Milla nodded, killing the stealth cutouts they’d been running and bringing the shuttle’s powerful radar online. She flipped the system over into Doppler mode and started running scans all around them.

“As you said,” Milla noted, “strong turbulence behind us. They have entered the atmosphere in pursuit.”

“Only one of them, Milla.” Stephen sighed. “He’s just bird-dogging us so that we can’t sneak around the hunters.”

“Can we get away?”

“I don’t know, but we’re going to have fun trying,” Steph said with a grin.

Milla grimaced. “You, Stephan, enjoy the very strangest things.”

He pushed the shuttle deeper down into the atmosphere, not bothering to try and mask his turbulence signature. Evading them was the ideal, but since that wasn’t going to happen, Steph was more than happy to take second best—keeping them right where he could see them.

►►►

PC (Piar Cohn) Parasite Five

► Subaltern Penae Girar glared at the scope that showed the path of the craft he was pursuing. He was tracking the ship by atmospheric disturbances, and the profile on all active scans was almost nonexistent. Penae had never seen anything like it. Even a ship as small as the one they were tracking should have a much larger profile.

Catching this one will be difficult, even with three parasites.

He was dealing with a small—very small—and apparently maneuverable craft. The pilot hadn’t done much yet to stand out as either good or bad, but Penae had to assume that the prey was at least competent.

“Check the signal relay,” Penae ordered his second.

“All scans are mirrored to Three and Eight,” the second confirmed. “They see what we see.”

“Good. Tighten the noose. This one can’t run for long.”

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 9

AEV Odysseus

► “Something odd about that tachyon pulse, Captain.” Ensign Perez frowned at his station, running pattern recognition on what they’d picked up from the pulse.

Tachyon pulses were a double-edged sword. Since they were effectively instantaneous in how fast they traveled and spacefarers would often know their source, anyone in the system could use a pulse to pick up locational data. As soon as the bogey had lit off, it had given both itself and the Odysseus a real-time peek at the situation.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“There seems to be interference around the target ship, sir.”

Eric cocked his head to one side. “Interference, Ensign?”

Nothing “interfered” with tachyons, aside from perhaps gravity. They were extremely high-energy particles that generally moved too fast for any sort of interference to be visible on human scales. Gravity did affect tachyons, of course, but there was unlikely to be any source of gravity in the area remotely chaotic enough to be considered interference.

“I don’t really know what to make of it, Captain,” Perez admitted. “It looks like the ship is breaking apart.”