The Lady Macbeth ’s bridge was completely silent as Terrance Smith’s voice came out of the AV pillars.

“Oh, Jesus,” Joshua moaned. “This is all we need.”

“It looks like Datura and Gramine are preparing to jump,” Sarha said. “Sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels are retracting.” She frowned. “Most of them, anyway. Their thrust is very erratic. They should be above the five-thousand-kilometre gravity-field boundary in another four minutes.”

“This invasion force is too big, isn’t it,” Joshua said. “We’re not going to save Lalonde, not with what we’ve got.”

“Looks that way,” Dahybi said in a subdued tone.

“Right then.” Joshua’s mind was immediately full of trajectory graphics. A whole range of possible jump coordinates to nearby inhabited star systems popped up.

You’ll be abandoning Kelly, a voice in his head said.

It’s her choice.

But she didn’t know what was happening.

He instructed the flight computer to retract the thermo-dump panels. Fully extended, the panels couldn’t withstand high-gee acceleration. And if he was going to run, he wanted to do it fast.

“As soon as Ashly returns we’re leaving,” he announced.

“What about the merc team?” Warlow asked. “They are dependent on us knocking out the invader’s bases.”

“They knew the risks.”

“Kelly is with them.”

Joshua’s mouth tightened into a hard line. The crew were looking at him with a mixture of sympathy and concern.

“I’m thinking of you, too,” he said. “The invaders are coming up here after us. I can’t order you to stay in these circumstances. Jesus, we gave it our best shot. There isn’t going to be any mayope again. That’s all we ever really came for.”

“We can make one attempt to pick them up,” Sarha said. “One more orbit. A hundred minutes isn’t going to make much difference.”

“And who’s going to tell Ashly he has to go down there again? The invaders will know he’s coming down for a pick-up.”

“I’ll pilot the spaceplane down,” Melvyn said. “If Ashly doesn’t want to.”

“She’s my friend,” Joshua said. “And it’s my spaceplane.”

“If there’s any trouble in orbit, then we’ll need you, Joshua,” Dahybi said. The slightly built node specialist was uncharacteristically firm. “You’re the best captain I’ve ever known.”

“This is both melodramatic and unnecessary,” Warlow said. “You all know that Ashly will pilot it.”

“Yes,” Joshua said.

“Joshua!” Melvyn shouted.

But Joshua’s neural nanonics were already feeding him an alarm. The gravitonic distortion warning satellites were recording nine large gaps in space being forcibly opened.

Thirty-five thousand kilometres above Lalonde, the voidhawks from Meredith Saldana’s 7th Fleet squadron had arrived.

An electronic warfare technique that can knock out power circuits as well as processors? What the hell have we come up against?

A single gleam of bright pale green light shone up into the lounge through the inspection window in the middle of the floor hatch. There was movement below.

“Erick, what’s happening?” André Duchamp datavised.

The channel to the lounge’s net processor was thick with interference. Erick’s neural nanonics had to run a discriminator program to make any sense of the captain’s signal.

“We’re getting power drop-outs all over the ship!” Madeleine called.

Erick pushed off from the ladder, and grasped the floor hatch’s handle to steady himself. Very gingerly he edged his face over the fifteen centimetre diameter window and directly into the beam of light. A second later he was airborne, arms and legs cycling madly as a twisted shout burst from his lips. He hit the ceiling. Bounced. Grabbed at the ladder as his body spasmed in reaction.

Erick had looked into hell. It was occupied by goblinesque figures with hideous bone faces, long, reedy limbs, large arthritis-knobbed hands. They dressed in leather harnesses sewn together with gold rings. A dozen at least, boiling out of the airlock tube. Grinning with tiny pointed teeth.

Three of them had clung to Bev, yellow talon fingers slashing rents in his ship-suit. His head had been flung back, mouth open in black horror as the abdominal gashes spewed entrail strands of translucent turquoise jelly. And suicide-terror shone in his eyes.

“Did you see that?” Erick wailed.

“See what? Merde ! The net is screwed, our databuses are glitched. I’m losing all control.”

“Dear God, they’re xenocs. They’re fucking xenocs!”

“Erick, enfant , dear child, calm down.”

“They’re killing him! They love it!”

“Calm! You are an officer on my ship. Now calm. Report!”

“There’s twelve—fifteen of them. Humanoid. They’ve got Bev. Oh, God, they’re chopping him to pieces.” Erick shifted a stored sedative program into primary mode, and immediately felt his breathing regularize. It seemed heartless, callous even, wrapping Bev’s suffering away behind an artificial cliff of binary digits. But he needed to be calm. Bev would understand.

“Are they heavily armed?” André asked.

“No. No visible weapons. But they must have something in the spaceplane, that light I saw—”

All six electronically operated bolts on the floor hatch thudded back together. The metallic bang rang clear across the lounge.

“God . . . André, they just cracked the hatch’s codelock.” He stared at it, expecting the manual bolts to slide open.

“But none of the systems processors are working in that capsule!”

“I know that! But they cracked it!”

“Can you get out of the lounge?”

Erick turned to the ceiling hatch and datavised the code at it. The bolts remained stubbornly in place. “The hatch won’t respond.”

“Yet they can open it,” André said.

“We can cut through it,” Desmond Lafoe suggested.

“Our hatches and the capsule decking have a monobonded carbon layer sandwiched in,” Erick replied. “You’d never get a fission blade through that stuff.”

“I can use a laser.”

“That will allow them into the other capsules, and the bridge,” André said. “I cannot permit that.”

“Erick’s trapped in there.”

“They will not take my ship.”

“André—” Madeleine said.

“Non. Madeleine, Desmond, both of you into the lifeboats. I will stay. Erick, I am so sorry. But you understand. This is my ship.”

Erick thumped the ladder, grazing his knuckles. This life-support capsule’s lifeboats were accessed from the lower deck. “Sure.” You murdering pirate bastard. What the fuck do you know about honour?

Someone started hammering on the floor hatch.

They’ll be through soon, Erick thought, monobonded carbon or not. Count on it.

“Call Smith for help,” Desmond said. “Hell, he’s got five thousand troops on the Gemal , armed and itching to kill.”

“It will take time.”

“You got an alternative?”

Erick looked round the lounge, inventorying everything in sight—cabins, lockers filled with food and clothes, emergency equipment cubicles. All he had was a laser pistol.

Think!

Open the floor hatch and pick them off one at a time as they come through?

He aimed the laser at a cabin door, and pressed the trigger stud. A weak pink beam stabbed out, then flickered and died. Several small blisters popped and crackled where it had struck the composite.

“Bloody typical,” he said out loud.

Look round again. Come on, there must be something. Those dreary months spent on CNIS initiative courses. Adapt, improvise. Do something.

Erick dived across the intervening space to a wall of lockers, catching a grab loop expertly. There wasn’t much in the emergency cubicle: medical nanonics, pressure patches, tools, oxygen bottles and masks, torch, processor blocks with ship’s systems repair instructions, fire extinguishers, hand-held thermal sensor. No spacesuit.

“Nobody said it was going to be easy.”