Truly's quintet of Hornet attack ships worked in tandem against dozens of pirate fighter craft, drawing them away from Deep Fog and the hidden gate. The agile Hornets dodged beyond the reach of the pirate fighters, using their close-range lasers to slice apart droves of smart missiles.

"Got most of them tied up, Myra," Truly said, curt and strained. "There's your window, make it count."

Bee asked Myra, "Is this going to hurt?"

"Depends on whether or not everything goes as planned," Myra said. "But the numbers say it shouldn't."

The shuttle stuck close to its twin Hornet escorts as they covered the distance between the retreating Wanderlust and Deep Fog in pursuit. Crouching against the wall and locked in place by the nullsuit's gravity nodes, Bee resigned herself to the AI's calculated optimism. If this was her one shot she'd make the best of it. She had a steel-hearted brute of a solider beside her and a hyper aware artificial intelligence guiding her every movement. Considering her only previous plan had been a lone, undoubtedly suicidal attack, this situation seemed ideal. Better than she ever had reason to hope for.

The minimap on Bee's HUD swarmed with action. Wanderlust continued its retreat, providing supportive fire against the fighters, but the shuttle shot off toward Deep Fog along with the two Hornets. Four fighters remained guarding Starhawk's warship and the shuttle's sudden advance stirred them to action. The fighters streaked off to meet the Hornet escorts.

Still crouched in the back of the shuttle next to Spud, Bee swallowed her fear and reminded herself what was at stake. She'd suffered more than a decade at Starhawk's hands. Her mother died filthy and foul, a rasping vitriolic shell of a person-nothing like the woman from Bee's cherished early memories. Starhawk did that. Starhawk took her mother's life. The old resolve came roaring back.

No more searching. No more uncertainty. Just one final task.

"Ready to pull the plug on their weapons systems. Think I'll get started on that gate now," Myra mused. "I can see a few chinks in the armor already. Might be able to stop them sending more ships."

"Just get me on board."

Deep Fog's four remaining fighters launched a barrage of missiles toward the Hornets and they pulled back, again using their laser beams to split the missiles into harmless scrap or detonate them before they got close enough for real damage. The fighters split into two groups of two, advancing in a pincer attack, and before Bee could blink the Hornets darted together at one of the pairs.

The flurry of visual data on the HUD was impossible to follow, but after the lightning fast encounter the Hornets emerged unscathed. One damaged fighter limped back to Deep Fog, its partner carved to pieces in the attack, as the shuttle pressed on straight toward Deep Fog.

Swift in the void, the Hornets moved to intercept the final two fighters immediately. The shuttle banked toward the protection of the Hornets just as the fighters fired another volley of missiles-this time followed by a scatter-shot cone of projectiles. Myra jerked the shuttle out of harm's way and the blast of destruction passed harmlessly by. The Hornets swooped in to slice apart the incoming volley of self-guided missiles while launching their own back at the pirate fighters.

Deep Fog loomed closer with each moment.

"We in range of their weapons?" Bee asked with a nervous tremor.

Myra sounded distracted. "Not quite. Few more seconds. Gotta cut this close or you won't have time to board. Almost there. Hijacking weapons and power systems-clock's started. They know I'm in. Less than thirty seconds in the clear."

On Bee's HUD Deep Fog unleashed a barrage of missiles at the shuttle. The two escort Hornets spun around and headed right for the incoming attack, the pirate fighters giving chase.

"Uh, Myra?"

"Don't worry."

Most of the missiles suddenly veered back toward Deep Fog, detonating in a bloom of shrapnel that peppered the bow of the warship with jagged holes. The rest slipped right past the two Hornets and found their true targets, staccato explosions sending bursts of flak tearing through the pirate fighters. Unimpeded by other enemies, the Hornets charged forward and concentrated their high powered lasers at close range on the section of the hull the missiles had shredded. Molten slag oozed from the edges of the gaping wound, a white-hot target for the rapidly approaching shuttle. Deep Fog maintained its course, paralyzed by Myra's touch.

"Here we go," Myra warned. "They're about to lock me out. Keep your helmet on, I vented most of their oxygen. Internal defenses are fried and I've got their crew tagged on your HUD. The Hornets burned you a tunnel so you'll punch through near their bridge. When you get inside Spud's going to slice through the shuttle wall to get you out. Stay with him. Get in, kill Starhawk, and get to their hangar bay to escape. I'm with you every step of the way, Bee. Brace yourself."

"I'm ready," she said as the suit tightened around her, the gravity nodes rooting her in place against the wall in the shuttle's cargo area.

Kill him, Mother whispered.

"I'm ready," Bee repeated.

The shuttle speared itself into the opening the Hornets had burned in Deep Fog's hull, metal shrieking against metal until the craft's whole front section crumpled inward and it came to a bone-jarring stop. Even with the suit holding her steady the impact knocked her around. She tasted coppery blood in her mouth-must have bit herself.

"They're going to try and turn back," Myra said. "I mucked with their maneuvering before they shut me out but you should have enough time to get out of there before they get back to the gate with you on board."

Spud shoved a beam rifle into Bee's hands before she could to respond and yanked a much larger gun from the weapons bag for himself. No time for thought. The suit took charge, guiding her hands as she primed the weapon for combat. She'd never fired one at a person, just the hardlight targets from her training sessions with Truly in the nullroom. Still, with the suit's guidance the movements felt natural, as if she'd done the same thing every day of her life. It just... made her feel the way things should be done.

The map on her HUD shifted to display Deep Fog's interior instead of the ship-to-ship combat still raging near the asteroid. At least a dozen silhouettes appeared across the ship on her visor, all but one marked with a yellow outline. One glowed red. Starhawk.

"He's running back to the gate already," Myra said. "I'm still inside the gate's systems but I don't think I can stop them from-"

Myra's channel went dead.

Spud aimed his gun-no, a laser drill, Bee realized, the kind they used for mining-at the shuttle's wall. Her HUD showed yellow silhouettes gathering in the hallway on the other side, approaching cautiously with weapons drawn. Spud made a happy gurgle over the comms as the drill whined with power. A three-inch wide beam sliced one pirate from left hip to right shoulder as Spud made them a hole and the others scrambled for safety. A chunk of melting wall crashed to the floor on top of the armored body and the giant dropped the drill.

From the weapons bag he pulled two fist-sized spherical drones studded with gravity nodes and laser lenses. He tossed both out the opening and they buzzed to life in midair, darting after the three pirates. Spud shouldered a beam rifle from the bag, picked the drill up again, and ducked through the wall. Bee fell into step behind him without a thought, giving in entirely to the urges of the suit. She felt the way it wanted to move, crouching behind Spud for cover.

The drones riddled two pirates hidden around the corner with laser fire. In a desperate attack the last of the trio flung himself at them and Spud caught him in the chest with a short blast from the laser drill. He shouldered the armored corpse out of the way when it drifted into him. They moved quickly, hunting the bulky red shadow her HUD displayed on the bridge ahead. Six guarding Starhawk, eight or ten more on other levels, closing fast.

Spud pointed the drill at the thick door and the beam seared through, sending the pirates inside diving for cover. The armored gargantuan carved a new door for them, but before he finished the hole the drill's beam faded and sputtered out. Its energy spent, Spud tossed it aside and swapped it for the rifle slung across his back. He raised a boot and smashed the chunk of metal into the rest of the door and it bent inward enough for them to fit through. The hovering drones zipped inside the gap, dodging lasers and firing at the pirates inside. Spud followed without hesitation, Bee shadowing him.

Her heart stopped when she saw Starhawk across the room in his feather-etched golden armor. If not for her nullsuit's constant guidance she might have stopped in her tracks. She dove left as a drone took the first hit, spiraling out of control and smashing into the ceiling. Bee felt the suit guide her rifle to fire, felt her finger pull the trigger, and saw a beam of light lance forward and boil through nullsteel plating on an armored chest. Spud finished him with a shot through the visor and the suit of armor mimicked the death throes of the man inside.

The rest opened fire on both her and Spud, causing the last drone to fly wild as a distraction, unloading its energy in a bid to cover Bee and Spud. Two more pirates thrashed around clutching their helmets. Spud popped another with three shots to the gut. No telling how close Deep Fog was to the gate. Maybe they already went through. Maybe even if she and Spud managed to take Starhawk out they'd get killed anyway by the carriers on the other side. Smashed up from far away like Bill did to that asteroid. Boom.

In that moment it became clear to Buttercup there wasn't enough time for all of her old promises to Mother, but there could be enough time to right at least one wrong in the universe. She ignored the suit's demands and broke from cover. Starhawk pointed his gun right at her, standing tall in his golden suit, Myra's red outline glowing bright. Bee leaped at him, twisting in the air, feeling the suit's pressure as it corrected her aim-and then in an instant everything to her right vanished, replaced with a view of vast empty space. Like the rest of the ship suddenly turned invisible. The floor surged up, knocking her into the ceiling. Everything shook and roared and she blacked out.

Chin up, Buttercup, Mother said.

Bee woke with a pounding headache. Around her stretched an endless field of shimmering stars. Finally out in the void, she thought. The great empty dark. Zee. When she craned her neck around she saw the surface of an asteroid, and strewn across it what remained of Starhawk's warship. The bow of Deep Fog looked like it had been sliced clean off from the rest of the ship, right through the bridge-but the rest of it was nowhere to be seen.

"What happened?"

Myra's clone said, "Deep Fog suffered mid-transit deactivation. Only the bow of the ship made it through the gate. It crashed into the asteroid after entry, causing your brief incapacitation. You and he are the only survivors on this side."

Through a cloud of swirling dust near the crash site she saw the glinting of what must have been the gate they came through, still partially hidden beneath the surface.

"Where are we?"

Myra's clone took a moment to reply. "An unnamed asteroid in the Lethe Belt at the edge of the Luxar System, approximately forty nine astronomical units from Lux."

"That's impossible," Bee breathed. That was past Ymir, even-almost fifty times the distance between Lux and Surface. No gate she knew of had range like that.

"Correct," came the clone's deadpan reply. "We appear to have traveled far beyond currently settled territory."

Find him.

Mother's words jolted her back to her mission.

"Where's Starhawk!" Bee demanded, suddenly wild-eyed behind the suit's visor. A red glow traced around Starhawk's armor in the partially intact bow and relief washed over her.

"Infirmary," the fake Myra droned, outlining the room around Starhawk on Bee's HUD.

"Alive?"

"Unconscious. Scans suggest severe trauma to the lower body."

Kill him slow.

"Take me to him."

A thread of light appeared in front of her, plotting a path to follow into Deep Fog's bowels. Bee reached out toward the asteroid and pulsed her palm nodes, "falling" to the surface along the thread's trajectory. She let the suit take over and glided to the guts of the ship where it had been cut in two. Bee touched down on a mid-level deck near the infirmary.

Wasn't quick for me.

That was more than luck, for both of them to make it through together. She must have been thrown from the ship after it got sliced apart. Myra probably had a hand in it-she was in the gate's systems when it happened.

Suffer he has to suffer-

"Thank you Myra," Bee whispered.

She realized she'd probably never see Myra or any of the crew again and tried her best to bury the terror bubbling up in her chest as she made her way to the infirmary. She focused on what must be done. Buttercup said nothing more, her eyes locked on Starhawk's red silhouette. All those years, all her miseries, and at last she'd make good on those old promises.

#

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