orbital supermax

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Orbital Supermax

Psychology is war. You walk into a room, sometimes by choice, sometimes because you’ve been busted

for diverting medical supplies from Med Bay to the prisoners’ infirmary, and sit across from the enemy

while they do everything they can to get inside your head.

“Do I need to remind you,” asked Cayla Wyrick, my psychologist, “that failure to comply with these

sessions is a violation of the agreement you made with Captain Fieras to keep you out of a four by four

cell?”

She had a long neck and a narrow, but pretty face that made her everyone’s favorite civilian contractor.

Her blonde locks were cut short, but stylishly done, and her makeup was immaculate, like she was

daring any one of OSP-4’s caged monkeys to try something. She was young for a therapist, especially

one stationed way out here in the Banshee system.

“I don’t understand why Fieras insisted on these sessions. I’m a smuggler, not a mental patient.”

She crossed her legs and sat back in her chair. “And if a smuggler was all you were, I’m certain he would

have simply fired you. Or thrown you in a cell. But you have a history, don’t you?”

I took a sip of ice water and put the glass on a nearby table. There was a huge vid screen behind her that

showed a starscape. In a couple of hours, Lorona, the planet in whose Lagrange point we sat, would

heave itself into view on the lower right.

Of course she’d read my file. She’d probably watched the vids of the fiery explosion that had claimed my

brother’s life.

I resented Danny for dying so publicly. If we’d been miners in some nameless asteroid belt, no one

would have cared about the details. But we’d been pilots, best and second-best at the Academy, and

when he’d died I’d had to accept the medal that should have been his, because I’d been right behind

him on the scoreboards. That single incident had become a gold mine for the head shrinkers I’d seen in

the years since the incident. Any action I took was labelled survivor’s syndrome, or twinless twin

syndrome, or any number of other personality disorders. Now that I’d been caught with my hand in the

cookie jar, Fieras and Wyrick were falling over themselves in their rush to call it something other than

what it was: a crime of greed.

I didn’t want to go through another minute of therapy. I’d rather spend my time in a cell.

“You know that blush you’re wearing is contraband? These guys use the pigment for prison tattoos. Or

wear it. You know. It takes all kinds.”

“… and I think we’re done for the day,” she replied, tapping a few keys on the notepad and then letting

the screen go dark.



A small flash, like someone lighting a match in a dark room, attracted my attention to the screen behind

her. One of the stars began to move. It grew from pinprick to buttonhole, gaining velocity exponentially

until it shot off the top right corner of the screen and disappeared. The whole process had taken maybe

five seconds, and it took me slightly longer than that to figure out what I was looking at.

I launched myself out of my chair at Wyrick. My weight caught her in the shoulder and overturned herchair. A heartbeat later the station shook violently and the lights flickered before going out. A blast of

super-heated air blew off the cover of the air conditioning vent and flames shot out of it, briefly painting

the darkened office with shades of orange. Emergency lights in the base of each wall came on and we

could see again, albeit dimly.

I rolled away from her and got to my knees. To her credit she didn’t say a word about my knocking her

down. “What happened?” she asked instead.

“We got hit by a missile,” I said. “At least one. For some reason, our automatic defenses didn’t come

online to prevent the attack.”

The emergency lights changed from red to yellow and flashed a pattern that indicated the door. An

inoffensive, computer-generated voice spoke from everywhere at once. “Lieutenant Cayla Wyrick, as the

highest ranking officer on board Orbital Supermax Prison 4, you are now in command. Please follow the

yellow lights to the Auxiliary Command Deck.”

“Lieutenant Wyrick?” I said sarcastically back to the computer. “That’s her paygrade, not her rank!”

Civilian contractors were paid on the same scale as the military. Wyrick was obviously an OS-9, which

meant she got paid the same as a lieutenant. But that wasn’t the same thing as actually being a

lieutenant. She couldn’t give orders, or even be saluted. The computer had made a mistake, and it didn’t

take me long to realize what else that meant. We’d been attacked with surgical precision. Everyone with

any real rank was already dead.

Wyrick threw the notepad onto her desk and tapped on the starscape until it dissolved into a map of the

station. Green sections were undamaged, yellow meant that we’d suffered a non-lethal holing on that

deck, and red meant that we could safely cut the prison food budget. There was a lot of red.

Wyrick’s fingers danced across the vidscreen. “Command, Engineering, Med Bay … they’re all offline.”

I joined her at the screen. “May I?”

She glared at me, then reluctantly keyed in her override codes. Without wasting any time, I swappedback to the starscape and then zoomed in as far as I could on the source of those missiles. It didn’t take

much scrolling to find a small pleasure craft that had been hastily modified to accept huge missile racks.

Several more fighters flew nearby in close formation. A larger ship lurked behind them, but the station’s

limited magnification gave it a pixelated look and I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Suddenly, the

image was obscured by something so large that it too was pixelated. A fighter maybe, passing very close

to the station. And not one of the UEE’s either.



I tried the emergency channels but all I heard was the dull hiss of static across all wavelengths. We were

being jammed. “Pirates. I don’t know what they’re doing here, but it can’t be good.”

“Is it a prison break?” asked Wyrick.

“Maybe? But you’d think that anyone worth a small flotilla would have been flown immediately to

Kellog VI,” I said, meaning the infamous prison planet. Installations like OSP-4 were prisons in their own

right, but also feeding stations, temporary lodgings where high-risk prisoners from the outer systems

could be held, pending transfer to Kellog VI. “It might just be a raid. Once a pirate pack gets too big they

can’t sustain themselves on plunder from the occasional freighter. An installation like this might be a

tempting target. The prisoners are just an added bonus. Or they’re expendable, depending on the whims

of the pirates.”

“But aren’t there defenses?”

“Sure.” As the prison’s former quartermaster I was in a better position to know than anyone else still

alive on the station. I punched up the flight deck. Debris floated in the air. A dark, human-shapedsilhouette tumbled lazily through the micro-gravity. A quick scan highlighted a jagged gash in the hull.

Decompression had been swift and violent, but the station’s two fighters were still on their pads. “Looks

like we didn’t put up much of a fight.”

A dull vibration and then a thump echoed through the deck all around us. I felt my stomach lift as gravity

fluctuated. The ominous hiss of air escaping through the vents was a sign that we’d suffered too much

damage for the station’s systems to patch, and that meant that breathing was going to get difficult

pretty quickly.

“We’ve gotta go,” I said.

Reluctantly, she followed me out the door and down the hall.

The damage was more extensive than I thought. Wires descended from the drop-ceiling like jungle

vines, dripping sparks onto the floor. The air smelled of ozone and burnt rubber and was uncomfortably

hot, as if a fire raged just out of sight. The hallways we passed through were empty and dim, except for

the occasional flash and sizzle from the wiring overhead. The computer was guiding us to Aux

Command, but I had a different plan. Instead I turned aside to the prison’s Maximum Security block.

“What are we doing here?” she asked. We stood in front of a red, metal door with a keypad at its center.

“The comm systems are down and that means there’s no way for us to send a distress signal. Unless weget lucky and someone sends us an unscheduled prisoner transfer, the earliest we can expect help is two

weeks from now. Waiting here is not an option.” I let my tone convey an additional meaning. “Especially

for you.”

Wyrick shifted uncomfortably. “There are 1600 prisoners and two hundred staff members aboard this

facility. We can’t leave them behind.”



I stifled my aggravation. “You’re a therapist and I’m a quartermaster. Neither of us is hero material.

There are two fighters still on the flight deck. We can use them to get off this station and warn the UEE.”

Unconvinced, she looked up at the door. “Okay, but then what are we doing here?”

“Getting hero material,” I said with a smirk on my face.

I’d done a little digging back when I’d started ‘misplacing supplies for profit’ just in case I ever needed a

little inside help to make a quick escape, and every official document I could lay my hands on said that

the guy we were about to liberate was the best damned pilot aboard. He was ex-military, so most of the

files I’d found were redacted, but I’d found a list of medals he’d received and pretty much the only ones

he didn’t have were the ones you got for taking a bullet.

Opening the Maximum Security door was like opening an oven. A blast of superheated air seared my

face and I looked away involuntarily. There weren’t any flames visible in the passageway, but some of

the plastic fascia on the walls burped and puckered.

“Give me your card,” I said with a wave of my hand.

“Nylund,” said Wyrick, “you can’t …”

I nodded down the passageway. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. I’m not escaping through that.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she replied, but gave me the card anyway.

My instincts were telling me not to go in. The heat was too intense, the air wasn’t breathable, that kind

of thing. I ignored them. I might have been able to find another pilot, but this guy was the best and I’d

convinced myself that anyone else would get us killed. I stayed as low as I could, on the opposite side of

the hallway from the puckering plastic, but it was nearly unbearable. I counted two doors and then

swiped Wyrick’s card.

The panel went green and the door slid open. I was about to find out what kind of man we were risking

our lives to set free.

The fire in the Maximum Security block travelled through wiring ducts in the drop-ceiling, burning so hot

that it had begun to melt the plastic fascia on the walls. The thick black smoke that poured into the

corridor reminded me of ink slowly spreading through water.

Wes Morgan, the man we’d come to spring, pressed his face close to mine. He’d torn a sleeve off his

prison uniform, wet it in his small sink, and then tied it over his face. The other sleeve, he passed to me.

“Up there,” he pointed at the ceiling, “is superheated steam. Down there is chemical smoke that’ll kill

you if you breathe it. So stay low, but not too low.” He turned to step further down the corridor.

“We’ve got to get to the flight deck. It’s the only way off the station,” I said, pointing back up toward

where Cayla Wyrick waited for us. The prison was in lockdown and she was the only one with the codes



to get us there. We didn’t have time for detours. I was armed with a snub-nosed stun gun I’d taken from

a locker outside the block and there was always the option to turn it on him, but we needed his help to

get us past the pirate blockade.

“We’re not leaving without Asari,” he said gruffly.

“Who’s Asari?” I asked, but Morgan had already begun moving down the corridor toward the next cell. I

was certain I’d heard the name before but couldn’t remember where, so I followed reluctantly, half-

hunched over as I’d been instructed. Though I could see no open flame, the air was blistering hot and

seared my lungs when I breathed, even through the wet cloth.

“This one,” said Morgan through his sleeve. He stood in front of the only other occupied cell on the

block. There was no identifying mark beyond a string of numbers above the door.

Wyrick had given me her ident card and it would open any door in the station. But this was the

Maximum Security block. This was where the UEE parked prisoners they didn’t want anyone to find.

Men who’d committed atrocious crimes, or who had known pirate affiliations, or …

I remembered who Yusaf Asari was.

“I’m not opening that door.” I said firmly. Asari was up on charges of attempted genocide. A Tevarin

terrorist, he’d released a weaponized virus on one of the colonies in the Geddon system. The idea had

been to spread the infection through colony transports that were returning to UEE space. The Advocacy

had gotten wind of the plan and locked down the colony before the virus could spread, but the

casualties on the ground had been horrendous. He was a monster in every sense of the word.

“We can sit here and argue, or I could just take the ident card from you and open the cell myself. Letting

you keep the card is just a courtesy.”

Morgan knew I was armed and didn’t seem to care. Maybe he just wanted to keep Asari from dying in

the fire, I reasoned. If that was the case, I could bend a little. “I want your personal guarantee that he

doesn’t get off the station.”

Morgan considered that. “I won’t help him leave the station. What he does on his own is up to him.” It

was the best I was going to get.

Asari did not immediately emerge from his cell. He was big for a Tevarin and that was saying something.

He’d also been scarred across his face and upper shoulders, scars that were plainly visible because of the

white, sleeveless shirt he wore. “Morgan,” he said with a slurred voice. “You don’t look anything like Iimagined.”

“You look just like your newsreels,” said Morgan. “Consider this a rescue.”

Asari’s gaze passed over me as if I wasn’t even there. “I cannot join you,” he said. “My brother Tevarin

are being held on a lower deck. I will find them and then join the invaders if they’ll take us. If not, then

we will kill them.”



“I understand,” said Morgan. He held out a hand, which Asari shook. “It’s been a pleasure.”

“I’ll see you again, Wes Morgan, if not before death, than after.” With that, the giant Tevarin turned

down the corridor and disappeared deeper into the prison.

“We’re still not going to the flight deck yet,” said Morgan when we’d returned to Wyrick. He spoke again

before either of us could object. “That toy stun gun you have isn’t going to mean squat if we run into the

people responsible for taking out the defenses of an Orbital Supermax, and I’ll be damned if I face them

armed with nothing more than my winning personality.”

“No guns,” said Wyrick firmly.

Morgan looked her up and down. “You’re a sweet girl. Good looking too. You don’t want to find out

what these guys’ll do to you if they have the chance.” He let that gruesome thought hang in the air for a

moment before continuing. “You know who am I?”

She’d gone pale, but she nodded.

“You’ve read my file?”

Another nod. “Kellogg IV wanted a psychological profile before we transferred you. I was going to

conduct it sometime next week.”

“Good. Then you know I’m not a psychopath. Guns are a negotiating tool. If I don’t have to fire one, I

won’t.”

She studied him a moment longer, then nodded a third time. Funnily enough, I didn’t think it was

Morgan’s threat that had made up her mind. She was a shrink, and shrinks were good at reading people.

I’m guessing she saw something in him that told her that he was telling the truth.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the first people on the station to think of the armory. We risked the elevator,

taking it down two levels, and then passed through a maze of hallways. As we got close, we began to

hear noises, metal-on-metal, yells and curses. The source was apparent when we rounded a corner. A

prisoner so skinny he looked like he had a concave chest was holding a patch gun against a sealed vault-

like door. The gun, usually used to seal holes in the hull made by micro-meteorites, sparked as it

contacted the metal. Char marks stained a wide swatch where previous attempts to open it had failed.

A giant prisoner whom I knew as Albus Cronock stood with a cluster of men. His arms were folded over

his chest and he oversaw the operation with heavily-lidded eyes. A weapon taken from a dead guard

leaned against a wall nearby, within easy reach.

“Last chance to turn around and head for the flight deck,” I offered nervously.

“We’re staying,” said Morgan. He held out his hand. “Give me the gun.”

I hesitated, but surprisingly, Wyrick agreed with him. “Do you think it would make a difference one way

or another?”



It might not make a difference, but its weight on my hip was comforting and I was reluctant to give it up.

As soon as I’d handed it over, Morgan stepped up to one of the control panels that was mounted on the

wall, smashed it with his fist, and then removed a wire from its insides. He popped out the stun gun’s

clip and did something to it with the wire that caused it to spark. He gave it a brief inspection and when

he’d come to a satisfactory conclusion, he popped the clip back into the gun.

“There. Now it’s lethal.” He lifted the barrel and pointed it right at us.

“Well,” I said, glaring at Wyrick, “that didn’t take long.”

“This is all part of the plan, isn’t it, Morgan?” asked Wyrick optimistically.

“It’s part of a plan, sure,” answered Morgan with a shrug. “You know that advice you get about your first

day in prison? Find the biggest meanest sonofabitch and start a fight? That’s what we’re going to do.”

Then he waved us forward with the gun. “Now get moving.”

It took a few seconds for the man with the patch gun to notice that the other prisoners had fallen silent,

but when he did he lowered the tool, lifted his safety goggles, and then looked towards Cronock. The

bigger prisoner pushed off from the wall, caught the butt of the guard’s rifle with the edge of his toe,

and then tossed it into the air where he caught it with his hands. As he advanced towards us, several of

the other prisoners followed in his wake. “Well, well. Cayla Wyrick. Nice to see your pretty face. Who

are your two friends?”

I should have realized that everyone knew the prison shrink. Morgan caught my eye. His grip tightened

on the gun and he nodded deliberately at the skinny guy with the patch gun, as if to suggest that I

should charge him if things went south. I shrugged and pretended like I didn’t understand him. I’m as

brave as the next guy, but a patch gun fuses metal together. There was no way I was going to throwmyself against the sparkly end.

“That’s Dr. Wyrick,” she said. “It was Dr. Wyrick the first time we met and it was Dr. Wyrick last week

when you were crying in my office like a baby because your girlfriend got tired of waiting for you and ran

off with her boss.”

Cronock blinked like he’d been struck, and then shot looks left and right. “Crying? Me? You got the

wrong guy.” He hunched his shoulder and spoke in a softer, pleading tone of voice. “Isn’t there

supposed to be some kind of doctor/patient confidentiality or something?”

But Wyrick wasn’t done. She looked at the man holding the patch gun. “Hello, James. I’m surprised tosee you here. What do you think your sister will do when you get another twenty years added to your

sentence for attempting to escape? Stay with Slade and end up in the hospital? You were going to save

her from all that, weren’t you?”

‘James’ reddened and then set the patch gun on the ground. “Sorry, Cronock, I ain’t gonna let that

happen.”



“And you! Mick Brown! Weren’t you going to —?”

This time the prisoner in question didn’t even wait for her to finish. “All right, all right. You made your

point. I ain’t touching a hair on your head.”

I was stunned. Wyrick had managed to neutralize one of the most violent group of men on the

Supermax. Using words.

Morgan’s eyes were wide. “Is there anyone she hasn’t got dirt on?”

I could only shrug.

Wyrick strode right into the middle of the group. Even in heels, her head didn’t even come up to their

shoulders, but it was like she owned them, body and soul. “I’ve got news for you. I am this facility’s new

Warden. That means that I am free to offer station paroles and sentencing recommendations to anyone

who helps us out.” She looked around, waiting for that news to sink in. Then she held up her ident card.

“And because I am the acting warden I have access to the armory.”

Morgan blinked, as if he’d only been half-listening up until that point. “Hold on a second …”

I stuttered out something too. We were going to arm them? But a cheer went up from the prisoners that

drowned me out. Then Wyrick had the door open and we found ourselves in the center of a bunch of

celebrating madmen who were armed to the teeth.

Since the only thing that was keeping them from throwing us out the nearest airlock was Wyrick’s lack of

hesitation in divulging confidential information, I made sure to grab a P4SC assault rifle. If they ever

came for me, I was going to be armed.

Being in command of an army of escaped prisoners isn’t half as glorious as I’d pictured — not that I’d

pictured it. But when you’re assigned to guard said prisoners, your imagination can get a little carried

away. Now, thanks to a pirate attack that had killed every senior officer on the station, the computer

had put the prison shrink in charge, and as her ranking patient I had found myself in a position of

pseudo-authority.

My blue officer’s uniform stood in stark contrast to the prison orange worn by everyone else in our

group, except Cayla Wyrick, the therapist in question. I was already attracting the occasional curious

glare and I knew that as soon as these guys got bored of the new weapons she’d procured for them out

of the armory, things were going to get rough. The trick to staying alive was to keep them occupied, and

Wes Morgan, the mercenary we’d rescued from Maximum Security, was attempting to do just that.

Morgan, Wyrick, and Cronock were huddled around Wyrick’s notepad, just outside the cargo elevator.

The mercenary had proven to be something of an expert hacker and used what was really an office toy

to access the prison broadband. Images of the flight deck, newly patched, flashed across its screen.



“It was vented in the initial attack,” I said. “Looks like the pirates who attacked the station patched it up,

restored the gravity.”

We could see a few pirates milling around in clumps, while landing lights had lit up a section of the flight

deck and a large freighter was maneuvering through the bluish airshield. It looked like it had been

cobbled together from parts of other ships. A large fixed-mount particle cannon extended above thebow, painted to look like the horn of some savage beast. Unfortunately, the illusion of ferocity was

shattered by two disproportionately small wings, which made the ship look less like a predator and

more like a turkey with a horn.

“It’s the Dogs,” Morgan said grimly. His finger highlighted some graffiti on the side of the freighter.

“The Dogs?” I asked.

“The Nova Dogs. They’re bad news. Heavy on weapons and light on morals. Got deep pockets too, for

pirates.”

“Cannibals,” grunted Cronock. “Ain’t gonna let us join them.”

When he saw the look Wyrick and I gave him, he shrugged. “If you expected loyalty, you’re bigger idiots

than I thought.”

“We can try a flanking maneuver,” said Morgan, ignoring the remark. He’d probably taken it for granted

that Cronock would turn on us at his first opportunity. He shifted the camera angle on the notepad’s

screen. “Sneak in behind these fighters and hit them before they know we’re there.”

Cronock burped loudly. “ ‘Flanking maneuver’? These boys ain’t soldiers. You gotta use short words and

speak slowly with this lot.”

“Can we reason with the pirates?” suggested Wyrick.

Morgan continued on as if Wyrick hadn’t spoken. “Your men won’t last five minutes against the Nova

Dogs in a direct attack.”

“Only one way to find out.” Cronock ham-fisted the elevator button and barked for his men to get in. I

stood with Wyrick in the back, trying to figure out how I’d gotten into this situation. If I’d wanted to fight

pirates I could have flown a fighter for the UEE. I’d had my choice of assignments when I’d graduated. Of

course, David’s death had convinced me to work anywhere but in a cockpit.

Security on OSP-4 was tight, and the flight deck was designed to be confining and claustrophobic. The

elevator opened into an airlock that was effectively a killing field. Guards on the flight deck could fire

into it through a vertical slot on the wall, and I knew that there was a subsonic device near the ceiling

that could be used to stun anyone inside. Fortunately though, we had Wyrick, and her codes allowed us

to disable both the airlock defenses and the elevator alarm.



It was a simple matter for Cronock’s men to overwhelm the few pirates stationed at the elevator doors.

This small success was taken to be a sign that his plan was the best one and he strode across the flight

deck like the crest of an orange wave that fired lead in every direction. Those few pirates who were

scattered around the flight deck quickly took cover behind stacks of crates and returned fire.

“Stay here,” said Morgan quietly, putting a hand on my chest. He glanced around quickly, taking in thepositions of the pirates. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

The small file of pirates that had just begun to disembark from the armored freighter were more heavily

armed and better trained than the rest. They quickly shielded a huge man in a black suit from the

gunfire and urged him back up the gangplank. He was having none of it, and shoved his lieutenants

aside.

“Throw down your weapons!” he roared at his subordinates, and I could see a flash of chrome where his

jaw had been. The rest of him was hugely muscular, so much so that his head looked comically small

atop his massive shoulders. He had long black hair that matched the black flight suit that he wore. The

decal on his chest displayed a skull in the jaws of a larger skull, which made a grim kind of sense for the

leader of a cannibal pack.

He strode right into the thick of the gunfire, batting down the weapons of his pirates.

Cronock, surprised and confused by the sudden surrender, must have felt that he had no choice but to

stop firing himself, and ordered his men to stand down.

“Who is that?” asked Wyrick quietly.

Morgan’s jaw had tightened. “Martin Kilkenny. You’d probably diagnose him with a god complex. He

became infamous for an attack he led on a slave ship, except instead of freeing the slaves, he and hiscrew ate them, and then sold the ship. We’re in trouble.”

Cronock did not appear to recognize Kilkenny, or if he did, he was unintimidated. “We’re here for your

ships. Give over the codes if you want to live.”

“I can’t hear you. Come closer!” yelled Kilkenny, cupping a hand behind his ear.

“Did you see that?” said Morgan quietly to Wyrick and I while Kilkenny was speaking. He nodded at the

fighters.

I followed his gaze. The two vehicles were the OSP-4’s advanced Hornet fighters. After a few moments I

saw a change in light. Someone was inside the fighter! My eyes shifted to the second Hornet. The anglewas too oblique for me to see inside the cockpit, but I was sure that it too was occupied. Worse,

Cronock’s group had moved right into the arc of the ship’s weapons.

“We have to warn them,” said Wyrick in alarm.



Morgan looked at the psychiatrist like she’d sprouted another head. “What do you think those prisoners

were going to do to us once they no longer needed your codes to escape the station? We wait here. No

matter which group loses, we win.”

“We can’t just let them be slaughtered,” said Wyrick desperately. I almost pitied her. I had forgotten

that she knew each of these men with the intimacy only a psychologist possessed. She knew theirbackstories, their hopes, their dreams … it was her job to bring out the best in them in the hopes of

helping them to be rehabilitated. Morgan and I had the luxury of seeing a crowd of heavily armed

lunatics in orange jumpers. We could watch them get slaughtered without a second thought. She

couldn’t.

“It doesn’t help us if Kilkenny kills Cronock without a fight,” I pointed out.

“Fine,” he shook his head. “Fine. Keep quiet and follow me.”

We kept low to the ground and sprinted behind the nearest fighter. Morgan ducked beneath the

fuselage and beckoned us to follow. On the other side was a stack of crates that had been scored byblaster fire. Two dead pirates lay sprawled out on the deck nearby.

“Pay attention,” said Morgan, pressing a knife into my hand. He pointed at a thin rubber hose that

dangled from the fighter’s front landing gear. “This carries hydraulic fluid for the landing gear. When I

say so, you cut it. Don’t get any on your hands. It’s poisonous as hell.”

He ducked his head around the fighter’s nose and checked out Cronock’s group. They were completely

oblivious to the fighters’ front-mounted weaponry. With a sigh, he lifted his rifle to his shoulder and

sighted down the barrel at the other fighter’s landing gear.

“Stop there,” said Kilkenny to Cronock. I could barely see either of them around the fighter’s landinggear.

Wyrick knelt beside me. She was unarmed, having refused the weapon Morgan had offered her back at

the armory. Philosophical grounds, I guessed. I respected her decision but that didn’t mean I couldn’t

wish we had a third gun. Even crouched underneath the fighter, I felt exposed. She didn’t seem to notice

my discomfort. “What’s wrong with his jaw?”

“Shut up,” hissed Morgan. He pointed with the rifle at a spot above my head. “The cockpit is right

there.”

Wyrick and I looked up and then back at him. We nodded in unison.

“I said,” said Cronock repeated, louder than he had before. “We’re here for your —,”

“I heard you,” said Kilkenny. “I just needed you to be exactly where you are now.” Cronock’s crew had

walked right into his trap.



“Now!” said Morgan sharply. He opened fire on the other fighter’s landing gear, the rifle chugging in his

hands. I slashed with the knife, but to my horror the rubber hose flexed with my cut. Bright flashes

seared my vision as the Hornet’s guns began firing into the crowd of prisoners.

“Nylund!” shouted Wyrick. Her nails dug into my arm.

“I’m trying,” I shouted back. I grabbed the hose in my other hand and began to saw at it. Morgan had

turned to fire at Kilkenny’s men, who’d retreated into the freighter. All at once I cut through the hose

and hydraulic fluid sprayed everywhere. The nose of the Hornet dropped abruptly, and it would have hit

me in the head had I not fallen backwards to avoid the spraying fluid. Laser fire hit the deck nearby and

hot air washed over us.

“This way,” shouted Morgan to what remained of Cronock’s men. We heard a hiss above us and he

swivelled and fired. The body of a pirate fell out of the cockpit to the deck beside us, a bloody hole

where his eye had been. Morgan grabbed Wyrick’s arm, yanked her out from under the fighter, and

then practically threw her at the loading platform. I followed, sliding to a stop in front of the platform’s

control panel. One of the coaxial guns on the armored freighter had powered up and was spitting lasers

at us. I slammed my hand on what I guessed was the down button and a fighter-sized square of floor

shuddered into motion beneath our feet.

I heard Wyrick shout for Morgan, who was firing at the freighter to little effect as a half-dozen prisoners

made a break for us. The platform moved depressingly slowly, but thankfully we sank out of the coaxial

gun’s arc in a few seconds. Just before the platform’s doors shut above us, Morgan slid over the edge

and dropped down beside us.

“Well,” he said, looking back the way we’d come. “We need to find another way off the station.”

The twelve of us who had made it to the loading platform alive had to wait in the dark as the thirteenth

choked to death on his own blood. The sound was hideous and wet, and no man spoke until it stopped.

It was a sign of how badly the pirate force led by Martin Kilkenny had damaged the station that the

lights wouldn’t come on in the cargo area in which we now hid for several minutes. When they did

flicker to life, the light was dim and uncertain.

We felt the platform begin to stir in response to a summons from above, but Morgan bashed the panel

to pieces with the butt of his rifle. Nearby, Wyrick, the prison’s therapist and our de facto conscience

wept softly over the dead man.

“Okay Nylund,” said Morgan. “We need another way off the station.”

I realized that I’d been staring into space and shook my head. We’d gone to the Flight Deck to steal the

station’s two Hornet fighters and then use them to run the blockade set up by the Nova Dogs and their

Captain, Martin Kilkenny, a pirate about whom I knew little, save that he was a cannibal and that there



was, in the words of Cayla Wyrick, something wrong with his jaw. Now, with the Flight Deck in pirate

hands, not only would we have to find another ship, we’d have to fight our way past those very same

Hornets.

“Nylund?”

“I’m thinking,” I said quickly. “There are two mothballed fighters and an old station transport in a hangar

on the other side of the station, but it would take a miracle worker to get them battle-ready. Besides,

Kilkenny’s men would simply follow us in the Hornets and gun us down. They wouldn’t even need the

rest of their ships.”

“Then we need to take out the fighters.” Morgan glanced ruefully at the destroyed control panel. “I

guess that was a little hasty. Is there another way to get back up to the Flight Deck?”

“We can’t go back there.” Wyrick rose. She’d dealt with the prisoners at the armory, traveled through

the station with ex-convicts, and survived being shot at by the Nova Dogs. Some women would have

crumbled under the pressure, but she seemed to have gained something from the experience. She stoodstraighter, held her chin up. Gone was the therapist’s passivity. She would have a hard time re-entering

the practice once this was all over. “We need every man we have left.”

Morgan’s fist clenched. “We have no other choice–,”

“–We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” I said, not realizing that I’d spoken aloud. When I found all eyes

upon me, I realized that I’ve have to explain myself. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists. If a group of

prisoners ever seized the Flight Deck, we were to activate the automated turrets. Blow them to kingdom

come.”

Wyrick flushed with anger. “I never knew about that policy. Flushing prisoners into space is inhuman.”

Morgan put his hand out to stop her. “It’s that or die.” He gave her room to object, but she remained

sullenly silent. “Okay,” he said, continuing on, “we activate the turrets, blow up Kilkenny and his men,

and then escape on the backup fighters.”

“Not so fast,” I interjected. “There are a lot of missing steps there. The turrets were activated on the

Command Deck and that’s gone. Then there’s the matter of fixing the fighters…”

“Never mind that. I know a guy. The turrets though…” Morgan looked around and pointed at several

circular nodules in the ceiling. “There. Can we hack them from here?”

“No. They’re strictly remote. Can’t have the prisoners disabling the turrets themselves.” I rose, excited

despite myself. “But there is the server room. If it hasn’t been destroyed.”

“Fine–,”



Whatever Morgan was about to say was drowned out by a burst of static from the station-wide comm

system. The voice that came up was so deep and sonorous that I had no doubt it belonged to a pirate

captain. Of course, it was Kilkenny himself.

My name is Martin Kilkenny, and you can consider me your parole officer. I say parole because you are

not free men. A free man is a man who can do any task he chooses, but there is only one task you needto accomplish to earn a place aboard my ship. I am looking for a man named Martin Browning. Prisoner

number AX-345987.

There was a pause.

You may have heard that the Nova Dogs are cannibals. You have not heard wrong. We are creatures of

the Void, and the Void is a hungry place. Does it not try and claw its way into your station? Does it not

suck you into its belly like wet pasta? We follow its example. What we don’t use, we eat. There are

twelve spots aboard my ship. One in the crew cabin and eleven in the kitchen. A useful man will earn his

place in the crew.

Complete silence.

“Charming,” said Wyrick dryly.

“Maybe he’ll find this chap and leave?” said one of the prisoners. Wispy hair, body like a bag of sticks. It

was Relic, I think, the prisoner who’d threatened us with a patch gun.

“Maybe,” I said and let the word dangle in the air. If Kilkenny was hunting this Browning character, he’d

leave us alone. That was the thought of course, but I knew that we’d killed some of Kilkenny’s men and

he’d come after us for that if he could.

We made our way through the utility corridors towards the server room. The former prisoners who

trailed behind us whispered about Kilkenny’s offer. No one seemed to know anyone named Browning,

but each of them thought they knew someone who did. Despite the recent massacre of their friends,

they all dreamed that they would be the one to claim Kilkenny’s unused berth. The thought that the

winner of their little contest might have to eat the losers never occurred to them.

I thought I knew a better way to find Martin Browning. Wyrick walked at the front of the group, just

behind Morgan. I caught her arm and then with a nod of my head indicated that she should slow her

pace. If Morgan noticed he said nothing.

“There’s a direct terminal in the server room. With your access codes, you can find out who thisBrowning guy is. Which cell he’s in.”

“You want to turn him over to Kilkenny? After everything we’ve seen?”

“Maybe. We need to consider our options here. What if he gets his man and…,” the unlikelihood of my

own suggestion made me stumble. “…well, he just leaves. One man’s life in exchange for everyone on

the station. Who wouldn’t make that deal?”



“The man in question, I suspect.” Wyrick seemed to think that ended the argument and rejoined

Morgan in the front.

The deck which housed the server room was dark, and I worried that it had no power. If that was the

case we’d have to draft a new plan, and quickly. Morgan found a few palm lights on a wall, which he

distributed. We passed through a door that had once been secure and entered a room that was the kindof hot that soaked through our clothes and dried out our eyes. Banks upon banks of black boxes stared

at us with flickering green and red lights.

“It’s hot in here,” said Relic unnecessarily.

Morgan looked around and then moved down one of the rows. “Let’s find an active terminal. Spread

out.”

I followed Wyrick. I had worked out something important on the journey here. The server room was

truly the heart of the station. From here, all things were possible. Though the records of my arrest and

trial would eventually be sent back to the UEE, we were isolated enough that transferring large amountsof data could get expensive. For now, it was all stored on the station’s servers. Given the right access, I

could wipe out evidence of my crimes. Everyone who knew that I was even a prisoner was dead, aside

from Wyrick herself, and after this was all over I could perhaps find some way to buy her silence.

“All I’m saying is that there is no harm in finding out which cell is his. It’s the only thing that Kilkenny

wants. It has value. We could trade that information. But then maybe warn Browning that Kilkenny is

coming for him.”

Wyrick stopped cold. I nearly ran into her. She turned and I could see the blue of her eyes in the palm

light. “I’m your therapist, Nylund. I know you better than you know yourself. You’re not a coward at

heart. You know that caving in to Kilkenny is wrong. This self-serving criminal that you’ve become, it’s

just your way of dealing with your guilt. You’re punishing yourself.”

The palm-light dipped and I caught hold of one of the server racks. “My brother has nothing to do with

this.” I licked my lips with a dry tongue. “And I may be a self-serving criminal, but I am not punishing

myself. I am trying to use every tool at my disposal to get us all out of here alive.”

If therapists can lie, then so too can their patients.

Wyrick caught my gaze for an uncomfortably long time, her blue eyes darting microscopically, as if to

keep the line between our pupils unbroken. At last, she seemed to come to some conclusion. “I will give

you the access codes. If you want them. Do you really want them, Nylund? Think very carefully.”

Despite myself, I did. I thought of Danny and our days in the Academy. Before his death, I’d been a

straight arrow. I never would have considered committing a crime, let alone wiping out the evidence

that I’d done it. What had changed since then? I shied away from that thought. Damned headshrinkers

were starting to get to me.



“Yes,” I said as innocently as I could.

I was uncertain if she’d follow through on her promise, but she pressed on a sliver of metal and a

terminal popped open. She punched in her codes and then walked away. Her radical therapy had failed,

I told myself victoriously.

It was only after I’d wiped the evidence of my crimes from the database that I realized that it was not a

victory at all. For some reason, it felt more like a loss.

I had pulled up a query window and the cursor flashed at me. I suddenly felt a huge weight on me that

had nothing to do with the heat. I was betraying Wyrick’s trust twice in as many minutes. I told myself

I’d make it up to her. At first, the thought was flippant, but it felt right, so I told myself again that I’d

make it up to her and meant it this time.

My fingers danced across the keyboard as I punched in Martin Browning’s name. To my surprise it came

up blank. Out of the 2400 prisoners on OSP-4, not a single one had the misfortune to be named “Martin

Browning”, and the ident Kilkenny had given belonged to a dead man named Wilbur Marx.

Morgan had found another terminal in the back of the room and brought up a view of the Flight Deck. A

targeting reticle hovered over the two Hornets. “The connections are fried,” he said, wiping sweat off

the back of his neck and flicking droplets onto the floor. “It’s this damn heat. Only one of the turrets is

responding. We won’t have much time.”

“Target the fighters first,” I said, wiping sweaty palms against my pants. “The freighter’s deadly but we

can outrun her.”

“Find what you were looking for?” asked Morgan, glancing over his shoulder.

“Sure. Used one of the terminals to check my messages. Pay some bills. You know.” It was a weak joke,

but he grunted a laugh and didn’t follow up. Wyrick, standing beside him, studiously avoided looking at

me. I tried to think of something to say to win back her trust, but I couldn’t.

Morgan punched a few keys into the terminal and the targeting reticle turned red. “Consider this a love

letter addressed to Captain Kilkenny,” he said, mashing down the keys.

I was in a bad spot.

I was an officer in a prison that had been half-destroyed by pirates, in which most of the prisoners had

escaped and now wandered the hallways unfettered. Those few criminals whose lives we’d saved still

didn’t trust me. Wes Morgan, the mercenary that we’d rescued from a prison cell, probably thought I

was a fool, and Wyrick… well, Cayla Wyrick was my therapist.

“The cargo hold is this way,” I offered when I realized that we were about to miss a turn.

“We’re not going to the cargo hold,” said Morgan without slowing.



I asked him if not there then where, but he ignored me, and I let it drop. No one else seemed to care.

The prisoners followed him like young pups following the Alpha Wolf. Wyrick wouldn’t talk to me. She’d

disagreed with my decision to turn Martin Browning over to the Nova Dogs, and though I hadn’t actually

managed to find out who he was in the server room, the fact that I’d looked at all made me a coward in

her eyes.

As we passed deeper into the bowels of the station, we began to hear things through the walls. Quiet

coughs coming through the ventilation ducts, but then something else. A low giggling that never seemed

to stop, never took a breath. The shifting of papery fabric. The scent of sweat and the unwashed.

Fat Max, the largest man amongst us, if not in muscle then in pure bulk, stopped dead, blocking the

corridor. “I ain’t going in there.”

The door ahead of us was riveted steel and painted with a white stripe that bore another, red stripe on

its back. I recognized it at once. It was the Forensic Psychiatry wing. A buddy of mine once described it

as being like Maximum Security if the prisoners were tweaking all the time. A man in Maximum Security

might stab you for a toothpick, but a man in Forensic Psychiatry would stab you if the voices in his head

told him you even owned a toothpick. These were men who would not survive on a prison world like

Quarterdeck, either because they could not take care of themselves, or because other prisoners would

kill them out of fear for their own safety.

Only a few of them had actually gone insane while they were on the station. Most were simply monsters

the other systems didn’t know what to do with. Some were sane, but had performed acts so horrendous

a jury of twelve reasonable men and women could not comprehend how anyone in their right mind

could have committed them.

I could understand why Fat Max wanted to avoid the place. But I also understood that I needed to win

points with Morgan and Wyrick. I pushed my way to the front of the group and turned around. These

men did not look like the hardened group of prisoners we’d found trying to break into the prison

Armoury. They’d seen many of their friends killed in Martin Kilkenny’s ambush, and had themselves

been threatened with death by a cannibal. They were scared.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I asked. “What’s the worst that can happen? Will these guys kill

and eat you? Cause that’s what the guys behind us have promised to do, and we know they’re

cannibals.”

Fat Max glared back at me with beady eyes that were made small by the vast slabs of coffee-colored

flesh that were his cheeks. “Go in yourselves then.”

“Fine. But you know what?” I turned and pointed dramatically at Wyrick. Blonde with diamond ear studs

and a pantsuit, she had kicked off her high heels somewhere on the Flight Deck and now wore nothing

but her stocking feet. “This woman came here three times a week, every week, as part of her job, and

she’s going back in now. Are you going to let her go in alone?”



It turned out that several of them would. But more than half decided to come with us, and I figured it

was no great loss to leave those others behind.

“I can’t decide if I should feel flattered or insulted by that little speech,” Wyrick said as we slowly

advanced into the ward. It was the first she’d spoken to me since I’d used her codes to look up

Browning’s info.

“I’m as scared as Fat Max,” I admitted. “It takes courage to do what you do.”

“Fat Max stayed behind,” she pointed out. “You didn’t.”

I didn’t know how to take the compliment. Did this mean that I was earning my way back into her good

graces? I was about to continue our conversation but she’d already walked away.

I don’t know what I’d expected Forensic Psychiatry to look like, but what we found looked very much

like a hospital. Medical stations that included defibrillators and firefighting equipment were mounted on

the walls and beds were lined up on one side of the corridor. Each bed had restraints, but they were

clean and sterile in nature. We came to a common area with a few scattered tables upon which old

fashioned cardboard board games were laid out. A circle of sofas were arranged around a shattered

vidscreen and a line of bloody footprints led from there to one of the doors. There was a medical

dispensary behind a sheet of Plexiglas on one side of the room, but the door swung on its hinges and I

could see several patients slumped over with dried foam and vomit on their mouths and the fronts of

their shirts.

“Where’s the staff?” asked Morgan.

No one answered.

We proceeded further into the ward, encountering the occasional patient who was so stoned on

prescription medication that they barely acknowledged our presence. Wyrick was no doctor and there

wasn’t much she could do for them except try to keep them calm as we passed.

Morgan occasionally checked the map on Wyrick’s notepad. He seemed to know exactly where his

friend was being held. We came to a door that required her to enter her codes again, and for the first

time since we’d begun our little journey she balked.

“This is the high security ward. If this is where your friend is incarcerated, he’s better off staying here

where he can receive treatment.”

“Herby’s got a condition, but I know how to manage it,” said Morgan defensively.

“Herby?” asked Wyrick with one eyebrow raised. “You don’t mean Herschel Konicek?”

“You know him.” It wasn’t a question. More of an admission of defeat.

“As a therapist, I hope he gets treatment. As a woman, I hope he rots in his cell.”



Morgan shook his head. Wyrick hadn’t asked for an explanation, but he gave her one anyways. “Herby

was one of the best field mechanics I ever knew. One time, our APC was attacked by Vanduul. They blew

the thing to hell. The damage was bad enough, they left us for dead. We found Herby under the

wreckage with a three inch piece of steel in his forehead. Crazy thing was, he was still able to walk and

talk. Except for this piece of metal in his skull, he looked perfectly normal. So there we were in the

middle of hundreds of miles of desert with no vehicle. What were we going to do? Walk to the nearest

town? Well, Herby took the APC’s drivetrain, hooked two wheels to it and we drove outta there on the

ugliest motorcycle you ever seen.

“When we got back, we took Herby to the hospital and it turns out the metal fragment damaged the

part of his brain responsible for impulse control. What happened to those women…he knew what he

was doing—he just couldn’t stop himself. Cut him up inside, real bad.

“I wouldn’t wish what he did to his victims on anyone, but he was a victim too. Our unit was all-male, so

as long as he stuck with us, didn’t take any shore leave, he could have a life. Course, when the law

caught up to me, it caught up to him too, and that’s how he got here.”

Morgan turned to Wyrick. “The fact is, we need him to fix Nylund’s mothballed fighters. I understand

that you have more incentive than anyone to keep him in his cell. But I’ll do whatever it takes to make

sure you stay safe. Herby will know not to cross me.”

Wyrick crossed her arms, hugging herself. She looked up at me, then at the other prisoners. If I was in

her position I’d want to stay clear of Konicek, but there was no way we were getting those fighters

operational without some high caliber help, and she knew it too. Her choice was simple: agree to free

Konicek, or let the rest of us be captured by Kilkenny and his crew. I didn’t envy her the decision. “Okay.

We release him, but…if what you say is true, and Konicek’s condition is the result of a brain injury, then

he’ll never be cured. After all this is over, I want your word that you’ll bring him back here.”

“Done,” said Morgan so quickly that I could tell that Wyrick was trying to figure out where she screwed

up. After a moment, she gave up and punched her code into the console.

The reinforced door began to slide open and then stopped abruptly, the lights on the panel going from

green to orange, indicating that an obstruction was present. It took Morgan and two of the prisoners to

force it open, and when it finally did, a guard slumped to the ground. His eyes had been pushed into

their sockets and two scarlet trails, like scabbed-over tears ran down his cheeks. The rest of the corridor

was coated in blood, more than I’d ever seen in one place. We found a few bodies, but also many empty

blood pouches, normally used for transfusions. The stench of rot and copper hung heavy in the air.

“Herby!” Morgan called out, but there was no answer. Somewhere far away I thought I heard the

beginning of a hysterical laugh that was quickly cut short. We were being sent a message and we all

knew it.



As ex-quartermaster aboard OSP-4, I have seen my share of dead bodies. Contrary to popular belief, we

do not space the bodies of men who die in prison. Instead, each death begins a rigorous investigation,

and I was required to provide for all of the medical supplies and any other exotic components the

examiners need for their tests. I have seen the bodies of men shanked by other prisoners, beaten to

death with lead pipes, and I even saw one man who’d gotten stuck in one of the heating ducts and

slowly cooked.

The sight that confronted me and the small group of escaped prisoners in the Forensic Psychiatry Ward

was unlike any other I’d seen. Dead bodies. Men and women, some wearing guard uniforms, others the

flimsy dressing gowns of the patients. Some of their faces were beaten into a mass of purplish flesh, but

others were recognizable. Some lay slumped peacefully against a wall while others wore looks of horror.

Someone had broken the overhead lights and shattered glass littered the floor.

I heard a sob from Cayla Wyrick. She knelt next to a young man with angry red welts on his cheek and a

frightened stare captured in his cold, dead eyes. She said something to him I couldn’t quite hear.

Figuring she needed some privacy I left her and joined Wes Morgan, the mercenary we’d rescued from

the Maximum Security wing, who stood further down the corridor.

“Do you feel that?” he asked me.

“Existential terror? Yeah, I’m there.”

“No,” he took a deep breath. “The atmosphere mixture is wrong in this wing. Captain Kilkenny’s attack

must have damaged the recyclers. There’s too much nitrogen and too little oxygen.”

“You can smell that?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I feel a little drunk. Don’t you? That’s one of the signs of nitrogen narcosis. Weneed to find Herby and get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”

I turned and looked at the half-dozen or so men in orange-jumpsuits. They were all armed, many with

prison tattoos on their face and hands. One of them, whom I learned was simply called “Shank,” had

dyed the white of his eyes so that he stared at us with blacked-out orbs. Not the type of men who

needed any more “-osis” anythings.

They were the enemy of our enemy, so to speak, and we’d somehow come to the conclusion that it was

best to travel together as long as we were all trying to avoid becoming the Nova Dogs’ next meal.

Literally. They were cannibals. Now that decision was starting to look a little dicier. “What do we do

about them?”

“Nothing.” Morgan raised an eyebrow and looked over his shoulder. “Look at them. At the armory they

were taking turns trying to out alpha-male each other. Now? They’re more afraid of Kilkenny than they

are of us. If they weren’t they would have already shot us both in the back …” His eyes roamed over to

Wyrick, who knelt next to another of the bodies. “… and done much worse to her.”



He was right, of course. The worst of the bunch had stayed behind with Fat Max. I had no doubt they’d

already been captured by Martin Kilkenny. The rest of them … they were like a headless snake. Not as

exciting as a live one, but also not as deadly.

Our little group made our way further into Forensic Psychiatry. It was a small ward, but the hallways

were all maddeningly similar to each other and there were quite a few double-locked doors that hadbeen smashed open, often at a physical cost to the assailant if the bloody marks on them gave any

indication. Always we heard laughter — the disturbed, joyless laughter that was as involuntary as a

sneeze.

Eventually, we found one of its sources. A slim man with jaundiced skin, he was covered in medical

bandages he’d stolen from an overturned medical cart. He was desperately trying to bind wounds on his

hands and wrists.

Wyrick knelt quickly to offer aid, but recoiled when the crazed man offered his wrist and she saw the

metal band that dangled on one of them. She stumbled back into my arms and for a moment I smelled

sandalwood and roses. I was reminded that she had put on perfume earlier in the day, never suspecting

that an attack by pirates would turn everything upside down.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“His watch belonged to a friend of mine,” she said quietly. Her hand closed on my arm, painfully, but her

eyes were locked on those of her patient.

It was obvious that her friend’s corpse now decorated the corridor behind us. One of the prisoners,

name of Relic if I remembered correctly, came to the same conclusion. Only a few hours ago he’d

threatened us with a patch gun, but running for your life from a group of cannibals is a heck of a bonding

experience. It wasn’t that he cared for Wyrick … it was more like he’d come to view her as part of his

pack. Any threat to the pack was a threat to him.

He caught the man by a wad of hospital gown and shoved the barrel of his gun into his cheek. When the

man didn’t react beyond a giggle, Relic fired the weapon into a wall and then pressed the now sizzling

hot metal into the same spot. “You’re a dead man. He’s a dead man.”

Wyrick began to cry and I clutched her closer to me.

The crazed man began to mutter incoherently, and as Relic spun him around, I could see that several

hypodermics were lodged in his back. “North, East, South, West. It’s West, isn’t it? Only not quite. West,

west, west. I’m high, Wes, up in the sky, I’m high. You gotta help me, Wes, before I fall down.”

Morgan had raised his gun the moment Relic moved, but now he squinted and lowered it. “Herby?”

The man’s eyes rolled and his head lolled to one side.

Morgan took two steps closer. “Is that you? What the hell happened to you?”



Relic looked between the two of them, eyes so wide I could see the whites all the way around. His gun

shifted from the man we now suspected was Konicek to Morgan himself. “You know him? Are you

together?” He turned to his fellow prisoners. “We’ve been led into a trap. And he’s at the center of it.”

Morgan’s eyes narrowed and his hand tightened on his weapons, “… just what in the hell?”

I remembered what Morgan had said about the atmosphere. “Relic,” I said, using his name to try and

put him at ease. “There’s no trap. This is the man we’ve come to find. He’s the reason we’re here.”

Wyrick pushed away from me and I was suddenly aware of how much I’d enjoyed her attention. “Your

friend killed my friend,” she said. Her bearing had changed in an instant from despair to bitter anger.

“We’re not taking him with us.”

Morgan’s anger was almost indistinguishable from any of his other emotions, except that it was colder.

Harder. I knew that if I didn’t interject he’d shoot Relic down without warning and then we’d have to

fight our way through his friends as well as the patients.

“Now, Caylie — Cayla,” I quickly corrected myself. I was not immune to the ward’s altered atmosphere.

“There is no evidence that he did the killing. Those needles in his back … obviously he’s been drugged,

and not by anyone with medical training.”

“You’ve got about ten seconds to put down that rifle,” said Morgan. The thumb and forefinger of his off-

hand circled each other, and the rifle barrel shifted imperceptibly. I had the impression he’d gotten the

drop on Relic and not the other way around.

Perhaps Relic knew it too. His tone was almost pleading. “He’s a nutter. It would be a mercy. Be a mercy

to all these men —”

As his gun swung out to encompass the entire ward, Morgan shot him cleanly though his shoulder.

Relic’s gun clattered to the ground and the prisoner himself was so surprised he followed it down.

I kicked it away before he could regain his senses. Wyrick joined me a moment later, tearing at Relic’s

jumpsuit to check the wound. She needn’t have bothered. If Morgan had wanted to kill him, he would

have. I was certain the wound would prove non-lethal. A temporary inconvenience at best.

“Let me get those for you, Herby,” said Morgan. One after another, he pulled the hypodermics free. He

slapped the former patient lightly on the cheek, as if unwilling to use full force.

“We have to get out of here, Wes,” muttered Konicek. “They’re all around us.”

Morgan nodded, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We’d found the right man and it looked like we were all

going to get out of here in one piece. I rose and came face-to-face with five hard men and the barrels of

their rifles. Not believing that they could be meant for us, I turned around and spotted a herd of

humanity down the corridor. A dozen men or more in blood-stained smocks, many with dried drool on

them, stood at the other end.



“You can all put down your weapons now,” said one of the prisoners behind me.

I realized that the guns had, in fact, been meant for us. Wes had spared Relic’s life, but they didn’t see it

that way. One of us had shot one of them. Our little alliance was breaking apart.

My gun clattered to the deck. Wyrick looked back towards the prisoners. Her face was too moist for

tears, and I realized that we were all soaked with sweat, though it wasn’t much hotter here than

anywhere else in the station. Was this another symptom of the poisonous atmosphere?

Morgan did not drop his weapon. “How do you suppose you’re going to get by them?” he asked,

nodding over his shoulder.

A lean man with not enough teeth spoke. “They ain’t armed. We’ll go through ’em the same way we go

through you.” He smiled, showing off his most obvious feature.

“You can’t get off this station without her,” I said, indicating Wyrick. Without her codes none of us were

going anywhere.

“You’re right,” Wyrick said, and Morgan and I both looked over at her. She wasn’t speaking to the

prisoners. She was speaking to us. “None of you can.”

She took a shuddering breath and put her arms out, as if she was steadying herself on the armrests of

some throne, and then turned to the prisoners. “Like it or not, I’m the only hope you’ve got. Any of you.

That means that if we stay together, then we stay together. So I suggest you settle your differences.

Stat.”

With that, she turned to lead us down the corridor. Perhaps it was the altered atmosphere, but we

followed like she was Moses walking through the Red Sea. And I’ll be damned if those patients didn’t

part before us and let us through without so much as a whimper.

I once knew a man who’d worked at OSP-4 since the day they set her in space and gave her a spin. He

told me that the only thing that set apart Forensic Psychiatry from the Political Activities Wing was that

the crazies in the PAW had a cause.

We had never meant to go there, but when our elevator stopped and all the lights turned red, Wes

Morgan pried open the doors and we found that the attack by the Nova Dogs had blown open the shaft.

We’d been saved from the vacuum of space by a piece of steel that had peeled off one wall and lodged

underneath the car.

We were lodged in the shaft, but we could all detect the gentle hiss of escaping air and we stepped off

carefully. No man wanted to be the last to disembark and risk a short trip into the black. I let them go,

and eventually only Cayla Wyrick and I remained. It was fitting in a way. She was my therapist, the

woman into whose custody I had been given after being stripped of my rank. She looked at me and I



looked at her, and neither of us wanted to go before the other. In the end, she had more steel in her

than I did, and she followed me out of the shaft.

Right into the barrel of a gun.

Our assailants, like most of our group, wore prison orange, except that they wore red suns painted on

bands of white cloth on their arms. They’d been waiting by the door of the escalator, capturing and

disarming us one-by-one as we came through.

They took us through the prison block and up a flight of stairs. There, striding around a control center

consisting of hacked notepads and vidscreens that had once been mounted in guard posts, was a

Tevarin. He was tall and well-muscled, with grayish skin, and he owed his freedom to us.

“We meet again, Yusaf Asari,” said Morgan cockily. By this time we’d all been shackled with plastic

handcuffs, and his wrists were bound before him. Several more Tevarin prisoners from the PAW stood

nearby, holding onto our guns for us.

“We do indeed,” responded Asari. “What are you doing here, Morgan?”

“Sightseeing. You know, snap a few pictures, have a drink with the locals. That kind of thing.”

“We’re here by accident,” Wyrick quickly interjected. The small blonde woman in nylons and a suit

looked out of place in the sea of orange and blue uniforms that made up our group, but she’d become

as much a part of it as any of us. “Our elevator —”

“— I don’t care what brought you here. I want to know where you’re going.” Asari’s face was stone and

his accent made him stress his syllables in all the wrong places. “We are here and the pirates are out

there and no one travels between us. Except you. Why? What are you seeking?”

The Nova Dogs, a group of pirates captained by one Martin Kilkenny, were cannibals who sought one

particular prisoner named Martin Browning who no one had ever heard of and who were willing to blow

up the station to find him. They’d struck without warning, targeting command centers and barracks with

pinpoint precision. It was because of them that Cayla Wyrick, who held the civilian rank of Lieutenant,

had been promoted by OSP-4’s computer to Warden. She was the most valuable thing on the station

right now, and I had no idea if Asari knew it or not.

“We’re getting off the station,” said Morgan simply. My chest tightened. What the hell was Morgan

doing? The last thing we needed to do was to tell these guys the truth.

The Tevarin who surrounded us grunted in laughter. All except Asari. “I know you too well to believe

that’s a joke. How are you going to accomplish that?”

Morgan nodded at Herschel Konicek, who still wore the hospital gown he’d had on when we’d rescued

him from Forensic Psychiatry. “Herby’s my mechanic. He’s going to fix a couple of mothballed fighters

Nylund knows about, and we’re going to use them to run the blockade.”



I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking Morgan just what in the hell he was trying to prove.

Asari absorbed this information impassively. “What makes you think we won’t use those fighters

ourselves?”

Morgan shrugged, an awkward motion considering his hands were bound in front of him. “Herby won’t

work for you. That right, Herby?”

Konicek, still coming down from an involuntary high from the drugs the other inmates had fed him,

shrugged and wiped at an ear with his bound hands.

“We have our own mechanics.”

“Not like Herby.”

Asari looked at Konicek, who now crouched on his haunches, rocking back and forth. “Evidently.”

One of the prisoners in the back started to say something, but he was violently cut off by a Tevarin whoshoved the butt of his rifle into his guts. I was glad I hadn’t spoken up.

“We saved your life,” said Morgan quietly. “Apparently, the Tevarin have a short memory.”

“The Tevarin have a long memory.” Asari’s brow creased. “My people remember the Battle of Idris IV

and we remember the day when Corath’Thai —”

“Enough with the performance, Yusaf. Two years of exchanging chess moves on bits of paper tied to

strings and all of a sudden I’m suppressing your people?” Morgan took two steps towards Asari and

every rifle in the room raised at once. He stopped and sighed. “No one’s got more sympathy for your

cause than I do. When we get off this hunk of junk, the first thing I’ll do is send your people a note withthe station’s coordinates. You know that.”

Asari considered this as he looked at his men, meeting each of their gazes. “Chess is chess. But I don’t

trust you Morgan. Leave the girl here.”

“Sure, done. Now let’s get these cuffs off,” said Morgan.

I was offended by just how fast he’d agreed to Asari’s terms. He’d sold out Wyrick without a second

thought. I couldn’t contain myself. “We’re not leaving Cayla with you —”

A rifle butt to the solar plexus silenced me a lot quicker than I’d like to admit. I spasmed and found

myself on the floor having to struggle not to vomit repeatedly.

Morgan’s voice sounded fuzzy over the pounding of blood in my ears. “Nice going, kid. The idea was to

convince them she wasn’t valuable as a hostage.”

“That,” said Asari as I struggled to my feet, “is exactly why I don’t trust you. The girl stays. And you

uphold your end of the deal.”



“No, I —”

Another blow from the same rifle sent me back to my knees. I didn’t know why I got back up again. Sure

I’d come to respect Wyrick during our escape attempt, but it wasn’t like me to risk my own neck for

someone else. It wasn’t that I was selfish. It’s just that the last time I took a risk, someone very close to

me died. Being a bastard is generally safer for everyone involved. So why was I putting myself out therefor her? Was it because I respected how she’d bested twenty armed men with only the sound of her

voice at the armory? Or was it because she’d trusted me enough to sign me into the system at the

server room, knowing that I was going to use that access for my own purposes?

“I’m — oh for chrissakes let me speak,” I barked as I saw the rifle butt rise again. Asari looked at me and

then nodded at the guard. The rifle lowered. “She was the one who saved your life. Without her access

codes we’d all be dead. And, despite everything, she has never left a man behind. No one. Not multiple-

murderers, not convicted rapists, not even a former quartermaster with sticky fingers. So there isn’t a

man among us —” I looked around at the other prisoners and found a surprising number of them

nodding back, “— who’ll leave her behind now. If you ever want your people to know which sorry ass

scrap of metal you got yourself imprisoned in, you’ll let us go.”

As far as impassioned speeches go, it was one of my best. Asari, whose job it was as leader of the

Tevarin minority in OSP-4 to give impassioned speeches, was not impressed. “Or we could just kill you all

and we’re no worse off than we were before.”

“I’ll stay,” said Wyrick. “I can’t fly a fighter or a transport and I’ve never been much of a mechanic. And I

won’t shoot anyone.” She’d gotten to her feet and, though she was the shortest person in the room by

at least a half a head, somehow, she seemed to loom larger. “You don’t need me to get off this station.”

I was about to protest, not that we needed her access codes to get off the station or anything.

Something more personal. Luckily she cut me off before I embarrassed myself. “You have everything you

need to get these boys where they need to go, Lieutenant Avery Nylund. Just remember to send a

search party for me when this is all over, okay?”

And just like that we left her there. I kept waiting for Morgan, our ultra-competent mercenary, to

propose a plan to rescue her. As soon as we got out of earshot he’d suggest we storm the air ducts, or

take out the guards with knock-out gas. But the plan never materialized. Asari’s men marched us to the

nearest working elevator and gave us machine guns instead of the guns we’d appropriated from the

armory and sent us on our way.

I was still numb when we arrived at Cargo Deck 1C, which housed the mothballed fighters and reservetransport that would get us off the station and past Kilkenny’s blockade. Of course, it was locked, and of

course I pointed this out to Morgan. “This is why we need Wyrick. She’s got all the security codes.”

Morgan stepped away from the door console and gave the door a thump of disapproval. “No. Wyrick’s

too smart for that. She would have known we wouldn’t get far without the codes.” He scratched his

head and then looked at me. “She called you lieutenant, didn’t she?”



She had indeed. She’d called me ‘Lieutenant Avery Nylund’ for the first time ever. Even before I’d been

convicted and we’d met each other in passing, she’d merely called me by my rank. And then it hit me. I’d

wiped away the records of my conviction in the server room, and the computer must have then

automatically restored my rank.

It was with some satisfaction that I approached the door console. “Voice Print: Lieutenant Avery Nylund.Passcode: How now brown cow.”

One of the hardened criminals in the back of our group burst out laughing and I felt my cheeks go red.

“What? I like the way it rhymes.”

From a far enough distance, a battle in space looks like dueling fireflies. The actual fighters are lost in

the glare of their exhaust so all you can see are little points of light darting around against a starry

backdrop, and then the occasional violent burst of an explosion.

“They’re shooting down escape pods,” I said to Morgan when I realized what was happening.

“I guess that explains why we haven’t run into many guards. Or service staff for that matter,” said

Morgan with a shrug. “Still, you’d think the Nova Dogs would be more interested in boarding them than

shooting them down. They’re cannibals, aren’t they? Tough to eat interstellar dust.”

It was black humor, but we needed it. We’d left the Political Activities Wing behind and found

temporary shelter in the cargo hold that housed a few mothballed spacecraft. There we’d found some

survivors from the attack — apprentice engineers that Herschel Konicek had put to work re-fitting the

fighters, an old Cutlass and an older Hornet.

“I’ve got bad news, sir,” said a young tech in an oil-stained blue jumpsuit. He’d spoken to me, not

because of my rank, which wasn’t visible because I was in civilian clothing, but because I was the only

one of our group not wearing prison orange. “I overheard … uh,” embarrassed, he pointed at one of the

prisoners while hiding his finger behind his hand. I supplied the name ‘Flint.’ “… yes, um, Flint, saying

that you planned to fly these vehicles to the system’s jump point?”

I explained that yes, we were, and that I’d already outlined our plans to them not two days ago. “Yes,”

he said nervously, “well, these are chase fighters. That is, they’ve been modified for high speeds. In case

station authorities need, uh, needed to catch an escape vehicle. They can’t, however, make quantum

speeds. You’ll be caught before you reach the halfway mark.”

“Good news/bad news,” said Morgan. “Speed is essential for running a blockade.” He glanced over at

the large, rectangular vehicle that was parked next to the fighters. Sparks were shooting away from an

arc welder that was being used to repair some of its armor plating. “What about the transport? Can we

use it?”



“Certainly,” said the tech, slowly enough to indicate that it was not at all a certainty. “But that brings us

to the other issue. None of these vessels was expected to fly. If not for the help of Mr. Konicek, I don’t

believe they would. Even if we get everything back online, there isn’t enough fuel to get even one of

them to the jump point, let alone all three.”

Morgan considered that for a moment. Then he slapped me on the back, which had become a harbingerof bad luck for me. “Well it just so happens that our fearless leader’s previous job assignment was as the

Station Quartermaster. If anyone knows where to find us some fuel, it’s him.”

“Sure. I know where to find fuel,” I retorted. “On the Flight Deck, where it’s supposed to be. We’ll only

have to fight through a couple of hundred pirates to get there.”

Of course, all the snappy retorts in the world weren’t going to change the fact that we did indeed need

fuel, and so after a few hours of pacing the deck I came up with a plan. I quickly assembled our “strike

team,” as I took to calling the six ex-prisoners who’d accompanied us all the way from the armory,

mainly because they were useless at repairing fighters and needed something else to do.

“We need fuel, and Kilkenny and his men have either confiscated or blown up everything they can find.

But there is an alternate source of fuel that I know is still available.” I readied myself for objections

before I continued. “The station’s positional thrusters. They have huge fuel tanks and they’re kept full at

all times. All we have to do is free one of the fuel pods and bring it back here.”

Though Relic had been eating copiously of the station’s supplies for most of the last two days, he was

still the skinniest man I’d ever laid eyes on. He stood with a tube of nutrient paste in one hand and

squeezed some in his mouth. He spoke before he swallowed. “What if we don’t want to leave the

station?”

That one threw me for a loop. “What?”

“We could stay here. We’ve got plenty of food and water, and the door can be welded shut. As soon as

this Kilkenny character finds the man he’s looking for, the Nova Dogs will be gone.”

Morgan spoke before I could. “Am I hearing this right? A bunch of prisoners who don’t want to escape

from prison? I know that thinking long-term isn’t exactly your thing, Relic, but what’s your plan for after

Kilkenny leaves? Wait for the authorities to return you to your cell? What if they don’t leave? Kilkenny

will tear this station apart looking for this Martin Browning, and if that means breaking down a few

doors, your welding won’t stop him.”

Relic was undaunted. “Someone needs to guard these fighters then.” He said back down and laced his

hands behind his head. “We’ll look after them until you get back.”

Another prisoner, a tattooed bald man with a paunch and a five o’clock shadow got up slowly and

ominously. Flint was the man the techs were most afraid of, and with good reason. He rarely spoke, but

when he did, everything he said was tinged with violence. “I don’t trust these two buggers to do it on



their own, and I don’t trust you buggers to guard these ships. We’re going with them, and I’ll kill any

man who says otherwise.”

I have rarely been more grateful to a convicted murderer. Under his watchful eye, all five remaining ex-

prisoners were shepherded out of the hold and into the elevator, leaving the techs and Herschel Konicek

to work in peace. “You think they’ll still be here when we get back?” I asked Morgan.

“I’m sure of it,” he replied. “Herby won’t let us down.”

‘Herby’ was a madman, but I trusted Morgan and that meant that I trusted a madman by extension.

We were equidistant from two positional thrusters. To reach one we had to pass through the Visitor

Center, and I was pretty sure that was Kilkenny’s base of operations. I didn’t relish the idea of sneaking

Relic and his buddies right under the noses of the captain of the Nova Dogs and his men. Plus, Kilkenny

scared the hell out of me, so I scratched it off my list.

To get to thruster number two, we needed to pass through the remains of the Command Deck. It had

been the first place the pirates had attacked and I wasn’t sure how much damage it had sustained or if it

even had any atmosphere, so I made sure we were outfitted for spacewalks before entering the code

that would take us there. Eventually the elevator stopped and an indicator flashed to say that there was

an obstruction in the shaft. We pried open the doors and heard a hiss as air escaped into the vacuum of

space. We found ourselves between floors. I could just make out the bottom of the letters that formed

“COMMAND” on the side of the shaft. We had arrived.

We threw our weapons through the narrow opening and ascended one by one onto the command deck.

I’d been here many times before, but I could hear sharp intakes of breath from some of the ex-

prisoners. The OSP-4 was not a military vessel with its tight, enclosed spaces. The Command Deck

looked more like a floor in an office building. Banks of vidscreens occupied every wall, most of them

shattered by explosive decompression. Shards of transparent Plexi floated in the null-g like drops of

water from a frozen rain. Rainbows played against the wall as light from the nearby sun shone through a

jagged rent in one wall. I walked onto the deck, feeling a slight pull from my magnetic boots with every

step.

I heard Morgan’s voice hiss over the radio. “This is it? A bunch of cubicle jockeys run the whole station?”

Relic sounded equally offended. “That’s a coffee maker …” He tapped the offending appliance and sent

it spinning around its axis, bleeding crystals of frozen coffee and cream.

“I get it. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and all that. Can we move on now?”

I walked over to the hole in the wall and then stopped. A shred of blue fabric from someone’s uniform

was caught on the twisted metal. Below it floated flash frozen fragments of a person. I looked away

before I could see who it had been. Instead, being careful to maintain my distance from the jagged hull, I

looked outside. The convex shape of the thruster was just visible.



I turned back around in time to see Flint mashing a keyboard with the back of his hand.

“Hey!” I said just a little too sharply. I modified my tone quickly, remembering who I was speaking to.

“This might look like the floor of an office building, but it is in fact the nerve center of a Super Maximum

Security prison. There are safeguards in place. Dangerous safeguards. Remember … the UEE doesn’t

negotiate with terrorists.”

I could barely see Flint’s face through the dome of his faceplate, not enough to make out an expression,

but he removed his hand.

Suddenly my comm chirped and a red light began to flash inside my helmet. “What did you do?” I asked

Flint quickly.

He shrugged.

A deep voice emerged from the static, a voice that put a slight emphasis on the wrong syllables, as if the

mouth that produced it didn’t quite work properly.

Denizens of OSP-4 I am so very disappointed in you.

“It’s Kilkenny,” said Relic’s voice.

“I know. Shut up.”

I had hoped that there was a man among you who would rise above his peers, but that has proven not to

be. Natural selection, it seems, is a slow and tedious process, so I am sounding my bugle and signalling

the end of days. If Martin Browning will not receive his death like a man, then I will deliver it to him like a

god.

The light in my suit dimmed and then went out.

All of a sudden a section of the floor rose abruptly, catapulting Relic into the air. His magnetic boot held

for one tenuous second and then released, sending him into an uncontrolled cartwheel. Because we

were all watching him, none of us noticed the gun barrels that extended out of the floor panel that had

sent him into the air. Maybe Kilkenny had activated the prison defenses, or Flint’s mashing of the

keyboard had set wheels in motion that would end badly for him. It didn’t matter. I’d just lowered my

eyes to find the button that worked the comm when I noticed a barrel swivel to track Flint.

The shot was incredibly quick and I couldn’t see the wound from where I stood. Flint’s lower body

remained anchored to the floor with his magnetic boots, but his upper body began to drift.

“We need to go!” I yelled. I snatched the floating coffeemaker out of the air and threw it at the turret,

hoping it might be tracked.

Morgan spun around and knew exactly what he was looking at. “Go, go, go, go!” He fired a couple of

shots at it, but the weapons the Tevarin had left us with were substandard at best and failed to



penetrate its armor. With blinding speed, the turret swiveled upwards and shot the coffeemaker three

times, leaving nothing behind but a spray of molten slag.

I reached the elevator, threw my weapon into the narrow slit and then slid into it, propelling myself into

the short space between floors. My boots magnetically grappled themselves to the elevator floor,

forcing me to quickly duck as Morgan slid through the opening behind me. Together we pulled two moremen into the elevator. When no more came I risked I glance over the edge of the floor. Three bodies in

punctured space suits spun through the air of the Command Deck. The turret swiveled towards me and I

found myself staring down the barrel for one frightening instant before I ducked again and mashed the

down button.

The Visitor Center of a Super Max prison is often the only place in the whole complex where prisoners

can set aside the violent reputations they’ve cultivated for themselves. On a remote facility like OSP-4,

families must spend thousands of credits and many days of travel to meet with their imprisoned loved

ones. Sometimes, in special cases, the prison has been known to cover part of the costs. There is plenty

of research that indicates that a prisoner who maintains social contact with loved ones is more docile

and easier to manage. It’s an investment that tends to pay off in the long run.

The Visitor’s Center was now home to the Nova Dogs, a group of pirates lead by Martin Kilkenny, a

cannibal with a god complex. I had intended to give it a wide berth, but we needed fuel to make our

escape from OSP-4, and the only available supply we knew about was on the other side of it.

We were close enough that we’d turned off our comms. Even a scrambled signal gave off a telltale hiss

of static. Instead, we relied on stage whispers as we crawled through a narrow circuitry duct, which was

itself no easy task in our space suits. In prior times, I’d made the trip several times with a bag full of

contraband medical supplies tied to my leg, so I went first. The easiest way to move was to walk on

one’s elbows and I was making good progress. The others were struggling.

“This would be a lot easier without the space suits,” grumbled a voice behind me. Relic from the tone.

The other ex-prisoner, Pike, had a deeper voice and spoke infrequently.

“It’ll make too much noise if you drag it behind you and we’ll need it at the other end. Besides, there’s

enough juice running through these wires to fry you where you stand. The suit’s insulation should offer

some protection against a short.” I spotted movement through an access grate up ahead. “Now shut up,

before the Nova Dogs hear us.”

Although we’d seen the damage caused by Kilkenny’s men and had had to travel through parts of thestation that were exposed to space, we’d had few encounters with the pirates themselves. I got a look at

their current forces through that small access grate.

There were dozens of them in the small space nearly ten meters beneath us. They wore spacesuits that

had come from a dozen different armed forces and even time periods. Some had even been cobbled

together from suits that had once belonged to different races. Many were lazily painted with thick, tar-



like black paint, so that the original color showed through underneath. Few of them wore helmets,

preferring to show off elaborate haircuts, mostly variations on a Mohawk except with long, braided

sideburns, and neck and face tattoos.

“I’m stuck.”

The voice belonged to Pike, our master of words. “Don’t panic,” someone said in a loud hiss.

“I ain’t panicking, I’m just stuck.”

I looked back at Wes Morgan. His eyebrows raised, and then he looked back down the duct.

I heard a couple of brisk thumps.

“You kick me one more time and I’ll shoot you in the ass.” Pike was slow to anger, but I could hear the

heat coming into his voice. His volume was also rising and my gaze darted to the access grate

apprehensively. The Nova Dogs were a loud bunch, but one of them, a man with a full beard and wild

black hair had cocked his head and turned towards us.

“Shut up,” I hissed.

“Should we leave him behind?” asked Relic.

“You ain’t leaving me behind.” Pike’s statement was final, the threat left unspoken.

It didn’t sound like either of them lowered their voices at all. In fact, the volume was climbing. The

bearded pirate had risen and begun to walk over towards us, a rifle clutched loosely in one hand.

“Last warning, guys. Keep it down.” The confines were tight, but I did my best to move to the other side

of the duct, out of view. He was far enough beneath us that the angle would do some of the work ofhiding me, but I didn’t want him to spot movement.

“You gotta get me unstuck. I ain’t dying here.” I heard the sound of creasing aluminum and banging as

Pike attempted to free himself.

Someone cursed and then a shout of alarm rang out from the pirate beneath me. Shots cut the air and

sparks blew out of the wall of the duct closest to the Visitor Center. Holes appeared in a line, passing

from the bottom corner to the roof just above my head.

Behind me, Pike had begun to panic and clawed at Relic, who was desperately trying to kick him away.

Morgan, the one with the most experience out of any of us, had hunkered down on the side of the airduct closest to me. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“How?” I yelled back. “On our hands and knees? We’d be shot full of holes before we got more than a

couple of meters.”



“Think of something!” Morgan unshouldered his rifle and turned it so that it was pointed diagonally

downward. The weapon barely fit that way in the duct. He squeezed the trigger and then let the recoil

draw it to the side while it was still spitting bullets. I heard screams from below and then return fire.

We were sitting ducks.

I needed to get us out of there, and fast. Once before, when I’d been on the verge of getting caught with

smuggled goods, I’d evacuated the tunnel, and I’d done it by setting off the fire alarm.

There were bundles of wires running along the ceiling above us. I pulled a small knife out of the

spacesuit’s utility belt and stripped two of the wires, grateful that the suit was insulated. I touched them

together and was rewarded with nothing more than sparks. Quickly, I stripped another wire and

connected them. This time, lights began to flash and a siren sounded somewhere nearby.

The easiest way to put out a fire on a spaceship is to suffocate it in the cold vacuum of space. Metal

plates descended over the grates, sealing them as tight as possible, and at the far end of the tunnel a

tiny pinprick of light appeared as the exterior door was opened. Instantly the air howled around us and Ifelt myself carried along with it, my spacesuit scraping against metal as I was buffeted against the walls

and ceiling.

I was in space.

A starscape spun around me and then the station came back into view. I could hear myself

hyperventilating as I realized that I was falling towards a planet thousands of kilometers away. A metal

antenna appeared in my peripheral vision and I caught it with my hand. My grip was so tight that it

nearly yanked my arm out of its socket.

A flash of blue appeared and I caught out at it blindly with my other hand. By some miracle I caughtMorgan’s hand and held on tight, swinging him to the antenna next to me. Morgan, more at home in

space than I was, used the momentum to land feet first, letting his magnetic boots clamp onto it.

Another body cartwheeled toward us and I could hear screaming over the radio. Morgan reached out,

but his hand hit Relic’s hip and spun him away from us. Without missing a beat, he shoved the end of his

rifle into my hand, kicked off my knee and spun around himself. His feet hit the spacesuit in the chest

and the magnetic boots clamped down on the metal-plastic synthetic. I felt a tremendous force on the

rifle and for a moment it stretched between us like an umbilical cord. Then it slackened and I was able to

pull them both in.

The next spacesuit was followed by a cloud of red and silver crystals, and when the chest spun into viewI could see several large holes that were no longer leaking air. It was too late for Pike.

“Nylund,” said Morgan’s voice over the radio, “we have a problem.”

Relic had been shot. The bullet had missed him, but it had carved a deep furrow in his suit that spilled

powdered air into the Void. I didn’t have a patch and there wasn’t time to use one anyways. Relic’s eyes

were wide and panicked as he tried desperately to scoop the escaping air crystals back into the suit to



no avail. Its temperature indicator plunged rapidly and the veins in his cheeks reddened in a criss-cross

pattern.

I wanted to say something to calm him, but I realized that the only thing I knew about him was that he’d

nearly killed us with a patch gun in our first encounter. I could think of nothing better than to squeeze

his hand tightly and whisper that it was okay. Over and over. It was okay.

His cheeks and nose were black and his lungs heaved for air that wasn’t there. His eyes found mine and

locked on for what felt like a long time. I didn’t know exactly when the life left them. I’m not sure you

ever do.

Morgan and I hid in the lee of the thruster’s fuel tank as pirate vessels flew in close to the hull to search

for survivors. Two quick bursts of light signaled that they’d located the bodies of Relic and Pike. It was a

cremation of the most violent kind.

We waited for several hours before we signaled Konicek to bring the fighters and transport. Once they

left the safety of Cargo Hold C, we would only have a few minutes to refuel them before they werepicked up by pirate instruments.

After that, it was every man for himself.

I’ve piloted fighters before as they’re being refueled in the midst of combat. You’re a sitting duck,

parked for precious minutes next to a tanker that is, in reality, nothing more than a metal ball of

combustion ready to go off. No matter how intense the fighting gets, you’re paralyzed as your fuel

gauge slowly fills. Your bird needs fuel. It is the one constant of combat.

It is the helplessness that hurts the most.

On the hull of the Orbital Supermax I was finding out the true meaning of the term “sitting duck.” We

weren’t just refueling a fighter. We were siphoning fuel from one of the station’s positioning thrusters

and using it to fill two fighters and the tanker that Herschel Konicek had flown around the hull from

Cargo Hold C. And instead of a regular enemy, we were hiding from the Nova Dogs, a pack of pirates,

headed by Captain Martin Kilkenny, a cannibal who’d threatened to eat every prisoner on the Supermax.

We’d filled the fighters first and Wes Morgan had taken the Hornet on a wide sweep in the hopes of

distracting the Nova Dogs from our refueling operation. I sat in the Cutlass. It had been a long time since

I’d flown one, but it was coming back to me. Thrust, attitude, firing controls. Check.

“One bogie, 12 o’clock low,” said Konicek from the tanker. I looked to my twelve o’clock and then down.

Through pure bad luck, a single Nova Dog fighter had somehow gotten a profile on us, even though we

were against the station wall.

“I’ve got him,” I said as I powered up the fighter. A pre-flight menu popped onto the HUD, but I

motioned past it and guided the Cutlass away from the station.



“I need about twenty minutes,” said Konicek over the radio. I sighed. Might as well ask for a day. I didn’t

think we had either.

The Nova Dog didn’t seem especially concerned as I guided my ship towards him and a hail came

through the comm. After Day 3 of their siege I could imagine them being confused at the appearance of

an unidentified fighter. The Flight Deck had been destroyed, and with it both of the Station’s activefighters. They had no idea we’d managed to repair two mothballed fighters that had been put in storage

longer than I had been on station.

I wasn’t going to give him a chance to raise the alarm.

I quickly shifted my shields forward and gunned it at maximum thrust. Inertia pushed me back in my

seat with enough force that my vision darkened at the edges. As soon as I heard the chirp of my scan on

the Nova Dog, I squeezed my trigger. Several bursts flashed out across the void, provoking small

explosions on the enemy’s wing and hull. The second burst hit in a bright shimmer. He’d been rationing

power, but now he raised his shields. His thrusters flared and he dove down towards the station, looking

for cover.

I jinked left, spinning my craft to pursue him and kept the heat up. Bolts of energy smashed into his

shields. He barrel rolled around an antenna, narrowly avoiding it and it came up fast in my vision. I

pulled the trigger, severing the antenna. My shields bloomed a sickly blue color as the metal flew up and

bounced roughly past me. By the time I’d cleared it, nearly fifty percent of the power of my geriatric

craft was gone, just like that.

We were close to the hull now, so close that I could see the tiny squares of light that were the station’s

viewports flying past. I hit my thrusters, launching myself away from the station and then coming in

again hard. Instinctively, my opponent veered and his shields scraped OSP-4, flaring brightly for a few

seconds before collapsing. My next shot turned him into a ball of fire that winked out almost as quicklyas it appeared.

I reduced thrust and came in close to the station. I was momentarily alone, but my radio still hissed with

organized static that almost sounded like words. Curious, I changed the band and caught the sounds of a

firefight. Screams were punctuated by the rapid tap of projectile weapons. The Nova Dogs were

attacking someone on the station nearby and they were getting hell for their trouble.

I couldn’t imagine who could possibly offer that level of resistance after three days of siege. The

remaining guards were dead while anyone who could had fled in escape pods and been gunned down by

the pirates. Suddenly my heart dropped. There was in fact one group that was still armed and organized.

After all, they’d stolen our guns.

I tapped on the comm while maneuvering the fighter as close to the station as I dared, using increasing

and decreasing bouts of static to triangulate her position. I say “her,” for although the group I was

tracking was no doubt the Tevarin, I was in fact trying to locate their solitary guest. Cayla Wyrick. My

therapist.



At an angle, I saw one of the station viewports flashing irregularly. I wasn’t reading any oxygen, which

meant this area had already been holed. Whoever they were, they were fighting in spacesuits.

I risked a transmission. “Cayla?”

The sounds of battle barely ebbed, but I thought I might have heard her voice in the far distance. That

hope, although probably a trick of the imagination, was good enough for me. I feathered the controls

and turned the nose of the fighter towards the station. I was so close now that I could see the battle

raging through the viewports. One side wore irregular spacesuits, smeared with tar-like paint. The other,

the red and blue of station staff. But they weren’t station staff. They were the Tevarin.

“Dear Yusaf Asari,” I called over the radio. “I suggest you pull your men back. Love, The Kid Who

Wouldn’t Shut Up.”

Against all odds, I saw one of the men in the red spacesuits press his hand to his helmet, where his ear

would be, and then look out the viewport right at me. It must have been a heck of a sight. A massive

Cutlass, positioning jets firing sporadically all over the hull, not more than a couple of meters outside thewindow. He turned and waved his men back. I let myself drift to the left. My targeting computer

wouldn’t recognize ‘Human,’ so I lined up on the black striped spacesuits by hand and pulled the trigger.

The first blast turned the hull white hot and the second splashed globs of molten metal into the crowd

of pirates. It took them several seconds to identify the source of this new attack, and by that time I’d

blown a huge hole in the hull and mowed down nearly half their number. Some returned fire with

sporadic bursts of small arms fire that were absorbed harmlessly by my shields. I kicked my positioning

thrusts, turning the fighter slightly and continued the barrage of fire. It wasn’t long before they were

running for their lives and the Tevarin were pumping their fists in the air.

But I wasn’t done. I cut the shields and then feathered the control stick, turning the fighter around.

Using only maneuvering thrusters, I guided the fighter through the hole I’d made in the hull. Collision

klaxons began to blare in my ears and I kept my eyes glued to the tiny readout, usually used during

landing, which showed where my ship was in relation to the deck. Soon, I was inside the station,

hovering in the middle of the bay where the battle between the Tevarin and the pirates had just

abruptly ended.

The nose of my fighter was incredibly hard to keep in position, but I bobbed it up and aimed my

weapons at Yusaf Asari and the rest of the red spacesuits.

“You know what I want, Asari,” I said over the radio. The Tevarin had lowered their fists in confusion.Some had raised their rifles, but others knew the futility of that gesture and looked to their leader. I

nosed the fighter towards him. “I told you before that I wasn’t going to leave without her.”

Long moments went by.

I began to sweat. The Tevarin weren’t pirates. They might have committed minor crimes, but everyone

knew that they’d been sent to OSP-4 instead of local prisons because they were the wrong species. Asari



knew that I wasn’t going to gun them down. But maybe he appreciated the risk I’d taken. He was, after

all, a Tevarin who’d been arrested for speaking out for his people. I was speaking out for mine.

“Wes Morgan is a man who needs an incentive to keep his promises,” said Asari at last. “But you,

however, have shown that you keep your promises, even at great cost to yourself. With you, I need no

hostage. Take her, and keep your promise.”

A small figure in a red spacesuit broke away from the Tevarin and crossed the distance between us at a

run. I popped the cargo door and she scrambled up into the hold. She took the navigator’s seat and I re-

pressurized the hold so that she could remove her helmet.

Moments later I felt her hand on my shoulder. “I knew you’d come back for me.”

For some reason I found I couldn’t speak. I swallowed and took a deep breath, then reached up and

squeezed her hand. “Okay,” I said, after I’d allowed myself a minute. “Hang on. It’s a bit of a tight

squeeze.”

I tapped the controls and heard the hiss of maneuvering thrusters through the hull as the fighter slowly

began to drift sideways.

“Avery,” said Cayla. Her voice tight, as if she was struggling to sound calm.

“What?”

“Avery!”

“What?!”

I felt the hull lurch and damage indicators began to flash. I jerked the controls back, trying tocompensate for the sudden movement, but it was too late. We’d drifted forward. One of the turret guns

had caught on the hull and bent wildly. Sparks bled from the damaged joint between fighter and

weapon as it gave and then gave further before it snapped and twirled away from us.

“The Nova Dogs are back and they’ve got some kind of shoulder-mounted weapon,’ said Cayla. “They’re

going to fire again.”

We hadn’t yet cleared the hull and there was no room to dodge. I straight-armed one of the cockpit

struts and jammed my back into the seat and held on tight as we took the hit. The blast spun us around

and out of the hole in the station. I ignored everything else and punched the shields, and then guided us

back into the void.

I surveyed the damage as OSP-4 receded behind us. The hull was scarred and pockmarked in two

different locations and the engine had suffered some minor, cosmetic damage. The missing gun was the

most alarming thing. It was one of a pair of neutron guns that were linked together in the turret and I

was afraid to fire the remaining weapon for fear of a short or electrical malfunction. I would have to rely

on the wing-mounted cannon and the laser repeater mounted in the nose.



The radio chirped beside me. It was Morgan.

Cayla heard it too. “Don’t answer that.”

I looked up. My hand hovered over the radio. “Why?”

“There’s something you should know.”

Words are powerful little creatures. Even by themselves, the right words, curse words for instance, carry

power. Leashed together in the form of sentences they can provoke a feeling of dread in the listener.

The sentence that always provokes the most dread in me is, “There’s something you should know.”

Cayla Wyrick uttered that exact phrase while we were rocketing away from the damaged remains of the

Orbital Supermax.

“Can this wait?” I asked. We’d finished refueling from the tanker and I was just about to answer atransmission from Morgan. He was currently at the controls of the second fighter in our fleet of three

ships.

“I don’t think so,” said Cayla. “I know who Martin Browning is.”

I slowly eased off on the thrust. Martin Browning was at the heart of everything that had happened to

us over the last few days. He was the reason the Nova Dogs had attacked the station in the first place.

The deaths of hundreds of people could be directly attributed to his presence on OSP-4. “I was starting

to believe he doesn’t exist.”

“He doesn’t,” said Cayla. “He’s an alias. That’s why he didn’t show up in your initial search.”

That made no sense. Lots of prisoners, if not most, have aliases. “I thought aliases were included in

searches by default.”

“They are. That was what threw me for a loop. But there’s not much to do when you’re a hostage, and

the Tevarin had a direct connect to the server room. His file was blacked out, but I was able to bypass

it.”

I’d tried to search his name earlier and Cayla had been dead set against it. What had changed?

“I had a lot of time to think,” she confessed when I asked. “Kilkenny is risking a lot. With every hour the

chance that someone alerts the UEE to his little operation rises. But he’s still here. Why? What makes

this Browning so special? I looked him up, but not because I wanted to turn him over to the Nova Dogs. I

thought he might be able to help us. And it turns out he has been.”

“It’s Morgan isn’t it?” I asked, with cold certainty in my heart. He’d been one of the only two prisoners in

Maximum Security. If he was Browning, then he’d stayed silent as hundreds of people had been killed.



On the other hand, without his help, we would never have made it off the station and there was no way

we were going to be able to run the Nova Dogs’ blockade without him.

“What do we do?” she asked.

I had no clue. “What was he arrested for?”

“It didn’t say. That part of his file was locked up so tight I couldn’t access it even with the codes I was

assigned when Kilkenny destroyed the Command Deck,” Wyrick confessed.

I heard Morgan’s voice hiss over the comm. “Everything okay, Nylund?”

I looked to her, but Cayla’s face had no expression. I tapped on the comm. “Everything’s fine. Konicek’s

with us. How’s your fuel?”

“Half mast,” he said. “Good news/bad news. Scratch two bogies. On the other hand, I’ve got three in

tow and that freighter is sitting between us and the jump gate. Care to assist?”

I hesitated for only a moment. I could see Morgan’s rocket exhaust and three fast-moving stars breaking

away from the starscape to follow. The targeting computer highlighted all three, plotting vectors and

analyzing them for weaknesses.

“Konicek, we’re uncoupling.” The fueling umbilical retracted from somewhere above me and spooled

back into the tanker.

“This is Corporal Smythe, sir. Mr. Konicek has been “… staring into space for the last twenty minutes. I’m

afraid to wake him,” came the reply over the comm. Smythe was one of the techs who’d helped Konicek

fix the tanker. I felt some pity for him and the others. “Stay away from the fireworks. Morgan’s coming

in to refuel. When he’s done get your ass out of here.”

The dark shadow that was the fuel tanker lifted up and then rolled over like a breeching whale and

disappeared beneath us.

“All buckled up?” I asked.

“Are you sure about this, Avery?” asked Cayla. “All we’d have to do is tell Kilkenny that Morgan is Martin

Browning and he’d let us go.”

“We don’t have a choice. We need Morgan to run the blockade. We’ll deal with this Browning thing on

the other side of the jump point.” I couldn’t help muttering ‘if we make it’ under my breath. The bulk ofthe Nova Dogs were far behind us, but two antiquated fighters against three modern craft and an

armored freighter were not good odds. Added to that, there were a few suspicious smudges on the

long-range radar that I didn’t like thinking about.

I gunned the Cutlass’s engines. Our fighters had been configured to run down escaping prisoners and I

knew I’d have to keep an eye on my power consumption, but the extra speed gave me a huge advantage

in a dogfight. I swung wide, hoping the three fighters were so intent on Morgan that they wouldn’t



notice me coming up on their six. When it looked like I had escaped attention, I maxed out my thrust

and unloaded on them. One of the fighters went up after only a few pulses and the other two scattered.

I jinked left to track one and spotted Morgan chasing after the other bogie. After we finished them off,

he rendezvoused with the tanker and began to refuel.

I was about to radio him when I realized the comm was still open. I tried to remember the lasttransmission I’d sent. No one had said anything during the battle. I felt the blood drain out of my cheeks.

It had been with Corporal Smythe. That meant that Morgan and everyone on the tanker had heard Cayla

identify him as Martin Browning.

My hand hovered over the comm button. We had enough fuel to disappear into remote space before

Morgan could start after us. We could outrun him if we left now. I closed the comm and hit the throttle.

“Uh, Avery?” Cayla asked from the back seat. “Shouldn’t we wait for Morgan and Konicek?”

I kept my hand where it was. I set my shields forward. It would be difficult to get past Kilkenny’s

armored freighter on my own, but we didn’t have a choice. There was no way Morgan would let us livenow that he knew that we were in on his little secret. “He knows we know.”

“Oh,” she said. I could hear her slump back in her seat. She’d always been bright. I’m sure she figured

out what had happened.

The freighter loomed large in my vision. The HUD brought up its specs, and highlighted the wicked

looking particle weapon I’d seen on the Flight Deck. She wasn’t very maneuverable, but she was sitting

right between us and the jump point and had enough weaponry on her to pose a serious problem to

anyone trying to get by. “This is going to get rough,” I warned, checking the shields.

Suddenly the freighter lurched into motion and blasted away from the jump point. But not towards us.

Greetings my old friend, my old nemesis, said a voice on the public channel that I recognized as

belonging to Captain Martin Kilkenny of the Nova Dogs. Are you surprised that I know you for who you

are, Martin Browning? You wear the skin of a pirate king, but the man beneath belongs to the UEE. I

have come to eat your flesh and wear your skin and I will rule the pirate kingdoms in your stead.

“He’s a live one isn’t he?” asked Cayla.

“The livest,” I replied. “Corporal Smythe must have sold Morgan out to Kilkenny. But the good news is

that we appear to have a clear shot at the jump point.”

Instead of gunning it, I cut the throttle and let us drift. The freighter dwindled behind us. It was clearly

too powerful for one fighter to handle on its own. My hand moved towards the throttle and then

dropped again. I tapped on the controls. Looked over my shoulder. Looked back at the construct that

was the jump point.

Cayla said nothing, not questioning why we’d stopped.



“Dammit,” I said as I turned us around and hit the throttle at full burn.

“You’re doing the right thing,” she said.

“That’s great. I’m glad my therapy is progressing so well,” I shot back and then immediately regretted it.

Cayla had become far more than my therapist. I respected her. No, it went deeper than that. I didn’t

know the word for it exactly. Or at least I wouldn’t admit that I did.

Morgan was still refueling. Smythe must have slowed down the process to entrap him.

My console lit up with dozens of signals from the direction of OSP-4. Kilkenny had found his man and

was collapsing the net around him. Things were about to get very hot, very quickly.

Suddenly I heard a shot over the comm system and then some fumbling. “You’re all clear, boss,” said

Herschel Konicek. The madman had come back to life at just the right moment.

“I knew I could count on you, Herby,” said Morgan. “My gauge is filling fast.” There was a pause. “You

get lost on the way to the jump point, Nylund?”

“Yeah, but while I’m here, we might as well clean up a little,” I said, locking on to the freighter. I fired at

it, but it didn’t even try to evade. Instead, rear-mounted cannon returned fire and we were the ones

who were forced to jink. We were fast, but without missiles I couldn’t direct enough firepower on the

freighter to bring down its shields.

Luckily, Morgan detached from the fueling umbilical and pulled away from Konicek. With a burst of

thrust he was back in the fight.

Suddenly I was thrown violently against the canopy. The starscape swung wildly around me and I

realized that we’d been hit with the massive particle beam cannon on the front of the freighter. While

I’d been watching Morgan she’d swung around and fired. My controls were unresponsive and my

instruments dead. A terrible thought occurred to me. “Cayla?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “A little shook up, but fine.”

I did a quick survey. Our shields were down and there was a wicked dent in the hull, but we weren’t

leaking air and the plant, while powered down, appeared to be undamaged. Could it be a main

controller? I had no idea.

“What can I do to help?” asked Cayla.

“I don’t know,” I cursed. My fist pounded down on the instrument panel.

Kilkenny’s freighter turned away from us, focusing on Morgan’s fighter. Gunfire flew back and forth

between them. The freighter was all fight and no flight. Instead of evading Morgan’s blasts it sat there

and took them, unworried. It began to drift towards us.



I rebooted the system and, after it cycled, my instruments flashed and came up. Weapons and shields

were still offline, except for one gun that flickered on and off. It was the mate of the turret gun that had

been damaged in my encounter with the station.

We were so close to Kilkenny’s freighter that we couldn’t miss.

“Let it fire,” I prayed and then mashed the trigger. Energy pounded the freighter and there was a bright

explosion of light. We were jerked back in our seats and then everything went dark as the canopy

polarized. When it returned to normal, we saw the punctured hull of the freighter spinning away from

us.

“I thought we were dead,” said Cayla breathlessly.

“Not. Quite. Yet.” I said as I punched thrust and followed Morgan towards the jump point. As we neared,

twin lasers leapt from the Hornet, and we were suddenly without a jump drive.

Then his voice came through the comm. “Now, don’t panic, but you and the good doctor are going to

have to stay in-system while we leave, Nylund. Don’t worry, the Nova Dogs have nothing else they can

send after you.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“Nothing personal. I just can’t have you following me. There should be a UEE team on the way to the

Supermax right now. They’ll find you before you run out of air. So sit tight. I’m sure you two lovebirds

can think of some way to pass the time.”

And then he left us. We watched the bright streak of his exhaust flash into Interspace.

“He called us lovebirds,” said Cayla with a hint of curiosity. “You don’t …?”

“Isn’t there a thing about dating your patients?” I asked, looking back at her.

“Yeah,” she said, a little crestfallen. “I guess there is.”

I unhooked my flight harness and inspected the cockpit. There wasn’t much room, but after everything

we’d been through, I was sure we could make this work. I raised an eyebrow and smiled broadly. “In

that case, you’re fired.”

The End

orbital supermax

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