Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  “Still in the lab.” I strode to my console and silenced the blaring alarms, leaving only the visual readouts.

  I looked pointedly at Fiona again. “And they don’t matter if you’re not gearing up an escape pod right now.”

  She opened her mouth to argue but then shut it. I’d announced that it was a pod or death, and my crew knew I always meant what I said. The two were likely synonymous anyway.

  “I won’t let the military take back the serum. They’ve been working on that enhancer since I was a kid, and if we stole their secret lab and their only batch, there’s a good chance it’ll take them years to create it again.” And if my freakish blood really was the base ingredient, and they’d used their entire supply to produce those thousands of fake cure-alls, which my gut feeling told me they had, then they were about to be shit out of luck.

  Fiona’s brow furrowed. “How do you know they’ve been working on that serum since you were a kid?”

  Ignoring her question, I informed them of my decision. “I’m taking the Endeavor and the false vaccines into the Black Widow. If you don’t want to come with me, you need to get out right now.”

  The crew all looked at me with little surprise. In addition to categorically needing to keep the enhancer out of the Overseer’s hands, we were out of time, and we’d run out of chances to get away. Capital punishment or, if someone was feeling very generous, life in jail were our only future options. It was really a no-brainer, at least for me.

  The ship groaned again, and my console flashed to indicate a breach at the starboard door. Dark Watch goons were inside the air lock. They still had to break through the safety entrance, but that door was nothing compared to the outer wall.

  Bridgebane’s voice barked over the com. “I’m taking the Overseer’s lab back, and you’re all going to be court-martialed in Sector 12.”

  “Tell him who you are, Tess,” Jax whispered, the scar on his cheek whitening from the tension in his jaw. “It’ll stop him. Your father…”

  I laughed. It burst out of me, awful. Then I squared my shoulders and told my best friend and first mate the one thing he still didn’t know about me.

  “My father handed me over to Bridgebane when I was eight years old, and only three days after my mother died, with strict orders to keep me in an air lock on Dark Watch 12 until the ship was out of my home Sector and then float me into space.”

  Jax’s jaw dropped. Miko gasped. Shiori stayed silent.

  “Who the hell is your asshole father?” Fiona asked.

  I glanced at Big Guy, who was staring at me. I didn’t mind that he was here for the truth, but maybe that was because I wouldn’t have to worry about it for long.

  “Bridgebane is the one who took me to Starway 8, but he said if he ever saw me again, he’d do what my father first asked.”

  Jax cursed. “So Bridgebane is the good guy in all this?”

  “Bridgebane is a bastard. And my name will only get us all killed faster than we’re already going to get killed anyway.”

  “Who the hell is your asshole father?” Fiona practically snarled.

  I wanted to snarl back what had always been in my heart. That man has never been my father!

  “Who the hell are you?” Fiona demanded.

  My pulse pounded so hard I heard it in my ears. Tess Bailey was about to die along with the rest of us. “I’m Quintessa Novalight.”

  My friend stumbled back against Jax’s broad chest. That was the power of a name.

  The blood visibly drained from Fiona’s face. “As in Galactic Overseer Novalight’s dead daughter?” she choked out.

  Clearly, not so dead after all. Yet.

  Nodding, I owned up to the name I hadn’t used in years and to the family I wished I didn’t have. “Daddy is the evil overlord of the galaxy, and Bridgebane is my uncle.”

  Everyone stared in shock, even Jax, who already knew who I was.

  “So… No one’s leaving?” I eventually asked, not surprised, but not happy, either.

  No one spoke. The Endeavor rattled like a sick metallic animal and then groaned again hard.

  “We’re as dead out there as we are in here,” Miko finally answered. No one contradicted her, so I figured she spoke for them all.

  “Big Guy?” I asked, turning to the bearded man.

  He just shook his head.

  Fine. His choice, although I had no idea why. Maybe he was as wanted by the Dark Watch as we were.

  “Power up, Jax, and get ready to punch it. Miko, set us ninety degrees to the left.” Portside was nothing but the Black Widow. Devoid of all light, the huge, empty circle interrupting the stars looked like a bottomless pit and gave new meaning to the oft-used expression “endless Dark.”

  I turned away from the window, my stomach knotting. I feared the unknown as much as anyone else.

  Focusing on my friends again didn’t help. I had zero expectations for an afterlife. I’d never see them again. This was it.

  I cleared the lump from my throat. “Strap in. Don’t strap in. It doesn’t really matter at this point,” I said.

  We’d never been much for emotional speeches, so I didn’t give one. Shiori unbuckled herself from the captain’s chair, got up, and felt her way to Miko. The two women stood side by side near the navigation controls, holding hands. Fiona and Jax stayed close together. I was alone. Except for Big Guy. He stayed pretty close.

  My gaze returned to the black hole, as if drawn by its massive gravitational force. Twenty-six years, and it hadn’t been a bad life, even if a lot of it hadn’t been fun. I’d wreaked more havoc on the galactic government than most rebels could manage in five lifetimes. With the help of my crew, I’d kept the Outer Zone colonies from true starvation for years. And everything else I ever had, I gave to the kids on Starway 8. I didn’t regret a thing.

  And I was a Novalight. I wouldn’t go out like a sigh in the Dark. I’d go out like a fucking bomb.

  I reached for the external com and opened the line to Bridgebane. “Your boarding crew has thirty seconds to detach. After that, I’m taking the Endeavor and your vaccines into the Black Widow. Everyone on this ship would rather die than see that serum back in the hands of the Galactic Overseer.” I lifted my finger but then pressed firmly down on the button again. “By the way, this is Quintessa, and you can tell my tyrant father that I hate his fucking guts.”

  I pulled my hand off the com. The line went dead, then blinked red again.

  “Quin?” Bridgebane said.

  I counted down in my head. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…

  “Let’s talk, Quin,” my uncle said. “Give me the lab, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…

  “I saved you, Quin. You owe me.”

  Five, four, three, two…

  I turned to Jax, seeing the Black Widow looming through the wall of windows behind him. I felt a lurch and hoped it was the boarding cruiser beating a retreat.

  “Quin!” Bridgebane yelled over the com.

  A second later, the Dark Watch frigate fired on us. The resulting jolt nearly knocked me off my feet. Silent alarms flared all over my controls—pressurization compromised in three zones. Another blast like that, and they could disable us enough to hold us in place.

  I gripped my console to steady myself. The Endeavor was a good ship. It was too bad I had to take her out.

  Each beat of my heart felt like an explosion inside my chest.

  Some ends are just a new beginning…

  My mother’s words to me, when she’d gotten so sick. Too sick for anyone to save her.

  The Black Widow stretched before us, ready to snare us in her web. Nothing escaped a black hole. Not light. Not matter. Maybe not even a soul.

  Slowly, I exhaled. Some ends were just the end.

  “Hit it, Jaxon.” I nodded cr
isply to my first mate.

  Jax looked at me one last time. Our eyes met, and seven years of shared history struck me in a bittersweet rush. Then he grabbed Fiona around the waist and threw the hyperdrive switch with a cosmic roar.

  I inhaled sharply. Everything blurred. My bones crunched, and my chest folded in on the thousands of things I’d still wanted to do as the Endeavor shot toward the event horizon—and the end of us all.

  Chapter 3

  The darkness felt crushing, but there wasn’t a single thing that actually changed. I was no science freak, but as far as I knew, we should have been compressed into nothing by now—the ship, the crew. Everything.

  “Hold on,” Big Guy rumbled next to me. He snaked a powerful arm around my waist.

  Who am I to argue? I wrapped my free arm around him and tightened my grip on my vibrating console.

  The damaged ship rattled around us, noisy and frightening, but I had faith in her. The Endeavor would hold tight until something happened. Because something was bound to happen, right? You didn’t fly into a black hole and then just…nothing.

  Boom! Tiny pinpricks of light streaked past us. I did a double take. Stars?

  What was happening? It looked and felt exactly like flying through hyperspace.

  Holy shit! We hadn’t set a destination. We could race straight into a moon, a planet, an asteroid belt. A fucking star!

  “Jax!” I screamed.

  Jax bellowed something incoherent and took us out of warp speed without the usual slowdown, which was already jarring enough. My feet flew out from under me, but Big Guy stayed upright and kept me upright, too. I lost my hold on my console and swung in his grip, my upper body smacking against his chest while everyone else fell down like dolls with floppy legs.

  I got my feet back under me faster than a shooting star when my console started flashing out emergency warnings. Damaged circuits—bridge sector. Living quarters—oxygen at 57% and falling. Starboard door—open.

  I hastily typed out the command that would close the safety hatch to the lower deck and cut off the bedrooms from the rest of the ship. They would lose their air, but we wouldn’t. The outer starboard door probably had a hole the size of Bridgebane in it, but the rest of the air lock was still intact. We could fly like this, as long as the engines didn’t conk out.

  “We’re not dead!” Jax leaped off the floor, whooping like a maniac and pumping his fists in the air. “We’re not fucking dead!”

  We all took a second to absorb that. It was unbelievable. Shock and amazement left my limbs trembling and weak. At the same time, it felt as though someone had just slammed a shot of adrenaline straight into my heart. Numbness gave way to a burst of life, and we laughed and screamed together, jumping up and down. We were completely hysterical.

  Except for Shiori, who sat up facing the wall. And Big Guy. Nothing seemed to surprise him at all.

  His lack of a reaction calmed mine, and I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. My smile shrank. The Black Widow hadn’t eaten us, but that didn’t mean we were safe.

  No one had reached out to us yet, but I used radio waves to verify that we were alone. Nothing came back to me, and the monitors weren’t picking up anything unusual other than low levels of blackbody radiation.

  “I’m seeing Hawking radiation behind us. It looks like a small black hole,” I said. Had we come through that? Was it like using a front and back door?

  I craned my neck to look around us, but the views outside the window panels seemed perfectly normal. No rip through space, no bright tear, no vast nebular cloud. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and my best guess as to how we’d gotten here was something I could barely wrap my mind around.

  Whatever luck had come our way, though—I would take it.

  Relief breathed new life into my lungs, driving out some of the remaining fear and tightness. “The Dark Watch didn’t follow.” We’d stolen the serum, we weren’t dead, and the fact that no one knew where we were anymore was the sweetest frosting on this whole messed-up cake.

  “We just went through a black hole,” Fiona said, disbelief still heavy in her voice. “And lived.”

  Jax gave her a rare, big smile, one that actually stretched his face. “And left those goons in the dust.”

  “Maybe the Black Widow is only masquerading as a black hole.” Excitement glimmered in Fiona’s expression. “Maybe it’s using similar properties to camouflage something else.”

  “Wormhole?” I suggested, voicing my unlikely thought.

  “Yes!” Fiona’s eyes widened. “A shortcut with two mouths.”

  If that were true, how had no one figured it out? “But there have been experiments. Probes. They never reappeared anywhere else.”

  “Maybe it had something to do with going in at warp speed?” Jax offered.

  I shrugged. “Could be.” That was as plausible as anything else.

  Everything about this was fascinating and mysterious, but right now, figuring out our new location in the galaxy was more important.

  “Where are we?” I asked. We needed to land in a place where we could repair the Endeavor and get new numbers up on her. Then we’d be anonymous again, just one more lonely cargo ship making its way through the Dark.

  “From what I’m seeing, it looks like Sector 2.” Miko grabbed the old and yellowed manual to double-check the coordinates that were popping up in rows of green numbers across her controls. “Yes, definitely somewhere in 2.”

  Shiori finally turned and groped for Miko’s unoccupied chair beside the navigation console. A thin line of blood trailed down the center of her forehead and curved along the side of her nose.

  Damn it. She must have hit something when she’d fallen. She was conscious, though, and looked calm, which was more than I could say for myself.

  Miko reached out to steady her grandmother and helped Shiori into the navigator’s chair. Shiori wiped the blood away when it dripped to her chin, leaving a smear of red across the back of her hand.

  Miko shot her grandmother worried glances while still dealing with our most pressing issue—locking down our exact location in the vastness of Sector 2.

  I tore my eyes away from them.

  “Fiona, can you do the honors?” I pulled the first aid kit out from under my console and handed it to our resident scientist. I could fix Shiori up myself, but Fiona could do it better.

  Using sterile compresses and saline solution, Fiona started cleaning Shiori’s cut and wiping the blood off her face, all the while telling the blind woman what she was doing in a quiet voice. Shiori was really a grandmother to us all, and Fiona treated her with a gentleness she showed to no one else.

  While she worked, I turned my mind back to our new location, a good half a galaxy away from where we’d just been, give or take a few solar systems. Sector 2 wasn’t beaten and battered like the Outer Zones, but it wasn’t exactly a thriving hub of civilization, either. I’d only been here twice before and had never lingered. I didn’t know the Sector well, and I was still a little bowled over by recent events. Ideas weren’t coming to me clearly. A big part of me was still stuck on the fact that we weren’t dead. We were possibly the only living beings to know that the Black Widow did not, in fact, kill you. It spat you out in Sector 2.

  The hypothetical wormhole had just gotten real. I was pretty sure we should keep that to ourselves. Having a handy escape route only we knew about was like winning the galactic lottery or raking in all the chips from the biggest game of poker ever played. This could be our future ace in the hole.

  I glanced out the windows, still uneasy for several reasons. A random Sector was fine. Leaving Dark Watch 12 and Captain Bridgebane behind was more than fine, but it was too bad we didn’t have enough power left to get us back to a place we really knew.

  “What’s in Sector 2?” I asked, hoping someone else’s brain was already up and running
better than mine. “We need a place that can sustain life and has a bright enough sun to recharge the Endeavor.” Unfortunately, there weren’t that many. Asking for a sunny, habitable planet was a tall order.

  “Flyhole,” Jaxon suggested.

  “Full of criminals,” Shiori declared from behind Fiona’s ministrations.

  Well, technically speaking, so was the Endeavor, but no one mentioned that.

  And Flyhole wasn’t a planet. It was a spacedock orbiting a barren moon. It had decent sunlight, though, and would have what we needed for repairs, just not at an acceptable price. Also, the Endeavor was as likely to be stripped by space rovers as restored to working order.

  Fiona deftly patted down the sides of the sterile tape she’d used to seal Shiori’s cut, her steady hands those of someone who’d patched up plenty of people.

  “Good as new,” Fiona said.

  Shiori murmured her thanks.

  “What about Nickleback?” Fiona asked, straightening as she tossed the bloody compresses into the trash.

  Nickleback. Nickleback. What do I know about Nickleback?

  Oh, right. “Isn’t that the place with the giant carnivorous spiders?” Another one of the Overseer’s science experiments. The modified arachnids had been supposed to help aggressively control the growing pest population on one of the galaxy’s more productive crop planets. If I remembered correctly, it had worked for about a dozen years. Then the spiders had begun to breed into something bigger, scarier. Now natural selection was at work, and the humans on that planet weren’t coming out on top.

  “Oh, yeah.” Fiona grimaced. “Forget Nickleback.”

  A bright electrical snap from my console sent me jumping back so fast I slammed into Big Guy’s solid frame. My controls went utterly black for the first time ever. Every whir, bump, and groan that was the constant music under my fingertips went silent, and my throat tightened so abruptly it closed.

  Holding my breath, I looked over at Jaxon’s control panel. It was still functioning, thank the Sky Mother.

  I exhaled slowly. I needed to get the Endeavor docked and resting fast, or she was going to die on us. And if she died, we all died, too. There wasn’t enough light from the distant stars to impact our solar panels, and the ship’s energy core would eventually drain completely. We’d end up floating. The air-renewal apparatus would shut down along with all the other systems. Without any power, we’d suffocate. I’d seen ghost ships like that, and I’d rather blow up than have a gradual, helpless death be my fate.