The Quintan Edge (Roran Curse Book 2)

by Heidi J. Leavitt

  At first Jimmy couldn’t relax. He kept wondering where in the VR room the rest of the guests were and if they would accidentally run into them. He worried that it was almost time for the actual crash and that his brain would find it just a little too lifelike. He stressed that he might throw up all over Jenna’s sparkling shoes, because even though he had never been troubled by motion sickness before, there was a first time for everything, and it would just be his luck that he would learn that fake weightlessness didn’t agree with him tonight. But Jenna was smiling and laughing and chatting to him about completely unrelated stuff, asking him questions about his life back on Terra and the people he missed, so soon he completely forgot he wasn’t actually at a party on a space cruiser and just immersed himself in the moment, enjoying the colors and the dancing and, most of all, Jenna’s smile and shining eyes fixed on him.

  They took a break and wandered over to the food. Jimmy had always found eating in a VR to be probably the most surreal part of the whole experience. He could pick it up, put it into his mouth and chew, and he could even taste it. But everything tasted like something he had had before. His brain had to compare it to something that was in his actual experience, so he could try the most exotic things, and it would still taste like something (bad or good) that he had eaten before. He wandered up and down the buffet, looking for the most bizarre food item. He finally found a platter of what looked like jellied tentacles.

  “Any idea what they are?” he questioned, pointing them out to Jenna. She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “They look disgusting,” she said with a grimace.

  “I know, but they are the most unfamiliar thing on the table. I want to try them and see what they taste like. You know, if my brain makes me taste calamari or jellied cranberries. You never know what it’s going to be!”

  Jenna looked at him dubiously. “You first!”

  He picked one up and stared at it. It flopped about in his hand. “This can’t be a real tentacle,” he observed.

  “Of course not,” Jenna agreed wickedly. “We’re in virtual reality right now.”

  “Ha, ha,” Jimmy acknowledged drily. “But really, back in those days it must have been the fashion to eat something else made to look like a tentacle, because even virtual versions of food are usually better than floppy tubes.” He nibbled on the end of the tentacle but couldn’t really get a sense of the taste. Encouraged by Jenna’s horrified fascination, he shoved the whole thing into his mouth and quickly chewed.

  Rubbery cinnamon-flavored candy. That’s what his brain produced for the taste. Something, no doubt, he’d eaten as a kid. It was not a flavor he cared for, but it wasn’t gag-inducing.

  “Wow, you actually got it all down,” Jenna said, her tone impressed.

  “Your turn.” Jimmy offered her a tentacle.

  “Not a chance,” Jenna refused adamantly. “I’d rather eat—”

  SCREEEECH!

  The whole ballroom shuddered, and Jimmy was thrown to the side, smacking his elbow on the ground. The loudest, most horrible grinding noise enveloped them, and his head felt as if someone had shoved a drill straight through his ears into his brain. His eyes were watering from the pain. This was it then. The disaster.

  He tried to get to his knees just as the shields slammed down on all the windows around them. Jenna lay dazed on the floor beside him, her eyes unfocused. Then suddenly she snapped up, as if she had just realized that they weren’t actually in a party that had been rudely interrupted. This was a survival scenario, and she had the plan. At least, he hoped she really did have a plan.

  She did.

  Jenna scrambled to her feet and beckoned to him. The horrible noise had been suddenly silenced. The music had stopped, and the virtual musicians and servers screamed and ran for the windows as they probably had done during the real disaster.

  All around them, though, the real couples were focused. Most of them were headed for the forward entry doors, the same route that Jimmy had seen the majority of the guests leave by earlier. One determined couple had ignored it all and was waltzing without music. Jenna dragged him past them, heading the opposite way.

  “Sticking it out?” Jimmy called at the last couple. The man raised his magenta feathered top hat.

  “Going down with the ship in style!” he returned gallantly.

  Jimmy waved at him and turned to follow Jenna. It took all types, he guessed.

  When they reached the rear doors, Jenna halted for a second, looking thoughtfully both ways down the passageway that would circle back around the front of the ship.

  “Why are we headed away from the area of the ship where all the survivors are going to be found?” Jimmy asked conversationally. “And why is everything still so normal? I thought we were going to lose the artificial gravity and all that.”

  “It’s coming,” Jenna said, finally choosing to go left and jogging down the passageway. “The idiot pilot had us positioned right next to the comet just in time for the comet to start breaking up. The first piece to break off took out the navigation deck. The pilot and his navigation crew are already dead. In about ten minutes we’re going to get struck by the next piece to break off. It’s going to rip a hole right through the ballroom and part of the engine room.”

  Well, at least they were leaving the ballroom, Jimmy decided. His adrenaline was already running high. He wanted to escape. This ship—not even real—felt like a real-enough deathtrap. There had to be a way to get off.

  He refused to think about the glowing emergency icon in the corner of his netband screen. He wasn’t going to drop out. Jenna was brilliant; she would have planned a foolproof way out of this for them. Though when she stopped in front of a door marked “Maintenance,” he had a tiny twinge of doubt. Unsurprisingly, the door wouldn’t slide open for them, since it had a thumbprint reader that was almost certainly coded for the crew only (which of course didn’t include Decimus and Cora).

  “I hope this works,” Jenna muttered, using a knife she must have pilfered from the buffet (when had she done that?) and prying the faceplate off the print reader. There was a jumble of multicolored wires inside. She poked through them a bit and finally dragged a blue one out of the tangle.

  “Supposedly on these really old thumbprint scanners, you could cut the blue wire and bypass the security,” she explained as she starting to saw at the wire with her knife.

  Jimmy watched her in alarm. “You are going to electrocute yourself!” he protested.

  “No, I may get a shock, but the current’s too low to do any real damage,” she grunted. “Besides, can I get electrocuted from a virtual shock?”

  “I don’t know, those tentacles tasted real enough,” Jimmy said. He watched her for a second and then pried the knife away from her. “Let me take a turn,” he insisted, slipping the knife into a loop of the thin blue coated wire and yanking upward. The wire snapped, and Jimmy dropped the knife at the zap that left his fingers tingling.

  “Ouch,” he griped belatedly, retrieving the knife. His hand was still stinging. Wasn’t this supposed to be virtual? Why did it have to hurt for real?

  Jenna had already grabbed the manual release handle on the door and was trying to yank it open. It grudgingly slid open, and then she flattened her skirts and squeezed through. “Come on!” she called anxiously. “We’ve only got a few minutes left!”

  He slipped through after her. They were in a tiny closet-like room with a shaft and a ladder in it. Jenna was already trying to climb down the ladder as quickly as her mammoth skirts would let her move. He followed, wondering how they were managing to climb down on a flat virtual reality floor. The climb seemed endless, though eventually they reached the bottom of what must have been a lower deck. They were in a storage room of some kind, no windows or anything recognizable at all. It was absolutely, eerily silent, with no sounds of any of the other guests or the engine of the ship or anything.

 
Like they had crawled down into a metal tomb.

  Jimmy shivered. That was not a pleasant thought under the circumstances.

  Jenna raced around the perimeter of the room, checking out the various doors. “Here!” she shouted.

  The door was marked in large red lettering in a language that Jimmy couldn’t read. Jenna impatiently grabbed the knife and dug off the print plate again. This time they were quicker with the wire, and Jimmy knew what to expect. He wrenched through the wire quickly, barely even feeling the shock. They were quickly running out of time. He knew it just by the look on Jenna’s face. The atmosphere around them was heavy and charged.

  This door was much harder to manually open. Jenna had to stand aside and let Jimmy put his back into it. Finally, he yanked it open only to find it was twice as thick as a normal sliding door and led to an airlock.

  “An escape pod?” he cried, half disbelieving. “If there were escape pods, why didn’t everybody escape this floating death trap?” They hurried in and strapped down, and Jenna activated the emergency release button. Lights flickered to life inside the small pod, and the hydraulics hissed, giving life to the ejection system. A flat computer voice started counting down, startling them both.

  “Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .” the voice intoned expressionlessly, devoid of all urgency, as if anyone trying to use an escape pod were doing it out of sheer boredom. Jenna took his hand and gripped it tightly. Jimmy had time to wonder what a virtual pod ejection would feel like when a sudden jolt snapped his head back against the seat. A rushing sound filled his ears, and then there was sudden silence. His stomach swooped and lurched, and he realized that they had managed to trigger the zero gravity part of the simulation. To his immense relief, he didn’t throw up. Neither did Jenna. That woman had nerves of steel.

  “I think we’ve won,” she said with a crooked grin.

  A minute went by before Jenna unbuckled herself and pulled herself out of her seat. Technically she should have floated away aimlessly, but since real gravity was still in effect, she kind of staggered across the pod to the viewing bubble that apparently faced the ship (clearly the reenactment took a little creative license with some things). She got to the window and said, “Look! There’s the comet!”

  Jimmy dragged himself out of his seat and stumbled across the room. It was if he had just indulged in the world’s longest bender. His head ached, and the floor seemed to lurch beneath him. For anybody still on the “ship” trying to reach a safe zone, this would be tough to slog through, for sure. At the window, he could see the blinding cluster of comet chunks. It was almost too bright to look at (more creative license), but he could spot their ship not terribly far away, drifting in the trail of debris following the main mass of the comet.

  “Has anybody ever made it outside the ship like this?” Jimmy asked wonderingly.

  “Not that I know of,” Jenna replied, her eyes staring at the comet in awe. “I talked to a guy once who had tried to get to an escape pod right at the start of the reenactment, and he said that virtual crew members kept appearing and forcing him back to the party. I figured after the impact the crew would be too busy to get in our way.”

  “Well, if no one’s made it off the ship before, then I guess the VR had to make the scene up just for us. I feel special!” Jimmy exulted.

  Jenna laughed at him. “No, there’s always a group of people watching the full thing in the lounge. I’m sure they get to see the exciting parts on the outside also,” she explained with a smile. “But you are special, even still. The real Decimus de Albineio couldn’t have done it better.”

  Suddenly a piece of comet at least half the size of the ship collided with the top, causing an explosive burst of light. When his eyes adjusted, he could see the gaping wound in the side of the Gloriana.

  The VR even simulated debris (including suspiciously body-shaped bits) floating around the ship. Jimmy felt tears unexpectedly prick his eyes. Several hundred people had just met their deaths. Or they had met their deaths just like that a couple of hundred years back. It didn’t matter when exactly; Jimmy felt as if they had all truly just died. What a senseless tragedy.

  “The doors to the escape pods didn’t have a manual override,” Jenna whispered, her voice solemn. “The first hit to the navigation deck took out the system that ran the thumbprint scanners. Nobody could open the doors to them.” Her explanation was a bit stilted. Jimmy wondered if she was fighting back tears or if she was just in a state of extreme incredulity, experiencing this as near to firsthand as they ever could.

  Jimmy shook himself. This had happened way too long ago, and there was nothing they could do about it now.

  “So it’s over, right? Or is there more to come?” he asked, his tone more businesslike.

  “This is pretty much it,” Jenna said thoughtfully. She scrunched up her nose like she was thinking hard, probably trying to dredge up her memories about the original disaster. “I think it only took a few hours for the ship that rescued the survivors to show up. They were a scientific research ship, traveling on the other side of the comet to do research. They came and found the survivors in the bulkhead.

  “That’s probably a pretty uncomfortable group right now,” she speculated. “As many people as they could cram into that one room. The most that’s ever been managed is that record—twenty-six, I think the announcer said, right?”

  “So are we survivors because we’re living now?” Jimmy asked doubtfully. “Because if the others are rescued by another ship, what about us? Are they even going to check for escape pods?”

  “I have no idea,” Jenna said, “though the pod should be emitting a distress signal.”

  “So can we leave, then?” Jimmy said hopefully. He was not looking forward to trying to move across the floor again like a sodden miner.

  “No!” Jenna retorted. “We’re in it to win it, Jimmy! No quitting during the last lap. Come on!”

  “Oh, all right,” Jimmy grumbled. “But I’m lying down on the floor while we wait. This seasick feeling is killing me.” He carefully lowered himself to the floor and stretched out his legs. It wasn’t the most comfortable he’d ever been, especially considering he was still in his lime tux.

  Jenna flopped down next to him, her dress hoops sticking straight up in front of them, blocking the ports from their view. She turned on her side to face him, and Jimmy found himself staring into her eyes; he was only inches away from her face. His breath caught, and he suddenly forgot all his seasick feelings.

  “Thanks, Jimmy,” she said, her voice soft. “I’m so glad you were willing to do this with me tonight.”

  Jimmy’s mouth twitched. “It takes someone a little bit wild to throw good sense out the window and go down with the Gloriana, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, her tone amused.

  “You know what I think?” he asked. He leaned even closer to her. He could feel the puff of her warm breath on his chin. He dropped his voice. “You need a little wildness in your life.”

  “I do?” she asked. Her voice had gone all breathy, and her eyes were downcast, like she was studying his mouth.

  “You do,” he affirmed, and then he threw all caution out the window and kissed her. He was gentle, giving her the option to pull away, but to his great surprise, she returned his kiss, a little hesitantly. That was all the encouragement he needed. He kissed her again, more enthusiastically this time. She tasted like peppermint and honey, and the heat flooded his entire body. He put a hand up and touched her silky hair, then ran his fingers down her neck and onto her shoulder before tracing a line down her arm. She shivered under his touch.

  Suddenly she broke away.

  “Oh!” she choked.

  “What?” He tried to sit up, afraid something was terribly wrong, only to be struck with a wave of dizziness. He put a hand to his head, wishing this part of the simul
ation could just be over with.

  “I can’t do this,” Jenna moaned. Tears sparkled in her eyes. Jimmy’s heart plummeted. Was it Zane? Was it something else? Was it Jimmy himself?

  Had he moved too fast?

  “It’s not fair to you,” Jenna sniffed. “I just broke Zane’s heart; I don’t want to do the same to you, Jimmy.”

  He sat back on his elbows and considered her for a second. She looked back at him, her eyes agonized and pleading, like she was begging him to understand. But understand what? That she wasn’t interested? He found that hard to believe. He felt an almost magnetic attraction to her, and when they’d kissed . . . well, he knew she had felt it too. The chemistry. He took refuge in a wisecrack.

  “I knew you just liked me for my body. It’s OK. We can keep our relationship purely physical,” he quipped.

  Jenna snorted. “I wish you would be serious for once.”

  “Who can take life seriously while wearing lime green?” he rejoined. Jenna glared at him. “Aw, come on, Jenna,” Jimmy relented finally, letting go of the teasing. “I’m not worried about you breaking my heart. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you feel the same way when you’re with me as you did when you were with Zane?”

  Jenna blew out a long breath. “No.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  She hesitated, and then the words flew out of her mouth in a rush. “I’m broken, Jimmy. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But everyone around me always gets hurt, and I like you too much. I don’t want you to get hurt too. And I know it’s just going to be a mess. I can’t start dating someone, especially you. What about my job, and Mr. Quintan, and Zane if he found out . . . ?” Her voice trailed off, which was good because he had a feeling she was starting to get hysterical.

  It was actually kind of refreshing to see this side of Jenna finally come out. She was usually so calm it was uncanny. Especially since he could often see that there was much more simmering below the surface.