For now, the pirates seemed more focused on taunting the black-haired woman than cutting her down with their swords. They hadn’t noticed me yet, and I planned on keeping that way.

At least until I sent them on a one-way trip to the underworld.

“Let’s see what you look like under those fancy Caledonian clothes, eh?” the first pirate said as he prodded her golden coat with the end of his cutlass.

Even though she was cornered by two armed men, the woman wasn’t exactly cowering. Her otherwise delicate face bore an expression of defiance which would probably get her killed.

Unless I did something. My prot-field was almost completely recharged, and I had plenty of room to perform a forcewave maneuver.

“The ship’s detection systems are offline,” the other pirate said to her, “so the rest of the crew won’t find you in time. Soon, they’ll all be dead.”

I lifted my sword in both hands and slashed down. This time, I controlled the power in my attack so I wouldn’t deplete all of my prot-field with a single swing. At the end of the movement, I flicked my wrist up, and my prot-field pulsed from the tip of the blade, buzzed through the air, and smashed the closest pirate in the skull. His eyes popped from their sockets as his cranium compressed like an accordion. His body flew like a ragdoll and narrowly missed hitting the woman.

The other pirate turned to me, his face contorted in confusion. On my next swing, I was more careful so I wouldn’t accidentally hit the woman. My forcewave slammed into the second pirate, and he shot in the opposite direction of her. His flightpath ended at a bulkhead, and the crunching sound of broken bones filled the room.

The woman grabbed a pirate’s cutlass. Before I could say anything, she slammed the blade into the first asshole’s skull, pulled it out, and then skewered the brains of the second pirate.

I didn’t feel like telling her the men had been dead as soon as my forcewave hit them.

“Nice one,” I said as I admired her ruthlessness.

“Who are you?” The point clerk wiped her face with her sleeve and glared at me.

For a moment, I thought she might stab me with the sword, but she slid it between her belt and a golden embroidered full-coat bearing the RTF’s trident crest. Bionic implants glistened on her temples and their design indicated she was a point clerk. Every Royal Trident Forces ship was assigned a PC to ensure any gear obtained from missions was properly logged and accounted for. They were able to use their magical-machine tech to link with the kingdom’s databases, serving as brokers for Runetech equipment, Arcane Dust, and Kingdom Point distribution.

Flawless skin pulled against high cheekbones, and her pointed nose lifted in disdain as she studied me with her hazel eyes. She bore the air of someone who thought a little too highly of themselves. Then again, she was a point clerk, and they all tended to share a haughty disposition.

“Squire Nicholas Lyons. I’ve come to fix the detection system.”

“I was about to repair it when these pirates attacked me,” she said. “I figured they’d been sent here to make sure no one cleared the virus.”

“Seven-zero-golf-nine-delta-whiskey,” I said, but the woman frowned at me. “That’s the code, right?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said with a shrug.

“Why did you come here if you didn’t know the code?” It seemed really strange the point clerk would have come to the surveillance room to fix the systems if she didn’t know the code, but her sneer stopped me from asking any further questions.

“What are you just standing there for?” she said. “Enter the code.”

“Right.” I smiled at the point clerk’s ferocity and turned to the computer systems instead.

After careful scrutiny, I found the terminal responsible for detecting hostiles on board by searching for organic bodies that didn’t wear prot-belts. I was surprised the Stalwart was even equipped with these systems. It was probably one of the few pieces of regulation equipment on the starship.

I punched the code into the system’s console. A monitor two rows down and one column up flickered for a moment, and then scrambled into error codes. I clenched my teeth in frustration as I stared at the glaring text. If I didn’t get this system up and running, then there could be pirates hiding all over the ship without any way for us to track them. We’d never deal with them all without massive casualties.

“Can you contact anyone else on the ship? They might be able to tell us how to fix it,” the beautiful young woman asked me.

“This is my first tour. My prot-belt isn’t connected to the network yet. The artilleryman who knew how the system’s worked got injured so I left him in a corridor elsewhere on this deck. It will take at least five minutes to go to him and bring him back here.”

There were probably a dozen other people on the ship who knew how to fix the systems. Regrettably, they were all too busy fighting the pirates.

The scrolling ones and zeros on the monitor seared my retinas. None of it made sense. I needed to get Zac here so he could figure out how to fix it. Moses had ordered me to make sure the artilleryman didn’t get killed for a good reason. If the bullet had made its way to Zac’s heart, we were screwed.

I could probably run down the passageway to ask the artilleryman if he knew any other way of bringing the systems online again. He might be unconscious, but with luck, I might be able to prod him awake.

The door was still open so I peered into the passageway. With my head outside the room, I could hear fighting. Olav and Flanagan had probably engaged more pirates in combat.

Ten pirates trickled out from a doorway. I spun back into the surveillance room to avoid detection and then pressed the button beside the door. It closed with little more than a whisper, silencing the sounds of battle.

“More hostiles out there?” the point clerk asked as she walked over to the computers. She seemed far too levelheaded for a woman who was on board a pirate-infested starship.

“I counted ten. I can take them down. Except I don’t really know how many more could be waiting in any one of those rooms. If I get swarmed by a bunch of them, I’m not going to be able to get these systems online again.”

I could kill them all, but that would take precious time. My gut twisted in frustration, but it was replaced with surprise when a shadowy mist burst from the black-haired woman’s face. It was like a cloud of demonic tendrils reaching from her head into the computer terminals. A bunch of numbers rolled along the surface of her eyes like a thousand lines of scrolling code.

“What the fuck . . .” I shook my head.

I’d seen people connect bionic implants to computer systems before, but I’d never witnessed a strange black mist coming from someone’s head.

The detection systems booted up and then summoned a holographic display with a map of the ship. About eighty red dots spotted the Stalwart’s five decks, and I figured they were pirates.

Now I knew why the point clerk came to the surveillance room without knowing the code required to reboot the monitoring systems. Whatever the mist was, it allowed her to do the impossible with computers.

“Was that mist some kind of point clerk thing?” I asked. The only PC I’d spoken to before was the old man who’d died on Tyranus, so I didn’t know whether it was a functionality I’d never heard of before.

The point clerk shook her head. “Not exactly.”

“Well, whatever you did has put the detection systems back online.”

The markers on the holo were quickly vanishing one by one until there were only about sixty remaining. The enemies outside the room had been vanquished. I wondered whether Olav and Flanagan had cleared the passageway.

I’d need to know the whereabouts of the remaining pirates while I was outside this room. I wondered whether the point clerk possessed other technological gifts that could assist me.

“This holo shows the enemies on the ship, but it won’t do me any good outside this room,” I said to her. “Can you link my prot-belt to the ship’s computers?”

“That I can’t do since my prot-belt’s unlinked just like yours. You’ll need the captain’s approval to get access. I can track the hostiles using my magic, so I can come with you and let you know when there are pirates nearby.”

The last thing I wanted to do was put this woman in danger, but I didn’t have a choice. She was the only hope I had of helping the rest of the crew take down these intruders.

I nodded at the point clerk. “What’s your name?”

“Elle McGrath.”

“Alright, Elle, let’s go kill some pirates.”

With a punch of a button, the doors opened. I tilted my head and saw pirate corpses lying on the ground. Olav and the herald knight must have gone somewhere else because there was no sign of the two men except for this trail of death.

“Are there any other pirates on Deck 5?” I asked Elle as we stalked out of the surveillance room.

Her eyes did their weird rolling thing, and she nodded. “Fourteen in all. Two groups of them.”

“Where’s the nearest group?”

“I can see five in a room three doors left of here. There’s no breach, so they must have gone there to hide.”

“Let’s deal with them.”

We made our way to the room. The door was closed, and I turned to Elle. “You stay out here. I’ll take care of the pirates, and then we’ll move on.”

The point clerk nodded, but I could see she wouldn’t stay put for long. I didn’t have time to argue with her, nor did I think she’d listen, so I punched the button and raised my sword as the door opened.

The five pirates were standing at the far end of the room with their backs turned, and they whirled around when I entered. Their guns barked as I ran toward them, but my prot-field caught the bullets, and they pattered to the ground like pebbles. I couldn’t keep taking fire for long. I also couldn’t deplete my prot-field by using a forcewave because I needed it for protection.

It didn’t really matter though, because I was in the middle of the pirates in seconds. My longsword took two enemies down with a single swipe, and their screams filled my ears as I plunged the blade into the chest of another. One of the pirates shot me with his rifle at close range, but his bullets disintegrated on my shield. The man’s pupils widened as I opened his chest with a backhanded cut.

When I descended on the last pirate, he dropped his weapon and knelt in front of me. “Don’t kill me, please.”

I punched him in the face, and he crumpled to the ground. I knew the RTF’s policy was to accept an enemy’s surrender, but I didn’t know whether this pirate was classed as a regular enemy or something else. I also wasn’t sure whether the Stalwart even shared the RTF’s policy. They didn’t hand over Dust stores, so they might just kill enemies like this guy.

I decided to take the matter into my own hands, so I drove my sword into his stomach. He grabbed the edge of the weapon as blood bubbled out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. I yanked the blade free, and he collapsed in death.

Pirates, like rebels, didn’t deserve to live. They were criminal scum, and I wouldn’t allow a single one to continue breathing.

Blood dripped from my longsword as I scanned the rest of the chamber. A door behind the corpses led to another room, and faintly glowing runes marked its outer edges. Curiosity consumed me, and I marched over to the door. It bore no handles, no terminals to enter access codes, and no scanners to read palm-runes.

What lay beyond this door?

My thoughts were interrupted by the click of a magazine inserted into a firearm. When I turned, a pirate I had failed to kill was pointing his rifle at me. The man barely had the strength to pull back on his rifle’s operating rod, but he accomplished the action before I could initiate a forcewave attack. My prot-field couldn’t have replenished enough to stop all the bullets this man was about to fire at me.

Before the pirate could pull the trigger, I saw a flash of metal at the other end of the room. A cutlass spun toward the man, and the blade plunged into his head. As he toppled, his finger pulled the trigger. The gun screamed as bullets sprayed in a vertical arc, and I threw myself down in an effort to avoid them.

My prot-field absorbed most of the shots, but then it went down, and a final round slammed into my chest. It felt like a champion kickboxer had kicked me in the ribs.

Elle ran over to me and pulled her cutlass out of the dead pirate’s head. “She’s a beauty,” she said as she smiled at the blade. “These pirates really do have some nice weapons.”

As I stood, the point clerk walked over to me. “You okay?” She pointed her bloody weapon toward my bullet wound.

“Hey, I’m not so sure I want you operating--” I started to say as the black-haired woman inserted the end of her dagger into my cuirass. Then she jimmied the bullet out and onto the floor.

“It didn’t even get through your armor,” she said with a snort.

“Ha!” I smiled at the small dent in my chest piece after I stood. My chest was sore, but it felt like a bruise and nothing broken. I owed Max my thanks for a well-crafted item.

“Are you glad I didn’t listen to you now?” Elle said, and I couldn’t stop the smile from forming on my face.

“I am. But I’m wondering how those pirates managed to corner you in the surveillance room earlier. You’re pretty good with that sword.” I’d never seen someone throw a sword with such precision before.

“If you want me watching your back from now on, you won’t ask about it ever again. Besides, I’m not the only one who did something stupid today. You were asking to be shot by leaving that guy alive.”

“I would have gone over their bodies to make sure they were all dead, but something else caught my attention.”

“Like what?”

We really needed to get moving, but I was still intrigued by the locked door with the strange symbols. Elle might even know something about it, so I stepped over the dead pirate and showed her the door.

“Know anything about this?” I asked the point clerk as I pointed at the strange door.

“It’s not regulation on RTF Beluga-class starships.” The point clerk ran her hands over the glowing runes on the doorframe and sighed. “Another thing to add to my long list. I can look into it if you like, see whether there’s anything in the database matching these runes.” She touched her temple, and I guessed she’d captured the image through her cybernetic retinas.

“That would be great,” I said. “I’ll hold you to that if we kill all these pirates before they get hold of the bridge.”

Elle gave me a half-smile and sprinted toward the elevator. She might have been a point clerk, but she could run like a soldier. After fifteen more minutes of sweeping through Deck 5 together, I’d killed another six pirates, and Elle had added two to her tally.

I couldn’t help but admire the woman’s tenacity when fighting. The point clerk could wield a blade as well as any of the Academy cadets. Her kingdom-issued prot-belt beneath her golden coat absorbed bullets as though they were made of jelly.

I sent a forcewave into the last of the pirates, and it crushed him like a tin can. After the crew finished dealing with the attackers, there would be a lot of cleaning to do.

When I glanced down at my prot-belt, it wasn’t showing my remaining shields. I touched the interface, and the metal surface seared my finger. “Ow!” I pulled my hand back.

Elle knelt in front of me and examined my belt. I felt a little awkward with a beautiful woman so close to my crotch, but I endured.

“It’s malfunctioned,” she said. “The prot-belt looks like it’s good quality. Maybe there’s a problem with some of the equipment your belt is linked with. What about this longsword?” Elle asked, and I held out the weapon for her to inspect. She touched the surface of the Forcewave rune, and her eyes turned to their whites. “Non-regulation rune. No wonder your prot-belt malfunctioned.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Do I look like an enchanter?” She stood and shook her head. “That’s why we have regulations. Your prot-field is down, and I wouldn’t try to use the longsword’s rune effect either.”

I sighed, trying not to think what would happen if we faced any more pirates while my prot-belt wasn’t working and I couldn’t use the Forcewave rune.

“Where to now, then?” I asked Elle.

She glanced down at her prot-belt, and her eyes rolled back into her head. “The bridge,” she said as numbers flashed across her eyeballs. “Twenty pirates are making their way there now.”

“We need to get there before they do.”

That was just our luck. The other crewmembers might be heading there also, but we were only one level away since the bridge was located on Deck 4. We needed to get there before the intruders killed the command team and took control of the ship.

I could still use the longsword as a regular weapon, plus I knew how to take cover. I’d have to be extra careful not to get hit with any bullets. My armor could probably take a few shots, but they’d hurt like hell.

As Elle and I sprinted down the passageway, I stopped to check on Zac. He was unconscious, but the medkit had stopped most of the bleeding. Without an x-ray, I couldn’t see the bullet’s whereabouts, but he would be alright as long as the shrapnel didn’t move toward his vitals.

I heard a commotion and looked up to see Elle raising a finger to her lips. She tilted her head to indicate the corner of the passageway. The bulkheads curved around so I couldn’t see what she was looking at. From the way the black-haired woman was acting, I figured there were more pirates.

But how was that possible? She’d scanned the area, and the detection systems hadn’t found any intruders.

I left Zac’s side and crept forward silently until I could see around the bend. Three pirates carrying rifles slipped into cover behind a console. Their weapons were much larger than the other intruders I’d fought and probably contained some heavy firepower. They were in position to ambush anyone that came from the other direction, and I prepared myself to slowly sneak up behind them.

Then Casey stepped into the passageway on their other side.

She was holding what looked like a railgun, and its black rails glowed with purple runes. I was a bit shocked a woman of her size could carry such a massive gun. Her slender arms bulged with the effort, but her expression gave no indication she wouldn’t be able to fire the weapon.

Casey’s back was to the pirates.

I played out the next few actions in my head and saw a dozen bullets slam into the enchantress’ forcefield. Another dozen shots would penetrate the forcefield to puncture her soft flesh, and she’d be dead before she hit the ground.

No. I’d watched Alice get hit when I was helpless. I couldn’t let a friend die again.

I sprinted toward the pirates and willed my legs to go as fast as possible. With my prot-belt malfunctioning, I couldn’t use my speed sequence to make a short burst or employ a giant leap. Almost in slow motion, I saw the pirates rise from behind their cover. My breath caught as they raised their rifles toward Casey.

I heard Elle cry out behind me, but her voice sounded muffled because my mind was too focused on saving the enchantress.

Every step was a giant leap, and my heart slammed a thunderous reverberation in my chest. If only my prot-field hadn’t malfunctioned. If only I could swipe my sword and take out the pirates with a forcewave maneuver, but now I only had my leg muscles and my prayers to help the enchantress.

I wasn’t going to get there in time. Casey would be riddled with bullets in a microsecond.

Time seemed to still as every portion of my body scrambled and slammed together again. My mind whirled as I experienced the same displaced feeling as when I’d teleported Alice, Ludas, and I from the battlefield on Tyranus to the Academy starship.

One second, I was fifteen meters away from the men who would kill Casey, the next; I was standing in the middle of the three pirates. My unexplained arrival caused them to falter for a moment.

A slight hesitance from my enemy was all I needed.

I screamed as I drove my sword into the stomach of one and slammed my elbow into the nose of another. While the pirate with the broken nose was clutching his face, I kicked the third man in the chest before he could point his rifle at me. The air ejected from his mouth with a gasp, and I forcibly expelled every last fraction of oxygen from his body when I skewered his lungs. After I removed my blade from the dead man, I spun toward the pirate with the shattered nose and lopped his head off with a clean slice.

As blood dripped from my longsword, I glanced up at Casey. Her blue eyes settled on me, filled with surprise.

“Holy shit!” The enchantress drew in her breath. “I didn’t even see them until you--”

“Saved your life,” I finished, hoping to cut off any thought of what her eyes might have told her she’d seen. “I’m just glad you didn’t let loose with your railgun. My prot-field’s down, so you would have turned me into a human sieve.”

Casey ignored my joke, her mouth still agape. She looked back at the dead pirates and then at me while she shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. I turned around in time to see these pirates. Then when I was about to blow the shit out of them, suddenly, you were in the middle of them! Weird.”

I swallowed and racked my mind for an explanation. “I was really fast.”

The enchantress glanced from left to right. “You were over there, and then you were here. How is that even possible? Do you have some kinda illegal Runetech I don’t know about? Can I see it? I’d love to reverse-engineer that shit.”

“Uhh . . . I’ll tell you later, alright?”

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d tell her, but it couldn’t be the truth. She was a nice girl, but I’d known her for only a few hours and I wasn’t sure I could entirely trust her.

Footsteps echoed down the passageway, and I whirled around. Elle approached us, and her eyes narrowed at me.

“We don’t have time to work out how this squire managed to vanish out of thin air and reappear elsewhere,” the point clerk said to Casey. “The last of the pirates will be at the bridge by now.”

She was right. We had bigger problems to deal with. Like the pirates on the Stalwart who’d made it past the ship’s sensors.

I glanced at the corpses and found the answer to how the pirates got past the rebooted surveillance systems. Bloodied prot-belts were wrapped around their hips. They must have stolen them from the crew. Normally wearing another user’s belt wouldn’t work because of the biolink, but so much of the crewmembers’ blood was soaking the belts, somehow bypassing the monitoring systems.

Elle squatted next to a pirate, took the dead man’s sword, and used the end of the blade to flick the buckle on the prot-belt. The belt unlatched with a click.

“Covering the bioreader with blood only works for a little while,” she said. “A few more minutes, and we would have known there were hostiles on the deck.”

I forced myself to look away and tried not to think about what horrors such bloodthirsty pirates might inflict on the command team.

“Let’s go, Nicholas. Come along, sifter,” Elle said to Casey as she ran for the elevator.

We all got in together, and I hit the button for Deck 4.

“Who’s the bitch?” Casey said with a jerk of her thumb at Elle.

I figured she was annoyed about being called a sifter. RTF enchanters aboard starships were often called sifters because of a rumor suggesting they sifted the Dust stores on vessels to sell on illegal markets. I didn’t think the rumors were true since the penalties for lawbreaking were so severe.

“I am the Stalwart’s point clerk,” Elle said with a flick of her shoulder length hair.

“Eh, that explains why you stand like you’ve got a stick up your--”

“Her name’s Elle McGrath,” I said before Casey could finish, “and she’s the reason why the detection systems are back online.”

“Yes. If not for me, the Stalwart would be--” Elle began, but I cut her off.

“And this is Casey. If she hadn’t been there to repair our gunner terminals, we wouldn’t have been able to defend ourselves from the first wave of pirates. We’d all be dead right now. She is far from a ‘sifter.’ She’s my friend.”

“Fair enough.” Elle gave the other beautiful woman a short nod, and Casey returned the movement. Obviously, the two women didn’t like each other, but their feelings wouldn’t matter if the pirates took the bridge. I gestured for them both to follow me, and we ran toward the command center.

When we arrived at the passageway leading to the bridge, the first set of security doors were already open. Corpses lay along the red carpet inside, but all of them were pirates.

I ran to the end of the curving passageway, and Elle followed behind me. When we came to the four-meter double doors sectioning off the bridge from the corridor, a group of two knights and eight artillerymen were waiting outside.

I recognized Olav among them.

“Olav, sir. There are twenty pirates inside the bridge.”

“Aye,” Olav said as he studied his axe blade.

“They’ll take the ship,” I said.

“Monitoring systems show we’ve cleared all the pirates except for those in the bridge. Shielders are maintaining the breaches. It’s time to celebrate, Squire.”

I could hear yelling from inside the bridge, and it sounded like people were dying. We needed to get in there and help the captain.

Olav unclipped the water drum from his belt and raised it to the other crewmembers. “We did it, lads. Killed every last one of those fuckers who tried to take our beautiful girl.”

The other knights were holding drums, too, and they yelled a jovial cheer before downing their drinks. I turned to Casey, but she was in the middle of a conversation with an artilleryman. The enchantress was grinning, and the soldier seemed equally pleased with their efforts.

But our fight wasn’t over. All the pirates weren’t dead yet.

“Are they insane?” I whispered to Elle. She was the only person who wasn’t celebrating with the rest of the crew while the leader of our ship was behind this door fighting pirates.

“I think they are. Or maybe they don’t like their captain?” She leaned in close to whisper to me, and even though my body was screaming with adrenaline, her warm breath sent a shiver down my neck.

The bridge’s doors slid open, and a headless pirate body fell backward onto the passageway floor. The rest of the crew was still gulping from their water drums, and they paid no attention to the body that landed next to them.

These men were insane.

I nodded to Elle and then stepped over the pirate corpse into the bridge. My sword was in my hand, and I prepared myself for more killing.

A man clad in a royal blue trench coat wiped his sword on a dead pirate’s tunic. Long black hair fell over his face, gray peppered his beard, and crow’s feet hung around his eyes. His serious demeanor suggested the lines were from scowling rather than smiling. I recognized his face from the holo announcing the pirate attack.

This man was Captain Atticus Cross.

Standing beside him, with a dagger in each hand, was a woman wearing a royal blue coat much like the captain’s. Her jet-black hair was cropped around her ears and nape, and veins pulsed in her thin neck. The woman gave me a cold stare with her blue eyes as she sheathed her weapons. I assumed she was the ship’s commander.

The captain and the commander were the only people in the bridge. The only people still alive, at least.

They were surrounded by pirate corpses, about twenty in all, though their mangled and disfigured state made it impossible to tell the exact number.

“Good work, Commander Reynolds,” The captain said to the commander before he pressed a gauntleted finger onto the button of a nearby console. “The enemy assault is over. Yeomen, we require a cleanup in the bridge.”

I was still speechless, unable to look away from the dozens of pirate corpses inside. I couldn’t work out how two practically unarmored officers had taken down over twenty intruders. It was possible but highly unlikely. And neither the commander nor the captain seemed to have broken a sweat.

Elle pushed past me and stormed up to the captain.

“Captain Atticus Cross.” Her voice tweaked a little as she said his name. The point clerk sounded a little nervous, but she puffed her chest up and continued. “There are matters for which you must account for. I thought them simply rumors, but a few hours on your ship have confirmed their truthfulness to me.”

Was this point clerk employed by Duke Barnes like I was? If so, was she about to reveal to an entire crew that she’d come to spy on them?

My mind reeled with the thought, and I guessed there was about to be a lot more bloodshed on the Stalwart.