The droning alarm had ceased, but the tension on the ship stayed high. Tooley had dashed to the pilot’s chair and started tuning every sensor she could get her hands on. They all said the same thing: a ship was approaching them. Not quite at FTL speeds, but fast. Meanwhile, Kamak executed one of his favorite skills: complaining.

  “You said this place was supposed to be hidden!”

  “It is,” the Ghost snapped back. “Though not anymore, now that you’ve opened a direct comm channel. Before that even I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Well somebody clearly does!”

  “All the drones were non-networked, and had their memories automatically wiped as soon as they were out of sensor range,” Ghost said. “The drop was a randomly generated point in deep space. There isn’t a single living or nonliving thing in the known universe that knows where you are.”

  “And again, something clearly does!”

  Kamak held his datapad out, and Tooley briefly switched the alarm back on. The Ghost got a few earfuls of siren before Tooley shut it down. As annoying as it was, the Ghost was grateful for the valuable insights into the case. Every time he talked with Kamak and his crew, Ghost better understood why Kor wanted to kill them.

  “Yes, clearly we have been outwitted in some other completely unforeseen bullshit manner,” Ghost said. “Do you have any idea what’s after you?”

  “Not much,” Tooley said. The Wild Card Wanderer had top of the line long range scanners, but they could only do so much. “It’s small. Scout craft, or a single-person traveler.”

  “So not the ship Kor was seen leaving Earth in,” Ghost said. That had been a multi-person cruiser of the same model as the Wanderer, and would have read much larger to the scanners. “Maybe you’re lucky and it’s just some Structuralist finally catching up to you.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” Tooley said. “I’d love to blow up one of those assholes right now.”

  “We shouldn’t take any risks,” Corey said. “Kor’s rich enough to own two ships.”

  “Corey proves to be the sensible one yet again,” Ghost said. “If you start evasive maneuvers now, you should be able to meet escort craft coming the other way before whoever that is catches up to you.”

  Tooley’s hands flexed on the controls, and she readied their launch sequence. She’d already calculated their escape vectors (an easy thing to do, in the black void of dead space), and could set them running with the flip of a switch. The switch stayed unflipped.

  “Nah.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Instead of starting their engines, Tooley powered on the weapon systems, and cycled their engine power.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Tooley said. “I don’t care if it’s a Structuralist or Kor Tekaji or the Seventh High One himself, I can outfly them. In any straight dogfight, I win.”

  “Love the confidence,” Kamak said. “But what if they don’t take a straight dogfight?”

  “Nothing that small is carrying heavy ordinance,” Tooley said. “And whoever they are, they probably think we’re damaged. We play into that and bait them right into position.”

  Tooley did a quick shuffle and positioned the Wanderer directly on the incoming ship’s trajectory, then cut the propulsion and put them on a gentle drift. She fiddled with the power controls again.

  “When we get visual, I’m going to manually trigger a power surge, make it look like our engine overloaded when I tried to set off too fast,” Tooley said. “The ship’ll look dead, but be ready to fly on a moment’s notice.”

  “Oh, like that thing you mentioned when we met,” Bevo said.

  “Exactly,” Tooley said. “We look dead, and our hunter sees easy prey. When he comes in for a strafing run, he’ll come in right along our cannon’s line of fire.”

  Tooley traced the blackness of space with her fingers held out like a gun, and pulled the trigger. Kamak was skeptical it would be that simple, but if there was one thing in the universe he was confident of, it was Tooley’s piloting skills. It was her only redeeming quality, after all.

  “I’ll be a little focused on the engine toggling, though, so if someone else could grab the gun…”

  “Anyone other than Farsus got experience on main guns? No offense, Fars.”

  Farsus shrugged, and hurt himself in the process, demonstrating exactly why he could not be a gunner.

  “I got it,” Bevo said. “Used to run tail-gunner for my sister.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “Used to,” Bevo said. To Vo promptly tried to disappear.

  “At the risk of being rude,” Kamak said, though that had never stopped him. “Were you by any chance tail-gunning for your sister when that ‘used to’ happened?”

  “Nah, Bort’orit insisted on taking it,” Bevo said. “Little bastard always was cocky, did you know he-”

  “Focus, Bevo,” Kamak snapped. She dutifully shut up, took the gunner’s seat, and aimed in the direction Tooley indicated.

  “If they’ve got any sense, they’ll stop outside our effective range,” Tooley said. “Wait until they’re close.”

  Bevo nodded, and clenched the controls tight. Tooley double-checked her instruments.

  “Should be getting here soon,” Tooley said. “One-hundred ticks, or less.”

  “Well, this sounds like a valiant last stand,” Ghost said. “I’ll send a cleanup crew along with the escort vessels.”

  “Great,” Kamak said. “Since these might be my last words: thanks for not being as much of an asshole as you could’ve been, Ghost.”

  “Same to you,” Ghost said, after considerable delay.

  “Thirty ticks,” Tooley said.

  “Please spare us the countdown,” Kamak said. Tooley obliged. The rest of the wait played out in dead silence, until the vessel on approach slowed and finally came into visual range. On the opposite end of the universe, the Ghost stayed on the line and waited, expecting to hear the sounds of cursing and explosions any second. He ended up waiting a lot more than thirty ticks.

  “Ghost? Still there?”

  “Still here, Kamak,” Ghost said. To his surprise, Ghost was relieved to hear the voice again. “Should I cancel that cleanup crew, then?”

  “No. Send them. Send the escort vessels. Send the entire fucking fleet, everything you got. Now.”

  Ghost stared down at his datapad. There was an edge to Kamak’s voice that sent a chill down his spine.

  “What is it? Is it Kor?”

  “It’s worse,” Kamak said, and it baffled them all that it was true. He glared out the cockpit window at the circular vessel slowly rotating in front of them.

  “It’s the Horuk.”