But Lorillard’s crew…they know what they’re doing…and they’re better at handling old tech than anyone I’ve got…

  That was the hard truth, and he knew it. He needed them, for a little longer. He needed them to help secure the station, deal with any still-functional security systems. Then, he could get word back to Montmirail, and urge that reinforcements be dispatched at once to the Osiron system, to the desolate bit of nowhere that had suddenly become the most important place in the galaxy.

  Damn…

  He turned, frustrated, and he snapped out another order.

  “Send two more Foudre Rouge to Nightrunner, at once. They are to investigate and return to report the current status.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gavereaux took a deep breath and tried to remain calm. He had Nightrunner under his guns, and he had Foudre Rouge soldiers inside the station. He told himself he had no reason to be overly concerned, nor to be afraid of Lorillard and his pack of pirates.

  But he was anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Somewhere Inside Imperial Station

  Orbiting Zensoria, Osiron VI

  Year 301 AC

  “Thanks just doesn’t seem like enough, Cap.” Andi had managed to control her hyperventilation—barely—but her voice was still a cracking squeak. Danger was one thing, but she’d been less than a second from death.

  Probably a lot less. But she didn’t think there was much utility in trying to figure how minute a fraction of a second it had been.

  “We’re a team, Andi. You know that.” Lorillard managed a smile, a bit of celebration that he’d saved two of his crew, she suspected. But the tension in his voice told her the complete story. Lorillard was more than concerned or scared. There was something else there.

  “What do we do, Cap? Head back to the ship? These sacks of swag are probably worth more than everything we’ve found in the last five years combined.” Gregor was sitting on the floor, next to the body of the Foudre Rouge trooper he’d killed. The Union soldier’s head was laying at a grotesque angle, and his helmet had rolled off his head, revealing open, but lifeless, eyes. Anna was crouched down next to Gregor, slicing open the already torn section of his sleeve, trying to get at his wound.

  Andi had no doubt what Lorillard’s response would be, and she agreed. She was completely onboard with Gregor. They had enough already to make the mission a great success—and they still didn’t know the status of Nightrunner, or their prospects for getting out of the system. It was time to get the hell out and regroup. They could always come back, possibly with a few other crews, and finish the job.

  But Lorillard surprised her.

  “No, we can’t go. Not yet.”

  “Captain, seriously? We need to get back, see what’s going on with the ship…and we have no idea how many more of these guys are prowling around here. We’ll be lucky even to get back to Nightrunner.” Jammar this time, the words heavy with his thick Physalian accent.

  “These are Foudre Rouge, Jammar. The Union’s elite soldiers.” Lorillard’s tone was deadly serious, as he pointed toward the corpses. “This is not some other crew trying to horn in on our find. If it was, I’d offer whoever it was a straight out split on all of it. Honestly, we could use the help, and there’s plenty to go around. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here.”

  Andi listened. She thought she knew where he was going with his words, but she wasn’t sure she cared. Sure, the Union was the Confederation’s enemy. Everybody knew that, even lost souls in places like the Gut. But, to her, the Confederation had been no friend either. She’d been born in a horrific slum, in a place that was allowed to ignore all the stated ideals Confederation politicians spoke of so passionately—and hypocritically—because it produced massive wealth and production. No one wanted to rock that boat, and if a few million people had to live in misery, well that was a reasonable price to pay to keep the freighters full and running.

  Even after she’d escaped the nightmare of the Gut and joined Nightrunner’s crew, the Confed navy had been something to avoid, its patrol ships periodically cracking down on prospecting in the Badlands. As far as she was concerned, they all deserved each other.

  “I hear you, Cap, but what the hell can we do against Union soldiers…except slip away if we’re lucky?” Jammar didn’t address the fact that the Union soldiers on the station suggested the ships out there were also Union. Andi had been fixated on reaching Nightrunner, and making a run for it, but now the worries about the ship, about what might have happened already, fanned hot.

  “We have to do something, Jammar, before we can leave.” The rest of the crew were all in the room by then, and Lorillard turned and looked at them all. “We can’t allow the Union to gain control of this station, to exploit the technology in here. Have you even considered the implications of a true study of this place, what hundreds, or thousands, of scientists and engineers could do in here? The balance of power on the Rim will be shattered. The Confederation might even be defeated. It might fall.”

  Andi had been fairly resistant to concerns about the Confederation, but the thought of it falling entirely, of being taken over by the Union, was upsetting. She wasn’t sure she understood why, at least not completely, but she was sure of it.

  “Do you really think the Union would invade, use this technology to completely destroy the Confederation?” Andi had never thought of the Union-Confederation struggle in those terms. She’d always imagined the wars as a fight for border systems, and on the Confederation’s part, to regain the eight planets that had been lost in the first conflict, the War of Shame. She had her share of bitterness for the Confederation, but she found the thought of it being gone decidedly unsettling.

  “The Union’s system in based on power, Andi, and nothing but. Every member of their government exists for one reason, to claw and scratch and climb his way to more political power. I know you came from a terrible place, and it’s shameful such things exist in the Confederation, but that is not how most Confeds live. You’ve seen that since you escaped. You know it’s true. But in the Union, most people live like that, or not far above it. And they exist every day in fear, terrified anything they say or do might bring Sector Nine down on them. Whatever misery you experienced—and whatever anger all of you have at the harassment we’ve had to deal with—you will never truly know how lucky you were to be born in the Confederation.”

  Andi shook her head slowly. She respected the captain, and she trusted him as much as she was capable of trusting anyone. But she couldn’t think of herself as lucky to be born where she had been, not in the Gut. “I don’t know, Cap…I don’t know how much worse it could have been.”

  “You got out, Andi. You found somewhere to go, and you came to us. As bad as things were for you, your chances of doing that in the Union would have been one in a million. It’s almost impossible to escape from there.” He turned and looked at the others. He was becoming upset, as edgy and uncontrolled as any of them had ever seen him.

  “I understand what you are saying, Captain, I do. But how can you be so sure? How can you know so much about the Union, about their soldiers…and Sector Nine?”

  Lorillard was silent for a few seconds, and she could see in his face, his thoughts were elsewhere. Then, his eyes moved to her, locking onto her gaze.

  “I know, Andi, because I was born in the Union, in a place I suspect was very much like your Gut. I know because my family tried to escape…and I was the only one who made it out. I saw my mother killed, shot down in the street. I ran, even as the Sector Nine operatives caught up with my sisters and my father.” He paused, and she could feel the pain in his words, the bitterness in the memories welling up inside him. “I almost stopped, turned and went back…but I was too scared. I managed to get around a corner and sneak down into the sewers. I was down there for months, I don’t even know how long, and finally, I worked my way out, stowing away on a freighter. I had a couple of close escapes after that, but I made it. I was that one in a million.”

  Andi was silent, fighting back tears as she listened. She’d long had a sort of arrogance, she realized, a certainty that she had experienced the worst, come from the most deprived circumstances…endured the most pain. Now, that cold assurance began to crumble.

  “I don’t know what happened to my father and my two sisters.” Lorillard took a ragged breath. “I tell myself they fought, tried to escape, that at least they were killed then and there.” Another pause. “I’ve heard stories about what happens in Sector Nine facilities, the torture, the brutality. I manage to believe they were killed outright, most of the time…but I still wake up some nights, soaked in sweat, the bloodied face of my little sister screaming inside my head.”

  The room was silent. Andi knew they didn’t have time to waste, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Not for a moment anyway.

  Lorillard’s words had hit her hard, both in sympathy for her friend, and in the loss of the self-pity she’d long reserved for herself, the belief that no one had been born into worse circumstances, faced greater hardships than she had.

  It made her think of the Confederation in a different way, too. The Gut was an abomination, a shame upon any nation that had such concentrations of filth and human suffering. But Lorillard was right. Andi had seen other parts of the Confederation, now. Dannith was a rundown, unspectacular planet, but its millions enjoyed a standard of living billions of Union workers would envy. Even Port Royal City’s Spacer’s District, worn and sleazy as it was, lacked the all-encompassing poverty and desolation of the Gut.

  Andi had never seen Megara, never visited any of the Core worlds, nor even the more enlightened systems in the Iron Belt. She’d never seen the agricultural planets out near the Far Rim. But despite a few unpleasant encounters with Confederation naval patrols, she had to admit, once she’d escaped from Parsephon, she’d enjoyed a considerable amount of personal freedom…a benefit she suddenly realized was rare and precious in the universe, and something she hadn’t fully appreciated.

  “Okay, Cap…say you’re right. Say we can’t leave the place to the Union. How are we going to prevent that? We have no idea how many Union soldiers are wandering around. And, if there are Union ships out there, and if they haven’t already blasted Nightrunner, what’s to stop them from getting word back to their people? For all we know, there’s a Union navy taskforce on its way. Even if we escaped, and raced back to Dannith to report this—and assuming the navy took us seriously and didn’t just lock us up—there is no way to be sure the Union wouldn’t have the place all wrapped up by then.”

  Lorillard maintained Andi’s gaze for a few seconds. Then he sighed and turned toward Sylene. “Sy, any chance you can get back into the data system, activate some kind of defensive response?”

  “The main AI is cut off from some of the subsections, Cap, most likely because of severed lines in damaged parts of the station.” Sylene pulled out her tablet. “I’ll never work my way into the control units in those sections, not in the time we’ve got…but I may be able to trigger security alerts. If there are functional bots or other defensive systems in this section, the local AIs might just activate them, even without contact from the main AI.”

  Lorillard looked back at Sylene, and he asked a question, even though the look on his face suggested he already knew the answer. “Can you direct the system to target the Foudre Rouge, and leave us alone?”

  Her head was shaking before he’d even finished. “Sorry, Cap…it’d take me months to even find my way around these systems. I don’t know the architecture, and I have no idea what internal defenses are programmed into the routines. I’m just planning to make a clumsy attempt to trigger a response, hoping the system will come back with a full-scale sectional alert.”

  “So, the Foudre Rouge will be dodging security bots and other defensive systems, assuming any remain operational…but so will we?”

  “That’s about it, Cap. Best I can do…if I can even do that.” A pause. “Sorry.”

  Lorillard sucked in a deep breath. His face was twisted into a frustrated scowl. It was clear he didn’t know what to do next.

  “Maybe we can destroy it, Captain.”

  The words had burst out of Andi’s mouth, without thought, without the chance to hold them back.

  “Destroy what?” Lorillard looked confused, but then, a strange look crept onto his face. Understanding…and shock. “The station? The whole thing?”

  A wave of grunts and stunned comments worked its way around the assembled crew. But Lorillard was silent.

  “Yes, the whole thing.” She turned and looked at her comrades, most of them staring at her like she had three heads. “Why not? What else can we do?” It felt strange, all of a sudden, standing there, awash in a strange way with patriotism, or at least feeling an urgent and unexpected need to help defend the Confederation from the Union. She hardly recognized herself, and from deep within, a part of her looked up, horrified at the very suggestion of destroying something of such unimaginable value. But she remained rigid, determined. “If the Union’s out there, they’re going to take control anyway…so we’re not going to get anything out of this that we can’t carry out now.”

  “But this is an extraordinary find, Andi. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before. Like nothing anyone has seen, for almost three centuries.” Yarra this time, speaking as Andi expected from the gifted—and knowledge hungry—engineer.

  “And the value here…even if we can’t handle it ourselves, the Confederation authorities would have to reward us for leading them to something like this.” Barret turned and looked around at the others, half of whom at least, were nodding their agreement.

  Andi was swept up by her sudden realization of just how important the Confederation’s survival truly was, but there was enough of a cynic in her to take the other side, too. “They’d have to? Really? You don’t think they’d come out here, take control of the place, and still lock our asses in some cell? Even to keep us quiet?” Her conversion to patriot was clearly still an uncomfortable, and somewhat conditional, one.

  But it was real.

  “Even so, what chance is there of getting back in time, connecting with someone high enough in the command structure, and convincing them to send a force out here…before the Union does the same? They’re ahead of us. They’ve orchestrated this whole thing, even us being here.” Andi didn’t know that last part for sure, but suddenly it made perfect sense to her. They’d been suckered in from the beginning, sent forward like cannon fodder, to unmask the dangers. “For all we know, they’ve got half a dozen battleships on the way, maybe one transit away.”

  She paused for a second. That last comment had even given her a scare.

  “There’s no way to save the station, and you all know it. We either find a way to destroy it…or we give it to the Union. Assuming we can even get out of here. We don’t even know if Nightrunner is still there, docked, waiting for us.” She held back any references to the ship being destroyed. She tended toward the dark, but even she had some restraint in that direction.

  The others began speaking again, one voice over the next. There was more confusion than there had been, but still clearly some resistance to destroying the greatest find ever discovered in the Badlands.

  Finally, one voice, loud and clear, cut through the others, silencing them all.

  “Andi is right.” Lorillard took two steps forward, toward the middle of the room, the others forming a rough circle around their leader. “We can’t allow the Union to take control…we can’t even allow the possibility of that happening. It’s unthinkable.” He hesitated, and then he continued, his voice, if anything, deeper, grimmer. “We can leave, but not with this station still here. It is difficult to imagine destroying such a technological wonder, I know, but if we do not, we risk seeing untold billions subjugated as virtual slaves, and what light remains on the Rim extinguished, perhaps forever.”

  The others were silent as they stood around their leader. Seconds passed, perhaps a minute. Then, Yarra spoke. “You may be right, Captain, but even if you are, how the hell are we going to destroy this thing?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Somewhere Inside Imperial Station

  Orbiting Zensoria, Osiron VI

  Year 301 AC

  “There it is. At least, that’s where I’d say it is.” A pause. “Of course, this is all guesswork, Captain. I can’t even be sure the files I’m accessing are accurate. I could be pulling up plans of the old commander’s vacation house as easily as a schematic of the station.” Sylene had been staring at the screen of her tablet for upwards of twenty minutes, while Anna tended Gregor’s wound and Andi and Jackal stood guard at the door. Lorillard had spent most of that time pacing back and forth, clearly worried about the time Sylene’s research was taking.

  “Your guesswork has always been enough for me, Sy…besides, we don’t have any other options. We were lucky to get the time we did, but if we stay here much longer, we’re not going to get to that location or back to the ship. Not with Foudre Rouge out there on top of whatever security systems remain active.” Lorillard turned and looked out across the room. “Everything still clear, Andi?”

  Andi leaned her head back out one more time, checking in both directions, still as surprised as it seemed Lorillard was that nothing had come their way. “So far, Cap.” She stood and listened for a few seconds, but there was nothing. “All clear.”

  Lorillard turned toward Anna. “How’s he doing?” From the time it had taken for her to bandage the wound, combined with the series of grunts and a couple angry yelps, it had been apparent that Gregor’s wound was worse than they’d thought, or at least harder to dress.

  “Yeah, Cap. He’s good to go. I had a hard time digging out the bits of cloth that got jammed in there, and cleaning the thing out, but he’s all tied up now, nice and tight.”