‘Reactor output reaching peak,’ said Chi-32-Beta. Gade pulled the lever on the helm console. Lights flared across the bridge. The deck lurched as the reactor dumped its bloated heart into the void, and the ship burned forwards.

Behind it, the hunter ship that had been watching the Antius fired without hesitation. Las-beams stitched the dark. The Antius began to corkscrew, as the hands on its helm fought to control it. Shouts and confusion filled the bridge. Machines were screaming. Some of those at consoles froze with terror while others screamed, their eyes wide as fresh banks of red warnings lit. Gade was staring at the helm console, his mouth open like a fish drowning in air. Shouts roared louder than the machines. That chaos saved the ship. As the hunter’s guns fired again, the freighter’s wild course pulled it away from the shots that would have torn its hull apart.

But the hunter was accelerating. It was a small ship, smaller even than the Antius. A tapered block of metal a little over two hundred metres long, half of it was engines; it was fast. The Antius tumbled on. Before it, the glittering sea of the Jovian Caul beckoned. The hunter fired again, and this time its shots struck the keel of the freighter’s hull. Metal and ceramite plating burned away. Gas and bilge fluid sprayed out. The clamour of panic on the Antius’ bridge warred with the shriek of sirens. In her tangle of cables, Chi-32-Beta flinched as bulkheads locked off the damaged portion of the ship. The hunter cut its fire and burned closer, eating up the distance.

‘We… The ship…’ gasped Chi-32-Beta. Sparks were flowing over the enginseer. The smell of burning wire and cooking flesh rose. ‘It can’t go on. Its heart and spirit are burning…’

‘We must go on or die,’ said Mersadie.

The tech-priest spasmed, limbs thrashing. Arcs of charge whipped out from consoles. Gade juddered in place at the helm, hands locked to the controls.

Out in the void, the hunter closed. It was close enough now that its targeters could hold a lock no matter what its prey did. It charged its guns. Power built in turbo laser reservoirs.

The Antius rolled over. Micro-debris rattled off its hull. A piece of rock hit the hunter and gouged a crater in its armour. Jupiter’s outer cloud of orbital detritus began to ring off both ships like rain.