Evy’s attention shifted between the end of the shotgun barrel pointed at her face and the man that wielded. She slowly raised her hands, a task made difficult by the narrow confines of the shaft. The man had her dead to rights. She should have expected this and cursed her carelessness. Fear of the Andrani had made her hurry which, in turn, had made her sloppy.

  “Easy, friend,” she said. “I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “Who you?” asked the man. He looked rough. His spacesuit was shabby and had grime all over it. Worry lines and deep wrinkles covered his tanned face. The man’s complexion and facial features indicated that he came from Tokugawa space. His thick accent reinforced that assumption. “Where’s hacker?”

  “Behind me,” said Evy. “Out cold.”

  She shifted so that the man to see past her into the chamber.

  After a moment, he said, “More than expected. Supposed to be only two.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes. Her and an alien thing.”

  “What?!” said Niko, almost yelling.

  Soon after, a loud rumble came from somewhere deep inside the station. Evy’s ears picked up the faint sounds of something drawing close.

  “Shit,” said Evy.

  The Tokugawan said, “What the…?” The pilot’s eyes flicked sideways to peer into the chamber. That was all Evy needed.

  She exploded off the wall she’d braced against, launching herself in a flat trajectory straight at his center mass. Her body shot across open space like a missile.

  The pilot reacted too late. He grunted as her shoulder slammed into his chest. The impact sent them both spinning backward in a tangle, the shotgun still clutched in his right hand. Evy hooked her left arm around his gun wrist and twisted hard away from her torso, toward the deck plating.

  He snarled and yanked back, trying to bring the barrel around. The motion only accelerated their mutual rotation. Evy’s wrapped her legs around his waist and clamped her thighs tight to anchor herself against him. Without gravity to pin him down, every thrash he made threatened to fling her off into open air.

  “Get off me!” he yelled, voice muffled through his helmet.

  No time for finesse. She released one hand from his wrist and clawed at his faceplate, fingers scraping for purchase on the smooth polymer. He snapped his head away and, in doing so, overcommitted. Their combined momentum carried them drifting toward the ship’s far wall.

  Evy saw the opportunity and took it. She planted her boots against his hips and shoved hard, using his body as a launch platform. The push sent him tumbling backward in one direction while she rocketed the opposite way still gripping his gun arm with her left hand.

  The shotgun came with her as the pilot’s wrist bones cracked audibly.

  Newton’s third law punished her instantly. The sudden release of tension hurled Evy backward in a wild cartwheel. She collided shoulder-first with a support strut and pain shot through her arm. The impact sent her rebounding at a shallow angle toward the deck.

  A few feet away, the pilot spun helplessly, clutching his injured hand. His eyes locked on the shotgun now pointed at him. Evy had managed to right herself enough to aim during the tumble with her legs braced awkwardly against the wall.

  She steadied the barrel with both hands, breathing hard through clenched teeth.

  “Stand down,” she commanded.

  He floated to the opposite wall and steadied himself. Defeated, he raised one hand in surrender while the other hovered limply in the air.

  “Gotta go, angry lady,” said the man. “Not got room for that many.”

  The inside of the man’s ship was indeed small, but they would be able to squeeze in.

  “Then make the room,” said Evy.

  The man shook his head. “That not it. Oxygen run out too fast.”

  “Keep wasting time and we’ll have the Andrani all over. Oxygen will be the least of our problems.”

  The ship pilot pressed his lips together. Finally, he let out a frustrated sound, waved his hand, and muttered something in his language, likely insults and slurs.

  Evy shouted through the tunnel. “Move people. We’re out of time.”

  “Movement, XO,” said Tracer as he steadied his rifle on some opponent that Evy couldn’t see.

  2246B moved through the tube with Niko right behind her. Evy considered the other two. She wouldn’t leave Tracer behind, not unless the situation became desperate. Silk, on the other hand…

  She shook her head. No, she couldn’t be that cruel, but if push came to shove, she’d take a trustworthy sniper over a traitorous hacker any day. To his credit, Tracer shoved Silk’s body into the tube. The hacker’s chin hit the lip of the door as Evy tugged on her boot.

  Serves her right, thought Evy.

  Tracer’s rifle barked as he sent two rounds across the room. The narrow access tube amplified the sounds.

  “Got to go, lady,” said pilot. He didn’t wait for her response as he moved to the cockpit and began departure preparations.

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  “Get out of here, XO!” shouted Tracer.

  “Two seconds,” Evy said to the pilot as she dove through the tube and got a solid grip on one of the holds of the hatch. She grabbed a hold of the sniper collar and hauled him back hard. For once, she was thankful for the zero gravity. No way she could have done that in full gravity. She accidentally bumped his head against the edge of hatch in the same place Silk’s chin had hit.

  “Sorry,” she said as he flew past.

  Then she caught sight of what he had been shooting at. It was like a nightmare given form. Its armor formed a gleaming shell of obsidian composite. Every surface was engineered for deflection and intimidation. It had no gentle curves, only razor-sharp facets and overlapping angled plates that reflected the pulsing emergency lighting. Segmented pauldrons swept back like the wings of some abyssal raptor. The gauntlets ended in talons, each finger an articulated knife capable of rending armor or piercing muscle and bone like so much tissue paper.

  Where a human face should have been, the helmet presented a blank, featureless slab broken only by a pair of glowing crimson orbs devoid of mercy. Despite its size, it moved with predatory grace and efficiency. One moment it stood motionless, and the next it crossed meters in a blur of servos and thruster bursts.

  This was a shock trooper built for one purpose alone: kill everything in sight before they could scream for help.

  As Tracer cleared the ship’s hatch, Evy grabbed the handle to close it. She had barely started pushing when the creature reached the other side and began clawing its way through the tube, its talons digging divots into the metal. Evy screamed and reached for her gun, but Tracer already had his at the ready. He fired round after round, less careful at this close range. The first two missed, but the third struck one of the thing’s eyes. It screeched and tucked its head down, momentarily dazed by the impact. Evy used the half-second to steady her own rifle and let rip a full barrage of hard light bullets. None of them penetrated, but they didn’t have to kill the thing, just slow it down. A thunder crack boomed inside of the ship. Something slammed into the creature and send it tumbling back into the sewer chamber.

  Evy turned and saw the pilot holding his shotgun. The casing ejected from the gun told her the shock trooper had just eaten a 4-gauge slug.

  “Sit down,” commanded the pilot. He yanked the door shut and shoved Evy aside in a scramble to reach the controls, cursing and yelling in his native tongue the whole way. Evy caught the words “baka gaijin” somewhere in the tirade.

  She didn’t care. The man had more earned whatever pay awaited him on the other end.

  “Hang onto your asses,” he shouted back to his passengers.

  They all scrambled to grab something, anything, in the ship’s cramped compartment. A heavy clunk on side of the ship told Evy that the pilot had disengaged the docking clamp. A second later, the ship tilted down and accelerated hard.

  The pilot cursed again, but his tone held a sense of dread and awe. He was staring at a small screen positioned where a window might be on a planetary aircraft. This was a psychological holdover. It made little sense for a ship in the vacuum of space to use actual windows; they would just be a weakpoint. Years ago, some genius engineer many devised a way to install screens within the ship that gave a view of the outside via a camera feed. On the screen of this ship, Evy saw what the pilot had cursed at. Her eyes widened as she took it in.

  “Ho-lee,” said Tracer looking over her shoulder.

  A ship the size of a moon floated ominously far above the station. Countless ships swarmed from a multitude of launch bays. The few Mamertine ships floating around the station broke apart and explode under swarms of Andrani vessels. It reminded Evy of the holo-vids she seen describing bees. Suddenly, the true weight of the Collective dawned on her for the first time. This wasn’t just some crazy luddite cult or police force. This was a civilization, an entire nation dedicated to an ideal, serving as a check against dangerous technology. Evy felt incredibly small in that moment. This was the true power of the galaxy. Not those squabbling companies or any of the pirate leagues out of the Colchis Nebula. And Gecko squad had just tossed a rock at the hive.

  The pilot’s fingers danced across the control panels as he maneuvered the ship closer to the station. Smart, through Evy. If the Andrani wasn’t already tracking them, this was their best—actually, their only—chance to slip away undetected. Ship scanners relied on energy and heat signature, but next to a large, heat-generating station, a ship this size would be but a speck. Whatever slim chance they had, Evy had to trust this pilot whose name she did not know would keep them alive.

  As the ship skimmed close to the hull of the station, the pilot kept checking his own scanners, looking for any sign that the Andrani had noticed them. Finally, he halted and waited, watching the rocks of the asteroid field as they drifted by. Evy found that she had been holding her breath and took a big intake of air.

  “Hey,” snapped the pilot, “oxygen.”

  “Right, sorry,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Plan? Plan is to hide until they gone. Then I fire up booster and get the hell outta here.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know. Anywhere. Old plan won’t work. Too far.”

  Evy didn’t like that answer. Getting away was fine, but they needed to at least point the ship in the right general direction, or else they would wind up thousands of kilometers out into open space. And if they ran out of oxygen before reaching somewhere then all of this had been for nothing.

  “Last Horizon,” said Tracer. He was staring at a star chart he pulled out from a side pocket of his pants. “I’m just guessing at the oxygen reserves, but if we’re careful, we might just be able to make it.”

  Evy gave him an incredulous expression. “That bump scramble your brains? That’s clear on the other side of the galaxy.”

  “Ah, but what if we used the S-gates? There’s one not far from here. Two days maybe, give or take. There’s also an old one near right next to Last Horizon.”

  Evy blinked at him. “We might as shoot off fireworks and yell, ‘Hey, guys, we’re over here.’”

  S-gates, or subspace-gates, had been constructed long ago by some ancient spacefaring race though no one knew who they were. The few times an S-Gate had been activated, the Andrani arrived shortly thereafter and shut them down. Many an old world ship became stranded inside subspace never to emerge. Curiously, the Andrani did not or could not destroy them.

  “Besides,” she continued, “won’t they just follow us through the gate?”

  “Not if we blow the gate after we use it.”

  “Are you crazy?” it was Niko’s turn to yell at the sniper. “If we destroy the gate at one end, we’ll be trapped in subspace. How would we even turn it on? Does anyone here know how to operate an S-gate?”

  Tracer held up his hands, palms out, “You gotta a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  “We could go back for your launch ship,” suggested Niko.

  “You mean at the station swarming with Andrani?”

  Niko swallowed. “Fair point.”

  “Tracer’s right,” said Evy. “Of any of our terrible ideas, this one is the least terrible. We’ll just have to come up with a way to open the gate when we get.”

  “Baka gaijin,” said the pilot, “wasting air. I head to S-gate. Better than waiting for Andrani to find us.”

  “You know where the gate is?” asked Tracer.

  “Hm? Ah, yeah I know where it is. I know this area like the back of my hand. Gonna have to use the rock field, though.” He glanced and gave his passengers a wary look. “Gonna be going twisty-windy. Nobody throw up on my ship. Got it? You throw up, I throw you out the airlock.”

  Evy glanced at Niko and said, “We got it. By the way, I didn’t catch your name, Mister…?”

  The pilot a hand. “None’a of that ‘mister’ stuff. Call me Roji. Not real name, but it easier for gaijin.”

  Evy smirked. “Thank you, Roji. We’re in your hands. Oh, and sorry about the wrist.”

  Roji flicked a few switches and pushed forward on the engine. “Damn straight better be. Better get double pay for this crap.”

  “Speaking of that,” said Evy, “can you patch into your boss?”

  Roji shook his head. “No can do. Comms out this way not too good. Hacker lady had some sorta way to talk, but not through my ship. Andrani probably listening anyway. Bad idea with them around.”

  “Of course. When it’s safe.”

  Roji returned his attention to the console and plotted a course.