by R. M. Olson
Ysbel smiled back at her.
Tanya looked up calculatingly, then began to scale the tangle of pipes and wires up to the ceiling. Ysbel watched her, and something inside her chest hurt.
Maybe Tanya was right.
It had been a long time. It had been a long, long time, and she wanted to protect Tanya, she needed to, but—maybe Tanya had never needed her protection after all.
Maybe it was herself she’d been protecting.
Tanya was up beside the explosive now.
“Has it been set?” asked Ysbel, tapping her com to the private line.
“Just a moment.” Tanya’s voice carried the strain of holding herself up on the pipes. A moment later, Ysbel heard her sharp intake of breath.
“They’ve set it, Ysi. We have half a standard hour.” She paused, and there was something tight and worried in her voice. “And—I think you need to take a look at this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TAE PACED BETWEEN the bed and the wall and back again.
He’d pulled up the vid feed of the gambling floor, and the others were gathered around it, but he couldn’t seem to stand still. His blood was still pumping with the sick horror of seeing Masha take a heat blast to the chest, seeing the scorched hole in her coat.
He almost tapped his com again, but Ysbel wouldn’t thank him for harassing her, and if he knew anything about her explosives, disarming them would be fiddly work.
“Tae. I think you’d better come look at this.”
He turned quickly at the tone in Ivan’s voice, and something about the grim expression on Ivan’s face sent a cold fear through his stomach.
Lev’s face, too, was set and worried.
He crossed to them quickly and peered at the screen, but it took him a moment to see what they had already seen.
And then he saw it, grim-faced boyeviki striding through the panicked gambling hall, grabbing people by the arm and dragging them from the room.
Not the people he wanted to kill, though.
Instead—
“It appears,” said Lev quietly, “that Grigory has given up on getting people into position.”
“Where is he taking them?” asked Tae in a low voice.
“They’re being taken to Grigory’s ship,” said Masha. She was sitting up, propped against the headboard, and there was something odd in her voice.
Tae glanced over at her quickly.
He’d never been able to read Masha’s expression. But the sharp worry in her eyes was unmistakable.
“It’s his own people, the ones he wants to keep alive. Looks like he’s given up on shutting down the partition,” said Ivan. His face had gone slightly bloodless. “He’s going to get out on his ship and let this whole thing blow.”
Tae gritted his teeth.
If Grigory was getting people out, he’d almost certainly started the countdown on the explosive. But Ysbel and Tanya had found it, so it should be fine.
Probably.
He hit the com. “Ysbel,” he said. “How long will this take you?”
There was a short pause, and then Ysbel’s voice came onto the com. “Thirty minutes,” she said at last, and there was something heavy in her tone.
“Thirty minutes until you can disarm it?” he asked, glancing at his com. His stomach was tight with worry.
It would be cutting it very close, if Lev’s calculations were correct. Which they usually were.
“No,” said Ysbel, in that same unfamiliar tone. “Thirty minutes until it goes off. I’m sorry.”
He stared at the com.
Everyone in the room was staring at the com.
Finally, Masha tapped her own com. “Ysbel. You were unable to locate the explosive? Or unable to disarm it?”
“No one is going to be able to disarm this,” said Ysbel, her voice emotionless. “The thing is, they’ve set something into the timer. It triggers the explosive the moment the timer stops running, whether it’s run out or not. We can’t even run the timer backwards to add more time, because any interruption will set it off.”
They were all looking at Tae now.
He stared down at his com.
The trigger woven into the timer. He’d heard of this before, never seen it.
Zhenya must have had a hell of a lot of faith in Tae’s abilities.
Slowly, he shook his head. “If they’ve set it like Ysbel says they have, I—don’t know how we’d avoid setting it off,” he said, bitterness in his voice. “Even if I attempted it, somehow got through Zhenya’s firewall, I’d likely blow us all to pieces.”
“Could we get it out of the ship somehow?” asked Ivan after a moment.
“No,” said Ysbel. “I already thought of that. But I was the one who made this. The moment it hit zero pressure, it would explode. There’s no way we get it onto an escape pod, not if Tae can’t get into their system to hack one. And from the specs Lev sent me, this ship’s airlocks are not reinforced like Grigory’s are. This thing explodes inside the airlock, and it takes the whole ship down with it.”
“And even if we did manage to disarm it, it would likely only give us a few additional minutes,” said Masha, in that same odd voice. “Once Grigory has everyone he wants alive off this ship, he’ll destroy it. I’ve seen the guns on his ship. He has the gun-power to do it, and with no witnesses, he could still play it off as an accident. He spent a great deal of resources planning this, after all.”
They looked at each other for a long time. Finally, Lev hit his com.
“Ysbel,” he said quietly. “I suppose you may as well come back here. I think Olya and Misko would like that.”
“If I had my damn ship—” Jez began, her voice tight.
Tae looked up at her.
Then he glanced down at the com again.
“Wait,” he said slowly, staring at the holoscreen.
“What is it?” asked Lev, voice sharp.
“Lev,” he said, looking up abruptly. “They’re getting his people onto his ship. Which means—”
Lev stared at him for a moment. “Which means, the airlock doors are open,” he murmured.
There was a moment of silence as they all digested that information. Then Lev turned to Jez.
“Jez,” he said, “we may have a way out after all. How would you like to go get your ship?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JEZ STARED, NOT quite sure she could believe her ears.
Her ship.
She could get back to her ship.
The explosive, the mafia boyeviki tied up in the room next door, the scorch-marks in the wall where the boyaviki had tried to kill them—all of it seemed suddenly unimportant.
She was getting her damn ship back.
“Alright, kids,” she began, snatching a heat pistol off the chair. “Be back in a jiff.”
“Wait,” said Masha. “I have a pass for the one-person lifts. That should get you down more quickly than trying to melt the door locks.” She reached into her pocket, grimacing at the movement, and pulled out a slim card.
Jez snatched it from her hand and turned for the door.
“Jez,” said Lev. “There’ll be locks on the hangar door, and Tae can’t hack them. You’ll need someone who can—.”
“You volunteering to come?” she snapped. “Because I’m leaving right now.”
Lev sighed. “Fine. I’m volunteering.”
She gave him a sharp grin. “Well, genius, let’s go.”
They sprinted down the corridor to the lifts. When they reached them, Jez paused, glaring at the tiny pods.
She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to jam herself in there with Lev, of all the damn people in the system.
Still—
Lev took a deep breath, seeming as unenthusiastic about the prospect as she was, and stepped in, shoving himself as far into the corner as possible.
Her ship. The Ungovernable was down there.
She gritted her teeth and shoved herself in beside him. He shifted in a vain attempt to mak
e more space, but she still ended up jammed up against him as the doors slid shut and the pod began to move, her back pushed up against his chest.
Which was completely fine, because they were just making do with a crap circumstance, and—
And—
She found she was losing her train of thought.
And considering they were in a race against time to save her damn ship, which was probably the thing that she cared about more than she’d ever cared about anything in her life, it didn’t really make sense that she felt herself relaxing into him, the tension bleeding from her muscles, the warmth of his breath on the nape of her neck sending small shivers up her back.
The door slid open. She blinked and jerked upright, stepping out so quickly she almost tripped.
She glanced over her shoulder. Lev’s face was bloodless, his hands clenched tightly at his sides.
“You OK genius?” she asked, and she found her voice was shaking.
He ran his hands over his face. “I’m—fine,” he said.
She turned away quickly, before her eyes could get caught in his. “Come on then, let’s go.”
The ground floor of the ship had turned to utter chaos. Terrified people ran down corridors, alarms blared, doors were flung open. From the gambling hall, he could hear the tinkle of shattering glass, screams, the fuzz of a heat pistol.
She shoved her way through the people, and then they were sprinting down the passageway that led onto Grigory’s ship.
The airlock doors that separated the two ships were open, but two guards were already detaching the deck from the gambling ship’s airlock.
“Hey, where are you—” one of the guards began, straightening.
Jez jerked up her free arm, grinning like a damn lunatic, and swung so that her elbow connected with the guard’s temple as they passed her. The woman went down without a groan. Another guard rounded the corner. “Where are you—” he began, then cut off his words abruptly as Jez scorched a hole in the wall beside him with her heat gun. She reached him before he could figure out what was happening, grabbed him by the collar, and swung him around hard. His head connected with the wall with a sickening crunch.
A moment later, they were at the airlock door that led to Grigory’s ship’s hangar bay.
“Locked,” she said, glancing up.
“Hold on,” Lev said, frowning at the keypad.
She tapped her foot impatiently as he scowled at the screen. From behind them there were running footsteps and shouts, and hell, she liked a gunfight as much as the next woman, but right now it was her ship they were talking about.
“Not to rush you, genius, but we’re on a bit of a—”
“Got it.” He hit a button on the pad, and the door swung open as two boyeviki rounded the corner.
They ducked inside as a heat-blast scorched the air above them, and Lev slammed the door behind him. She gave him a skeptical glance as they ran for the ship. “So, you Tae now?”
“No,” he said. “But they armed the lock with a passcode, and I happen to be able to extrapolate from information I’ve been given.”
She rolled her eyes at him, but she was grinning.
They reached the ship, and she hit the control to lower the loading ramp.
“Mag lock,” Lev said grimly, glancing at the floor of the hanger under the ship. “They’ve locked the ship in.”
She took a deep breath.
About what she’d expected.
This wasn’t going to be pretty, which, honestly, if it was any ship except her perfect angel she wouldn’t have worried about that nearly as much.
Then again, any ship but her perfect angel probably wouldn’t survive what she was about to do.
She took a deep breath. “Alright, genius, I’m going in, start her up. You take this.” She dropped an explosive into his hand, and he frowned.
“I—”
“When I say so, you arm it and drop it right by the mag lock. Then you get the hell in here.”
“Jez, even if that actually works, and we actually get the mag lock released, how are we going to get out of the damn—”
“Leave that to me,” she murmured. She couldn’t stop grinning, which didn’t seem to make Lev feel any better.
There were shouts from outside, and the airlock door started to slide open.
“Sorry genius, don’t have time to chat,” she said, swinging herself inside.
The soothing familiarity of the Ungovernable’s old-fashioned corridors was almost enough to make her knees weak as she sprinted down them to the cockpit, and she closed her eyes in pure pleasure as she slipped into the pilot’s seat, revelling in the way it fit like it had been built for her. She tapped the controls to fire the ship up, and sighed blissfully as the soft hum of the running ship settled into her bones.
“Jez—” came Lev’s voice over the com, “Not sure what you’re doing in there, but out here I’m about to get into a damn shootout.”
“One sec.” She pulled back gently on the throttle, and the ship’s soft hum increased in volume. She took a deep breath and hit the shields.
“Now!” she snapped.
There was the smooth whine of the loading ramp closing, and a moment later Lev slid into the copilot’s seat.
And despite every damn thing that had happened, the sight of him there felt like her entire world falling back into place.
She grinned. “Hold on, genius.”
She only had a moment to register the alarmed look on his face before there was a muffled boom and the ship rocked with the force of the explosion. She grabbed the arm of her seat with one hand and hit the throttle with the other, and the ship groaned with the strain.
“Come on, beautiful,” she murmured. “I know you can do this.” She pulled back, then shoved the throttle further, and the ship rocked harder, and for half a second she felt the visceral jolt of terror, the horrifying thought that maybe she’d miscalculated, maybe her sweet angel ship would tear itself to pieces—And then there was another jolt, and the ship jumped free, and she just had time to yank back on the thrusters before they hit the roof of the hangar bay.
She pointed the Ungovernable’s nose so it was facing the tight rows of Grigory’s fighter ships.
Might as well take the plaguing things out while they were at it.
“Guns,” she said through her teeth. “You know how to run them, right? Make me a door.”
Lev’s face was pale, and he was managing an impressive variety of swear words through his teeth, but he fumbled for the cockpit gunner controls.
“Hey you bastards, might want to get behind the airlock,” Jez called over the general com line.
There was a mad scramble for the airlock doors.
“Hold on,” said Lev, his voice strained. She glanced over at him. His hands were on the gun controls and his expression was grim.
“Lighten up, genius,” she said, grinning. “Just a ship’s gun. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“It’s a ship’s gun. That was created by Ysbel,” he said through his teeth.
“Like I said—”
He gave her a flat look. Then he took a deep breath, pulled the gun up into position, and fired.
The entire world went completely white, and the noise, inside the closed-in airlock, rose up and around them like a sort of stifling atmosphere, and she had to shove the thrusters forward to keep the ship from being thrown against the back wall of the bay.
“One more!” she shouted over the noise, and she wasn’t actually sure he could hear her, but he glanced over and seemed to understand. There was that brief tension in his muscles for a moment, like he was re-thinking all the life choices that had led him to this point, and then he fired the guns a second time.
Again the world exploded around them, and thank the damn Lady for Tae’s shields, because this would have been a hell of a ride without them, and then—
And then, ahead of her, through the floating debris of what was left of Grigory’s fleet, there was th
e breathtaking, achingly beautiful blackness of deep space, and her whole body thrummed with the giddy joy of it. She whooped and hit the throttle, and the Ungovernable shot through the ever-widening crack in the shell of the hangar-bay, and they were out.
She was grinning so hard it hurt, and her ship was beneath her, and every muscle in her body felt loose and light, and there was a sparking happiness running through her brain that was almost too much to handle.
She hadn’t realized how much she missed this.
Grigory’s ship had already separated from the casino ship, and was widening the gap surprisingly rapidly. She turned the Ungovernable, tipping her head back against the seat, and let the feeling of flying flow through her like water, relaxing every muscle in her body, her fingers stroking the controls of her ship almost unconsciously.
“Jez?” Lev sounded slightly amused. “Do you need me to leave the two of you alone?”
She opened her eyes and turned to glare at him, but it was hard to glare when you felt this damn happy, and it turned into more of a grin.
He grinned back at her, that soft look in his eyes once more, and it took her a few moments to realize that she hadn’t looked away. And that nor had he, and that she was staring into his eyes, and that the happiness that was bubbling through her brain and fizzing in her stomach was turning into—well, into something else, a familiar ache of desire that was building inside her bones, and, OK, they had plenty of other damn things to do right now, but for some reason there was another possibility that kept intruding itself into her brain—
Nope, absolutely not, this was definitely not the time to think about that.
With an effort, she wrenched her gaze away from his, and glanced down at the ship’s holoscreen. It was running a red damage report, and for just a moment she felt a spike of panic, but looked like Tae’s shields had held—a couple quick fixes and she should be good as new.
She took a deep breath, waiting for the shaky feeling in her muscles to subside. When her hands had stopped shaking and her breathing seemed to be mostly back to normal, she chanced a glance up. “Hey genius, thought we were in a hurry.”
He glanced up as well, with a reflexive smile that dropped as soon as he met her eyes, and she noticed, in the corner of her mind, that his face was still paler than usual and something told her it had less to do with breaking out of Grigory’s ship and more to do with the fact that they were here in the cockpit, sitting so close that she could easily reach out and touch him, and if they both stood up, it would only take one step, from either of them, and they’d be close enough that—