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  Teesenel and Neevet were two of three major planets in the system, Jalia knew, so their mercenary presence was explainable, but for the Raiders to arrive shortly after they did and hit their jumpship . . .

  “They blew up that Morrin transport to keep you on the jumpship,” Jalia declared, staring Ivara in the eye.

  “Keen deduction. We came to a similar conclusion moments ago.”

  Jalia blew out a hard breath through pressed lips, making a rude sound. “Three top line mercenary units, working together no less, and they have the gall to hit a Gorovan jumpship? Whatever it is you’ve got, someone must want it bad . . . or want to sell it to someone who wants it bad. I half thought the stories of this sort of craziness were exaggerated.”

  “They don’t know what we have,” Ivara said icily. “And for the moment they don’t know where we are. How long that will remain the case, I cannot say.”

  “So let’s get moving. I assume all five of you are still aboard?”

  “Yes.”

  Jalia nodded and headed back to the airlock. Ivara deactivated the hologram and slipped the device into a hidden pocket somewhere beneath her grey robe, then followed the Junta at a distance.

  Jalia ran lightly up the ramp and opened the airlock control panel. She keyed the close sequence and the massive doors jolted once, then began to slowly come together. Jalia walked forward just shy of the doors and looked down the long tunnel that led to the station’s interior. Not a person, machine, or crate was in sight. She waited there, visually confirming that nothing slipped aboard her ship, until the airlock ground closed and locked with a large repetitive thumping sound. As soon as the last beat fell silent she walked off at a brisk pace towards the bridge, with Ivara and Marren following.

  “Where is our next port of call?” the taller Cres asked, removing his helmet and tucking it under his arm as he trailed her.

  “Neevet,” she answered back without looking.

  THE RESOLUTE LEFT the Gorovan mining station without incident and headed further insystem toward Hellis itself, getting enough lateral pull on the surrounding planets to kick the ship into a slingshot maneuver around the star. Using the gravity drive as a sort of tether, Jalia latched onto the star’s gravity and enhanced the pull, enabling a superspeed low orbit that exited on a trajectory to Neevet when the drive disengaged.

  It took another eight hours to get to Neevet, with the Resolute’s drive powering up once again to brake against the planet’s gravitational field. Jalia brought her ship to a standstill in high orbit, then approached the planet at a respectable speed. Diving into low orbit was considered to be rude, flashy, and dangerous . . . three things they didn’t need right now.

  The Junta took an extra slow and steady approach, push/pulling on the planet’s gravity when needed and lining up their approach vector for the rotational speed of the planet to bring the northern continent under them when they eventually hit the atmosphere.

  Using the gravity drive once again, Jalia floated her ship down to the planet’s surface, using her plasma engines to match the rotational speed of the surface and then to navigate across the planet’s cloudless skies. Traveling eighteen keets above the ground, the Resolute crossed the desert landscape until an urban environment replaced the bone dry plains and mountains beneath them. They had just crossed the boundary of Neevet’s third largest city and received an automated navigational beacon ping in response.

  Jalia matched her course to the beacon and followed it across hundreds of keets of thick buildings and tall spires until a vast flat region dotted with ships broke the endless sea of habitats. The city’s main spaceport had more than 2,000 docking platforms, ranging from small pads for local aircraft to massive platforms for high mass starships. The Resolute fell somewhere in between and was appropriately assigned a medium-­sized pad.

  Jalia deactivated the plasma engines and increased her chemical thrusters to full power, slowing their forward momentum and maneuvering about to align the ship with the glowing icons on the surface. There was a small building on the edge of the pad, but if she hit her marks they weren’t going to be in danger of landing on it.

  Once aligned high in the sky, Jalia gently reduced power to her gravity drive and the Resolute began to sink toward the landing platform. Halfway down she keyed for the landing gear and two dozen panels on the underside of her ship slowly opened. Thick, heavy struts extended on angled joints that absorbed the impact of landing. They bent slightly as Jalia deactivated the antigrav technology, but the hydraulics compensated and returned the ship to standard height above the ground, approximately ten meters, or two ketak, as the commerce measurements went.

  Jalia remotely triggered the ventral cargo hatch which sat in the middle of the ship, next to the primary cargo hold and a series of vertical ramps leading to all levels. Next she queried spaceport control on the status of their cargo transfer. She was told that the supply convoy wouldn’t arrive for at least half a day.

  Typical as that was, it didn’t sit well with her, but it wasn’t like they had any choice. Unlike Gorovan, the owner of this cargo was a corporation that used the spaceport for commerce, but they didn’t own it. Thus there wasn’t anyone to deliver the goods to on hand and the truck convoy that was being dispatched would have to cross a significant part of the city before they arrived at the spaceport.

  “Is there a problem?” Ivara asked.

  Jalia sighed. “No . . . we just get to sit on our tails and wait all the while those mercs and who knows who else get closer to tracking us down.”

  “Why then have you opened up the ship?”

  “Well, we can get the cargo off the ship and onto the deck now, but we’ll still have to wait around for the client’s convoy to arrive. It’ll save us some time.”

  The Cres nodded. “We will see to it at once.”

  “Along with me,” Jalia amended. “Three walkers will work faster.”

  Ivara inclined her head slightly. “You won’t have a spotter.”

  “I don’t need one,” she said confidently.

  Ivara cracked a rare smile. “Of course.”

  Jalia slipped her headset on so she could keep in contact with the spaceport and headed down to the cargo hold.

  THE MERCENARY SCOUT watched from afar through an optical scope as the Resolute’s crew unloaded dozens of large shipping crates onto the tarmac. The best the Presca could make out was three crewers operating cargo walkers, but he doubted that was the entirety of the crew. From his position atop a distant control tower he couldn’t see up into the bay of the ship, but he could make out the bottom half of the boarding ramp and the cubical piles of crates being arrayed on the port side.

  Adjusting the scope further, he targeted one of the walkers as it lumbered down the ramp carrying a long rectangular crate more than twice its width. The head of the pilot was visible, and appeared to be a Junta . . . the captain of the ship, according to his files. Her walker passed another heading back up into the ship, and from a side angle the scout saw its pilot was encased in a thin envirosuit.

  That was curious.

  The reptilian Presca clicked its jaw mandibles in interest as it waited for the third walker to exit the ship. A few moments later its large black padded feet came into view and as soon as it cleared the underside of the ship he confirmed that its pilot also wore an envirosuit.

  The Death Head scout flicked its tongue once then backed off from the edge of the tower’s roof, retracting and packing the surveillance scope into a small carrying case. It was time for a closer look at that ship.

  EACH OF THE landing platforms was separated by wide trenches that doubled as roads. There were access ramps for wheeled transports, walkers, and pedestrian travel while the airborne antigrav trucks and transports simply adjusted their altitude controls and drove up and over the edges of the trenches when need be.

  Encased in an optical camouflage
suit, the Death Head scout walked in the shadows along the wall of one of the connective trenches. His suit mimicked the dark shadows cast by a bright white overhead sun adequately, making him invisible to all but the most discerning eye. He walked slowly and purposefully, observing all around him and acting little. The art of skulking was more about patience than guile.

  Eventually the scout got as close to the Junta’s ship as he could within the trench network, so he stopped and waited until the sparse traffic cleared. A few trucks were rumbling by, but once they’d passed his position the Presca gripped the high side wall with special adhesive gloves and began to climb.

  When he approached the edge he reduced his movements to a bare minimum. As his hand crossed from shadow into sunlight, his suit altered accordingly to match the light grey color of the landing platform. A line of color-­change passed over his body as he slid up and on top of the platform, coming fully out of the trench.

  With arms and legs spread wide, the reptilian crawled an inch above the surface. His suit made him indistinguishable from above and only his silhouette would give him away against the skyline, which was minimized by his low profile.

  Sudden movement would also create an increased chance of visibility, so he kept his movements very slow and crawled a few meters in from the edge of the trench. He stopped there, settled on his chest and reached back to the case attached to the small of his back beneath a layer of the optical camouflage material. He pulled out his scope again and set it up on the ground in front of him.

  The walkers were still working, having assembled twenty six stacks of crates and busy with the twenty seventh. If he adjusted his approach line, the nearest of the crates would shield him from view.

  Mentally plotting out his path, he repacked his scope and lifted himself up off the ground ever so slightly, then began creeping laterally, spinning about as he did so. He moved about thirty meters off to his right into the visual deadzone created by one of the crate stacks. Once there, the scout allowed himself a slightly more rapid pace and closed in on the ship.

  WITH HIS GREY suit shifting into the deep reds of the cargo crates, the scout maneuvered from stack to stack, circling around until he was on the far edge opposite the blind side of the ramp and well away from the path of the walkers. Crouching low again, his suit shifted back to the landing platform grey and he crawled up to one of the ship’s giant landing legs, circled around it, and closed on the ramp.

  He reached it without detection, pulling up beneath the angled plate and crouching in the shadows while he stretched. Crawling was natural to his race, but this much was beyond the norm.

  The sound of heavy footsteps was easily audible through the ramp and the Presca mentally counted the interval between one walker’s passing and the next. After a while he got the pattern down, noticing a large dead zone during which two of the walkers were inside, ostensibly loading crates, while the third was out and stacking its.

  The scout waited through another rotation to be sure, then hearing the third walker come down over top of him he moved out to the edge of the ramp and swung up on top of it as the walker stepped off onto the tarmac. He took a quick glance inside as his suit adjusted to the color of the ship.

  All clear.

  Keeping in his low, spider-­like crawl, he moved up the ramp and into the freighter, hugging tight to the wall and standing pressed against it. Distant heavy footsteps became audible as one of the walkers in the hold began its trek up to his level and out onto the tarmac.

  The scout scurried along the wall down the long accessway until he came to a ramp junction. Glad for the additional cover, he slipped onto the dorsal ramp and began searching the interior of the ship.

  Chapter 7

  HAVING RECEIVED WORD from the spaceport that the Felaxix corporate transport convoy was approaching, Jalia waited at the base of the Resolute’s ventral boarding ramp for them to arrive while the Cres went back inside to bring out a pair of walkers to help load the cargo. The transports would probably have their own walkers or hoverlifters with them, but using both would expedite the transfer, and corporate types always liked expediency.

  The first of the long transports lifted up out of a trench on the south side of the ship, which was on the opposite side of the boarding ramp. Jalia heard the slight sound alteration in her headtails and circled around to see the second of the flatbeds rise up and slide onto the tarmac. The operator tower was in the center of the rectangular beds, sitting high over the engine compartment. The lead transport approached head-­on, giving a vertical silhouette that reminded Jalia of the long-­necked dulchak pack animals on her homeworld.

  The third transport rose up in sequence, followed by many more. They formed a long line with uniform intervals. Jalia noticed that some of the flatbeds already had some crates on them.

  She frowned. That wasn’t typical. Based on previous experience, the flatbeds came directly from the corporate warehouses. Sending partially loaded transports meant that more would have to be sent to accommodate the entire cargo . . . and that was very uncorporate-­like.

  Behind Jalia, barely noticeable, the distant steps of the walkers coming from inside the cargo hold stopped.

  The first of the transports swung around to the outside of the stacks of crates, putting them between the flatbeds and the ship with Jalia getting a bad feeling creeping up her spine. They’d left an intentional gap between the staggered clumps of crates for the transports to line up inside to make for easier loading, yet the drivers had chosen to go outside of that, making more distance for the loaders to travel.

  Four of the flatbeds were now behind the crates, out of sight save for their high towers. The others should have held back until the first set was loaded, but instead they drove up through the gap between crates and parked there. Then the next set pulled up directly between the crates and the ship.

  Jalia’s hand dipped down to the holster on her left hip, brushing against it gently.

  Suddenly there was a blur of commotion behind her, barely audible but for a mass of footsteps. Four of the Cres ran down the ramp and circled around it, with Ivara running up to Jalia and pulling her aside as dozens of armed mercs swarmed around the corners of the crate stacks.

  “Kitja,” she spat as the Cres pulled her over to one of the Resolute’s landing legs and took cover as the mercenaries opened fire with a hail of red and green lachar blasts.

  “Stay down, Junta. We’ll deal with this.”

  Jalia noticed that Ivara had a chest plate on instead of the envirosuit. Her dark blue eyes scanned the area intently, then suddenly her heavy vest activated, seemingly on its own, and expanded across the rest of her body. Within two dek she was covered in a full suit of combat armor and dove out of cover, firing a small handheld lachar as she rolled headfirst onto the ground. She leapt out of the somersault and into a run, firing an extremely fast salvo of tiny gold lachar bursts.

  Jalia pulled out her trusty pistol and ducked around to the opposite side of the landing leg, taking a quick peek. Two mercs were on the ground with another five firing at Ivara and many more behind them taking what cover they could or simply dropping to a knee.

  Taking a quick breath, Jalia leaned out of cover and shot one of the yellow-­adorned Presca in the chest. Her orange shot made him stumble backwards, but failed to penetrate his armor. She got off another two quick shots that missed before ducking back behind the landing leg and circling around to the other side. She knelt down on her left knee, her shoulder pressed against the ship’s leg, then stepped out on her right side and fired another two shots into the same Presca as he was getting back to his feet. One hit his arm, another clipped the hole in his chest armor and took him down for keeps.

  Jalia pushed back with her right leg and fell backwards onto her tail behind cover.

  “Ouch,” she moaned, then fell silent as she listened intently. There was so much gunfire that it was hard to hear, b
ut . . .

  A grenade explosion jarred her teeth together. It had come from the other side of the landing leg, and fairly close if she had to guess by the brief wave of concussion-­induced numbness washing over her body.

  Jalia rolled onto her knee and up to her feet, then carefully looked back around the other side of the ship’s leg. Two mercs were dead and . . . in pieces. There was a black smear on the ground not far from where her downed Presca lay. She glanced up over her shoulder and saw some small debris tears in the landing leg.

  “Quit blowing up my ship!” she yelled, taking a potshot at another merc farther away.

  MARREN HAD COME down the ramp in the face of over a dozen mercs, with more coming around the edge of the crates. The Cres had sensed them coming, for there were far too many minds for empty trucks. Already activating his battle armor, he ran out of the ship and took aim at the horde just after telepathically sending an impulse into the lot that someone had appeared on the tarmac to their left out of nowhere.

  As they reacted to the phantom fighter, Marren unleashed a quick semi-­auto burst into the group. The first three-­round lachar spurt caught a merc in the head, the second hit another in the leg, the third dead center in the first one’s chest, and the fourth landed on another’s neck. By then Marren was halfway to them, sending another mental misdirection to the group.

  Some took the bait, others didn’t, having seen him and the threat he posed. The golden-­armored Cres pulled a small knobby sphere from his hip and sidearmed it towards the group as several lachar blasts hit his extremities. His armor’s shields held firm and he changed direction in a flash, dashing toward the nearest truck for cover.

  The grenade exploded in the midst of the merc horde, killing and/or scattering the lot of them. Marren appeared over top of the truck briefly, firing six more three-­round bursts, then disappeared behind a stack of crates.

  More mercs emerged from their hiding places on the trucks, some of which barely made it out of their crates before they were shot down. The Cres moved with such speed and superior reflexes that they were hard to track, even in the open, with many of the mercs’ shots missing wide or over their heads. The armored soldiers showed considerably more flexibility and agility than any other known race, and they were using it to dodge most of the mercs’ fire . . . or so it seemed. Half of their missed shots were due to slight telepathic nudges, with the rest due to their impressive mobility.