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The assault ship had an onboard medical unit, and it included a diagnoster. Kaird carefully lifted the case in both arms and made his way to the autodoc. In the course of his profession, he had, on occasion, needed to use such devices to attend to injuries, either his or those of his comrades. He was no expert, but the machines had been designed to be used by those with minimal medical training, and they came equipped with simple instructions.

This model had an axial image resonator built into it.

Kaird carefully put the case onto the diagnoster’s table. He called up the instructions for the device on the computer, scanned them, and found the maximum settings. He touched the proper controls.

A clear, hoop-shaped transparisteel radiation shield lowered over the case. There came a power hum. It was but the work of a moment for the medical device to produce an image of what was within, and what the scanner showed was not bricks of compressed bota.

What it showed was a bomb.

Kaird studied the image that floated in the air over the computer with a practiced eye. He saw four thermal detonators linked in series with a timer—more than enough to vaporize the carbonite and everything between them and the ship’s hull if they went off together. Maybe even powerful enough to blow the ship itself apart. It was the corner of one of the detonators that had showed where the carbonite had chipped away next to the wheel and axle. Since carbonite did little to suspend electronic or mechanical processes, there was every reason to expect that it would go off as planned.

Thula and Squa Tront had betrayed him. They had taken the bota for themselves and given him a death sentence instead. And he had paid them well to do it!

Luck was a funny thing. Had he chosen to carry the case instead of rolling it—and had it not been for that poorly made wheel, and the hatch lip that broke it, then the bomb would almost certainly have been sitting right next to him in the control cabin when it went off.

It had been a bold move. Had it worked, the pair would have been very rich, and nobody anywhere would be the wiser.

It might still work, if you just keep standing there staring at it like a sunstruck fledgling—!

Kaird lifted the case and headed briskly for the nearest airlock. He did not know when the timer was set to deto-nate the device. He could feel himself beginning to sweat as he deposited the case in the lock, stepped back to the other side of the hatch, turned off the A-Grav in the airlock and slapped the cycle button.

The winds were at Kaird’s back this time. The rush of air from the depressurized lock carried the bomb away from the ship, into vacuum. He returned to the cabin, and in a few seconds he had accelerated enough to leave the case safely behind. It might not go off for hours, days even—

The soundless flare was picked up by his rear array less than two minutes after jettisoning the bomb. The readout showed a yield of half a kiloton. The bomb would have turned him and the ship into a cloud of incandescent plasma.

Kaird leaned back in the seat. He had made a mistake, a large one, and it could easily have cost him his life. He had succumbed to hubris. He had assumed that Thula and Squa Tront were smart enough to realize that crossing him would be foolish; that he would hunt them down and make them pay in blood, no matter how long it took, no matter how far they fled. Black Sun had eyes and ears everywhere, and sooner or later, he would find them.

What he hadn’t counted on was the pair having the nerve to attempt to assassinate an assassin. They were low-rent, small-time criminals, with no history of violence. He hadn’t guessed that they’d had it in them, and that had very nearly been a fatal mistake. It was always better to overestimate a potential enemy’s strength than to underestimate it. If one was prepared for the worst, the least was easy to manage.

What really stuck in his craw was that he had very nearly proven them right in their estimation of him. He had been lucky, and as everyone knew, there were times when