Ian nodded. Tracking starships through hyperspace was an art, not a science . . . and one that was frighteningly easy to get wrong. Hyperspace had been playing tricks on sensors ever since humanity had first figured out how to open vortexes and use the dimension to circumvent the light barrier. It wasn’t uncommon for starships to pick up sensor ghosts, or for hyperspace distortions to make it look as though a ship hundreds of light-years away was actually right on top of the sensor. He’d been on enough deployments to know that nothing could be taken for granted in hyperspace.
But they didn’t want to be detected either.
“Do your best, Betty,” he said as reassuringly as he could. “We need to know where they’re going.”
“Aye, sir.”
He settled back into his command chair, trying not to think about the dead and dying they were leaving behind. Dorland had never attracted much attention—the locals seemed to be happier that way—but his ship had received copies of files captured on Ahura Mazda. The planet was permanently close to the edge. He honestly didn’t understand why the locals hadn’t abandoned their arid homeworld long ago.
They don’t have a choice now, he thought. And if we don’t manage to get them some help, they won’t survive the year.
Elizabeth felt . . . unwell.
She wasn’t sure how long it had been since the attack, or since she’d even had something to eat or drink. Her throat was parched, while her stomach kept rumbling ominously. She’d looked around the tiny cell, but there was nothing to eat even if her hands hadn’t remained bound behind her back.
The hatch clicked, then opened slowly. Elizabeth rolled over and looked up. A man stood in the hatchway, silhouetted by the light. He tapped his lips once as he stepped into the cell, warning her to be quiet. She wasn’t sure if she should do as he wanted or make as much noise as she could. The guards would hear, wouldn’t they?
She studied him for a moment, feeling an odd shiver of . . . something. The man looked like a Theocrat, right down to the hawk-nosed face, skin, and neatly trimmed beard, but there was something about him that caused her to doubt it. He looked more like an actor playing a part than anything else. She’d once met Cyril Worthington-Gore, star of seven Space Marine Extraordinaire productions, and there had been something false about him. He’d simply been too good to be true. His scriptwriter had probably helped.
“Keep your voice down,” the man hissed. He spoke perfect Standard. There wasn’t even a hint of an accent. That was odd, wasn’t it? The Theocrats rarely spoke anything other than their own language. She’d heard that, once. It kept them from being corrupted by outside influences or something. “Here.”
He pressed a glass to her lips. Elizabeth drank gladly, even though she knew the water might be drugged. But they hardly needed to resort to tricks to force her to drink. The water tasted faintly odd and left her tongue feeling numb. She opened her mouth to protest, but it was already too late. The sensation was spreading rapidly. She couldn’t even move.
“This is the only mercy I can grant you,” the man said quietly. She thought, as her vision started to blur, that he genuinely meant it. “If things were different, I would have tried to get you out. But the mission comes first.”
Elizabeth wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but the words refused to form. Killing her was a mercy? A Theocrat being merciful. It struck her, in her last seconds of life, that her killer wasn’t a Theocrat. Who was he?
But she knew, as the last of her awareness drifted away, that she’d never know.
“The bitch is dead,” Moses said.
Admiral Zaskar looked up. “What bitch?”
“The unnatural woman,” Moses said. “The one who claimed to be in command.”
“Oh,” Admiral Zaskar said. The clerics might rant and rave about women who overstepped their bounds, but he found it hard to care. He doubted the poor woman’s captors had bothered to feed or water her. Maybe she’d just starved to death. Or maybe she’d had a suicide implant. “Put the body out the airlock and forget about her.”
Moses didn’t look very happy—he’d been looking forward to teaching the woman the error of her ways—but Admiral Zaskar ignored him. He had a worse problem. The destroyer he’d sent to Asher Dales had not returned. And that meant . . . The files claimed that Asher Dales was defenseless, but the files were out of date. The Commonwealth could easily have stationed a ship or two in the system in the hopes of catching one of his ships by surprise. They might just have succeeded.
And if I send a ship back to find out what happened to the lost ship, he thought, I might lose that ship too.
He shook his head, then keyed his terminal. “Take us back to base,” he ordered. “We’ll sort through the captured supplies there.”
“Aye, sir.”
Ian had taken Peacock out of hyperspace as soon as it became clear that the enemy ship was leaving hyperspace herself. He’d expected to encounter another ship, but instead the entire enemy fleet was spread out in front of him. Thankfully, they didn’t appear to be very alert, yet the shock was enough to make him rethink his tactics. If they’d come out of hyperspace a little closer, they might have been detected and blown away before they realized what they’d found. As it was, they were dangerously close to the enemy fleet.
“Hold us here,” he ordered. He had to fight to keep his voice under control. The urge to whisper was overwhelmingly powerful, even though he knew the enemy couldn’t hear him. “And monitor the enemy position.”
“They’re preparing to return to hyperspace,” the sensor officer said. “Their vortexes are opening . . . now.”
“Take us back into hyperspace with them,” Ian ordered.
