He was talking to her in a soft voice, trying to cajole her into getting up, but Maat didn’t even seem to hear him. Strauss, the universally renowned plasmex doctor who’d been assigned as Maat’s caretaker, was on his knees beside her.
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Caldswell said quietly, glancing over his shoulder.īehind him, Maat lay on the floor, curled up in a ball under Brenton’s coat. “The only thing we can do now is make sure it never happens again.” “Even if we’d left the second the gravity alarms went off, the planet would still have been completely destabilized by the time we’d finished the jump,” Brenton went on, staring down at the small knot of refugee ships that huddled in the battleship’s shadow, the ten thousand people who were all that remained of the Republic core world of Svenya. Caldswell had spent the first fifteen years of his career running slave-freeing missions against those damn lizards-like hell was he going to let the doctor shove one into his brain. Strauss wanted to put one of those things in him, too, but that wasn’t happening. Damn creepy symbiont, he thought with an angry breath. John Brenton was right beside him, his arm almost brushing Caldswell’s shoulder, and Caldswell hadn’t heard a thing. Always, that was, until yesterday.Ĭaldswell kept himself from jumping just in time, sliding his eyes over to look at his partner. Even these last eighteen months, when the phantom attacks had grown so frequent it didn’t seem possible to catch them all in time, Caldswell’s team had always pulled it off. They’d never missed an alarm or arrived too late to save whatever colony planet the phantoms had chosen to nest on. But in those seven years, they’d never failed. Seven years of working constantly, of never seeing his wife, of missing his daughter grow up. Seven years now they’d been fighting the phantoms.
Commander Brian Caldswell, head of the little-known and terribly named Joint Investigatory Spatial Anomaly Task Force, stood on the bridge of the Republic battle cruiser he’d requisitioned from fleet command an hour ago, staring through the huge observation window at the void beyond, a void that should have been a thriving planet of sixteen billion people, and wondering how everything could have gone so wrong so quickly.
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