“I don’t like it.”
The prison barge Purge’s newly appointed navigator and second-in-command, Bissley Kloth, was at the bridge, still engaged in the process of hailing the gaudily arrayed space yacht that had positioned itself directly in front of him, when the entire console erupted in a storm of proximity alarms.
Kloth snapped them off briskly, taking control of the situation with a quiet confidence that belied his age. At twenty-two, he was still a young man, but he’d already been working aboard the Purge for five years, since he was old enough to hire on for a full share. Hauling convicts and local scum out to various detainment stations and galactic penal colonies including Cog Hive Seven wasn’t the easiest way to earn a living. Yet he’d quickly gotten used to it—most of it, anyway—including the occasional unwanted encounter with tramp vessels adrift in the Outer Rim. And although the Purge was really no more than a garbage barge retrofitted with holding cells and a makeshift medbay, Kloth had a vision of one day transforming it into a floating prison of its own, one in which he might even someday be in charge. He would be Warden Kloth.
Today the Purge was carrying forty-six inmates, human and nonhuman alike.
“Mr. Kloth.” That was the Purge’s captain, Wyatt Styrene, limping across the bridge toward him, his pale blue eyes alight with reckless enthusiasm. A former smuggler himself, Styrene knew these uncharted systems as well as anyone Kloth had ever met, and he’d never run from a fight. “What’s the word?”
“Proximity alarms from that space yacht.” Kloth nodded, indicating the luxury ship that had still not responded to their call. “I’ve got it under control. It’s not—”
A sudden volley of explosions slammed into the Purge, rocking them hard enough that Kloth had to grab the console in front of him and hang on. Checking the screens before him, he saw for the first time what he’d somehow overlooked until it was too late—an attack swarm of Z-95 Headhunters closing in from below them, firing on their underside in a steady volley of concussion missiles. The alarms screamed.
“Where did they come from?” Kloth shouted, unaware for the moment that he was asking the question aloud. Of course the Headhunters had been the ones that had triggered the proximity alarms he’d foolishly attributed to the space yacht in front of them—a ruse that he couldn’t believe he’d fallen for, although Styrene’s expression seemed untroubled. In fact, Kloth could’ve sworn the old pirate had a wry grin on his face.
“They want to tussle, we’ll give ’em a tussle.” Without glancing back at Kloth, he powered up the full retinue of the Purge’s weapons suite. “Go secure our cargo, Mr. Kloth.”
“Captain?”
“Go on, I’ve got the bridge. Besides—” He gestured toward the hatch. “It’s almost feeding time for them, innit?”
Kloth strode quickly back through the Purge, nodding at the guards on either side as he opened the hatchway leading to the vessel’s main hold.
“Everything secure down here?”
“Locked down,” the guard shouted back. “What’s going on topside?”
“Not sure,” Kloth said, making a split-second decision to keep the arrival of the Headhunters to himself for now, for the sake of maintaining some semblance of order. “Captain’s at the bridge now. It’s under control.”
“Tell that to them,” the guard said, pointing down into the hold, where the Purge had been outfitted with its containment cells.
Kloth could already hear the convicts down below, some of them screeching, shouting, or demanding answers in the near-darkness. Typically the inmates they brought out to Cog Hive Seven had lapsed into a silent stupor of boredom by this point in the voyage, but the blasterfire had stirred them up, and Kloth heard them calling out to find out if the ship was under attack.
“I’m going down to check the main cargo hold,” Kloth told the guard. “Who else is down there?”
“Carrier and Hayes.”
Two good men, Kloth thought, or at least battle-tested. He nodded, already ducking forward. “Tell the captain that if I’m not back up in five minutes—”
Thwam!
Something broadsided the vessel from amidships, heavier than a turbolaser, almost like they’d been struck by an asteroid, or another ship. Kloth was already halfway down the gangway amid the holding cells when it struck, and the impact pitched him back into the console wall behind him. It was followed by an unfamiliar high-pitched grinding noise from somewhere below, like an oscillating blade shearing through steel.
The guard beside him hoisted his blaster, checking the cartridge, his face drawn tight with nerves. “What the kark is that?”
“It feels like—” Kloth began, and the words snapped off in his throat.
It feels like we’re being boarded.
Seconds later, from down below, he heard it.
The voices of the prisoners had fallen absolutely silent.