Instantly he was a giant standing in space.

The six worlds and countless moons and nascent, burning orbital forests of Lucifer spread out at his belt level. Far beyond the burning sun, the six Ouster motes balanced on tiny fusion tails. Gabriel’s tail was much longer; Raphael’s the longest yet, its brilliance rivaling the central star’s. Mother Captain Stone stood waiting a few giant’s paces from de Soya.

“Federico,” she said, “what in Christ’s name are you doing?”

De Soya had considered not answering Gabriel’s hail. If it would have offered them a few more minutes, he would have stayed silent. But he knew Stone. She would not hesitate. On a separate tactical channel, he glanced at the translation plot. Thirty-six minutes to shift point.

Captain! Four missile launches detected! Translating… now! It was WHIZZO Commander Shan on the secure conduction line.

Father Captain de Soya felt sure that he had not visibly jumped or reacted in front of Mother Captain Stone in tactical. On his own bone line, he subvocalized, It’s all right, Carel. I can see them on tac. They’ve translated toward the Ouster ships. To Stone, he said on tactical, “You’ve launched against the Ousters.”

Stone’s face was tight even in simlight. “Of course. Why haven’t you, Federico?” Rather than answer, de Soya stepped closer to the central sun and watched the missiles emerge from Hawking drive immediately in front of the six Ouster torchships. They detonated within seconds: two fusion, followed by two broader plasma. All of the Ousters had their defensive containment fields to maximum—an orange glow in tactical sim—but the close-range bursts overloaded all of them. The images went from orange to red to white and then three of the ships simply ceased to exist as material objects. Two became scattered fragments tumbling toward the now infinitely distant translation points.

One torchship remained intact, but its containment field dropped away and its fusion tail disappeared. If anyone aboard had survived the blast effects, they were now dead of the sleet storm of undeflected radiation that was tearing through the ship.

“What are you doing, Federico?” repeated Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya knew that Stone’s first name was Halen. He chose not to make his part of the conversation personal. “Following orders, Mother Captain.”

Even in tactsim, Stone’s expression was dubious. “What are you talking about, Father Captain de Soya?” Both knew that the conversation was being recorded. Whoever survived the next few minutes would have a record of the exchange.

De Soya kept his voice steady.

“Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship tightbeamed us with a change of orders ten minutes before the flagship translated. We are carrying out those orders.”

Stone’s expression was impassive, but de Soya knew that she was subvocalizing her XO to confirm that there had been a tightbeam transmission between Uriel and Raphael at that time.

There had been. But the substance of it had been trivial: updating rendezvous coordinates for the Tau Ceti System.

“What were the orders, Father Captain de Soya?”

“They were eyes-only, Mother Captain Stone. They do not concern the Gabriel.” On the bone circuit, he said to WHIZZO Shan, Lock on death beam coordinates and give me the actuator as discussed. A second later he felt the tactsim weight of an energy weapon in his right hand. The gun was invisible to Stone, but perfectly tactile to de Soya.

He tried to make his hand on the butt of the weapon look relaxed as his finger curled around the invisible trigger. De Soya could tell from the casual way that Mother Captain Stone’s arm hung free from her body that she was also carrying a virtual weapon. They stood about three meters apart in tactsim space. Between them, Raphael’s long fusion tail and Gabriel’s shorter pillar of flame climbed toward chest height from the plane of the ecliptic. “Father Captain de Soya, your new translation point will not take you to Tau Ceti System as ordered.”

“Those orders were superseded, Mother Captain.” De Soya was watching his former first officer’s eyes. Halen was always good at concealing her emotions and intentions. He had lost to her in poker on more than one occasion on their old torchship, Balthasar.

“What is your new destination, Father Captain?”

Thirty-three minutes to shift point.

“Classified, Mother Captain. I can tell you this—Raphael will be rejoining the task force in Tau Ceti System after our mission is completed.”

With her left hand, Stone rubbed her cheek.

De Soya watched the curled finger of her right hand. She would not have to raise the invisible handgun to trigger the death beam, but it was human instinct to aim the firearm at one’s opponent.

De Soya hated deathbeams and he knew that Stone did as well. They were cowardly weapons: banned by Pax Fleet and the Church until this expeditionary force incursion. Unlike the old Hegemony-era deathwands that actually cast a scythelike beam of neural disruption, no coherent projection was involved in the ship-to-target deathbeam. Essentially, the powerful Gideon-drive accumulators extended a C-plus distortion of space-time within a finite cone. The result was a subtle twisting of the real-time matrix—similar to a failed translation into the old Hawking-drive space—but more than enough to destroy the delicate energy dance that was a human brain.

But however much Stone held the Pax Fleet officer’s hatred of deathbeams, it made sense for her to use it now. The Raphael represented a staggering investment of Pax funds: her first goal would be to stop the crew from stealing it without damaging the ship. Her problem, however, was that killing the crew with deathbeams probably would not stop Raphael from translating, depending upon how much of the spinup had been preprogrammed by her crew. It was traditional for a captain to make the actual translation manually—or at least to be ready to override the ship’s computer with a deadman switch—but Stone had no assurance that de Soya would follow tradition.

“Please let me speak to Commander Liebler,” said Mother Captain Stone.

De Soya smiled. “My executive officer is attending to duties.” He thought, So Hoag was the spy. This is the confirmation we needed.

Gabriel could not catch them now, not even by accelerating to six hundred gravities herself.

Raphael would have reached translation requirements before the other ship could get within tow range. No, to stop them, Stone would have to kill the crew and then disable the ship by using the last of her physical arsenal to overload Raphael’s external containment fields. If she was wrong—if de Soya was acting under last-minute orders—she would almost certainly be court-martialed and expelled from Pax Fleet.

If she did nothing, and de Soya was stealing one of the Pax’s archangels, Stone would be court-martialed, expelled, excommunicated, and almost certainly executed.

“Federico,” she said softly, “please reduce thrust so that we can match velocities. You can still follow orders and spin up to your secret coordinates. I ask only that I board the Raphael, and confirm that everything is all right before you translate.”

De Soya hesitated. He could not use the guise of orders for his precipitous departure under six hundred gravities, since wherever Raphael ended up, there would be two days of slow resurrection for the crew before the mission could continue. He watched Stone’s eyes while also checking the tiny image of Gabriel on its three-hundred-gravity pillar of white fire.

She might try overloading his fields with a salvo of her remaining conventional weaponry. De Soya had no wish to return missile or lance fire: a vaporized Gabriel was not acceptable. He was now a traitor to Church and state, but he had no intention of becoming a true-death murderer. The deathbeams it had to be then. “All right, Halen,” he said easily. “I’ll tell Hoag to drop to two-hundred-g’s long enough for you to come alongside.” He turned his head as if concentrating on issuing bone-channel orders. His hand must have twitched. Stone’s did as well, the invisible handgun rising a bit as her finger tightened on the trigger.