Dakota described the new plan to Trader. By now more than half the drones recovered from around the mouth of the cache had been destroyed.

<Are any of the remaining drones recoverable?>

I don’t think so, she replied. I could pull them back towards us, but all that’ll do is draw the scouts straight to us.

<Then we must abandon them.>

We have what we came for anyway. How long before we can jump?

<Immediately. >

The frigate was already gone: it had slipped into superluminal space only seconds after she had spoken to Lamoureaux.

She switched her attention back to the cache. The scouts had rallied, throwing the last of their antimatter-equipped clones at the remaining Meridian drones with devastating effect.

Dakota opened her eyes and again checked on Nancy, thinking that, if she was lucky, she might live long enough to appreciate the irony of trying to save the life of a woman who’d like nothing better than to see her dead.

Time to go, Trader.

<Initiating. >

The stars spun around the yacht and then, for one brief instant, vanished.

‘That’s it,’ said Lamoureaux, leaning forward in the interface chair as he reached back both hands to massage his neck muscles. ‘Twelve light-years, and just half an AU off-target.’

Corso nodded, looking up at the simulation of the system they had landed in as it floated beneath the ceiling. Each of the simulation’s planets became gradually more detailed as additional data arrived from the hull’s sensor arrays.

Martinez stepped away from the console he had been manning and slumped next to Perez on one of the couches. ‘I guess all we can do now is wait and see if they make it, too.’

The next several minutes slid by at a glacial pace. Corso glanced around the bridge, at displays of intercepted tach-net feeds originating from the Perseus Arm: most of it indecipherable gibberish.

Thirteen minutes after they had jumped, an alert sounded.

‘They made it,’ Lamoureaux exclaimed, his gaze fixed on some faraway point. ‘I’m picking them up now.’

Martinez clapped his hands a couple of times, and Corso found himself grinning as the tension suddenly lifted away.

‘They’re a couple of light-minutes away,’ Lamoureaux added. ‘That means a couple of hours before we can rendezvous.’

‘Is the med-bay prepped for Nancy?’ asked Martinez.

Corso didn’t miss Lamoureaux’s hesitation when he answered. ‘I’ve unlocked the seals and reactivated the medboxes.’

Martinez merely nodded, as if satisfied with this answer, yet Corso knew they were all maintaining a fiction: there was likely very little they could do for Nancy Schiller. Even if by some miracle she was still alive by the time Trader’s yacht docked with the frigate, it would almost certainly be far too late to save her.

Lamoureaux stepped down from the interface chair and approached Corso. ‘Have you had any more thoughts about what we found back by the reactors?’ he asked him quietly.