“Oh.” Mercury hurried to the reprocessor. “Just a minute. I perfected this in secondary school.”
“Plus”—he jerked his thumb over his shoulder—“you’re going to want to be in the control room for the fireworks.”
“Will it be impressive?” she asked.
“You better hope not,” Xan said. “But the control room’s got the best shielding. In case it all does go wrong.”
Mercury held the tray of steaming tea and little cakes. Her skin took on the pale pink of coconut. “Um, you’re not joking, are you?”
He grinned. “Not at all.”
“It’ll work,” Yves assured her. “My calculations are flawless. They always lead to the correct conclusion.”
Even though his correctness meant he couldn’t fully allow himself to join with her.
He shoved that thought away. “Ready?”
She gripped the tray in white knuckles. “If you’re with me, then yes.”
Yves put his green oculars over his eyes. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mercury slid into her seat, the tray of snacks and tea in front of her no longer so appetizing as they approached the exit of the Tube. Xan hovered over the controls; Cressida stood at his shoulder, completely focused.
Yves sat beside her. He had already finished his calculations and input his coordinates into the screen by Xan. Cool and casual, his ankles crossed and his arms behind his head.
Even though her limbs were still all loose and melty from the wonderful time in the kitchen, Mercury couldn’t share his relaxation.
Once, they used to strap people in during danger points. Any hiccup in space would smear the occupants to paste regardless of whether they were strapped down. Restraints were still offered on most luxury cruises, especially those with historical themes, mostly for the psychological benefit.
She could’ve used some of those right now.
Yves put a calming hand over her fidgeting ones. “Relax.”
Easier said than done. She smiled tightly.
He stroked her white knuckles. “We’ll exit with no problem. My analysis of the cruiser’s capabilities is flawless.”
She closed her eyes, telling herself that she believed him. “Any drones won’t attack us.”
“Drones ignore anything flying away from the Tube. We certainly will be, and at high velocity. The only risk will be when we swing back around to re-enter the Tube from the side, and by that point, we will already see all of them and know how to avoid their fire.”
She nodded. It wasn’t him she doubted.
It was the Undovan war cruiser, and the look of pure evil on the skeletal android’s face as she’d promised to end Mercury, and Yves getting captured and disassembled. It was all of that.
“Unless…” he said.
She gulped. “Unless?”
“Unless the zero class already reviewed our supplies list, calculated our likely strategy, and informed the Third Brigade before we entered the Tube.”
Her belly dropped.
He rubbed her hand. “If that happened, we have bigger problems than the drone.”
“We’re coming up on the exit,” Xan said.
Yves raised his voice. “X-class, don’t mess up my plan. I want to look good in front of the women.”
Xan glanced over his shoulder, amusement roughening his voice. “Says the guy who still has a giant hole in his forehead.”
“It’s cosmetic.”
“Why does that not inspire confidence?”
Cressida hissed at her husband. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” he assured her, sounding as relaxed as if he were watching the passing ship identifications to win the farthest-origin game. He looked up at her. “Easier than an arcade shooter, don’t you think?”
She smacked his shoulder. “Look at the screen!”
“It’s fine.” He rubbed the shoulder absently. “We still have one-point-eight seconds—”
A low grumble behind Mercury’s teeth warned they were breaking free.
Well, that and a giant buoy filling their screens. They didn’t normally do that, but not too many people cared to focus on a buoy when there was so much else to concentrate on at a new hub.
“—to pass the buoy.” Xan slammed the shot.
A metal weight streaked for the buoy as they passed by it.
Lock-on sirens blared.
Mercury’s heart lunged for her throat.
“You were late!” Cressida shouted.
“I wasn’t late,” Xan said grimly. “I performed a perfect lateral shot. The buoy is not supposed to have the capability to fire.”
“No,” Yves sighed, resting his chin on his hand, “but the fifty drones intercepting it certainly do.”
Xan’s shot fired directly into the cloud and streaked toward a drone. Twice the size of the buoy and ranged in a veritable chain link fence around the buoy, the drone’s auto-turrets churned. Planetary-class bullets the size and density of nuclear fists plowed into their little fishing weight, smashing it to shatters.
A thin ribbon of magnet tape, designed to yank the buoy like a hammer pulling out a nail, instead dragged like a red flag from their cruiser.
So the Faction knew what they’d tried. They were now stuck in the shipping lane at a normal speed, and the Undovan warship would emerge from the Tube right behind them, any second now, and drive them out to face the Third Brigade.
“Uh oh,” Yves said.
Drone fire chewed up the end of the tape. Even though they were flying away, the drone they had accidentally almost hit engaged and started to chase them.
“It’s not stopping!” Xan yelled, fighting to maneuver the ship.
Yves curled his hand around hers. “Cut the tape.”
She held on for dear life.
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“It’s not like this ship has a gun. I clamped the magnet tape in the exterior airlock.”
Bullets ate their way up the tape, precision hitting the miniscule ribbon and turning it to powder, chewing its way back toward the ship.
“Shit!” Xan shouted.
“But we’re flying away from it,” Cressida said. “Look, it’s behind us!”
“It’s not the kind of thing we can hail,” Yves said. “Power down the ship. All systems. Go dead.”
“Power down? We’re going to take a fucking hit!”
The ship boomed. The teacups rattled and fell over, spilling across the crumbling cakes. The lights blinked. The door’s interior locks turned, sealing in the occupants of all rooms. Red flared and disappeared, flared and disappeared.
On screen, debris drifted from the breach, including the escape capsule halves. The auto-turret continued to fire.
“Power down now,” Yves said, as calm as if he were having a conversation. “Before they hit the engines.”
Xan skated over the controls. As the ship died, he jumped to his feet and grabbed Cressida.
Everything went black and gravity abruptly failed. Like a transit shuttle suddenly out of fuel, plummeting for the planet’s surface, Mercury’s stomach turned as she somersaulted out of her seat.
Not again.
Wetness brushed her face and chest—the tea—and she batted it away, pushing the globules as she re-reviewed her childhood disaster training.
Find a small, magnetese-coated space to shelter under. Failing that, curl into a ball and protect your head. Okay. She could do that.
The final booms echoed through the now silent ship. Each one fell like thunder. She awaited the one that accompanied a suffocating fist—that would be the one that breached the final layers and smooshed them all into space.
The booms seemed to get more distant. Breathing sounded in the room, and a quiet, hitched sob.
Mercury licked her lips. The blackness fell, unpierceable. Peering through it was like trying to see through solid onyx.
“Yves?” Mercury said.
“Just a sec.” His voice
came from near her ankle.
Cool shimmers began to appear on the surfaces, outlining the others in black. Xan and Cressida lodged safely in the captain’s chair, Xan’s body sheltering his wife. Yves floated below Mercury at the dead terminals, one hand gripping her ankle.
She curled around and crawled to join him, hovering over the same screens. “Can we bring the ship back up?”
“I don’t know what range the drone was programmed to fire on us.”
“It stopped,” she noted.
“We’re still flying away from it, and now we’re ‘dead,’ so no longer a ship it might be programmed to annihilate.”
“I thought you said it wouldn’t shoot at us,” Cressida cried, her hurt voice muffled by her husband’s shoulder.
“Drones are programmed to protect the buoy,” he said. “They are usually only protecting it from external bogeys.”
“Well, this one shot at us.”
“Yes. It complicates our next move.”
But obviously Yves had a new plan. Just knowing that made Mercury feel much, much better.
The screen below his hand lit with a stream of codes, barely visible on the stored power within the actual device. “You watched more messages.”
Silence.
“We were in the Tube,” Xan said finally, uncurling. His eyeballs reflected the strange light. “Even a bad program can’t transmit outside a Tube.”
“It could the instant we exited. Everything we said and did was transmitted out the instant we exited the Tube.” Yves snarled, showing more emotion than usual, floating subtly away from the screen. “Do you know what this means?”
Xan dropped silent.
“She expected us to try this,” Yves said. Anger tinged his voice. Mercury recognized that brand of anger. It was directed at himself. “We’ve walked into a trap. The zero class’s trap.”
Silence followed that pronouncement.
Mercury’s heart ached for him. He had been so confident. She stroked his hair and, when he looked up, pulled him into her arms. He hugged her so hard. She whispered, “It’s okay. We tried hard. We can’t always get away.”
“Oh, we are getting away.” He sucked in a breath and let it out, but kept on squeezing her. “I don’t care if they hear that. You are getting away, or I swear I will take everything down with my final breath.”
She hugged him harder.
“The Undovan warbird has exited,” Xan confirmed on his screen. “It will catch up to us shortly. So, probably they’ll grapple us and take us on board.”
Yves breathed, slow and even. Planning. Even now. Mercury stroked his back and waited for the next shot of brilliance.
Even though below them, the ships of the Third Brigade shimmered like a moving constellation, a force so large it seemed like its own galaxy. Before, they were worried about the warship driving them into the Third Brigade. But now that they were dead in space, they couldn’t even spend their last moments in each other’s arms, because the warship would swallow them up and force them on board.
It wasn’t fair. She tightened her arms around her gorgeous, thoughtful, brilliant android and willed this moment to last for the next hundred thousand years.
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Cressida’s face paled in the screen light. “The message was from our uncle.”
“From Uncle Sirus?” Mercury clutched her chest to stop her cold blood from leaking out. That’s what it felt like. A shot. “But he never messages me on his trips. It’s too dangerous.”
“This one clearly wasn’t his idea,” Xan said. “He’s been captured by Zenya.”
~*~*~*~
“He’s on the warship behind us,” Xan was telling Mercury, even though the illogic of his words struck Yves with the full force of denial. It simply wasn’t possible. Zenya was a lot of things, but psychic and omniscient were not two of them.
“No,” she cried, believing it utterly. “She has Uncle Sirus? How?”
“It’s not possible.” Yves looked Mercury in the eye to stall her horror. “There is no way your uncle can be on the warship. It simply isn’t possible.”
Mercury’s expression changed, slow and tender, to hope.
Yes. That was how he needed her to be. Not resigned to heartbreak, like she had been earlier, and not shouldering the future pain of their separation when he returned to the Faction—with his new data, which he already craved more of—and she escaped. Hopeful, beautiful, and his.
Impossible as it was.
“We saw it,” Cressida said to him. “I’m sorry, but you don’t know because you haven’t seen the message. It’s definitely our uncle.”
“The message is a fake.”
Mercury put a hand to her throat. Although the glowing emergency material made visibility nearly impossible—he flickered between infrared and nocturnal vision—he could see the trauma in her tremble. “Yves, are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“I would like to believe you.” Cressida gripped her husband hard. “How can you tell?”
“Logic.”
Mercury’s hope almost broke his heart. “Really?”
“The zero class is a legend, but she’s still bound to the same laws of physics.” He tapped the dot of the warship advancing on them like a predator on a small mouse. “Undovans never leave their own solar system. The odds she’s had time to take over their ship, hunt down your uncle, make a video of it, and still catch up to us here defies a hell of a lot more than odds.”
“But it is possible,” Cressida pushed, pale and calm, as she faced a terrible fact. A fact as terrible, perhaps, as being hunted by the same zero class, helpless in a broken ship, and soon to be overtaken by either the Third Brigade or Hub employees clearly in the Third Brigade’s employ. “Say the Faction captured our uncle and sent him to her on the warship.”
“If this all happened weeks ago,” Yves said. “Crossing galaxies still takes days.”
“Unless he was already in Undovan space.”
Yves shook his head. “Was he?”
Everyone looked at Mercury.
Her mouth opened and closed. “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me exactly—he went somewhere with good fishing. That’s all I know.”
Damn. It would have been nicer if she knew, and could convince them herself. He stroked her hair absently. The longer they argued, the less time he had to construct his plan.
One that involved reviving the ship, ducking under the warship’s sensors, and sneaking out in its shadow…somehow. It would be nice if he could get into the Faction and access the specs. He could make some guesses though.
Cressida bit her lip. “The message is a holo.”
“Those are the easiest to fake.”
She snapped, “Why are you so certain?”
“Because,” he said, understanding that she was stressed and thought him arrogant for dismissing her without a long explanation, “knowing Mercury’s tender heart and overwhelming generosity, making a video that preyed on those traits is exactly what I would do.”
Cressida’s lips trembled.
Yves understood, but he didn’t have time to coddle her. He wished she had a little more backbone and could just live with uncertainty, like Mercury. If he had been stuck with Cressida, he would probably still be stuck back in Luck Hub, arguing over which direction the rogue had gone.
He nuzzled Mercury lightly, breathing in her delicate feminine scent. Mixed with tea and sweet cakes, which he suddenly realized he had never gotten to taste.
Perhaps, if they could rig some sort of cold-start to the engine…or managed to shield its start-up so they could dart out from beneath the grapple arm…but the warship was bristling with auto-turrets. The last thing they wanted to do was get close enough to trigger those ship-maulers.
No, the last thing they wanted to do was board the warship. No matter what else, he had to keep Mercury off that ship.
“Just see it,” Xan pushed, still holding his wife to keep her safe. “Then decide.”
Yves shook his head. But the others wouldn’t be satisfied until he deconstructed the video himself. Faked videos were as easy to spot as they were to make, especially ones that had to be released fast.
And they had nothing now but time. Time until the warship picked them up. Time until he made a successful plan for averting the threat or they got captured and deconstructed. Time until the others were all killed.
If ever he were going to play a potentially corrupted file, doing so now, with the whole system dead and cutting off any harm, was the safest time.
“Fine.” He pressed play.
Light crackled from the screen and slammed Yves squarely between the eyes. Molten hot lava poured into his brain. Silence screamed in his ears.
Thoughts disjointed, fragmented, and then zippered up into false memories. He fought to scream, but the silence stuffed a warm, wet sock down his throat. Somewhere behind him in the darkness, he thought he heard a woman’s laugh. No, not a woman. Zenya|Sen.
The control room’s soft glow abruptly returned. He blinked hard. In front of him, the video had ended. To his left, Mercury was crying softly. To his right, Xan held Cressida to his chest.
The corrupted x-class looked at Yves. “Still convinced it’s a fake?”
He opened his mouth to describe the problem with his processors, the nightmares he had experienced rather than a video, but different words came out his mouth.
“Absolutely not. That video is 100 percent the real thing.”
~*~*~*~
Two minutes earlier…
Agony split Mercury’s heart in half.
“Mercury, I’m sorry about this.” Her battered uncle braced against a steel gray wall. His normally crinkly eyes turned shadowed and dark. “The man you were supposed to meet is dead. This is the last you’ll ever hear from me.”
The camera showed the horrid woman whose skin unnaturally stretched over her square face. “Tell your stupid, fat niece why your excruciatingly painful death is her fault.”
The video went on to explain that Mercury had to turn herself over to the Undovan warship immediately.
“Otherwise, his death will be on your swollen head, Mercury Sarit Antiata,” the evil woman sneered. “Like all the other failures in your life.”
The video ended on her uncle’s pained, tortured face.
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