No one seemed to have noticed besides the two of them. Their Trandoshan guard was keeping her eyes on her captives. And of course, the Nihil weren’t looking anywhere but dead ahead. They were hanging on for dear life, trying to stay in their saddles.

She gave Ronn a questioning look, and he responded with as much of a shrug as he could using just his eyes. He didn’t know who was on their trail, either—and Erika knew he hadn’t been able to raise help from Ogden’s Hope.

Maybe the settlement’s security squad had found their spines and sent a team out to help—but they’d be in a speeder, not as mounted riders.

It didn’t make any sense—but it was a little bit of hope, and hope was in short supply at the moment.

She risked another glance back, just to see if they were getting closer, and this time her luck ran out. The guard saw her doing it and looked, too. She saw their pursuers immediately—impossible to miss, now. The sparks were shooting up to either side like the people chasing them were riding along a road of flame.

The Nihil stood in the cart and yelled out to the rest of her crew.

“Trouble! We got people comin’ up behind, fast! Looks like three of—”

And then Ottoh, who as it turned out was not unconscious but merely pretending to be, waiting for a moment like this, holding his own hope in reserve, clicked his tongue sharply against the roof of his mouth three times. It was a loud sound, and all five of the steelees, well trained and well loved by her husband, knew the command and obeyed immediately.

They stopped, their duralloy hooves locking into the ground with the organomagnetic field that allowed them to climb even the steepest of Elphrona’s mountains—here, the maneuver simply removed all velocity cold, in one quick, snapping movement.

Velocity, but not momentum, not inertia. Three of the Nihil were thrown from their saddles, whipping forward at enormous speed. Their guard, too, who was in the worst possible position when the steelees stopped—standing, unbalanced, in a fast-moving repulsorcart. She shot up and out, as if fired from her own rifle.

A moment later, a thick, hard sound, between a snap and a thud, the sound of something very hard breaking when it hit something even harder.

Erika didn’t see it happen, because she, along with the rest of her family, was pressed together against the front edge of the repulsorcart, a tangle of limbs and pressure and future bruises. Despite that, she was fairly sure she now knew what it sounded like when a Trandoshan’s skull split open against hard ironstone.

And good bloody riddance.

“Is everyone all right?” Erika said.

“I’m okay,” Bee said. Tough little kid.

“Hurt my hand, but it’s nothing too bad,” Ronn said.