Clay tapped her earbud. “They hit the shuttle from orbit. Kinetic weapon fired from that Carnivore we’re fighting. The transponder’s dead. I think the shuttle’s gone.”

We brushed ourselves down.

“What do we do now?” Preston’s voice trembled on the edge of hysteria. He glanced upward, as if expecting to see the heavy cruiser bearing down on him.

Clay took him by the scruff of his neck and marched him to the mouth of the cave. “We get out of sight.” She pushed him up the wall. “And we do it quickly.”

Forty-Eight: Trouble Dog

FORTY-EIGHT

TROUBLE DOG

I hit the dimensional membrane with a slap that would have pancaked a less robust craft. Hull plates buckled. Alarms went off on every console. Plates smashed in the galley, and one of the remaining shuttles broke loose from its moorings and slewed across the internal hangar, wrecking itself and another craft before fetching up against the bulkhead.

Captain Konstanz and the Outward agent were alive but unconscious. Not that it mattered. Let them rest. The captain had given me licence to play this conflict out as I saw fit, and that was exactly what I intended to do.

Two minutes after entering the hypervoid, I dropped back into the universe. My screens turned white. Proximity alarms shrilled, and the external temperature went up so quickly the numbers on the readouts blurred. When they stabilised, they registered a fluctuating value between 3500 and 4000 degrees centigrade—about halfway to the maximum limit of my tolerance.

Metal creaked as it expanded in the heat, and I allowed myself a moment of self-congratulation. My calculations had been correct, and I was now deep within the photosphere of the local sun—a feat of precise navigation to rival any I’d ever heard of.

Plasma raged around me, welling up from the star’s interior in plumes large enough to swallow a dozen planets. Convection cells trembled; lines of magnetic flux whipped and crackled through the miasma, pulling tides of fire in their wake. And all of it burned with an excoriating, cacophonous roar.