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get up, but a kick to the side of his head convinced him otherwise, another kick and the world went black.

  Horizon Station, Central Control Room

  By the time Remi noticed the flashing icon that indicated the third set of bay doors was being forced, it was over. Two of the newcomers were on the ground in the airlock, their misted blood making its way into the scrubbers, and a third lay unconscious after a kick to the head. Remi’s finger hovered over the button that would evacuate the cargo bay’s air, but the pirates lowered their weapons. The pirates faces were blank and they held themselves relaxed and ready. As bad as the violence and blood had been, the pirates’ complete lack of reaction was worse. If things went wrong, they wouldn’t have a second thought about killing the lot of them. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even have a first thought, but would just act.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there, paralyzed, before the rational part of her brain kicked in and started wondering about the other ship. Immediately she lost herself in mechanisms of her intellect, as she always did when things got bad or scary or hard, and the fear went away. The newcomers’ ship didn’t have a transponder, and Remi couldn’t interface with it, but she was able to get an ID off of it.

  “Syndicated Merchants Guild, who the hell is that?” she asked, then laughed when she realized she was talking to an empty room. She watched the feed from the cargo bay as her fingers entered a query about the SMG into the system.

  “Back to business, then,” the pirate captain said after his crew had knocked the remaining soldier unconscious and secured him. “You were telling me that we couldn’t just take what we wanted.”

  “Yes,” Ava said, looking shaky but remarkably calm given the situation. “The problem is that you’re stuck here. Our friend in the control room has the entire station on lockdown.”

  “We can get around that,” the captain said, unfazed.

  “Maybe, but not before my friend blows the charges on the docking arms, you can’t, not before she opens this level to vacuum,” she said.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “She doesn’t want to,” Ava corrected him. Remi was thankful that it was Ava down there and not her, she had never gotten the knack of bluffing. “But if you don’t want to be reasonable about this, that’s a gamble that you’re going to have to work out on your own.”

  The captain relaxed. “That’s not how this works. If you give us what we want, we will let you live, and even if you don’t believe me, it’s still a possibility. On the other hand, your friend opens the airlocks, we all die.” He paused to let his words sink in. “Here’s what we’ll need.”

  As the captain listed off the things that he would be taking from the station, Remi’s attention drifted back to the console where her query had come back with the requested information. The SMG was a coalition of traders, manufacturers, and merchants, who controlled about half of the interstellar trade. Remi had always assumed that the Stations were part of some governmental federation, but it appeared that she had been mistaken, the various Stations were bound together by a web of guilds and cartels, with the SMG being the largest of them. The SMG owned the jump gates, and used them to exert control.

  “So what were you doing here?” she asked, and began another search.

  Horizon Station

  +01:13:09

  Zero woke up to the strange sensation of half of his head being numb from direct contact with the cold floor and the other feeling like he had drunk his weight in cheap alcohol. His arms were tied behind his back, tight enough that the cords were cutting into his skin even through the suit, and his AR display still didn’t register any contact from Skip or Dart. He had his system play back the fight, if it could really be called that.

  The first shots had been small concussive rounds, enough to knock them back, but not heavy enough to do any real damage through the suits. The next shot had been a heavy concussive round, and in the close confines of the airlock, his AR calculated that they would have been exposed to several thousand atmospheres of pressure. The possibility of an afterlife was more probable than survival.

  As his mind processed what had happened, he was glad that he was already on the ground, it wasn’t the sort of thing he would have wanted to be standing up for. After he had lost Soren five years before, he had been careful not to get too attached to his comrades, but after enough time locked in a small ship someone, you either kill them or become friends, and although friend wasn’t as bad as lover, it still hurt like hell. The tears that leaked sideways down his face were hot until they reached the deck and all of their heat was sucked out of them.

  A little while later, his mind had worked though enough of the past to start working on the future and he felt his muscles unclench as he looked around and tried to figure out what to do next. He couldn’t pick up any sound or movement nearby, the pirates were otherwise occupied and hadn’t noticed that he had regained consciousness. He might still be able to get out alive.

  He instructed his AR system to display a map of the station, and it projected a rotating 3D wireframe onto his retinas. The station was a squat cylinder, with five decks. There was a shaft ten meters in diameter that ran straight down the vertical axis with a lift running along one of its sides, as well as several stairways along the edges of the station and next to the lift. He looked around as much as he could without moving his head, and everything he saw was locked. His AR did the same thing, trying to pair with the various doors in the bay, but was rebuffed from the few interfaces that weren’t disabled completely. There would be no escape.

  He flexed his wrists, hoping for some play in his restraints, but they were secure. His system couldn’t find any electronic lock to interface with, which wasn’t surprising, the pirates were too practical for anything as failure prone as cuffs and had probably bound him with simple composite cord. He fed a couple of instructions to his suit, and felt the fabric around his wrists stiffen, taking some of the pressure off of his wrists. The suit continued to stiffen, and his wrists were loose inside it as the suit’s cuffs attempted to form perfect circles. After a few more seconds, he was able to slip his hands out of the restraints. He carefully worked the stiffness out of his wrists and was about to start moving back towards the airlock when two people approached the crate that he was laying behind. He relaxed his muscles as much as he was able, willed them to not look too closely and notice that he had gotten free.

  “No,” a woman’s voice said. “Everything else, but not that.”

  “We’ve been over this,” a man’s voice said. “As much as you may dislike it, we’re going to take what we want.”

  “Or what, you’ll kill us? What do you imagine will happen if you take all of our food?”

  “I imagine you would starve to death, but that’s not on me,” the man said. “The food would have run out eventually. If you came out here without figuring out where your next meal’s going to come from, that’s on you.”

  The two of them moved on in silence, and Zero let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he had been holding. He needed to get a weapon. Between cover and surprise, he might be able to make it out alive. A glance at the airlock, the locked symbol partially obscured by a film of blood, was all it took to convince him of the foolishness of the idea. He moved so that he could see around the corner of the crate. There were three pirates, easily distinguishable by their piecemeal armor, and two inhabitants of the station as well as one other person on a stretcher. Two of the pirates were in the process of loading the crates through the bay doors into their ship.

  “What’s the status of Darius, here?” the pirate captain asked.

  “The infirmary was gutted when we got here,” the man said. “And neither of us is a doctor. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” the pirate said before calling to his crew over his shoulder. “How much longer.”

  “Less than an hour,” one of the crew replied. Zero could see the captain checking his sidearm, he wasn’t planning on leaving any survivors.
r />   Zero looked around again, hoping that his needlegun was just wedged under a crate or something. It wasn’t. As rough up as the pirates looked, they weren’t stupid. He unfocused his eyes, bringing up his AR system, and picked out the ship tile, waiting for a too-loud heartbeat as the ship’s systems authenticated him. He flashed past the first two tilesets until he found the emergency beacon, and set it on a heading for the nearest gate. There was no way it would make it, and even if it did, help would be a couple of months too late in coming. He sent it anyway.

  “Captain!” a shout came from the pirate captain’s handheld. “The Guild ship just shot off a beacon.”

  “Fucking Guild,” the captain said, and looked back towards where Zero was laying. Zero froze, but the captain wasn’t looking for anything and his gaze didn’t linger. “You had better get chasing it, before it gets too much of a lead.” He put his hand on his weapon and looked at the two stationers, but their looks of confusion saved them.

  “What about the cargo?” one of the pirates asked.

  “I’ll load what I can into the Guild ship, we’ll take care of the balance when you get back.”

  The two pirates each grabbed a crate and carried it with them into their ship before the bay doors closed. The station vibrated from the