Chapter 18: The Rift

Halden Rift was empty.

We came out of the jump at dawn into a wide field of drifting rock and old hull plating.

The sensors found nothing alive.

"There's your distress call," the pilot said.

It was a recording of a freighter captain's voice, looping from a beacon that had been dead for years.

"Somebody dug that up," Dax said. "Somebody went to the trouble of digging that up."

He sat on the edge of the tactical console with a bandage already around one wrist.

His grin did not reach his eyes.

I stood at the anchor port.

It was a steel cradle at the right arm of Caspian's chair, with a flat plate set into it for my palm.

The ship carried my signal from the plate to his implant, so I could stand off from him in a fight and still hold him.

I had only used it in drills.

Caspian looked at me over the chair arm.

"Stay on the plate," he said.

"I will."

"If I say stand down, you stand down."

"Caspian."

"Please."

"I'll stay on the plate," I said. "I'm not going to stand down."

The corner of his mouth moved.

The engineer's voice came up from the console.

"Contacts. Three, bearing nine-one, two-seven, and dead astern."

"Raiders?" said the gunnery chief.

"No. Fleet transponders." She paused. "White pennants."

Three cruisers came out of the rock on three sides.

They were the Anchor Office's own ships, painted white from bow to stern.

A voice came over the open channel, polite and dry, and I knew it before it finished its first sentence.

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