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If they have feet, that is, she thought as she worked console after console frantically, like a doctor continuing to try to save a code-blue patient long after the vital signs had stopped.

The partially melted communications console rewarded her stubbornness by lighting up and displaying an image, apparently being generated by the secondary external sensor array.

A procession of half-shadowed, box-shaped metal objects was making its way through the blackness of space, with the glowing azure crescent of Deneva slowly growing in the background. The bright yellow rays of Kappa Fornacis, Deneva’s primary star, glinted off the slight curvatures of the small duranium-composite hulls.

“Yes!” Stiles shouted in triumph, stabbing a clenched fist into the air. Somebody—several dozen somebodies, from the look of it—had made it to the escape pods and had managed to launch the emergency vehicles manually.

Then a shadow hove into view from across the blue planet’s terminator, drawing the attention of the Yeager’s automated backup sensors. Stiles watched with a slow sinking feeling in her gut as a shape that appeared much larger than any of the escape pods grew steadily as it approached those who had fled the dying Yeager. With the Denevan sun at its back, the new arrival was all but invisible except for its silhouette.

Until it turned and displayed the fierce red plumage that had been painted on its belly, abruptly killing and burying the euphoria Stiles had felt when she had first glimpsed the escape pods.

A talon of amber fire reached out from the ventral hull of the returning bird-of-prey.

An escape pod abruptly exploded into so much drifting shrapnel, transforming abruptly from a solid object to a cloud of debris, like dust motes suspended in sunbeams.

Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Stiles let out a scream as the renewed but strangely unhurried Romulan onslaught claimed a second pod. She regained but little of her equanimity as a third shattered and mostly vaporized, followed by another, and another, and another. The attacker’s pace seemed methodical and deliberate, like a child choosing targets at a carnival shooting gallery. The Romulans evidently considered the other two birds-of-prey to be more than adequate to the task of seizing this still only lightly settled human colony, so much so that the remaining vessel could afford to play with its victims, like a cat taking its sweet time to kill a captured mouse.

The hull overhead groaned again, in even more anguished fashion than before. This time, however, an explosion followed, a din louder than any emergency klaxon she had ever heard. The gale-force wind that came with it immediately peppered her with a hail of loose debris as it bore her ceilingward and beyond.

And spared her from having to witness any further carnage.

Tellarite cargo vessel Skev

Near Kappa Fornacis

Christ, but this has to be the toughest room I’ve ever played, Gannet Brooks thought moments after she began the interview in Captain Shav’s cabin.

The grizzled, hirsute freighter captain had been obliging enough when she’d offered him a rather generous fee in exchange for passage to one of the hinterlands of Coalition space. Once she took a seat on one of the two low, futonlike cushions on the deck, however, his demeanor had changed radically. She wasn’t keen on sitting on the floor, but at least she felt cooler there than she had while standing anywhere else aboard the ship. The average temperature of Shav’s homeworld, Tellar, must have been somewhat higher than that of Earth.

“I seem to encounter your kind out here with increasing frequency every time I make a freight run through this sector,” Shav said, his beady eyes staring out querulously from beneath his shaggy, overhanging brows. “You hairless anthropoids must breed like Altairian blowflies.”

Brooks was grateful for the several encounters she had already had with Shav’s species, for which rudeness, insults, and even invective were all simply the coin of