I watched to confirm that Miko’s hand was flying over the navigation controls before I punched my own hand down on the yellow internal communications button. “Shiori! Get to the bridge. Fiona! You too! Do not stop to collect your plants. This is an emergency.”
I swung my eyes back to Jax, nerves riding my spine like an icy comet. “Tell us when we’ve got the juice.”
“We’re good to go,” he answered. “At least to Miko’s new coordinates.”
I nodded. Now we waited for the other two. Usually, I’d just tell them to brace themselves for a jump, but right now, with the Dark Watch threatening to fire on our back end, I wanted everyone up on the bridge.
Every second lasted an eternity with the warship DW 12 and Captain Bridgebane breathing down the Endeavor’s comparatively minuscule neck. I stood there. I didn’t shake. I didn’t move. My head felt numb. But I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. Not in fear, although there was plenty of that, too. No, it was rage boiling in my chest.
Shiori finally rushed through the bridge doors first, her fingers gliding along the wall. Miko ran to her grandmother, took her by the hand, and then quickly guided the older woman toward my abandoned chair. With her good arm, Miko practically threw the tiny Shiori into my captain’s seat, strapped her in, and then locked the chair back down again, not leaving me much room at my console.
Miko raced back to her navigation controls. Shiori blindly reached out to me.
“I think I got us into big trouble,” I said, taking her fragile hand.
Her skin felt paper-thin, and the veins stood out, but Shiori squeezed my fingers with surprising strength. “We’ve been ghosts for five years already, child. You gave us many more days.”
The heat of unwanted emotion climbed up my throat just as my console flashed with new information. Incoming cruiser—starboard side. 200 meters.
I shot a look at Jax. “We can’t wait.” Fiona was going to have to deal with taking a fall.
He nodded, and I grabbed the edge of my console for balance.
“Go!” I cried.
Jaxon hit the small, round button that had saved our lives too many times to count, and everything went dark and weightless as the Endeavor shot through space. My bones seemed to crunch and shudder and then bounce back to normal again as the ship slowed practically before it got moving. That was the shortest jump of my life.
I shook my head to clear it and then studied the view outside the bridge’s windows again.
Mighty Powers that Be… The Black Widow was all I could see.
“You’re certifiable, Tess,” Jax murmured.
Yeah. I kind of had to agree.
I swallowed hard. “They won’t follow.”
The com blared like that awful prison whistle again, sending through Bridgebane’s clipped voice. “Captain Bailey, you are now under military arrest. Jump again and all crew members on board the Endeavor will be deprived of a trial. Our boarding cruiser jumped after you, and DW 12 followed. Prepare for entry on your starboard side.”
I cursed. How could I have forgotten that Bridgebane was as ballsy as I was?
Fiona burst onto the bridge, spitting mad. She was barefoot and wearing leggings and a tank top, which probably meant she’d been in a hazmat jumpsuit a few minutes earlier and had needed to get out of it before leaving her secure lab. No wonder she hadn’t shown up in time for the jump. At least she’d listened to me and hadn’t stopped to collect her specimens. The botanist had her priorities, and they were plants.
“What the hell is going on?” Fiona demanded. “I just cracked my head on the wall when you jumped without even telling me to brace myself. And I swear, I’m this close to finding a cure for Shiori’s blindness. Those vaccines are full of good stuff—like superpower stuff.”
“Those vaccines just got us followed practically into the mouth of a black hole,” I said, sweeping my hand at the bridge windows.
Fiona looked around, and her eyes widened. “Holy shit!” She stumbled back. “Are you crazy?”
I gave a small shrug. “The Dark Watch was breathing down our necks.”
“The Dark Watch is always breathing down our necks!”
“Yeah. Well this time, they’re trying to board us as we speak, and a warship got close enough to get visual confirmation on the stolen lab.”
“So jump the hell out of 14!” Fiona cried.
“We can’t. The Endeavor’s power is too low to do anything other than play cat and mouse around the Sector until we completely run out of juice.”
Fiona snapped her mouth shut.
“And then they’ll either board the ship or blow us up,” Jax said. “Either way, we’re toast.”
I caught Shiori’s serene expression out of the corner of my eye as I swiped my overlong bangs back. Shiori was always asking me to meditate with her and Miko, but I never wanted to sit still. Maybe I should have. She looked a lot calmer than I felt.
The Endeavor jolted from the hard bang of Dark Watch 12’s boarding cruiser latching on with a vacuum seal. Obviously, we hadn’t opened the port.
“Starboard side has our most solid door,” Miko said. “It’ll take them a while to break through.”
I nodded. But break through they would. They had all the tools.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered out loud. The intensity of this chase was baffling. Vaccines were important, yes, but it was as if these ones were liquid gold.
I turned back to Fiona. “Has the big guy said anything about the vaccines?” He hadn’t threatened the crew in any way after we’d carted him off by accident along with the floating lab. He hadn’t tried to reach the bridge. He hadn’t even asked for food or water or a freaking loo in the three days we’d had him, or complained about the near-constant jumps. I’d offered him the basics more than once, but he never took me up on anything. He was big, quiet, and stoic in the extreme. I liked him. And I’d better go get him.
Would he even fit into an escape pod?
Fiona shook her head, the tip of her dark ponytail sweeping her shoulders. “He left the lab only once, and I couldn’t stop him from poking around the cargo holds. He wanted to know where we were taking everything.”
Nowhere anymore. At this rate, those things had no chance of getting to where they needed to go. The food and seeds were for the dirt-poor colonies out in Sectors 17 and 18, which would never recover from the war. The books were for the Intergalactic Library’s rare and archaic section, and the drop-off I’d had planned would have been stealth itself. The vaccines were for the orphanage on Starway 8. Abandoned kids never got cure-alls. I would know.
“What do you mean ‘superpower stuff,’” I asked, suddenly zeroing in on what Fiona had said.
“I mean give a few rounds to Jax, and he’d be unstoppable. Strength. Speed. Boosted healing.” Fiona huffed. “Hell, give some to Shiori, and she’d kick ass like she was twenty years old again.”
I felt my jaw loosen. An enhancer? The enhancer? I’d thought that was a myth. Or a dream. Or something that would never work.
And then it hit me. No wonder the lab had been so discreet, so empty of personnel that it shouldn’t have drawn a single eye as it floated around out in bumblefuck Lyronium. That was how the Overseer worked. Hide your best science. Destroy what you don’t understand.
Shit! I’d almost genetically modified about three thousand kids.
“We can’t give that to orphans!” It was the abomination the galactic government had been working toward for years.
Fiona shrugged. “You can if you want to turn people into super soldiers without telling them and call the drug a vaccine.”
I gasped. Wasn’t the military already unstoppable enough?
An ear-splitting hammering started on the starboard side. I closed my eyes.
They’re going to tear apart my ship.
I inhaled slowly and then glanced up
, seeing the edge of the Dark Watch ship come into view. Too bad I couldn’t incinerate it with only the heat of my glare.
The galactic generals weren’t just lying to civilians anymore. Apparently, they were lying to their own.
Furious on behalf of just about everything that lived, I slammed out a combination on my console. “I won’t give it back. I’ll die before the Overseer gets his drug back and uses super soldiers to terrorize the Outer Zones even worse.”
The bridge lights flickered from the sudden power drain, and the hammering abruptly stopped.
“I just electrified the whole starboard side.” Best case scenario? I fried their jackhammer, and they’d have to return to the warship for another. Worst case? We were pretty much already living it.
Bridgebane’s voice barked through the com again. “You are now accountable for an attack on the military, three burn victims, and a damaged Type-4 heavy armor hammer. Also, galactic records show no Captain T. Bailey and no Cargo Cruiser Endeavor. We’ve definitively identified the floating lab. We will fire on the bridge if you continue to resist.”
Jax looked at me. “They can blow up the bridge and still recover the lab.”
I watched the behemoth warship hover over our starboard side. DW 12 definitely wasn’t behind us anymore. “If they board, we’re dead.”
We were all repeat offenders. With the vaccine heist, I had four black marks against me. Now I had an attack on the military as well. Five offenses meant no jury, no trial, and no more wasting food and space on a criminal like me. Jaxon was in the same situation, but not for theft. I called what he’d done in the Outer Zones heroic. The galactic government called it murder, because they’d won.
I wasn’t sure where Shiori and Fiona stood in terms of black marks, but Fiona was a bio-criminal who’d created at least three major airborne plagues when she’d been fighting with the rebels out in 17, just like Jax. And Miko had cut off her own left hand to get out of shackles, so I was pretty damn sure she didn’t like being chained up.
I glanced over at my navigator. Miko’s brown-skinned beauty had landed her in a position she didn’t want to be in when she was nineteen years old. I didn’t have the details, but Miko’s sporadic comments about the violent appetites of powerful men spoke volumes. And Miko’s death sentence spoke volumes about her violent response. She’d escaped with her grandmother’s help the night before she was slated to die, and Shiori went where Miko went, even if that was a galactic prison or a cargo cruiser that looked like a good place to hide.
Five years together now—Jax, Fiona, Miko, Shiori, and me—and my obsession with orphans and their health was about to get my loyal band of misfits killed. If I hadn’t taken the whole floating lab, no galactic warships would have been looking for us. There wouldn’t have been a Dark Watch frigate in Sector 14. Captain Bridgebane would have been stalking someone else.
I looked out the windows at the looming Black Widow and curled my hands into fists. Such nothingness was terrifying. I could almost feel its unholy pull.
I should have stayed away from the vaccines—the super soldier serums. I should have known the almighty Galactic Overseer could never produce anything good or pure.
The ship lurched—the DW’s boarding cruiser latching on again with new equipment. Probably insulated this time. My tricks never worked twice.
“I’m getting some of those vials before it’s too late,” Fiona said, racing for the door. “I can work backward and figure out the organics, I’m sure!”
“Stay put.” My voice rang out over the bridge. “I’ll get the samples. And the big guy.”
Fiona pulled up short. At least everyone here listened to me. When I said stop, they stopped. When I said move, they moved. My father may have stripped me of my identity and tried to get rid of me when he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but I’d obviously inherited his imperial vibe and knew how to use it, despite eighteen years of abandonment and four Sectors of separation.
I looked at my crew one by one. At my friends. My real family. “Anyone in an escape pod when I get back can take their chances with the authorities. If you’re still on the bridge, you’re dying today with the Endeavor, me, and a hell of a lot of super soldier serum. You have less than five minutes to decide.”
* * *
I quickly worked my way through the succession of air locks and the vacuum seal and then strode into the stolen lab, spying the massive man immediately. He was two heads taller than anything else in the room, including the dozens of metal shelves stacked with vaccines.
I took him in, surprised all over again. No one was naturally that big. Maybe he’d been shot up with super soldier juice, and this was the result.
He looked up at my entrance and then set down the vial he’d been holding. It wasn’t a vaccine. It was blood.
Where did he find that? I’d searched the lab from top to bottom—with him watching—and found nothing but the thousands of false vaccines.
We both ignored the booming and sawing as Bridgebane’s lackeys worked on breaking through the starboard door. The Endeavor was a good girl. She’d hold them off for a few minutes more.
Luckily, the lab was connected to the rear door, which was the weakest of the three and disconnected from the rest of the ship by a series of air locks that made vacuum attaching easiest here. If the DW’s boarding cruiser had been able to latch on to the rear port, this would all have been over by now.
I grabbed a medical satchel stamped with the galactic government’s seal and started filling it with as many vials as would fit, excluding the test tube of blood, even though that was what I really wanted.
“Come with me if you want to live,” I said.
The man didn’t move, and I mentally gave him ten seconds before I turned on my heel and left. But I hoped he’d come. There was something about him that appealed to me. He exuded fortitude and calm, although I couldn’t tell if the impression came from physical traits, his age, which was easily twice mine, or something else.
I beckoned with my free hand. “Move it, Big Guy. We don’t have long.” It was time for my accidentally stolen goods to squeeze his big, bearded, and possibly enhanced self into an escape pod.
He stared at me with dark eyes. He stared as though he could see right through me.
“Look, I don’t care if you’re military or civilian or a scientist or a victim or whatever,” I said. “You came with the lab by accident. The Dark Watch is about to board my ship, so unless you’re one of them, you’d better get off it if you want to live.”
I watched him for a reaction. There was none.
“You think they’ll destroy the lab?” he finally asked, his voice gravelly and deep. It sounded like he didn’t use it often.
I shook my head. “They’ll do everything they can to avoid damaging it. But it might not remain fully pressurized. Or the Dark Watch goons could have really bad aim.” And there was another possibility bumping around in my mind. “Or I might just take it out of their reach forever.”
He didn’t react to that, either. Instead, he simply asked, “Are you offering me a pod?”
I was having trouble getting a handle on his accent, and I’d been around the galaxy more than once. Plus, the kids in Starway 8 came from all over the Sectors. I should have been able to place him, but I couldn’t.
“Yeah, I’m offering you a pod,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
As I turned to leave, the man lunged forward and snatched the medical bag from my hand. He’d moved fast. Super soldier fast.
I swung back to him with a glare. “I need those.” Well, Fiona did. If she opted for a pod and actually managed to escape, I had no doubt she could eventually figure out the organics and maybe use these samples for something good, like helping invalids left crippled by the war.
Shaking his head, he carelessly tossed the bag onto the metal table behind him and then bl
ocked my access to it with his huge body. I tried twice to grab it again, but he was like a freaking building, incredibly quick, and impossible to get around.
“You’re wasting time,” I ground out, unable to ignore the pounding that was coming from the starboard door. It was getting louder. They were probably most of the way through.
“You don’t need those right now.” He jerked his hairy chin toward the exit in a get-the-hell-out-of-here type of way.
Metal cried out like it was in pain, and the Endeavor gave a sickening groan.
Fuck it. I didn’t reach for the bag again.
“Let’s go,” the man said, herding me toward the door.
I was pretty sure that was my line, but we were heading in the same direction anyway. It seemed pointless to argue.
We worked our way toward the bridge to a deafening chorus of hammers and saws. The bridge doors slid open and all four of my crew members looked over at Big Guy and me—even Shiori, who couldn’t see.
This was it. The end of the line. They’d chosen, and not one of them had gotten into an escape pod. I couldn’t tell if my heart soared or sank. It definitely swelled.
“Where are the vials?” Fiona asked.
“It doesn’t matter.” Not if she wasn’t getting into a pod.
She opened her mouth to argue, and I held up my hand.
“I won’t let the military take them back. If we stole their secret lab, hopefully that’s their only batch. They’ll need decades to figure it out again.”
Fiona’s brow furrowed.
I ignored her unasked questions and told them what I’d decided on the way back from the stolen lab. “I’m taking the Endeavor and the false vaccines into the Black Widow. If you don’t want to come with me, you need to get out right now.”
The crew all looked at me with little surprise. We were out of alternatives. Capital punishment or, if someone was feeling very generous, life in jail were our only options. It was really a no-brainer, at least for me.
The ship groaned again, and my console flashed to indicate an air lock breach at the starboard door. The Dark Watch goons still had to get through the safety lock, but that door wouldn’t last long.
Heart on Fire (The Kingmaker Chronicles Book 3) Page 36