Chapter 3

"A one-of-a-kind humanoid life form that has never been catalogued?" Robert broke the silence at last, staring through the observation glass at the pod, a rare smile pulling at his mouth and a pleased gold light coming up in his eyes. "Boys, I believe we're about to be rich."

It must be said that Robert's assessment was entirely correct.

Unfortunately for him, they had only ever analyzed that box through sterile glass with a scanner. It never occurred to any of them to go in and open it.

Had they done so, they would have discovered that this rare piece of cargo was not merely priceless. It was very likely the most delicious thing any of them would ever taste.

Robert, however, would not be the one to make that discovery.

The thaw cycle hadn't even finished when the alarms went off across the whole ship. The Wanderer was surrounded.

Less than fifteen light-years out from Thorne, on a homeward route she had run a hundred times, an ominous silver flash broke across the black.

A full squadron of black stealth craft dropped their cloaking without warning and closed the ring in a single motion.

Capture beams wrapped the ship's four corners and locked like chains. High-intensity jamming, and voltage enough to kill every system aboard, came pouring down the lines.

The engine bay gave out two dull thuds and went silent.

The Wanderer, who minutes earlier had been going wherever she pleased across the system, hung there like a bird with someone's hand closed over its wings. Inside of a few minutes she was a heap of immobile scrap.

A few lifeboats squeezed out of her shadow in a last spasm of hope, scattering in different directions.

Then they got a clear look at the ornate noble crest on the flank of those black warships, the one beginning with the letter M, and nearly every man aboard gave up on the spot.

"That's — a Sacred Blood mark? It can't be!"

"M. That's House Montero! Don't tell me that's Marquess Michael Montero himself out there. We're finished!"

"Oh, hell. Our luck is unbelievable."

"Shit, we are done. Why is a Sacred Blood noble doing border patrol work?"

"Idiots. Still haven't worked out what's happening." Robert, seeing that escape was off the table, simply let go of the controls.

He lit a cigarette rolled from Nicara leaf, settled back in his chair, and began working through his last few mouthfuls of free air.

"After that mess in the Kostermaw system, the last of Marquess Michael's kin died in the fighting. The whole of House Montero is one man now. To keep the family's last blood alive, the Elders and the princes had no choice but to pull him back from the front. He only took this post near the end of our run. I never expected him to move this fast. He's already reorganized the border defenses and mapped our smuggling route clean through." Robert drew on the cigarette and studied the dead power readings on the screen. "Straight to the core and kill it. Clean. He is supposed to be the finest general in Sacred Blood history, and it shows. This time we're finished."

Before they forced the hatch, Robert put out his cigarette and said, evenly, "Given everything we've done, I'd estimate three hundred years in the Eternal Cage. See you in three centuries, boys."

Do the work, pay the bill.

The scattered lifeboats were collected one by one and towed back, without hurry.

The Wanderer, powerless, was escorted by a formation of warships toward the military port on Thorne to be brought down.

Aboard the dark command vessel, the man Robert had called the finest general in history had already handed off the tedium of cargo inventory to his adjutant.

Michael mounted his personal flyer and left the celebration behind him.

What, exactly, was there to celebrate?

No hard fight between two forces. No exchange, no answering blow. Not so much as the smell of blood or detonation in the air, and nowhere in any of it the particular madness of an enemy who has decided to die where he stands.

For a man who was used to killing on an actual battlefield, a one-sided arrest of this kind was dull past all bearing.

He had been in the post for some time before finally catching a properly armed smuggling operation, and they had surrendered so cleanly that Marquess Michael felt a disappointment he couldn't put words to.

Though it wasn't hard to understand.

In a society with no death penalty, where the heaviest sentence on the books was nothing worse than enforced sleep, desperate men genuinely had no reason to fight to the death. Plead it out, lie down in a pod for a few centuries, and walk out at the end of the sentence to find the world still turning exactly as it had been. Set against being shot where you stand, the arithmetic is not difficult.

That gentle policy, drafted to protect the population, kept every available punishment safely inside the bloodless range — and in doing so smoothed away every conflict that might otherwise have caught fire.

Domestic patrol duty. Tedious beyond description.

Michael thought about it and grew steadily more irritable.

He missed a real battlefield.

Only that air had ever suited him.

...

Meanwhile, in a corner of the ship, a certain unfortunate creature who had just been thawed and then forgotten by absolutely everyone finally opened her eyes.

Mary lay in the pod with her eyes open and her body entirely unwilling to move.

It wasn't that she didn't want to. Ten thousand years of deep sleep had left every muscle in her body shrunken down into a dormant state of its own.

The nerve signals went out. Nothing followed them. Her body only shivered faintly under the pressure of her will, entirely past her control.

She lay there like that for a long time before she managed, with arms that had all the structural integrity of wet rope, to prop herself up.

She leaned against the cold wall of the pod, breathing hard, and looked around the strange, empty place.

It was a sealed white space.

Whichever way she turned, it offered the same monotonous white — no shadow, no visible edge, no seam anywhere to fix on. There was no telling where the wall stopped and the floor began, and nothing at all to hold on to for a sense of direction.

Absolute silence lay over everything.

The noise outside of a ship being run down, the shouted orders, the crew being taken into custody — not one thread of it reached through the sealed isolation chamber.

And the patrol counting cargo was working the storage bays, which meant that not one living soul knew that inside this sterile room, an unidentified organism had just woken up.

By the time Mary, naked, could stand on shaking legs and haul herself out of the pod, a great deal of time had passed.

Enough time that her cold-numbed body finally registered something else, with total clarity.

She was starving.