Sagittan whiskey didn’t leave a hangover, but there was no way to go through a chessboxing match, a barroom brawl, a night of no sleep, lots of dancing, and two plates of Dragon’s Tongue kebab without suffering some consequences.

  Jeridan and Negasi sat slumped in a booth in a cheap diner as the early morning sun shone through the grimy window. The dispenser at their table was broken and instead of the black coffee they both desperately needed, it was dispensing apple juice mixed with coffee grounds. Neither of them had noticed yet. Negasi had his head on the table and was drifting in and out of sleep, letting out a toxic belch every few minutes.

  Jeridan looked blearily out the window as the sun rose on his first day without a ship. A newsvid attached to the far wall chattered in the background. A few other diners, human and alien, slurped and belched at the other tables. Jeridan ignored them all.

  He hurt everywhere—his face, his ribs, his stomach (inside and outside), his knuckles, and an especially sore spot on the side of his head. He reached up and touched it, coming away with a few bits of glass that had been stuck in his hair.

  Someone had hit him with a bottle? Typical rich brats, fighting unfair.

  Oh wait, that had been the waitress trying to break up the fight.

  All right, now he didn’t feel guilty about leaving without paying.

  What were they going to do? Their credits wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks, and the rent would soon be due at the warehouse. They had a small fortune in whiskey that was worthless until they got it off planet.

  They couldn’t even get decent jobs. Nobody wanted to hire someone with a low credit rating. It meant they were “not a good fit for teamwork enterprises” or “not fully engaged in the economic system” or a million other corporate phrases for wanting to be your own person.

  They’d been through all this before on other planets. Once you were in the hole, it was damn hard to dig yourself out.

  Jeridan turned away from the view of the ugly street as something on the newsvid caught his attention. A pretty announcer, way out of Jeridan’s league in his present circumstances, was talking about a comm probe that had just made it to Sagitta Prime.

  “The latest report from the Tyrul system says the invaders have taken Tyrul Beta and Sigma. Tyrul Alpha is expected to fall within weeks. The comm probe included some images of the invading ships, which experts are unable to identify.”

  The newsvid switched to a series of pixilated images, obviously taken from long distance, showing those strange starships again. The images were too poor quality to see much detail, but Jeridan had to agree with the so-called experts. He’d never heard of ships like that in known space.

  “The ships are estimated to be five kilometers in width,” the announcer said, making his jaw drop. “The Tyrulians report that even their strongest weapons had little effect. We’ll be following this breaking story as further details become available. Now on to the entertainment news.”

  Jeridan belched and looked away from the screen. The nearest point of the Tyrul cluster was 162 light years away. Even a comm probe—a small transmitter and hard drive attached to a powerful engine—would take a month to get here from there. Far faster than any crewed vessel, but long enough ago that Tyrul Alpha may have been overrun already.

  The reports had been coming in for a year now. Comm probes had been telling of the destruction of systems toward the outer rim, each star system falling one by one as the invaders, whatever they were, moved closer and closer to the local region where Jeridan and Negasi flew.

  One more problem beyond their control to worry about.

  The aliens can’t kill us if we starve to death first.

  Jeridan reached across the table and shook Negasi, who was resting his head on his arms.

  “Rmph?” his gunner mumbled.

  “Smartest thing you’ve said all evening, partner. Time to go back to the hotel and sleep it off.”

  His copilot raised a thumb without raising his head. “A good evening, buddy.”

  “One of the best,” Jeridan said without enthusiasm.

  “We slaughtered those rich boys.”

  Jeridan chuckled. “They should have brought more numbers if they wanted to tangle with us.”

  “We would have knocked every one of them out if they hadn’t called the cops.”

  Cops? Jeridan tried to focus. He had a vague memory of sprinting through alleys as a police hovercar chased them. How had they gotten away from that? Instinct, most likely. It’s what usually saved them.

  Negasi lifted his head and tried to focus his bleary eyes. He looked past Jeridan and focused on something.

  “We got company,” he said.

  Jeridan jerked his head around, expecting a phalanx of police officers and a beaten up and irate rich boy pointing his broken finger at them. Instead, he saw a woman standing just inside the doorway. She was thin and looked about forty, with shoulder-length brown hair. She wore canvas work clothes, but they were clean and she had an intelligent, businesslike look to her. Jeridan pegged her as a supervisor or an on-site engineer.

  She looked right at them.

  Jeridan put on a winning smile. A bit old for him, but she was the only woman in the place who didn’t look like she was down to her last few credits.

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked her.

  Negasi cocked his head. “Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with?”

  “It’s been a long day,” Jeridan replied.

  “And an even longer night, from the look of it,” the woman said. “Are you Jeridan Cook and Negasi Gao?”

  The two friends glanced at each other.

  “I’m not from the bank, if that’s what you’re worried about,” the woman said, approaching their booth.

  “Why would we be worried about the bank?” Jeridan said. “Mr. Farnsworth over at the Central Bank is a personal friend of ours.”

  The woman sat down. “You must be Jeridan. I’ve been told you’re an inveterate liar.”

  Negasi laughed, then let out another toxic belch.

  “And you must be Negasi. You’re just as I pictured you.”

  “Racist,” Negasi hiccupped.

  The woman waved a hand in front of her face. “I was referring to your breath, not your skin color.”

  “Look lady, we’ve had enough abuse for one day,” Jeridan said. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

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  The woman put her arms on the table and leaned forward, studying them. “My name is Nova Bradford, and I want to offer you a job.”

  “Who told you we need work?”

  “Becca at customs is a friend of mine.”

  “Becca,” Negasi belched. “Good woman.”

  Nova wrinkled her nose. “You’ve been eating Dragon’s Tongue kebab, haven’t you?”

  “Tastes good going down,” Jeridan said, then let out a spicy belch. “Not so good coming up. Are they really made from the tongues of dragons?”

  “You don’t want to know what they’re made of.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I need a crew for my ship, the Antikythera.”

  “What happened to your old crew?” Jeridan asked.

  Nova didn’t reply immediately. She looked out the window, not at the street outside but at something in the unseen far distance.

  “Gone.”

  Jeridan didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What kind of ship is it?”

  “A Vega Class All-Purpose.”

  Nova pulled out a communicator and hit a button. A hologram of the ship appeared over the table, turning slowly. He and Negasi studied the large, wedge-shaped vessel. The engines had been souped-up judging from the size of the thrusters, and Jeridan noticed a couple of extra gun turrets and torpedo tubes that didn’t come in the factory model.

  It was a beauty.

  Jeridan woke up a little. He’d captained half a dozen ships over his career, most of them someone else’s. He had begun to think of the New Endeavor as his own, until the bank brutally reminded him who the real owner was.

  That still hurt. She had been a great ship.

  But the Antikythera was on a whole other level. Piloting a ship like her would be a pleasure.

  No, an honor.

  He studied all those extra weapon systems. This woman was expecting trouble.

  That tempered his enthusiasm.

  “Let’s see the specs,” Negasi said, his bloodshot eyes suddenly focused, professional.

  Lines of text and several blueprints appeared. Jeridan had been right. This was a souped-up model. Capable of 1.93 light years a day, a hell of an acceleration on thrusters, state-of-the-art computer, and bristling with weapons.

  “Not bad,” Jeridan admitted. Negasi nodded, then rubbed his neck like it hurt him. Jeridan vaguely remembered one of those guys giving his friend a karate chop from behind.

  “Can you fly one of these?” Nova asked.

  “I can fly anything.” Jeridan said. “And my buddy here is the best gunner in the Orion Arm.”

  Nova studied him. “I’ve heard that about you two. It’s pretty much the only good thing I have heard.”

  Jeridan grinned. “You haven’t heard we’re the best chessboxers in three systems?”

  “No. Who beat you up?”

  “No one. We beat them up. What’s the mission?”

  “I’m a tech scavenger.”

  Negasi turned to her, suddenly a lot more interested than before. “What are you after?”

  “A beacon station. Some juicy stuff there if we can get it.”

  Jeridan and Negasi looked each other in the eye for a moment. They’d been working together for so long they could almost read each other’s minds.

  “Civilian or government?” Jeridan asked her.

  “I’ll tell you if you sign on.”

  Jeridan’s heart fluttered. After the Galactic Civil War, some systems had managed to hold on for a century or two before finally slipping into chaos. Many of their installations were abandoned, with technology still intact that was rare or even unknown, even on worlds as advanced as Sagitta Prime. The lost tech they might find could be worth a fortune.

  Or the place could be stripped to its girders. Most of the old installations got scavenged centuries ago as the planets tried to claw their way from the brink of falling into the Stone Age. Some hadn’t made it. Jeridan and Negasi had been to some of those planets. They had barely gotten out in one piece.

  “If we sign on, I will be recognized as captain,” Jeridan said.

  That brought him a lot more rights and power. If he had to work for someone else, at least he was going to have his rightful status.

  “All right.”

  “Standard danger pay, plus 20% of the take and 25 cubic meters of your cargo hold,” Jeridan stated.

  The woman frowned. “Danger pay? We’re not going into danger.”

  “Tech scavengers are always going into danger, and you’re going into something pretty bad if you aren’t going through the Spacers Union to hire a crew. That pay rate starts the minute we sign with you.”

  Nova cocked her head and studied them. “All right, but only ten percent of the take.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Twelve and a half, or I find another beaten up crew who are a few credits away from the street.”

  Negasi put his arms back on the table and rested his head on them.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” he mumbled.

  Nova turned to him. “I need your astronavigator too. What’s her name?”

  “Cassie, and she already got a job with a cargo freighter. She’s a couple of light years away by now,” Negasi said, then belched. “No sense of adventure.”

  “Are you an astronavigator as well as a gunner?”

  Negasi raised his head again.

  “No, but I’m an accredited xenoanthropologist and I just happen to know someone—or more specifically something—who will be the best astronavigator you ever met.”

  “What species?” Nova asked.

  “S’ouzz. I met it in town a few days back. They don’t like to speak much, but it needed help finding a place to stay that could accommodate its species needs. They don’t forget a favor, and I know it needs a job.”

  Nova frowned. “S’ouzz? I thought they were locally extinct.”

  “So did I. It says it’s the only one of its kind it knows of. The S’ouzz home world is in the Beta Quadrant, so it’s not getting back there anytime soon. It says when the jump gates went offline near the end of the Galactic Civil War, only a few S’ouzz were in this quadrant, and their numbers have been dwindling ever since. Now it’s dwindled down to one.”

  “Didn’t the old government use them as astronavigators?” Jeridan asked. History wasn’t his strong point, but the race had been famous.

  Negasi nodded, rubbing his neck again. “They have a natural talent for it. They’re loners, though. Best let me handle this.”

  “If you can get it on the same terms I offered you, we can leave tonight,” Nova said.

  Jeridan remembered the police hovercar. “Hurry up and find him, Negasi.”

  “Right,” his copilot said, struggling to his feet.

  “And then call me and help me load our … possessions.”

  “Right.” Negasi staggered out the door.

  Nova turned to Jeridan.

  “What are you putting in my hold?”

  Jeridan looked her in the eye. This could be a potential deal breaker. Best to cut to the chase.

  “Part of the terms of our agreement is that you don’t get to ask.”

  “Nothing sentient or chemically unstable?”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” she said and sighed …

  … confirming what Jeridan suspected. Nova Bradford was just as desperate as they were.

  “Looks like we have a deal,” Jeridan said.

  Nova hesitated, then nodded. “We do. My hovercar’s outside. There are some things I need to pick up for the trip.”

  Jeridan drained the last of his apple juice/coffee, made a face, and got up.

  For the next couple of hours they flitted about town, Nova flying the hovercar above the skyline and away from ground traffic, landing on the roofs of commercial buildings so they could go down to various shops and pick out electronic gear and spare parts. Nova seemed to know her business, and Jeridan grew a bit more confident this mission would end better than his last one.

  Then they shot out of town, passing over algae ponds and a factory where the gunk was processed and mixed with flavors, vitamins, and texturizers into any type of food one might want. There were some honest-to-goodness farms and ranches somewhere on this planet too, but even when he was flush, Jeridan rarely had the money for authentic food.

  They stopped at an isolated house by some algae ponds where a couple of men with flechette rifles met them, gave Jeridan the once over, and handed Nova a small box. Nothing was said, and Jeridan sure as hell wasn’t going to add to the conversation.

  Nova hit the bottom thrusters, took the hovercar up to 500 meters, and shot back toward Fletcher City and its spaceport.

  That was when they came after them.

  Jeridan first spotted them as three dots in the sky in the direction of the city. The dots grew, resolving into hovercars, flying in a triangular formation straight for them.

  Nova rose a hundred meters to avoid them, and the unidentified hovercars did the same.

  “What are those idiots—”

  Nova cut off her question as a pulse charge shot out of the lead hovercar. Nova banked and the shimmering clump of energy, enough to short out their engine and send them falling to their deaths, hummed past.

  “What the hell?” Nova said.

  She made a sharp turn and hit the power, zipping back the way they had come. Jeridan glanced over his shoulder. The three vehicles were gaining on them.

  The lead vehicle fired again. Another miss, but closer this time. Nova handed him a pair of binoculars.

  “See who it is.”

  Jeridan punched a button to bring it to 100x magnification and zoomed in on the lead vehicle. The autofocus stabilized the image, and he got a clear view of the two men in the cab. Young men, well dressed, their faces covered with bruises.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Are they the guys who beat you up?”

  Another pulse hissed by, close enough that their engine faltered and they dropped fifty meters before Nova could stabilize again.

  “They didn’t beat us up. We beat them up!”

  “I don’t care who beat up who. How did they find you?”

  Nova pulled a scanner out of her pocket and passed it over Jeridan. It beeped when she passed it behind his shoulder.

  Jeridan reached around, felt a lump on his flight suit, and pulled a small adhesive tab off it.

  “Oh great, a locator,” Nova said as he tossed it overboard. “Why did you pick a fight with a bunch of aristocrats?”

  “How do you know they’re aristocrats?”

  Another pulse shot by.

  “Because they’re the only ones on this uptight world who could get away with having a pulse cannon on their hovercar.”

  Jeridan looked over his shoulder. They were still gaining.

  “Got anything to fire back with?” he asked.

  Nova glared at him. “Do I look like an aristocrat to you?”

  “Frowning at me like that, you look like every employer I ever had,” Jeridan said and laughed.

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Wait until you get to know me.”

  The pulse cannon fired again, scoring a direct hit on the rear of the hovercar. The engine seized, and they hurtled down toward the algae ponds far below.