She paused a few rungs down from the top and watched as Ballard pushed himself up and out of the water, his palm flat on the platform and his good arm and abs flexing. When he pulled one leg up onto the platform and then the other, the fins curled around his legs, seeming to seal themselves in place.
She glanced at his wounds as he turned, suddenly wondering if she shouldn’t have been more careful when she’d been wrapped around him. “Your shoulder looks much better.”
He flashed her a quick grin. “It’s the salt water. My ancestors were engineered to be one with the ocean, as much as an air breathing creature who walks on two legs can be, anyway.”
Another pang of envy—and admiration—tweaked the center of her chest. What she wouldn’t give to be “one with the ocean” the way Ballard was. If she was, they could do this all the time . . . Her envy condensed into a tight, uneasy point in the middle of her stomach. What would happen after she got back home? Would she ever even see Ballard again?
Her brows lowered as she tried to push down the curious twinge around her heart. She shouldn’t be thinking about whether she was going to see Ballard again. They’d had some fun—well, it was more than just fun, she’d admit that. But regardless, she shouldn’t harbor any expectations going forward. She shouldn’t be thinking about the future at all right now. Like Ballard said, they had important things to attend to.
As she pulled her hair over one shoulder and squeezed water from it, she watched him, her eyes roaming over the contours of his body and watching the way his hands moved as he strapped his belt around his waist. A flutter of excitement began to gather low in her core again.
When he turned to her, she thought she could see heat behind his gaze and wondered if he was having the same thoughts. By the way his eyes lingered on her body as she stepped into her jumpsuit, she was fairly certain he was.
He waited until she was fully clothed and then came to her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He bent over her, nuzzling into her wet hair. “Don’t tempt me,” he said, his lips brushing against her ear.
She laughed softly. “I won’t if you won’t.” She marveled at the husky tone of her own voice. What man had ever affected her this way? She flipped through her memories of past encounters, but they all seemed pale and distant, somehow very hollow compared to what she’d experienced with Ballard.
She took a deep breath and pulled back a little. “We should get going.”
He nodded, giving her a comically sad face. She laughed and scooped up her wet bikini and wadded sarong off the floor and slipped the strap of her pouch around her wrist.
Still in a haze of endorphins and contented satisfaction, she let Ballard guide her back toward the control room. He held her hand, only letting go when they had to climb ladders to get to higher levels.
When they neared the door, there was an insistent, repetitive beeping noise coming from inside the control room. Talia’s stomach dipped. That couldn’t be good. She caught Ballard’s face in profile as he pushed through the door, and his eyes were wide with alarm.
Chapter Ten
Ballard’s heart lurched as he rushed to the console and skimmed the monitors, trying to understand the reason for the alarm.
“What is it, what’s wrong?” Talia asked, leaning around him to peer at the readouts and messages.
He scrolled through the warnings and then shook his head in disbelief. “They’re not supposed to be armed.”
“Armed? Who?”
He licked his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. “The Narwhal, the other submarine. This is saying . . .” He scanned the messages again. “This is saying the Narwhal is armed and it has torpedoes trained on us. And they’re threatening to fire.”
“They’d destroy one of the two submarines they have just to kill the two of us?” Talia asked as her brows shot up in disbelief.
Ballard understood her reaction, but it was entirely possible that the Ice Cap rogues now guessed the truth. His Ice Cap superiors didn’t just suspect that he was in league with the raiders. Lieutenant Shoreditch from Ascent Ship Bravo, who had arrived with the others who’d missed the first sub, had told them that he’d known Ballard during the Rebel Wars and had heard Ballard had disappeared after the battles and was presumed dead. Shoreditch had known Ballard as Remy Whitlock, his real name. The rogue Ice Cap group might be brash with their trips to Above, but they weren’t completely lacking powers of logic. They’d had two good reasons to believe that he wasn’t truly on their side and now may have guessed his true mission.
He leaned forward, concentrating on the monitors. The two subs were supposed to be allies. Was there some way he could control and disarm the other one remotely? He found the signal that should have prevented friendly fire, but the Narwhal must have found a way to override it, just as he’d blocked all remote commands to the Sea Dragon.
He pulled the keys from his belt and flipped to the highest-security protocols. If the Narwhal hadn’t changed their codes, he might still be able to get in to their system. He paused and took a breath, quickly running through what he was about to do.
He turned to Talia and showed her the code engraved on the inside of one of the rings. “When I say go, read that sequence to me quickly,” he said.
She nodded and tilted the key so she could see the numbers and letters.
Ballard pulled up the login screen on the left-most monitor and different screens on the middle and right monitors so he wouldn’t have to waste time navigating.
“And . . . go,” he said. His fingers flew over the screen as she read the characters.
He scooted to the middle monitor and reset Narwhal’s master code. Then to the third monitor to disarm the weapons protocols. He got halfway through the task and then the screen froze. He swiped at it, and then cursed under his breath. He didn’t quite get there, but it still may have been enough.
“What is it?” Talia asked, peering anxiously at the monitor.
“I got into their system, but they realized what I was doing.” He leaned back in his chair and brushed his hand over his hair. “I think they did a hard reset. If that’s the case, when their system boots up again, they’ll have to do everything manually.” He turned to her. “Including aiming and firing at us.”
He leaned forward again, returning to the screens for the Sea Dragon, where he pushed the speed into the red zone. There was a deep growl in the bowels of the sub.
“Do you think that’ll be enough?” she asked.
He lifted a shoulder. He didn’t want to lie to her, and the truth was he really didn’t know. “We’ll just have to hope so.”
They both watched the blinking lights on the panel of readouts for several seconds.
Then Talia sighed. “Well, if we’ve done all we can for now, maybe we should take turns trying to get some sleep. It sounds like we’ve got a long—”
There was a hollow crashing sound that shook the sub, and her words dissolved into a startled cry. The Sea Dragon jolted, throwing them both forward. Alarms blared, and Ballard slapped buttons to silence them. Everything went dark, and then the emergency lights flickered on. The sub was eerily still. The power to the engines and reactors had been cut, somehow. All of the power. They were just drifting, the lights and controls now on battery power.
Ballard pushed himself upright. That couldn’t have come from the Narwhal. “What in the . . .” He checked readouts, not knowing enough about the mechanics of the sub to understand the malfunction.
One of the monitors flickered, and a face appeared—a masked face. Ballard’s chest clenched. “Looks like you’ve run into a bit of difficulty, Sea Dragon. Troublesome to take on water in your engine compartments!”
Talia gasped, and Ballard could feel her growing panic. He reached for her hand and squeezed it, trying to also calm his own pounding heart.
“What do you want?” Ballard asked, assuming that if the raiders had broken into the monitor feed, they could also pick up audio in the control room.
“We w
ant your ride, first of all. And apparently someone else is after the two of you, which makes you valuable. So instead of killing you, we’ll hold onto you and see if anyone would like to do a little trade. Nice of you to subdue them for us, by the way.”
Ballard ground his teeth and let out a string of silent curses in his head. Another raider vessel had been lurking nearby, apparently, and he’d just given them the perfect opportunity to take the two submarines and probably the Ice Cap rogues’ base, too.
“What if we don’t like that idea?” Ballard asked, trying to stall while his mind raced for a way out of the situation.
The man under the black hood laughed. “I don’t think that’s going to make much difference.”
The live video feed blinked out.
“And I thought we could at least get away,” Talia said, and let out a laugh that sounded a bit too much like a panicked sob.
He squeezed her hand again and then let go. “We’re not going to give up yet. I’m going to try to undo what I did to the Narwhal. The raiders are a serious threat to them, and if they’re really armed, they’ll have to go after the raider vessel.”
He created a Mayday message, set it on a loop to the Narwhal, and then tried to get into the Narwhal’s systems. But the other sub must have been still in reboot. He scrubbed his hands down his face. Somehow everything had spun from a bad dream into a full-fledged nightmare.
He switched consoles and tried to contact the Ice Cap base, sending the same Mayday message there. After a long minute, he got a short, coded message that came on a different channel. It said it was from Vice Minister Casta.
The dogfish is loose in the yard.
He stared at it for a long moment, reading it several times to be sure he wasn’t imagining things. That was a Trench Military code that meant reinforcements were within striking distance. He’d assumed that VM Casta was a traitor, but . . .
He pulled Talia’s arm to draw her near and then leaned close so he could whisper in her ear in case the raiders were listening. “I think we might have an ally close by.”
As she watched Ballard work at the consoles, Talia tried not to dissolve into a puddle of despair. The pirates were back. They’d somehow cut the submarine’s power. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.
When he turned to her and said there was an ally out there, she couldn’t let herself believe him.
She shook her head. “It’s probably just a trick.”
“I don’t think so.” He held her gaze, his green flecked eyes intent. Then he leaned in again, his lips at her ear. “I don’t want the raiders to overhear. I just got a coded message from Vice Minister Casta. A Trench Military code. That means he knows I’m not Ice Cap, but he didn’t give me away. He must be part of my mission. I don’t know how he ended up here, but . . .” He glanced again at the screen. “He says there are reinforcements within striking distance. That means they’re close.”
Against her will, her heart started to lift.
Something was happening on one of the monitors, and Ballard straightened and began working through screens. “The Narwhal is back online,” he said. “I’m resetting their security and ability to arm.”
She watched him work for a few seconds. “Ballard,” she said quietly. “All of this is because of the plague, isn’t it?”
He flicked a glance at her. “What?”
“The plague.” She frowned and shook her head. “The rogue Ice Cap men started going to the surface—Above, as you call it—to take women like me for our eggs. If the plague hadn’t wiped out so many women down here, and caused most of the survivors to become barren, they wouldn’t have had a reason to go Above in the first place.”
Ballard’s hand paused, hovering over the screen. “You’re probably right. Even the raiders haven’t tried to go Above. They’re black market traders and opportunists, and dangerous, certainly, but even they’ve abided by the First Tenet. It’s our most important law, the one that says we mustn’t interfere with the people Above.”
She slumped, suddenly not sure she could summon the strength to even keep herself upright. “It’s just so terribly unfortunate because it didn’t have to be this way. Your people have been isolated for so long, you lost the ability—and probably the immune system function—to combat any serious communicable disease. But I just know that I could do something. Even now, though the plague is widespread and it’s too late for many of the women, I know I could still help you.”
Before he could answer, the console began beeping urgently. Ballard scanned the monitors and then smiled broadly. “The Trench Military is here.”
Talia straightened. “Are you sure?”
He pointed to a blinking light on a panel and then to a string of letters and numbers streaming across one monitor.
There was a series of loud clanks that seemed to ring out through the hull of the sub. Talia inhaled sharply. “That must be the pirates. How close are your guys?”
“Not close enough,” Ballard said grimly. “We may have to hold them off.”
She nodded, adrenaline energizing her. She stood and went to the door. “If they’re going to try to board, we should barricade ourselves in.”
“And first get more rifles.” Ballard joined her and opened the door. “Go to the armory and get a few more pistols and as much ammo as you can carry.” He showed her what type of bullets to look for, and then held out the keys. “These will open the locked cabinets. I’m going to look for things to block the door.”
Talia’s pulse was so swift she could barely catch her breath. Ballard gave her directions to the armory, and she took off at a run. More clanks and groans echoed through the dark sub as she took one turn after another. She propped open the armory door to try to let in a little light, but the one emergency light in the hallway was several yards away.
Feeling her way into the room, she found a locked cabinet and swiped the keys over the front of it. It popped open and she reached in, her fingers brushing the cool metal of a row of rifles. She went through the other cabinets until she found smaller guns, the harpoon pistols.
Her eyes had adjusted enough to locate the bullets for the pistols, which were packaged in tight rolls. She stuck a pistol in each pocket of her jumpsuit, then started stacking ammunition on one arm. Holding as many bullet rolls as she could carry, and with the keys hooked over one finger, she pushed the armory door closed with her foot and locked it. No sense in giving the pirates easy access to all those weapons.
About halfway back to the control room, there was a rumble in the lower part of the sub. She paused to listen. Had the pirates gotten in? Her heart in her throat, she raced the rest of the way to the control room and locked herself inside.
Breathing hard, she stood there for a moment before she realized that Ballard wasn’t back. The weight in her arms further brought her focus back to her surroundings, and she dumped the bullets on the floor next to the consoles and then pulled the pistols from her pockets. They were unlike any guns she’d ever seen, but she didn’t think they were loaded. She fumbled with a latch until a compartment fell open. There were no holes for bullets, but it looked like an entire roll might fit in the space.
She sat on the floor where she’d left the ammo and grabbed one roll. It slid into the compartment with a satisfying click. She snapped it shut and noticed that a tiny green light had illuminated on top of the barrel. Green had to be good. Ballard had shown her how to turn the safety switch on and off. She turned the safety on so she could put the pistol back in her pocket without worrying about accidentally firing it.
Where was Ballard? She watched the door, chewing on her lip. When a minute passed and he didn’t appear, she rose and slipped into the console chair he usually sat in.
Blinking lights, lines of commands, system readouts . . . She examined the panels of switches and buttons. Ballard had said most of them were only for manual operations, and as she’d watched him, he’d hardly touched any of those. He’d used the monitors to program
commands.
She turned to the right-most monitor, where there was a static menu with several options. Before she could scan down the list, there was a loud bang behind her. She jumped and turned, then hurried to the door.
“Talia, it’s me!” Ballard yelled.
She unlocked the door, and he rushed in. “What’s going on?”
He reached the console in a few long strides. “A couple of the raiders got in through the torpedo tubes. I killed them and sealed it off.” He glanced up at the ceiling, probably wondering as Talia was whether the pirates were listening to them.
“Are you sure there aren’t more?” Talia asked.
He nodded grimly. “I caught them just as they were coming in.”
“How close are your guys, the Trench team?”
He scanned the monitors and readouts. “They’re . . .” He frowned and his gaze swept the monitors again. He scanned through a bunch of information she didn’t try to decipher; instead, she watched his face, which was pinched with tension. “They’re here, but we’ve got a situation.”
Talia’s stomach dropped at his tone.
He looked back and forth, as if trying to make sense of it all. “Trench has two armed vessels. The Ice Cap base is armed, and now the Narwhal is re-armed. The raiders are armed, too.”
She pushed her fingers through her still-damp hair. “So if someone fires, we’re going to have a real mess on our hands.”
“An epic mess.” Ballard hurriedly typed several lines of text. “I’m trying to open communications with Ice Cap.” He shook his head. “This is not good.”
Before Talia could respond, at least three different alarms exploded through the small space, and red lights began to flash all over the console. Messages were flashing across the monitors, but she couldn’t even focus long enough to read them.
Ballard’s lips were moving. It looked like he was cursing, but the alarms drowned him out.
Talia sat frozen, sure that the sub was going to explode, or fill with water, any second.
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 123