“Duke Rago is in command,” I told everyone. “He will make the decision.”

  Trask grunted. “Rago is not our master. This ship is fast enough to turn and run on our own if we want to.”

  “Perhaps you’d prefer to return to your flagship, Baron.”

  Trask grumbled. He’d spent much of the journey on either my ship or Rago’s, planning out the campaign. Except for Dernel and Morwyn, no one in the fleet had ever been to Vindar. None of Trask’s men had ever fought this new brand of alien, either. Aboard my ship, he was able to talk to people with firsthand knowledge of both the enemy and the battlefield. These truths made him prefer our company.

  “All right,” Trask said at last. “I’ll go back to my ship. But if I see you drop out of formation and drift away, Gorman, I’ll know then which way the winds are blowing.”

  He left us and took a shuttle to his own ship. Jort was glad to see him go.

  “That man is without honor. He’s an embarrassment. This isn’t some pirate raid—this is war!”

  I nodded vaguely and sent Jort aft to man his cannon. Soon, only Sosa and Morwyn were on the bridge with me.

  After another hour, during which we noted the devastation all over the planet, we were joined by Dernel.

  If he’d looked odd before, he now looked half-mad. The Tulk within him must be agitated in the extreme. His face was unwrapped, having healed into a scabbed mess. But his eyes were rolling like those of a frightened horse in a thunderstorm. The lips were pulled taut as if he were in the middle of a scream, and he struggled to speak.

  “This is Dernel…” he said. “The real Dernel. My rider is so terrified… he wants to run from this. All the Tulk do. They’re struggling with their human mounts—and with each other.”

  Morwyn knelt next to her father and tried to comfort him, but it was an impossible task. The alien inside his guts was agitated, tearing at his nerves and organs thoughtlessly.

  “Father?” she asked. “Is that really you? It looks like you’re in agony.”

  “I am. I have been for weeks. My rider… he’s torn by indecision. The enemy has already swept much of the planet. Can we possibly be strong enough to push them back? He doubts it.”

  Here, he reached out a claw-like hand and gripped her so firmly that she winced in pain.

  “We must march onward, girl!” he rasped. “We can’t turn back now. We’ve brought an army to save our world, and we must at least give it a try.” He turned those haunted, tormented eyes on me next. “Gorman, don’t let them turn back! We haven’t even fired a shot yet.”

  It struck me then that the Tulk were odd creatures. They were brave enough when they had the upper hand in a situation, but when they sensed they might be crushed like the tiny creatures they truly were, they quailed and wanted nothing more than to crawl away and hide in a crevice.

  “I’ll talk to the duke,” I said, and I had Sosa make the connection. Moments later, Rago’s strained face was on the screen.

  “What is it, Gorman? Have you got any more bright ideas?”

  “This assault was our shared plan, Your Grace. I think we should orbit the planet once, looking for suitable targets.”

  “Suitable targets, eh? This isn’t a raid. We’re here to exterminate aliens… of a particular breed. Are you suggesting a bombing campaign… or…?”

  Our conversation turned to tactics. I was happy about that, as at least he wasn’t talking about turning tail and running. Before we’d gotten very far, however, another call came in. This connection couldn’t be denied.

  “It’s Harkaman,” Rago told me. “He’s demanding we stop privately plotting. He insists we include him in this channel.” He gave me a quick up-down of his eyebrows.

  I knew right away what he was suggesting. We two were, after all, fully human. That put us clearly on the same team. In my experience, there was nothing that brought together rival humans faster than an alien threat. Today, we had two varieties of monster to deal with.

  “By all means, patch him in.”

  Rago looked mildly disappointed, but he did as I suggested. Soon, Harkaman’s ugly face was peering at me alongside the duke’s.

  “Have you forgotten I command half this fleet?” Harkaman demanded the moment he was fully tuned into the channel.

  “Not at all,” I said smoothly. “We were merely surprised that the planet seems to be in the middle of an attack, and we’re discussing what to do about it.”

  “Nothing will be done without Tulk approval! Nothing! Where is your surrogate, Gorman?”

  “What?”

  “I’m talking about that ghastly half-dead vessel—what does he call himself? Ah yes, Dernel.”

  “He’s been feeling ill,” I said in a concerned tone. “His daughter took him below.”

  Harkaman stared at me with vast suspicion for a few moments. “So that’s how it’s going to be, is it? You’ve already killed or incapacitated the only Tulk aboard a human ship. How can you expect cooperation, when—?”

  “Lord Harkaman,” I interrupted firmly. “Dernel’s rider… well, he was overcome by fear. He saw the planet, the state it’s in, and he lost control.”

  Rago looked concerned. “He lost control? You mean he pissed himself or something?”

  “No, I mean the Tulk lost control of the human body we call Dernel. He wanted to run.”

  “Lies!” Harkaman shouted. “My brother wouldn’t run from the sight of a conflict.”

  “You forget,” I told him, “that he faced this enemy personally with me out at the Sardez system. He knows what awaits us down on Vindar.”

  “And what does await us, Gorman?” Duke Rago asked. “How bad is this fight going to be?”

  I thought for a moment of the terrifying ordeal I’d experienced on the cold, dark planetoid. Of how the enemy could run, jump and fire a gun in midair all faster than a human could manage.

  “It’s going to be rough,” I admitted. “This enemy… they’re better than us. Man-for-man, gram-for-gram… they’re better soldiers. They’re just as clever and twice as physically able. Worse, they can take a shocking amount of punishment.”

  Rago smiled grimly. “But they don’t have thousands of Sardez rifles. That’s what these famed weapons were developed for, isn’t it? To blow down this kind of enemy?”

  “Yes. Normal guns won’t affect them much. They tend to hop right back up after you put twenty darts from a shredder into them. You have to hit them with something more powerful.”

  Harkaman nodded thoughtfully. “So we have your guns. Is that our only advantage?”

  “Not just that,” Rago said. “An even bigger advantage is our fleet. We have the high ground in this struggle. They can’t reach us in space, while we can land where we want. We’ll choose the time and place for each battle.”

  Harkaman and I nodded in agreement—but we couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Our fleet arrived cautiously. We stood off from the planet in far orbit, about two hundred thousand kilometers away.

  “We’re getting pinged again,” Sosa said. “It’s ground-based radar. They know we’re here.”

  “Any hint of a space traffic controller?” I asked.

  “No. Their traffic control seems to be offline.”

  After questioning Morwyn, I found this was unusual. Any group of ships like ours should have been challenged by now.

  Another hour of confusion went by, during which we circled the planet halfway around. Finally, Rago contacted me.

  “Gorman, I want you to tune into this. We found a signal—kind of weak, but readable.”

  A garbled message began playing. “…Vindar is under siege. No one should land. No one should attempt to enter low orbit. Anyone violating this order by the High Council will be shot down.”

  “Shot down?” Morwyn asked, having overheard. “We don’t even have a missile base.”

  “Maybe you didn’t when you left home,” I said, “but that was many months ago.”

  Morwyn retreated. She looked more troubled than ever. It had to be hard for her to see cities burning on her home planet.

  Rago hailed me after the message repeated. “What do you think, Gorman? Do we go down and test their defenses?”

  “We’ll have to if we’re going to land troops.”

  “Exactly. I’ll take your statement as a personal commitment to our cause. This is your chance to do something material in this campaign, Gorman. Take your ship down into low orbit, and do a full circle of the planet.”

  “Ah… what if—”

  “What if they fire at you? That’s the test, isn’t it? You’ve got the fastest ship in our fleet. You’ll outrun their missiles, I’m sure. Didn’t your passenger just admit that they didn’t have any missiles a few months ago? They can’t be very advanced weapons.”

  “Well, sir…” I began, but Rago quickly cut me off.

  “Now, now, don’t embarrass yourself by trying to weasel out of this. You’re going down.”

  “And if they blow me out of the sky?”

  Rago shrugged. “In that case, we’ll at least get the chance to count their guns, won’t we?”

  He disconnected, and I released a long series of foul words.

  “Are we actually going down there, Captain?” Sosa asked me quietly. “Alone?”

  “Set a spiral course for the planet’s upper atmosphere. Don’t approach at a steep angle, ease your way closer.”

  Sosa did as I suggested, and our ship began a wide spiral toward the planet. Long before we reached the scudding clouds, however, things began to heat up.

  “They’ve got a target-lock on us,” Sosa said, but her words were hardly necessary. Alarm tones were going off and lights were spinning all over the ship. It was obvious we had an offensive weapons system targeting us.

  “Any sign of a launch yet?” I asked, scanning every screen.

  “Nothing. Maybe they’re waiting until we come closer.”

  Another figure appeared on the bridge then. It was Huan, who’d kept to himself for much of the voyage out to Vindar. He now seemed to be completely recovered from his bout of radiation sickness.

  “Is there a problem I can help with, Captain?” he asked me in a calm voice.

  I glanced at him and nodded toward the operations console. “You can pilot a ship larger than a fighter, can’t you?”

  He nodded confidently.

  “All right then. Run the ops board for me. We’re switching screens every few seconds up here.”

  The truth was one person could fly Royal Fortune solo if they had to, but having a bigger crew helped. There were AI systems that could take over most functions, but they weren’t entirely reliable. The AI made reasonable choices—but not necessarily the best ones.

  A case in point was our main cannon. Did I really want to give a half-bright computer the power to decide when to fire on an enemy ship? The answer was an emphatic “no” which was why I had Jort on that job in any tense situation.

  By switching screens frequently, Sosa and I could pilot, navigate and operate the ship’s vital systems. The trouble was a matter of focus. It took time to do these things, and while you were examining and making decisions about one matter, another one would pop-up and get in the way. It was very easy to let a critical problem slip by.

  My lack of crew was never more obvious than in combat situations like we were in now. The situation was developing rapidly, and the choices we made could result in life or death for everyone aboard.

  “Rose, come up to the bridge,” I announced over the PA. “We need you on communications.”

  Some people—particularly Baron Trask, when he was aboard—were irritants on the bridge. Fortunately, he wasn’t visiting my ship now. He was safely ensconced on his destroyer. I had no doubt that was because he wanted nothing to do with approaching Vindar at this time.

  Morwyn and Dernel couldn’t really run any of the ops needed, so they weren’t welcome on the bridge during critical times like these. I’d ordered them to their quarters, and so far they were staying there.

  Including myself, I had a crew of five relatively functional people. That was pretty good by my standards. I could use another five or so to round out every job, and double that would allow me to run a full crew around the clock. You technically needed your crew to rotate shifts every eight hours if you weren’t doing things on the cheap. That’s why Royal Fortune had been designed with the capacity and resources for thirty-odd people aboard.

  Our approach was different. We had one watchman awake at all times, while the rest of us slept in the off-hours. If something went wrong, we scrambled out of our bunks and hoped we made it to our stations in time. That wasn’t the best or the safest system, but I didn’t have enough people to do it right.

  “Launch detected…”

  It was the computer voice. I didn’t hear it often, only for critical matters. Ice-cold in demeanor and slightly feminine, it never failed to cause my mind to reset and speed up.

  A blip showed up a moment later, rising up swiftly through the planetary atmosphere.

  “There’s only one missile,” Sosa said in surprise. “And its tiny.”

  “Perhaps they only mean to warn us off,” Huan suggested. “If it self-destructs in the next few minutes, we’ll know.”

  Rose arrived on the bridge then, and she looked around at the screens in fear.

  “They’re shooting at us? And you want me on comms? What can I do about it?”

  “Contact the planet. Tell them over and over we’re here to check on Vindar’s welfare. Tell them we’re from the Conclave.”

  “But we’re not… oh.”

  Rose sat down and went to work without further confusion. She broadcast repeating messages toward Vindar. They didn’t seem to be listening, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  For a few minutes, we continued to approach the planet while the enemy missile roared toward us with surprising speed.

  “Still only one missile,” I said, measuring out the projectile’s speed and course.

  The math indicated it might not even make it up to us without running out of fuel. After all, it was climbing against the planet’s gravity, and we were still a long way from the atmosphere.

  It was definitely a bad sign, however. We’d hoped to approach and land troops without resistance.

  Heaving a sigh, I called for Morwyn and Dernel to come up to the bridge. They were natives here. Maybe, just maybe, they could talk some sense into the Vindari.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Stop the descent,” I ordered. “Stay up here, out of missile range.”

  Sosa threw up her hands. “We can’t land troops from here.”

  We all watched quietly. After a long time, the missile ran out of fuel and fizzled. I’d expected it to self-destruct, but it didn’t. The small projectile, no more than two meters long, glided through space. We easily dodged it.

  Morwyn appeared at the doorway. She looked around at the relatively full crew. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your people are shooting at us,” Sosa told her.

  “Morwyn?” I said. “Talk to these people. Tell them we’re here to help.”

  Morwyn walked across the bridge trepidatiously, and she took up a headset.

  Sosa had been trying to raise the base without any luck. She relayed the signal to the central console, but there was no answer.

  “I’m still hailing them…” Sosa said, “but there’s nothing coming back.”

  “Let me try,” Morwyn asked.

  I nodded, and Sosa shrugged, passing her the headset.

  “Traffic control?” Morwyn asked. “I’m a Vindari citizen. These ships accompanying mine aren’t here to cause harm.”

  We waited, but there was no response.

  “People of Vindar, I’m one of you. If you would only—”

  An odd sound came from the console. It wasn’t a sound that any human had ever made. In fact, it made us all recoil slightly.

  The projected video was still dark, still blank and empty. But something was there, something was listening to us. We could all feel it.

  “That sound…” I said. “It reminds me of a certain creature—the thing we met back on Ceti. Get Dernel up here.”

  A few minutes later, Dernel walked onto the deck. His bandages were mostly absent now, and a fresh purplish swell of flesh had been revealed. It was as if he’d been sunburned and peeled down a few layers.

  “Dernel, who are we talking to? They won’t show themselves.”

  “Vindari,” he said, speaking to the black screen. “I am a prefect of the fourth art. I demand that you—”

  The sound came again. It was an odd clicking noise. Inhuman in nature, it was almost insectile.

  Dernel took an involuntary step back from the console. He dropped the headset he’d been speaking into and turned as if to run away.

  I grabbed him by the shoulder. “What is it, man? What’s that sound?”

  “It’s the enemy. It’s their speech. We’re not talking to any kind of man. We’re talking to creatures of vast evil. That’s why they won’t show themselves.”

  I looked back at the screen in alarm. “Does this mean the planet is lost?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But that station… it isn’t held by my people.”

  He shook a bit, so I let him go. I allowed Morwyn to escort him from the bridge. I was troubled, and I contacted Duke Rago.

  “The Vindari aren’t the ones firing missiles at us. The alien invaders did it. I’m not sure how to proceed.”

  “You don’t have countermeasures aboard?”

  “My usual defensive technique is to outrun the missile.”

  Rago snorted in disgust. “That won’t do. We’re going to have to destroy that installation.”

  “We might lose the support of the Vindari if we start our rescue mission by blowing stuff up.”

  “Too bad. Stay out of range, and stand by.”

  Turning back to the center console, I eyed the black shadows playing on the holoplate. We were still connected to the station. They hadn’t bothered to cut off the channel—maybe they were listening to us.