“Times ticking,” Fenli grumbled.
“Impulsive moves will kill us all, so cool your jets, Fenli,” said Yul. “Miko, report your status. Your friends okay?”
“Yeah. Two crew members here, Star and Usk. We’re shaken but otherwise intact.”
Yul clipped out a rumbling query. “Who exactly are your crew—this Star and Usk? They have any combat skills?”
Miko paused. “Star’s a street hustler, not savvy with ship tech. Usk, he’s…a Mentera, so has some piloting and military training.”
A pregnant pause lingered over the com. “Come again? Mentera?”
“A rebel. Prisoner of theirs from long back. I rescued him from a tank—since then he’s been an ally.”
“Are you mad? You’re playing with fire, spaceboy. All the Mentera are feral bloodsuckers. They’ll clip your jugular, stick you in a tank and suck you dry.”
“Yeah, how many more of these weird friends you have?” mumbled Cloye.
“If you’re counting me among those ‘weird friends’, Cloye,” hissed Fenli, “you and I are going to have a conversation.”
Hresh interjected. “Let’s get serious. We have a major risk here. He’s a Mentera.”
“Usk’s more loyal than any crew member I know,” affirmed Miko.
“Okay, Miko, your call.” Yul sighed. “Looking as if we need every available helping hand…and to use brute force to get out of this mess. If we try to impulse to planet farside, we’ll have a hundred lightfighters on our tail.”
“Wait,” interrupted Miko. “We can’t just blast out of here and let those aliens take over innocent worlds. We’ve got to try and stop them.”
“Right, spaceboy,” jeered Yul. “Three rogue ships against a fleet of thousands? Think again.”
“We can think of something.”
“Like what? Fly in, shout loud enough and order them to call off their invasion?”
Miko went beet red in the face. “That’s not exactly what I meant, Yul.”
Hresh coughed, his hoarse, raspy breath catching at the edge of the static. “Unless—”
“What?”
“We can use your Mentera. You say he’s a dependable ally? Can you communicate?”
“We have a limited communication, using the shipboard translator.”
“Good. Get the bug to radio in to fleet command. Tell them our scouts lost the human captives to a ship crash. Tell them we’re going to join the fleet as planned and await further orders.”
Cloye squawked, “You crazy? We’re not going to go up there into the spider’s nest.”
“No way around it, Cloye. Unless we sit here and die.”
“What happens when they try to contact the dead officers that Fenli nuked down there?”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Yul muttered. “Hresh’s right. We’ve got a small window of opportunity here to fool them and blast out of Dodge. The old ‘hide in the open’ trick.”
“Yes, it could work,” mused Miko. He consulted Usk, who looked at him with intent eyes. Star gazed on, her mind still in a daze.
While Cloye continued to curse and grumble, Yul hissed at her to settle down.
Hresh’s voice hissed over the com. “Have your bug make it sound plausible, Miko, or we’ll have a swarm of hornets on our asses.”
Miko licked his lips. He’d have to switch to open channel and take his chances. From the ship com came a garbled spatter of bug speak. Likely mission control. Miko grabbed the receiver, passed it to Usk while Star stood by, tugging at the shredded folds in her suit. “Radio in, Usk,” rasped Miko. “Tell them the intruders were gunned down. Dead. There are no survivors.”
The universal translator spat the words into Usk’s earpiece while the com continued to stream new orders from mission control. Obviously they were expecting a reply. Usk’s antenna twitched. He uttered some words in response.
A tense silence passed. Another blast of alien talk rattled the airwaves and Usk’s antenna dipped in a gesture of anxiety.
Miko whispered into the translator clipped to Usk’s antenna. “Tell them the others went down, Usk. We’re the only survivors.”
Usk chittered more words into the com.
Another long and nail-biting pause. “Affirmative Mentera KU6j. Update will be reported to Commander Kruk. Respond.”
Miko covered the mouthpiece and spoke to the others. “Progress!”
“Let’s hope they buy it,” Yul growled.
Usk’s antenna perked up once again. The universal translator relayed the message in a broken, robotic tone. “Report to main fleet, squadron Meijk-JytO—” the rest was gibberish, even the translator couldn’t copy “—Full investigation of hostiles will proceed as soon as resources are made available…The assault on ‘Quenrix’ takes priority.”
“Quenrix? That’s a frontier world on the fringe of The Dim Zone,” Hresh mused.
“They’re telling us to join the fleet,” Miko whispered.
“Good.” Yul exhaled relief.
“What do you mean, ‘good’?” bawled Fenli.
“Means we can go up there, spy on their operations and hopefully do something to sabotage their efforts.”
Fenli threw up his hands. “Are you people insane? You can’t win against these locusts. They’re insidious. Ruthless killers. They’ll throw you in a tank and let you sit there for a hundred years.”
Yul spat, “If we don’t fight them, Fenli, we’re all going to die. Besides we need to find a clear avenue to get our ships out of here. Otherwise we’re screwed. Only so many planets we can hide on before both bugs and squids take over this whole galaxy.”
Fenli fumed over the com.
“He’s right, Fenli,” said Miko.
“Don’t tell me what’s right, Miko,” raged Fenli. His staccato curse was harsh on the ear. “Wasn’t you lying in a frozen pool on an alien world left to die—freezer food for those crab-locust-squid whatever-the-fuck primitives.”
Miko grunted. “I’ve had my share of them too and dunked in tanks. Don’t think that I’m that oblivious to what it’s like.”
“Sorry, Miko. I forget that. Just a little frayed around the edges.”
“I get it.”
“Still, the instant this plan goes south, I’m impulsing the hell out of here. Blasting my way to freedom or
