“Don’t even think of it,” one said.

He was propelled firmly towards the waiting pod.

“No,” he said.

“Get in,” Ralph told him impatiently.

“No. Not that. Please. I’ll be good, I’ll behave.”

“Get in.”

“No.”

One of the security men anchored himself to the decking grid with a toe clip, and tugged him down.

“No!” He gripped both sides of the open pod, his features stone-carved with determination. “I won’t!” he shouted.

“In!”

“No.”

All three security men were pushing and shoving at him. Gerald Skibbow strove against them. Will tucked a leg round a nearby girder, and smacked the butt of his TIP carbine against Gerald Skibbow’s left hand. There was a crunch as the bones broke.

He howled, but managed to keep hold. His fingers turned purple, the skin undulating. “No!”

The carbine came down again. Ralph put his hands flat against the decking above, and stood on Gerald Skibbow’s back, knees straining, trying to thrust him down into the pod.

Gerald Skibbow’s broken hand slipped a couple of centimetres, leaving a red smear. “Stop this, stop this.” Rivulets of white light began to shiver across his torso.

Ralph felt as though his own spine was going to snap, the force his boosted muscles were exerting against his skeleton was tremendous. The soles of his feet were tingling sharply, the worms of white light coiling round his ankles. “Dean, switch the pod on the second he’s in.”

“Sir.”

The hand slipped again. Gerald Skibbow started a high-pitched animal wailing. Will hammered away at his left elbow. Firefly sparks streaked back up the carbine every time it hit, as though he was striking flint.

“Get in, you bastard,” one of the security men shouted, nearly purple from the effort, face shrivelled like a rubber mask.

Gerald Skibbow gave way, the arm Will had hammered on finally losing hold. He crashed down into the bottom of the pod with an oof of air punched out through his open mouth. Ralph cried out at the shock of the jolt that was transmitted back up his cramped legs. The curving lid of the pod began to slide into place, and he bent his knees frantically, lifting his legs out of the way.

“No!” Gerald Skibbow shouted. He had begun to glow like a hologram profile, rainbow colours shining bright in the compartment’s gloom. His voice was cut off by the lid sliding into place, and it locked with a satisfying mechanical click . There was a muffled thud of a fist striking the composite.

“Where’s the bloody zero-tau?” Will said. “Where is it?”

The lid of the pod hadn’t changed, there was no sign of the slippery black field effect. Gerald Skibbow was pounding away on the inside with the fervour of a man buried alive.

“It’s on,” Dean shouted hoarsely from the operator’s control panel. “Christ, it’s on, it’s drawing power.”

Ralph stared at the sarcophagus in desperation. Work, he pleaded silently, come on fuck you, work! Jenny died for this.

“Switch on, you shit!” Will screamed at it.

Gerald Skibbow stopped punching the side of the pod. A black emptiness irised over the lid.

Will let out a sob of exhausted breath.

Ralph realized he was clinging weakly to one of the girders, the real fear had been that Gerald Skibbow would break out. “Tell the captain we’re ready,” he said in a drained voice. “I want to get him to Ombey as quickly as we can.”

Chapter 02

The event horizon around Villeneuve’s Revenge dissolved the instant the starship expanded out to its full forty-eight-metre size. Solar wind and emaciated light from New California’s distant sun fell on the dark silicon hull which its disappearance exposed. Short-range combat sensors slid out of their jump recesses with smooth animosity, metallic black tumours inset with circular gold-mirror lenses. They scoured a volume of space five hundred kilometres across, hungry for a specific shape.

Data streams from the sensors sparkled through Erick Thakrar’s mind, a rigid symbolic language written in monochromic light. Cursors chased through the vast constantly reconfiguring displays, closing in on an explicit set of values like circling photonic-sculpture vultures. Radiation, mass, and laser returns slotted neatly into their parameter definition.

The Krystal Moon materialized out of the fluttering binary fractals, hanging in space two hundred and sixty kilometres away. An inter-planetary cargo ship, eighty metres long; a cylindrical life-support capsule at one end, silver-foil-cloaked tanks and dull-red fusion-drive tube clustered at the other. Thermo-dump panels formed a ruff collar on the outside of the environmental-engineering deck just below the life-support capsule; communication dishes jutted out of a grid tower on the front of it. The ship’s midsection was a hexagonal gantry supporting five rings of standard cargo-pods, some of them plugged into the environmental deck via thick cables and hoses.

A slender twenty-five-metre flame of hazy blue plasma burnt steadily from the fusion tube, accelerating the Krystal Moon at an unvarying sixtieth of a gee. It had departed Tehama asteroid five days ago with its cargo of industrial machinery and micro-fusion generators, bound for the Ukiah asteroid settlement in the outer asteroid belt Dana, which orbited beyond the gas giant Sacramento. Of the star’s three asteroid belts, Dana was the least populated; traffic this far out was thin. Krystal Moon ’s sole link to civilization (and navy protection) was its microwave communication beam, focused on Ukiah, three hundred and twenty million kilometres ahead.

Erick’s neural nanonics reported that pattern lock was complete. He commanded the X-ray lasers to fire.

Two hundred and fifty kilometres away, the Krystal Moon ’s microwave dishes burst apart into a swirl of aluminium snowflakes. A long brown scar appeared on the forward hull of the life-support capsule.

God, I hope no one was in the cabin below.

Erick tried to push that thought right back to the bottom of his mind. Straying out of character, even for a second, could quite easily cost him his life. They’d drilled that into him enough times back at the academy. There was even a behavioural consistency program loaded into his neural nanonics to catch any wildly inaccurate reactions. But flinches and sudden gasps could be equally damning.

The Villeneuve’s Revenge triggered its fusion drive, and accelerated in towards the stricken cargo ship at five and a half gees. Erick sent another two shots from the X-ray cannon squirting into the Krystal Moon ’s fusion tube. Its drive flame died. Coolant fluid vented out of a tear in the casing, hidden somewhere in the deep shadows on the side away from the sun, the fountain fluorescing grey-blue as it jetted out from behind the ship.

“Nice going, Erick,” André Duchamp commented. He had the secondary fire-control program loaded in his own neural nanonics. If the newest crew-member hadn’t fired he could have taken over within milliseconds. Despite Erick’s performance in the Catalina Bar, André had a single nagging doubt. After all, O’Flaherty was one of their own—after a fashion—and eliminating him didn’t require many qualms no matter who you were; but firing on an unarmed civil ship . . . You have earned your place on board, André said silently. He cancelled his fire-control program.

Villeneuve’s Revenge was a hundred and twenty kilometres from the Krystal Moon when André turned the starship and started decelerating. The hangar doors began to slide open. He started to whistle against the push of the heavy gee force.

He had a right to be pleased. Even though it had only been a tiny interplanetary jump, two hundred and sixty kilometres was an excellent separation distance. Since leaving Tehama, Villeneuve’s Revenge had been in orbit around Sacramento. They had extended every sensor, focusing along the trajectory Lance Coulson had sold them until they had found the faint splash of the Krystal Moon ’s exhaust. With its exact position and acceleration available in real time, it was just a question of manufacturing themselves a jump co-ordinate.