“No, but what do you care? You can sell the weapons even if they do have a tendency to explode.”

“True, but I try not to blow up my customers. That sort of thing cuts down on repeat business. All right. We’ll give it a try, and if the results are satisfactory, we’ll discuss an ongoing relationship, and a home base for your ragtag bunch of refugees. Where’s the target?”

“It’s out in the Oort Cloud…” Callie began.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They held the meeting around the same long table where Elena had enjoyed her first cup of coffee in centuries, and had her first conversation with Callie. Almost all of them were there, anyway; Ibn preferred to stay in his quarters, seemingly indifferent to his fate, and Sebastien was still unconscious and restrained and being watched over by Shall.

Callie laid out her plan, and told them if anyone wanted to bail out, they’d arrange that, but of course Elena and the whole crew were in, Uzoma was curious to see how things would work out, and Robin said she didn’t have anywhere else to be, so it was settled.

Elena sat on Callie’s right, Stephen on her left, and the others were arrayed around: Ashok, Janice and Drake in their closed mobility device, Robin, Uzoma, and Lantern. “So we think the plan worked?” Callie said.

“Pretty much the whole force on Glauketas departed,” Ashok said. “They’re burning toward the Oort Cloud. They left one ship, but it’s being repaired: there are drones scuttling around its hull. We only have the TNA estimates about how many pirates call the asteroid home, but assuming our intel is good, and knowing how they favor overwhelming force, I’d say they left just a handful behind to guard their base.”

“So let’s steal their house,” Callie said.

Elena rested her head on Callie’s shoulder. “I wish you weren’t going in alone. I worry about you.”

“I fought alien brain-spiders. I blew up an Axiom space station. The kind of pirates who get left behind on a mission like this? I can take them.”

The White Raven moved in close to Glauketas. The pirate base was lumpy and unlovely, a roughly potato-shaped asteroid riddled with old mining tunnels and bristling with antennae and guns and airlocks. Predictably, the asteroid fired on them when they approached, and, just as predictably, they missed by kilometers, because of the displacement technology the Raven employed. While the defenders on Glauketas puzzled over their failure to connect, Callie took the canoe, piloted remotely by Shall, until she was close enough to use her teleporter to jump into the base itself.