“I’ll let you know. I want to get beyond even a whisper of Meditreme Station traffic. It’s better if nobody’s around to see, even at a distance, when we wink out of existence. I’m going to take Elena upstairs to meet Drake and Janice–”

“Oh, no,” Shall said, through the ship’s PA system. “Oh, everyone, I- I’m so sorry.”

Callie’s eyes narrowed. “Report,” she barked.

“Meditreme Station,” Shall said. “It’s gone.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean someone just destroyed it.”

Chapter Eleven

Callie always went cold in emergencies. “Show me.”

“This footage was taken by our sensors. You can’t see much from this distance, but…”

The screens all blanked, showing star-dotted blackness, and a faint shimmer that was probably Meditreme Station, getting incrementally dimmer in the distance as the White Raven moved farther away. Then light suddenly bloomed on the screen, a radiant flash of bluish-white that gradually faded into sparkles, and then, blackness.

“The comms are all lit up,” Janice said over the PA. “Every ship in the vicinity saw that.”

“We have to go back. Drake, get us turned around.”

The ship extruded jumpseats from the machine room’s walls, and there was a clunk as Ashok sealed his boots to the hull. His physiology was adjusted to handle acceleration.

Callie numbly strapped herself into a seat, and Elena followed suit. “Janice, check the station security frequency, see if there’s any chatter.”

“Dead silent. The civilian comms are full of chatter, but there’s nothing you’d call official.”

Callie groaned. “Warwick called in all the security patrols.” Warwick. She was gone. So was Hermione, and the customs agent on the dock, and everyone else Callie knew on Meditreme, the place she’d called home for the past decade. She tried to tell herself there might be survivors, but that explosion, that spray of glittering dust… she couldn’t believe anyone had made it through that intact. “What the hell happened? Could it have been an accident?”

“I don’t think so,” the ship said. “I think it was an attack, though I haven’t identified the weapon. Usually that sort of thing is easy to identify, based on the nature of the debris field and any radiation signatures left behind, but this data is unlike anything I’ve seen before.”

Callie gritted her teeth. “If someone attacked the station, that means there’s a ship, and if there’s a ship, there’s someone to chase.”

“Uh, cap, if they have weapons capable of blowing up the station, do you really want to go after them? Respectfully.”

“Someone just killed fifty thousand people, Ashok. We might be the only gunship representing TNA authority for thousands of kilometers. No way we’re letting the perpetrators get away.”

“Understood,” Ashok said. “I’ll get the defensive systems online.”