pounding sounded against the hatch. Sofia tensed.

“We’ve gained access to the shield systems,” Coren said. “And if I can reroute the systems commands to the shipwide network....”

“I think I understand what you are doing here,” Alpha said, leaning over Coren’s shoulder. She joined him at a nearby terminal, and they muttered between themselves as they worked.

The hammering against the hatch intensified.

“How long is this going to take you guys?” Sofia asked.

“A time estimate isn’t possible at this point,” Alpha replied coolly. “We are still rerouting our commands to bypass system security. I’m beginning to grasp the Mechanic coding practices better and should be able to assist Coren.”

The din at the hatch grew louder.

Sofia eyed Tag. “Not sure how long that hatch is going to hold.”

They needed to buy Coren and Alpha more time. Tag rushed to a stand full of repair bots. “Help me with these!”

Together, they shoved the stand. Metal squealed along the deck. Sweat trickled down Tag’s back, and his quads burned with the effort. His EVA suit struggled to maintain a comfortable temperature. He fought for purchase, leaning his full weight against the heavy rack. Soon it slid into place behind the hatch.

“We got it,” Coren said. “Drone-Mech shields are down.”

For a moment, nothing seemed to change on the holoscreen. The violent exchange of cannon fire and rocketing torpedoes continued on the display. Explosions still rocked the ships and fighters. But Tag noticed more and more of the explosions were emanating from the Drone-Mech ships. Several of their fighters erupted into spurting balls of plasma and billows of spreading debris.

A trickle of joy turned into an unbridled sense of accomplishment. They had actually done it. “Great job!” Tag said.

“The engineers are going to be working to fix this,” the Mechanic said. “It might not last long.”

Even so, Tag couldn’t help the glimmer of hope sparking within him. But he knew that optimism might prove premature. The Drone-Mech ships, even without energy shields, outnumbered the SRE fleet, and their offensive measures were still proving to be too much for the Montenegro’s fleet.

Coren stared at the screen, standing next to Alpha. “We can bring down the dreadnought’s AI systems, but I’m not sure that will drastically alter the course of this battle. You still want us to try?”

Tag studied the battlefield. The fighters were veering around the SRE and strafing the struggling ships. The Drone-Mech destroyers were levying powerful barrages at the Montenegro, their torpedoes hitting home along the capital ship’s hull. “No,” Tag said finally. “Scratch that AI systems subversion attempt.”

“What should we do then?” Alpha asked.

“We don’t want to destroy the Drone-Mechs’ AI systems. We’ll use them ourselves.”

CHAPTER SIXTY

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Tag’s thoughts turned back to the moment he had almost lost the Argo to a single stubborn Drone-Mech. The fusion reactor had been overloaded to a near meltdown. Maybe ...

“Coren, can you send all these repair bots to the dreadnought’s fusion reactors?” Tag asked.

“We’re not supposed to be helping them!” Sofia said.

“No, we won’t be,” Coren said, already seeming to understand Tag’s plan. His fingers danced across the terminal, and dozens of the spherical repair bots whirred on. They started heading for two of the open chutes. One by one, they rolled in and were sucked away to their destination. “Sabotage the power plant?”

“Exactly,” Tag said. “Have them tear the place apart.”

“I’m already sensing engineers attempting to undermine our efforts,” Alpha said. “They’re trying to reverse the unshielding commands and restrict our access.”

Tag steadied his rifle at the hatch. The struggling outside had grown eerily quiet. “Keep them off Coren’s back while he finishes this.”

“I will do my best, Captain.” Alpha worked doggedly at her terminal.

Bots continued to roll from their racks and zoom into the chutes. Tag’s nerves felt on fire with anticipation as his eyes flicked between the raging battle around the Montenegro on the holoscreen to the hatch. The last repair bot slipped into a chute.

“Repair bots are all underway,” Coren said.

“How hard will it be to divert the dreadnought’s firing solutions? Can you retarget cannons and point-defense systems on the Drone-Mech fleet?”

Coren paused, seeming to mull the request over. “I believe it may be possible.” Once again, he resumed his position at the workstation.

A long silence followed, only broken by the rhythmic tapping of Coren and Alpha on the terminals. Tag and Sofia kept their rifles trained on the hatch. The heavy rack, now devoid of the repair bots, still stood in place over the door. Tag’s finger hovered near his trigger guard, and his pulse thumped in his ears. He wished he knew what was going on out there. Maybe the Drone-Mechs had given up on gaining entry. Maybe they were trying desperately to reverse the damage Coren had caused their network and were too focused on the computer systems. But something told him that was very wrong.

Then the hatch burst inward. The door tore apart in a pluming explosion. The blast fractured the bot rack, and chunks of metal whistled dangerously through the air. Fingers of fire twisted across the deck.

Tag ducked, and Sofia threw herself down beside him. Smoke filled the entryway, replacing the fire, and pulsefire beams pierced the gray clouds, pinging across the bot racks and bulkhead. Tag and Sofia returned fire blindly, with no targets in sight. Then Tag spotted a few dark silhouettes moving within the settling dust. He and Sofia pounded the shapes with mini-Gauss slugs, but more flooded in.

Alpha paused her work to lay down a barrage of covering fire. But Coren worked diligently, ignoring the hell breaking loose around him.

“Guard Coren!” Tag yelled over the cacophony of gunfire.

“Copy, Captain,” Alpha said, flipping over a workbench to help block Coren. She stood behind it and shouldered her mini-Gauss, looking evermore the valiant soldier.

Tag and Sofia continued firing on the entryway. Several dark shadows crumpled in the dust clouds, replaced by others, firing and yelling.

“My sensors are reporting at least a dozen individual lifeforms!” Alpha said, firing. One of her shots slammed into a Drone-Mech. “Eleven now!”

“Weapons systems are almost ... there!” Coren yelled. He turned away from the terminal. A blast of pulsefire hit the workstation. Sparks flew, and the terminal went dark. The holoscreen still glowed, and the outboard view showed the dreadnought’s cannons firing in sporadic, crazed patterns. Torpedoes changed trajectories and accelerated toward the Drone-Mech battlecruisers and destroyers. Piercing blue rounds lit up the Drone-Mech fighters soaring around the Drone-Mech fleet. The exploding fighters’ blasts resonated through the dreadnought’s thick hull.

“Got a status report on the power plant?” Tag asked.

“Reaction chamber integrity is dropping,” Coren said. “We’re getting the first signs of radiation leaking. We have five, maybe ten minutes if we’re lucky before this entire place detonates.”

“You heard him!” Tag fired on a Drone-Mech leaning in from the corridor. “To the Argo!”

He forced himself up against all his instincts yelling at him to stay low. Firing at the Drone-Mechs, he surged forward. His small team followed. They pushed through the meager forces clustered in front of the hatch, cutting through them with a barrier of flying slugs. The pulsefire slowed, until Tag brought his sights over a final Drone-Mech lingering in the smoke. He squeezed the trigger until the Drone-Mech collapsed, then rushed to the exit. Something barreled out of the dark smoke and crashed into him before he reached it. His fingers loosened around his rifle, and the mini-Gauss clattered across the deck. He went down, entangled in the grip of a thrashing Drone-Mech. The alien’s power armor had holes punched through its left arm, but if it was injured, it showed no signs of weakness. Just anger, hate.

Tag made out other vague shapes leaping over him, and the grunts and clangs of ensuing hand-to-hand combat reached his ears.

Before he could contemplate the fate of his crew, the Drone-Mech standing over Tag pummeled him, ripping at his helmet, trying to twist his neck. Tag wrapped his hands around the Drone-Mech’s wrists, desperate to pull it away. Then one of the Drone-Mech’s hands pressed down on his shoulder. Hot agony radiated through the injury, and he let out a pained yell. The alien took advantage of the weak spot and put its full weight on his shoulder.

Tag’s arm went weak. His nerves screamed. The alien began punching at his visor, slamming its armor-reinforced fist into the polyglass. The blows shook Tag’s head, and he blinked, desperate to keep his blood and sweat from blinding him. Another impact sent his teeth chattering, and he tasted something coppery, metallic. The Drone-Mech drew its fist up again, and Tag tried to block the blow by raising his good hand.

But the alien’s punch never landed. A thin set of six fingers wrapped around the Drone-Mech’s wrist. Coren grabbed the Drone-Mech by its neck and threw the alien across the room. The lanky Drone-Mech crashed into an empty bot rack, and the rack tumbled over its limp body, and it settled near another fresh set of Drone-Mech corpses.

Coren offered a hand.

Tag took it and stood. “Thanks.”

“No time for thanks,” Coren replied.

Sofia wiped blood from her visor, and Alpha wrung her metal fingers after setting down the body of another Drone-Mech.

“Everybody okay?” Tag said.

The others shook their head.

“Then time to get out of here!” Tag said.

The group ran through the corridor. They heard more scurrying footsteps echoing down other passageways, but Tag paid them little heed. They couldn’t waste a moment longer returning to the fighter bay and to what remained of the Argo. They reached the hatch and rushed into the bay.

The deck shook under their feet, evoking memories of Eta-Five in Tag. A distant explosion sounded, not from outside but from deep within the belly of the massive ship. The meltdown had started, but it didn’t matter now. It wouldn’t be long before the dreadnought tore itself apart from the inside. They just needed to make sure they weren’t in it when it did.

That meant a short dash to the Argo, and then—

Coren froze. The others skidded to a stop near him.

“Ah, so the real soldiers are here,” he said.

Ahead, a squad of Drone-Mechs in mechanized exo-suits stood, each looming almost four meters in height. They carried double-barreled weapons as long as Tag was tall. The first exo-suit soldier spotted Tag and the others. It brought its weapon to bear.

“Look out!” Tag cried.

The crew took shelter behind a wrecked fighter. A low whine escaped the gun, rapidly growing louder, until an intense green beam cut through the air and tore into a defunct fighter. The beam chewed up the metal, turning it into a puddle of hot orange slag. The other soldiers’ weapons whined and fired, and the fighter slowly disappeared under the assault.

Tag forgot about the sharp pain throbbing in his shoulder. He feared it would hurt a great deal more when he was cut in half by one of those green beams.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

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“Do those exo-suits have any weaknesses?” Tag asked.

“The soldiers inside will still die if you shoot them,” Coren said.

“Oh, that’s extremely helpful,” Sofia said, her nose in a snarl beneath her clear visor.

“I’m serious.” Coren glared. “The suits are well armored, but those rifles of yours should still pierce them.”

“All right, but we can’t take them head on,” Tag said. The exo-suit soldiers’ weapons continued to dissolve everything around them. The deck shook as one of the soldiers loped to a new position, preparing to flank them. “Focus on getting back to the Argo. I’ll distract them, you three move!”

Before any of them could protest, he slid into a firing position and shot a burst of slugs into one of the soldiers’ exo-suits. Two of the rounds whizzed by harmlessly. But the third devastated a servo on the suit’s right leg. The soldier took a step forward, and the suit crashed sideways, its leg slipping from under it. Still, it laid down an unrelenting curtain of fire, and the others picked up its slack, churning forward over broken fighters and broken crates.

“Your turn!” Sofia yelled. A flurry of slugs punched into the side of one exo-suit, and it swiveled to fire on her.

Tag ran. He didn’t bother looking back, but he could feel the heat radiating from the exo-suits’ beams, following him. He dove behind a fallen catwalk. The entire structure deformed and melted under the concentrated fire hitting his position. Throwing himself to his belly, he army-crawled to the Argo. He was close, almost there. Sofia and Coren jumped into the ship, disappearing into the cargo bay. A few minutes later, one of the Gauss cannons opened up on an exo-suit. The shrieking rounds shredded the suit and the alien inside. The cannon pivoted and fired, and another exo turned to globs of half-molten alloy.

Tag scrambled for the cargo bay hatch. Another explosion from somewhere within the ship resonated through the deck. The quaking knocked him off his feet. He sprawled, his hands outstretched.

The deck trembled under Tag again. But it wasn’t another blast rocking through the ship.

A shadow fell over Tag. He rolled just in time to avoid the green beam tearing into the metal where he’d just been. Moving for the exo-suit soldier’s blind spot, he dove under its feet. Another blast ripped into the deck. He dodged the stomping feet.

“Come on, Tag!” Sofia cried. “We’re ready to go!”

He and the exo-suit soldier were in the Argo’s blind spot. Now he was engaged in a deadly dance with the terrifying metal monster.

“I’ve got an exo on me!” Tag said.

“I will assist,” Alpha replied over the comms in her near-monotone voice. She sprinted from near the cargo hatch of the Argo in a flash of silver. Green beams cut into the deck behind her, but she juked from side to side, anticipating each blast. Then, drawing near, she threw herself into the air. Her arms pinwheeled until she slammed into the cockpit of the exo.

With her body blocking the soldier’s view, Tag rushed for his dropped mini-Gauss. He picked it up and leveled it at the exo. The exo flailed and thrashed, trying desperately to throw Alpha off. She clung to the cockpit and punched at the polyglass. Blow after blow, she hammered it. Fracture lines appeared first, then the polyglass fell away. Alpha tore the soldier from his perch within the suit and threw him clear of it. His body hit the bulkhead and fell to the deck, a bleeding mess.

The suit, pilotless, collapsed. Alpha tried to jump away, but she didn’t make it. Tag watched in horror as the suit crashed onto her legs and pinned her beneath it.

“No!” he yelled.

The dreadnought shook again. This time, the tremors didn’t cease, and more explosions echoed through the ship, sounding like the roars of some awakening kraken rising from the depths.

Tag ran to Alpha. She writhed, struggling to free herself. At least she was alive. Tag knelt to help her as point-defense rounds screamed overhead. Another exo-soldier crumpled, armor shredded and melted.

“Go on, Captain!” Alpha said. “I am unable to escape.”

“You’re coming with.” Tag grabbed her wrists and pulled. She tried to push herself free, but even with their best efforts, she remained pinned.

“This thing’s going to blow any second!” Sofia yelled over the comms. The Argo’s grav impellers rumbled to life and glowed blue. The ship shifted, shedding debris, and it started to hover above the deck.

A deep roar resonated through the fighter bay, accompanied by the distant sounds of explosions.

“Captain, go!” Alpha said. “It is not worthwhile for all three of you to die for me.”

Tag shouldered his mini-Gauss. “Sorry, Alpha. Not going to happen. You don’t have any pain metrics running, do you?”

“No.”

“Good.” Tag fired twice at her. Each round cleaved through a leg, shredding the wire and metal leading to her torso. He threw the mini-Gauss over his back and dragged her legless body across the deck, away from her severed limbs. He hoisted her into the cargo bay and slammed the hatch shut. “We’re on board! Get us off this ship, Coren!”

“Doors are still closed, Captain!” Coren replied over the comms.

“Cut us a way out then!”

The hum of the charging energy cannon accompanied the swelling thunder of the explosions rumbling through the dreadnought.

“You okay?” Tag asked Alpha.

“Yes, all units functional. But I’m afraid my EVA suit is compromised, and I will be unable to join you on the bridge.”

Tag lifted her into a fireman’s carry. Her weight exacerbated his injury, but he ran up the ladders and to the med bay. “You’ll be safe in here.” He locked her into a patient crash couch. “When we get out of here, I’ll get you a new pair of legs. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“And thank you, Alpha.” He left before she could respond and sprinted for the bridge.

“Energy cannon at full power,” Coren said.

“Fire,” Tag said, strapping his harnesses over his body.

The charged blast filled the cargo bay with brilliant light and coursing energy, crashing against the massive fighter bay hatch. Heat washed over them, rolling through the hole in the bridge viewport. The huge metal doors protested in a long grating whine, then bent outward. Vacuum finished the job, pulling loose fighters, Drone-Mech corpses, dead exos, and fragments of alloy through the wound in the bay doors. The Argo was thrown into open space with the rest of the fighter bay’s contents. Tag’s stomach flipped end over end as he struggled to orient himself as the Argo spun away from the dreadnought.

“Get us out of here, Sofia!” Tag said.

“Aye, aye, Skipper!”

The ship swayed then stopped, finally stabilizing, and it shot from the dreadnought, colliding against a screen of debris. Cannons boomed from the enormous ship, sending rounds coursing in all directions. Fighters, confused by the attack from their own ships, perished in vaporizing blasts. The dreadnought lashed out at everything around as it destroyed itself from within because of Coren’s subterfuge.

“Get us to the Montenegro!” Tag commanded.

They swerved between assaulting fighters. Coren kept the weapons system hot, bringing down incoming torpedoes and the occasional warhead. Another ship appeared in their viewport, giving Tag confidence and a glimmer of hope that they’d actually make it, they’d actually succeeded.

The Montenegro was still alive. Damaged, but still alive. No other SRE ships drifted around it, and only a small detachment of fighters circled it, finishing off Drone-Mech fighters daring to dive in too close.

Tag turned on the stern outboard cams on another holoscreen. He watched the dreadnought falter in its last death throes. Cannons still sputtered wildly as a jet of blue plasma cut through its belly. The jet widened into a colossal pillar. Then a violent flash of white light overwhelmed the view. When the cams adjusted, the dreadnought was nothing but a spreading plume of broken and scattered pieces careening through space.

Sofia whooped in her seat while gripping the controls. Tag closed his eyes for a moment and soaked in the tremendous victory. He opened them to see Coren glance at him. The Mechanic held his fist in the air in a simple, quiet gesture of triumph. The surviving Drone-Mech fighters fell back, retreating to the two remaining Drone-Mech destroyers and a damaged battlecruiser. The limping fleet accelerated then vanished in a white blink of light, jumping into hyperspace.

Tag straightened in his seat, pride swelling in his chest, and he watched Sofia and Coren working diligently at their stations, bringing them closer to home, closer to the Montenegro.

Victory at last, Tag thought.

They’d pushed back the Drone-Mechs. They’d saved the Montenegro. And his crew was alive.

It was over. For now.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

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Tag, Coren, Sofia, and Alpha sat around the table in the flag officers’ conference room of the Montenegro. Several oil paintings of Earthside oceans complete with full-rigged sailing ships and circling gulls graced the bulkheads, anachronistic reminders of the planet that was hundreds of light-years away, still unaware of the events that had transpired.

Alpha’s mechanical mouth twisted into a slight smile as her beady eyes scanned over the artwork. Over her short time in the crew, her gestures and actions had grown more uncannily human, but she still had a ways to go before she shed her strange speech patterns altogether. It hadn’t taken long for Tag to find replacement legs for her from spare droid components in engineering aboard the capital ship, and, with Coren’s help, he’d restored her to her full self. Once she’d been refitted, she’d served beside Coren, Tag, and Sofia as they aided in the repairs of the Argo and the Montenegro.

It had taken quite a bit of convincing for the admiralty to realize Coren was not a threat, but fortunately Tag and Sofia’s research aboard the Argo, along with Sofia’s months of research logs on Eta-Five, had eventually persuaded the SRE officers that Coren was no Drone-Mech.

Despite the days of work that had already gone into it, the Montenegro was a wreck. There was no doubt about it. Tag estimated there were more crew members dead than alive, and almost three-quarters of the ship’s assigned fighters had been destroyed. Its escort ships were obliterated, and it would be weeks before they joined up with a new escort fleet. That gave the crew plenty of time to administer the thousands of burials at space they owed the men and women who’d perished, starting with the Argo’s crew.

The hatch to the conference room opened.

Admiral Sheila Doran walked in, followed by Rear Admiral Owen Blank. The two settled down into the seats opposite Tag’s crew. Admiral Doran’s eyes were bloodshot, and heavy bags hung under them. Rear Admiral Blank’s expression was no less weary. Tag didn’t envy their positions. It had been difficult enough for him to witness the deaths of the Argo’s crew, knowing there was little he could do to change the tide of battle. He couldn’t bear to imagine the emotional turmoil those two had endured as they’d watched their fleet fall apart to the Drone-Mechs. Even with all they’d been through, however, the duo sat straight and alert, ready to prepare the Montenegro for the next phase in what looked to be a dangerous and war-filled new era of the SRE’s expeditions in space.

“I’ve dug through everything we have,” Doran began at once. She wasted no time on perfunctory greetings. “My officers and I scoured all the classified information we have access to.” She held her hands out, palms open. “I’m afraid we have no idea where the nanites originated. As far as I can tell, the SRE and Earthside humanity as we know it did not enslave your people.”

“I think the Drone-Mech attack on the Montenegro was proof enough for me,” Sofia said. “Unless the SRE is so devoted to a lie they want to sacrifice a capital ship.”

“Doubtful, I’d hope,” Blank said. “Last we heard from Earth, the political infighting was no worse than usual. But there were no reports of extremism, much less any group capable of infecting an entire unknown race with these nanites. The only possibility is that one of the independence-minded colonies in the far reaches of our space took and developed the technology.”

“But again, there’s no evidence of anything like this,” Doran added. “At least, none we’ve uncovered.”

“Did you find any possible explanation for how this technology ended up in alien hands then?” Coren asked, looking at the two flag officers warily.

“We’re going to examine every possibility,” Doran said. “But the only human ships we know that have come this way are the UNS Hope and the SRES Hanno.”

“Right,” Sofia said. “The Hanno dropped me off on Eta-Five.”

“And the UNS Hope was the generation ship lost centuries ago,” Tag said.

Doran nodded and folded her hands together on the table. “That’s correct. We have no records of the UNS Hope after it passed by the Eta system, so there’s no telling what happened to the technology and everyone aboard, and the Hanno reported no extraterrestrial interactions besides those you studied on Eta-Five. It could very well be that the Hope is our missing link in this disaster.”

“Yes, ma’am, it certainly seems like it,” Tag said. “So where does that leave us?”

“That’s what I’d hoped you’d answer for me. What was your mission aboard the Argo?”

Tag was taken aback but gestured to Alpha. “You’re looking at her. I was charged with developing my synth-bio AI systems and, of course, serving the ship’s medical needs.”

“What about Captain Weber’s mission?”

“Pardon me?”

Doran shared a look with Blank. He picked up where she left off. “What I say here does not go beyond this room.”

Tag and the others nodded.

“We recovered classified records buried within the Argo’s databases that matched some of our own. Unfortunately, these records are a bit cryptic and unhelpful. We believe your mission of scientific exploration wasn’t quite as innocent as it seemed.”

“What do you mean?” Tag asked. He’d never heard anything in his mission briefings other than the directives for the crew’s experiments and research projects, along with an overarching theme of retracing the UNS Hope’s ill-fated journey.

“There was a considerable amount of cargo that was unaccounted for on the Argo when you arrived here,” Blank said.

“Yes, sir,” Tag said. “The Drone-Mechs entered through our cargo bay. I suspect they took much of our cargo.”

“And do you know why?”

Tag shook his head. He’d barely had time to contemplate the question.

“Okay, do you know what kind of torpedoes the Argo was equipped with?”

“No,” Tag admitted, wondering where this was headed. “That wasn’t germane to my responsibilities, and after the Drone-Mechs boarded us, there weren’t any torpedoes left.”

Again, Doran and Blank shared a meaningful look.

Doran took over the conversation. “The Argo’s torpedoes were no ordinary armaments.”

“What were they?” Sofia asked.

“Ramjet thermonuclear warheads.”

That didn’t make sense to Tag. Such weapons were meant for immobile land-based targets—and they’d never been used. The SRE had no reason to use them as far as he knew. They would only be employed in a scorched-earth policy against alien races with whom peace could not be brokered. “But those are—”

“Yes,” Doran cut him off. “We believe Captain Weber was tasked with a covert mission to wipe out a threat even I didn’t know existed.”

Tag mulled over the ramifications of that hypothesis. “If the SRE knew about such a threat but kept it quiet, does that mean they suspect a mole?”

“I’m afraid so,” Doran said. “There was definitely a good reason the Argo’s crew underwent such extensive background checks. But I think someone at Earth Command has been compromised. Which is why I’m not sure we’ll get any straight answers to my courier drones.”

“So what do we do about the rest of my people?” Coren asked.

“That is the question I leave you with,” Doran said. “Currently, we’re awaiting a response from the SRE Command. We have no crew to extend; we have no ships; and we have little in the way of supplies. But what we do have is a mission for you, Commander Brewer, and your crew.”

Tag perked up at the subtle promotion.

“Commander Brewer, you are all that remains of the Argo,” Doran continued. “I’m appointing Lieutenant Vasquez to your ship. Likewise, we have no crew records for Coren or Alpha, given they aren’t members of the SRE, so they don’t easily fit into our chain of command right now. But as Commander of the Argo, you may offer them positions aboard your ship of your own volition.”

Tag glanced at Alpha then Coren. The Mechanic held his gaze as if he was going to levy a different answer than the one he gave. “Of course I will.”

“Since I haven’t received any orders from Command yet to say otherwise, I want you to carry out the mission Captain Weber started. I understand that’s going to involve some detective work on your part. But I have a feeling your crew will be up for it. The Argo has been resupplied and should be space ready within the day. Your bots can handle the rest of the repairs on your journey to Eta-Five. I expect continuous updates as you progress. I want to know where you are and where you’re headed at all times. I want to know how the Mechanics fare, and I want to know of any other encounters you may have with alien species.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tag replied. “You have my word.”

“Whoever enslaved the Mechanics is still out there. We must find them. I think Captain Weber’s mission has something to do with those responsible for the nanites as well as the Hope’s disappearance, and it’ll be your job to find out why. As soon as we receive our escort fleet, we’ll reconvene and reinforce your mission, but for now, you’re on your own.”

Tag looked at his crew. Alpha wore her characteristic emotionless face. Sofia seemed eager and ready for whatever journey came next. And Coren appeared stoic, at least to the untrained eye. Tag had, however, learned to read the subtle hints of emotion in the Mechanic’s expression. He saw the small twitch in Coren’s good eye and the slight, almost imperceptible frown turning down his thin lips. The Mechanic carried the weight of his people on his shoulders. Undoubtedly he yearned to be reunited with them.

But Tag had promised the Mechanics he’d bring back human help. And now all it appeared they’d be returning to Eta-Five with was the Argo. It wouldn’t be enough.

“Do you have any smaller transport vessels to spare? Anything at all we can bring to Eta-Five to help the Mechanics?” Tag asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Doran said. “Not without compromising the safety of the Montenegro, especially should the Drone-Mechs find us again for a second assault.”

“If I may, Admiral,” Blank started. Doran nodded for him to proceed. “There’s a fair bit of wreckage floating around out there. I’m not saying it’s optimal, but maybe you can salvage something from the Drone-Mech ships.”

At this, Coren outright grinned. “Yes. Repairing things is something my people are very good at. We might be able to recover enough scraps to repair the vessel we crashed on Eta-Five.”

“Very well,” Doran said. “I don’t want to delay you any longer.” She stood from the table, and the others followed suit. “Coren, your people are relying on you. Good luck and godspeed to all of you.” Then her eyes met Tag’s. “And Commander Brewer, your people might be relying on your success as well.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tag said. The admiral and rear admiral left, leaving Tag alone with his crew. They weren’t a perfect team yet. They had their faults, their inadequacies, and plenty to learn about their roles aboard the Argo. But they’d already survived the icy maw of Eta-Five and brought down a Drone-Mech dreadnought unaided. It certainly wasn’t the crew Tag had left Earth with, but it was the one fate had given him.

He sat a little straighter.

He was a commander now, with his own ship, crew, and mission. And though doubts of his own abilities still haunted him, he had a chance he hadn’t been given before. It was time to prove those doubts wrong. He had set out on the Argo to explore unknown worlds and delve into new scientific mysteries. Never had he dreamed of saving another alien species nor that he would be in a race to save his own—yet now that he was, he couldn’t imagine his life taking any different path.

“You all ready?” he asked.

The others responded with unequivocal determination, ready to take on all that their impending mission had to throw at them.

It was time for the Argo to sail again.

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The End of Book 1

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Thank you for reading Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier, Book 1). If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review?

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Book 2 in The Eternal Frontier series, Edge of War, is available now. You can pick up your copy here: http://amzn.to/2oFglf8

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I love to hear from my readers. If you want to get in touch, there are a number of ways to reach me.

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About the Author

Anthony J Melchiorri is a writer and biomedical scientist living in Texas. He spends most of his time researching and developing cellular therapies and artificial organs when he isn't writing or reading.

Read more at Anthony J Melchiorri’s site.