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Jinn shook his head as if she were the stupidest bitch in the galaxy. “It isn’t a false alarm. They’re in their aircraft.”

She flew upright, feigning surprise. “What? That’s impossible. I’ll have security run a check of the cargo bay.”

“No need. I already called for one.”

“Pugmarten. He’s on duty.” She swallowed. “He’d better find them. My reputation’s on the line.”

Jinn’s wine-colored eyes glinted. “And quite the reputation you have, too.”

“You can mention that to your commodore.”

Her dry retort quelled his arrogance a fraction. “I’ll pass.”

“Jinn, leave Moray out of this. I’ve got a promotion pending. This is my big break. Let me try to fix things before we get him involved.”

“He already knows.”

So it was Jinn who told Moray
. “What’d you do that for? He’s got his hands full with the docking and the transfer. If you have a question about the refugees, come to me first. I’m the intercessor.”

“Trist, settle down. I see this as a good thing.” He pulled up a chair and sat down. “I have a plan that might get us both promoted. We know Moray’s getting paranoid, and that he plans to lie low for a while after this, to work on his son’s problems, I think. Leave the refugees in their airplane.”

She screwed up her face. “Why?”

He lowered his voice. “If anything happens, if the transfer goes bad, those refugees would be witnesses. A couple of hundred people testifying at a war crimes trial in an Alliance puppet court? It would be a disaster. Before you were stationed here, during the Kerils incident, we thought we had an Alliance spy onboard. Moray sent the refugees to the cargo bay, opened the bay doors and”—Jinn made a sucking noise—“no more witnesses.” His mouth curved smugly. “It was my idea.”

Trist formed an admiring grin. “You killed all of them?”

He preened. “Yes. Of course, the goods didn’t get to where they needed to go, and that was unfortunate, but we hadn’t a choice.”

Trist knew that Jinn was troubled more by the aborted business transaction than he was by the loss of innocent life. It sickened her. Often she’d wondered if the compassionate
aspects of her nature were due to her Alliance-born great-grandmother, a onetime slave who’d escaped the Empire with her Talagar husband and settled among their own kind in the central galaxy. But her parents, Alliance loyalists themselves, were no different. Often ostracized, her mother and father never gave up trying to convince the skeptics who called themselves patriots that it was “nurture, not nature” that formed a person’s character.

“It won me a promotion to third aide,” Jinn boasted. “Keep that in mind before you send them back to the holding bay.”

“I think I will, Jinn.” Her smile was fabricated. But when he walked from her sight, her grin became genuine. Jinn could try all day if he so desired, but he wasn’t going to get those cargo-bay doors open. She was well ahead of him. When it came to interrogation time after his arrest, she looked forward to seeing his expression once he learned that Captain Cady, a slavery-bound refugee, had helped accomplish the one preventative for his evil plan.

Trist shoved her hands through her hair and briefly shut her eyes. She hoped they made it, the refugees. She’d become attached to them. And Kào, too. He’d been raised by Moray, a monster if there ever was one, yet somehow he’d escaped contamination. When she’d first met Kào, all she saw was a cold, physically imposing ex-prisoner. With Jordan, he was a man who was generous and self-deprecating, and who talked openly about his life. There remained something defensive at the core of his personality, and that self-protectiveness made him seem vulnerable—as if his remoteness were meant to deflect one from noticing the sensitivity of his feelings, the hidden hurt.

Biologically he must have been programmed for goodness, she’d decided—coding that not even Moray could break. Jordan was much the same way, and Trist was grateful that the will of the Seeders had brought them together.

Nature versus nurture
. It may indeed have been Kào’s inherent nature that saved him, but for her, a descendant of Talagar expatriates, it was her upbringing that formed her—and she’d gladly die proving it. Possessed of much-maligned Talagar genes, she was not ruled by them; nor were the others like herself, as enlightened individuals in Alliance already knew.

Talagar culture was to blame for the evilness of their Empire, not any inborn traits. Now, in her shining moment, she’d finally have a chance to prove it.

Breaths uneven, sweat glistening on his exposed skin, Kào ducked inside the airlock and rotated the heavy hatch closed behind him. The primary airlock was used as a thoroughfare when the
Savior
was docked to another ship. It was carpeted, its rounded walls spongy with soundproofed insulating material. But this, the secondary airlock, was another story. It was a poorly illuminated tube bridging the space between two ships, no higher and no wider than a man. The walls were constructed of bare alloy, every rivet, every scar of construction as visible now as the day the vessel left the shipyard. From there, he contemplated the round hatch on the far end of the airlock. An untold number of Talagars were going about their business on the other side.

Steeg
. So close.

When it came to Moray, Kào’s sentiments were . . . muddled. But Steeg—Kào wanted to rip out the man’s heart; he wanted to send the monster to the place the Earth people believed men like him burned in agony for all eternity.
Hell
, they called it. But it was easy to have such thoughts for a man he didn’t know.

Dutifully he marched onward through the airlock, his boots clanging on the metal floor, a loyal Alliance soldier there to prove what he could not during the war: He would
willingly die defending the ideals his government stood for—freedom, peace, and honor. He’d gladly give his life to ensure a future with Jordan, in which she and her people, and their children, would be safe from Talagar raids. Whatever it took to stop men like Moray and Steeg, whose livelihoods fed on the human spirit, he would do it. For all those reasons and more, he’d come to this airlock ready to do battle with a recalcitrant mechanical switch that would not obey its computerized command.

The passageway in which he strode was cold and barren, serving two purposes only: as an emergency manual breakaway should the normal docking release fail, and as a backup conduit for everything from digital signals to water and air. At each end were sealed hatches—one Kào had shut behind him when he climbed inside the airlock, the other leading to the Talagar battleship. Between the vessels was a breakaway point at which a closed pressure door shielded the fragile human body from the deadly vacuum of space when the ships parted. But with one pull of the manual release handle, used to detach the
Savior
in an emergency situation, the seam would split apart. Anyone unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of the pressure door would be sucked out and sent to their almost instant death.

The docking relay switch was located in an area near the floor that required Kào to open the pressure door to access it. Instinctively he attached a safety cord to his waist belt before setting to work. He pondered that. There was a time when he was so numb and empty inside that he wouldn’t have cared if he lived or died. Because of Jordan, he’d come alive, gloriously so. But with his renewed ability to feel came a blooming hatred and sharp sorrow of almost equal intensity—for Moray—along with regret which Kào suspected any man might experience if he were to sense the imminent end to a life seemingly just begun.

Focus
, he told himself. With a harsh grunt, he yanked on the handle and opened the pressure door. His ears popped. There was always a fractional pressure differential between a pair of ships. The heavy door opened inward, toward him. With a grating scrape, it came to rest against the curved wall.

Kào crouched, setting out the tools he’d brought. Starlight and reflected illumination from the two immense vessels flanking him provided sparse light in which to work. But he knew his way around a starship better than most. Within seconds, he’d located the telltale seam in the metal wall and followed it with his fingers until they collided with a square protrusion. He saw the problem: the switch, a simple blasted switch, coated with dirt and old lubricating fluids. The congealed mess had prevented it from closing over the relay when Trist had commanded it.

He wiped his hands on his trousers, blotted the sweat of his brow. Then he gripped the handle in two hands.
For you, Jordan. For the Alliance
. “For the future,” he gritted out past clenched teeth as he shoved the handle downward over the switch and closed the critical relay.

“There were several unsuccessful attempts to get onto the main computer, Commodore,” an ensign reported.

“From what terminal?” Moray demanded.

“Seven-four-oh-bravo. A workstation in the cargo bay. That’s all I have, sir. We’re still working on it. In light of the docking-in-progress and your request to monitor the comm, I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes, yes, Ensign, thank you,” he said distractedly as he began typing one-handed on the nearest terminal. “Jinn,” he bellowed. In an instant, the aide was at his side. “Where is Poul?”

Jinn squinted. “He reported that the refugees were missing—or misplaced—which I passed along to you. Then he
left with Heest and”—his facial muscles went rigid and his eyes widened—“they never reported in.”

“Traitors,” Moray growled under his breath. He slammed his fist into his palm. “Check for all communication in or out of this ship.”

Jinn went to work. Almost immediately, his head popped up. “A signal is being transmitted from our ship to the
Diligent
. Unorthodox code, hidden in a legitimate routine. It’s being routed through the secondary airlock, sir. And whatever it is, it’s big, and it’s taking a while to download. Otherwise I don’t think I would have seen it.”

Moray’s head snapped to the battleship looming outside. “Is there a chance that the signal being sent could do damage to the
Diligent?
”

Jinn’s jaw moved back and forth.

“Out with it,” Moray barked. “Don’t give me the answer you think I want to hear as opposed to what you really believe. I didn’t promote you to third aide to hear pretty-talk.”

Jinn’s throat bobbed. “The code could summon a larger program, once inside the
Diligent
, and put Admiral Steeg’s ship in danger.”

Moray swung away from the observation railing. “Get Trist to help you and abort the transfer. Purge any and all substantiation of our activities onboard this ship. I don’t care how. Just do it. That signal will be stopped, if we have to tear apart the wiring in the airlock with our bare hands.”

A boom shook the 747. It came from outside the airplane. In the cockpit, Jordan jolted to full alert. Was it an explosion?

The loud bang sounded again, then stopped. For long moments. She was about to settle back in her seat when a series of thunderous reverberations rattled the airplane and her teeth. More silence followed.

Jordan threw off her seatbelt and shoulder harnesses. So much for Trist’s orders; she was going to see what the heck was going on.

As she bolted down the center of the aisle in upper-deck business class, she tried to smile reassuringly at the passengers staring at her from their seats. “I have to tell whoever’s doing that to hold down the noise,” she quipped, although she felt anything but funny.

They merely watched in silence as she ran past. As travelers, they were an airline’s dream: No one complained
about atrocious conditions and lousy service.

Downstairs, Ben was straining in his harness in his flight-attendant jump seat by the forward left door. His face was pressed against the small circular window in the door, and he was looking at the cargo-bay doors. “That hook keeps lifting and banging down against the bar. Is it supposed to do that?”

She dropped to her knees and cupped her hands around her eyes to see out the window. Was the hook designed to bounce around? No. Something was wrong. One good bounce and that hook would fly off the bar as if it weighed nothing.

She fell back on her haunches. “Someone’s trying the bay doors.”

“Are you sure?” Ben turned white; his dark stubble stood out starkly.

“The hook moves when the command is given. Only we put it over the bar so it can’t lift. In the down position, it disables a command from the bridge to open the doors.”

“We’d die if those doors opened. We’d freeze to death.”

“Actually, we’d suffocate first. Or would our blood boil?” She stifled a groan. “It’s one of the two. And neither is how I want to go.” She didn’t want to “go” at all, but that was beside the point. “Every time that hook lifts, it’s trying to obey a command issued by the ship’s computer. It shouldn’t lift at all. But maybe we didn’t check to make sure it was fully in place before we came inside. I didn’t back up Trist. I figured she knew what she was doing.” Jordan knew how to use the hydraulic wheel to lower the hook. Lowering the hook as far as it would go would stop the bouncing. But that meant she’d have to go outside to do it.

Her stomach twisted, and a horrible feeling of vulnerability choked her. Ten seconds, she’d heard you had in space with no protective suit. Ten
seconds
. In the airplane
they’d last longer if the cargo bay lost pressure—but how much longer? A minute, maybe? It might be long enough for Trist to get the doors closed from upstairs.
Might
.

Jordan grimaced. Was that reason enough to huddle in the plane when she knew how to save everyone?

She peered down the aisles, making eye contact with many of the passengers staring back at her.
We trust you, Captain. We know safety’s your top priority
. Jordan bit back a sigh. That was the company line, wasn’t it?

Outside, the banging started again. The hook waggled spasmodically on the bar. “Whoa,” Ben said nervously. “That one got some airtime.”

Jordan shot to her feet. “I’ve got to fix it or the next time it bounces, it falls, and we’re history.”