Vega borrows my clothes. The pants are too short, and her ankles are visible above her boots, but at least she doesn’t look like an IA dropout anymore. She drags behind as we make our way to Saint Rita’s quarters. The only people awake are the crew members responsible for early-morning ship duties.
“Wow,” Vega drawls when I usher her into the captain’s meeting room. She gazes at the lush carpets and velvet couches. “Bit of a discrepancy in living situations, isn’t there? The pirates don’t care they’re literally sleeping on top of each other while the captain gets all this space?” She inspects an embroidered emblem on one of the couches. “This furniture is from a Premiere cruise ship. How did she get these?”
Saint Rita emerges from her private sector. “Good old-fashioned piracy,” she replies to Vega’s question. “I worked hard for those. Took me a whole year to get the entire set. I even got the footrest.” She plants a boot on the plushy violet ottoman. “Thanks for noticing.”
Vega’s lip curls upward. “How many people did you kill for your interior decorating?”
Saint Rita pretends to count on her fingers then gives up. She points at a few different tally marks on her sunken ship’s wall. “The Impossible took down the Premiere Pride, Inspiration, and Triumph. Guess they weren’t as triumphant as they thought, eh?”
She chuckles at her own joke, but Vega can’t mask her look of utter disgust.
“You killed innocent people for your own comfort,” Vega says.
“I killed the ones that got in my way,” the captain corrects. “I left everyone else alive.”
“They wouldn’t have gotten in your way if you hadn’t illegally boarded their vessel to begin with,” Vega shoots back.
Saint Rita gives Vega a long look. “Ophelia, your pet is annoyingly loquacious.”
“I am not her pet,” Vega growls. “I hate her.”
“Yet you borrowed her clothes and slept in her bed,” Saint Rita points out. “Those are intimate things to share with someone you despise.”
Saint Rita knows and sees everything that happens on The Impossible. I’m convinced she has cameras everywhere, including private bunks, to watch her crew. Vega’s eyes widen. She’s not used to the ship’s panopticism. Saint Rita lifts a hand to touch the scab on Vega’s scalp, but Vega jerks away.
“It’ll heal,” the captain says. She rounds on me and runs a finger over my split lip. Unlike Vega, I don’t have the nerve to pull away. Saint Rita gives Vega an approving nod. “You landed one on her. That’s an impressive feat. Ophelia’s one of my best fighters.”
“Go figure,” Vega replies shortly. “What do you want from me?”
The captain straightens up, assuming her power stance. “The Impossible is approaching Harmonia.”
Vega and I both stiffen.
“Why?” I ask. “I thought we were going to Phobos.”
Saint Rita goes to her massive bay window and looks out. Vega’s shoulders rise like a dog’s hackles, but I take her wrist before she does anything stupid. In the window, Saint Rita smiles. Though her back is turned to us, she can see our reflections in the glass.
“We don’t have the intel we need to land on Phobos,” Saint Rita says. “That’s where our guest comes in. Vega, as an Intelligence operator, you should have access to IA’s servers, do you not?”
When Vega doesn’t reply, I jab her in the ribs with my elbow.
“Yes,” she grunts. “But it won’t do you any good.”
The captain turns to face us. “Why is that?”
“First of all, I told you yesterday the information you want is encrypted,” Vega says. “Second, you won’t be able to pull this monstrous ship close enough to Harmonia to access IA’s servers without attracting their attention. Harmonia has the heaviest defense out of all the planets in Pavo. Even your legendary behemoth can’t fight off an entire fleet of IA battleships.”
“First of all,” Saint Rita replies, mimicking Vega’s righteous tone. “I don’t believe you’re unable to access the information I need, but even if you are, one of my crewmembers is well-versed in Information code. Second, I don’t intend to take The Impossible any closer to Harmonia than absolutely necessary. That’s why I called on the two of you.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Vega says.
Saint Rita lazily prepares a small machine in the corner of her suite. Something bubbles and gurgles, then the enticing smell of coffee fills the room. I bite my tongue. I can’t remember the last time I had a cup of coffee that didn’t taste like dirty water, but I know Saint Rita isn’t sharing.
“You are my secret weapons,” Saint Rita announces. “When we near Harmonia, The Impossible will idle at a safe distance from the planet’s atmosphere. Ophelia will pilot one of our speeders to Harmonia’s surface, close enough for you to access IA’s servers. With any luck, you can pull the information I need and return to The Impossible before IA realizes the security breach.”
“I’m not Ophelia,” Vega says. “I won’t be a traitor. I will not betray my own government.”
“You will if you want to stay alive,” Saint Rita replies. “It’s this or face the nothingness of space. Then you truly will be a falling star.” She fixes Vega with a sweet smile. “But you won’t go easily. I won’t let you. If you refuse to assist in our mission, Ophelia will teach you the meaning of pain. She’s well-practiced.”
I avoid Vega’s accusatory stare, but I can’t hide the stench of my guilt. I’ve done a lot of things for the captain. That includes torturing civilians for information.
“You’re disgusting,” Vega whispers.
“Thank you,” Saint Rita says.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Vega snaps. “Though you’re equally repugnant.”
Saint Rita’s coffee maker chirrups, and the captain retrieves her fresh cup. She inhales the steam and over-emphasizes a sigh of content. “I’m afraid repugnance is the very basis of piracy. We conquer tasks common people don’t have the audacity to consider. At our core, we are fighters, and we take pride in that. Don’t we, Ophelia?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Saint Rita snaps her fingers. “Dustin?”
The ship’s engineer—a massive blond man with meaty muscles—emerges from Saint Rita’s private quarters, wearing only pants. I catch Saint Rita’s eye, and she smirks.
“Yes, Captain?” Dustin says.
“Do you mind escorting our guest outside for a moment?” Saint Rita requests. “I need a private word with Ophelia.”
“Certainly, Captain.” Dustin approaches Vega but doesn’t lay a hand on her. “After you, Miss Major.”
Vega throws one last look of disapproval at me and Saint Rita before she follows Dustin from the captain’s quarters. Saint Rita watches them go.
“She’s feisty,” she says after a sip of coffee.
“Yes, she is.”
“She hates you.”
“Yes, she does.”
Saint Rita swirls her cup around in thought. “That’s a lot of spite to work up in one night. I don’t suppose the two of you are formally acquainted?”
I almost roll my eyes. Of course she already knows.
“We went to school together, Captain,” I admit. “At the Academy on Harmonia.”
“Ah.” Though she hides her face behind her cup, I can see the upward angle of her lips. She’s pleased with this discovery. “Did you have some sort of academic feud?”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “We were best friends. She hates me because I defected.”
Saint Rita pouts. “How tragic.”
“It’s done with,” I say. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
She sets her cup down and dusts her hands. “Your mission should be simple enough. Get that speeder within range of the servers on Harmonia. The challenge is getting your partner to cooperate.”
“We’re not partners,” I say. “To be honest, I don’t think I’m the best person for this job. You have better speeder pilots.”
“I�
��m not looking for a decent pilot, though you do underestimate yourself there,” Saint Rita replies. “I want someone who can control Vega Major. You’re closest to her. I assume you know a lot about her. You can make her do what we want.”
“No one can make Vega do anything she doesn’t want to do.”
“IA can and has,” the captain says. “She needs to think of us as her new IA, but we don’t have anything to hold over her head to keep her loyal to us yet. Death threats and torture will only get us so far, especially with someone so righteous. Take this time to find out something we can use against her. Don’t screw up, Ophelia. I hate to admit it, but Vega’s right. We don’t have the resources to take on an IA fleet. Get into the servers and get out of dodge. Understood?”
“Yes, Captain.”
When The Impossible gets within range of Harmonia, I march Vega to the cargo deck. It spans the length of the ship and holds all of our escape pods and speeders, most of which are also stolen IA vessels. My favorite speeder is an IA Defense Wasp that I commandeered during one of my first missions for Saint Rita. The streamlined ship is polished and perfect. Vega watches as I pat its pointy nose.
“It’s not a dog,” she says.
“But it is my baby.”
“So you care more about an inanimate object than you do about actual human beings,” she huffs. “Wow, you’ve changed.”
I hand her a flight jacket and a Comms earpiece. “Look, I don’t like doing this anymore than you do. We don’t ever get this close to Harmonia. If I fuck this up, the Captain’s going to have my liver for dinner, so I need you to bear with me.”
“My success is connected to yours, huh?” She fiddles with the complicated straps of the flight jacket, unable to get it to sit right over her torso. “If I don’t get into the server, it’s your head on a platter.”
“If you fail, I fail,” I admit. “So we’re in this together.”
To prove it, I arrange her jacket so it fits correctly and tighten the straps for her. Then I fit her Comms piece into her ear and turn it on. A blinking blue light indicates that she’s linked to The Impossible’s central communication system.
“Thanks,” she says grudgingly. She glances at the ladder to the speeder’s cockpit. “I don’t suppose this thing has an ejection seat, does it?”
“Nope.” I climb up first, using my print to open the cockpit. “We’re hardcore here on The Impossible. If you sink a ship, you go down with it.”
I give Vega a hand up. She scrambles over the speeder’s lip and lowers herself into the bucket seat next to mine. Her knees nearly hit her chest.
“Not much room in these things,” she grumbles.
“Yeah, so don’t try anything stupid.”
The glass slides forward and the vacuum seal hisses, enclosing us in the cockpit. It gets hot quick, especially with the added bulk of our flight jackets. I flick the toggle for the speeder’s engine. As it fires up, the entire cockpit rumbles. Next to me, Vega turns green.
“Please don’t puke,” I beg.
She takes a deep breath and blows it out with puffed cheeks. When she wipes her palms, they leave damp sweat stains on the thighs of her pants. “I’ve never done this before.”
“What? Ridden in a speeder?”
“Flown.”
I glance up from my routine safety check. “Yes, you have. You had to fly from Palioxis to Harmonia to get to the Academy.”
“I was asleep,” she says. “IA sedated me.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a panic attack.” She catches my questioning look. “Don’t ask.”
“Okay.” I finish up the safety check and tap my Comms. “Ophelia to Command. Do we have clearance to launch?”
Vega flinches as the command center’s reply blares in her earpiece.
“Permission to launch granted,” Command says. “Opening bay doors.”
The massive doors at the end of the cargo bay slide back, revealing nothing but open space, stars, and the tiny planet of Harmonia in the distance. Vega lets out a deep gasp and leans forward to get a better look. I place my hand on her chest to push her against the seat.
“Sit back,” I say, yanking on the straps to tighten her restraints. “Try to relax. If you’re tense when we launch, you’re going to feel it in the morning.”
She settles into the seat, but her shoulders are still tightly locked. When the speeder’s thrusters lift it from the ground, she grabs hold of the handlebars on either side of her. I line up the speeder on the takeoff path and let it idle.
“Here we go,” I say. It’s Vega’s last warning.
I punch the speeder into action. It shoots off like a rocket, slamming Vega into her seat so hard that I can hear the whoosh of her breath leaving her lungs. One second, we’re in the cargo bay, and the next, we’re in deep space, miles away from The Impossible. Out here, it almost feels like we’re free of everything, including Saint Rita and the IA. Almost.
Vega’s eyes are closed. I nudge her knee.
“Pay attention,” I order. “As soon as we get in range, I need you to access their servers and download whatever information they have on Phobos.”
She peeks one eye open, shudders, and looks at the floor of the cockpit. She focuses on the tablet between her knees, tapping through screens of code with the ease of reading a children’s book. I can’t keep up, especially when my attention’s on piloting the speeder.
“Head west,” Vega directs. “We need to get closer to IA’s headquarters.”
Up ahead, ships of all sorts and sizes litter the space outside Harmonia’s atmosphere, waiting for clearance to dock below. Most of them are IA vessels or luxury cruisers. The only people who live on Harmonia are IA workers or wealthy government officials.
“Might be difficult,” I say. “There’s traffic.”
“You want this intel or not? You’re in an IA speeder. Who’s gonna notice?”
I grit my teeth and do what she says, taking the Wasp right into the thick of things while my heart hammers in my chest. We cruise past an official IA battleship. Vega notices the hair rising on my arms.
“Not really your thing, huh?” she says. “Breaching enemy territory.”
“We don’t do this,” I reply. “I’ve boarded a ton of cruise and cargo ships, but we normally intercept them in deep space.”
“Saint Rita got bored, huh?”
“Apparently so.”
Her focus never leaves the tablet. When a login page with the IA logo appears, she grins in triumph.
“We’re in,” she says.
“You’re happy about that?”
Her smile drops as she logs into her IA account. Her fingers move too quickly for me to catch the details of her credentials.
“This tablet can’t hold all this information,” she says, scrolling through pages and pages of files. “You didn’t think to bring a data disk, did you?”
“That should’ve been your responsibility,” I growl. “Don’t tell me you can’t get what we need. If we have to go all the way back to The Impossible—”
“Relax.” She searches the databases for information on Phobos. “I can narrow it down a bit. Here we go.”
She begins downloading files to the tablet, but the time creeps by. An IA battleship pulls up next to us, enshrouding our little Wasp in shadow. My teeth clench together as I glance up at the battleship’s bridge. The pilot is looking into our cockpit.
“Any day now, Vega,” I say.
“One...more...minute.”
The battleship pilot catches my look. His eyes drift to the patch on my vest, the one that marks me as Saint Rita’s first mate. His eyes widen.
“We don’t have a minute.” I punch the Wasp into reverse, zipping around the battleship as it fires up its blasters. “That battleship pilot saw us. Don’t worry. Those things are difficult to turn around. We’ll be back at The Impossible before it can follow us.”
Vega’s fist comes out of nowhere and smashes into my nose. The speeder jer
ks and rolls as she climbs on top of me and hammers me with hit after hit. The cockpit is too small for me to defend myself. All I can do is roll my head from side to side and hope to avoid most of her blows. Finally, I get one of my hands free, cup my fingers together, and clap her ear. It stuns her just enough, and I shove her back into her own seat. Her fingernails scrabble against my neck, and she catches hold of my necklace. The clasp breaks and the data disk pops off and spins to the floor of the speeder. I pop Vega in the face.
I duck beneath the speeder’s control panels and fish around for the necklace, but Vega recovers quickly. She keeps pounding me, but I take the hits to my back. I can’t lose that data disk. Finally, my hands close around it. With the necklace safely in my grasp, I sit up, take hold of the speeder’s joysticks, and push it to top speed. Just like during the launch, Vega slams against the seat rest.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I check the radar. The IA battleship has turned itself around. “Oh, great. It’s heading right for us. Are you happy? We’re probably both gonna die now.”
But Vega’s not done with her sabotage attempt just yet. She rips my Comms set out of my ear before enabling her own, disconnecting from The Impossible’s frequency and sending out an all-call instead.
“This is Intelligence operator Vega Major,” she announces. Any ship between The Impossible and Harmonia can hear her call. “My employee number is 568721. I have been kidnapped by pirates and am being held hostage against my will. I repeat: I have been kidnapped by pirates—”
I swing out, catching her throat with the back of my fist. She gags and coughs, but it’s too late. The battleship is on our tail. The unmistakable roar of cannons makes the Wasp shudder.
“Do not fire!” Vega shouts into the headset, her voice hoarse. “I am an IA Intelligence operator!”
The cannons power up.
“They don’t care, Vega,” I snap at her.
She shrieks when the first boom of the cannons tears through deep space. I can hear the enormous opalite stone whistling toward us.
“Hold on tight, idiot.”
The opalite burns white-hot, illuminating the cockpit as it nears the Wasp. At the last second, I roll the speeder over to avoid the blast. Another one follows right after, and I yank the speeder in the opposite direction. The opalite clips our right wing, sending the speeder whirling. Vega won’t stop yelling.
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