Navar squealed and pointed when they walked into the galley. “You’ve been at it again!”

Jed tried to bat her hand away, but she dodged back, laughing and sneering. He could hardly rebuke her; he and Beth hadn’t exactly been secretive about what they were doing.

“Can we eat now?” Gari asked plaintively. “I’ve got everything ready.”

Beth gave the preparations a quick inspection. The girls and Webster had prepared six trays for the induction oven, mixing food packets together. Potato cakes with rehydrated egg mash and cubes of carrot. “Well done.” She keyed in the quantity on the oven’s control panel, and activated it. “Where’s Gerald?”

“Going crazy in the main lounge. What else?”

Beth gave the girl a sharp glance.

Navar refused to give ground. “He is,” she insisted.

“You dish the food out,” Beth told Jed. “I’ll go see what the problem is.”

Gerald was standing in front of the lounge’s large viewport, palms pressed against it, as though he was trying to push the glass out of its frame.

“Hey there, Gerald, mate. Supper’s ready.”

“Is that where she is?”

“Where, mate?”

“The asteroid.”

Beth stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. Almaden was centred in the viewport. A dark lump of rock, rotating slowly against the starscape.

“No mate, sorry. That’s Almaden, not Monterey. Marie isn’t in there.”

“I thought it was the other one. Monterey, where she is.”

Beth gave his hands a close inspection. The knuckles were lightly grazed from pounding on something. Fortunately, they weren’t bleeding. She gently put her hand on his forearm. Every muscle was locked rigid beneath her fingers, trembling. His forehead was beaded in sweat.

“Come on, mate,” she said quietly. “Let’s get some tucker down you. Do you good.”

“You don’t understand!” He was near to tears. “I have to get back to her. I don’t even remember when I saw her last. My head is so full of darkness now. I hurt.”

“I know, mate.”

“Know!” he screamed. “What do you know? She’s my baby, my beautiful little Marie. And she makes her do things, all the time.” He shuddered violently, his eyelids fluttering. For a moment, Beth thought he was going to fall over. She tightened her grip as he swayed unsteadily.

“Gerald? Jeeze . . .”

His eyes abruptly sprang open, hunting frantically round the room. “Where are we?”

“This is the Mindori ,” she said calmly. “We’re on board, and we’re trying to find a way to get back to Monterey.”

“Yes.” He nodded quickly. “Yes, that’s right. We have to go there. She’s there, you know. Marie’s there. I have to find her. I can free her, I know how to. Loren told me before she left. I can help her escape.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m going to talk to the captain. Explain. We have to fly back there right away. He’ll do it, he’ll understand. She’s my baby.”

Beth stood completely still as he turned round sharply, and hurried out. She let out a long despondent breath. “Oh shit.”

Jed and the three kids were sitting round the small bar in the galley, spooning up the pinkish mush from their trays. They all gave Beth an apprehensive glance as she came in. She tilted her head at Jed, and retreated back into the corridor. He followed her out.

“We’ve got to get him to a doctor, or something,” she said in a low voice.

“Told you that the day we first saw him, doll. The fella’s a genuine braincrash.”

“No, it’s not just that, not just in his head. He’s really ill. His skin’s all hot, burning, like he’s got a fever, or a virus.”

“Oh Jeeze , Beth.” Jed pressed his forehead against the cool metal wall. “Think, will you. What the hell can we do? We’re inside a bleeding hellhawk fifty trillion light-years from anyone who’d give a toss about us. There’s nothing we can do. I’m real sorry about him catching some xenoc disease. But all I’m worried about now is that he doesn’t infect us with it.”

She hated him for being right. Being completely impotent, not to mention dependent on Rocio, was tough. “Come on.” With a final check on the kids to make sure they were eating, she hauled Jed into the lounge. “Rocio.”

A translucent image of his face materialized in the viewport. “Now what?”

“We’ve got a real problem with Gerald. Reckon he’s sick with something. It’s not good.”

“He’s here on your insistence. What do you want me to do about it?”

“I dunno for sure. Have you got a zero-tau pod? We could shove him in there until we leave. The Edenist doctors can give him a proper going over then.”

“No. There’s no working zero-tau pod anymore. The possessed are understandably nervous about such items; the first ones to come on board broke it up.”

“Bugger! What do we do?”

“You’ll have to nurse him along as best you can.”

“Terrific,” Jed muttered.

Almaden began to slide across the viewport.

“Hey, where are we going now?” Jed asked. The asteroid vanished below the rim, leaving only stars which were slicing thin arcs across the blackness as the hellhawk accelerated in a tight curve.

“Back to my patrol route,” Rocio said, “and hope no one has noticed my absence. Deebank has datavised the list of electronic components they need to get the nutrient refinery functioning again. They’re all available at Monterey.”

“Well glad to hear it, mate,” Jed said automatically. A cold thought ran clean through his brain. “Wait a minute. How are you going to get the Organization to hand them over?”

Rocio’s translucent image winked, then vanished.

“Oh Jeeze. Not again!”

In peacetime, Avon’s starship emergence zones were positioned round the planet and its necklace of high-orbit asteroids at convenient distances to the stations and ports which they served. The one exception was Trafalgar, which, of necessity, was always on alert for suspicious arrivals. Following the official outbreak of war, or as the diplomats in Regina preferred: crisis situation, all the emergence zones were automatically shifted further away from their port. Every Confederation almanac carried the alternative coordinates, and the onus was on captains to ensure they were aware of any official declaration.

Emergence zone DR45Y was situated three hundred thousand kilometres away from Trafalgar, designated for use by civil starships flying with government authorization. The sensor satellites which scanned it were no less proficient than those covering the zones designated for various types of warships, there was after all no telling what vessels an enemy might employ. So when the gravitonic distortion scanners began to pick up the familiar signature of a ship starting to emerge, additional sensor batteries were brought on line within milliseconds. The rapidly expanding warp in space-time was the focus of five SD weapons platforms. Trafalgar’s SD control also vectored four patrol voidhawks towards it and put another ten on rapid-response alert status.

The event horizon expanded out to thirty-eight metres and vanished, revealing the starship’s hull. Visual-spectrum sensors showed the SD controllers a standard globe coated with dull nulltherm foam. All perfectly normal, except for a single missing hexagonal hull plate. And the ship was impressively close to the centre of the zone; the captain must have taken a great deal of care aligning his last jump coordinate. Such a manoeuvre indicated someone anxious to please.

Radar pulses triggered the starship’s transponder. Trafalgar’s AI took under a millisecond to identify the response code as the Villeneuve’s Revenge , captained by André Duchamp.

Following the standard transponder code, the Villeneuve’s Revenge promptly transmitted its official flight authorization code issued by the Ethenthia government.

Both codes were linked to grade two security protocols. The CNIS duty officer in Trafalgar’s SD command centre took immediate charge of the situation.