Sure, the Klikiss Torch at Oncier had been a big, dumb mistake, and she felt sorry for the hydrogue casualties... but ithad been an accident, and Old King Frederick, the Hansa, and everybody else had tried to make amends. The drogues wanted no part of it. Damned pissy alien troublemakers.

A few scattered suns hung close and bright, places she had never visited, names she only had seen on starmaps. Crenna was far out into the fuzzy boundaries of where the Ildiran Empire petered out and the Hanseatic League had barely expanded. The system was a set of coordinates centered on an unremarkable sunspot-speckled orange star that bathed the habitable colony planet in a warm glow.

She thought about Branson Roberts, recalling the good times with exaggerated fondness, conveniently forgetting the arguments they'd had during their tempestuous marriage. She was definitely looking forward to seeing him, and she was ready for this assignment: TheCuriosity 's hold was full of medicines as well as substantial supplies for a long-term stay on Rheindic Co. After this mission, perhaps she'd remain on the Chairman's approved list for odd jobs. After lean years and lost customers, things were finally looking up.

Then the hydrogues ruined her celebration again.

As she aligned an approach vector on the fringes of the Crenna system, her sensors detected large ships suddenly looming in the vicinity. The screens went wild, and she activated all emergency systems. Like spiked balls ripped from an ogre's club, five giant alien spheres hurtled through space, intent on a kill.

Rlinda instantly cut all power to theCuriosity 's engines. Surrounded by cold blackness, the ship tumbled without stabilizers, leaving a weak but unmistakable signature-if the deep-core aliens were bothering to look for her.

"What the hell are you doing out here?" She called up her dossier from the Hansa starmaps, verifying what she already knew. The Crenna system did not even have a gas-giant planet.There shouldn't be any hydrogues here!

She vented a belch of exhaust to change direction, drifting back out of the system, hoping the deep-core aliens had not detected her.

She could not recall hearing of any drogue attacks on individual human spacecraft, but she didn't particularly relish the idea of becoming the first statistic. Earlier, Rlinda had wanted to moon the enemy out the porthole; now that she had the opportunity, it did not seem the wisest course of action.

Her ship hung there, exposed. "Never mind me," she said like a prayer. "Nobody out here but us asteroids." Space around her was alarmingly empty, with barely a handful of dust flecks to hide behind.

But the hydrogue vessels paid no attention to theCuriosity .