“I can’t begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am, sir.” It was the truth; Quinn couldn’t tell him, but only because he wasn’t really sorry at all. It was a botched job, part of the game, and everyone knew it. Unfortunately, people at Ganz’s level of the game, Quinn had learned, rewrote its rules to suit themselves whenever they saw fit.

This, apparently, was going to be one of those times.

Ganz sat up, stood, and walked slowly toward Quinn. “Let me tell you how you’re going to make this right,” he said. “You owe me a debt. Not money—a favor. A job to be named later. When I ask it of you, you’ll do it, no excuses.” He stood mere centimeters away from Quinn, towering over him, his dark eyes glaring down with cruel intensity. “Do we ‘reach,’ Mr. Quinn?”

“Sure. How can I refuse?”

“You can’t.” Leaving his warning implied, Ganz turned and padded casually back to his mountain of comfort. Reclining into its lush embrace, he snapped his fingers, and a pair of lissome young women—one human, the other Deltan—sprang to his sides and began doting affectionately and silently on him.

Choking back the bile of his envy, Quinn stood and waited patiently for his dismissal. After a minute or so frolicking with his sylphlike courtesans, Ganz made an exaggerated show of noticing that Quinn was still there. “One last thing,” he said. “In case you think you’re getting off easy…you’re not.”

Oh, no.

Closing his eyes, Quinn braced himself, and the beating commenced. A sweep kick took his legs out from under him, dropping him on his back. Punches rained down, battering his face and knocking the breath out of him with a few well-placed gut shots. Someone pulled him to his feet and held him steady, but he knew not to say “thank you”; he had taken enough stompings in his life to know they were propping him up only to use him as a punching bag. His vision was hazy and bloodred, so all he saw before each new jab or cross to his head was a dark blur. The hands gripping his arms released him, but he didn’t get his hopes up; it just meant whoever had been behind him was moving out of the way, for the assailant who now kicked him in the groin. Nausea swelled inside him, and he dropped to his knees, which probably was very helpful for whoever it was who pistol-whipped him across his temple.

He flopped sideways onto the floor, a thick stream of bloody spittle gushing from his split lip and loosened teeth. Blinking slowly, he fought to see through the heavy swelling around his eye sockets. He recognized the bespoke white fabric of the pant leg standing in front of him.

Overcoming the hideous pain in the vertebrae of his neck, Quinn turned his head slightly and looked up at Zett. “Nice shoes,” he gurgled, causing red-tinged saliva bubbles to froth over the corner of his mouth.

“Thank you,” Zett said. Then he pulled back his foot, snapped it forward, and broke two of Quinn’s ribs.

“That’s enough,” Ganz said, and the beating ceased. Morikmol gingerly lifted Quinn’s disheveled, sagging bulk into a crude facsimile of a standing position. He turned him toward Ganz, not that Quinn could see the Orion boss—or anything else right now, for that matter. Ganz’s foghorn of a voice resonated in the tense hush. “If anyone should ask…”

“I slipped in the shower,” Quinn said.

“Very good…. We’ll be in touch.”

Borne away in the hands of the Tarmelite, Quinn’s exit from Ganz’s ship was a swish-pan of blurred vision and an ordeal of pain. The corridor lighting was harsh and bright after the dim, smoky haze of the Orion’s lair, but squinting stung his swollen eyes. He was actually grateful when his chin struck the deck back in Vanguard’s docking wheel, and he heard footsteps recede back inside the Omari-Ekon. The hatch scraped shut. I’m alone, and I’m still alive, he realized. It took a few moments for him to believe it. He rolled slowly onto his stomach and drew one shallow breath after another.

He crawled forward. Every muscle and joint burned. When his arms and his legs and his back all finally gave out, he slumped onto the deck for several minutes, then peeked around himself to gauge his progress. To his dismay, he had moved less than twenty meters. Marshaling the atrophied vestiges of his youthful survival instinct, he forced himself to put one hand in front of the other and go on dragging himself forward.

It’s a long way to the bar, he told himself. Keep crawling.

Diego Reyes gazed out into the endless void beyond the main window in Dr. Fisher’s quarters, and he wished for a moment that he could just lose himself in all that comfortingly silent darkness. “It’s just been one of those weeks,” he said.

Behind him, the doctor sat on his sofa, sipping at the gently spiced, half-decaf coffee he had brewed for the commodore’s impromptu, late-evening visit. “Meenok’s disease is about as bad as it gets,” Fisher said. “I wish I could put a silver lining on your mother’s situation, but…well, I’m just damn sorry, Diego.”

Reyes glanced at Fisher’s reflection, half-spectral against the stars on the other side of the transparent aluminum window. The older man’s heavy-lidded eyes projected serenity. It was an emotion that Reyes could only envy this evening.

“I spent the last four days thinking about how awful it must be to get a death sentence like that,” Reyes said. “To have a few months to contemplate the end of your life…. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Then we lost the Bombay.”

“Two months or two minutes, doesn’t make much difference,” Fisher said. “No matter how ready we think we are for death, no one’s ever ready. Not really.”

“Maybe not. But there’s a big difference between getting a terminal illness and getting killed in an ambush.”

“You sure about that? Are there degrees of dead?”

“I can’t take revenge on Meenok’s disease. I can hunt down the bastards who attacked the Bombay.”

“Hang on, Diego. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.” Over the years, Reyes had learned to heed Dr. Fisher’s advice. The old physician, despite being an irascible curmudgeon, was known to dispense some fairly sound philosophy in his spare time. Regardless, tonight his notes of caution sounded naïve.

Reyes’s voice simmered with anger. “It was a milk run, Zeke. Simple as it gets. Except they aren’t coming back.”

Fisher leaned forward with a soft groan of effort and rested his mug on the antique cedar coffee table. “That’s the job,” the doctor said, the gritty edge of his drawl a bit more pronounced than usual. “Sometimes things go wrong. But it doesn’t matter how many times life knocks you down; what matters is how many times you get back up.”

“Spare me the pep talk, will you? I know risk is part of the equation,” Reyes said, the twin demons of doubt and regret wrestling in his gut. “But the Ravanar system was well charted. No anomalies.” In one gulp, he downed the rest of his own mug of black, unsweetened coffee. “If this wasn’t an attack, why is my ship missing?”

Fisher folded his hands together. “A lot can happen to a starship, even under the best of circumstances. There’s still a lot of things in this galaxy we don’t understand.”

“Here’s what I understand,” Reyes said, turning away from the window. “A good ship with a great captain isn’t coming home.” He stalked into the kitchenette and poured himself another cup of coffee. A faint scent of cinnamon and nutmeg rose on its wisps of steam. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question on the table is, who did it? The Klingons or the Tholians?”

“Why not declare war on both? Could save time later.”

Reyes scowled at the doctor as he picked up his mug and gave it a cooling puff of breath. “Ravanar’s a long way from the Klingon border, and we’ve had Endeavour patrolling that for a few weeks now. But the Tholians haven’t shown any interest in the Taurus Reach, so I can’t figure out why they’d do this.”