Linked

by Imogen Howson

  Above Cadan’s head the communication unit gave a sudden beep, lights flashing along its lower edge. Cadan, one hand on the throttle, didn’t even look up.

  At the controls, flipping switches—please let them be to arm the ship’s weapons—Stewart said, “Captain . . .” He sounded breathless. Was this his first sole-charge flight too? Had he, like Bruce and Cadan, only been in simulated combat before? And now, on their first flight, just hours out of Sekoia’s protection . . . How can there be pirates now? So soon after we left orbit?

  Cadan didn’t answer.

  “Cay, they want to talk.”

  “No.” Cadan’s voice was cold and calm.

  “Cay, if it just gives us time to fully arm the ship—”

  “I said no.” Cadan didn’t take his eyes off the viewscreens. He moved the hand that was not on the throttle to another lever. His fingers whitened, closing their grip, easing the lever upward, and the ship gave another tiny shudder. “You know the protocol as well as I do. No negotiation with pirates.”

  Something cold lodged in Elissa’s chest. Without volition she found her gaze moving up to where Lin clung to the rail. Their eyes met. They want to talk, Stewart had said. To talk? Or to demand that Cadan hand over his two passengers? Were they pirates, or were they something else entirely?

  I thought we’d gotten away. I thought once we were off-planet, we’d be safe.

  Another blast. Fire flared in the viewscreens as the missiles hit the Phoenix’s shields, but this time, stability drive fully engaged, the superbly built SFI-engineered ship scarcely shivered.

  Thank God. As long as the gravity drive kept working, it didn’t matter which way the ship was “up”—in space all directions were the same. But in a battle, Elissa knew they couldn’t afford to be tipped out of position. Is this a battle now? If they’re after us and if Cadan won’t negotiate, what will the pirates do? They don’t want us killed, surely, but if they keep firing and firing and Cadan has to give in . . .

  “Weapons ready, Captain.”

  Cadan gave a jerk of a nod. “I’ve got her steady. Fire in three, two, one.”

  Flames shot out, obscuring the vicious little spaceships behind momentary, instantly disappearing fireballs. Two direct hits against their shields, one miss as a little craft dropped abruptly out of sight, and a glancing blow that sent the remaining ship spinning out of control.

  “Three, two, one.” Cadan’s voice was so steady, he might have been doing nothing more than directing Stewart to get him a coffee.

  Stewart fired again. Another fireball disintegrated the shield around one of the ships and exploded against its side. Flames bloomed over the punctured hull, and the ship flipped, tumbling over and over.

  “Three, two, one.”

  But this time, as Stewart fired and the rockets shot out across the viewscreens, all four pirate crafts winked out, leaving nothing but the split second of their afterimage floating in front of Elissa’s eyes. She blinked, and the afterimage was gone. On the communicator unit the lights died.

  “Good God,” said Stewart. He put up a hand and wiped his sleeve across his forehead.

  “Keep her armed,” Cadan snapped. “It could be a diversionary tactic. Let me scan for hidden craft.” He moved his throttle hand to the keyboard. His voice remained steady, and his hands, too, but his fingers had left prints on the throttle that showed dull for a moment, damp patches on the smooth metal.

  Long seconds passed. The viewscreens stayed empty. Elissa became aware that she could hear her heart beating, and next to her Lin’s breathing, fast and shallow. She pushed herself up to her knees and reached for Lin’s hand. The fingers that wrapped around hers were ice cold.

  “All clear.” Cadan eased the other lever—some sort of manual steadying control?—back into place and moved the throttle forward. On one of the screens a line flickered, showing the Phoenix’s speed as it picked up.

  The view from the transparent sides of the ship didn’t change, nor did the images on the viewscreens, but as the speed line climbed on the control panel, Elissa knew they were moving fast away from the scene of the attack, leaving it behind them, and her stomach began to unknot.

  “Sorry,” said Stewart. His voice was flat, almost a mutter. Elissa flicked a glance at him. He was looking at Cadan, his face flushed. “I shouldn’t have suggested that you open to communication with them. I know the protocol. No negotiation with pirates. Ever. I know it. I just—”

  “I know,” said Cadan. “But that’s exactly why we have the protocol. Heat of the moment—no one thinks straight by themselves.”

  “You did.”

  Elissa’s attention sharpened at the change—a very slight change—in Stewart’s tone, and Cadan threw him a quick look, as if searching for what might be behind it. Then, after a moment, he grinned. “Yes, this time. There’ll be something that hits me like that one day, though, Stew, and then it’ll be the protocol that saves my skin.” He glanced around at where Elissa knelt, clutching Lin’s hand. “Elissa? Ms. May? Are you all right?”

  Elissa nodded, fighting with herself not to start shaking, or crying, or something. The danger was over. It hadn’t ever been much of a threat—not against an SFI ship—and she knew about pirates, they weren’t that unusual. She didn’t have to start thinking it was anything other than a random attack. But if it wasn’t . . .

  Lin’s hand gave a convulsive twitch in hers, and Elissa’s chest tightened. Either I’m picking up her fear or she’s picking up mine. But either way, one of us is so freaked out, she’s going to start having hysterics any minute.

  Elissa got to her feet, her hip aching. She’d really gone down hard—she’d have a bruise there later for sure. “We’re okay,” she said. “We’ll just go back to our cabin for a bit.”

  “Of course.” Cadan looked at her a moment, then stood up. “Stew, take the controls for a moment, would you?” He came over to them. “I’m sorry. That’s a hell of a thing to happen on your first day out—and to see it firsthand from the flight deck too. It wasn’t as risky as it felt, though, I promise. They didn’t even breach our shields. I think they just wanted to intimidate us into opening communications.”

  “Why?” Lin’s eyes, wide and dark, came up to his.

  “Because once we’re talking to them, they can threaten us even further, try to trick or frighten us into letting them on board, paying them protection money . . . any number of things.”

  “So if anyone else attacks, you’ll just refuse to talk to them? You’ll never find out what they want?”

  Cadan laughed. “I really don’t anticipate any more attacks, I assure you.”

  “But if—”

  “Okay, if, then yes. We don’t communicate, we don’t negotiate. Those are the rules we agreed to when we joined SFI. We live by them, and we all stay safe.” He gave Lin a brief smile, and after a moment she nodded, her hand relaxing a little within Elissa’s. But Elissa didn’t relax. She was abruptly as cold as Lin had been, a prickling cold that went all over her body.

  “Elissa?” said Cadan. He was looking down at her, his smile gone, his brows drawing together in a frown—not of disapproval but of concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  For an instant he didn’t look like the high-flying SFI cadet, the arrogant young man who’d left her behind a long time ago. He looked like the teenage boy the thirteen-year-old Elissa had adored, the boy she’d have trusted with nearly anything, whom she’d trusted more than she trusted her brother, more than her best friends.

  She swallowed, making herself look away. He hadn’t been that boy for a very long time. And she wasn’t the thirteen-year-old to whom everything had come easily, who thought everyone she loved would automatically love her back.

  Those are the rules we signed up for. Not only was he not that boy anymore, but now he worked for the SFI, owned by the Sekoian government. They might be outside planetary jurisdiction here, but if an SFI ship came with a message that he had fugitives on board, he wouldn’t
hesitate a microsecond before handing them over.

  They haven’t done it yet, at least. Which means those ships—maybe they were just pirates. Maybe we are still safe. But, oh God—her stomach lurched—if they do track us, if they do send a message out to him—

  “I’m fine,” she said, and tugged at Lin’s hand, backing toward the doorway.

  He was still frowning. “All right. Look, you don’t want to be sitting all alone in your cabin all day, not after that. Come and eat with the crew later, okay? Thirteen—one p.m, in the dining area. You can follow the signs on the walls, yes?”

  “Okay.” She nodded, not caring what she was agreeing to, just needing to get away. “We’ll come.” She reached the door, managed to find the button to open it, and pulled Lin down the steps.

  At the bottom, drawn by an instinct she didn’t recognize, wasn’t expecting, she glanced back. Cadan was standing where she’d left him, his brows still drawn together, watching her leave.

  “Was it pirates?” asked Lin. They were outside the flight deck, still hand in hand, descending the staircase that would take them back to their cabin. Lin’s lips were pale, and when she spoke, they moved as if she couldn’t quite feel them.

  “It could have been. They do exist—you hear about them all the time. SFI flies orbital patrols specially to protect the planet from them—and lots of other planets do too. They completely could have been.”

  “But if they weren’t—”

  Elissa’s hand twitched tightly around Lin’s. “Not here. Wait till we get back to the cabin.” She didn’t think the ship corridors had security cameras or hidden mics, but among all this echoing metal their voices would carry. And they kept passing doors—shut, locked doors, but how did she know which crew members might be behind them, able to catch what she and Lin were saying?

  In their cabin, with the door clamped shut, Elissa caught sight of herself in the tiny mirror in the shower cubicle, and for a ridiculous instant nothing but self-conscious vanity took over. Her face looked as if all the blood had drained out of it, leaving her skin a muddy shade of pale, her freckles and the fading bruises standing out like dirt. Cadan had seen her looking worse—well, probably everyone she knew had seen her looking worse. But all the same . . . No wonder he’d had that expression on his face, as if he thought she might throw up in front of him.

  “They won’t communicate with anyone? That’s what he said?” Lin’s voice jerked Elissa back to urgent—real—preoccupations. The fake tan meant that Lin didn’t look quite as awful as Elissa, but her lips still moved stiffly, and one hand, now released from Elissa’s hold, twined tightly around the other.

  Elissa pulled herself together, hit the buttons on the nutri-machine for two hot chocolates with extra sugar, and handed one steaming cup to her twin. “That’s right. It’s SFI rules, and like he said, he won’t defy them.”

  “So they . . . if it wasn’t pirates, if it was people from Sekoia, they can’t get through to the ship? They can’t make him give us back?”

  Lin’s fingers curled around her cup, and her lip showed bloodless where she was biting it. For a moment the impulse to lie, to offer comfort whether it was true or not, rose within Elissa. It would be so easy to say no and to see Lin’s face relax, to see her hands lose that careful jerkiness that showed she was trying not to let them tremble.

  She couldn’t do it. Not to Lin.

  “Kind of,” she said. “If it’s law enforcement pretending to be pirates—or if it’s pirates sent by law enforcement—then Cadan won’t talk to them unless they manage to force him to. But”—she swallowed, hating to say it—“if they turn up as themselves, with SFI authorization codes, telling him he’s got to hand us over . . .”

  Lin’s whole body seemed to shrink, as if she were pulling herself tighter. “Yes. I see.”

  Elissa made herself take a sip of chocolate. “It’s why I wanted Bruce to help us. You’re his sister too—if I’d gotten him to accept that, I think I could’ve gotten him to agree just to take us somewhere else and dump us and forget it had ever happened. But Cadan, he’s practically the SFI poster boy. Ugh, hell.” She had to stop her fingers from clenching on the flimsy cup. “I was stupid to get us on his ship. If I’d waited for Bruce to come out of quarantine . . . But if I’d done that, we might have ended up without a ship at all. Bruce could have missed his chance by then. And anyway, we couldn’t afford to wait—”

  She halted. Something had flickered across Lin’s face. “What?” said Elissa.

  “You really think your brother would have helped?”

  “Well, I think so.” She stopped. “You don’t think he would?”

  Lin was no longer chewing her lip, although she still stood as if bracing herself against something. “He’s SFI too, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but it’s different.” She hesitated, thinking how to explain. “See, Cadan’s family—they’re not well off; they’d never have been able to afford to put him through flight school if SFI hadn’t spotted him and paid for his education. Since he was, like, eleven, he’s been in debt to them.” It ambushed her suddenly, the thought of what she’d done to him. Let him think he was earning money to pay off that debt. Tricked him into helping a fugitive from their own government’s law enforcement agents.

  She pushed the thought away, focusing on the skeptical look on Lin’s face. “You don’t think Bruce would be any different?” Elissa asked.

  Lin lifted a shoulder in a tiny shrug. “Well, you know, your parents . . .”

  “I know,” Elissa said, too fast. That was another thought lurking in the undercurrents of her mind, another thought she couldn’t look at yet, not until it had stopped hurting so much. She took a gulp of chocolate. “And you could be right. I mean, I knew going to Bruce was a risk too, but we were so out of options.” She sighed, combing the fingers of her free hand through her hair, as if by doing so she could comb the thoughts out of her head.

  “I just mean,” said Lin, “that you weren’t stupid. Your brother might not have been any safer than Cadan.”

  Elissa blinked. Once again, just like last night, Lin had offered comfort and understanding that Elissa hadn’t been expecting. She certainly hadn’t expected it from Lin, but as well as that—it had been a long time since she’d expected it from anyone.

  “Thanks,” she said finally. She drained the last, gritty mouthful of chocolate. The shock and fear of the attack had receded a little; she was thinking more calmly again. The attackers could have been nothing but pirates. And the flight would be over in less than forty hours. Once she and Lin got to Mandolin, they could get new IDs, get on a standard passenger flight with people who didn’t know them at all, and lose themselves somewhere in the whole of the rest of the star system.

  We’ve gotten this far, and I never would have thought we’d manage it. Our luck only needs to last a little while longer. Just two more days and we’ll be done, we’ll be safe.

  Something familiar about the cadence of her thoughts caught at her, sparked memory. She’d been thinking something very like that about two days ago, forty-eight hours in the other direction, as she’d stood in phys ed, waiting to be picked last, telling herself that all she had to do was wait a little longer and her whole life would be okay.

  Four days, and everything will be better.

  No, that wasn’t what she’d thought. It came back to her now. With the sudden unexpected clarity of total recall, she smelled the sweat-and-rubber scent of the gym, felt the prickle of hostile or mocking stares on the back of her neck. She hadn’t been thinking, Four days, and everything will be better, but, Four days, and they’ll make everything better.

  She hadn’t known then what that meant, or how definitely she was going to defy the way they—the doctors, her parents—had intended to make things “better.” But there’d been so much comfort in the thought that someone else was going to sort out her problems, that all she had to do was obey, submit, go along with what they told her. No questions, no second-guessing.


  That comfort had gone. No one was going to take over her responsibilities, the decisions she had to keep making. It was just her now, her and Lin, and if they didn’t fix things for themselves, no one else would do it for them.

  Elissa had agreed that they would eat lunch with the crew of the Phoenix, and at the time it had seemed like the easiest answer to give. But now that she and Lin were following the wall-markers to the crew’s dining area, she wished she’d thought of an excuse. Their cover story had been enough to get them onto the ship, but was it enough to hold up through half an hour or more of talking with the whole crew?

  Heart beating so hard that she felt the blood pounding inside her head, felt it vibrating under her skin, she touched the door panel.

  The door opened on a blast of conversation and the scent of spices and rice. The crew—fifteen people—was gathered around a long table, slightly curved to follow the curve of the spaceship wall.

  Stewart James stood up the moment they came in, his smile flashing out at them. “Our newest passengers! Ms. Ivory, Ms. May, come find a seat.” The look of shock he’d worn after the pirate attack was gone, and he was once again the cheerful young man who’d invited them to the flight deck, assuring them Cadan would welcome the visit.

  Which he completely didn’t.

  Elissa pushed away the thought, plus any others threatening to distract her, and smiled back, as bright and bland as if her head had nothing important in it at all.

  Cadan wasn’t there, and Stewart made the introductions—a jumble of names and positions she couldn’t keep track of and wouldn’t remember. The only person who stood out was the chef, Ivan, a long-armed gorilla of a man, untidy even in his white chef’s uniform. He wasn’t just the chef, obviously. Everyone on an SFI crew had to be multifunctional. Does he wear a different uniform the rest of the time? Elissa wondered, a random, fleeting thought.

  After spending the first few minutes vibrating with nerves, Elissa realized that although the crew was polite and relatively friendly, they weren’t interested enough in either her or Lin to be the risk she’d feared. They were all a good ten years older than Bruce, so although either Cadan or Stewart had told them she was Bruce’s sister, and several of them were courteous enough to say they hoped he’d be out of quarantine soon, they were not his fellow cadets in the way Cadan and Stewart were, and they had no personal interest in Elissa as his sister.