There was silence for several seconds. Then she heard someone sigh at the other end of the link.

  “There was an…incident, One Seven Niner. I don’t have the details, but there was some sort of explosion. Took out two shuttles and at least three hundred civilians. We’re not getting Nineteen Bravo back today.”

  This time Sergeant Debnam looked up from his displays, his dark eyes meeting his pilot’s blue gaze.

  “Thank you, Control,” Kilgore said quietly. “And…Godspeed to you, too.”

  “Appreciate it, One Seven Niner. Now get your arse over to Eighteen Bravo.”

  “On our way. One-Seven-Niner, clear.”

  Kilgore altered her heading, then leaned back in her couch, looking over her shoulder at Debnam again.

  “An explosion,” she said. “Don’t like the sound of that, John. I don’t like it at all.”

  “Don’t much care for it myself, Ma’am.”

  They looked at one another for a handful of seconds, and then she turned back to her controls, thinking about that voice on the other end of the com. The voice which must have realized from the beginning that it wasn’t getting out, whatever happened to the civilians it was trying to save.

  Guts, she thought. God, that takes guts. Look after him, Jesus. Look after all of them.

  Sebastianos Tsoliao watched the icon alter heading away from the atmosphere-spewing wound in Prásino Phúllo Habitat’s skin. He wondered if he’d ever met its pilot. The chances that he had were excellent; he’d worked with the HSP’s pilots for a lot of years now. But never like this, and he wondered if the pilot of that shuttle knew how fervently he wished her “Godspeed.”

  He checked his displays. At least twenty seconds till the next incoming, he thought, maybe as much as a full minute, and he punched the button on his uni-link.

  “Yes, Sebastianos!” his wife’s beloved contralto said even before he’d heard the first buzz from his end.

  “How are you and the baby doing?” he asked, trying to drag a little of the exhaustion out of his voice, trying to infuse a bit of energy. Of hope.

  “We’re fine.” He wondered if she realized her chipper tone sounded as false as his own. “Petra didn’t want to leave Mikhalis behind, but I told her he’d be fine until we get back and she checked his water bowl.”

  “Little pitchers have big ears?” he asked softly.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, can you put me on speaker for just a few seconds? I don’t have much time before the next inbound flight.”

  “You’re on…now,” she said, the sound of her voice shifting as she lowered the wrist unit so that Petra could hear him.

  “How you doing, sweetheart?” he asked.

  “Fiiiiiine, Daddy,” she said, and his heart twisted as he heard the anxiety—the little-girl bravery—in her drawn out reply.

  “I’m glad to hear it!” he said cheerily. “You’re taking good care of Mommy?”

  “Of course I am. I’m carrying both bags!”

  “That’s my big girl. I knew I could count on you. You stay close to Mommy, now, hear me? And you go on looking after her until—” his voice wavered ever so slightly, and he yanked it ruthlessly back under control “—until I see you again, all right?”

  “Of course I will, Daddy. Are you coming soon?”

  “Just as soon as I can, sweetheart. You know Daddy has a job to do. Sometimes it’s more important than others, and this is one of those times. So it may be a little while. Just remember how much I love you and Mommy until I get there.”

  “Yes, Daddy. And do you think you can bring Mikhalis when you come? I know he’ll be all right, but he’s really kind of a small cat without his people there to look after him.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him for you,” he promised. “Now Mommy and I need to do some grown-up talk for just a second, okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy. Love you!”

  “Love you, too, baby girl.”

  “We’re off speaker,” Kassandra told him a moment later, and he cleared his throat.

  “What I wanted to say,” he said more briskly, “is that there was some kind of explosion at Nineteen Bravo. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it was pretty bad. So you’re going to have to use Eighteen Bravo, instead. You’ve got plenty of time! The tube cars are still running. Go up to Deck Seven and take the Number Twelve line. That’ll get you there without any problems, and I’ve already updated the passenger list. They’ll be holding places in line for you and Petra.”

  “I understand.”

  He heard the fresh flutter of fear behind the two words. She kept her voice light for Petra’s sake, but then she asked the question he’d dreaded. The question she had to ask, even with Petra listening.

  “Will you be leaving through Eighteen Bravo, too?”

  “No,” he said. “They’re pulling us out through Niner Charlie. You know it’s a lot closer to Flight Control.”

  “I guess it is.” She sounded a tiny bit less anxious, as if the reminder that Bay 9C truly was much closer to his duty station had reassured her. After all, he could get there in a hurry, especially with the high-speed tube cars reserved for station personnel’s emergency use. “How much longer do you think?”

  “Not much.” He closed his eyes as he lied to the woman he’d loved for twenty-seven years. “Third shift’s due to take over pretty soon. When they do, everybody on Second’ll get a chance for some rest, and those of us with families will be sent on to join them.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered, and he heard the tears quavering in the words.

  “Yeah, I think He’s working overtime for me today,” Sebastianos said with absolute sincerity. “You just look after the baby for me till I catch up with you.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you.”

  “I know you will, Honey. But I gotta run now. More shuttles incoming. Love you!”

  “Love you, too,” she said, and he killed the link.

  Then he sat there, looking down at the uni-link. He could count the number of times he’d told her even little white lies on the fingers of one hand. Now he’d lied to her three times in less than ten seconds, because he had at least another ten or fifteen seconds before his scopes needed him again. But he’d had to go, before his voice failed him completely and she realized the truth behind the other lies.

  He stroked the uni-link, his fingertip just brushing the call button, and drew a deep, shuddery breath.

  “Love you, Babe,” he whispered. “Look after the Moonbeam for me. I’ll be waiting for both of you…but not today. Not today.”

  SLNS Camperdown

  Hypatia System

  “Are you going to adhere to your deadline, Admiral?” Madhura Yang-O’Grady asked, and Hajdu Győző looked up from the message board he’d been studying.

  “If they can’t get everyone off in time, are you going to adhere to your deadline?” she repeated.

  “That depends,” he said after a moment. “I meant every word I said to that traitor Vangelis. This is their fault, not ours, and I have zero interest in exposing my personnel to risk just to save the lives of a few thousand traitors and their families.”

  “I’d just as soon not see anyone killed if we don’t have to kill them,” she said, and he regarded her thoughtfully. That decision was no longer hers, but he supposed he did owe her the courtesy of a fuller explanation.

  “As nearly as I can tell,” he said, “they’re working as hard and as fast as they can to get as many people as possible out of the residential habitats, at least. That tells me that whatever the arrival schedule they’re predicting for the naval force they requested, they don’t expect it to get here until after my original time limit runs out. I’m sure they’d want to get everyone they could out as early as possible under any circumstances, but the rate at which they’re working right now—and, frankly, the number of accidents they’ve absorbed because of the rate at which they’re working—tells me they’re truly desperate.

  “Because that indicates we have some time in hand, I’m more inclined to consider extending the deadline—possibly in five or six-hour increments—for as long as they stay desperate. I’m not about to give them more than another twenty-four hours or so, no matter what, given that there’s no way to know when the Manties are going to arrive, but I’m not especially eager to kill anyone we don’t have to, either. The instant it looks to me like they’re relaxing a bit, though, I’m going to assume that means they expect help momentarily. And at that point,” his voice was grim, “there won’t be any extensions.”

  “But you will extend it at least once?”

  Yang-O’Grady’s fervor for punishing the traitors seemed to have ebbed a bit, he thought. Probably because she was a civilian. She’d thought all along in terms of the nice, clean destruction of deserted installations. Explosions that might do terrible damage to a star system’s economy and standard of living, but wouldn’t kill anyone. Now it looked as if quite a few “anyones” were about to be killed, and she didn’t like it.

  I don’t like it, either, he thought. But I knew something like this could be in the cards from the instant I read the precis of Parthian Shot. It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines and know what that meant…and what’s likely to happen to anyone who fails to come through in the crunch. Besides, this is my responsibility. Making the point to Hypatia—and everyone else in the goddamned galaxy—just became my job. So I’ll do it, and these people had better by God believe I will. And so should the next system on the Buccaneer list. In fact, running up the death toll here just might help that “next system” see the error of its ways without having to kill anyone there.

  The truth was that every life lost here might well save dozens of lives later. He didn’t like thinking in those terms—and recognized the sophistry of any comfort they might give him—but that didn’t make them untrue. And what that meant for extended time limits…

  “Not necessarily, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” he told her, his tone cold. “I’ll make that call when I get there. So I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  Prásino Phúllo Habitat

  Hypatia Planetary Orbit

  Hypatia System

  Corporal Helike Vasdekio was only twenty-nine T-years old, but she’d joined the Hypatia System Patrol when she was just seventeen, and she’d learned a lot in those twelve years. At 162.6 centimeters, and small-boned, she was no hulking giantess. Her mother had always insisted she was “no bigger than a minute” when she was a little girl, but she was a very muscular and solid “minute” these days. She was also a member of HSP’s Alpha Seven, its elite Search and Rescue team, as well as a highly skilled cargo inspector with no less than nine major smuggling busts to her credit. So there was ample reason for her to feel confident and competent to handle any duty that came her way.

  But she’d never expected this one.

  She stood almost in a position of parade rest, with her hands clasped behind her. A pulser nestled in a shoulder holster under her left armpit, a stun baton hung from her belt, and the visor of her skinsuit’s helmet was raised as her brown eyes watched the crowd. They were very still, those eyes, with something deep and dark lurking in their depths, yet she was unfailingly courteous. She smiled a lot, too. It wasn’t easy, but reassurance was something Alpha Seven’s teams learned to project early—people who needed rescuing were generally a little stressed, after all—and the last thing anyone needed was a panic in the evacuation queue.

  Next month was her thirtieth birthday, and she wished she’d be there for the party her fiancé had planned. A lot of people weren’t going to be where they’d thought they would, though, and there were a lot worse things someone could be doing just now. A lot worse ways someone could—

  “Look, Mommy! It’s Helike!”

  Vasdekio’s head snapped around. It took her eyes a second or two to pick up the tiny, dark-haired girl child who’d just appeared out of the crowd. Then she went down on one knee and opened her arms wide.

  “Petra!”

  The girl flung herself into Vasdekio’s embrace, and the corporal hugged her back, careful of the way her lightly armored skinsuit could bruise. She looked up over Petra’s shoulder at her mother and saw the recognition—the happiness at seeing a familiar face—flicker through Kassandra’s expression. Then the relief disappeared, and Vasdekio sighed silently. Of course Kassandra was smart enough to realize why Vasdekio was here…and that she’d undoubtedly still be here, still be trying to save a few more lives, when the timer ran out.

  “Kassie,” she said, standing and holding out her hand.

  “I wish I were happier to see you, Helike.” Kassandra Tsoliao’s tone, even more than her words, confirmed that she’d guessed the truth.

  Vasdekio smiled at her, briefly but with more genuine warmth than most of her other smiles had contained, and flicked an inquiry into her uni-link. Then she nodded.

  “You and Petra are on the list, Priority Gamma,” she said. “That means you go to the head of the queue for the next shuttle, not this one.”

  She twitched her head sideways at the line of passengers—many of them weeping, one or two on the edge of hysteria…or with the glassy, drugged smiles of someone who’d already been there—creeping down the boarding tube to the shuttle in Bay Eighteen Bravo’s Number Three docking buffers. It didn’t look as if all of them were going to get on board, but she pointed at a line on the deck to one side.

  “Over there,” she said. “There are another couple of dozen Gamma Priority people already here. Go ahead and walk on over. We’re due to start forming the line in another couple of minutes, anyway; might as well get the two of you close to the head.”

  “Thank you,” Kassandra said softly.

  She gave the corporal’s hand one last squeeze, then twitched her head at Petra.

  “You heard Helike, sweetheart. Let’s go get in line.”

  “Man, I don’t like this,” Alexandros Karaxis said. “Don’t like it one bit, Apollo!”

  “How about telling me something I don’t already know, Xander?” Apollo Dukakis shot back, rolling his eyes in exasperation. At twenty-seven, he was eight T-years older than Karaxis…and twelve T-years his senior in Prásino Phúllo Grúpes—the Green Leaf Griffins—one of the more vicious gangs which made some places in Prásino Phúllo Habitat’s bowels unsafe to visit.

  “Man, they gonna put all these sheep onboard those shuttles and they ain’t gonna do shit for us. Hell, they probably be just as happy to get rid of us once and for all!”

  Despite Alexandros’s less than stellar performance on the Hypatia Department of Education’s standardized tests, there were moments when he grasped the essence of a situation with commendable clarity, Apollo thought. This was one of them. No doubt burning a house to the ground was an expensive way to get rid of the cockroaches, but if the place was going to burn anyway, you might as well make sure as few roaches as possible made it out. And he had to admit that from the perspective of Hypatia’s law-abiding community, the Grúpes would make very nice cockroach briquettes. For that matter, he couldn’t even blame them.

  That didn’t mean he had to go along with their plans in his own, personal case, however, and for his present purposes, Alexandros’s size—he stood 195.6 centimeters in his smelly sock feet and had massive, powerful shoulders—offset his sad lack of mental acuity.

  “Just be frosty,” he said now, softly. “There’s not enough time to get into position for this shuttle. But be ready when the sheep start boarding the next one. You know what to do, right?”

  “Oh, right!” Alexandros smiled and slid his hands into his trouser pockets to touch the waiting knuckledusters. He did so like hurting people, and this time it would be for a much better cause than usual.

  The shuttle which had been loading when they arrived departed, and Kassandra watched the next one slide into the buffers and engage the umbilicals. The display lit with the flight number—179-PPE-6 and the name Asteria—and the window between its arrival and the previous shuttle’s departure was far shorter than standard operating procedure would ever have permitted under normal circumstances. No one was likely to complain today, though, and she watched the light above the boarding tube turn green, signifying a good seal. The exhausted-looking young man in the same Traffic Control uniform Sebastianos wore on formal occasions—the sight of it sent a fresh pang of worry through her—held his uni-link to his ear, listening to it through the not-so-muted crowd-mutter of the packed concourse. Then he nodded.

  “Ready to board!” he called. “Have your uni-links ready for the scanner, please! And remember, if you’re not scheduled for this flight, you won’t be allowed to board, but there are going to be plenty of additional flights!”

  Kassandra checked her own uni-link, then gripped Petra firmly by the hand as the exhausted-looking young man stepped aside. He made a beckoning motion with his hand, and they started forward. It was going to—

  “Mommy!”

  She heard Petra scream at the same instant her daughter’s hand was snatched out of her own. She turned frantically, then cried out and went to both knees, holding a suddenly bloody face as the hulking tough’s knuckledusters smashed her to the deck with a brutal backhanded blow.

  “All right!” the other ganger, the one who’d snatched Petra off the deck, shouted. He held the sobbing, terrified girl suspended by the neck of her coverall with one hand while the other closed upon the nape of her slender neck, and his face was hard. “We got no boarding passes,” he snarled, “but we ain’t staying on this fucking deathtrap, either! So you’re letting us on the shuttle. And if you don’t, this little girl? She’s gonna need a new neck, ’cause I swear to God, I’ll break it in a heartbeat.”

  “You realize,” a single voice replied quietly into the sudden, ringing silence his threat had produced, “that if any of that happens the authorities will be waiting for you dirt-side? The instant you step off that shuttle, a dozen SWAT guys will bust your arse like a soft-boiled egg. And they’ll enjoy it, too.”