Jort was agitated. “What about the girls? We have to go back to the ship right now.”

  Trask looked at me in annoyance. “Explain things to your dog, here.”

  Thinking things over for a few seconds, I made a quick series of hard decisions. “Jort… We can’t get back to Royal Fortune without killing those aliens first. They’re right between us and the ship. And Trask is right about firing on them now. We have to take them out at range if possible. They’re much more dangerous in close combat. If Dernel dies… well…”

  “Captain,” a voice rasped in my headphones. “Captain—it’s Sosa.”

  She’d broken radio-silence, but under the circumstances, I thought I could forgive her. The question was whether or not I should give myself away by transmitting over a long distance. Our short range radio transmissions were scrambled to prevent detection, so they sounded like background blips to anyone listening. A more powerful signal, however, was sure to be detected.

  “Sosa,” I said, transmitting in the clear. “We’re fighting the aliens. We’re winning so far—but what’s your status?”

  “We lost Dernel and Huan. I stuffed Morwyn and Rose with me in the hidden compartment when the aliens broke into the ship—then I irradiated everything. I don’t think anything could have survived.”

  My eyes drifted out onto the snowy landscape again. I had to admit, Dernel didn’t look like he was doing all that well. There was no sign of Huan.

  “Dernel might live,” I said. “We have eyes on him right now, and—”

  “Captain!” Jort interrupted, slapping his big hand down on my shoulder. “The aliens—I think they can hear you!”

  It was true. The aliens had dropped Dernel into a snowbank. After casting about like hounds sniffing the wind for a moment, they began bounding in our direction. They’d picked up my signal.

  Trask fired the first shot. Jort and I joined in a moment later. The aliens were bouncing around like rabbits, and we all missed. We reloaded and fired again—and again.

  The third volley scored two hits on one of the attackers. The alien did a full backflip, slammed hard by the force of the combined blasts. Incredibly, he got to his feet again, but he only managed to stagger a few steps before flopping down dead.

  The other alien was smarter, or luckier. He fired a few wild shots at us, making us duck—then he suddenly vanished.

  “Where’d he go?” Jort demanded. “He was right there! Where—?”

  “The tunnels,” Trask answered him. “He made it to the same tunnels we used to sneak in here.”

  “What do we do?” Jort asked in alarm.

  Trask and I exchanged glances. Trask spoke first. “We could meet that thing down low, or out in the open. Which is it going to be, Gorman?”

  “Out in the open. We’ll take them down, pick up Dernel and head back to the ship.”

  It seemed like a grandiose plan, but we needed something to do. We all jogged out across the snows together, trying to look everywhere at once. Not a second went by without one or more of us swiveling our heads to scan for more hopping shapes.

  Three long minutes later, we reached Dernel.

  He was face-down in the snow, and he didn’t look good to me. We rolled him over gently.

  Dernel’s skin was red and swollen. You could see blisters inside his faceplate. His mouth was open, and his breath came in gasps like a fish on a deck.

  “He’s still alive. Grab his other arm, Jort.”

  Together, we hauled him up and began to drag him toward the rim of the crater. Trask kept both his hands on his rifle. He looked over his shoulder constantly.

  We hadn’t taken a dozen more steps before the alien made his move. He must have doubled back, or maybe he had just crouched in the tunnels and waited for us to move to Dernel. That seemed to fit the profile—these bastards loved to bait traps for dumb empathetic humans like us. We tended to try to help one another, and the enemy constantly tried to exploit that fact.

  Fortunately, Trask had never bothered to help Dernel in the slightest. He’d been on full-alert, ready and willing to fire.

  He snapped off a shot too early—but the second one landed. The alien was knocked flat.

  It bounded up again, showing its terrible vitality. It would probably die over the following hours, but it showed no sign of caring or being weakened by the reality of its injury. You had to put these creatures down hard and make certain they couldn’t get up again. Anything less than utter destruction invited disaster.

  Jort and I let Dernel slump down in the snows, and we unlimbered our weapons. We all shot the alien until there was nothing left but fragments.

  After that, we hustled to the crater’s rim and over it. We reached the ship and Jort put one boot on the ramp. We were happy to be back safe and alive.

  We boarded carefully, scanning every millimeter as we walked up into the ship. At the top of the ramp, we found Huan sprawled on the deck.

  At first, I thought he was dead. After a careful inspection, however, I saw he was only unconscious.

  “His ribs are broken,” Jort said. “Something choked him out.”

  My head came up in alarm. I knew what we had to be facing.

  Trask had moved on, less than impressed by Huan’s body. He was, in fact, poking around in some gear near the back of the hold.

  The thing that stalked him had waited until he’d passed close by. Wherever it had been hiding, the hiding place had been a good one. Trask never even saw it until it sprang on him.

  A stack of cartons fell over, and the next thing we knew Trask was firmly in its grip. It wrapped itself around his belly and shoulders like a band of steel.

  It was a shrade, of course. The scouting form of these alien monsters. The creature was visibly burned. It had bubbled-up blisters and open wounds—but it fought on relentlessly. Huan must have struggled with it, but before he could be finished off, it had fled at our approach.

  Dropping our rifles, we dug out combat knives and cut the constricting alien away from Trask’s wheezing body.

  When the snake-like monster slumped down at last, he heaved several ragged breaths before speaking.

  “I couldn’t shoot—I couldn’t do anything. That creature… so strong!”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve had to deal with a few of them.”

  “Me too,” Jort said, kicking the corpse down the ramp and closing it.

  After a long, cautious conversation with Rose, Morwyn and Sosa we got them to come out of their hiding place. What did the trick in the end was sharing an image of Dernel. He was still breathing at least, but he looked pretty bad.

  Morwyn tumbled out of the hidden compartment and rushed to her father. Behind her, Rose and Sosa crept into view. Sosa seemed distrustful of everything, even us.

  “Did you flush out the radiation?” I asked her.

  “Yes. That’s why you’re not burning alive in your suits right now.”

  We tended to Dernel’s burns and the other two men’s cracked ribs. Then we searched the ship carefully, every nook and cranny. We found nothing, but after I’d seen that shrade attack… I was difficult to convince. The alien had obviously hidden inside the cargo hold—perhaps in the sewer pipes—and waited until most of the fighters had left. It had then ventured out and lowered that ramp, allowing its comrades to enter.

  Sosa confirmed this sequence of events by telling us she’d never put the ramp down. It had been done by someone on the inside, and the shrade seemed like the obvious culprit to blame.

  Rose was the one who pointed out the obvious flaw with our careful search. “If we never found the first one, how can we expect to find the next?”

  Feeling paranoid, we did everything we could to locate a second shrade—or any other kind of monstrosity.

  We spent an hour searching, but the effort was wasted. We’d found nothing, naturally enough. All of this did little to allay our fears.

  Dernel was in pretty bad shape, but the autodoc box was capable of dealing with radiation poisoning and exposure. After some hours, he was resting comfortably in a healing solution. The prognosis light was yellow-green, which meant he should recover, but with some lingering health issues.

  “We should lift off now,” Sosa told us when we had a little meeting in the mess later on.

  I sipped some sewery coffee and shook my head. “Not without those rifles. We’ve got Dernel back. We’ve killed most of the aliens—and we even got our power packs off the dead ones. By my count, we have all four in our possession. The enemy won’t have Sardez rifles that will operate when we go back tomorrow.”

  “You don’t really know that—and besides, they barely seem to need rifles. They prefer to fight up-close and personal.”

  I couldn’t argue with her logic, so I didn’t bother. “We’re going back to that base. I want those weapons. I want those sleds. We’ll rest up—six hours for everyone. Then, we’ll go back out there and come back with the gear this time.”

  Shaking her head, Sosa cast her eyes downward and walked off the deck. She knew I was too stubborn to see things her way.

  Morwyn didn’t know me as well, so she tried to wheedle and plead her case. I was gentle, but no less firm with her.

  “You hired us for this purpose. You started this whole thing—not us. But we’re part of it now. At least you can put your life on the line with the rest of us, now that we’ve come this far.”

  That stopped her. She blinked and stared for a minute, then she slipped a hand out and put it over mine.

  “You’re right. I’m shaming my family—again. My father has suffered so much… I’ll tell you what: I’ll go with you tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Trask is injured, so is Huan. His ribs won’t heal in time, and he can barely breathe. I’ll back up you and Jort.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but I found I couldn’t. She had a point. If we met up with more aliens, she could be valuable—but then again she could also get herself killed.

  “All right…”

  I stood up and stretched. Every muscle in my body ached.

  Morwyn watched me in concern. “You’re hurt.”

  “No, just a little sore. It’s nothing serious.”

  “I have a remedy for that. Do you want to experience it?”

  “Uh…” I said, figuring she must be talking about some kind of native salve. At last, I shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Give me whatever you’ve got.”

  She smiled and stood up. Then she walked out into the passages. I followed her, mildly curious.

  She led me to the cabins. She stopped at hers, entered, and left the door open behind her.

  When she didn’t come back out thirty seconds later, I walked in after her.

  There she stood, nude and still smiling. “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

  “Uh…”

  I almost blew it. One wrong word, one snort of laughter—but no. I held it all in. She’d totally surprised me, but in a pleasant way. Her form, her fine pale blue skin… she was intriguing.

  I shut her cabin door behind me, and Morwyn approached. By the time our rest period had passed, she had indeed given me everything she could in the way of solace and comfort.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The next day, we gathered our rifles without a single violent incident. Either the aliens were all dead, or they’d retreated, deciding they’d lost enough of their soldiers in this fight.

  Later, when we had loaded our sleds and hurried them back to the ship, I considered hunting for the aliens—to see if any were left alive.

  But I didn’t, in the end. Was this decision made out of cowardice, as Jort suggested? Not exactly. We had taken losses on this voyage. Varrick was dead. Trask and Dernel were injured—it had been rough. Thus far, only our superior equipment had saved us from a worse fate. We had a ship and power packs—they’d had nothing but snow and cunning to start with. Even so, they’d almost beaten us.

  I didn’t want to give them any more second chances.

  As we lifted off, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. The others felt it too.

  “I never want to come back here,” Rose said.

  “It’s unlikely we ever will,” I assured her. “This is the last weapons cache I know of on this forgotten rock. To get more Sardez rifles, we’d probably have to search that burnt cinder of a planet circling the central star.”

  She looked at me with big, alarmed eyes. “I don’t want to do that, either.”

  I laughed.

  Everyone on the bridge stared at the shrinking planetoid until it was a tiny gray dot. At last, it vanished from the visual screens. We were all relieved.

  Just to be sure, I had Jort and Rose sweep the ship again. We examined every subsystem, locker and waste-tank before we dared to sleep aboard Royal Fortune that night.

  Fortunately, our search found nothing, and days passed. Soon, we all felt certain we were safe. The aliens had been left behind, still trapped on that icy rock forever. I imagined the feeling was akin to that which people must experience when they escape a prison planet.

  After a week, we reached the Fringe. It took longer this time, as I’d carefully avoided using the slip-gates. I wasn’t interested in paying anymore patrolmen an exorbitant fee.

  The nine planets of the Sword Worlds eventually glittered ahead. We headed for Flamberge, first. This sparked an immediate argument with Trask.

  “Varrick is dead. They’ll never believe we didn’t have a hand in his demise.”

  “We have his Tulk. He’s still alive inside Dernel.”

  Trask made a dismissive gesture. “So what? That burnt husk of a man isn’t going to convince anyone of anything.”

  “What would you suggest, then?” I asked, already knowing what his answer would be. He’d been hinting around for days.

  “I want to fly to the next world in the chain—Claymore. I have old comrades there. With this ship and a large cache of weapons, we can hire a good-sized force. Then, we’ll return to Flamberge in a position of strength. We’ll negotiate as men should.”

  I eyed him thoughtfully. His idea wasn’t insane—but the scheme had a huge hole in it.

  “And what do you plan to pay the Tulk mercenaries with? If you’ve given all our loot to the men of Claymore?”

  Trask shrugged and sat back. “Nothing. They’re Tulk, after all. They’ll follow Dernel—or whatever that freak calls himself now—for free. We’ll put them and their ships on the front lines, in fact.”

  He was already trying to change the deal on the Tulk. I understood why his scheme had merit, but I didn’t think it would work. “Not long ago, we killed thousands of their kind, Trask. We have to build trust. We can’t start off a relationship with an alien species we don’t know all that well by twisting the deals we make with them.”

  He slammed his fist down on the table between us. We were sitting in the officer’s mess, which amounted to a large closet with a table in the middle of it.

  “You build trust by showing strength—then not using it…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. We will hire a fleet. We will fly to Flamberge with an armada at our backs. The aliens will think we are there to drive them out—but no. We’ll reveal our kind hearts. Mercy comes only from the strong. Instead of a violent attack, they’ll be greeted as allies. After this, they’ll be glad to fly in our wake and kill for us at Vindar.”

  “I thought you said they would fly in front.”

  He threw his hand high. “Whatever. Listen Gorman, I don’t like dealing from weakness. These aliens must have an army of humans to fear. Otherwise, who knows what they will do when this campaign ends? Whether we win or lose, we can’t be at their mercy.”

  I thought it over. I really did.

  Of course, I knew Trask was really trying to gain a dominant position. Both with me, and with the Tulk. But that didn’t mean his plan wasn’t a good one.

  At last, I shook my head. “No. We’ll follow the original plan. We’re already bringing them back a Tulk in a new, crippled body. I don’t want to change things up on them any further. We need their help.”

  “Damn it, man! You’re as pigheaded as my third wife!”

  I snorted and left the room. He grumbled behind me, but he didn’t argue any further. I hoped that didn’t mean he was planning some kind of coup. You always had to keep one good eye on a pirate like Baron Trask.

  In the end, we didn’t change course. We flew to Flamberge and arrived with a single small ship and a valuable cargo. Naturally, when twenty-two vessels flew out to greet us, we suspected the worst.

  “We should turn around and run,” Sosa said. “Anything else is crazy.”

  “No. Fly onward… but ease off the engines. Let them die. We’ll coast the rest of the way.”

  I summoned Dernel to the deck. He was wrapped in bandages, and he shivered now and then. One eye glinted beneath his bandages, the other being covered entirely. That single eye didn’t seem entirely sane to me—but then, Dernel had never been all there to begin with.

  “I see our efforts to heal you have been highly successful,” I told Dernel and Morwyn, who was hovering over her father.

  Morwyn managed a comforted smile. I don’t think she was accustomed to harmless lies designed to make people feel better.

  Dernel, on the other hand, kept staring with that single, partially-covered eye. He began speaking after an uncomfortable silence, and his voice was raspy. “You humans burned me.”

  “We had to,” Sosa told him in a defensive tone. “We had to drive out the aliens. Surely, you can understand that. You know how dangerous they are.”

  “One doesn’t expect to be burned by comrades.”

  I forced a quiet laugh. “Bitter, huh? I understand. I’ve been injured plenty of times. No one likes it. But let’s look on the bright side. We won our first battle with this enemy. We escaped them cleanly, killing more of them than they did of us.”

  “It was hardly clean in any sense of the word. I lost one host and was nearly driven from a second. I can’t help but notice that on both occasions, when it came time for one of this group to be severely abused, it was my host that was singled out to suffer the worst of it.”