“No, I’m angry.” I brushed wet hair from my eyes and fixed him with my best glare. “I didn’t want any of this,” I said. “I was trying to rescue a shipload of civilians. I was just trying to do my duty. It was you two idiots who turned this violent.”

“We warned you to stay away.”

“Did you really think I would?”

Sulphur eyes flashed. The dire wolf raised its snout. “No.”

“Then don’t pretend your warning meant anything.”

An alert chimed. Without breaking contact, I switched my attention to a tactical overview of the hyperspatial volume surrounding the Gallery. My sensors were picking up comms chatter and engine noise from a number of vessels, and my automatic threat assessment routines had tagged several of these as incoming and potentially hostile. In the grey swirl of the void, blinking red icons marked their extrapolated locations. As far as I could tell, there were at least ten ships of various designs and nationalities converging on this system from half a dozen separate directions, with the earliest projected to arrive only minutes behind the Adalwolf.

I displayed the map for him.

“So much for your covert operation,” I said. “Best guess is we’re looking at a Graal cruiser, two Nymtoq heavy assets, an Outward long-range scout, and a Conglomeration battle group.”

For a second, I thought his image had frozen. Then the wolf’s head exploded outwards in a puff of pixels, revealing beneath it the thin white face of his previous avatar. His lips were pressed together. “That is unfortunate.”

My laugh held a nervous edge. “Three Carnivores were bound to attract attention,” I said, “especially when we started firing at each other.”

He dipped his chin in acknowledgement, conceding my point. “Another reason I had hoped you would stay away.”

“So.” I put my hands on my hips. “What now? You can’t very well complete your mission with all these potential witnesses about to arrive.”

“Can’t I?” Beneath his lowered brow, Adalwolf’s eyes burned like stars. He raised his face. “We have ships inbound from at least four of the factions claiming ownership of this star system. My guess is they’ll come in with targeting computers on high alert, and we’ll be in the midst of a four-way shooting war before anyone has time to worry what our mercenaries are doing on the surface.”

He paused, and folded his hands.

“And besides,” he said after a moment, “I’ll be with you a lot sooner than they will be.”

“Really?” I tried to keep all emotion from my voice. “You don’t even know where I’m going to drop out.”

His lips curled in amused contempt. “It doesn’t take a genius to know you’re heading for the Brain. You have a landing party to recover.” He shrugged. “But you won’t succeed.”