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Chapter Three
    Approaching the Galanti, fifty hours later
    Getting past the pirate mother ship was anticlimactic; the enemy ship’s weapons did not function.
    The Leonidas ’s sensors showed the old Volusian battle cruiser was dead in space.
    Mel ordered one of her squadron’s battle cruisers to lock onto the beleaguered ship and to tow it away from the Galanti— and the danger zone. Later, they’d board the pirate ship and place the crew under arrest for crimes against the Alliance. Right now, it was contained and out of the way.
    She smiled. However they’d done it, the Prime had effectively trapped the pirate boarding party on the Galanti.
    Unfortunately for the pirate boarding party, they were now sandwiched between two sets of predatory creatures—the Prime and the Alliance. This should be easy to finish—or at least it would be if they could contact the Prime and coordinate an attack on the pirates now on the Galanti . So far all attempts to hail the Prime on the ship had been fruitless.
    Something was blocking all signals in—and the only signal coming out was the emergency signal she’d already heard.
    They’d have to contact the Prime face-to-face and that entailed boarding the ship.
    Mel was pretty sure the Prime controlled most of the systems on the ship under the Code Argenta. Something drastic must have happened to keep them from overpowering the pirates.
    She’d know soon enough.
    Maneuvering her small transport for the final approach, she issued orders over her ear-com unit. “Prepare to board the Prime ship. Switch now to alternating com-code ZZY.”
    She wasn’t taking any chances the pirates might be able to monitor her teams’
    communications. The codes would change every half-standard hour.
    Each of the five small transports she led into the suspiciously wide-open docking bay of the Galanti checked in. All communications were now self-contained among their team. The rest of Gold Squadron and the approaching ships of Blue Squadron were not to communicate with her team until she gave an “all clear”—after the self-destruct mechanism was shut down.
    “Okay, soldiers. Our first job is to secure that docking bay. No one else goes in and no pirates get off.”
    “That’s clear, Captain,” Commander A’tem said. She’d brought her chief engineer along in case the Prime needed assistance in stopping the self-destruct. Plus, the Volusians were noted for their fierceness in hand-to-hand battle. “How do you want to go about contacting the Prime once we are on board?”
    “We’ll seek out the one defensible position on the ship—which in all Prime military ships is the engine room.”
    “What if there are friendlies between us and the pirates? How will we tell the good guys from the bad?” Nowicki’s calm tones came over the headset.

    Mel had worried about that also, then she realized that the Prime planned for that under Code Argenta. The ancient military plan was a drastic, harsh—and final—solution.
    Any Prime crew member who had not made it within the designated defense perimeter would be dead.
    “We won’t know until we get there, but I suspect that the only live bodies we’ll find on that ship other than the Prime in the secure location will be pirates.” And possibly the traitors that had allowed the pirates in. There had to have been traitors in the Prime crew. There was no other way to breach a Prime starship. The Prime weren’t careless with security.
    Mel added, “Prime history has shown that they will do whatever is necessary to eliminate the enemy.”
    “The Prime would’ve shut off the air to all decks once they had secured their defensive perimeter,” Nowicki concluded in a flat, disapproving tone.
    “That’s my guess,” Mel said. But it wasn’t a guess. She knew that is what the Prime captain had done. She’d read of such situations in several Prime military histories in her father’s private collection.
    “But the pirates might have had