Zenith Point (The Sector Fleet, Book 4)

by Nicola Claire

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” López offered. “You know something, but you’re not prepared to admit it.”

  “I don’t know,” I stressed.

  López stepped up to me, reaching forward and touching my shirt. She rubbed the expensive material between her fingers. Then she pushed me abruptly against the chest. Shoved me away from her.

  “Don’t lie,” she snapped. “At least don’t lie to yourself. You know something. You know it. Think.”

  I shook my head, my eyes darting down all the corridors between the towers and praying that the captain would appear. I’d even have settled for Lieutenant Johnson.

  But no one came. Just me and a pissed off Latina woman. Wearing a freaking steak knife on her hip. I was entirely too thankful that she wasn’t on watch and had possession of one of the six plasma guns right then.

  I studied her hard face. Had I at one time thought she could be a friend? How stupid I’d been. How desperate for friendship.

  I shook my head. Well, if this was my lot in life now, I wasn’t going to take the abuse any longer. I’d had enough.

  “Aquila,” I said, my voice hard. López arched her brow. “Aquila!” I shouted when the AI didn’t answer.

  “Now, now, Adriana. Manners.”

  My hands fisted and I glared at the gel wall, even though I knew he couldn’t see me.

  “I have a message for my father,” I said.

  “Oh, goodie. Just when I thought I had transcended the menial existence of communications conduit, I’m reminded again why humans are so useless.”

  I hesitated. López had stilled as well. We shared a look. At that moment, we were in complete agreement. Aquila was crap-your-undies level dangerous. Not that I hadn’t recognised that before. But now? I shuddered. The AI was so removed from what it had been that what it was was frightening.

  Humans are so useless.

  “Your message?” Aquila asked.

  I shook myself, stiffened my spine, and sucked in a fortifying breath of air.

  “Yeah,” I said, “My message. Tell that son of a bitch I know exactly what he did to my mother.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Fuck You!

  Hugo

  I’d heard every word. Leaning against one of the computer towers just out of sight. I’d considered intervening, but I’d had to admit to myself, that López was on to something here. So I’d let the commander do her job without interference from me.

  But I hadn’t expected this.

  I stood up and moved closer. Still out of sight, but close enough to hear any whispered words. Not that Adi was whispering. No. She was on fire.

  “Have you told him?” she demanded.

  “Yes, yes. Your familial dysfunction is astounding.”

  “Does he admit it?” Adi growled. “Does that bastard admit what he did to her? For years he abused her. For fucking years! And no matter what I said to her, no matter what I did, she refused to leave him.”

  Oh, shit.

  “And then when he started on me something snapped.”

  Oh, fucking shit.

  “She found her courage,” Adi said softly as if all the fight had drained out of her. “She found it. I was so proud. We only packed the essentials. We didn’t need all that stuff. All the clothes and the jewels. Mom said if we took the jewellery and tried to sell it, he’d find us. So she raided the housekeeper’s petty cash; five hundred bucks in total. And she told me she’d pick me up as per usual after ballet class. ‘Don’t want to raise an alarm, Adi,’ she said.”

  I leaned back against the closest tower and stared at the gel floor. I didn’t think this story would have a happy ending.

  “I waited and waited for her. So excited to be getting her away from that man. So happy to start an adventure with her. I didn’t care where we went. We couldn’t leave the country; the borders were closed by then. But we planned to head up into the Rockies. To find somewhere off-grid and just live out what was left of our time together. Safe from the monster even though we knew we’d never be safe from the sun.”

  Fuck. I reached up and scrubbed my jaw, placing a hand over my mouth as I contemplated just what sort of courage that would have taken. To know that death from a solar flare was a better option than death by the hands of a person you should have been able to trust.

  “She didn’t come,” Adi was saying. “I waited for four hours. By then it was so late that the busses had stopped running. I caught a taxi home. I had to walk three blocks to find one. I could have called our driver, but I needed to walk. I needed to delay the inevitable. I needed to prepare myself for what was at home. Home,” she said, her voice breaking. “He was home. My mother wasn’t.”

  I waited for Adi to keep going. I wished that I could see her. I debated the wisdom of showing myself and letting her know I’d been eavesdropping. In the end, the silence was too great. I stepped forward and peered around the corner of the last tower.

  Adi’s back was thankfully to me. But López looked up when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked hard. Her face set. But I knew Andrea López by now. I knew this was her face when the world got too much. This was the face she used when crying wasn’t an option. This was the commander she’d become.

  Her eyes met mine, and she shook her head.

  I stayed where I was and looked on. López stepped forward and placed a hand on Adi’s shoulder. My girl looked up into the commander’s eyes and sniffed.

  “What did he do?” Andrea asked.

  “He acted like nothing had happened,” Adi whispered. “I went upstairs and stood outside their bedroom. I wasn’t usually allowed in there. But it wasn’t locked. It was as if he knew I’d want to check. I was more scared in that moment than I have ever been in my life. Including on this vessel. I knew that my life would change if I walked in there. I knew it. But I found the courage anyway.”

  Adi looked back up at López. I had no way to know what was on Adi’s face. But López held the girl’s look with a reassuring one of her own and nodded her head.

  Adi took a deep breath and said, “She wasn’t there. Nothing of hers was there. Her side of the closet was empty. Her side of the dresser and bed had been cleaned out. I checked the ensuite. Nothing of hers was in there. Nothing. I ran through every room in that house and couldn’t find a single thing that was tied to my mother. Her car was gone. Her garden shears were fucking gone. Her photos, her umbrella, the basket she used to pick roses. Gone. All of it gone.

  “I walked back into the sitting room where my father had been reading the newsfeeds. He didn’t look up but said, ‘We won’t speak of this ever again.’ I remember staring at him. I remember thinking to myself, do something. Say something. Anything. My father looked at me then. As if he could read my mind. His eyes were so cold. So dead. Not my father. Not even the monster. I shouted, ‘Where is she? What have you done?’ He smiled. I had never seen that smile on his face, not even when he was…when he was doing those things. I never wanted to see that smile again.”

  López squeezed Adi’s shoulder. Then stepped closer and wrapped an arm around her back. Her hand brushed up and down Adi’s arm, slowly. Adi trembled where she stood, leaning into the other woman for support.

  “What happened, Adi?” the commander asked. “Where was your mother?”

  “Dead,” Adi whispered. “She was found in a park near my ballet school. Her car had been stolen. Carjacking, they said. Assault gone wrong. They wouldn’t let me look at her body. They said it was too disfigured. The cops came to the house. My dad acted like he was upset. I wanted to tell them. I wanted to show them. ‘See? All her things are gone. See what he’s done!’ But my father just looked at me and then walked over and wrapped me in his arms as if he was trying to soothe me. I pushed. I shoved. I tried to get away. Just as the doctor injected the sedative into my vein, my father whispered in my ear, ‘We won’t speak of this ever again.’ The cops left, thinking we needed to grieve. The sedative worked.
And when I woke up Ratbag was there. ‘A gift,’ my father said. I didn’t want him, but Ratbag was so tiny, and he needed love.”

  No, I thought. Adi was the one who needed the love. And her father trapped her with it.

  “I didn’t mean to fall for him. But he was tiny, and he licked my face. Licked away the tears. By the time I realised what had happened and had started making plans again to run away, my father informed me that Ratbag had been microchipped. ‘Nanobots in his blood,’ he said. I couldn’t cut them out. Not like a normal chip. And they were traceable.”

  She looked down at her feet. Probably expecting to see the dog right there, but I’d instructed Johnson to hold it while Adi was being sick. I thought I’d been doing the right thing. Keeping the dog out of the firing line. I kinda wished I’d let the little rascal near. Adi looked like she could use a lick to the face about now.

  “Adi,” López said. “I’m sorry.”

  Adi nodded her head as if she’d heard it all before. And she probably had. How many people had said they were sorry her mother had been killed so brutally? How many people had said it to her father right before her eyes?

  “Afterwards,” Adi said, surprising me that there was more. I’d thought she’d talked herself out. I’d thought the worst of it was over.

  I’d thought wrong.

  “Afterwards,” she said again, “he changed. He was a different monster. He didn’t use his fists. He used his head. Sly. Cunning. Deadly. I couldn’t outthink him. I couldn’t outrun him. A boy I liked disappeared. A friend I’d had since kindergarten moved away without saying goodbye. A teacher who showed concern for my…change in behaviour was fired. The housekeeper stopped talking to me. The gardener always turned away when I paced the lawn. More and more people left my life, but I had Ratbag. I always had Ratbag.”

  Dependence, I thought. He shrunk her world so that all she had left was her pet.

  “He gave me a security detail,” she whispered. “‘For your protection.’ Everyone thought it was a good idea. They didn’t talk to me. But they were always there. In the house. In the garden. At school. At ballet lessons. Always there. They made my classmates uncomfortable. The only time I was free of them was when I was in my bedroom with Ratbag. I stayed in my bedroom a lot for the next few years.”

  Shit. That was it. I was officially Team Adi. I shook my head, annoyed at myself and at the situation and most importantly with Nathan Fucking Price.

  I stepped out of the shadows and approached the two woman slowly. López shifted, alerting Adi to my presence. Adi looked up and stared at me. Eyes moist with tears, heart on her sleeve, a fey look to her features that called to me.

  “Adi,” I said. So much emotion in that one word.

  Then Aquila, the fucking inconsiderate prick, said, “Well, I think we’ve made tremendous progress. Next time, why don’t we discuss how this adolescent crisis is to blame for your inability to be anything but a wet rag.”

  And Adi, sweet, broken, courageous Adi snapped back.

  “Fuck you, Aquila,” she said.

  López let out a snort of surprise and shared a grin with me.

  “Yeah,” I said loudly. “Fuck you, Aquila!”

  “Fuck you!” López shouted a second later.

  “FUCK YOU!” We all yelled making several officers come running.

  Johnson stared at us as if we were mad. Maybe we were. I knew I was. Because the moment Adi let out a cathartic laugh and then followed it up with another, I was sold. I was gone. I was a wreck.

  I knew I’d do anything to make this woman laugh like that again.

  No, I thought. I’d make her laugh in a way that didn’t involve telling a batshit crazy artificial intelligence to go do something technologically and anatomically impossible. I’d make her laugh at something innocent.

  Because Adriana Price deserved to laugh at the good things in life and not the bad.

  She deserved a little innocence.

  Twenty-Nine

  No Matter What, We Were In This Together

  Adi

  The Habitat Three central hub was busier than I’d expected, but then my father had lifted curfew. It was cause for celebration. He was playing them, of course. There’d been no more attacks from Corvus, which was either a good thing or a bad thing, but I couldn’t decide which. And so he’d lured the civilian population into a false sense of security.

  “In reward for your good behaviour,” Aquila said through the habitat’s speakers, “each passenger has been given an allowance. Spend it wisely.”

  “He’s buying them off,” Hugo said from my side.

  I’d started calling him Hugo in my mind. He hadn’t invited it. But Aquila called him Hugo and I wasn’t going to let the tin can have more of an edge than me. It was petty. But it made me smile. And after my debacle of a confession the other day, I needed something to cling to. Everyone had looked at me as if I was a wounded animal for the rest of that day and part way through the next.

  And then I’d made them all dinner and put so much spice in it that they’d had tears streaming down their faces and sat there laughing my ass off at their tortured expressions.

  They’d stopped pussyfooting around me after that and had been trying to find ways to pay me back since.

  I wasn’t one of them, of course. And Hugo had kept his distance, which, I’ll admit, had hurt at first. But then after several unsuccessful forays into the ship with my wrist comm, having left me behind for my ‘own protection,’ I’d suggested we try my friend down in the pay-for-passages.

  Mandy’s stall still hadn’t been rebuilt in Habitat Two. That was a concession my father had not given. I wondered if she’d received the ‘allowance’ or not. We were about to find out. None of the officers knew any of the civilians well enough to approach them. Any one of them could have ratted us out.

  But not Mandy. I thought Mandy was better than that.

  I scanned the central hub, unable to find her. Not for the first time, I missed how easy it was to locate someone through Old Aquila. You just asked, and he told you where they were. I’d avoided the mayor many a time doing that.

  But Rogue Aquila was another matter.

  I missed my friend.

  “Can you see her?” Hugo asked.

  I shook my head.

  “If she’s not here and not in her quarters, where would she be?” he pressed.

  “Observation deck,” I offered.

  Hugo nodded his head at Johnson and Armstrong. The latter having made a full recovery. And then we headed back down the emergency tunnel.

  They’d started to learn their way around. Each floor had a similar floor plan, especially down here in the habitats. It was the one edge that I’d had that had enabled me to accompany them on earlier trips into the tunnels. I didn’t exactly regret handing my wrist comm over to Hugo, but sometimes I thought holding on to it had given me more power. I had liked that power, I had to admit.

  But something else had happened since that breakdown with Commander López. I’d noticed a different kind of power I now had. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Or even if I liked it. But the moment Hugo would return from a scouting trip he’d search for me. First thing in the morning there’d be a cup of coffee beside my bed. Throughout the day, he’d seek me out just to chat.

  Nothing heavy. Nothing important. Just a question about the tunnels. Or a joke about one of his officers. And if I disappeared into the towers, he’d come looking for me. He even made a point of giving Ratbag scratches behind the ear.

  He’d won my dog over and, I thought, he was winning me over as well.

  We made our way through the Deck H tunnels, out toward the bow of the ship and the observation deck. It had been days since I’d looked at the stars. I wasn’t sure if reminding myself what little was out there would improve matters. But if we could find Mandy, it was worth the blackness that surrounded.

  Hugo stopped near the hatch and waited for me to approach. He kept the wrist with the comm on it back, so
he could look through the grille without activating the gel. So far, Aquila hadn’t been able to crack that. We were safe in the tunnels, having not run into any of my father’s men. And no one had stormed the core room.

  Whatever Old Aquila had done was still holding.

  “Is she there?” Hugo asked.

  I peered through the grille. There were quite a few people on the deck. Most of them near the large windows. I narrowed my eyes, trying to pick my friend out of the crowd. It was useless. We needed to be in there.

  I shook my head. “I can’t tell,” I offered.

  Hugo frowned. Then looked at Johnson and Armstrong. “We backtrack to an isolated corridor and take our chances with the crowd.”

  “Yes, sir,” they both said.

  He looked down at me then. I arched a brow back at him. He could hardly insist I stay safe and sound in the tunnel if we had any chance of not frightening Mandy. We’d raided some civilian quarters, and now all wore new clothes. The lack of Anderson Universal uniform would go a long way in letting them blend in, and the fact that we’d all managed to grab toothpaste, combs and shower gel.

  My hair still looked bedraggled, even though López had offered to tidy it up. I’d declined. I liked my hair. It was something my father would have had kittens over.

  But despite us all looking the part, Hugo and his men weren’t civilians. I was. I walked like one. I talked like one. The pay-for-passages wouldn’t look twice at me. And, more importantly, Mandy wouldn’t run.

  I followed the guys back to a maintenance corridor and hopped out through the hatch when Hugo opened it. No one stayed in the tunnels. If we didn’t return to the computer core, there was nothing López and the others could do about it. They couldn’t get out, and without the wrist comm, anyone left on guard in the tunnel couldn’t get back in. But López knew to be prepared for anything.

  If my father got hold of the wrist comm, then…well, then it was all over.