Pul looked away from Natalya a moment. “You okay, Dana?” he asked.

“Yes,” a little voice chimed from the other side of the platform.

Natalya’s eyes widened as she saw the little girl she’d tried to rescue in Teal City. Dana stood on the other side of the central platform, two security officers armed with rifles flanking her. Natalya had no doubt more security teams were surrounding the bridge. The axe was being raised above her head. If she didn’t get out of the way soon, there’d be no escaping her execution. But she couldn’t leave Jasper. And now that she knew Dana was alive, Natalya felt a pain of responsibility like someone was clenching her throat.

“Let them go, Qin. Give us the girl and the Prophet and we don’t have to do anymore damage,” Natalya insisted.

“Oh, you want the Prophet? Which one? I’m afraid we lost one recently,” Qin said.

“Natalya… go,” Jasper pleaded. Blood was caked all over his body. His hands and feet were shackled, and it looked like he was about to fall over where he stood.

Two more security officers stood on either side of the platform, the ranks on their shoulders showing them to be high-ranking soldiers. They kept their rifles trained on the Prophet.

“Don’t mind him. He’s likely upset after killing Erika,” Qin explained. “You see, the White Prophet didn’t want to reveal the location of Ptolemy’s space station. I’m told Whites have a talent for scanning fixed areas telepathically, Erika being particularly skilled. She found the space station, with a little encouragement, and Jasper killed her for it, adding to his crimes.”

The bridge crew stayed focused on their work. Some of them glanced at the exchange, sweat pouring from their brows. Whether they were terrified, or simply trained to never question, the crew made no attempt to leave their posts.

“So you know where the station is,” Natalya said. “You don’t need Jasper. You can frame him and let him go.”

“I do need one thing, however,” Qin said, as if Natalya hadn’t spoken. “And it seems you’ve saved me the trouble of seeking it out. The Key Core. Where is it?”

Natalya made a tactical analysis of the situation, and realized that she was mostly screwed. She had Jasper’s sword. If she could get it to him, he could probably heal himself from any wound Qin inflicted on him. But he couldn’t heal without the blade, and twenty meters separated her and the Prophet.

“Is it on that ship of yours? Impressive you survived Pul’s little assault, though I don’t envy him having to cling to your hull for weeks in order to execute it,” Qin continued. “Thank you, by the way, for keeping him from foolishly trashing a critical piece of hardware.”

“Let me finish her off, Qin. You can get your core without them,” Pul insisted.

“Lieutenant, is that piece of debris still floating around? Wonderful ruse, by the way, Natalya.”

“Nothing on the scanners,” the Lieutenant standing at the scanner console said. She was laser-focused on the scanners, searching the system.

“Hmm. It seems your ship has left you.”

Natalya felt like her guts had fallen onto the floor. Ptolemy left? Ptolemy left!

I should have known, Natalya thought, clenching her jaw to keep from showing Qin her anger. She imagined Ptolemy on his way to his space station, gleeful in his safety.

“Is the Key Core on that ship, Natalya?” Qin repeated.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“You can hunt it down on your own, Qin, just let me deal with these two!” Pul demanded, standing and raising his pistols. Co displayed a grenade in response, her finger on the primer.

“There are bigger things at stake here, Pul. I want that Key Core. And it will make things much easier if the scientist who helped design it can put it to use. Oh, how you’ve made things so much easier for me, Natalya.”

“She’s mine,” Pul insisted. “The both of them, for what they did to — gah!”

Qin pressed the button on his forearm again. Pul once more fell to his knees.

“Your narrow-mindedness is becoming a problem, Pul,” Qin said. “It’s keeping us from our goal.”

“I only want these two dead! I don’t care about your — gah!”

Pul fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

“If wrath is all you care about, then it seems you and I have reached the end of our partnership. Thank you for your help bringing the station under my power, Pul, your efforts have been noted,” Qin said and kept the electricity flowing. Whatever device he had implanted inside Pul turned his shield emitters against him, wires popping and smoking all over the man’s body.

“Sisi Mend, I offer you a partnership,” Qin said. “Natalya as well. Bring me the Key Core, help me install it.”

“Let Dana and Jasper go and we’ll help you,” Natalya replied, tears in her eyes. She was grasping at straws. Time, she just needed more time. If she could placate Qin maybe she’d have a chance to get Jasper his sword.

Qin turned his pistol on Dana and fired.

The child collapsed without so much as a whimper.

“No!” Natalya screamed as Pul roared with fury and pain.

“I’m sorry, you thought this was a negotiation,” Qin said. “I’m saying what you will do, and you will do it. What you get in return is up to me. Now, I’d like to be able to deliver this Prophet for a proper execution, but a dead body will do just as well.”

Qin shoved his smoking pistol against the back of Jasper’s head.

“You can do this willingly or not, Natalya, but I will find that ship,” Qin insisted.

“I’ll kill you!” Pul vowed.

“Then you are dismissed from my service, Khitan. Natalya, you will reveal the location of the Key Core and I will—”

“Chairman Qin, we have a Prosper capital ship closing,” the Lieutenant on the scanners interrupted.

“What? Why?”

“It appears to be the Ranger again, sir. Only this time it’s not in pieces. And it’s closing fast.”

The forward projector screens zoomed in on a tiny object in space. Silhouetted by the yellow gas giant, closing with its engines flaring and its weapons armed, flew Chimera.

“Hello, Captain, sorry I’m late,” Ptolemy said in Natalya’s communicator.

Twin cannon burst from Chimera, striking Shihuangdi’s shields in a glimmer of light.

“Its weapons don’t pose a threat to our shields,” the Lieutenant announced.

“Disable it,” Qin ordered. “If the Key Core’s onboard I don’t want it damaged. Two pulse missiles. Fire!”

“Firing,” the Weapons Officer said. The viewscreens showed two blue dots rocketing toward Chimera.

“Ptolemy, what are you doing?” Natalya asked.

“Are you near the shuttle?” Ptolemy replied.

“We’re on Shihuangdi’s bridge.”

“Good. I’d suggest you find a way off that ship, Captain. And quick.”

What Ptolemy had not told Natalya when she and the others piled into the lifeboat, was that he had no intention of bringing them back onboard Chimera. He had every intention of damaging Shihuangdi and leaving to get his space station on his own.

Opalescent power had a way of making a person introspective. A million colors shifted and flowed in the spacecraft’s viewscreens as Ptolemy flew across the galaxy. Since he was the only one onboard, Ptolemy had to stay on Chimera’s bridge to pilot it, and was forced to stare at the opalescent scene around him.

The colors reminded Ptolemy of where he’d come from, the rotten streets of a forgotten hole in Prosperity. Gangs, dealers, prostitutes, and thieves, these were his peers. His mother was among them. She used to say the chems she put in her body made her see a million colors at once.

Ptolemy remembered what his mother had said, and a vow he’d once made. He wanted to escape that life, to help his mother escape. Even when she took that last, too-powerful dose, Ptolemy told her he’d bring her out of that hole and to a world with so much color she would never need to dose again. When she died, he went on to sell the same chems that had killed her, the first foundation of plats with which he’d forged his empire of wealth. But he never forgot that vow.

As he stared at the opalescent colors, knowing all he had to do was keep going, he swallowed the regret that his mother couldn’t be there with him, that he had no one with him. He’d escaped that pitiless neighborhood on Prosperity alone, made his fortune alone, built his space station alone. But he’d found the means to recover it with friends, and he knew he didn’t want to enter the next stage of his life without them.

“For you, Mother,” Ptolemy had said as he turned Chimera around.

Regardless of whether it was practical, regardless of whether it was moral or just or beneficial in any way, Ptolemy wanted his crew by his side. That was why he’d neglected to detonate the bomb he’d placed on the shuttle, not until he knew they were a safe distance away.