When the door hissed open, Annika kept up her attack as she sneaked a look. Nice, they’d only sent two. They were dressed in the same formfitting black with the hoods, still trying to escape detection. They came on slowly, no doubt thinking about some of her moves from before. What they couldn’t have known was that she’d been pulling her punches then, too.
She stood and lashed out with a foot, catching one in the solar plexus. The other danced back, brandishing a shock stick. Oh good, they’d brought her a weapon. Ama would have been sickened by them.
With a quick apology, she threw Noal at the one with the shock stick, and they fell together in a heap, their bodies keeping the door from closing.
Annika knelt and swept the legs from the injured one, then delivered a swift kick across his neck to finish him. She slid across the floor as the other was trying to disentangle himself from Noal, whose glazed eyes said he’d been hit with the shock stick. She planted both heels in the kidnapper’s hood, and his head rocked back. She neatly flicked the shock stick from his grasp and leveled it against his chest until he stopped twitching.
Annika stood and pulled Noal to his feet. “What happened?” he asked, his voice a slur. “Why did you—”
“Keep moving.” She hurried into the hall. “More will be coming.”
As she hurried them down the smooth, curved hallway, she scanned the walls for maintenance hatches, any clue as to what part of the ship they were in. Conduits ran along one side of the wall. They were either near the engines, or it was a smaller ship. Maybe both.
“Why did you… Did you kill them?” Noal asked.
Her grandmother’s voice demanded she leave him, but she told it to keep quiet. “Better them than us.” She followed a line of conduits to a hatch in the wall and eased it open.
“What are you doing?” Noal asked, his voice getting steadier by the moment.
She scanned the wires and chips inside. “Most ships are designed more or less the same, did you know that?” She was mostly talking to herself, but maybe it would keep him from asking so many questions. “It makes them easier to repair but also easier to sabotage, but there’s nothing to help us here.” She looked up and down the hall. “We have to be near the engines. Come on.” She hurried him down a bend in the hallway.
“We’re going to sabotage the engines?” he asked.
“No, better to take the ship if we can. Though we have to make ourselves as hard to catch as possible.” They reached a small door marked Environmental Controls. “Perfect.” And it wasn’t even locked. If her family had hired this ship to kidnap her, they needed to demand a refund.
She hurried inside a room packed with machinery and didn’t stop until she found the mechanism that controlled the artificial gravity. There was no time to sort out wiring, and she had nothing to cut with anyway. She jammed the shock stick into the tangle. “Ready to be a pain in the ass?”
He stared at her confusedly, and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She turned the shock stick on before running from the room, hauling Noal with her.
The shock stick hummed for a moment before the whole mechanism began to groan, and smoke leaked from the open mouth of the door. A shudder passed through the ship, and the sound of popping wires and the smell of burning electrics filled the corridor before a thunk sounded around them.
Annika pressed herself and Noal against the wall before the gravity gave way, and they began to float, their hair drifting. Noal struggled impotently, and she let him go. A thump came from a connecting corridor before a door hissed open, and two guards drifted on the other side where they’d bounced off the door.
“Stay here,” Annika said. The way Noal was flailing, it didn’t seem as if he had much choice.
She turned to the guards. They may have searched her for weapons, but they hadn’t found the last gift Annika’s mother had given her, a weapon no search or scanner could detect. Annika pressed along the inside of her forearm, massaging until the thin, bone stiletto slipped through the pocket of skin created to carry it. A few drops of blood floated free, and she rolled her sleeve over the tiny cut. Stiletto in hand, she braced her feet against the wall, made sure of the angle, and pushed toward the guards.
These weren’t wearing hoods. Maybe they’d been in too much of a hurry to put them on. A man and a woman, they didn’t have the specific hair or eye colors of any of the larger houses. One wriggled in the air while the other floated calmly, looking to the wall, probably waiting for the chance to either grab hold or push off, but neither chance would come.
Annika flew for the flailing one. She moved her head away from his wildly swinging arm and dragged the slender stiletto across his throat. As sharp as the knife was, the contact still sent her to the side as his body floated away from her, trailing drops of blood. She shifted and tucked so her legs would be beneath her.
The female guard was trying to keep Annika in view as she reached the wall and scrabbled for something to grab hold of. As she rotated, she fumbled with a pouch on the side of her trousers and pulled a small pistol, one of the ship designs that fired sonic force, designed to damage organics but not harm anything else. To shield against such a shot, a person had to take cover behind thick metal or plastic, and a shot that landed close could still wound.
Annika came at the guard fast, trying to reach her before she could fire, but she pulled the trigger wildly, the deep thrumming sound of the pistol filling the small space. Down the hall, Noal yelped, and Annika gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to look. She grabbed one of the woman’s legs and stabbed her behind the knee.
The guard shrieked, pushing off from the wall and taking Annika with her. Annika pulled up the guard’s body, jammed the stiletto in her neck, and pulled it free in one smooth motion. She plucked the pistol from the air and turned back. “Noal, are you all right?”
“Bruised. It came…really close.”
The bodies drifted away, and Annika had to wait to make contact with another surface before she could push back to Noal. Except for the wild shot, the whole attack had gone like clockwork. She could almost see Ama’s small smile of approval.
Noal had ceased struggling and stared at her, his jaw slack, and one hand held to his arm. When their eyes met, his expression turned tightened, panicked, and she knew he’d seen her killing look: the blank expression she remembered from her own training videos. She smiled softly, trying to look like herself again. She hadn’t always pretended with him and Judit. Even with all the lies, she’d been able to relax now and again; he’d seen the real her, though she supposed her killing look was another part of her, too. She just had a few…extra facets to her personality.
Now, if she could only make him see that. “It’s all right, Noal,” she said softly. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She gestured at his arm. “Want me to take a look?”
He swallowed and stared at her with naked fear. “You killed them.”
She decided on half a truth. The whole one would only make things more complicated. “All my life, I’ve secretly trained as a guardian. My family thought it best that I be able to protect myself and you if necessary.” She put on a curious look. “Your family didn’t teach you the same?”
He shook his head but seemed a little less panicked. He let her drift close and examine the fast-forming bruise on his arm. Any closer, and the shot would have taken his skin off. If it had hit him directly, it would have turned the whole arm into ruins.
“You really think we can escape?” he asked.
She nodded, smiling wider. “I don’t know how we got into this situation, but I’m going to get us out.”
His face relaxed a little more. “Did your family suspect your guardian might turn on you?”
She swallowed. That still stung. But she had no real answers. “My family doesn’t trust anyone.”
Now his face fell, and she saw the same sympathy as when he’d discovered her broken rib. “You can trust me,” he said. “And you can trust Judit. I’m sure she’s looking for u
s.”
And that was probably true. Maybe her family was also searching, but if they were, it was only so they could find a reason to go to war with Meridian again. Somewhere out in the galaxy, maybe her mother would look for her if anyone bothered to tell her that her daughter was missing. But according to Ama, her mother wouldn’t care at all.
“We need to find the bridge,” she said. “If we can’t take the ship, we’ll find an escape pod or shuttle.”
He nodded, though he still looked cautious. They floated along the corridors, searching for the bridge. There didn’t seem to be many people, but Annika kept herself ahead of Noal, peeking through each door. They passed a large room full of cargo containers secured to the floor by maglocks. A pressure suit hung against the wall, and the window of an airlock gleamed beyond.
Annika pushed inside. “Stay near the door.” She drifted to the window and looked out; the light of a nearby planet filled the airlock with a blue glow. She didn’t recognize the planet, but she supposed it was a good sign. If it was inhabited, maybe she could signal.
“I’m getting a little…light-headed,” Noal said.
She’d noticed the same feeling. “Someone’s probably fiddling with the life support, trying to make us pass out.”
“Or it happened when you shoved a shock stick into random bits of the ship.”
She gave him a wry look. “It’s my first time crippling a ship. I think that deserves a little slack.” Well, it was her first time doing it for real. But her grandmother wouldn’t have given her any slack, either.
He looked as if he didn’t believe her. Or maybe he resented the fact that she’d kept such a large secret from him. Well, if he resented that, he was going to hate the truth.
If he ever heard it.
“We need to do something about the air, and I don’t know how to fix the ship even if I’m the one who broke it.” And there was only one pressure suit. She dug inside a nearby locker and found an emergency canister of air and a mask.
She smiled at Noal before she looked to the cargo containers again. He’d already been wounded, and she suspected that the reason she hadn’t seen any other members of the crew was because they were guarding the bridge. That was going to be a hard fight.
She passed Noal the emergency canister then donned the suit herself. “Look, Noal…”
“I’m not staying here and waiting,” he said, his voice muffled through the mask.
She breathed a laugh. “I’m not going to leave you behind.” The suit was made for cold, low atmosphere environments rather than open space, but it would do aboard the ship. The guards wouldn’t be able to turn off the temperature controls without killing themselves, too. “But it’s going to be dangerous.”
He stayed near the door, watching her with wide eyes.
“And these pistols, they only hurt organic matter, so if you had some kind of shield—”
“You want me to get in the crate, don’t you?” he asked flatly.
“It would be safer.” And better he get in now than she have to stuff his injured body in later. Maybe if he knew more about the stakes. “You’ve already seen that a pistol shot won’t be stopped by clothing, even a pressure suit. The pulse only came near you, and it left a bruise. It can turn a body to liquid. The crate is thick enough to stop it.”
“But…” His mouth worked, and he seemed to despair. “I’m only fit to be cargo?”
She slid a gloved hand along the crate as if debuting it in a showroom. “Once I close the lid, I can fill in the empty spaces with foam. Then you’ll be cushioned and safe—”
“And stuffed in a crate.”
“Just until I take the ship.”
He muttered something about being useless but drifted toward the crate, staring at it. She resisted the urge to stuff him in even as Ama’s voice urged her again to leave him behind. He looked from the crate to her and back again, and she knew he was weighing whether or not to trust her.
“I know that finding out about my skills is a shock,” she said. “But frankly, I’m shocked your family didn’t teach you the same.”
“We’re not duplicitous and underhanded,” he said.
She couldn’t even be offended. It was true for her family and probably for his. He’d realize that someday. “If you’ve got any special skills you’re keeping in reserve, now is the time to tell me.”
He chuckled, but it didn’t have much humor in it. “I’m a pretty good cook.”
“You’ll have to make me something when we get out of here.”
With a grimace, he climbed into the crate. “And apparently I’m good at being cargo.”
Annika engaged her suit’s magboots and steadied him as he climbed inside. Before she closed the lid, he pressed her gloved fingers. “Thank you for helping me.”
She smiled, oddly touched. “You’re welcome. Watch your head.”
She shut the lid of the crate, filled it with the foam so he wouldn’t be jostled around, and disengaged its maglocks. She pushed it into the corridor and then disengaged her boots so she could float after him. Around the bend of a corridor from the airlock, she spotted a pair of lift doors, but when she pressed the panel, it stayed dark, no doubt designed to shut down while the gravity was off.
The lightweight doors slid open when she pulled on them, and she spotted the dark top of the lift car one floor below, blocking that way. There were two more floors above. She drifted upward, pushing the crate to the highest doors and prying them apart. The hallway dead-ended to her left and curved slightly to the right. She pushed ahead, keeping behind the crate. She’d stowed her stiletto and pistol, but when she spotted a contingent of five guards waiting at the other end of the hall, she ducked back, secured the crate against the wall, and drew the pistol.
These guards hovered in front of a large closed door. All wore pressure suits, and she couldn’t tell one from another save that two held shock sticks and one a pistol. The others might be armed, but she hadn’t been able to tell with a single look.
“Leave the crate and come forward,” one called. “We’ll put you back in holding. No one needs to get hurt.”
She begged to differ, but she said nothing. If she poked her head out, the one with the pistol would have a clear line. And she couldn’t get to him fast enough to prevent a shot. She looked to the crate. What was it she’d said to Noal about a shield? It was thick enough to protect them both.
“Hold on, Noal.” She put the pistol away, engaged her boots, and clung to the wall. Bending at the knees, she pointed the crate down the hall. When she shoved forward, disengaging her boots at the last minute, she rocketed toward the opposite wall and then pushed off that, the crate between her and the guards. She heard them cry out, voices echoing weirdly through their speakers. The pistol fired, a hollow whomp sound, but the shot connected harmlessly with the crate.
Annika released the crate as it crashed into the guards. She caught the back of a guard as he floated past, drew her stiletto, and slashed the hose leading from his air tank to his helmet. The hissing release of air spun him down the corridor behind her. She engaged her magboots and put one foot near the closed door. With her other foot, she kicked another guard, sending him crashing into the wall. The crate knocked into the door and floated her way. She grabbed it, using it to batter two other guards. The last was working to get the door open, and she ignored him, letting his panic get her into the place she most wanted to go. She drew her pistol and shot the one she’d kicked. As one of the others went for his own pistol, she shot him, too, but the last drifted behind the crate.
The one on the door opened it and hauled himself inside. She flung the crate after him, pushing him inside faster, arms flailing as he tried to catch hold of nothing. The last guard caught her leg and yanked, drawing himself closer. He wrestled the pistol from her grasp, and she let it go, slipping her stiletto into his heart.
Inside the now open room, someone in a pressure suit rose from a control console. Annika flicked her stiletto, nicking t
he suit and sending its occupant careening across the room. She launched toward the crate and secured it to the floor before engaging her boots and pulling the last guard down to her. Stunned, he barely put up a fight as she jerked his helmet off, kneed him into the wall and rammed an open palm into his chin, bouncing his head off steel. He slumped. Only one left, and that one would provide the answers she needed.
Annika reclaimed her stiletto and drifted to the console. She turned the atmosphere back up as the woman in the pressure suit struggled to get her helmet off. She gasped in the thin air, but she wouldn’t suffocate, not with everything returning back to normal. Annika eyed her for weapons. When she saw none, she opened the lid of the crate so Noal could struggle out.
The woman in the pressure suit engaged her magboots and clung to the wall, bending at the knees so she could watch Annika and Noal warily.
“Are you the one who told us we wouldn’t be harmed?” Annika asked.
The woman swallowed. Her skin was pale, and her curly hair had a bright red sheen. That and golden eyes made her House Flavio. Nocturna used them as occasional allies. But so did other people.
“If I told you the same thing,” Annika said, “would you believe me as much as I believed you?”
“I suppose it wouldn’t matter if I told you this was just a job.” It was the same voice as the one over the speakers, rich and melodious.
“If it was personal, at least I could understand.” Annika walked toward her slowly, magboots clunking. “You’re Flavio Blood.”
Noal gasped, and the Flavio glanced at him but didn’t confirm or deny. “I don’t have any orders to harm you,” she said instead.
“Like the dark you don’t,” Annika said. “If you’re trying to start a war, it’ll be a lot more convincing with dead bodies rather than kidnapped ones. You were waiting for the right moment. So, when is it?”
“Will telling you keep me alive?”
Probably not, but she didn’t want to say so. “I never throw away anything useful.”
The Flavio glanced at the door as if she might bolt. “I don’t know who hired us.”
House of Fate Page 5