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She considered calling for volunteers. Rich, Garrett, Natalie, they’d all be eager to help. While those on the airplane might survive, anyone near the doors would be sucked into space as easily as a crumb into a vacuum cleaner. No. Securing the bay doors was her duty. She couldn’t escape it; she couldn’t foist it onto someone else’s shoulders and think she’d be able to stand herself the rest of her life.

Promise, Mommy?

“I know, sweetie,” she said too softly for anyone to hear.
What can I do? I’m the leader, and this is what leaders have to do
. Leaders didn’t choose another to accomplish what they themselves were too scared to do.

“Do you want me to check it out?” Ben asked. Perspiration glittered on his pale forehead. He was scared shitless. But he’d volunteered anyway.

“I need you here,” she said.

A breath shuddered out of him. “To mind the store.”

“Yeah. You do a great job of it.”

His smile wobbled, and she reached out and ruffled his hair. “It’s better that only one of us go anyway, Ben. We
don’t need more. Trist showed me how to lower the hook. It’s a piece of cake. Really.”

With both hands, Jordan took hold of the airliner’s door handle and rotated it. The door swung open.
You’re coming home, right, Mommy?

Guilt bared sharp claws of regret, shredding her insides. But somehow, after all these months, she knew it would come to this: returning to her child or sacrificing herself so that the rest could survive—a terrible choice that had only one resolution she could live with.

I’m sorry, Boo
. Blocking any more thoughts of her daughter, she vaulted from the airplane to the platform below.

“No! Mommy,
nooo!
”

The keening cry woke John Jensen from a deep sleep. His firefighter’s senses were instantly alert. He jackknifed up in bed, gaping wide-eyed into the darkness.

His wife said sleepily, “It’s Roberta. She’s having a nightmare.” She tossed off the blanket.

He blocked her with his hand. “I’ll go,” he said and hopped out of bed.

Pulling on his robe, he shoved open the door and walked into the hallway. Roberta’s bedroom door was ajar. The fronds of the potted palm in the hall were still swaying. He must have missed the kid by seconds.

His gaze veered to the stairs. Then he heard the front door open. “Roberta!”

He took the stairs two or three at a time, stumbling onto the landing and almost breaking his neck. He collided with a tree fern in an effort to beat Roberta down the front porch steps. Heard the crash of the pot onto the wood floor behind him as he raced after her. He could see her now, a wraith in a pink nightgown, skinny legs pumping. “Roberta—stop! Now!”

The grass was spongy from yesterday’s rain. He slipped
and fell. Righted himself and kept going. Roberta headed for the street. “No!” he cried hoarsely.

But she ran as if her life depended on it. “Mommy!” she cried out.
Or someone else’s life
, he thought, his heart twisting. She’d dreamed of Jordan, but the kid had never done anything like this before.

The headlights of a car flickered to the left. Roberta dodged a fire hydrant and ran into the street. Time slowed down. He was thirty-five, he thought, but he ran with the speed of a seventy-year-old. Or it seemed that way. “Roberta!” he bellowed.

He was close, close enough to hear her bare feet slapping against the asphalt. Too far to grab for her. The car didn’t slow down. No one would expect people to be running across the street in the middle of the night.

Headlights, blinding now.
Goddamn
. Roberta darted in front of the car. A horn blared. Brakes shrieked. John dove for the kid, caught her in his arms.

They rolled across the street, tumbled over the sidewalk and onto the lawn of the house across the street. John’s hand shielded Roberta’s head, and he managed to get their bodies to stop before crashing into a row of thorny shrubs.

Roberta tried to struggled free. “Mommy, Mommy—no!” She squirmed and pummeled him.

“Hush. You’re okay now. I’ve got you.” He crushed her close. Kissed her blond curls. She smelled like bubble bath and little girl. He’d always wanted a daughter, but he railed at the unfairness of it all that the daughter he got was his dead sister’s. “Hush,” he soothed, sheltering her in his arms. “You had a nightmare. It’s over. You’re with Uncle John now.”

The kid fought him until she collapsed into a quivering mass of limp limbs. “Come back, Mommy, come back,” she chanted hoarsely.

John rose with her in his arms. The driver was standing
outside the car in a pool of light from the open door, her hand pressed to her mouth. Only the chime from the interior of the car and Roberta’s intermittent sobs broke the silence of the night. “I didn’t see her. I’m sorry.”

John shook his head. “You didn’t hit her.” His voice broke. “Thank you. She’s all I have left of my sister,” he whispered. Then he turned away and carried the child home.

Kào heard the hatch behind him open and then close, the hatch that led from the
Savior
. Kào jerked to his feet and spun around. His tools slid off his lap, falling in damning jangles to the metal floor.

Moray stood at the far end of the airlock. “Kào. . . .”

How could one word hold so much pain, so much regret? Kào felt the weight of it crushing down on his shoulders. He swallowed hard against a throat suddenly constricted, wishing that things had been different, wishing for a thousand things, all impossible now.

The moment drew out, horrible and poignant.

Finally Kào let his arms fall to his sides, palms up. “Why?” He was surprised to hear himself speak. He hadn’t meant to voice the thought.

“They took Jenneh,” Moray said gruffly. “My children.” The words were ragged-sounding, pain-filled.

The Alliance did?
“I thought they were killed in a Talagar raid.”

“They were.” Moray’s large hands crushed into fists. “It should never have happened. The Alliance bastards left Remeraton undefended. They knew the danger to the families stationed there. I was away—on duty. Giving my soul to the Alliance!” His voice quavered. “And when I came home I found them dead. All of them.”

“So you joined the Talagars? The same people who murdered
your family?” Kào heard the bitterness in his own voice, and the disbelief.

“The
Alliance
killed my family. Out of irresponsibility. Out of indifference. It was then I realized I was on the wrong side. The Talagars were misunderstood—and still are. Many reasons. Their culture is a closed one. Restrictive.” His gray eyes beseeched Kào. “And of course the barter of humans is misinterpreted. You would think differently of the society if you knew it as I have. Black and white. Right and wrong. No gray.” Across the airlock, Kào saw a flash of pain in his father’s eyes, painful in its intensity. “No
indifference
.”

So. Moray had assuaged his grief by punishing those he blamed for it. Kào knew that humans weren’t programmed to tackle life with the logical approach of computers—himself included—but this . . . this treason, the suffering and lives lost, the damage done to the longest-running freely elected democracy the galaxy had known, it was irrational. It was unforgivable. But after all these years, there would be no convincing Moray of it. No matter what his father’s motivation, Kào knew that no one else must die for it.

Kào glanced down at the switch next to his right boot. A tiny, crisp, blinking green light indicated, he hoped, that the relay was active. Trist’s file was large; it would take several more minutes to go through, minutes Kào hoped he had now that Moray had come. His father followed his gaze to the switch. Understanding dawned in his eyes. “It’s going through that relay, isn’t it? The signal.”

“It’s too late,” Kào told him. “While Steeg waits for you to get the refugees, this will destroy his battleship. It’s over, Father.”

The man advanced on him. In that moment, Kào wished he had asked Trist for her weapon. He also hoped that his father didn’t have one.

“It’s not too late, Kào. We have a future. Imagine all we
can still do. I’m sorry about what happened during the war. This transfer of the refugees was supposed to correct that.”

“Correct what?” Kào asked, incredulous. “You want to give these people to the Talagars to correct
what
?”

“Your career.”

His
career
? A sound escaped Kào, too clipped and bitter to be a laugh.

“I want you to be a hero, Kào. To share in the credit of this rescue.”

Kào jerked his chin at Steeg’s ship. “For giving them to the Talagars?”

Moray swiped the back of his hand over his deeply flushed face. “You weren’t supposed to know of that part. And you weren’t supposed to
care
.”

Kào saw the accusation in his father’s face. If he hadn’t gotten close to Jordan, he wouldn’t have questioned—or cared about—her people’s fate. The refugees would have been transferred to Steeg’s supposedly apprehended ship and, in his naïveté, Kào would have allowed it to happen. “No wonder you didn’t want me near her,” he muttered, his eyes returning to the switch. Only a minute had passed. It felt like hours. If he could distract the commodore a short while longer . . .

He spoke with a deadly calm he didn’t quite feel. It reminded him of his weapons-officer days when he planned the obliteration of populated areas: One simply disconnected one’s emotions in order to perform. He needed to do that now. “You’ve always wanted me to have, in your words, father, a brilliant career. Power, influence. A good marriage,” he added, his mouth twisting. “I wouldn’t think you’d need to live vicariously through me, when you could take such power for yourself.” He’d often wondered at that, his father’s motives.

Shock froze Moray’s features. “It wasn’t to live through
you, boy! It never was. I want the best for you because . . . because you are my son.”

“But you wanted me to gain the highest levels of government when I clearly didn’t have that particular ambition,” Kào insisted impatiently.

The two men held each other’s gazes. Moray’s eyes pleaded with Kào to understand, to forgive. For a second or two, Kào tried to understand. Then it became clear. He jerked backward as reason for Moray’s deception hit him. “You’re a Talagar sympathizer. As a man of power, I’d be a valuable conduit of information for you.”

Moray nodded encouragingly. Did he still think there was a chance to bring Kào over to his side? The man was delusional! “As an innocent byproduct of our interaction. Or,” Moray offered, “willingly.”

Kào sneered. “Never willingly. But that wouldn’t matter, would it? Because I’d assume your loyalty to the Alliance was above question—because I’d
trust
you—I’d reveal things I ought not. Or so you’d hope.” He well knew the cost of exposing military secrets to the enemy. Unintentionally, involuntarily, it didn’t make a difference how it happened; the consequences were the same. “At least it’s finally clear to me . . . what you had in mind all these years. Why you kept a child alive when you should have killed him.” He swallowed hard. “A part of me now wishes you had killed me.”

Moray’s face reddened with emotion. His voice was thick. “Listen to me, Kào. It’s true I had plans for you, but over time—over time something unexpected happened. As the years passed, using you as a means to harm the Alliance became secondary to my desire, as your father, to see you do well.”

For a moment, Kào feared the man would weep.

Moray clutched at his chest with thick fingers. “You were
my son
. My boy. I wanted the best for you. I wanted you to
be . . . happy. You were bright, a tenacious lad. When you went off to join the Space Force, I did everything in my power to make you a hero. I knew you would balk at my efforts, humble as you are, and so I worked behind the scenes. Got you the best assignment on the best ship that I could.” Remorse crept into his tone. “And when I heard through my channels the Talagar shipbuilding facility had been left virtually unguarded, I made sure that information was passed to your squadron—
your ship
, where I knew you’d be monitoring incoming intelligence. A small price to pay for the Talagars to lose that facility. But for you it would have been the first of many steps in a glorious ascent to a brilliant career.”

Kào shook his head. “Hold on—that intelligence came from
you?
” He’d received such reports daily from operatives in the field, tasked with passing up-to-the-minute information to the fleet. “The targeting message was reviewed by me,” he thought out loud. “It was verified by my commander . . .” As procedure dictated, he’d passed along the intelligence and his own opinions to those responsible for making the final decisions. Regarding that particular gem, an unwary shipbuilding facility that just happened to be on their path, he’d pushed hard to go in and destroy it. But if what Moray told him was true . . .

Sweat prickled the back of Kào’s neck. “The Talagars knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.” It hurt to think of what happened next, so he stopped and pushed the memories away.

“They weren’t supposed to be there, Kào. I swear it! Someone double-crossed me.” Moray’s eyes had never appeared as black to Kào as now, when the man seemed to focus inward on the past. “Someone somewhere in Talagar intelligence figured out my plans for you.” Moray’s scowl deepened. “They sent ships to thwart that attack. I’ll
find the faithless coward and kill him with my own hands, if it takes me the rest of my days.”

“That little miscalculation led to my capture,” Kào said numbly. “And the others’. The Talagars learned of the Daldénne offensive from one of us—or maybe all of us,” he added, hearing in his mind Jordan’s voice, insisting that he’d become a convenient scapegoat because he was the only one left alive to blame. “If not for that, we’d have routed them. We would have won the war years ago. We wouldn’t still be fighting now.”

Moray shook his head. “I don’t know what went wrong. And I arranged for your release after a short time. The Talagars were never supposed to keep you there. But they did keep you alive for me. They did that, at least.”