by Jenn Burke
He ran across the corridor, his bare feet all but soundless on the metal. His hands latched on to the ladder heading up and he pulled himself up two rungs before swiping his right hand at the hatch. His Guardian cuff flashed and the hatch popped open obediently. He ducked through and limped in the direction Ryan told him to go without acknowledging the commands verbally.
The medical wing was not going to be easy to infiltrate. He and Ryan had discussed crew rotations briefly, so he knew how many soldiers, doctors and nurses to expect. If their plan unfolded as expected, a chunk of the medical staff would be racing to an emergency two decks and a whole ship away. That would still leave at least half a dozen people to avoid or take out. Couldn’t be helped.
Zed hovered in an access shaft, adrenaline starting to pump through him. “Ready?” he whispered.
“Steady,” Ryan replied, nudging a smile to Zed’s lips. Just like the Academy.
“Go,” he said.
“Booyah!”
Alarms and announcements clanged through the corridors. Zed picked out the important keywords—nature of the emergency, deck it was on. Feet thundered on the deck plates, shouts reverberated off the walls. Before things quieted down too much, he darted out from the maintenance area.
No point in trying to hide. Nothing offered cover and anyone who spotted him would know he didn’t belong. The first obstacle came at a T-junction. A white-coated doctor rounded the corner and slammed into Zed—an accident. Zed didn’t grab for the Zone, unsure whether the dosage of stin poison had fucked it up, but he didn’t need the altered state of consciousness to deal with the doc. His hand whipped out, catching the man on the temple, and he crumpled to the floor.
“Green,” Ryan murmured in his head, their agreed-upon code for whether or not the op was still running smoothly.
An elbow to a jaw took out another guy in scrubs. A woman jumped on his back before her colleague thudded to the floor and Zed spun, slamming her into the wall. He jerked his head back, hard, uncomfortably satisfied when he heard and felt the crack of bone on cartilage. She went limp and he stepped away, unsurprised when she tumbled to the floor.
“Yellow.”
Shit. Zed jumped forward, hissing at the extra pressure and weight on his injured foot. Clenching his jaw, he limped quickly toward the room containing Kinley. A wave of his Guardian cuff sent the door retreating into the wall with a whisper. Zed stumbled over the threshold and stuttered to a stop.
Kinley sat in a chair, staring at the door. No, staring at nothing. She looked the same as he remembered—her ebony skin, gorgeous high cheekbones and wide-set eyes the color of autumn leaves more suited to modeling or acting than a soldier’s rough life—but the light in her eyes, the spark of her intelligence and wit, was gone.
“Kinley,” he said, not expecting a response. He didn’t get one. She didn’t blink. Her eyes never flickered. If Kinley was ever present anymore, it was infrequently at best.
Zed blew out a breath. He’d hoped she’d be able to walk, at least. Maybe he could encourage her to move? Bending down beside her, he scooped one of her arms over his shoulders. She stood when he did, not quite a dead weight. When he took a step forward, her feet dragged, but on a second step, they held her up.
Better than nothing.
“Okay, Kinley, we’re out of here.”
“Red. Shit. Zed—they figured—damn it, they weren’t supposed to find—smartass doctors—fuck.”
“Take a breath, Ryan.”
“Don’t tell me to take a breath. Fucking covert ops,” Ryan muttered. It sounded like a curse he said often. “Look, they’re coming back.”
Zed hobbled out of the door. Kinley helped with maybe every third step. If they got cornered now, he’d have to let her go to fight—and that would leave both of them vulnerable. Evasion was the best bet. “How long?”
“Not—Christ, not long. They’re—okay, you know what? No. Just no.”
The tone in Ryan’s voice made Zed’s heart skip. “Ryan, don’t—”
Bulkhead doors slammed shut behind Zed. Alarms blared, a different cadence than the ones Ryan had triggered earlier to signal a medical emergency. These ones indicated that the ship was under attack. Zed’s eyes widened as the implications of Ryan’s actions set in.
“Fuck, what did you do?”
“You’re getting out. You and Kinley. You’ve got a clear shot to the shuttle bay. Quadrant EC76. I’ve got the bridge and other areas locked down.” Ryan chuckled grimly.
Oh, God. “They’re going to trace this back to you. Charge you with treason.”
“Just get to a shuttle. The Chaos is out there, waiting.” He made a sharp noise as Zed drew in a breath to continue the argument. “Stop. You’re wasting time, Major. You’ve got a mission and so do I.”
The woman braced beside him wasn’t a friend—not the way Emma had been or Ryan was, buddies since childhood—but she’d been a teammate. Someone he’d made promises to, the same promises he’d made Emma and the rest of the team. The ones he’d promptly broken. Kinley deserved more than this end. He hefted her weight, securing her against his side, and started in the direction of the lift that would take them to the shuttle bay.
“Make them fight for it,” Zed growled.
“You know it.” The breath Ryan exhaled sounded shaky, but his voice was sure. “Follow the pulsing lights. Your route is clear. If that changes, I’ll let you know.”
With every corner Zed turned, he expected to come face-to-face with a squad of soldiers—but it never happened. True to his word, Ryan kept the path to the shuttles open. Shouts reverberated on the other side of doors as Zed passed, but he didn’t slow down, didn’t pause. His foot burned with each step. His muscles ached, still feeling the abuse of the stin poison and its aftermath. Kinley seemed to grow heavier, less capable of helping.
By the time they stumbled into the shuttle bay, Zed was running on fumes. He’d been a soldier in worse conditions—his body remembered, even if he didn’t want to, and it carried him to the nearest shuttle. Zed had half thought that the massive shuttle bay would have some personnel, but it was echoingly empty.
When he mentioned it to Ryan, he couldn’t mistake the pride in the other man’s voice. “I faked an airlock failure. Not too many guys willing to risk that, even if they know the system is being fucked with.”
“Good thinking.”
“I know.”
Zed strapped Kinley into one of the shuttle’s seats, then collapsed into the pilot’s chair. The dash wavered and he braced his hands on it, blinking, until his vision straightened itself out. Not a lot of sleep in the past couple of days, not enough water, definitely not enough food, paired with the adrenaline in his system—yeah, no wonder his stamina stuttered at the first hint of safety.
“We’re in.” Zed triggered the holo interface, hoping and praying that the shuttle still had its emergency tutorials in place. In theory, a shuttle wasn’t much more complicated than a skipper, but at least a skipper stayed close to the ground. And in the atmosphere of a planet. If he fucked up a command on one of the small, agile military transports, it probably wasn’t going to kill everyone on board. Unless he really fucked up. A little mistake here, though...
Think positive.
The tutorials were there. Zed engaged them and followed the steps they recommended, running the shuttle through its preflight diagnostics. It wasn’t something Flick ever did with the Chaos—that was more Qek’s style, though even she skipped the full array.
“Okay, head to—” A crash sliced across the comm. Muffled shouting. Then, “Shit! Zed, go! The Chaos will find you. Tell Marnie—”
“Ryan!” Zed held up his cuff and screamed into it again. “Ryan!”
Silence.
“Fuck. Fuck.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then repositioned his fingers over the shuttle’s controls. Ry
an had given up everything to make sure he and Kinley had this shot at freedom.
Zed wasn’t going to blow it.
Chapter Sixteen
Jupiter was two years distant from the Cambridge. Millions of kilometers. Her moons would provide no safe haven for the Chaos, or any shuttle Zed managed to secure. Felix maneuvered his ship through relatively empty space instead, attention fixed on the sensor array, hands curled like claws over the navigation panel. Beside him, Qek held a similar posture. They’d been in Sol for two hours, and each had stretched interminably.
“The Cambridge is in sensor range,” Qek said.
Felix opened a general channel. “Any word from Ryan?”
The bridge door slid open and Marnie answered him directly. “Nothing for five minutes.” She sounded worried, as she should be. Ryan had been sending regular updates every two minutes. A batch of code that when unraveled, traced Zed’s progress through the massive drift. No actual coordinates, but with Marnie’s knowledge of the Cambridge, she’d been able to plot his course. The idea was to keep the Chaos near possible escape trajectories, because they all knew that if—when—Zed left the Cambridge, he wouldn’t have much time.
The display beneath Felix’s fingertips flashed once, then a small speck appeared at the outer edge of the local map. “Is that—”
“A second signature.” Smaller than the Cambridge.
The bottom dropped out of Felix’s stomach. Despite the painful crook of his fingers, his hands trembled. The quiver of fear touched his throat. He swallowed. “Time to test these shields.” His voice was not steady.
“Plotting an intercept course.”
They could be plotting to intercept a military transport, or a piece of debris. But in his gut—the part left behind—Felix knew they were moving toward Zed.
“Anything from the Cambridge?”
“A lot of noise, nothing from Ryan—wait...” Marnie remained silent a moment and Felix imagined her fiddling with the holo display over her bracelet. He could picture her face, lips bitten, eyes focused downward.
They drew closer to the speck.
“Do we dare risk communication?”
“Can we identify the hull?” Felix asked.
Qek ran a subroutine. “Not yet. The craft is still too distant.”
“Fuck it, use our new comm system to send a nondirectional hail. If it’s not him, we’ll have hopefully distracted someone.”
It was Zed. Had to be Zed! Felix leaned forward over his console, as if he could push the Chaos faster with the power of his need.
“No response to our hail,” Qek announced, though the silence of the comm had already relayed that point. “But I can confirm that it is a shuttle craft. It appears to be on an unstable trajectory.”
“Unstable?”
“No flight path locked in. I suspect it is being flown manually.”
“It must be them!” Several more contacts flashed at the edge of the navigational display. “We need to make contact with that shuttle. Now.”
* * *
Lights pulsed and skittered across the shuttle’s controls, status indicators that Zed didn’t care to understand. Now that he was sitting, all he wanted to do was close his eyes.
Not yet. Not safe yet.
He forced his eyes open wide. Blinked a few times. A glance over his shoulder indicated that Kinley hadn’t moved from the position in which he’d placed her. Her chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm—that and the occasional flutter of her eyelids the only signs that she was still alive. He was tempted to talk to her, try to pull her mind back from the blankness, but he didn’t. Honestly, it was probably better for her to be absent now. The stress of waiting would just send her back into the Zone anyway.
Sighing, Zed turned back to the dash and spotted a new light. He brushed a finger across it.
“Shuttle, this is the Chaos. Please acknowledge. Over.”
Oh, thank God. One thing gone right. Zed wilted with relief. “Qek, it’s me.”
Clicks echoed across the connection. “It is so good to hear your voice, Zander. Fixer will have a cat.”
Eh, close enough to the right saying. He smiled at the shuttle’s controls even though the comm was audio only.
“We have detected several more signatures leaving the Cambridge.”
“Let me talk to him—”
Flick. Damn it. Zed couldn’t say what he wanted, what he needed to say with one very big thing on the verge of going wrong.
Qek clearly got Flick to leave the comm alone, somehow. Her calmer tone was welcome. “Are you finding it difficult to pilot the shuttle?”
“Well, if I wasn’t before—”
The craft shuddered. Zed braced himself against the dash, scanning the indicators for any clue what was happening. The vibrations of the engines ceased, grinding to a low, inaudible hum instead of the steady whine that said he was moving forward.
“Shit. I think I broke it.”
“I do not think that was your doing, Zander. I am reading another signal emanating from the signatures closing in on your position.”
Sure enough, the signatures the Chaos had detected appeared on the shuttle’s control interface. Clearly the Cambridge had gotten its shit together and sent out a retrieval crew, who’d gotten close enough to trigger some sort of...something. Shutdown protocol? Was that something programmed into AEF shuttles? Clearly, he should’ve spent more time bugging ship techs during mission transports instead of hanging out with the rest of the grunts in the gym. Shit. What would they do? Board him? Surround the shuttle and herd him back to the Cambridge? Or just shoot him out of the black?
He needed time to think of a plan. “Stay back. Stay hidden. And...Qek?” Zed paused, all the things he wanted to say sounding too much like goodbye or some dramatic deathbed confession. He didn’t want to go there. “Never mind.”
The pings on the console got closer to his disabled shuttle. He wasn’t surprised to see a comms light pop up a moment later, and flicked it on with the swipe of a finger.
“Shuttle Delta-Sigma-One, you have been disabled under orders from the Allied Earth Forces ship Cambridge. Stand down. Repeat, stand down. We will escort you back to dock.”
“Like I have a choice,” Zed muttered.
His gaze rested on the Guardian cuff and he froze. Maybe...maybe he did.
The bracelet acted as a comm and a universal lockpick, which meant it had some means of manipulating electrical impulses and computerized commands. Interfacing. Bridging. Undermining?
Not much to lose if he was wrong.
Brushing his fingers across the smooth metal, Zed visualized what he wanted. Control of the shuttle. Disruption of the Cambridge-enforced shutdown. Escape. One by one, lights that had dimmed or flipped to red when the shuttle had been disabled reignited. The whine of the engines increased. Zed couldn’t help but give the cuff a kiss.
Then he attacked the controls, sending the shuttle scooting away from the incoming escort.
He heard curses over the AEF comms until he switched to the channel Qek had pinged earlier. “Qek! Chaos! Coordinates!” A loud beeping cut through the cabin—a sound he hadn’t heard since well before the end of the war. The shuttle had been painted with a targeting system. “Now would be really, really good!”
The drone of the alarm reached a fevered pitch. Zed couldn’t tell where the shot was going to come from—fuck, avoiding it was out of the question. He couldn’t make the shuttle dance, he wasn’t good enough. The alarm’s tone rose to a crescendo—then silence. Sudden and absolute.
Zed sucked in a shaky breath just as the shot exploded on the starboard side of the shuttle. Not a direct hit, more a warning shot, but it was enough to stagger the little craft. More alarms, a cacophony, and lights flared all over the board.
�
�I’m in trouble.” The targeting alarm sounded again. “Shit, I’m in so much trouble.” The beeping increased in tempo, indicating that the targeting was getting closer to locking on once more. Coordinates flowed into one of the holoscreens, the Chaos’s location, he assumed, but it was too late. He couldn’t bring the wolves to the Chaos’s airlock.
He didn’t want to sit here and wait to die, either.
Slapping the AEF frequency, he yelled, “I want to negotiate!”
“Shuttle Delta-Sigma-One, you have violated a direct order and we are authorized to use deadly force.”
“You sure about that?”
“I—what?” The pilot seemed to regroup. “Stand down, Shuttle, or we will—”
“Tell Bradley I’ll talk. General Thomas Bradley. I’ll talk, tell him everything. On one condition.”
“You are not in the position to—”
“Fucking get General Bradley on the horn or I will ram one of your goddamned fighters and then neither of us will be in the position to do anything!” He muted the AEF channel and turned to the Chaos one. “Qek? If things go to plan, you’ll have a passenger coming aboard shortly.”
“Roger, Zander. I will inform Elias.” She paused. “Just one?”
Before he could reply, Bradley’s gruff tones sounded across the comm. “Major Anatolius—”
Zed flipped off the mute. “Just drop the ‘major.’ After all this shit, I don’t want the rank anymore.”
“Fair enough. You want to negotiate?”
“Yeah.” Zed sucked in a shaky breath. “Let me drop Kinley off on the Chaos, and I’ll turn myself in.”
“Lieutenant Webb is a patient in the care of the AEF. She was getting round-the-clock medical care aboard the Cambridge.”
“She was locked in what amounts to a cell while they waited for her to die—or maybe they were running tests. Trials.” God, a guinea pig to the end. Revolting. “She deserves more than that, General.”
The comm was silent for so long, Zed feared he’d lost Bradley’s signal. Then the general sighed. “I can’t argue that.”