“I wish I knew, but if they wanted to talk all friendly like, they could have just opened a comm link from the start.” Steph sighed. “Doesn’t matter. At this point, I’m going to make them sweat for their supper.”

There was a long pause before Milla said anything. “You are joking, yes? You do not really think they intend to eat us?”

Steph rasped out a laugh, coughing as he tried to hold the mask tighter to his face. “No, I don’t think they intend to eat us. It’s possible, I suppose, but that was just a figure of speech.”

“Of course.”

He laughed harder at the obvious relief in her voice.

Milla was quiet for a moment, then snapped a little sulkily, “It was not that funny, Stephan!”

“Yes, it was,” he gasped, still laughing.

His giggles finally petered out as he slumped against the boulder he was taking cover behind, holding the oxygen mask to his face and taking deep drags. He figured he had twenty minutes of air left at this level of activity—not that he would be able to keep up this level of activity for that long.

The adrenaline high coming off the crash was burning out, and he was pretty sure he’d bruised if not outright cracked a couple ribs. With the toxic atmosphere burning his exposed skin, and wisps of it leaking in to do the same to his lungs, Steph figured he was running on the ragged edge already. Twenty minutes would be pushing it, no question.

He risked a glance around the boulder, noting that the pursuit team was spreading down the slope and still closing on their location. The deep hum of the frigate was close, and he could see more men hitting the ground. Milla and Steph had only one direction left to go now, up the slope of the volcano. They would run out of stone and boulders in maybe a couple hundred meters and then be slogging through ash with no cover.

“Stephan? What do we do?” Milla asked him.

Steph didn’t have an answer. Honestly, he’d seen enough in his life that he didn’t want to be taken. POWs didn’t get treated well; it didn’t matter who took them. He didn’t know who their pursuers were, but the odds seemed good that they were the ones who’d sicced the Drasin on the Priminae.

Steph had sworn a long time earlier that he wouldn’t be a POW, not after the things he’d seen. Some of the stuff that happened to prisoners was . . . it was just unforgivable—and that was the stuff in Confederation camps. The Block had done worse.

He didn’t know these people, but if they had anything to do with the Drasin, they weren’t nearly as civilized as the Block.