2 PROLOGUE-2

The warning came too late. One of their fighters had already exploded, a flash visible in the distance.

"Break off!" Liam shouted over the com, and his flight split up, fighters going in different directions to confuse their attackers.

It was an ambush, he realized. Those fighters had been positioned behind those rocks, waiting for them, which suggested to him that they knew the route they were taking beforehand, that maybe they were tracking them right now, and Spencer knew why he'd felt like the computer wasn't being on the up-and-up with them. The bad guys had sneaked in a virus. Not to ground them; stuck in a hangar they'd get fixed and fly out again in perfect working order. No, the intent had been to lure them into a fight with their systems messed up so they could be killed.

Still, maybe there was something he could do. Their approach meant treading lightly, so lightly that somehow it had been imperfect in its messing with his systems, failed to suppress the data long enough for him to catch a glimpse of the fighters falling on them before going back to erase it. So the virus didn't sneak into all of their systems, something that would have given their presence away, and it seemed to him that there was a chance the back-ups were still uninfected. He called his up, in the hopes that it remained uncorrupted. Of course, that left him without his sensors briefly, but they weren't doing him much good as it was now. Don't see me, don't see me, don't see me, he thought while the systems shut off and rebboted, as if wishing could make it so.

There! Systems online, he quickly locked up one of the bad guys and fired, missile blasting off the launch rail and vanishing in the darkness. A fireball bloomed from the side of a stricken gun-ship which went cartwheeling into an asteroid, then disappeared in a flash on the edge of a rock.

But then the enemy fighters dispersed, vanished beyond the asteroids and from his displays. They were gone. The fight was over.

But it looked like he was the only one out of the whole squadron left. Ed, Jake, Kate, Quan, Ricardo and all the rest, they were gone, atoms scattered, or corpses floating frozen, or trapped in wrecked ships from which they were unlikely to ever be recovered. Maybe some of them were still alive in those wrecks, anticipating deaths that were just a matter of time . . .

He hailed them over the com, called out their names again and again, met only with silence; scanned the hell out of the rocks around him, hoping against hope to find a life pod, a ship still intact enough to support a living, breathing person, and saw nothing. He hated to go, but there seemed nothing for him to do but limp back home, and report what had happened, in a debrief that quickly turned into an interrogation. The debriefers—the interrogators, whose team just went on getting bigger from one session to the next—kept saying over and over again that he was the sole survivor of the massacre, come back with not a scratch on his ship, not even a missile loosed at him so far as the records showed. It was like the enemy had decided to spare him, even after he loosed a missile at one of their ships. Liam's report that the systems aboard their fighters had been sabotaged didn't make things any better for him. They wanted to know where he got such an idea, why he knew, why he survived when all the others didn't. That was what they said, at least.

It seemed they'd already made up their minds as to the answers.

The investigators couldn't make anything really tangible claims against him, just put a lot of suspicion and unease in the air. But enough of it stuck to him that he was discharged, and left looking for something else to do. Liam was still a trained, experienced pilot, which made him eligible to pilot commercial craft, and that was what he ended up doing, driving a medium freighter from star system to star system.

Alas, there was never a shortage of competitors for those jobs, and the market got more crowded. A coup brought the Inkeren War to an end that restored the status quo ante, and the Fleet scaled back, a process which hit pilots a lot harder than paper pushers, so there were now all these extra flyers looking for work, with those pilots who had spent the prior years actually flying freighters the hardest hit of all—the unglamorous logistical command always getting cut more deeply than combat units at times like that.

Meanwhile the shipping industry was going through yet another round of consolidation. The yards were putting out bigger, faster ships, capable of making more trips in any given period of time with more cargo per trip. At the same time, improvements in astrogation programs and interstellar communications were shortening stays in port, making shipping quicker still. And of course, only the big haulers were competitive in an environment like that, which meant bankruptcies and layoffs. And buyouts and layoffs. And mergers and layoffs.

All of that meant, in the end, fewer ships, and fewer pilots needed to fly them. Even his experience as a space combat veteran didn't count for much against a trend like that, at least not during the cold peace, and as he happened to be flying one of the older, medium-sized ships for one of those middling firms that were prey for the bigger companies, he was more likely to get his walking papers than a new ship., and not find any other opportunity waiting for him—with a recent accident likely to bump him higher up the list of those to be let go. (He certainly couldn't help it if he got hit by the golden BB, that meteoroid that ripped out and aired out compartment number six, but his name would be connected with the unhappy coincidence and likely to get him axed.) New job? New career, was more like it, not that he had much idea what it could be.

As he waited for the repairs at the station he sought out the cheapest diner he could find, and while trying to not think about all that for a little while realized he wasn't alone in his booth.

Eyeing the woman's clothes he suspected this kind of place was not her usual choice when she ate out; the suit would have cost anyone in here a month's pay, maybe more.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said back. She had auburn hair, shoulder-length, and large blue eyes and high cheekbones that lent her a feline aspect.

Liam couldn't think of a way to broach the question delicately.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Just to talk," she said.

"About what?"

"An offer which I am sure you will find interesting."

"I'll say it up front," Liam said. "I'm not moving anything illegal. Period."