“That wasn’t us,” I said. “Mister Keep said he was covering the prior charges.”

  “Was it in the contract?”

  Matt and I looked at one another. “We didn’t have time to read the whole contract,” he said. “Your goons were coming, and Keep said we had to make a decision.”

  Sedaya’s laugh rattled like an old lawnmower. “I can’t believe Avelus went to Earth to look for a buyer. Or that he settled on you.” He shook his head. “You’re too young for this.”

  “Too young for what?” I asked.

  “To be an unaffiliated entity with a starship.”

  “We don’t know what that means.”

  He laughed again, a hint of pity behind the cackle. “I recommend you learn. Quickly.”

  “We were hoping you could help,” Matt said. “Settle our debts, clear the bounty, pay us back what we gave Keep, and send us back to Earth.”

  “Is that all?” Sedaya said.

  “And if there’s medicine here that can cure cancer, get us some of that,” I said.

  “You’re sick?”

  “Dying. It’s terminal. Unless someone here can fix it.”

  “I see.” He froze again, staring at us in silence. Based on the last time, I had the sense he was accessing the hypernet, either offscreen or in his head or something.

  The power came back on, the overhead lights flickering to life, the gravity returning. The force was unfamiliar after spending the last ten minutes without it. I winced when my flight helmet crashed to the deck, and again when Matt’s vomit splashed down beside the co-pilot station.

  Alter would be back soon. We needed to wrap this up.

  “We’ll give you the Star,” Matt said, obviously thinking the same thing. “And the ship if you want it.”

  Sedaya’s amusement fled his face as if it were a candle snuffed out by the wind. “I control over twenty-one worlds in the Fertile Quadrant. My navy is composed of over three hundred ships, not including the countless mercenary units and bounty hunters who drop everything when they receive a work offer from me. I’m the most powerful man in the Manticore Spiral, second in influence only to the Empress herself. That you’ve spoken to me directly is an honor reserved only for a select few.” He leaned away, his angry demeanor settling slightly. “I’m not heartless or merciless, so I’ll make you a counteroffer. Give me the Star, and I’ll return you to Earth after your debt to my Caprum has been repaid in the levitite mines.”

  I swallowed my heart for what felt like the dozenth time, body shaking, cold sweat clamming my hands. This was going all wrong. Everything had gone all wrong. I wouldn’t live long enough to pay back any debts. I had a sense from the way Sedaya had made the offer, Matt might not either or if he did he would be an old man by the time he went back to Earth.

  “I see,” Matt said, his voice almost as cold as the duke’s had been. It took me off-guard. I hadn’t heard that tone from him in a long time. Since the one and only time his mother had called, trying to reconnect. “I’m guessing from your smug attitude that you probably know where we are, and you’ve got a goon squad moving in on us while you stall to give them time. I may be young, Baron, but I’m not a total idiot.” He smiled at Sedaya, the same charismatic grin he used often. Normally, it looked friendly and approachable. Right now, it oozed so much cool confidence it became scary. “You had your chance to get the Star, but you chose to be a contrarian miser instead. Come and take it from us then. If you can.”

  Matt tapped on the phone, disconnecting before Sedaya had a chance at a rebuttal.

  “What the hell did you just do?” I whispered, finding my breath hard to come by.

  He looked back at me, more resolute than pale. “I don’t know, but damn it felt good.”

  “You called Duke Sedaya, didn’t you?” Alter said, sneaking in behind me and causing me to jump. Turning to look at her, I was surprised to see her hair had gone from blonde to black and was tied back in a long ponytail. She had also changed her flight suit from the stained, loose silver to a more fitted gold. Somehow, that had made her face look smaller and more pointed, too.

  “Yeah,” Matt replied. “We thought—”

  “He rejected your offer, didn’t he?”

  “Again, yes.”

  “And threatened to come after you?”

  “I’m not sure he got to that part yet,” I said.

  “He’s an asshole,” Matt said. “So high on his own supply. I hate people like that.”

  “I could have told you that would happen and stopped you from getting further on his bad side if you had given me the chance. Both of you are new to the Quadrant. You have no idea what you’re doing. So maybe you should consider looping me in?”

  “We knew you wouldn’t be on board with giving Sedaya the ship, considering your history with him,” I said.

  “And knowing that, how could we know you would give us honest advice?” Matt added. “Since we are so new to the Quadrant, we’re unintentionally gullible.”

  Alter’s eyes flicked from me to Matt and back, their intensity piercing. “Well, now you know from Sedaya himself that he won’t buy the Star. And that he’ll have no problem seizing it. I’m sure he has ships already on the way.” She circled the sofa, heading for the co-pilot’s seat. “The primary is back online, all systems should be operational within the next minute. Ben, take the pilot’s seat. Matt…” She paused next to her station, looking at the deck and making a face. “There’s a storage compartment next to the elevator. Go get a mop.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Wait a second,” I said from behind the sofa. “This is our ship. We’re in charge.”

  Alter looked back at us. “Okay. Since you’ve handled everything so well. What should we do?”

  I winced at her sarcasm. It wasn’t only her look that had changed while she was gone. Her whole personality seemed sharper. More biting and bossy.

  “I think I should go to the pilot’s seat,” I said. “Because someone affiliated with Duke Sedaya has us pinpointed and is headed our way.”

  “Good idea,” Alter said.

  “And I should probably get a mop,” Matt said. “Before too much of my puke goes through the grating and damages the wires underneath.”

  “I agree.”

  Matt removed his harness and jumped off the sofa, legs a little shaky from the ride into space. He held onto whatever support he could find as he made his way from the flight deck in search of the storage closet.

  “We should have a cleaning robot or something,” I said as I returned to the pilot’s seat. “I mean, over two thousand years to advance in technology and we’re still using mops?”

  “Sometimes simple tools are the most efficient,” Alter said. “Nicer ships have cleaning bots. This ship has me. And mops.”

  “You fight, you fix things, you clean. Do you cook, too?” I joked, strapping myself in.

  “There’s no need to cook. The assembler has an adequate list of predefined meals it can produce.”

  “Assembler? Is that like a replicator? Do you know Star Trek?”

  “I’ve seen it. Yes, it’s very similar, but a bit more limited. Science, not wishful thinking.”

  She pulled on her helmet, so I did the same, noticing the transparency in the visor had cracked when it hit the deck, leaving a thin line down the middle of the view from my left eye. Annoying, but not unusable.

  Tapping on the virtual interface, Alter pulled up an enlarged version of the grid she had activated during our escape from Caprum.

  “This is an enlargement of the general public access starmap of the Spiral,” she explained. “Keep probably showed it to you downstairs.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “We fell out of hyperspace here,” she said, zooming in even more, so that Caprum and Sarton were almost quarter-sized. The ship was only a speck, sitting closer to Caprum near a small moon. “That’s Keishan, one of Caprum’s outer moons. It looks like we were pulled into orbit while the power was out.” She continued zooming in while different datasets appeared above the map, their values constantly changing.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Normally, not too bad. Today, bad.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Keishan is a barracks for Sedaya’s strike force. If I’m right, we should see their rapid response unit pop up on sensors right. About. Now.”

  Her timing was flawless. Three red triangles appeared on the zoomed in grid, emerging from the far side of the moon.

  Matt returned to the flight deck. “Alter, I found a mop and a bucket. Where do I get water?”

  “Forget it,” she said. “You took too long. Better buckle up.”

  “Damn it,” he cursed softly as the mop clattered on the deck. “Are we going to get shot at again already?”

  “No. Sedaya probably doesn’t want to destroy the ship before he has the Star. At least not yet. The incoming unit is most likely a boarding party. Anyway, I’m prepping the hyperdrive. We should be clear before they arrive.”

  “What’s involved with preparing the hyperdrive?” I asked.

  “First, you need to pick a destination,” she said. “I’m not particular right now. Anywhere-but-here is good. Once that’s done, the primary will route a path to avoid any obstacles. That’s why every ship has a broadcasting identifier. Otherwise, the odds of collision go up. Believe me, you don’t want to run into anything when you’re moving at hundreds of times the speed of light.”

  “So the hyperdrive is FTL, not like a space fold or a wormhole or something like that?” I asked.

  “The hyperspace field compresses spacetime. Anything already in the field maintains its velocity. Anything moving into the field is accelerated to the velocity of the field.”

  “What if a random particle of space junk hits the field?”

  “Compressed to the point of obliteration. Something the size of a starship, however…” She trailed off.

  “Got it. I think.”

  “When the route is set, the light on the console above the throttle turns green. Right now, it’s flashing orange to show it’s processing.”

  I found the light on my station. “Shouldn’t it be done by now? Sedaya’s ships are getting close.”

  “It’s probably slowed by the reboot. Once it turns green, flip the switch beneath it and the hyperdrive will be activated. It takes about ten seconds for the field to form. That’s how the disruptor round snuck in before we left it far behind. A one in a million shot, really.”

  “I seem to be hitting all the long odds lately,” I said. “What about the ships?”

  “If they try to board us, they’ll regret it.” she replied, flashing me back to the short work she made of the first of Sedaya’s mercenaries to reach the ship.

  “I bet they will,” I said. “Can’t we just shoot them?”

  “Too risky. The added energy expenditure could cause a short that would send us back to emergency power.”

  My gaze drifted between the flashing light and the red triangles, over and over as the ships continued closing on our position. After what we had already been through, I really didn’t want to get into another fight right now. If we couldn’t go home yet, I wanted to take the duke’s advice and learn as much about this place as possible, as soon as possible.

  With her helmet on and visor down, it was hard to make out Alter’s state of mind from her facial expression. But as the gap continued shrinking between us and the duke’s forces and as the hyperdrive light persisted its dogged flashing, I noticed how the muscles of her hand tensed as it rested over the switch to activate the drive. When her other hand raised toward her helmet, preparing to pull it off to head elsewhere to defend the ship, I found myself keyed up again, though it wasn’t quite as severe as before.

  I was getting used to being under threat. I didn’t know if that was a good thing.

  Seeming to sense our predicament, one of the three ships jumped ahead of the others, gaining velocity to reach us more quickly. A few tense, rapid heartbeats later, the hyperdrive light finally went green. Alter flipped the toggle almost before the color change, as if her perception was a few hundredth of a millisecond faster than mine. While there was no obvious interior change, the activation caused an immediate reaction from the ships trailing us.

  The two behind the lead jumped forward, trying to catch up. A warning tone sounded in my ears just before the lead picked up speed, closing the gap much faster.

  “Shit, he harpooned us,” Alter said, pulling her helmet off. “Ben, you have the stick. I have to go deal with this.”

  “Do you need help?” Matt asked.

  “Those are some of Sedaya’s most experienced soldiers. Are you an experienced soldier?”

  “No.”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do. Wait here.”

  She removed her restraint and climbed out of the co-pilot seat to run from the flight deck, leaving me alone at the helm. I still wasn’t completely comfortable with flying the ship by myself, but at least my stomach didn't take its usual nosedive. It felt good to be gaining some confidence in my abilities.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Matt said, moving from the sofa to her abandoned seat. “If we’re going to be out here for any length of time, I don’t want to be dependent on her to come to our rescue every ten minutes.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Matt, I’m sorry things—”

  “Forget it,” Matt said. “I’m done worrying about what I can’t have right now. All I need to be happy at the moment is to get under Sedaya’s skin as much as possible. He reminds me of my boss at Burger Shack.”

  “Brad?” I asked.

  “No, he was okay. The other one.”

  “Carl?”

  “Yeah, him. Guy thought because his dad owned the place he could treat people like shit.” He pulled on Alter’s helmet, getting his first look at the augmented view. “Oh, wow. This is kind of cool.”

  I looked over my shoulder, the visor allowing me to see through the ship’s flight deck to Sedaya’s ship outside. Tall and narrow, it had a pair of thrusters on the top and bottom of the fuselage and a small cockpit in the center, right above the thick cable that held us captive. Four sets of guns sat at equal distances from each other between the cockpit and the two thrusters on each side, proving that if they had wanted to blow us up, they certainly could have.

  The other two ships were falling further and further back as the lead ship winched itself closer. The hyperspace field continued forming around us, the universe gaining that strange curve I had noticed before. It cut the two trailing ships off from us completely.

  “What’s going on?” Matt asked as a hatch opened in the remaining corvette's bow, just below the grappling line. Dozens of punks in dark spacesuits jumped out, flying through space toward us.

  “It looks like we’re about to be boarded.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “We need to go help Alter,” Matt said as the attackers floated across the gap between their ship and ours.

  “Are you kidding?” I replied. “You heard what she said. These are experienced soldiers. Besides, she handled them before. She can take care of it.”

  “Those were mercenaries. These are trained fighters. Not the same.”

  “Yeah, exactly. They’ll kill us even faster than the other guys would have.”

  “That goes for Alter too.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You don’t know that I’m wrong.”

  The first soldier reached the ship’s stern, one of his boots stomping down on a camera and blotting out part of our view. Intentionally? I didn’t think so until he moved his foot and replaced the camera with some kind of dark goop. A second soldier reached the ship, repeating the maneuver and causing us to lose more of the rear view.

  “These guys know exactly what they’re doing,” Matt said, pulling his helmet off. “If we don’t help Alter and she loses, we go to the gulag. You’ll be the lucky one to die there in a few months while I’m pick-pick-picking away at hard rock for the rest of my life.”

  “You don’t know it’s that kind of mine.”

  “That’s not the point. Come on.” He released his harness and jumped out of the seat.

  I hesitated before taking my helmet off and standing up. “Matt, we don’t have any weapons. You might be Bruce Lee, but I’m more like Peggy Lee.”

  “There’s an armory on Deck Two,” Matt said. “We can grab something there.”

  “What? We never went to Deck Two.”

  “Why do you think it took me so long to find a mop? I went to the other decks to see what was there. I stayed in the elevator, but the door’s labeled.” The hatch slid open ahead of his approach.

  “So, what’s on Deck Five?” I asked, running to catch up to him. I didn’t really want to go down to the armory, pick up a gun, and try to shoot someone. But I didn’t want Alter to die trying to protect us either. And I definitely didn’t want Matt to end up in the levitite mines. It was the least bad in the basket of shitty options.

  “Storage, like Keep said, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “There were boxes and metal parts and sheet metal piled almost up to the elevator doors.”

  We reached the elevator, waiting a couple of seconds for the cab to arrive. A muffled bang echoed from somewhere else on the ship.

  “We need to hurry,” I said, rushing into the cab when the doors opened and sending it to Deck Two.

  We pushed through the doors as soon as they began sliding apart, sprinting the short distance between the elevator and the heavy blast door with a brass tag bolted to it. The word Armory was etched on it in childlike scrawl.

  “This can’t be the armory,” I said, looking at the writing.

  The door swung inward, revealing Alter behind it. She had changed again, returning to her original, clownish doll appearance. She smiled widely when she saw us, giggling as she held up a pair of rifles, giving us only a split-second’s notice before tossing them our way.

  “You knew we were coming down?” I asked, catching the weapon in shaking hands and nearly fumbling it.