Linked

by Imogen Howson

  “Lin.” Elissa managed to crawl across to where her sister lay. Pain shrieked through her shoulder.

  Markus was behind her. “Get her up to the bridge. Get her into a harness.”

  They managed to do it, one on each side of Lin, who slumped, almost unconscious in their hands as they brought her across the shuddering floor, up the steps. She started to come to as they reached the bridge, and Elissa strapped Lin and herself into the side seats with fingers that shook on the buckles, her brain blanking out as if it couldn’t hold the knowledge of how to fasten them.

  We were so close. We were nearly there. And now, with the hyperdrive going wrong . . .

  Warning lights flashed, and the beep, beep, beep of an alarm. “Shields at seventy-five percent,” came an uninflected, mechanical voice.

  Cadan swore, arms braced against the console as he fought to get control of the ship. “Markus, check that for me. They can’t be taking our shields down that fast. What the hell kind of tech have they got—”

  He broke off as suddenly as if someone had struck him across the throat. One of the ships had just swooped up into the view on a screen, and the logo on the side was plain to read. SPACE FLIGHT INITIATIVE. They were SFI ships.

  Elissa’s stomach dropped so fast, it was as if she were falling. Falling out of control, losing hold of everything she’d fought for, seeing it slip out of her hands and spiral away like dust.

  “No freaking way,” said Markus from Cadan’s far side, his voice so shocked, it sounded flat.

  Cadan’s face had gone bone white. “Elissa, I apologize,” he said.

  Another blast. “Shields at seventy percent . . . Shields at sixty-eight percent . . .”

  Cadan’s hands flashed over the controls. Elissa knew he couldn’t return fire, not while the Phoenix was wallowing as the power of the blast fought with her stability drives, and not while the shields were dropping so fast. But he was busy taking power from every nonessential function on the ship, shutting everything down he could, throwing everything he had into getting them shielded again.

  He moved his hand to unlock the hyperdrive. He wouldn’t dare use that yet, not with the Phoenix as heavily under fire as she was, but the minute he could, the minute he could fire back, distract them for long enough . . . He could get them out of this. He could save them the way he had before—

  Even as she had the thought, the ship rocked with another blast. Were the SFI ships actually planning on destroying the Phoenix and all her crew? Had they decided she and Lin were too much of a risk to allow them to live?

  Or were they just trying to intimidate them? Were they planning on pounding the ship half to pieces, sure that, before Cadan and his crew were anywhere near in danger, he’d have to give in?

  And he will have to. He can’t sacrifice everyone just to save us.

  Oh God. She’d never thought it would come to this.

  Cadan swore again, viciously, and put his hand up to the com-channel. Elissa’s throat closed. He was opening dialogue with them. But to do what? He won’t give us up. I know he won’t. Not Cadan.

  “Phoenix,” Cadan said, his voice coming out like a snarl. “What the hell do you think you’re doing to one of your own damn ships?”

  Silence. A long silence that crawled out forever. Elissa kept expecting a voice to come through, an official-sounding voice demanding that Cadan release her and Lin. But after an endless minute, punctuated only by the sound of the blasts against the ship’s sides, by the automatic warning voice—“shields at sixty-five percent . . . sixty-three percent . . . sixty”—she realized that no response was coming.

  The SFI ships didn’t want to communicate. They didn’t want to bargain. They were beyond stealth now, beyond discreet damage control. They just wanted to wipe them out.

  She saw the realization hit Cadan, saw his face go stiff. He switched off the com-channel. “Okay,” he said through his teeth, throwing open all the viewscreens he could. “Hang tight. The second I get a chance, we’re going into hyperdrive.”

  A million buts exploded across Elissa’s thoughts. But we’ll get hit. But it’s faulty. But it could tear the ship apart. She knew, though, that none of those things mattered. If the Phoenix didn’t get out of here, within minutes her shields would be down at zero, and it would all be over.

  Next to her Lin gave a sound like a bitten-down sob. Elissa reached out and took hold of her twin’s cold hand. “I don’t regret it,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure it was true, even though terror broke through her like a wave. “I don’t regret it. I don’t care.”

  Lin said nothing. Her hand was shaking, and her nails dug into Elissa’s skin.

  The hyperdrive whine began, powering up to maximum, Cadan’s hand on the controls, his head whipping back and forth to check every screen he had open. “Now,” he said, as if he had to command himself to do it, the way he’d have snapped out a command to his copilot or his crew, and threw the ship into hyperspeed.

  The whine became a shriek, the power kicked up to full, and the ship made the hop—

  Except it didn’t.

  The shriek of the hyperdrive cut out so suddenly, it was like going deaf. The ship gave a horrible shudder as if she would shake herself apart. And the lights on the hyperdrive display went dead.

  No. Oh no, not now.

  The hyperdrive, the thing that was going to hop them out of range of the attacking ships, that was going to take them to safety, that was irreplaceable unless you could get to SFI headquarters . . . it wasn’t just faulty. It had stopped working.

  Another explosion rocked the ship.

  “We have to get into the hyperdrive,” said Cadan. “Lin, tell me you’re up to opening the door.”

  Lin raised her head. There was a nasty purpling lump on the side of her forehead, and her eyes were huge and black in her white face. “I’m up.”

  “Okay, then. I’m going to reroute everything to get our shields and stability up to full. I can buy us some time. If we can get the hyperdrive working for another hop . . .”

  It still won’t be enough. One hop won’t do it. They’ll come straight after us. There was no point in saying it. It was a feeble hope, but it was their only one.

  Cadan snapped a warning through the internal com-system, received confirmation from Ivan and Felicia that they’d moved into the core sections of the ship, then began to shut sectors down. Elissa watched on one of the screens as, on the plan of the ship, section after section showed outlined in amber, then red, then went dark. Cadan was pulling everything—oxygen, heating, electricity—from those sectors, concentrating energy on the essential core of the ship. On the plan, dotted lines became solid as door after door clamped shut, sealing themselves so tightly, it was as if they were forming a ship within a ship.

  The shields began to climb. Sixty-six percent, seventy, seventy-two . . . The stability drive climbed too, and although Elissa could still hear the blasts hitting the ship, the floor didn’t heave with each impact.

  “Shields at ninety-five percent,” came the computer’s bland announcement.

  “It’s as good as it’s going to get,” said Cadan. He snapped to his feet, adjusting his earpiece. “Markus, you stay here. Okay, Lin.”

  Having seen what Lin had done with the ship’s repairs, Elissa hadn’t expected her to have any difficulty easing a door open. But within minutes Lin was shaking all over, her teeth clamped into her lower lip, her breath coming so heavily, it sounded as if it must hurt her chest. And the door hadn’t so much as trembled.

  “It’s not just locked,” she said on a gasp. “It’s sealed all around. And there’s a force field.”

  She went heavily down on one knee, then on both. Then she reached out a hand. “Lissa, I’m sorry, I can’t do it by myself.”

  Oh, of course. Feeling stupid that she hadn’t thought of it herself, Elissa gripped her sister’s hand. And once again there was a moment of blindness, of disorientation, before she was looking at the door through Lin’s eyes,
though a blur of fatigue, fury, and determination. And the door . . . it felt like trying to push over a skyscraper, like trying to get your fingernails under the massive buttresses at the end of a bridge.

  She—they—gritted her teeth, focused everything on the part of herself that was trying to push the door open. It hurt. It was too hard. They couldn’t—

  The door gave. Just a tiny bit, a millimeter of a crack appearing at one edge.

  “That’ll do,” said Cadan. “You can stop—”

  But at that point something else gave, something that snapped like a rubber band. The force field. And as Elissa jerked back into her own consciousness, gasping for breath, Cadan stepped past her and Lin, took hold of the edge of the door with both hands, and, muscles straining, dragged it free of the remains of the seal that held it, and away from the doorway.

  From within the chamber came a faint, pulsing glow. Hope leapt inside Elissa, flaring through her exhaustion. If the energy cell that powered the hyperdrive wasn’t entirely dead, then there must be a chance of getting the drive functioning again.

  Cadan strode forward into the shadowy chamber, Elissa and Lin close behind him.

  The energy cell was the first thing Elissa noticed. It lay, a pale, glowing cylinder the length of her arm, strapped into a padded hollow in the floor.

  Wires ran through it, ghostly blue, giving it the look of a jellyfish squished into a glass container. At each end the wires collected into a single cable, glossy silver, no thicker than her wrist. One cable extended just a little way outside the cylinder, making an S-shape across the floor and connecting to a slim black box.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “The hyperdrive,” said Cadan. “Yes. I know that much.” He bent, picked it up in one hand, and turned it over. A tiny unlit bulb caught an edge of pale light from the glow of the energy cell and glinted suddenly as if his touch had turned it back on. “Okay, the power’s dead. But I can’t see any sign the drive is broken.” He gave a breath of laughter. “If it’s as simple as a loose connection . . .”

  Elissa had stopped listening. While Cadan inspected the hyperdrive itself, Lin had gone forward, past the energy cell, following the other cable. It snaked away into the shadows at the far end of the chamber. As Elissa’s eyes became accustomed to the dim light, she realized Lin had come to an abrupt halt, looking down at where the cable had led her.

  “Lin?”

  Lin didn’t answer. And suddenly something stabbed through Elissa, a shock of emotion so intense, so sharp-edged that it came like a physical pain. Sweat broke out over every inch of her skin.

  “Lin?”

  “Lissa?” said Cadan sharply. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  But now Elissa couldn’t answer either. Horror had overtaken her, a creeping horror that raised every hair on her body, prickled all the way up the back of her scalp. Lin stood by a second, much larger cylinder, sunk so low in the floor she could only see its uppermost curve. It reflected the scant light in the room, making it opaque, impossible to see what was inside.

  Elissa didn’t want to see inside. She didn’t want to know what else was in the room that should only contain the hyperdrive and the energy cell it ran from. The room that had been locked and sealed by SFI themselves. The room they hadn’t been supposed to enter.

  She had to make herself walk forward, only peripherally aware that Cadan followed her. She got to Lin’s side and looked down.

  This cylinder was dark. Almost too dark to see what it contained.

  But not quite. There were wires, distorted by the curve of the glass and the colorless fluid within, and a fine network of tubes—a self-contained life-support unit. And what the cylinder held was—

  Behind her Cadan made a choked, horrified sound.

  The cylinder held a person. A young man, maybe a couple of years older than Elissa and Lin. He floated in the colorless liquid: naked, motionless, pale. The wires and tubes ran in and out of his body, an obscene network.

  And he was dead.

  “What the—” Cadan’s breath went in a harsh gasp. “What the hell is that?”

  The cable from the energy cell entered the cylinder by the young man’s head, ran a short length through the liquid inside, then attached to the corpse in a neat plug that exactly fitted the socket at the base of his skull.

  This was where the hyperdrive’s power came from. It wasn’t from an energy cell. It was from a Spare. The hyperdrive’s power, the SFI’s top secret superfuel they’d been using for the past thirty years—it came from Spares.

  ELISSA BECAME aware that she had both hands held out in front of her, as if to push the sight away, as if to make it not real, not true, not there. She’d known they were doing something awful to Lin, to the others, but she’d never imagined something like this. Never imagined they were shutting them away in the dark, trapped and drowning, every moment waiting for the pain that would tear through them when the ship went into hyperspeed.

  A memory pierced her. “You said others—other Spares—were taken away. It was this. It was for this.”

  Lin’s face turned to her, as pale as that of the dead Spare. In the dim room, her eyes were black hollows. Her jaw was slack with shock.

  “No,” said Cadan. “No. It can’t be. This can’t be what they—” He broke off. “Oh, God in heaven, hyperdrives last five to seven years.”

  For a moment Elissa didn’t pick up on what he meant. Then it hit her, a huge fist clenching in her stomach. “Seven years? That’s how long he’s been there?”

  “No. Not this one. The Phoenix is only two years old. This one—something’s been malfunctioning all along. He must—” Cadan choked again. “Ah, God, what have I been doing to him?”

  “Two years.” Elissa found her head turning back toward where the Spare floated, limp and helpless. Out there, in all the other spaceships, other Spares were floating in the same way, kept alive by tubes, kept— Oh God, were they conscious the whole time?

  As she looked, unable to turn away, other details revealed themselves, details she didn’t want, things she didn’t want to know could happen anywhere, ever.

  Blood floated in the fluid near the dead Spare’s lips, transparent ribbons of pale scarlet, and the lower lip showed dark bruises, vivid against the bluish color of death. He’d bitten himself.

  The Spare’s hair was longish, trailing like seaweed around his head. Except at the back, around the . . . the hole, the socket. There his hair was frizzled, shriveled as if it had been burned.

  Unbidden, Elissa’s gaze dragged itself up to the cable itself, to the inner wall of the cylinder. The cable showed signs of corrosion, uneven blackened marks on the smooth surface. The cylinder seemed almost untouched, except at its very edge, where the cable ran through it. There the glass showed the tiny hair-fine crazing that came from excessive heat.

  What had happened? Had the connections been overheating? Had the Spare’s brain waves been too much for the cables? Or had the settings been wrong? Had they tried to drag too much energy from the Spare, set off some kind of feedback that meant that whenever the ship shifted into hyperdrive—It was us, we did it; we kept using the hyperdrive to get away—the Spare, trapped, bound, helpless, had been subjected to the sort of pain Elissa had only felt secondhand but that she could hardly bear to remember?

  “I don’t know why the hell we’re still standing here,” said Cadan suddenly, violently. Lin jerked as if she’d been slapped, and for the first time her eyes left the sight of the Spare lying in the glass prison that had become his gruesome tomb.

  Elissa dragged her last shreds of self-control together, put her arm around her twin. “Let’s get out of here. Cadan’s right, there’s no point staying.”

  Lin still didn’t speak. Her hand came up, ice cold, closing around Elissa’s. Elissa wasn’t sure if the next words in her mind were Lin’s or her own. I knew it would come. It has. It’s over.

  It can’t be over! That was definitely her own thought, frantic, on the edge of pa
nic. “Not like this. There must be a way through!”

  She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud till Cadan answered her, turning to look at her as they stepped out of the chamber with its hideous, faintly pulsing light.

  “Lissa, I’m sorry.” His face was bleak. “We’re done. We’re not going to make it to IPL.”

  “Cadan . . .” Her voice came out like a desperate accusation. There had to be something. After everything they’d gone through, every narrow escape, it couldn’t all be ending here.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. His eyes met hers, and they were bleak too. “If there was anything I could think of, any bargain I could make . . .”

  They climbed the steps to the bridge. Markus snapped around as Cadan opened the barrier. “The shields are going down again. Did you—?” His eyes took in Cadan’s expression and he stopped. “It’s no good?”

  Cadan crossed to the controls. “No good.” He gave the shortest explanation possible, the strain of describing what they’d seen—what still lay under the floor they stood on—drawing lines in his face.

  Elissa looked away and realized for the first time that Ivan and Felicia had come up to the bridge as well. The thought came, cold and detached: So we can all die together.

  Lin’s hand stayed icy in Elissa’s. As icy as if she, like the pitiful burned-out corpse below them, were already dead.

  Cadan turned to the display screens. “The rate the shields are deteriorating, we’re not going to last longer than an hour.”

  An hour. After all they’d gone through, in the end that’s what it came down to? One more hour. Despite everything, despite what had happened to innumerable Spares only a little older than her, it seemed impossible that she, Elissa, was going to die before she’d ever really lived.

  Fear had left her. She felt . . . kind of lost, dizzy, as if she stood on the very edge of a cliff, the escape route she’d been supposed to take nothing but a tangle of snapped rope and broken harness before her. It had been for nothing. All that fear, all that effort. Getting away, and getting away again, and putting Cadan and his crew in so much danger, and it was all worthless.