She took one last look at the swirls of stars, the endless new constellations, and the white glow of the Milky Way. Where the hell were they?

She followed him out into the hall, watching his opaque-midnight cape swirl around his photon-sucking black suit. The way he walked, she knew he was keeping track of her position, ready at a moment’s notice to turn and kill her.

They made it to the companionway that would deposit them at Astrogation Control when the intercom announced, “Attention all hands. This is the captain speaking. Apologies for the delay, but we had a little trouble with an electrical fault in the equipment. Once we managed to track down the glitch, we made our initial observations.” A pause. “Let me be the first to tell you: Welcome to the Capella system. We made it.”

Falise didn’t realize when she’d stopped. Let alone sank back to brace herself against the sialon wall. Her heart felt like it was about to explode from her chest. She took a deep breath, realized she was smiling.

She looked over at Cinque; he, too, was grinning, the lights shining in his stone-black eyes. “Those are the finest words I’ve ever heard,” he told her through an exhale.

Falise let loose the hilt and pulled her hand free of the knife. Apparently the IG, Chad, and Bartolome would live to set foot on Donovan after all.

Chapter 2

  2  

Talina Perez flew warily above the mixed chabacho and aquajade. She was headed across the bush lands northwest of Port Authority. The low profile of the Blood Mountains lay just ahead. Beyond them, against the far horizon, the high and jagged peaks of the Wind Mountains rose like a serrated quetzal’s jaw.

As the aircar passed, the branches on the trees below twisted so that the leaves could follow her movement. That was one of the eerie things about the scrub aquajade that grew in the broken country around Port Authority. Hunting in the bush was always a mixed bag. The trees fixed on movement. The hunter’s as well as the prey’s. Made detecting movement a tricky game for both parties.

The country here was mixed, with short trees, brush, scrubby thorncactus, sucking scrub, low-growing gotcha vine, and bite ya bush interspersed with patches of ferngrass and claw shrub. The names were descriptive and might have offended a botanist, not that Donovanian plants were really plants in the terrestrial sense. But, hey, what else would you call them? The colorful names got the point across: Bite ya bush, with its peppery odor, would extend a branch in the direction of an unwary passerby, and the clamshell-shaped pod on the end would snap closed on flesh or fabric. About the only way to get loose was to cut the pod free.