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A heavy weight compressed Kào’s lungs. His legs wanted to fold beneath him as Moray’s traitorous face wavered in his field of vision. At last, he’d learned the answer to the question that had haunted him: why he’d survived when everyone else had died.

Sweat oozed out of his every pore. His stomach muscles were rigid. He longed to turn his back on the man he’d called father, but he couldn’t afford the risk.

Focus
. The commodore was the enemy, Kào reminded himself. The man was here to stop him from destroying Steeg’s ship; he was desperate and using revelations quite skillfully to distract him. But Kào knew that to let his emotions take over was to fail.
Again
.

He’d die first.

Slowly, Kào lifted his gaze. His jaw clenched. “I lost my entire squadron, spent years in prison,
because of you
. And now you tell me that you intend to exchange these refugees as slaves while disguising the entire event as a humanitarian effort. With no thought of how wrong it is. It’s just the first step in your plan to absolve me of my guilt. Is that
why Sofu agreed to reopen my records? Or is that another lie?”

Moray scrubbed a shuddering hand over his perspiring face. The airlock was frigid, but both Moray and Kào were bathed in sweat. “Please, my boy. Understand. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.”

Fear and hatred expanded in the pit of Kào’s stomach, hard and cold. “Not everything.” He cleared his throat. “What happened to my family?”

Startled, Moray blinked.

“You know,
Commodore
,” he said. “You were there.”

“Yes . . . I was.”

Kào swallowed to hide the longing in his voice. “Could they . . . be alive?”

Moray was matter-of-fact. “I know that they are not.”

“What happened?” He had to know.

“They rioted during transport, hundreds of them, killing themselves along with the crew.”

“By the Seeders,” Kào whispered harshly. He should be grateful. They would have suffered horribly had they lived.

Moray’s hands hung at his sides. He looked old, tired. “I’ve done everything since for you, Kào. I did it for love.”

Love
. The man made a mockery of the concept. Kào knew little English, but one phrase rushed out of him. “
Go to hell
,” he growled.

Moray could move swiftly for a big man, and he did so now. Kào dove for the floor, his hands cupped over the switch. Moray landed on top of him. The man was heavy, crushingly so.

Fiery pain shot up Kào’s knees, which had weakened during prison. Gasping, he continued to shield the switch from Moray’s clutching hands.

The green light blinked.
Not done. Not done
, it taunted. How big was Trist’s program? Or had time simply ground to a halt?

Hold on, just a little longer
.

They grappled. Gasped. Grunted. Moray’s smooth, meaty hands plucked viciously at Kào’s scarred ones wrapped around the handle, until he managed to grab two fingers and bend them backward.

Kào bared his teeth. The tendons stretched, began to tear. Kào panted as agony slashed ragged edges into his palms. Bolts of remembrance, of torture, tore through his brain, and his hold on the switch began to slip.

Jordan ran at full speed from the 747 to the cargo-bay doors. There came another series of sharp clangs. The hook bounced higher. Any moment it would clear the bar. With every step, every breath, Jordan prayed she would not be too late.

Halfway there, Natalie caught up to her. “Nice try, Captain. But I’m coming, too,” she said, barely winded.

Jordan waved her off. “I’ve got it. Go back!”

“Sorry. What would Batman be without Robin, Aladdin without Genie”—her face lit up—“Ben without Jerry?”

Jordan gave a groan of surrender. “If we make it back to Earth, I’m getting you serious psychological help. How you can think of ice cream at a time like this, I have no clue.”

They stumbled to a stop by the override device. The hook had gone still. For the moment. “When it starts up again, if they try one more time, Nat, that hook’s going over the bar and we’re history,” Jordan warned.

The flight attendant’s lips were coated perfectly in the MAC lipstick shade Del Rio, of which she had dreaded the day she’d eventually run out. Those lips curved. “The brave don’t live forever. But the cautious never live at all.”

“That works for me.” Together they grabbed hold of the hydraulic-assisted handle that Trist had used. The vibration began deep within the wall. Then the hook rattled. “Faster,” Jordan shouted.

Their hands were blurred. They spun the wheel until the hook had settled fully over the bar.

Jordan stumbled backward, wringing her hands. This time she didn’t fight the urge. She freakin’ deserved it! Triumph! “They can try all they want, but those doors aren’t going anywhere.”

Natalie’s dark eyes were wide as they focused on the gigantic doors, large enough for a 747 to fly through, which it had. “They’re trying to kill us, this means,” she said quietly.

“I know.” Jordan’s eyes shifted to the bottom of the tube from which they’d climbed down earlier. The sensation of dread that had dogged her all along skyrocketed.
Kào’s in danger
. Her heart knew it. Her instincts honed from years of motherhood screamed it. Did she ignore the warning, did she seek shelter in the airplane? “If they’re trying to kill us, that means something’s gone wrong with Trist’s plan.” She backed away from Natalie. “I’ve got to go.”

“Go? Go where? You got to get your butt back inside, girl!”

Jordan broke into a jog. “Tell everyone on the plane to buckle in tight, to secure all their belongings in case this compartment depressurizes. Whoever wants us dead won’t stop trying. They might come down here. They’ll see what we did.” She paused to think and catch her breath. “Brief Ben—take no longer than a minute. Then leave him in charge and go find Trist. Tell her. Whatever cover she had before must be blown. She needs to know.”

Natalie shouted after her. “Hey! Where are
you
going?”

“To help Kào.” Filled with a sense of rightness, of inevitability, of destiny, Jordan turned her back on the flight attendant and broke into a run.

Moray’s hand gripped Kào’s. Their ragged breaths hissed. Kào’s neck corded. His hand burned with pain. His fingers
were slipping. He cast his desperate gaze to the left. The wall. Curved. Near him.

He lurched backward, and the move caught Moray off guard. The man’s hold faltered, only for a heartbeat but long enough for Kào to throw his hip to the side and his leg upward. His boots, first one and then the other, grabbed the wall. Rubbery soles provided traction, and using his momentum he ran his feet up and over the inner radius of the wall, landing heavily behind Moray.

In a heartbeat, he’d captured the commodore in an arm lock and wrenched his head back. But Moray grabbed desperately for the switch. Fingers searching, clutching, fingernails scraping over the metal floor. Inches away from the switch.

“No!” Kào grunted, yanking him backward. The man gurgled, wheezed. His hand shook as it crept toward the switch. The indicator light flashed on and off. “Finish, blast it!” Kào shouted.

And then the light stopped blinking.

Kào threw his gaze to the gleaming battleship looming silently at the opposite side of the airlock. “It went through.” He let go of Moray, who sagged to the metal floor. Kào skipped backward. “Say goodbye to Steeg.”

Moray regarded him strangely from where he sat sprawled on the floor.

Kào snarled, “Now get up. We have to get out of here. When that ship blows, so will we.”

“I did all I could,” Moray replied in a defeated voice. “But it went so wrong.” Then his hand went to the breakaway handle, the docking release.

With a horrible, impotent fury, Kào knew that his father was going to pull the release handle. The airlock would open to space and they’d be sucked out of the ship like so much dust. Every cell in Kào’s body screamed. “No!” he bellowed hoarsely.

Moray’s hand shot up. “Stay where you are.” His florid coloring remained, but oddly, his facial muscles were relaxed. What could only be peace glowed in him. The realization conjured a fresh surge of urgency in Kào: The man was going to destroy himself, and take him along for the ride.

Kào focused. Analyzed the target. The man was five maybe ten paces from him. Between them was the open pressure door, useless as it was, hanging open. Moray noticed the direction of his gaze, and his hand flexed.

Kào’s mouth went dry, and he backed away from that thought. If he tried to close the door, Moray would act. Kào’s shoulders sagged and his arms fell to his sides. “So you’ve kept control of me to the end, Father,” he said resignedly. “It seems you will even choose the hour and the manner of my death. You couldn’t do it on Vantaar, but you’ll do it now.” And it was worse now that he had so much to look forward to: the promise of a future for the first time in his life. He grieved for all that would never be. But instead of weeping, he started to laugh. It was a dreadful sound, but he couldn’t hold it back. All along, he’d struggled with his emotional inability to deal with the tragedies he’d endured, and now that the emotions vented, they were all the wrong ones. Yet strangely, when he recovered, wiping the back of his hand across his face, he felt purged, purified, like a prisoner who had been prepared for execution.

Moray watched the entire spectacle, his knuckles white. In silence, Kào waited for him to pull the release that would kill them both. He didn’t know what else to say to this man who was both fiend and father. And he didn’t know what to do when Moray’s gray eyes clouded over with tears.

“Ah, Kào. Look what I have made of you.” A tear made its way down his reddened cheek.

Kào stared at the droplet, half in horror and half in pity.

“To say I’m sorry is pitifully insufficient. Sometimes . . . sometimes a man’s life gets away from him, you see.”

“Just do it,” Kào coughed out. “End it.”

Suddenly Moray’s gaze shifted and his mouth spread into a sad smile. Perhaps he saw the Original Ones before him; it was said that they appeared in the hour of death. “Ah, Kào. Here she is. Your refugee. She’s what you want, isn’t it? That life. So be it, my boy. I can give you that, at least.”

Kào whipped his head around. On the far side of the airlock, he could see Jordan’s blond head bent to the task of opening the outside door. His heart exploded. “No, Jordan! Go! He’s going to open the airlock!”

Her eyes were wild with fear. For him, he thought. Not for her. “Can’t it be closed electronically?” she screamed at someone with her.

Two heavy boots slammed into Kào’s rear. The powerful shove sent him skidding over the floor and away from the manual breakaway.

There was a wrenching hiss, a shriek of wind. Vaguely, Kào was aware of Jordan and others entering the airlock, clinging to handholds themselves. She’d never make it to him in time. She’d kill herself trying.

The air turned to ice. He couldn’t shout to her, to tell her to save herself. His lungs expanded to the bursting point at the same time his eardrums exploded in white-hot pain. A storm of loose detritus stung his exposed skin as he was wrenched backward.

The noise was deafening as he slid over the floor, hurtling toward space, a destination he couldn’t see because the air had turned opaque with fog.

He grabbed for a handhold with frozen fingers and missed. He tried next to stop his slide away from Jordan with the rope connected to the safety harness he’d forgotten
he’d donned, but it scorched his sliding hands like molten metal.

His cheeks and lips rippled with an outward rush of air from his lungs that he couldn’t control. Blindly, he clutched for something, anything to stop himself.

Then, abruptly, the roaring in the airlock subsided to a shriek of wind that whistled into silence. His eardrums wrenched with a powerful reverse in pressure as the opening in the airlock shut, commanded so, he was certain, from the bridge.

The last thing Kào saw before he sank into unconsciousness, facedown on a porthole in the floor, was the body of his father, the man’s swelling face triumphant in death, spinning away toward the stars.

When Kào came to, he was on the floor of the bridge and Trist, Natalie, and Jordan were stripping him out of his harness. His skin tingled, and his lungs felt as if they’d been turned inside out. Awareness flooded back. Moray was dead. Trist’s signal had gone through. The engines on Steeg’s ship were about to go unstable. When it blew, it would take out everything within a huge radius. Kào knew; he’d seen battleships explode during the war, usually viewing each fireball with satisfaction.

“His ears are bleeding,” he heard Jordan shout.

He tried to tell her that he was fine, but the words came out as an indecipherable croak. Jordan slipped her arms around him. He dragged her to his chest, pressing his hand to the side of her head, stroking her hair. Never did he think he’d hold her again.

“Get moving,” he heard Trist yell. “We can’t stay here.”

Kào was hoisted to his feet and dragged onto the bridge,
where he was helped onto a chair and strapped in. His vision was clearing, slowly. He saw one of Moray’s aides, Jinn, with blood oozing from a wound on his forehead. Bound with shock cuffs, he sat sullenly as he was searched by Pugmarten, the security guard on Trist’s team.

The crew members were shocked. They hadn’t known of their captain’s misdeeds, nor the treachery that had gripped their ship. Kào was confident that Trist and her team had weeded out what remaining traitors were left. If not, they would in the hours to come.

The
Savior
lurched and then tipped. The vessel had undocked and was wheeling away from the
Diligent
as it accelerated. Kào caught fragments of frantic conversation, Key and English, some of which he understood and some he didn’t. The voices were muffled, as if they were speaking into pillows. His strength was beginning to return, but sitting upright, he felt faint. He blinked away the sensation. Fought it. The battleship was going to blow. No weapons officer worth his weight in irradium would fall asleep before witnessing such a spectacular conclusion.