“Another fleet just dropped in. From the other hyperspace transfer point. We’re boxed in, Kassav.”

“Tell me it’s Nihil,” he said. “Tell me it’s Pan Eyta’s Tempest.”

“It’s not. The ships all register as being from Eriadu.”

“That’s where we messed up the extortion job,” Wet Bub said. “Where that moon got obliterated.”

An entirely unnecessary clarification. Everyone on that bridge knew exactly what they had done at Eriadu.

What they might not know, though, was the reputation of the people who lived there. Kassav did. He had looked them up after his little visit to their system. What he’d learned had made him curse for a minute straight. Turned out that the Nihil weren’t the only predators in the galaxy.

Eriadu was one of those warrior planets. A whole culture steeped in ideals of revenge and justice and blood and honor, easily slighted, always having duels and poisoning each other and whatever.

But for the moment, it seemed like they had stopped squabbling long enough to come together to hunt him.

“Guess we’re not running after all,” Kassav said. “Tell every ship. Time to fight. Let’s kill ’em all.”

Everyone on the bridge turned back to their stations, getting ready for battle. They seemed excited, even his idiot lieutenants, who should probably know better.

Kassav tapped a control on his command chair, and the music started. More wreckpunk, throbbing and pulsing and clanging. He set the volume to full.

“For the Nihil!” Kassav shouted, painfully closing his maimed hand into a fist and holding it above his head.

“For the storm!” came the answering cry, anticipatory and eager.

Kassav looked at his crew, his eyes flitting from face to face.

In the green light of the Kur Nebula, still pouring through the bridge viewports, they all looked like corpses, three days dead.

For the Nihil, Kassav thought. For the storm.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Loden Greatstorm pushed his Vector a bit harder, accelerating toward the wounded Nihil ship through the vacuum, the iron- and rust-colored orb of Elphrona receding behind them. He sensed Indeera doing the same in her own ship.

Not far now. He knew that a safe jump to lightspeed required a significant amount of distance from Elphrona. Like the world’s surface, the space around the planet was a roiling mass of magnetic fields and gravity distortions. There was no way the Nihil would be able to escape before he and Indeera caught them.

And then…well, the Force would be his guide. He did not want the Nihil kidnappers to die. He did not want anyone to die, ever—but sometimes, he had found, people chose their own ends, and there was nothing he or even the Force seemed to be able to do about it.