“Mick? Mick?”

Ariston shook her armored shoulder. She crouched utterly still, her helmet brushing the low ceiling as she stared at the skulls on the floor. She didn’t react, didn’t even seem to be breathing.

“Mick?” he repeated, pulling her around.

He’d raced up here as soon as he’d heard her scream. Busy negotiating with Eryx’s rogue thieves, he hadn’t been paying much attention to her whispers and mutters—they’d mostly seemed comments about the search—but the scream had made him think she had stumbled across hidden enemies and was locked in battle up here.

He shined his light through her faceplate, frowning at her glassy eyes, at the way they didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t seem to register anything at all. Was it possible she’d had some kind of seizure, the way Dev had?

Ariston hadn’t realized how lively and expressive her eyes were, so quick to sparkle with humor when she shared quips, until they were staring ahead, completely empty.

“Mick, are you with me?” he whispered, well aware that the shuttle didn’t have a medical AI or anything besides a meager first-aid kit. What if she didn’t snap out of it? “If you come back to me now, I’ll assume any position you like.”

She drew in a shuddering breath and blinked. He smiled, thinking she’d heard his comment and would smile back, but when her eyes shifted to meet his, they held the most haunted expression.

His smile evaporated.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Mick inhaled again, almost a gasp, and he remembered his thought that she hadn’t been breathing when he first came up. She bent over, hands clasping her knees, her body swaying with the tremors running through the shuttle. Or maybe that was her trembling.

He worried that Teia and her buddy were down there, comming Eryx or conspiring, since there hadn’t been time to restrain them in any way, but he didn’t want to rush Mick. Besides, there wasn’t room for him to stand up fully, toss her over his shoulder, and carry her down.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

Whatever she was, he was certain it was not fine.

“Stay there, and breathe,” he said. “I’ll get those.”

He scrambled around, trying not to clunk his head on the ceiling as he hurried to pluck up the skulls and tuck them back into the sack. No, there were two sacks stashed back there, the other still tied shut and upright. In the dim lighting, he glimpsed the black gems—the Wanderer chips—embedded in their temples. Why hadn’t Teia simply chiseled those chips out instead of dragging all these skulls away?

He thumbed one, and it didn’t come loose. Maybe that was why.

Ariston returned to Mick, dragging the two sacks behind him. He gripped her shoulder. “We need to get back down there.”

“I hate this god-forsaken planet,” she said.

“What happened?” He still wondered if she’d had some seizure and would need medical attention.

“I don’t know. Hearing things, seeing things. Nightmare. Day-mare. Whatever.” She flicked her hand, as if to shrug it all off, but her face remained pale, her eyes haunted.

“I’m not sure why it isn’t affecting me as strongly as you and some of the others, but I think I’m glad.”

He didn’t know what she’d seen, but he’d had plenty of nightmares in his life, including the one where he’d lost Zya. Any one of them could haunt him here and wreck him.

It worried him that Mick hadn’t been sleeping this time, that she’d been in the grip of some nightmare while fully awake. What if that happened while they were in battle on the salvage ship?

He could only hope that whatever was affecting her would lose its grip once they were in orbit above the planet instead of down on its surface. Except that they’d already almost left its atmosphere. If some virus or bacteria was causing this, it would remain within her, within all of them, until they figured out a way to eradicate it.

“I keep reliving this day in the desert,” Mick said, her voice low, hollow. “We were in town, relaxing a little because it was a day off. But this boy walked down the street toward us. We didn’t know he had a bomb under his shirt. He blew himself up, and he blew up a bunch of the guys in my unit. Guys I was close to after all we’d been through. Friends. We’d been caught totally off guard.”

Ariston wrapped his arm around her shoulder, cursing the armor between them. She needed a real hug.

“Who’d think a boy?” she whispered, barely seeming to notice him. “He was maybe nine, ten. I only survived because I’d stopped on a whim a few minutes earlier. Afterward, I always felt that I should have reacted sooner, that maybe I could have changed the outcome. I failed. And I couldn’t accept that. It’s why I got out of the military. And I’ve wondered ever since if I did the right thing.”

Mick turned toward him, returning his hug, and letting her faceplate fall against his shoulder.

“It’s hard to accept that we don’t always control our own fates, and we hardly ever control the fates of others. I know. I know it well.” Ariston wrapped his arms around her, hating that they needed to get back to the pilots, hating that he couldn’t simply stand there and hold her.

She sniffed and pulled away. “Sorry, I’m okay. I can hold it together.”

“I know you can.” He lowered his arms, lamenting that she needed to hold it together, and led the way back down into engineering.

She stayed close, so close she kept bumping him. He could tell she couldn’t wait to get out of that storage area. To get out of the entire star system, probably.

Teia and the male pilot were sitting at the helm, talking quietly about getting jobs for a legitimate salvage operation once this was all over.

Ariston didn’t buy it. Maybe he’d made a mistake in not offering them more, but there was a limit to how much he could offer without compromising his word or forcing himself into a position where, in order to keep his word, he would have to do something against the regulations or the orders of his superiors. And that was something he had not done in twenty-five years of service. When he’d been thinking of retirement, he had been imagining it an honorable retirement, not being kicked out of the Star Guardians.

He glanced at the comm, worried that these two had warned the Pleasant Journey.

Mick followed his gaze and must have guessed what he was thinking.

“Sorry,” she whispered again, sounding so miserable and frustrated with herself and everything going on that she seemed on the verge of tears.

He gripped her shoulder, again wishing they weren’t wearing armor so she would feel the gesture. “Not your fault.”

Teia and her buddy exchanged long glances, and he suspected they knew that he knew they’d been up to something. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a way that could be remedied now. They’d just have to deal with the situation that waited for them. Maybe some brilliant inspiration would come to him.

The view screen had changed from the pale orange sky of the planet to the darkness of space. He looked at the navigation and sensor displays. They were heading straight for the Pleasant Journey, with maybe fifteen minutes until they arrived.

That wasn’t much time for brilliant inspirations.

Mick sat cross-legged behind the cockpit, holding one of the skulls in her lap. She ought to have left it in its sack with the others, but she’d taken it out, in part as a silent challenge, a defiance toward the heavens. She was determined that looking at it wouldn’t cause another hallucination. More than a hallucination. A walking nightmare. She’d heard of such things but had never experienced one.

More than that, she felt that the skulls might be key to understanding what was going on with the planet—with her. She had to find a way to conquer her problems, or she risked being a liability for Ariston, more than she’d already been.

She knew their two pilots had been gifted time to conspire and perhaps warn their ship when Ariston had been forced to come looking for her. She also knew a battle waited for them. The captain of that salvage ship wouldn’t give her a converter just because he was a nice person.

“Any idea what this chip does?” Mick asked.

Ariston had put all his armor back on, and he stood behind the pilots, his arms folded over his chest as he gazed at the distant ship on the view screen. A bulky rectangle with protrusions, it reminded Mick of a giant Lego.

He turned at her question. “No idea. I don’t think anyone knew about them until recently.”

The pilots glanced back, but if they had ideas, they didn’t share them.

“Presumably, the Wanderer who removed humans from Earth and used them to seed planets around the galaxy would have created the chips and placed them there for good reasons,” Ariston added. “The story goes that he was traveling the gate system of wormholes that his people had created when he found Gaia. While exploring the planet, he fell in love with a human woman there, and they had twenty offspring together. The rest of his kind were leaving this galaxy, traveling to another one, or perhaps another plane of existence altogether, and he chose to follow them after his lover passed away. But he worried that catastrophe could come to Gaia one day, thus risking the lives of his descendants as well as all the other people of the world. He spread his offspring, and enough humans to ensure the species could thrive, across habitable planets all over the system. He wanted them to survive. We know of only two planets, including this one, where humans died off and didn’t make it. It was a virus on the other one, I believe, and a volcano here.”

“But it wasn’t a volcano. Or so my scientists say.” Mick rubbed at the chip, aware of the Lego ship growing larger on the view screen. She worried the mystery wouldn’t be solved in time for the solution to be useful. “When you first mentioned chips, I imagined animals being chipped before being released into the wilds, so they could be tracked, but if this wasn’t done anywhere else…” She waved to the black chip and lifted her eyebrows.

Ariston shook his head. “On none of the other planets. We believe we’ve found all of them or close to all of them.”

“Then maybe it was for their protection.”

He gazed down at the skull. “An interesting idea. Protection from whatever has caused us problems?”

“Why not?” Mick wished she had Dev with her. A doctor would be better, but she would take anyone with a scientific background. “But then something happened, and the chips stopped working. And that’s when everyone died off.”

“I can see some problems with that hypothesis. For one thing, the chips would have to be installed every time a baby was born. Where would the people have gotten them? How would a primitive society have put them in? We can chip people now, of course, but a chip that went into the skull would require a surgery rather than simply implanting something under the skin.”

“Dr. Lee said he got some pictures of ‘interesting’ rituals on the ruins. Maybe they’ll explain things.” Mick understood Ariston’s objections, but was reluctant to give up her ideas.

“Unfortunately, that can’t help us now.” Ariston turned back to the view screen, to the ship looming ahead of them. He touched the man on the shoulder. “Comm them, tell them you’ve captured me and destroyed the other ship, and that you’re ready to board.”

The pilots exchanged looks again, leaving Mick positive they’d already commed with the truth. But the woman complied, tapping a button on the comm, relaying the words, and saying they were on their way in.

Nobody responded, but maybe that wasn’t necessary. She touched a button on the console, and soon after, huge bay doors on the hull started slowly opening.

Mick scraped at the chip on the skull. She didn’t have any tools, but with the armor’s strength enhancements, could she pry it off? If she did, would it be a crime? Would it give Ariston another reason to arrest her? Maybe she could say it fell off.

He wasn’t looking. She tried to get it off without damaging the skull. The gauntlets didn’t have anything quite like fingernails. Maybe she would do better without them on.

Did she have time? The shuttle was maneuvering into position to fly straight into that bay, but it would take a few more minutes to land inside.

Mick removed one gauntlet and unfastened her helmet so she could peer extra close. She scraped at the chip again, trying to get her nail under it. But it was so small and so tightly embedded that she could barely feel an edge.

“There should be a magnifying element built into your faceplate,” Ariston said.

Mick jerked her head up, blushing because he was watching her. She expected him to berate her for messing with a precious artifact from his protected planet, but he merely looked curious.

But his attention didn’t linger on the skull or her. He turned back toward the view screen. Mick’s guts clenched up. The shuttle bay doors were fully open now. Come into our trap, they said.

How large a crew had Ariston said manned the salvage ship? Fifty? Too many for the two of them to take on if they all came down at once and all wore armor. Even a tenth of that many would be too many. When she and Mick had taken over the shuttle, they’d had the element of surprise on their side. That wouldn’t be the case this time.

Not bothering to put her helmet back on and fiddle with the magnifying lens, she bent low, peering at the chip. She needed to pry it out, not scrape it out.

“Anyone have a knife?” she asked.

The pilots, showing no inclination toward helping her, didn’t even look back. Ariston flicked open one of the small compartments in the hip of his armor and tossed her a multitool.

“You’ll need to get your helmet back on in a few seconds,” he murmured, eyeing the expansive shuttle bay they were flying into.

Its sheer size surprised Mick. It was like flying into a football stadium. Then she remembered that this was a salvage vessel. Maybe they pulled numerous smaller ships at a time into this bay so they could tear them apart for the pieces. Or maybe they sometimes sold ships whole.

Two shuttles identical to the one they were in rested on the far side of the bay. Mick didn’t see anyone in armor out there, but they were probably waiting outside of one of the hatches, prepared to storm in as soon as the bay was pressurized.

Abruptly, Ariston turned and jogged past her and into the lav. She almost laughed. Pre-battle pee?

Teia guided the shuttle toward a landing area outlined on the deck with a white rectangle. Mick bent low over the skull, trying to wedge the tip of Ariston’s knife under the chip. She wasn’t sure why she was trying so hard. It wasn’t as if getting it free would do anything or give them some super weapon. One didn’t typically implant super weapons into people’s skulls.

Not that someone wouldn’t try if it were possible. The memory of the boy and the bomb flashed into Mick’s mind again, and she closed her eyes, willing the image away. Focusing on the skull.

A super weapon wasn’t what she needed. She just needed to know she wouldn’t hallucinate while out there, while Ariston was depending on her.

He jogged back out of the lav, coming up behind the pilots as the shuttle settled onto its skids. He pressed something against the man’s neck.

The man swore and tried to lunge to his feet. Ariston stopped him with a hand to the shoulder. Teia spun toward him as the man slumped, his chin drooping to his chest.

“What are you—” she started to say, but he leaned forward with the item. A jet injector.

She jerked an arm up to block him, but he caught it easily and pressed the injector to her neck. She had time to call him some choice swear words—Mick’s ear chip didn’t translate them all—before she, too, slumped forward.

“You have a new plan?” Mick asked, still fiddling with the knife.

“Nothing brilliant, but maybe it’ll confuse them for a moment when their plan doesn’t go exactly as anticipated.”

Ariston left the pilots slumped in their chairs and fished in one of the skull sacks. He withdrew two of them and placed them on the console, facing the seats, the eye hollows seeming to stare in accusation.

“Is this idea inspired by your theatrical background?”

“Perhaps in part,” he said. “Come on. You and I are hiding in the storage area up there. I’m sure they’ll think to search it, but they’ll have a hard time taking us out if we’re behind crates and in a small space, and I’m going to assume they won’t blow up their own shuttle to get to us.”

Mick hadn’t been paying that much attention to the chip as she continued to wiggle the knife under it, and gasped with surprise when it gave way. She lurched down, afraid it would fly off somewhere and she would never find it.

It flew straight up into the air. At first, she thought the leverage from the knife had done that, but then it hovered in front of her eyes. She gaped at it and lifted a hand to… capture it?

It zipped to the side, then toward her. She jerked back, but too late. A sharp pain erupted at her temple. Was it biting her?

She slapped her hand to the spot, as if it were some mosquito she might scare away or kill. But the pain only intensified, and she cried out, rolling to the deck, her fingers pressed to her temple. She scraped at the spot, but there was nothing to scrape away except blood.

Horrified, she realized it had burrowed through her skin and muscle. Into her skull.

Hands gripped her armored shoulders. Ariston crouched in front of her and pulled her upright, enough so he could alternate peering into her eyes and peering at the new hole in the side of her temple. Warm blood trickled down the side of her face.

“That was really stupid, wasn’t it?” Mick whispered.

The pain was subsiding, but not the horror. Utter fear at what had just happened—what she’d done to herself—coursed through her veins.

“Would you prefer I lie to make you feel better or nod in agreement?” Ariston smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes, didn’t replace the concern there.

“We both know how good of a liar you are. Stick with the truth.”

“Then, yes.”

A clang came from somewhere outside the shuttle. That meant the bay had been pressurized. Armored men could walk in at any moment.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t do anything evil.” Ariston handed her helmet to her. “Wanderer technology is generally helpful.”

“Generally? Meaning there are exceptions?”

He gave her a bleak smile, picked up his bolt bow, and nodded to the back of the shuttle.

Feeling wobbly, Mick put on her gauntlet and helmet, grabbed her own bolt bow, and followed him. As she headed into the engine compartment, she glimpsed armed and armored men on the view screen. They walked into the bay and headed straight for the shuttle.

Ariston already had the trapdoor in the ceiling open, and he disappeared through it. Mick pulled herself up after him and closed it. They found positions between crates and across a tight aisle from each other. Ariston turned off his lamp. After hesitating a moment, and giving the forward section where she’d found the skulls a wary look, Mick followed suit.

“Do you have night vision?” he asked softly.

“No.”

“Ah.”

“That means you can make a move on me,” Mick said, “and I wouldn’t see it coming.”

“I prefer women to see me coming. So they can admire my fine manly attributes.”

“It’s hard to admire much when everything is hidden under armor. We’ll have to play some more Kapti later. With stakes involving nudity.”

“I might be amenable to that. Providing we stack the deck so I have a chance at winning.”

A clunk drifted up from below, and Mick swallowed her response. She knelt in her alcove, finding a position where she could lean out and fire. Bolt bows weren’t the most compact weapons, and in the tight space, she found herself wishing for Woodruff’s handgun. She couldn’t even stand up. But maybe they would get lucky, and the salvage crew wouldn’t think to look for them up here.

Doubtful. Even if their armor successfully camouflaged Mick and Ariston from their sensors, this was the enemy’s shuttle. They would know all about the secret cubbies.

More clunks drifted upward, along with muffled voices. Mick couldn’t make out what they were saying. Maybe the crew would be disturbed by the skulls. It would have been more disturbing, she imagined, if the men had found the skulls presiding over dead pilots, but she was glad Ariston wasn’t the kind of person to entertain something like that. Even with enemies.

“The crew is all over the ship,” Ariston murmured, sounding faintly puzzled.

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“I can’t get a good reading on the armored men below, but a lot of the rest of the crew isn’t in armor, and I’m reading knots of them in pockets around the ship, but not in expected places. There’s a trio in the big lav on Deck 3. Others are in their quarters. A group is in the armory. There’s only one person on the bridge, and nobody is in engineering.”

Mick’s own sensors weren’t so precise that she could see where on the ship people were, but she trusted his word. He might be wearing patchwork armor that looked old, but she suspected that was a ruse, and that everything was state-of-the-art.

Shouts drifted up from below, and someone yelled—almost a scream. Mick thought she heard weapons firing, though the bolt bows and similar energy-based weapons didn’t have the noisy report of firearms.

It grew silent, oddly so. Mick resisted the urge to shift her weight lest some creak might sound below.

“How are you feeling?” Ariston asked softly.

“Fine.”

“No difference since you installed that chip?”

“I didn’t install it. It jumped into my head of its own accord.”

“After you pried it out of a skull,” he said wryly, his tone seeming to suggest that one should let resting skulls lie.

“You’re not trying to come up with another crime to convict me of, are you? I was just trying to figure out what—”

“I know. I’d prefer not to convict you of anything. That’s not my job, anyway. I just gather evidence and bring people in to face the courts if they’re known criminals or if the evidence suggests they’ve become criminals.”

Mick didn’t respond. She didn’t want to argue with him about her criminal status. He might think she was trying too hard to sway him. Besides, they had to get her converter before any of it mattered.

“You said there’s nobody in engineering?” she asked.

“Not at the moment.”

“Is that where the converter would be?”

“In one of the adjacent storage areas. They’re large spaces, since Eryx keeps so many of the parts he salvages. Finding a converter could take a while.”

“Still, if nobody comes looking for us, maybe we can sneak out and—”

A soft scrape sounded from the direction of the trapdoor. Light slashed up into the attic space, and Mick shut her mouth.

She wiggled back farther, ensuring she wouldn’t be visible from the trapdoor. She would let Ariston take the lead and choose the moment of their attack. Her finger rested on the trigger of her bolt bow. She would be ready. She definitely wouldn’t be distracted by some walking nightmare or hallucination.

To her surprise, her mind seemed to agree. Even though they were near the spot where she’d had the waking dream, she didn’t truly believe that it would happen again. She didn’t feel worried about that at all. She was ready for a battle.

Had the chip affected her in some way?

A grunt sounded as a man pulled himself up. Other noises followed, scrapes, thuds, and whispers. Mick massaged the trigger.

“We can hide up here,” someone said.

Mick blinked. What?

It was still dim enough that she couldn’t see Ariston’s face or more than a vague, shadowy shape between the crates across from her.

“They could be up here too,” someone else said.

Mick’s curiosity got the best of her. She peeked and peered down the aisle.

Three armored men crouched around the open trapdoor. Light shining up from below gleamed against their faceplates and the dark metal frames of their bolt bows.

Should she fire? While they weren’t paying attention? Or wait and hope they left her hiding spot without ever noticing her and Ariston?

Ariston must have also been curious, because he also leaned out, just enough to peek down the aisle. None of the three men seemed to notice them.

Abruptly, one whirled toward them and fired.

Mick lurched back into her alcove as orange en-bolts streaked past, slamming into the front of the compartment. She hadn’t moved, and she was sure Ariston hadn’t moved, so what had made that man fire? Had his sensors detected them?

“They’re back there!”

“They’re all around us!”

More en-bolts streaked past, crimson mingling with orange. Heavy footsteps thundered toward them, and Mick aimed her weapon, ready to fire.

But the first armored man ran past, his back hunched, his helmet scraping on the ceiling, and his bolt bow firing relentlessly—at nothing.

Another man followed in exactly the same manner. It was the third that ran into view between Ariston and Mick and spun toward her.

She fired before his weapon came to bear. Her bolts slammed into his armored chest as Ariston lunged out of his alcove.

Their helmets both cracked against the low ceiling, but he got his arms around their enemy’s neck, pulling him back off his feet. Like some tentacled sea monster, Ariston dragged his prey back into his alcove. Something snapped. A piece of the man’s armor?

More en-bolts streaked down the aisle, this time from the opposite direction. Maybe those two idiots had realized they were shooting at shadows.

While Ariston wrestled with his armored foe, Mick leaned out and fired at the other two men. Unfortunately, they were fully in the dark—the only light source was at her back—so she fired blindly.

They might be idiots, but they had no trouble hitting a target. Two bolts bounced off her shoulder.

She leaned back into her alcove, debating on how to get some light back there without making a bigger target of herself. Before she had more than two seconds to think, Ariston lunged out of his alcove, rounded the corner, and barreled toward those men like a train.

A few more rounds fired as he raced toward them, but then he reached them, having no trouble finding them in the dark, and extended his arms, taking both of them to the deck.

Mick glimpsed a tangle of flailing arms and legs as the three men engaged in a furious wrestling match. Something flew toward her and she ducked. A broken bolt bow. It skidded all the way to the trapdoor, dangling over the edge of it.

She crept out of hiding, hoping to find a way to assist with the skirmish.

An armored man flew through the air, crashed into a crate, and tumbled down, almost at her feet.

She lunged toward him and fired, a sustained blast aimed at a charred and dented seam between his shoulder and chest plate.

“Yield!” the man cried, dropping his weapon and throwing up his arms. “I give up.”

He panted, sounding pained as well as scared.

“Remove your helmet,” Mick said as Ariston and the third man continued to box and wrestle, each trying to damage the other’s heavy armor. “Do it,” Mick barked when the downed man hesitated.

She pressed the tip of her bow to his faceplate.

He removed his helmet, revealing a tangle of black dreadlocks and bulging eyes. Mick was surprised by the sheer terror in those eyes, the raggedness of his panting. Was all that from dealing with her and Ariston? Or did some other fear haunt his mind? Could the crew on the salvage ship be affected the same way as her team on the planet?

Mick had hoped for a respite up here in orbit. She wished she could talk to her scientists, some of whom had believed bacteria or something in the atmosphere was affecting them. That couldn’t be the case way up here, could it? There was no atmosphere. What if the shuttle that had gone down the night before and taken off without all its people had brought some weird virus aboard? Some weird virus that was affecting everyone up here?

Her first thought was that it might make getting the converter easier. Her second was that these people seemed way crazier than her team on the planet had been. What if things were escalating down there too? What if her scientists started going crazy and attacked each other? Or did something irreparable to her ship?

“Mick?” Ariston asked warily. “Are you… in your head?”

He’d finished his fight—his opponent lay facedown underneath him and wasn’t moving. Mick hadn’t been moving, either, though she had her bow pointed at the man who’d removed his helmet.

“Yeah, just thinking.” Mick realized he might believe she was having another waking dream. “In a non-crazy way.”

“Good. I think my two are out for a bit, but you better strip your man out of the rest of his armor so we can tie him up.”

“Now, Ariston, you know I’m only interested in stripping you.” She smiled, though the joke came out forced. She was worried.

“So, you want me to strip him?”

“Only if I can watch.”

“You’re a quirky girl.”

“Does that excite you?”

“Maybe a little.” Ariston slung his bow over his torso on its strap and came forward to help her with her man. “But you might alarm me if you start talking about penis jewelry again.”

“Guess I better cross that off my Ariston-birthday-present idea list.”

“The Zi’i!” the man with dreadlocks cried, lurching from his back to a seated position.

Mick’s finger tightened on her trigger, but she didn’t fire. “The what?”

“They’re big, furred, fanged aliens that like to eat people,” Ariston said as their downed man looked left and right, eyes darting in his head as he searched all around him.

“I know that—didn’t I tell you I met one? And regretted it? But we don’t think they’re here in this system, do we? Or on the ship?”

Ariston gazed down at the man who barely seemed to know they were there. “I’ll check the sensors if we go to the bridge, but I doubt it. We’re deep in Confederation territory, and they have no reason to be here.”

The man didn’t seem to hear them. If anything, his panting had grown louder and more ragged.

“Be right back,” Ariston said, moving to the trapdoor.

He disappeared into the engineering compartment, apparently believing Mick could handle this guy. Which she could, though his darting eyes made her uncomfortable. She wondered if he was having the same kind of waking nightmare she’d experienced, some memory of the past returning to haunt him. She’d heard the Territory Wars, in which humans had battled the Zi’i for their lives as well as star systems, had been horrible and that millions had died.

Ariston returned with the injector. He tapped it against the man’s neck.

“How many doses of that do you have and how long will they last?” she asked.

“Only a few more and an hour or so, depending on the person’s size and metabolism.”

The man’s breathing slowed, and his eyes rolled back. Ariston caught his head, keeping it from clunking to the deck. He set it down with surprising gentleness.

Mick was glad for it. Even though these were enemies, she found herself feeling camaraderie for anyone dealing with something similar to what she’d dealt with. Or maybe his memories had been even worse.

“What now?” she asked, assuming Ariston hadn’t found a squad of troops down below.

“We go to engineering and get your part.”

Mick nodded. “I’m ready.”