The rest of the Nihil saw it, too, and they got the message. Suddenly it wasn’t about dogfights or head-on battles with your opponents. Kassav watched one of his ships land on one of the bigger Republic craft, then do a high-intensity engine burn right into the bridge viewport. He saw another crew use the harpoon trick that had worked so well in Ab Dalis, ripping apart one of the five cruisers.

It wasn’t all good news, though—one of his bigger vessels, a light corvette, was under heavy attack from a squadron of Longbeams. Its engines flared out, and the vessel began to drift.

That’s that, Kassav thought. Blast it. Could’ve used that ship down the road.

A number of escape pods jettisoned from the ailing Nihil corvette, and the Longbeams immediately broke off their attack and began collecting them with some sort of magnetic clamp apparatus. They towed them back to the nearest big Republic Cruiser, entering its docking bay with the pods trailing behind.

Kassav worried for a moment about what those prisoners might be able to tell the Republic about the Nihil and its operations, then realized it probably didn’t matter. Things couldn’t get much worse.

And then the Republic Cruiser blew up, in a massive explosion that also took out a number of smaller craft nearby. At the same time, the engines on the Nihil corvette, the one Kassav had written off, flared back into life, and the ship slewed around, its weapons firing at a nearby set of Skywings.

Kassav understood what had happened. The escape pods didn’t have his people aboard—they’d been packed with explosives, and when the Republic idiots got all noble and tried to rescue them because…

“Heh,” he said to himself. “We are all the Republic.”

He keyed the comm back on.

“That’s it!” he cried. “Smash a hole right through them! I’m with you all!”

He keyed off the comm system and lifted his hand to chew the edge of his thumb—a nervous habit—until he realized he no longer had a thumb on that hand.

“Any word from Marchion Ro?” he called over to Wet Bub.

In response, just a shake of the head, long, dangling ears flopping against Bub’s skull.

Not that he had expected anything. It was Kassav against the galaxy. Just like always.

Admiral Kronara couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He didn’t expect a bunch of criminals to fight with anything resembling honor, but this was…despicable.

One of the larger Nihil vessels had just released a huge swath of reactor by-products from its engines, creating a tail of invisible, deeply toxic radiation that not only snarled sensors, but poisoned any pilot that happened to fly through it. They’d be condemning them to a slow, agonizing death unless they reached medical facilities immediately.