Flashpoint

by Christie Golden

  * * *

  Matt believed her at once. For one thing, he could hear the yelling in the background, and for another, Annabelle was as steady and levelheaded a crewman as he could hope to have. If the “engineers” sent to “help” were blocking her from contacting Travis on the Bucephalus—“Contact Raynor at once,” he ordered.

  Static. The communications officer turned to him helplessly. He didn’t need to say a word.

  “Marcus, what’s the status on those ships outside the belt?”

  “They’re—Sir,” Marcus said, turning to his captain, “they’re entering the Kirkegaard Belt.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The meal had progressed to dessert, but the conversation had not progressed at all. Narud was still pushing his point, Jim was still digging his heels in, and Valerian was still trying to mediate. The dessert was very good—a berry cobbler of some sort that smelled as good as heaven and tasted as sweet as sin.

  “Oh, and Valerian,” said Narud, “I’ve had some port brought in for you specially. You do prefer tawny ports to ruby, do you not?” The servers brought an old, dusty bottle and three small glasses.

  “Indeed I do. How thoughtful of you to remember.” As the drinks were poured, Valerian said to Jim, “My father and I have similarities as well as differences. We both enjoy a fine port. He prefers the ruby ports, I the tawny.”

  Jim accepted the drink readily. He figured if this dinner was some sort of elaborate way to poison him, it’d have been done earlier in the meal. And he was never one to turn down a good drink—or, usually, even a poor one.

  He took a sip. It was almost as good as the dessert. “Huh. Cherries and caramel, kinda.”

  Valerian raised a blond brow approvingly. “You have a discerning palate, Mr. Raynor.”

  “Odd, since I’m used to drinking the cheap stuff,” said Jim, feeling no sense of shame at the statement. He was rarely ashamed of the truth. He took another sip. He could get used to this.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying it, Prince Valerian,” said Narud. He nodded to the server. “Please—clear the table and bring in the ruby port.”

  “But the man said it was his father who . . . . ”

  And then Jim knew, a fraction of a heartbeat before the doors irised open and three armed, but unarmored, guards appeared. Valerian gazed at them in utter confusion. Even as his senses sharpened and his mind went into high gear on how to get out, Jim felt a strange pang of sympathy for the kid.

  “You son of a bitch,” said Raynor to Narud.

  “Emil—what—?” Valerian couldn’t even seem to form a complete sentence, he merely turned to stare at his “friend” with an open mouth and shocked, wide gray eyes.

  “Mr. Raynor has figured it out,” said Narud. He smiled thinly. “I regret to inform you, Your Excellency, that your father will be here in a few moments. With,” he added, “what’s left of the entire fleet at his back.”

  Valerian still looked completely stunned. He looked over at Jim, his eyes wide. Jim looked back at him steadily.

  You ain’t a telepath like Sarah, Jim thought, but you’re no fool either. You’ve been around me and Matt long enough. Read my eyes. Figure it out, Valerian. You be ready, damn you. Or we’re both dead.

  Jim gave a shrug and reached for the bottle of port. “Well, since this is likely the last nice thing I’m going to have, might as well have another—”

  He leaped to his feet and threw the port at the first guard, who ducked, but not fast enough. The bottle grazed the man’s temple.

  Valerian jumped up the second Jim sprang up to throw, charging at the guard nearest him with two of the very fine, very sharp steak knives. The guard, who had been completely fooled by Valerian’s feigned helplessness, raised his gun a half second too late. He dropped, gurgling, as blood gushed from his mouth. Two knives were embedded hilt deep in his throat. Valerian seized the dropped weapon and turned to fire on the third guard. He riddled the guard’s body with steel-tipped spikes.

  Good boy, Jim thought, grabbing a chair to follow the path of the bottle. This man, though, had been expecting the attack. He dove out of the way, rolling and coming up firing.

  “You fools!” snarled Narud. “You think you’ll escape? Prometheus is my station, and it’s crawling with my people and Mengsk’s!”

  Jim dove under the table. He gritted his teeth, braced his feet firmly, and visualized Tychus Findlay lifting the jukebox so long ago as he straightened his legs and heaved the table upright. It was massive, but not so large that it didn’t turn over. Narud, who had still been sitting, sprang up and stumbled backward.

  Jim leaped for him—

  And landed hard on the floor on nothing.

  Narud had vanished.

  “What the—” Laughter greeted him, smug and satisfied, from over by the door.

  For an instant, Jim couldn’t comprehend what was going on. Then he remembered the xel’naga-inspired “pin” Narud was wearing.

  “Is that a piece of a xel’naga artifact, Doctor? It looks like one.”

  “Heavens no. Just a little tribute I had designed, hoping to honor Miss Kerrigan.”

  Sarah Kerrigan—ghost. The goddamn pin was a Moebius reactor.

  “Valerian! He’s got a cloaking suit—by the door!”

  “A bit busy at the moment,” grunted Valerian. Jim looked up to see that more guards were streaming into the room. He scrambled for the weapons from the dead guards and motioned to Valerian to join him behind the table. It wasn’t much protection, but it was a little better than simply standing up and presenting one’s chest as a target.

  “How many?” asked Jim.

  “I counted six,” Valerian said. His body was taut, focused, and each move was exactly what was needed, no more. Jim spared a nanosecond to be impressed.

  “We can pick them off as they come in the door,” said Jim. “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Fine suggestion. Care to elaborate?”

  Two more guards stuck their heads into the door. Jim and Valerian each took one, and the guards fell with their heads impaled.

  “Don’t know yet. We gotta get Sarah and Egon too.”

  “She’s dead already,” whispered a silky voice at his ear. Jim whirled and started firing, but Narud had already slipped away again. Raynor willed his heart to slow, willed the red curtain of anger that clouded his judgment to evaporate. He’d seen Sarah in action. He knew what to look for—a slight shimmering, caught at the edge of one’s vision. Easy to shrug off as a trick of the light or one’s imagination—if one didn’t know better.

  Jim knew better. “Keep firing,” he said to Valerian. “Hold the door. I’m going for Narud.”

  He let his gaze go soft, inviting the blur out of the corner of his eye to appear again. His body raged with impatience, but he forced a cool head and steady breathing. He allowed the sound of weapons fire, so urgent and demanding of attention, to fade into background noise. Only calmness would gain him the desired result—and oh, he badly desired to destroy Narud, he who would dare harm Sarah Kerrigan.

  And there it was. A slight distortion of space, a little blurring of the gentle sky-blue color of the wall. He whirled to his left and started firing, but again, nothing happened.

  Even so, he smiled. “Didn’t get him,” Jim said to Valerian. “But I got the next best thing. A way for us to get the hell out of this room.”

  * * *

  Matt knew exactly what had to happen and when and how if the Hyperion had even a slim chance of making it out of this alive. “Annabelle, listen carefully. I’m sending in backup. Don’t say anything to anyone. I’m betting those guys are armed to the teeth. Let Rory keep arguing. Can you quietly get some help and start trying to undo whatever it is they’ve done to the power cells?”

  “I—sure. I’m on it.” He could hear her falter, just for an instant, then recover. Like a Raider should.

  “You were right about the B
ucephalus. We’re cut off from it and the station. If your navigator friend is as sharp as you say he is, he’ll notice the ships too.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure he will.” She wasn’t. Neither was Matt.

  He contacted security and had several very irate crew members armor up and head for engineering. He sent out another call to the Bucephalus, which went unanswered.

  “Marcus, you monitor the Bucephalus. Let me know if it starts prepping for battle.”

  “Sir,” said Marcus, “do you think that the Bucephalus might be in on this?”

  “It’s possible,” said Matt. “If Valerian’s a traitor.”

  “But—you don’t think he is?”

  “Let me put it to you this way,” Matt said. “The only one I trust is Jim right now. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to attack the Bucephalus if they’re in the same situation as we are. You kill your enemies, not your allies.” You just have to know which is which, he added silently. He was taking an awful risk not turning on the Bucephalus and blasting it while its shields were down; that was the safe course of action. But he knew in his heart that it wasn’t the right one.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “Sir, they’re putting their shields up and prepping for battle,” said Marcus. “But we’ve not been targeted.”

  Matt nodded. “Estimated time of that . . . armada’s arrival?”

  “Approximately seventeen seconds.”

  “How the hell did it move so fast?” he wondered aloud. “Of course they know the route, but it took us hours.”

  “They’ve been blasting some of the smaller asteroids and towing the pieces away,” said Marcus quietly. “They’ve even pulverized some of them.”

  “Oh,” replied Matt. “That . . . would do it.” Hell with following the route. The ships had simply made their own shortcuts.

  Eight seconds.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  * * *

  Sarah had called for the nurse. No one had answered. She was completely alone in Prometheus’s sick bay, having been too wrapped up in her own thoughts of guilt and worry to have noticed the nurses had all quietly departed.

  Alone.

  And they were coming for her.

  She disengaged herself from the drips and dressed in the jumpsuit she had asked to have brought to her awhile ago, determined that she wasn’t going to die in a hospital gown. She was sorry she had eaten. The delicious meal sat heavy and churning in her belly. It would slow her down when—

  When what?

  She was so abysmally far from the top of her game it was laughable. Suddenly she remembered standing alone, out of ammo, knowing she had been abandoned. Knowing they were coming—not just dozens, but hundreds, perhaps thousands of zerg, descending upon her. Once, Mengsk had saved her. But that day, he had left her to die.

  Something had stilled and slowed inside her. Bitter anguish had turned to dull, sad acceptance. Fighting was futile. She couldn’t win, not against so many zerg.

  She couldn’t win now. They were coming, and they would take her, and that was all there was to say. Maybe they wouldn’t torture her. Maybe—

  And then it was there, sharp and clear and brutal, like harsh sunlight glinting on a knife blade. She recognized it for what it was at once, and the very familiarity of it suddenly galvanized her.

  Alpha waves. They were sending a cloaked ghost. Set a thief to catch a thief.

  No!

  The door opened, and without even thinking, her body and mind snapping into action, she lifted her hand, focused her psionic energy, and blasted the invisible foe into a wall. There was a crunch and a shimmer as the corpse, now visible, slid down the white surface. He had not come alone, of course. Four guards rushed in, but before they could fire, she froze their motion and, snarling, turned their brains to soup. They dropped, dead in an instant, fluid leaking out of eyes, ears, noses, and mouths.

  For the briefest of instants, Sarah realized that not only had her abilities returned but they also had come back stronger than before. She had always been good—no, the best—at what she did. Killing. But now she had suddenly become a demigod. For a second, the revelation troubled her, and then her thoughts went elsewhere.

  Jim!

  He was in immediate and deadly danger.

  They all were—

  The base rocked, as if it was little more than a child’s plaything and the child had grown irritated with it. What the hell could possibly do that to a space station inside an asteroid? Had someone rigged the place to explode?

  And then suddenly she knew, and her body went rigid with hatred. The base was under attack.

  “Oh, no you don’t, you son of a bitch,” she growled, feeling rage swell up inside her, fill her face with blood, shoot adrenaline through her veins. “Not this time. Not ever again.”

  * * *

  Egon was rather proud of himself. He’d managed to stay calm, locate a box of test beakers, break one, and was now using the sharp fragment to saw at his wrist bonds.

  Suddenly the floor beneath him shuddered. Boxes trembled on their shelves for an instant before tumbling down on him. Egon lifted his still partially bound hands to ward off the boxes and yelped as the sharp piece of glass dug into his palm. Then it was over.

  “Jeez,” he breathed, repeating the word over and over again. Just as he’d calmed down a little bit, the sharp, angry wail of an alert klaxon sounded. Then a calm, recorded voice began to announce, “Attention. Space Station Prometheus is under attack. Await further instructions. Attention . . . ”

  He groped with a bloody hand for the piece of glass and continued working on the bonds. Finally they snapped, and he turned to his feet. The shard, slicked with fluid, was slippery, but he managed to free himself. Well, at least from the bonds. He still didn’t know if the door would open.

  He rose clumsily, his feet numb from the tightness of the bonds, grasped the door handle, and hoped hard.

  It didn’t turn.

  Despair, temporarily kept at bay, washed through him. He was still trapped. Trapped on a science station, locked in a small supply closet, and no one knew where he was. If Jim and Valerian were still here, they were prisoners too. He and they would be turned over to Mengsk, who had to be the one behind this attack, and they’d be experimented on or tortured or killed.

  That is, if anyone ever actually found him. More likely he’d die here, alone, slowly, of dehydration, or else be blown to smithereens.

  The door handle turned.

  He froze for an instant, then looked for a place to hide. There were boxes all over the place, but nothing large enough to hide his gangly frame. Grimly Egon decided he would not go down without a fight this time. He grabbed one of the smaller boxes, wincing at the pain in his cut hand, and lifted it over his head.

  The door slammed open. Egon had only the briefest glimpse of a silhouette against the light of the corridor when the box flew from his fingers.

  A hand reached forward, grabbed his coat lapel, and pulled him into the light.

  He stared at a face that was beautiful in its fury, crowned by hair that was not hair but looked like draped serpents.

  “Stay close behind me,” said Sarah Kerrigan, her voice low and intense and as frightening as the expression on her face. “I’m only rescuing you once.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The “engineers” sent to “repair” the Hyperion and, presumably, the Bucephalus, had inadvertently done some good. Needing to maintain their cover while they sabotaged the power cells, they had actually made some repairs. It was the only reason that the Hyperion was able to withstand the attack from three battleships and the Wraiths they bore.

  Engineering was hard at work undoing the damage and restoring communication between the two ships and Space Station Prometheus. There didn’t seem to be any problem receiving communications from the White Star, though.

  “This is Emperor Arcturus Mengsk,” the loathed and familiar voice had said as soon as the fleet app
eared out of the asteroid field. “Surrender and you will escape destruction.”

  “Mengsk,” Matt had said, not even bothering to pretend respect by using a title, “this is Captain Matthew H—”

  “Oh, I know your voice by now, Matt,” said Mengsk. “I know where your boss is . . . and where his little girlfriend is too. There are people aboard your vessel and the Bucephalus who have done work for me, and I’d prefer not to blast them into pieces. Or you, for that matter. You are outgunned and barely limping along. So surrender and save us all a great deal of time and trouble.”

  “Gosh, that sounds just fine, but somehow I don’t think my boss would want me to do that,” Matt said, and nodded to tactical. With no further warning, they unleashed the full power of the Yamato cannon on the White Star.

  And since that volley, things hadn’t slowed. Not Mengsk’s angry threats, nor the retaliatory attack, nor the onslaught on the station. That seemed to be the main target, and Matt thought sickly, why wouldn’t it be? Both Kerrigan and Raynor were on the station.

  He was certain it was Valerian who had tipped off his father. Matt hadn’t really wanted to believe it; Valerian had come perilously close to winning his trust. But the Bucephalus was just sitting there, not moving to attack either side, and Matt Horner thought viciously of Vaughn and his unwillingness to act. He wasn’t surprised that the worm didn’t have the guts to even join Mengsk in the attack.

  * * *

  “I said offline, sir,” said Elias Thompson, the chief engineer of the Bucephalus. He sounded both irritated and frightened, a combination his captain completely understood. “When I say offline, I mean we can’t fire!”

  “They’re going to blast that space station and our prince with it back to the twenty-first century if we don’t help the Hyperion!” snapped Vaughn. His plan had been to join the Hyperion in the attack against Mengsk—who clearly had no intention of reconciling with his son, if he was so hell-bent on attacking Space Station Prometheus with such vigor—the instant it had started. Vaughn intended to send in his fighters and cover them, so at least the poor devils—there were so few vessels left—had some kind of backup from the Bucephalus.