"That sounds good," Creek said. "Thanks, Ned. Now get back to your room."

"Hold on," Leff said. "don't leave yet." He paced quickly to a door a third of the way down the deck and re-emerged almost immediately carrying an object in his hand "Here," he said, handing it to Creek.

"A handgun," Creek said, setting down the Nidu knife and taking the gun.

"An M1911 Colt .45," Leff said. "Or a replica, anyway. Standard issue handgun for U.S. officers for most of me twentieth century. I wear it with my dress uniform. Call it an affectation. But the point is, it works. And I just loaded it: seven bullets in the magazine, one in the chamber. Semi-automatic, just point and shoot. I think you need it more than I do."

"Thank you, Ned," Creek said. "Now, please. Get back to your room." Leff smiled and hurried to his cabin.

"Ready?" Creek said to Robin.

"No," Robin said.

"Great," Creek said. "Here we go." He opened the door, checked for company, men held the door to let Robin hustle through.

Robin had just slipped through the stairwell door of the shuttlebay and Creek was sneaking through the door when Creek's comm signal fired up; its mellow ping carried surprisingly far in me near-empty bay. Creek bit his cheek and fumbled to answer the communicator, dropping the Colt .45 as he did so. It was this clatter that the pilot of me Nidu shuttle, standing bored outside his craft, heard and headed toward, rifle hefted for action.

"Oh, shit," Robin whispered. The two of them were caught in the open; shuttlebays were kept bare as possible to avoid damage to shuttlecraft if me bay doors ever buckled and explosive decompression followed.

The Nidu pilot spotted them and headed toward them, bellowing in Nidu as he did so and jerking his rifle as if to say, Put your hands up. Creek reached into his pants pocket and found the second flash grenade; he activated it and then raised his hands, launching the grenade directly above his head like a miniature shot put, and yelling at Robin to close her eyes as he did the same. Creek could feel the hair on his head crisp as the grenade flared into brilliant light; he knew that every exposed surface on his body had just experienced a very bad sunburn. The Nidu pilot gurgled and grabbed his eyes; Creek opened his, lunged for the Colt .45, and prayed that Leff actually had put a bullet in me chamber.

He had.

"Christ," Creek said to whomever was on the other end of me communicator. "You just about got us killed."

"Creek," Captain Lehane said, not bothering with an apology. "Ned Leff just told me you're planning to take a shuttle to the surface."

"Yeah," Creek said.

"don't," Lehane said. "That Nidu gunship will track you and blast you before you get ten klicks out."

"We can't stay on the ship," Creek said.

"No you can't," Lehane agreed. "But I want you to use a lifepod instead."

"Why?" Creek said.

"We have dozens on the ship," Lehane said. "If I launch them all when you launch, the Nidu will have to track them. You'll have a better chance of making it to the surface."

"That leaves you with no lifepods for anyone else," Creek said.

"It's a risk," Lehane said. "But a calculated one. Each lifepod has its own beacon that connects to the nearest CC network. If we launch the lifepods, some of them will get past the jamming radius and start signaling. Then it becomes harder for the Nidu to pretend we didn't arrive."

"It's a gamble, Captain," Creek said.

"It's better odds than what we have now," Lehane said.

"Where do we go?" Creek said.

"I want you to use the lifepods on the Promenade Deck," Lehane said.

"Give me a fucking break!" Creek said. Robin, who could hear only Creek's side of the conversation, looked over in shock. "That's ten decks up. We nearly got killed three times getting down here. By now they're watching the stairs and elevators both."

"If you use the lifepods on the Promenade Deck, I'll be able to give the Nidu an extra surprise," Lehane said.

"Your surprise won't do us any good if we're dead," Creek said.

"There's a service elevator in the shuttlebay, along the aft wall," Lehane said. "I've unlocked it for you. It can take you up to Promenade Deck into the crew corridors. I can't guarantee they won't be waiting for you, but it seems less likely that they would. I've just turned on the emergency lighting on the Promenade Deck. Follow the nearest lit path to a lifepod. Once you're in a pod I'll program it to land at the Pajmhi communication center. Good enough?"

"Good enough," Creek said.

"Good luck, Creek," Lehane said. Creek closed the communicator, then opened it again and turned the notification signal to "vibrate." No need for another unpleasant surprise.

Creek pointed to the elevator in question. "Our next stop," he said to Robin.

"I thought we were going to take a shuttle," Robin said. "Now we're going back up?"

"The captain thinks we'll be safer using a lifepod. He's going to launch them all and make it hard for them to find us," Creek said.

"We're already here," Robin said. "Why don't we take the Nidu shuttle?"

"Do you read Nidu?" Creek said. "Because I don't. Come on, Robin. We're almost done. We can do this one last thing."

"They're in the elevator," First Mate Aidan Picks told Lehane.

"Good," Lehane said, and turned his attention back to the small bank of monitors in front of him, in which he could see what remained of the Nidu marines pacing through the various decks of the ship. There had been 20 of them, not including their shuttle pilot, when they arrived. Through the monitor banks, Lehane and his bridge crew—all the principals on station because they had come out of n-space—had watched as Creek dispatched six of them; Lehane had heard him shoot the pilot over the communicator. Lehane felt very bad about exposing Creek like that, but it couldn't have been avoided. He needed Creek to get to the lifepods so he could take care of the other marines.

Lehane knew about Creek and Robin Baker since shortly after Ned Leffhad approached him about finding a dress uniform for Creek. Leff was clearly excited about having a "survivor of the 6th" take part in the ceremony; Lehane was skeptical. There weren't enough survivors of the 6th for one of them to randomly pop up under the radar, and certainly not a clearly non-Asian man with a last name of Toshima.

Lehane met with "Toshima" shortly thereafter and tossed the name of a fictional colonel at him to see if he would bite; he didn't. After Toshima left him, Lehane had his security chief Matt Jensen pull up a data feed from the UNE network to find out what he could about the 6th. No Hiroki Toshima. But there was a picture of a Private First Class H. Harris Creek, thinner and younger but unmistakably the same man Lehane had just seen. An actual survivor of the 6th, yes. And a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross. Just not under the name he was using now.

Jensen's digging revealed why: Creek and his female friend were wanted in connection with a shoot-out in a DC area mall, which left four men—men with interesting police records—dead and another couple injured. Creek's friend also appeared to be named in some sort of legal suit by the Nidu government; Jensen didn't go into it but offered the opinion that the two were con artists of some sort. By the time Jensen caught Lehane up with all this, they were already under way to Brjnn, and their schedule was too tight to accommodate an emergency stop to have the two removed. Lehane instructed Jensen to alert authorities at Phoenix colony, their next UNE destination; the two would be discreetly removed from the ship then. Until then, Lehane didn't see why they shouldn't enjoy their vacation. Lehane told Jensen to keep an eye out to make sure the pair didn't try to con any of the passengers, but otherwise let them be.