I tried to look defiant. With my torpedoes gone and my armour compromised, all I had to fall back on now was my ability to bluff. “What,” I asked with all the bravado I could muster, “makes you think that?”

Unimpressed, he pulled himself up to his full height and his pupils blazed. “Because,” he said, “I am only a few seconds behind you.”

Fifty-Nine: Sal Konstanz

FIFTY-NINE

SAL KONSTANZ

The combat alarm frayed the stillness of the bridge. Laura Petrushka’s head had been lolling forward as she dozed against her straps, lulled by a combination of painkillers and nervous exhaustion. Now, I saw her jerk awake at her console, her professional reflexes responding to the siren by snapping her to attention before her conscious mind had time to properly wake and assess the situation.

She blinked at me. “Incoming?”

“The ship thinks so.”

“But we’re still in higher dimensional space.”

“Yeah.” I could feel the pulse at the back of my throat. “But we’re dropping out in half a minute.”

She turned to the forward screen and frowned at the mists swirling before the Trouble Dog’s prow. “And we’re expecting a rough reception?”

I tried to swallow but my mouth was too dry. “The ship says the other Carnivore’s right on our ass.”

Laura grimaced.

“What’s the plan?”

I sat back and exhaled. I didn’t have one. “Go in, see how many of our people are still alive, and then get the hell out.”

The Trouble Dog bucked, buffeted by the hypervoid tide, and I wiped my palms on the cotton fabric of my jumpsuit. We were going to die and I still didn’t fully grasp the reasons why—save there was some vast cavern buried in the Brain that the Conglomeration warships were keen to keep for themselves. I had let the Trouble Dog off the leash; now all I could do was hang tight and pray she knew what she was doing.

A second alarm announced our impending emergence. My heart leapt in my chest like a startled salmon. I checked my straps and tried to steady my breathing.

Okay, here goes…

The deck lurched and we dropped back into the universe with all the grace and finesse of a gut-shot hound tripping over its own feet—coming out sideways, in a sparkling cloud of venting gas. I knew the Trouble Dog’s attention would be occupied with scanning the immediate area for its hostile sibling, so I used the manual controls to fire the starboard manoeuvring thrusters, correcting the slight tumble we’d picked up and aligning the bow with our direction of travel.