Trish Ng, the pilot of a second lookout ship, frantically radioed Jess, cutting off the conversation. “The sensor buoys! Check the readings, Jess.”

He saw a standard carrier wave with a tiny blip in the background. “It’s just a lightning strike. Don’t get jumpy, Ng.”

“That same lightning strike repeats every twenty-one seconds. Like clockwork.” She waited a beat. “Jess, it’s an artificial signal, copied, looped, and reflected back at us. The drogues must’ve already destroyed the sensor buoys. It’s a ruse.”

Jess watched, and the pattern became apparent. “That’s all the warning we’re going to get. Everybody, pack up and head out!”

As if realizing they had been discovered, seven immense warglobes rose like murderous leviathans from Welyr’s deep clouds. The Roamer scavengers did not hesitate, retreating pell-mell up through the gas giant’s skies.

A deep-throated subsonic hum came from the alien spheres, and pyramidal protrusions on their crystalline skins crackled with blue lightning. The Roamer daredevils had all seen the enemy fire their destructive weapons before.

Kellum ejected four empty ekti cargo tanks, throwing them like grapeshot at the nearest warglobes. “Choke on these!”

Jess shouted into the comm. “Don’t wait. Just leave.”

Kellum’s diversion worked. The aliens targeted their blue lightning on the empty projectiles, giving the blitzkrieg scoops a few more seconds to escape. The Roamers fired their enormous engines, and four of the five harvester scoops lifted on an escape trajectory.

But one of the new vessels hung behind just a moment too long, and the enemy lightning bolts ripped the facility to molten shreds. The crew’s screams echoed across the comm channel, then cut off instantly.

“Go! Go!” Jess yelled. “Disperse and get out of here.”

The remaining commando harvesters scattered like flies. The automated cargo tanks would go to their pickup coordinates, where the commandos could retrieve the haul at their leisure.

The warglobes rose, shooting blue lightning into space. They struck and destroyed a lagging lookout ship, but the others escaped. The enemy spheres remained above the atmosphere for some time, like growling wolves, before they slowly descended back into the coppery storms of Welyr, without pursuing.

Though dismayed at the loss of one blitzkrieg scoop and a lookout ship, the raiders were already tallying the ekti they had harvested and projecting how much it would bring on the open market.

Alone in the cockpit of his scout ship, Jess shook his head. “What has happened to us, if we can cheer because our losses were ‘not too bad’?”

2: KING PETER

2

KING PETER