"You should have jumped to hyperspace the second we spotted those cruisers," Hugo said.
"You will address the Captain properly, boy," Lev said, his hand drifting to the grip of his blaster.
"Call me boy one more time," Hugo said, closing the distance between them fast enough that Lev's hand had barely finished moving before Hugo's rapier was already out and across the old navigator's chest.
He drew blood.
Lev folded forward, his tunic soaking through in an instant, and the light went out of his eyes before he even finished falling.
Corvin was horrified.
"No!
He was our navigator!"
"He drew first," Hugo said, sheathing the blade like he'd done nothing more than swat a fly.
Corvin turned a look on him that could have cut steel.
"Does that matter now?
Who reads the star charts?"
"I'll manage it," Hugo said.
Corvin crouched to confirm what he already knew, that Lev was gone. Hugo stood over him without flinching, a fine tremor running through his hands that had nothing to do with fear, Corvin was certain of that much. His pupils had blown wide, his breathing coming fast and ragged.
Around them, the pure blooded Thornkin watched with a stillness Corvin didn't like at all.
"You'll have to manage it," Corvin said.
"This has cost us a good man for nothing.
We wait here until it's safe to go back to the ship."
Hugo straightened, emboldened by the ring of Thornkin faces around him.
"And when will that be, Captain?
A week?
A month?"
"When I say it's time," Corvin said.
That was when Dashiell pushed through the crowd, taking in the standoff with something close to curiosity, as if he'd walked in on the last act of a play he'd missed.
"Captain," he said, glancing at the tight, angry Thornkin faces ringing them.
"Not the best moment, Dashiell," Corvin said.
"Then you'll especially want to hear this now," Dashiell said.
Corvin sighed and closed his fallen navigator's eyes with his own hand, needless and cruel as the death had been.
"Add him to the pyre," he told the crowd, and they parted just enough to let him through.
He and Dashiell walked far enough from the Thornkin that no ear, human or otherwise, could reach them.
"Captain," Dashiell said, "we've got three options as I see it.
We get these people off this world in whatever we can cobble together, or we hunker down while they take turns murdering one another."
"What's the third option?"
"There isn't one," Dashiell said.
Corvin let out a long breath, because the big man was right and he knew it. He'd known Dashiell since his own days under Halvorsen, back when the admiral had judged him a gifted hand with weapons and explosives but far too reckless to trust with anything requiring subtlety. Halvorsen hadn't been wrong about the recklessness, but Corvin had always seen the value hiding under it: a man with zero interest in fleet politics, eyes only for the job put in front of him, and enough raw mass on him to matter in a crisis that called for muscle over cleverness.
Corvin glanced back across the plain to find Hugo still glaring at him, unashamed of it.
"I don't understand these people," Corvin admitted.
"They'd rather kill each other than work with me."
"Then align your goals with theirs," Dashiell said.
"Remind them there's something waiting past all this.
Give them a road to walk, and whoever won't walk it..."
"Push them off it?"
Corvin offered.
He grinned despite himself, though it wasn't really his style. Most captains ruled through fear and raw threat, and he'd always preferred words, patience, whatever comradery he could build one relationship at a time, but he knew Dashiell had the shape of it right. Dashiell smiled back, coy for a man his size, and excused himself to see to the wounded.
Things got worse once the sun went down. The cold arrived with a bite that hinted at something close to an arctic climate, and more of the injured slipped away in the night, whether from the cold itself or from medical stores so thin they barely counted as stores at all. Later, stealthy predators crept in among the sleeping sentries and tore ragged chunks out of two of them before a dozen exhausted Thornkin managed to drive the things off.
Whatever hope Corvin had been nursing about this world being survivable started leaking out of him along with everyone else's. He couldn't stop replaying the image of that dragon slamming into their viewport on the way down, wings spread wide enough to blot out the sky.
Morning brought a fragile kind of calm that didn't survive past breakfast. New disputes broke out over what little food and water remained, and more people died over it, mostly Thornkin, which struck Corvin as bitterly ironic for a species that considered itself the more evolved of the two on this crashed ship. They turned on each other with a casual ease that made Corvin's skin crawl.
He wasn't sorry to see their numbers thinning, if he was honest with himself. The Thornkin hated him, and the feeling ran both ways, and fewer of them meant better odds of surviving long enough to matter. Whether the Confederate high command would even let him live after losing the Corvite was another question.
Execution, or a lifetime of hard labor on some mining rock, were the two most likely outcomes, and neither one appealed to him. Some tired, hollow part of him wondered whether it might be simpler if none of them made it off this planet at all. There wasn't much waiting for him back home anyway.
His wife had left him for the reason every officer's wife eventually leaves: he'd spent too much of himself on his work and not enough on her. The work that had cost him his marriage was about to cost him everything else too, since surviving this crash would only return him to a losing war against the Messari empire, fought over worlds that meant nothing to him personally, fought because humanity, subordinate to the Thornkin in all things, didn't get a vote in whether it wanted to bleed for someone else's border dispute.