“No!” Lily screamed and tried to wrench away. “Rian, shoot him!”
She saw a streak of laser fire hit Ashford, whose grip loosened. But she felt herself being lifted away and the air sucked from her lungs, then everything went black.
Chapter 16
Bright light flooded Lily’s eyes, and she greedily sucked in mouthfuls of air. Nausea slammed into her, and she doubled over on an unfamiliar floor and gagged, sure she was going to be sick. She gasped for a couple of minutes, but nothing came up. Pain ratcheted around her skull like a ping-pong ball, and she tried to stand up.
She looked around and saw the metal gridwork that made up the floor, and the smooth, sterile metal walls of the room she was in. It looked like a cleaner version of the Defiant’s cargo hold. A bulgy-headed Nym guard stood sentry at a large set of closed doors. But that wasn’t what made a scream rise to her throat.
Dr. Zadbac stood before her, his bulbous face wearing a triumphant expression.
“Minsa Stewart,” he said and held out a hand, as though he made to help her off the floor. She ignored the gesture and unsteadily climbed to her feet.
“You are not used to transport unit, no?” he asked. “Lots of people get sick the first few times. Especially one like ours. It’s much stronger and faster than the Commonwealth Fleet’s.”
“What the fuck is going on?” she demanded, hoping he didn’t detect the fear in her voice.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Zadbac assured her.
Lily didn’t believe that for a second.
“We have to kill you, but it won’t hurt,” he continued.
Lily would have given the bastard points for honesty if she believed him. She felt her gorge rise again and forced it back. Going into hysterics wouldn’t help at all, and she had no doubt Zadbac had painful ways of shutting her up if she started screaming.
“Where’s Captain Marska?” she asked.
“On his ship, I presume.”
“Dr. Ashford?”
“Still on the patrol ship.”
The nausea was fading, and she thought quickly. There was no way she could take down three people, especially without a weapon. She and Taz had covered only the basics in hand-to-hand combat, and she had never anticipated having to take on a Nym. At the very least, she could try to get something out of Zadbac about what they were doing. They owed her that much.
“Why?” she asked. “Why were you on Earth in 2017?”
Zadbac’s mouth compressed into a thin line. “If you had stayed where you should have, you wouldn’t be here today.”
“Why did you kill Andrew Claybourne?”
“He fought back. My colleague was merely attempting to defend himself.”
“From what?” Shit, the hysteria was creeping back. She tamped down her fear and stared him straight in his black eyes.
“He attempted to leave our office. My colleague tried to stop him. They fought.” Zadbac’s face twisted in disgust. “He did not return with me.”
Andrew Claybourne hadn’t died in vain. Lily would dwell on that later, when she got out of here.
At least Zadbac wasn’t reaching for a weapon. The guard looked straight ahead, as though she and the doctor didn’t exist.
“Why was your ship orbiting around Earth’s satellites?”
The guard called out something in the Nym language. Zadbac snorted. “I do not like humans either,” he replied in English, keeping his gaze pinned on Lily. “They talk too much. Earth was a mistake.”
“What do you mean, ‘Earth was a mistake’?”
“If you are not quiet, Minsa Stewart, I will have to quiet you myself.”
“You’re going to do that anyway.” Her voice rose to a shout. “At least have the fucking courtesy to tell me what you’re up to!”
Zadbac sighed and removed a transdermal unit from the pocket of his black coat. He wore a utility belt full of medical apparatus around his waist. She recognized some of them from her pharmacy text files and the Defiant’s sick bay.
Sick bay. God. Dr. Ashford. Whatever Rian did to Ashford, it wasn’t brutal enough. For the first time, Lily saw the logic behind Fleet’s mind-wipe policy, but a mind-wipe was still too merciful for that bastard. She could only pray Rian was okay.
Zadbac held out the transdermal spray but didn’t move to apply it. “We don’t like the Commons,” he said simply.
“No shit.” She deliberately kept her eyes away from the unit and on his oversized head.
“The Nym are dying. We need more space and a new planet, and we have nowhere to go. If we start over, we can rebuild our empire from the ground up. From the beginning of interstellar travel. Prevent Earthlings from ever expanding in their galaxy and the one beyond.”
It was ridiculous, and far too simplistic for Lily’s imagination. “That’s it? You wanted a new empire?”
“So did Earth. That’s why they migrated.”
“The Kurrans wouldn’t have allowed you to do that,” she spat.
“We would have dealt with the Kurrans, I assure you.”
“I don’t believe you,” Lily shot back. “Your ships can move through Commons space undetected. It happened twice, with the Defiant and Bishop’s Pride. What’s to keep you from taking over space that way?” She had to keep him talking until she figured a way out of the room.
“We don’t have enough ships to do that. That’s part of what we were doing on your planet in your time. We were, as you say, evaluating resources. We miscalculated the time travel equation. We should have landed in 2217, three solar years before the Commonwealth formed. Our ship left us on Earth and didn’t return for us for four of your solar months. We tried out a new cloaking device in your space, and your ships destroyed both of ours.”
“One,” she corrected. “The Pride fired, but your ship disappeared.”
“It was hit,” Zadbac said darkly. “It disintegrated on the other side of our wormhole.”
Wormhole? She knew that a wormhole could be detected and tried to make sense of what Zadbac was telling her. She filed the information away to tell Rian and Fleet later, and she would. She had to get off this ship, if that’s where she was.
“Enough,” Zadbac said and held up the transdermal spray. With his other hand, he grabbed Lily around her throat, leaving her pulse point exposed. She struggled and tried to breathe, her hands uselessly tugging at Zadbac’s grip. She covered her bare skin with her hand, trying to prevent contact. Zadbac cursed in his native tongue but didn’t give up.
She thought back to Taz’s instruction. Without the time to give it any more thought, she kicked Zadbac as hard as she could, her booted foot meeting squarely with his upper thigh. It was a little off the mark, but the impact had startled him enough to let go of his grip on her throat. She kicked him again, but he didn’t go down, merely doubling over. He dropped the transderm spray, and she snatched it before it could hit the floor and held it to the first patch of exposed skin she could find, on top of his bald head. She pressed the plunger as hard as she could and prayed that whatever was in there adversely affected the Nym.
He looked up at her, shock in his face, unable to stand upright. An angry red welt was forming on his scalp where she had sprayed him, and his features were slackened. She kicked him again and he went down on the floor, gasping.
Laser fire streaked through the cargo bay. Lily screamed and threw herself to the floor next to Zadbac, who was now seizing and uttering wordless, guttural cries. She grabbed the oversized laser pistol clipped to his belt and fumbled with the only switch on it, hoping it was the safety. A charge from the guard’s weapon seared the floor a couple of inches from where she lay, and she held up hers and fired. A scream of shock and fury echoed through the room, and the guard was slammed against the wall, his scorched hand dropping his weapon to the deck with a clatter. That had been a lucky shot. She didn’t expect to get another.
Zadbac lay prone on the floor, curled in a fetal position. She kept her belly to the ground and slithered
behind him, using his body as a makeshift shield. He made no move to relinquish the gun, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Across the room the guard dropped to his knees and groped for his weapon with his uninjured hand. Lily angled up on her elbows and aimed her own weapon at him, resting it on Zadbac’s waist. He ducked out of the way and with a shaking hand picked up his gun and trained it on her. Lily took a deep breath and fired one last time.
The charge hit him squarely in the chest, exiting through his back and spraying black blood along the back wall. The guard’s eyes rolled back and he dropped to the floor with a heavy, sickening thump.
Lily took a few deep, shaky breaths, forcing herself not to panic. The nausea had returned, and she leaned over and threw up on the floor next to Zadbac’s body. He had stopped clawing the air and was laying perfectly still, his eyes wide open in disbelief.
She had just killed two people and wasn’t going to kid herself. That had been due to sheer dumb luck, and she doubted that when the bodies were found any remaining Nym would underestimate her. She had to get out of here. She took a few deep breaths, and the nausea faded.
Adrenaline surged through her. She reached for the comm badge clipped to her collar and paused. If the Nym could track her down through an ancient cell phone, they could certainly track and hear her words to the Defiant, if she could even get through to the crew.
She was on her own.
She stepped to the door, pressed her ear against it, and heard nothing. She didn’t bother trying to open it with her palm; the pad wasn’t even shaped for a human hand. Too large, and designed for clubbed, webbed fingers. She inspected the gun in her hand. Its status light was still green, and miracle of miracles, it had an indicator on the side. She had hardly used any juice.
Still, she wasn’t going to waltz out of here with just one weapon. She looked down at the guard’s body in disgust. He and Zadbac were soaked in black blood that gave off a horrible stench. She held her breath and reached for the body, taking the weapon that had fallen to the floor next to him. She shoved it awkwardly into the waistband of her pants. The movies made it look so much easier.
She stepped back and fired on the doors, praying the charge would penetrate through them. Charred indentations appeared, and she cut out a square large enough for her to crawl through and kicked out the metal after a couple of tries. Pain reverberated through her body, and she gave the door a mighty smack with the barrel of the gun. The metal gave, and she forced it out the other side. She stuck out her head first and looked down an empty hallway on either side.
Good. She crawled through, the jagged edges of the hole slashing at her clothes. She ignored the sting of a few cuts on her arms and tried to pick a direction.
One end of the hallway ended in a wall, and the other had a few doors that looked like they could house more cargo bays. There was an elevator at that end, too, but she didn’t want to take it unless necessary. Stairs, she thought. Preferably ones that would lead her to an empty office with a comm console so she could figure out how to send an SOS. Or an unmanned control panel. Maybe she could take over the ship and steer it to friendlier skies.
Like that was going to happen. She wouldn’t know a Nym control panel if it were right in front of her.
The ship shimmied and tilted to the left. Oh, God, what next?
She eyed the elevator and forced herself to stay on her feet. She was well and truly screwed, but she wasn’t going down without a fight to save the universe as it was supposed to be.
* * *
Rian’s laser pistol had been set to stun, and he woke Ashford with a kick to the ribs. The man sputtered and sucked in a labored breath. Rian wanted to beat him until he was nothing but a pile of bloody pulp on the floor, but instead he aimed his weapon at the doctor’s head.
The ship sharply jerked upwards, and Rian stumbled. Ashford made a feeble grab for his weapon, but a security officer pressed his foot against the doctor’s neck and kept his own weapon aimed at him. Medical instruments that hadn’t been securely strapped down clattered to the floor.
Steg, roused from sleep, was in charge of a security detail that Rian had ordered to sick bay. The ex-prizefighter made a move to pound Ashford into oblivion, but Rian didn’t want that to happen just yet and held up his free hand. Steg shrugged a little and strapped the doctor’s hands in plasticuffs.
He had to find Lily, and this bastard knew where she was.
He entrusted bridge duty to Commander Kostin. He felt a rumble and a series of heavy thumps throughout the Defiant as the ship’s tractor beam activated. His first officer deserved a commendation after this; it took a great deal of skill to steer the ship directly above the Nym cruiser that had appeared out of nowhere.
Rian tapped his comm badge. “Captain to Kostin. Status!” he barked.
“Tractor beam engaged.”
“The ship?”
“Our sensors indicate it’s trying to cloak, but it can’t even under our traction.” He heard the commander’s glee through his badge. “We’ve got it locked for the time being, but we’re keeping our shields up as a precaution.”
Rian understood. Most ships were rendered immobile and defenseless by a tractor beam, but he wouldn’t put it past the Nym to develop a craft that could fire through that. It looked like they hadn’t, though. They probably hadn’t anticipated a Fleet ship—an antiquated patrol ship no less—to ever take them hostage.
“Hold the beam, Kostin,” he said. “What’s the ETA for help?”
“Thirteen minutes for Bishop’s Pride, twenty for the Magna.”
Well, praise the gods for that. The Magna was a battleship, the kind of craft Rian had once dreamed of commanding.
Ashford coughed. “You can’t hold the Nym much longer,” he wheezed. Rian leveled his weapon at him. “They’ll get through your shields eventually.”
“We’ll destroy them before that.”
“She’s on there.”
Rian wasn’t surprised to hear that; it was the most logical place for Lily to end up, and a team was trying to break into the Nym’s systems to find her. “Start talking,” Rian said.
“I want amnesty.”
“Start talking,” he repeated through gritted teeth.
“I’ll tell you everything I know if Fleet gives me amnesty.”
“I can’t offer you that. I’m only a commander.”
“You can help talk them into it.”
He was wasting time. Rian resisted the impulse to shoot him. “I’ll consider it,” he said.
“I want your word.”
Killing him wouldn’t get Lily back. “I promise to do what I can,” Rian lied. “Tell me where she is.”
Ashford hauled himself up to a seating position. “That’s your problem, Commander,” he spat. “You’ve been letting your emotions get the better of you.”
“Quit stalling.”
“You should be worried about Fleet and the Commonwealth. You should be worried about the Nym.” He struggled for breath and held his ribs where Rian had kicked him.
“I am. Lily is part of that.”
“You’re an idiot,” he spat.
“Fuck you.”
There was a buckling under their feet. “Shields holding,” Kostin reported over his comm link. Rian had deliberately kept it open, and Kostin could hear every word of his exchange with the doctor. He half-listened to the bridge crew as they scrambled to keep the tractor beam and shields engaged.
The device Ashford had used to transport Lily beeped. It was a few inches from his hand, and he made a grab for it. Rian kicked it out of his reach.
“They didn’t want her, you know,” Ashford said. “She was an accident. She’s no use to anyone, dead or alive.” He winced as he shifted his bulky frame on the floor. “She’s probably dead by now. If she isn’t, she will be soon. Nym ships are set to auto-destruct before they can be taken prisoner. You know that, Commander.”
An icy chill gripped Rian’s heart, but he didn’t lower
his weapon. He would not—could not—believe Lily was dead. He had to believe that she had found a way to stave off the Nym to get through this. Had to.
“Amnesty,” Ashford snapped.
Steg was overseeing the security detail and heard Ashford’s demand. The security chief muttered something damning in his native tongue before uttering a sarcastic, “Sure.”
* * *
Ensign Taz Shraft had been forced away from his communications panel by higher-ranking crew members. He relinquished his post reluctantly and followed the security team to sick bay, listening to snatches of conversation. The Nym were back; they were under their feet, and they had one of his friends in their clutches. He wanted to help and could, but no one would listen to him. Captain Marska hadn’t noticed him, and Taz’s frustration felt insurmountable. He felt his stomach turn over at the mention of the Nym’s auto-destruct sequence.
He hated feeling powerless.
Unless...
He ran for the transport bay. There was a tertiary access panel there, and he knew it probably wasn’t in use. Unbeknownst to his superiors, he wasn’t a total idiot, and had gone into engineering in an effort to direct his fondness for hacking and tweaking code into something positive. Reprogramming equipment was supposed to alert his superiors about design flaws. Fleet just didn’t see things his way and forced him into a boring desk job in communications as punishment for things that didn’t warrant it. He knew he would have been an asset as an engineer.
He was right about the shuttle bay and was relieved to find it was abandoned. He logged into the ship’s systems using a senior access code he ripped off from a former commanding officer he had in his first days in Fleet. He was lucky, and the computer read the code as if Captain Flitt were actually on board. Data flowed through the console, information a mere ensign wouldn’t ordinarily have access to.
The data on a vessel held in traction could be accessed by the holding ship, and he pulled up the Nym’s primary systems interface. Other crew members had been doing the same, and he saw that they were focused on the auto-destruct sequence that was going to go off shortly and trying to override it in time. They were doing it incorrectly; the better way was to find out where that command was hidden and disable it from the inside. A vessel built in almost any shipyard could be taken out using the methods they were trying, but they had forgotten that this was a Nym ship.
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