Ulla raised her eyebrows. ‘Wow. You’ve been doing that all the time, sir? Getting me to think sideways?’

  ‘To get the best out of their crew, officers have to be subtle at times.’

  And she glanced over at Captain Frith, who looked as if he was still unaware of Ulla’s anomaly – and, even more serious for him, Ulla thought, he wasn’t aware of the attention Commodore Mott was paying to it.

  Mott snorted, and focused on Ulla. ‘Forget the captain for now. I can see you’ve been working your consoles even as we speak? Collecting more data? Good habit.

  ‘So let’s think this through.

  ‘You’re losing sunlight pressure on the sail. Or rather, Hearthlight. So far as we can tell there’s nothing wrong with the Hearthlight itself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Well, then—’

  Ulla said, ‘I think it’s obvious, sir. Something must be obstructing the Hearthlight. It can only be that. Commander Fels seems to have encountered a wide shadow. I think there’s a shadow being cast on us.’ She touched her console. ‘But not cast from any cosmic body, no comet head or asteroid or even a planet, you’d think we’d have noticed that before now … We’d pick up the gravity. And Fels did report a sighting of what he thought was a ship. On the other hand, I have seen no record of any other ships due to be in the area, certainly none of ours—’

  Midshipman Ashe Vinna called over hesitantly, ‘I’m on comms, sir. You’re discussing close-by ships? I can confirm we aren’t getting any hails. Oh, but I did get some more messages from Commander Sedhi in the ramjet ship. He got out of danger, but is running back to port, putting himself into cryo suspension.

  Now his messages are repeating. Also, he sent us a spray of dark-matter ramjet drones to tail us.’

  Mott was nodding, listening carefully, as she had throughout. ‘Good work, Midshipman. And good move from Fels. Try to ping him back – and if you can, ping the nearest base to confirm his message.’

  Vinna nodded, a brief grin, and turned away.

  Ulla realised that Vinna felt flattered, by a couple of words from a senior officer. Words he would never have expected to get from a senior officer.

  While her captain was eating a sandwich.

  Now Mott touched her arm. ‘That move of Fels’s – to send those beacons after us. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. Any advantage we can grab – if this is some sort of sentient attack, even a human assault – something new like those beacons might slip by unnoticed … Well. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far …’

  And Ulla directed her attention to her console. She’d let herself be distracted. Now she looked again at the sensor displays. At images, flickering by on the main display, of that big grey shadow. A darkness gradually growing, moment by moment.

  ‘Just say what you think,’ Commodore Mott murmured, looking over her shoulder. ‘What do you see now?’

  ‘I see – a shadow. A shadow being cast over the sail, our sail. But – look at the edge. As it creeps forward, and we lose the light …’

  By now, she realised, at least some other people around the bridge were taking notice of what was going on at her console.

  Mott murmured, ‘They’re watching me, not you.’ She snorted. ‘Even the captain’s paying attention now. Just tell me what you see. And tell me what you think it means.’

  She traced the shadow’s edge on the screen with a finger. ‘Look at this. A straight line?’

  ‘No. Not quite, Commodore,’ Ulla said, swiping the screen for more data. ‘There’s a very slight curvature.’

  ‘A curvature. You mean, the shadow is cast from another circle? Like a lightsail?’

  ‘Yes, Commodore. Well, I guess. But much larger than ours.’

  That gave Mott pause. ‘Larger than a thousand-kilometre-radius reflecting sail. How much larger?’

  ‘Commodore, at this scale the curvature is so slight – I can’t confirm it, can’t image the whole thing—’

  ‘Best shot, Commander.’

  ‘More like twenty thousand kilometres across. Quite a construction project. And it’s coming in. Ten times our diameter. Running us down.’

  ‘How fast?’

  ‘Acceleration of two gravities.’

  She was overheard. There were gasps at that.

  Mott murmured, ‘That big and that fast?’

  Ulla was uncomfortably aware that, given she was with the commodore, she was now the sole focus of attention on the bridge, that all eyes were on her – some picking up the elements of the unfolding crisis, many with evident jealousy for all the attention.

  And Captain Frith showed a kind of suppressed irritation, she thought.

  But then she had reported her findings direct to the commodore, his boss, not to him. She hadn’t meant it to be that way … In fact she hadn’t known she had any findings at all until Mott had coaxed it out of her. Which ought to have been his job, she supposed—

  ‘Wake up, Mason Frith. Enough.’

  That was Mott. She stalked across the bridge and bustled Frith out of the captain’s position with a peremptory wave, took it herself.

  ‘Enough! All of you! I can see your training has been mostly a waste of time, if you’re unable to think, when confronted with the unfamiliar. One of you – I don’t care who or how – make sure we are downloading reports of this … incident … this invasion, to the worlds of the Alliance. Download live. To any ships in the area. And you, Captain – well, let’s just get through this and we’ll see where we all go from here. Commander Breen! You’ve done all the figuring so far. Brief us. Tell us what we’re dealing with.’

  Frith glared at Ulla.

  She tried to answer Mott, found her mouth dry, tried again.

  ‘Has to be a sail, Commodore,’ Ulla said. ‘A lightsail.’

  ‘I’ll buy that. But why so large … ? Anybody?’

  A hand was raised. Ashe Vinna again. A young guy in a midshipman uniform that always looked too big for him, Ulla thought.

  ‘Sir … I tried to figure this once before. Kind of an exercise. How would you build a ship that could take on outer Hearthspace? When the light is so much dimmer than here. This was during my training, when we learned about Hearthspace and the geography and all, and lightsail dynamics, I studied the problem. Just for fun. I figured—’

  Captain Frith snarled, ‘Just for fun? Who by the Hearth’s smoke are you, kid?’

  Mott put her hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘Wait, son. Don’t you know your own crew, Captain? Even bridge crew?’

  Frith seemed shocked to be picked up before the crew. ‘I can’t be expected—’

  ‘I don’t expect much of you at all, Captain. Tell us, son, ah – name?’

  ‘Midshipman Ashe Vinna, sir.’

  ‘OK. And tell us what you figured so far. Briefly.’ She glanced at her wrist. ‘I take it that shadow’s still falling across us—’

  Ulla nodded her head. ‘Go ahead, Ashe.’

  He seemed to be more comfortable talking to Ulla than to the captain. Which the commodore seemed to observe.

  ‘Well, sir, it boils down to how much light you need to capture with your sail. The Jupiters are mostly around a hundred, a hundred fifty thousand AU from the Hearth – sorry, “AU” means “astronomical unit”, a standard measure, an archaic one, supposed to be the distance of the original Earth from its origin—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that much—’

  ‘Just as our “year” might be related to something like the rotation of that world around its sun. In the academy we were told how these measures might be preserving knowledge of our origins—’

  Mott broke in now. ‘Well done, Midshipman. But can you get to the point?’

  ‘Sorry, Commodore. So, Jupiters are generally four, five times farther out from the Hearth than the Earths we inhabit. They have to be that far out, in the cold, to retain their thick, cold atmospheres. And they’re probably that much more apart from each other. And the Hearthlight is more diffuse out there. If you travel between them, and if want the same performance in terms of acceptable travel times out there as you get from a thousand-kilometre-radius sail here, among our close-in Marses and Earths, then you’re looking at ten thousand kilometres radius, for instance.’

  Mott nodded. ‘Good, good, that all fits … So, we have an incursion of an outer planet ship into these inner realms … Commander Breen?’

  But Ulla was distracted by fresh images on her monitors. Other kinds of shadows, caught by the Hearthlight. Not the smooth sweep of converging geometries this time—

  ‘Commodore – Captain—’

  Captain Frith sneered. ‘You have more to say, Breen? I do have a crew of clever little heroes, don’t I? It’ll do you no good—’

  Here was Ulla, breaking the chain of command, again. But, working quickly, she went back to her own screens, focusing on the shifting images that had suddenly shown up at other stations.

  Compared to the elegant sweep of a twenty-thousand-kilometre disc passing over, now the ship’s automated external sensors showed her shadows much more messy – much more sinister – much closer …

  Shadows that resolved into human figures.

  Raining down on the 45.

  She felt too stunned to speak.

  Humans in pressure suits – of a kind unfamiliar to her – humans who were already prising open one of 45’s airlocks, she saw from another angle. Humans wearing obviously tough and flexible pressure suits, and carrying a tool like a long tube—

  A flare of light in her screen, dazzling her.

  Even as she recoiled, she slammed an alarm button. Flaring lights, internal and external, a howling siren throughout the hull away from the bridge.

  Ulla said simply, ‘Commodore. Take a look at this.’

  Without hesitation. the commodore dragged herself over to Ulla’s terminal.

  ‘I think—’

  A dull whump.

  A moment of stillness. Then a noise, a shudder that passed through the fabric of Patrol 45.

  Then another sharp crack, that seemed again to shake the whole of the ship’s hull.

  A momentary dip in air pressure, that startled them all.

  For a heartbeat, nobody seemed willing to move.

  The captain seemed stunned.

  Then Commodore Mott yelled, ‘We’re being boarded. Hull breach! Emergency protocol! You know what to do!’

  They knew.

  Even Ulla herself, who had only sketchy training on such contingencies. The Alliance was a peaceful place …

  At Mott’s urging, Ulla and the senior bridge crew started compiling what data they could – the ship’s log, data technical, political, even scientific – and dumping it even as they scrambled for emergency masks at their belts, or stored in the bridge’s fittings. With the hull breached, for now staying alive was the only priority. That and reporting to bases on the home worlds, automated signals sent with a word, a swipe of a screen.

  A rating hurried around, brought masks to the captain and commodore, who were still arguing.

  Ulla checked her own station. The automatics had quickly cut in, and the ship’s smart hull and inner partitions were closing up as best they could around the fractures.

  But then came a louder whump, again – and a smart crack.

  And in one screen, Ulla saw another human figure, apparently heavily armoured – and, it looked like, heavily armed – descending on the hull.

  And she heard a hiss of escaping air.

  She yelled, ‘They’ve got weapons! They’re breaching the hull, overwhelming the self-repair facility, we’ve lost integrity—’

  The commodore snapped, ‘Pressure-seal this deck. Now!’

  A crew member slammed a panel to comply. Whirring sounds came from within the multi-layered walls.

  Captain Frith was pulling on an emergency survival suit. He snarled, ‘What next, Admiral Breen? You seem to be in charge now—’

  Another alarm howled.

  And now Ashe turned to face the main door. ‘They’re here.’

  In the chaos, just before the final intrusion, Commodore Mott reached over to the captain’s console and yelled out what was evidently a rank-specific access code, then slammed her fist down on an execute panel.

  And Mott saw Ulla watching her.

  Ulla recognised the play. She said, ‘You dumped our authorisation codes – base contact codes—’

  ‘We can’t just give our ship away.’

  The captain just stared at them.

  Then the bridge door, its seal burned through, fell inwards.

  And the invaders came.

  3

  They were led by troopers, or guards, who wore a kind of armour, pitch black, with flexible joints and hard, shiny panels. Even their faces were masked, with cheek panels and eye-covering visors which, Ulla soon learned, could be pivoted upward. Their black colour scheme was in contrast to the green – the colour of an Earth – of the Patrol’s crew uniform and the grey of the bridge itself.

  One of these invaders drifted over to Mott.

  ‘A senior officer, judging by the ornate uniform. Useful.’ Gruff male voice. He glanced around. ‘But what kind of bridge is this? Where are the naked slaves, the couches?’

  His language was comprehensible, if thickly accented, Ulla thought. Mocking. A common origin, recent enough for their languages to be mutually comprehensible? Or had these invaders studied broadcasts from the home worlds, the ships?

  Slaves, though? Was the use of that word just a sick joke?

  For a moment nobody answered.

  Another man came in now. Bulky, tall, imposing, but flabby, Ulla thought, in a long, ornate robe over vacuum armour. His hair and beard, both dark, were precisely tailored. That robe, apparently stiffened, swept down to the ground, jet black, with silvery metal ornamentation attached: bars, what looked like arrows, with no apparent practical function.

  Dressed to impress. To intimidate. It worked.

  He looked around.

  Mott faced him. ‘My rank is commodore. My name is—’

  ‘Irrelevant. My name is Ciren Pulet. My rank is senior scholar and protector. My colleague here is Captain Erbas. You are now recognised as the property of—’

  Mott snarled. ‘I am nobody’s property, sir.’

  ‘You are now property, according to the law of the Hierarchy of Worlds – the Outer Worlds, in your vernacular. Specifically, our property law. As you were defined by such law even before this encounter. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.’

  Mott drifted forward. ‘I’m puzzled. How is it that I can understand you? More or less. And you me, evidently.’

  A way in, maybe, Ulla thought.

  Pulet approached Mott, faced her, tapped gadgets on his person – an earpiece, a kind of medallion on his chest. ‘An intelligent question. Good start. We have developed translator software, able to comprehend all the tongues of our worlds based on small samples. We believe the settling of those worlds was only a thousand years ago, perhaps—’

  Ulla felt as if her head were exploding at this torrent of new knowledge and its implications. ‘We have a tradition too that humanity came here to Hearthspace only a thousand years ago.’

  Pulet smiled at her. ‘I do like an open, enquiring mind. That is a reasonable corollary. And so the languages are only somewhat divergent. Here we are, two scholars debating, in such circumstances. How amusing.’ Pulet was a big man; he laughed heavily and loudly. ‘But to business. Who is captain of this ship?’

  Captain Frith looked away, standing as if to hide his insignia.

  Ulla thought fast. In a conflict, you protect the commanding officers. If these invaders killed or captured the captain and, worse, the commodore, then all could be lost, quickly—

  She stepped forward and faced Pulet again. ‘I am captain. Captain Ulla Breen. Captain of this vessel.’

  The enemy captain held his weapon to her forehead.

  Then with a single movement, Erbas swivelled, pointed the weapon at Captain Frith, and fired, without warning.

  Frith’s head splashed.

  He fell back, limp in the zero gravity.

  The corpse was caught by Midshipman Ashe Vinna, his face dead white.

  The invader turned back to Ulla. ‘He was the captain. No longer. He was a coward.’ He laughed. ‘You are now captain of this impounded vessel.’

  Commodore Mott stepped forward. ‘I outrank her. Indeed, I outrank everyone on this ship.’

  ‘All save me as of now,’ said Pulet, with a dry chuckle. ‘Indeed, the most senior of your officers is now subordinate to the lowliest of the officers under Captain Erbas here. Very well, I’ll keep you, Commodore, perhaps as a mouthpiece in the negotiations to come with your authorities under the new regime. Also you may serve as a hostage. While this one—’ He read Ulla’s nametag. ‘Ulla Breen. A fine name. You showed great courage here, unlike your crewmates.’ He considered her, as if assessing her suitability for some post. ‘Under my regime, from now on, your duties—’

  ‘I will not answer to you.’

  Now Pulet shrugged. ‘You will answer for your crew, then, during the journey. Each disobeyed command will result in punishment. For your crew, that is.’ He smiled. ‘Depending on my mood.’

  Mott snapped back, ‘What journey?’

  ‘Back to where my people have lived for a thousand years. A harsh place, a place of dark and cold – a place of challenge and magnificence—’

  ‘The Neptunes,’ said Ashe Vinna, his voice small. ‘You come from Neptune space. Or the Jupiters. The giants of ice and gas. You’re taking us there.’

  ‘We call it Hierarchy space. I represent the Sabre Hierarchy. Eventually, yes, you will see such planets. If you survive. If any of you, I should say.’

  ‘Why take us?’ Mott demanded. ‘Is your militarised utopia so short of manpower? Are we to be workers?’

  ‘Oh, no. We must get our terms right. You will be, you are, my property.’

  ‘Slaves,’ Ashe Vinna said, as if in wonder. ‘Property. We’re all to be slaves.’