Free Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) by Dan Worth

both need it.’
    With that, he fired the Profit Margin’s main engines briefly and the ship sped away from Port Royal.
     
    Engines off, the Profit Margin drifted, until the Hidden Hand’s base was lost in the blackness at the edge of interstellar space.  Isaacs kept a close eye on the sensor console.  So far, none of the Shaper craft or their renegade human allies had turned their attention towards his ship.  They remained within the inner system.  Oddly, a number of civilian ships were also visible traversing the system and jumping for other destinations within this part of space.  This surprised him.  Had normal traffic begun to resume already? 
    No matter, they were now thousands of kilometres away from Port Royal and Anna had finished punching in their jump co-ordinates.  He moved his hand deftly across the controls and engaged the stealth module.  There was a dull clunk and a series of other mechanical noises that he felt through the deck as the four large radiator panels deployed and locked into place.
    Isaacs took a deep breath, crossed his fingers and engaged the ship’s jump drive.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
    It was night time.  He sat with his back to a tree and looked up at the stars through a hole in the forest canopy.  One of those faint, twinkling points of light was home.  He couldn’t tell which one.  He could only see a small patch of sky and working out what he was looking at was a virtually impossible task.  There were plenty of shooting stars to watch too.  Normally, he would have taken a simple pleasure from watching such a display, but not now.  The streaking fireballs were not of natural origin. They were the debris of battle burning up in this world’s atmosphere, fragments of once proud warships, broken fighter and bomber craft, spent munitions and human bodies streaking through the atmosphere to annihilation.  It was a repeated reminder of his failure.
    Other lights moved up there: other ships, the ones who had defeated him.  They winked in and out of existence as their hulls caught the light from the system’s sun.  Lights could also be seen moving in the sky at lower altitudes as craft swept low across the jungle, their engines whining in the tropical night as their searchlights played across the treetops.  They were hunting for survivors.
    He had been several days in the seemingly endless jungle and he didn’t really have a coherent plan for what to do next.  First of all, he needed to get a message back to the Navy to let them know he was still alive and maybe someone would come to get him off this sweltering rock but that itself carried with it immense risk.  The emergency hypercom distress beacon that he had salvaged from the crash site was a one shot device with enough power to send a single message back home without needing to use the local comm. nets, but it would doubtless attract attention from the very enemies that he was trying to avoid.  Beyond that, he had some vague notion of finding a working a ship with jump capability and somehow managing to get away, though he suspected that the ships in orbit above him would soon put paid to that. 
    The pain from his injuries sustained during the crash had abated somewhat, though his nose still throbbed and sent shooting pains through his skull if he touched it.  For now, he just needed to stay alive and avoid capture.  The information he had in his brain would be very useful to the enemy.   Tactics, current deployments, force strengths, encryption passwords, security codes, all of it could be obtained from him, and they wouldn’t need to torture him the old fashioned way, they would just implant him with one of their creatures. It would devour his mind and it would know everything and then they would know everything.  He needed to avoid capture until the information he held became outdated, until fleets had moved and codes changed.
    He pulled out the pistol he had salvaged and looked at it