Again, I used the flashlight in the left sleeve of my survival suit. A quick tug at the material, and the beam stabbed out. Far away across the seemingly endless expanse of floor, I saw its faint and diffuse circle of light spread against a distant wall. I waved my arm around and began to get a sense of the space I was in. The room was circular, and around thirty metres in diameter. A domed ceiling vaulted overhead, so high my light couldn’t reach its apex. The floor looked polished and reflected the beam. Strangely, the place put me in mind of a ballroom, after the tables and chairs had been packed away and the dancers all left for the night.

There appeared to be another door on the opposite side, so I started walking towards it. If the breeze I had been following came from anywhere, it would be there. My footsteps echoed, and so I tried to walk as quietly as I could. Somehow, it seemed wrong to break a silence that might have endured for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

I was less than a quarter of the way across the floor when I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

I was being watched.

I spun around, and—

* * *

Another ship dropped off the tactical grid, obliterated by a shower of pin-sized antimatter warheads. In the war room of her Scimitar, the Righteous Fury, Captain Annelida Deal uttered a venomous curse. The Outward ships were putting up more of a fight than she had anticipated, determined to protect their forward command post on the planet below. If she could only get past them, locate the bunker where the conference was taking place, and drop a decent-sized warhead of her own, the war might be over. At one stroke, she would have fulfilled her orders, which were to decapitate the enemy’s command structure, leaving its forces in a state of vulnerable disarray.

Intelligence projections had suggested an easy in-and-out operation. The Outward had gone for a minimal fleet presence, hoping not to attract attention. In theory, she should have been able to sweep them aside with ease. But these bastards were putting up more of a fight than anyone—maybe even they themselves—could have guessed, and the Conglomeration forces had already lost a couple of frigates and a light cruiser. A dirty smoke trail showed where the cruiser had fallen through the atmosphere, shedding debris and sparks, until it broke up over the night side of Pelapatarn, scattering wreckage across a wide swathe of ocean.

Alarms rang through the ship. More torpedoes were coming in.

In the war room, Captain Deal clung to the edge of the tactical display table. Around her, the hologram faces of her lieutenants were nervous and grim as they awaited her response.