Cadan hadn’t glanced back at them. His hands flickered over the controls, so fast he seemed to hardly touch them. It was as if the displays on the screens—the shields racing their way back up to a hundred percent, the little sinister flashes on the enhanced scan Stewart was running that were the only sign of the cloaked ships’ presence—were responding to his will, not his touch.
They’re not just pirates. She’d known it before, really, but now she knew it all the way through her, a feeling as if her spine, all her bones, had turned to melting ice. Ordinary pirates don’t work in groups that big. Ordinary pirates don’t have technology that keeps them hidden from SFI ships.
Cadan moved one hand off the keyboard and reached for a lever among a bank of them. The manual control for the stability drive, the one he’d used before? No, a different one, marked with a thin blue stripe, that he had to unlock with his thumbprint before he could ease it out of its starting position and move it up.
Elissa found herself watching him as if just the act of doing so could help him keep control of the ship—or as if it could keep her thoughts from exploding into unthinking panic.
Not just pirates. They’re bounty hunters. Powerful, tech-rich mercenary ships, available to anyone who could afford them, open to any assignment that would pay enough to make it worthwhile. Piracy was the least of it. Abduction, murder, terraforming sabotage . . .
Our own government hired them. Our own government sent them after us.
But if they were prepared to do that—and how much do they want Lin back, to pay bounty hunters to come after her?—why not send their own ships? Why not do what she and Lin had feared and send SFI officials to demand access to the Phoenix, arrest her and Lin then and there, save time and money and all the risks involved in attacking their own ship?
As Cadan slid his hand back onto the control panel, the answer came to her. They’re still trying to keep it quiet. Arresting us openly, revealing the existence of Spares, of what they’re doing to them . . . they don’t want to do it. Not yet, at least. They hired bounty hunters because they don’t need to tell hired mercenaries why. All they need to tell them is how much they’ll pay.
Half-beneath her notice, like the beginnings of a headache, a faint whine had been building in the air. Now it intensified, the headache blooming into migraine, shaking Elissa’s mind from her thoughts. The noise seemed to come from everywhere, seemed to travel through every metal surface, a vibration she felt in her bones, in her teeth, shivering at the corners of her eyes. She hadn’t felt it before, but back in the days of hanging on Bruce’s and Cadan’s words, she’d heard plenty about it. She knew what it was.
The hyperdrive. Cadan was engaging the hyperdrive, SFI’s ultimate technological triumph, the machine that would take the ship to a speed so much faster than light, it would be as if they’d teleported instantly from one coordinate to another.
It was the only thing to do. The only way to escape. But Elissa’s gaze went, as if drawn by magnets, to the screen where the shields now showed at a hundred percent. The one flaw of the hyperdrive: At the point when the ship kicked from normal into hyperspeed, the shields would drop. They couldn’t stay up during hyperspeed—which, once you were actually in hyperspeed, or once you’d hopped to your destination, didn’t matter. But for that tiny fraction of time while you were still under potential fire . . .
Her mouth went dry. She was clamped against the rail, but all the same her hands came up as if of their own accord to curl around it, so tightly that her fingers went numb.
“Cay,” said Stewart, “they’re moving into attack formation. We have to move—”
“Okay. Nearly there.”
“Cay—”
Stewart’s voice was drowned out. The whine became a shriek Elissa felt all through her body. The ship gave one shudder, all the screens went dark, and the stars outside blinked into blackness. Then, with a jerk that felt as if the whole universe had shifted, they were elsewhere.
The control screens all flicked back on in blurs of scrolling code. Then, a split second later, the viewscreens came on too. The flashes of cloaked ships were gone, but Elissa held her breath while Stewart’s fingers raced over the controls, scanning and rescanning.
An endless two minutes later, he said, “We’re clear.”
Cadan had his hand up to his earpiece. “Markus? . . . Yes. We’re good. Great job. Seal it up for me again, would you? Then— Yes, right away, please. Come to the bridge to debrief. Thanks . . . . Yes. Seriously, great job.”
He clicked a switch on the earpiece, then pulled it off and slid it into his breast pocket. He moved the hyperdrive lever back into its locked position. Then, for a moment so brief that Elissa would have missed it entirely if she hadn’t had her eyes fixed on him, he tilted his head back slightly, drew in a breath, and let it out through his teeth.
Then he unclicked his seat and swung it around to face Elissa and Lin. His eyes went first to the safety straps hugging them to the rail, and he nodded. “Good girls. It’s okay, you can unbuckle now. We’ve hopped right off-route, they won’t be able to work out where we’ve gone.”
The straps slipped under Elissa’s fingers. She had to pause and rub her hands hard on her top before she could finish undoing them. Lin slid out of them a little more easily, then looked at Cadan. “Doing that—”
“Using the hyperdrive?”
“Yes. Does that mean no one knows where we are now?” Urgency jumped through Lin’s voice, making the words sound jerky.
“No one we don’t want to.” Cadan gave Lin a brief smile. “I think those ships must have been working with those in the earlier attack. Maybe the earlier attack was mostly to soften us up. Anyway, don’t be alarmed. I’m quite sure that’ll be it for this flight!”
Except it won’t. Elissa wrapped her arms around herself, her stomach giving a cold lurch. He’d said it himself: No one we don’t want to. Which meant the bounty hunters by themselves might not be able to keep on tracking them, but SFI still could.
She met Lin’s eyes and didn’t need telepathy to see her own fear reflected back at her. They still had more than twenty-four hours left of the flight, and these two attacks had come within hours of each other. Her stomach lurched again, a feeling like a cold pancake flipping inside her. There was nothing they could do. Nowhere else to run. The ship had seemed as if it offered so much freedom, but all that coming on board had done was trap them in the exact thing that could be most easily tracked.
She clasped her arms tighter, trying to hold herself together, trying to think. There must be something else that would help them. If she and Lin could just go back to where they could talk properly . . .
“Lin, let’s go back to our cabin.”
But Lin shook her head.
Elissa stared at her for a second. “Lin. We shouldn’t even be here—we should have been in our cabin to start with.”
Lin flashed her a look. “Then we wouldn’t know what’s happening. I want to stay here.”
Something close to panic tightened all the way up through Elissa’s body. She couldn’t. She couldn’t stay here, trapped in this room, under Cadan’s and Stewart’s eyes, having to pretend she didn’t know danger was coming closer and closer. “Lin. Come on.”
“No. They’re going to attack again, and I—”
“Oh my God, will you shut up?”
Elissa’s voice was overlaid by Stewart’s. “Ms. May, honestly, there’s no danger of that now—”
And then, raised over them both, Cadan’s. “That’s enough.”
The snap of authority in his voice brought Elissa automatically around to face him. He had one hand back on the control panel, and his eyes were bright with irritation. “Ms. May, Elissa is quite right. You should be in your cabin. We are highly unlikely to be attacked again”—Lin opened her mouth, but Elissa shot her a furious look and she snapped it shut once more—“but if we were to be attacked, the safest place on the whole ship is the passenger section.” His gaze shifted
briefly as a footstep sounded on the steps leading to the bridge. “Markus, thank you. Come on up.”
He looked back at where Lin still stood, her hands clenched on the rail. “Ms. May. I’m afraid that if you don’t retire to your cabin immediately, I do have authority to order that you be taken there.”
Lin went white. Elissa began to reach out to her, before she realized her twin hadn’t gone pale from fear but from rage. Lin’s hands came up off the rail, a movement that, if you didn’t know, if you hadn’t seen it before, would have looked like one of capitulation. “No one,” said Lin, and her voice was like a hiss, “no one is touching me.”
Cadan stood, his face all at once devoid of expression. “Mr. James, would you take over. Mr. Baer, your assistance, please.”
As Elissa watched, caught and horrified, Cadan came around the end of the rail toward Lin. The other man—Markus, whom he’d left to guard the downstairs control panel—came forward from behind Elissa.
“Ms. May,” said Cadan, his voice flat, “I’m going to ask you again.”
And as Lin’s gaze whipped toward him, Elissa felt it. The building something in her palms, as if all the rage in her body were focused in just those places. Lin, fueled by panic and fury, drawing on her electrokinetic power. I can control electrical currents, she’d said. And here, on the bridge of the spaceship, they were surrounded by enough power to . . . What could she do? Set the ship on fire? Electrocute someone?
No. Oh, no no no.
“Lin.”
Lin’s eyes met hers, blank and glittering. And the sensation, the heat, still built and built in her hands, ready to fly out, to strike . . . who? Markus, who was just doing his job? Cadan?
Elissa acted before she could find out. Before Markus and Cadan could reach to take hold of Lin’s arms, she took two quick steps forward and seized Lin’s shoulders. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare even think about it.”
The heat stayed, pins and needles prickling up into her wrists. Lin’s eyes glared into hers. Her teeth were clenched, her face set.
For an instant, fury rose up through Elissa, a wave that blocked out everything, and a jumble of fragmented thoughts. Never going to be touched again. Kill them before I let them—
She struggled, gasping, getting her head above the thoughts and feelings that weren’t hers, and clenched her hands onto Lin’s shoulders, digging her fingers in as hard as she could. “Stop it. Lin.” A blink of memory, and suddenly she had the right words. “Lin, listen to me. I don’t want to have to hate you.”
The heat died. The heat and the fury and everything, as suddenly as if they’d been flash-frozen. Lin’s face went still.
Elissa let go of her shoulders and turned, linking her arm instead. “She gets panic attacks,” she said to Cadan and Markus, part of her mind noticing the embarrassment on Markus’s face, the narrow-eyed look on Cadan’s that indicated he might not be buying the quick and easy lie. “I’ll take her to our cabin now.” She hesitated half a second longer. Lin was right, there would be another attack, and he wasn’t expecting it. If it’s even worse than this one . . . and oh, it’s his first sole-charge flight . . .
It was no good. She couldn’t warn him, and she didn’t dare let Lin stay. She let her gaze slide away from his and led Lin off the bridge and away from the flight deck.
“Do you hate me?” said Lin when they were back in their cabin.
Elissa leaned back against the tiny section of wall between the nutri-machine and the shower cubicle and let her knees collapse slowly under her so she slid down toward the floor. She shut her eyes. “Not yet.”
She said the words without thinking, and only realized their impact when she heard the tiny sound Lin made. She opened her eyes to see her twin’s face rigid with hurt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way. I just mean, you didn’t do anything to make me hate you.”
Lin’s face tightened, the pain morphing into anger. “Yeah, well, I was going to.”
“What?” said Elissa, her voice jumping. “What were you going to do?”
“Hurt them.” Lin’s teeth snapped together on the words. “Lissa, you heard him. He said they were going to take hold of me, make me—”
“It’s his ship.” The spark of anger in Elissa’s voice surprised her. “He gets to do that. They were only going to bring you here.”
“I didn’t want them to!” Lin’s face went suddenly stony. “And I don’t know why you even care. You said—you don’t like him—”
Elissa pushed herself to her feet. “That’s got nothing to do with it. You can’t just hurt people, whether you like them or not.”
“But—”
“No. Lin, you have to listen to me. If we’re trying to escape, like back on Sekoia, or if we’re, like, I don’t know—fighting—then using your electrokinesis to help us get away—it’s kind of justified. But just now, just because you didn’t want to leave the flight deck, that’s not okay. You can’t do that.” She looked at Lin, sudden despair sweeping through her. Was she getting through at all? Did Lin even grasp the distinction Elissa was trying to make?
She didn’t get the chance to try again. The whole room gave a violent jolt, sending Lin crashing backward against the cabin door, banging Elissa into the side of the shower cubicle.
Even Elissa’s brain seemed to freeze. She’d known this was coming—they’d both expected it—and yet, for one long instant between the first and the second blasts, somehow there was time to think, Maybe it’s not, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s not—
The second blast came, knocking her off her feet, knocking her back into reality. The bounty hunters. Using whatever information or tracker technology SFI had given them, they’d used their own ships’ versions of hyperdrives and come after the Phoenix again.
She got hold of the rail at the edge of the lower bunk bed, braced herself against the next blast. “Lin—”
Lin looked at her, her eyes unfocused. She’d banged the back of her head on the door.
“Lin,” Elissa repeated, “we’re supposed to get onto the bunks, strap ourselves in. You use the lower bunk, okay?”
Lin nodded, lips pressed together so hard that they’d almost disappeared.
Another blast came as Lin pulled herself up to the bunk, drew the straps across her body. The blast flung Elissa sideways again, banged her elbow on the side of the nutri-machine. Tears of pain jumped to her eyes. We just did this. They’re not supposed to be able to come after us like this, over and over, with no chance of us getting away.
She reached for the rail that would steady her as she swung up into the upper bunk, just as an alarm split the air.
Elissa jerked around. Lights flashed red—one over the door, one along the top edge of the screen. Then came the unnaturally calm mechanical voice of the warning system. “Air lock B activated. Security breached at Section B-twelve.”
Elissa stopped breathing.
Bright white text blinked suddenly on the screen, but she couldn’t focus enough to see if it was simply reiterating the message. Security breached, she thought. They’re on board. They got on board.
The warning began to repeat then from the screen’s speakers, and Cadan’s voice came clearly over it.
“Attention, armed personnel. We have a security breach. Section B-twelve, pirates. Assume armed. Shoot to kill.”
A pause, half a breath long, then his voice came again. “Attention, all passengers. Please remain in your rooms. Repeat, please remain in your rooms.”
Lin’s feet thumped down onto the floor next to where Elissa knelt. “We have to hide.” She grabbed at Elissa’s arm. “Quick. We have to hide.”
“No. We have to stay here. You heard him—”
“Lissa!” Lin shook her. “They’re on the ship. They’re coming for us. We have to hide!”
“There’s nowhere to hide! Lin, no, we have to stay—”
“But this is where they’ll come! I can open one of those locked rooms. We can—”
The alarm sounded again. For a moment Elissa thought it was no more than a repetition, but then the spoken warning came. “Air lock J activated. Security breached at Section J-seven.”
More? Oh God.
“Lissa,” Lin said, dragging at her.
Elissa let herself be pulled, unresisting, to standing. But she was shaking her head even as she did so. “It’s no good. I don’t know where either of those sections are. If we leave the cabin, for all I know, we’ll end up running straight toward them.”
Lin’s hands were shaking on Elissa’s arm. “We can’t just wait. Lissa, we can’t—”
But it was too late. Outside the cabin the corridor echoed and clanged with the sound of booted running feet.
Lin’s hand flashed out to hit lock on the door panel, then back to clutch at Elissa’s arm. Elissa’s heart was pounding so hard, she couldn’t hear properly. Above her head the alarm kept on shrieking, the lights reflecting red flashes off Lin’s face.
Something crashed into the door. The door shook, and the little red LOCKED light flickered but held. Maybe they won’t be able to get in. Maybe—
Sparks jumped from the crack between door and wall. The LOCKED light winked out. Black-gloved fingers closed around the edge of the door and slammed it all the way open.
Somehow Elissa had thought that if the bounty hunters caught up with them, they’d still have time. Time to protest innocence, to use one of their cover stories, to insist the bounty hunters had gotten their facts wrong. Time to delay while they worked out how to escape.
There was no time. The moment the door was open, the cabin was full of men in black spacesuits, helmets folded back. Two of them seized Elissa, and before she knew it, she was being bundled down the corridor between the back of one man and the front of another, the one behind her racing her along so fast, she was half off her feet, feeling any moment she was going to fall.
She screamed, twisting around, trying to see what they’d done with Lin, and one of the men closed his hand across her face, cutting off most of her air supply so that within seconds she was struggling to breathe. Lin! Were the men bringing her, too? Or was she being taken somewhere else? There was security on the Phoenix—there was always security on SFI ships—but where was it?
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