Milla looked back briefly and then up into the dark sky above them. The gas giant was rising on the horizon. She thought the view of the planet would be stunning in an hour, if they were still around to see it.

“The Odysseus will be coming,” she said, her voice not quite certain.

“Oh, you’re damn right the Odysseus is coming,” Steph assured her. “Raze don’t leave people behind.”

Milla looked at him as they started moving again. “Raze?”

“Raziel,” he answered, shuffling along. “Secret of God. That was his call sign, back in the day.”

“I do not understand.”

They could feel the intense vibration of the enemy ship’s drive as it hovered over the surface, but they weren’t willing to look over their shoulders as they shuffled.

“Back then, the war was still cold,” Steph said, coughing. “The Archangels were still known as Project Double A. Some of the tech we . . . they were using, well, it was stolen from the Block.”

He grinned mirthlessly under his mask. “It was funny, in a way. They sent their best to us to be educated, we trained them in the latest technologies for decades, and they took it home. Then they invented the holy grail of transportation technology, counter-mass . . . so we stole it from them.”

Milla shook her head. “That is a very strange way to be.”

“Spy versus spy is old hat on Earth. We would have cheerfully bought CM technology from them, but the Block started developing Mantis fighters instead of passenger jets. Military tech was fair game to spies, especially back then. Lots of economic tension between the Block and the USA and other western nations. The Block had huge economies, but new fabrication systems were tanking the sweatshop labor a lot of their member nations depended on.”

He laughed, a little painfully, but continued to speak since the talk kept Milla’s mind—and his—off the situation while they moved. “It was stupid, in a funny way. Those sweatshops were the places that built the machines that in turn put them out of business. High-efficiency community fabrication units: cheap machines that built even cheaper products. The Block got desperate, watching their economy swirling down the crapper, and the one other thing they were really good at was building weapons.”

“This way of thinking is very strange,” Milla declared.

“Welcome to Earth.” Steph chuckled. “Third rock from the Sun. Anyway, Project Double A was how we played catch-up. Eric was the boss man on the project, lead test pilot . . .”

Steph hesitated, glancing behind them. He could see the men on the ground now. They were moving around slowly and spreading out from the ship in a half-crescent formation, heading toward the plateau.

“And a couple other things that are still classified,” Steph rasped out, laughing.

Milla didn’t get the joke, but Steph wasn’t going to fully explain what he meant.