The lounge’s vidscreen lit up on its own, showing the view through Willow’s hull cameras. "Danger status one," the ship-soul announced. "Awaiting captain’s orders." Its computer voice sounded sharper than usual. That wasn’t good — voice synthesizers don’t simulate emotion unless it’s really important for people to pay attention.

On the vidscreen, a new ship had popped up between the Jacaranda and Starbase Iris: a ship shaped exactly like Jacaranda itself but painted black with starlike speckles. The paint job looked prettier than the navy’s boring old white, but it sure wouldn’t work as camouflage… especially not at the moment, when the black ship was surrounded by the milky swim of a Sperm-field.

"What the hell’s going on?" Tobit asked. "Civilian vessels shouldn’t come anywhere near… holy shit!"

The strange black ship had just shot two missiles at Jacaranda.

The ships were less than a kilometer apart, so it didn’t take long for the missiles to cross the gap: two flashes of flame and vapor racing toward their target in less than a second. I caught my breath, wondering what would happen when the rockets struck home… but instead of banging straight into Jacaranda’s hull, they angled off to swish close by on either side.

The missiles missed the ship, but snagged Jacaranda’s Sperm-field.

Oh. Now I understood.

The missiles plowed on into empty space, and the Sperm-tail bagged out to stay with them, as if the milky field had got caught on the missiles’ noses. Probably, it had; I guessed that both missiles were using Sperm anchors to latch onto the field and drag it with them. They continued angling off in opposite directions, spreading Jacaranda’s sperm envelope wide, like two hands inside a plastic bag, pushing out hard to make the bag stretch.

At the last second, the milky color of the Sperm-field broke into an unstable glitter of green and blue and gold; then the field popped like a soap bubble, stressed beyond its limits.

The missiles continued on their courses, disappearing into the darkness of space.

So much for Jacaranda’s ability to go FTL. The crew would need twelve hours to generate a new field and get it aligned properly around the hull. That gave the black ship loads of time to do whatever it wanted and still escape without pursuit.

The stranger ship swiveled its nose toward Willow. "Uh-oh," Tobit and I said in unison.

Tobit slammed his helmet back onto his head. Even before he’d locked it in place, he was yelling into the radio, "Benny, evacuate the ship. Don’t ask questions. Now, now, now!" "Do you think they’re going to board us?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "Or they might take Willow in tow and run off with the whole damned ship."

Steal the ship? While I was acting captain? I didn’t want to think what Dad would say about that.

"No more lollygagging," Tobit shouted, grabbing my arm. "We have to get out of here."

He dragged me from the lounge and down the corridor to the nearest evac module. It wasn’t far — in a navy ship, you’re never more than ten seconds from an escape pod. "Get in," he said. "Next stop, Celestia."

"What about you?"

"As soon as you’re gone, I’ll jump out an emergency airlock. There’s one just…"

The floor heaved beneath our feet. I grabbed at something to keep my balance; the "something" was Tobit, who was grabbing me too. "No more time," he growled, shoving me toward the pod. "They’re grappling the ship with tractors."

"They’re really going to steal my ship?"

"York," he said, "it’s not your ship and it’s not your fault. You’re just caught in a High Council fuck-up. Bad enough that this whole crew died… but the Admiralty must have opened itself a whopping security hole that let all the wrong people hear about Willow. Someone smuggled nano aboard. Someone else heard there’s a crewless ship here, ripe for the taking. It’s a grade A extra large chrome-plated cluster fuck, but you aren’t the one responsible. You’ve stepped in someone else’s dog shit, York; scrape it off your shoe and just walk away."

"Can’t I do anything?"

The ship lurched again; I barely managed to stay on my feet. Tobit stumbled and went down on one knee, but scrambled up again fast.

"Yeah, one thing you can do," he said, pushing me all the way into the pod. "Ship-soul, attend," he called. "Captain is abandoning ship and invoking Captain’s Last Act."

The computer voice came over the speakers outside the pod. "Captain York confirms Captain’s Last Act?"

"Say ‘confirm,’ " Tobit whispered to me.

"Confirm," I said.

"Captain repeats confirmation?" the computer asked.

"Repeat confirmation," I said. "Confirm, confirm, confirm. And, umm… immediate forced landing emergency."

The corridor snapped completely black. I couldn’t even see Tobit in front of me in his bright white tightsuit.

"What did I just do?" I asked him.

"The ship-soul EMP’d itself," he replied. His voice wasn’t piped over the speakers now; it came out unamplified and muffled, straight from his tightsuit. "Every data storage on board just got fried with a massive electric pulse," he said. "As of now, Willow is a brainless chunk of scrap metal. The people stealing this baby won’t get any navy codes or records…"

Something went clang in front of me. The next second, lights came on inside the escape pod and I could see the hatch had slammed closed, shutting me off from Tobit back in the corridor. The pod had computers of its own, and I guess they’d detected the main ship-soul dropping off-line. The evac module had decided to go automatic.

"Ejecting in ten seconds," a computer voice announced.

There were no seats or controls. The interior of the pod was just a room-sized cube, five meters on each edge, with grab-bars stuck into the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling. You could jam all of Willow’s crew into a single one of the modules… and now that I thought of it, the whole crew was here. Me.

I dropped to the floor, wrapped my arms around the two nearest bars and tucked my feet under two more. "Five seconds," the computer voice said.

Overhead, a vidscreen turned on: it covered half the ceiling and showed the outside of the ship. The idea must have been to let people in the pod watch what was happening, rather than making them wait blindly in a closed capsule. That was fine if you wanted to see what was coming for you. Me, I was more inclined to close my eyes; but that would be uncaptainly, so I kept watching the screen.

The black ship had lined itself straight in front of Willow, shooting a snaky red beam back at the bulb on our prow. The beam was just starting to pull our ship forward, drawing us up toward the stranger’s long Sperm-tail. It wouldn’t take long to get us inside; once something starts entering a Sperm-field, it gets sucked in really fast.

Meanwhile, a few klicks away, Jacaranda was just beginning to move in our direction. The crew over there must have been caught totally off guard; they didn’t even have their real-space engines warmed up. Most ships don’t, not when they’re inside their Sperm envelope — no point burning fuel if you don’t have to. So Jacaranda was going to be slow, slow, slow for a few more minutes. By the time they got up to speed, Willow would probably be nabbed.

Even if Jacaranda got to us in time, I didn’t know what they could do. Navy ships don’t have weapons — the League of Peoples won’t let any ship in the galaxy sail around armed, not with the teeniest bit of killing power. Ships could carry nonlethal things like those missiles that ripped away the Sperm-field; but I doubted if Jacaranda had anything like that ready to hand.