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Alone at the helm of theJunkyard Dog, Margarita King used the rare solitude to think about where her life was going. She hated to admit it, but until their visit to New Earth she had found it extremely difficult—next to impossible even— to let go of what had been the driving and defining force in her life for most of her adult years.

To know that she no longer belonged to the Mars-based Red Barons made her feel as if a part of her body had been lopped off, like an arm or a leg.

Or her head.

Running into Red Baron Antony Marcus on New Earth had changed all that for her. Now calling himself Tony Mark, Tony had been forced to abandon his career in law enforcement because of an accident that left him with permanent amnesia. He had walked away from the Barons and taken on a group of orphans.

He had created a new life for himself. No regrets, no second guesses.

Rita needed to do the same. It was a truth she needed to accept. There could be no going back, not now. Even if she tried, she would never be able to fully trust her co-workers. They had broken the line. They had turned on one of their own. They had turned on her.

She needed to start thinking of how she wanted her life to be going forward now that she no longer belonged to the elite law enforcers of the galaxy. Since the sabotaging of her ship she had been on an aimless run, bouncing from one crisis to another without any plan, like a piece of space jetsam.

She stood in the twilight of theJunkyard Dog’smain cabin and looked out the clear nosecone at the stars. So many stars just in the Milky Way galaxy—up to four hundred billion estimated. An impossible number to count. And more galaxies beyond with their own hundreds of billions of stars.

Her mind boggled over the numbers, over the sheer size of it all. And she counted as less than even a speck of dust in the whole big scheme of things. More like a mere atom in the great cosmos.

She heaved a soft sigh, not wanting to disturb her fellow shipmates.

Behind their closed bunk doors she could hear the soft snores of Lexa, fully recovered from her ordeal on the planet Myam, and Yani, still recovering from the wound she received on New Earth during the pirate attack.

There was no sound from their passenger’s bunk. They had met the Healer when Lexa had been seriously injured on Myam. In exchange for helping Lexa Rita had agreed to take him off the desert planet..

As it turned out, there had been nothing the Healer could d