Chapter 12 · The Traitor List

The prisoner laughed when Mara put his own execution order on the screen.

Commander Tovan Rusk sat shackled to a cargo restraint in Bay Three, one cheek purple from the fighting over Orison and dried blood crusted beneath his nose. The evacuation had stripped the bay of everything not bolted down. Refugees slept behind thermal partitions forty meters away, packed shoulder to shoulder beneath emergency blankets while scrubbers fought the poison they had carried up from the colony.

Rusk glanced at the document hovering over Mara Quill's wrist console and smiled through a split lip.

"You think that frightens me?"

Mara enlarged the Dominion seal at the top of the file. "It should. Your superiors issued it three hours before we entered the Orison system. Operational failure, unauthorized surrender, contamination risk. They planned to kill you whether you won or not."

Rusk pulled against his restraints. The chain rang against the deck. "I did not surrender."

"No," Sera said from the edge of the light. "You failed to die on schedule."

The prisoner's smile vanished.

Sera kept one arm tight against her injured ribs.