He killed them. Yes, Vek killed them, not you. You gave the order to break from the dock, but he would have shot you.

You had no choice.

Down in the quiet, Zadia Koln, once sub-mistress and now brevet captain of the system freighter Antius listened to the thoughts roll and roar through her head. The passage was dark. The pistol in her hands hung in her fingers, still smoking, the slide open on an empty breech. Fat brass shell cases littered the floor around where she crouched. Further off, half folded in shadow, lay the bodies. Five of them, or maybe more. She was not sure. For a second, she caught them out of the edge of her eye.

She’d had no choice.

She had been walking the decks. They had come out of nowhere as she was sealing the bulkhead, and she had pulled the gun and…

Koln glanced up at the sealed door across the passage. She had come down to the decks to check that all of them were secure…

No that was a lie… She had just wanted to get away from the bridge, with its stink of fear, and Vek and his bodyguard watching everything like they didn’t trust Koln.

The thought of them brought the rage again, spearing up through her, sucking in terror as fuel like a firestorm drawing in air.

She hadn’t asked for this! How dare they doubt her. She was the one who had to give the orders, to keep the ship moving through the void…

She had spent most of her four decades on this ship or one of its sisters. Ore and supplies, back and forwards through the circles of Uranus’ moons, again and again, predictable and certain. A mundane life filled with boredom, but there had been the temple, the quiet gatherings in the silence of the docks off Miranda. She had been flattered to be asked to join, then intrigued. The frisson of secrecy had spiced the thought that she was, for once in her life, doing something not permitted. Something special. It had been just as mundane after a while, though, men and woman in tattered hoods, and nonsense words spoken to recognise each other. Tokens and coins, and meetings which were half-ritual and half the kind of talk you could have in any dock drinking hole.

Her eye settled on one of the corpses; its hand was open… Clear stars but it looked still alive. What was it they had shouted before she shot? Food, something about food.

What had she done?

No, no, no… It was not her fault.

What was Vek thinking? Almost a thousand refugees on a ship with provisions for its crew alone. Vek should have known… They had nothing. Hunger had begun to bite after only days. Soon it would make the refugees in the holds go further than this passage. They had just come running out of the dark and she had…

She had…