Renegades (The Eurynome Code Book 2)

by K. Gorman

  Marc keyed the door closed behind her. A red light flicked up on the door panel. "Cookie, I'm locking you out. Call us if anything happens."

  "I think I'm wetting myself a little," crackled the response over their comms. "Does that count?"

  "No," Soo-jin said.

  They followed the hallway up and, as they came to the junction, Marc turned around. "Okay, we’re planning to lead them all to the Mess and tape them there, right?"

  "Let's play it by ear," Soo-jin said. "See where we find the first ones. Ethan?"

  Ethan lifted his head. "Yes?"

  "We're going to go for your dad last," Soo-jin said. "And it might take a while. We need more manpower to take on the bridge, if what we saw last time was any indication of how it will go."

  "But—but he can help. I…" Ethan bit his lip. He shivered beside her.

  "I know, honey, but we need to make sure we are all going to be okay doing it. Karin's not invulnerable. We can't risk a Shadow knocking her out again. If they get to her, and manage take her over—or kill her—then we won’t able to help your dad at all. No offense, Karin."

  She gave a hard swallow. Soo-jin could be blunt sometimes, but, in this case, she was very, very right.

  They found their first Lost huddled in the next hallway, casually loitering by a light on the wall that seemed to have attracted their attention. Two men and a woman, each wearing the standard shipboard garments available on colony vessels and other industrial ships like the Ozark, except one of the men had lost his shirt. Short, greasy-looking hair fell in a mess around his face, like she'd seen on some sports athletes, though she doubted they also donned the seven weeks of beard growth. The Lost looked up as the four of them approached, their black eyes unwavering.

  Light, children, and people. That’s what they were attracted to—and they had all three. Two of them shuffled forward, but the shirtless man hung back.

  "Right." Marc loosened his shoulders and readied his blaster. "Ethan, make sure you've got our backs."

  He would stay on guard while Soo-jin held the people for Karin to heal. That way, any stray Shadows wandering the ship couldn't surprise them as easily.

  Soo-jin walked behind the first person and, after a couple of attempts where the Lost pulled his arms away feebly, she had the first man in a tight shoulder lock. His face, normally blank like the rest of the Lost, flickered with pain.

  Karin stepped forward, the light already flashing in her hands. She was well practiced at this now. Within seconds, her light flooded into his head and pushed out the Shadow. Soo-jin shoved the man down and stabbed the narrow end of her crowbar into the Shadow's back.

  It drifted apart in tatters.

  The next came to her just as easy. Soon, all three people were down on the floor in standard recovery position. Soo-jin sat next to the first one, the medkit open beside her as she attached a few readers to the man's head and fingers.

  "Now, I guess, we wait." Marc holstered his blaster and squatted down to the floor, helping with the second medkit. "Ethan, do you know these people?"

  "Of course. Arren, Charise, and Nick." He pointed to the shirtless man, then the woman. "Nick's the ship engineer. One of them, anyway. Charise kind of helps him, but mostly deals with the data log. Arren… He's okay at cooking?"

  "How okay are we talking?"

  "He managed to burn oatmeal once."

  Marc's eyebrows twitched. "Right. Well, we won't get him to bake us a pie as thanks, then."

  "Yo, party people, something's up over here," Cookie's voice crackled over the comms. "I'm getting some readings from the nav dashboard. Karin?"

  Karin ducked her head to the mic in her lapel. "What are you seeing?"

  "That alliance ship has popped up again. Same ident and everything. Enmerkar."

  A jolt of fear ran through her. She sat up straighter, then stood, turning her head away from the people on the floor and toward the open hallway that led back to the ship, as if she could help the Nemina by facing it. "There's a tracking window at the bottom right of the dash. If you click its icon, it'll give you all the info."

  "Got it."

  "Where is it?"

  "Twenty point five units away."

  "Speed?"

  "Seven fifty."

  Karin did the mental math. "Shit. That's a very hard burn."

  "How long?" Marc said.

  "An hour, maybe less. They're burning a lot of fuel."

  "Cruisers will have a lot of fuel." He paused, shaking his head. "The Nemina is still faster than them. We can run, maybe grab some rods from here. If we hard burn, we can get away."

  "You can't run away!" Ethan jumped up, his face red, eyes wide. "My dad is still here! And everyone else!"

  "We’ll have to come back. There's no time."

  "There won't be any time later, either," Karin said. "Even if we hard burn a loop, they won’t be far behind."

  "Any chance we can hide at Amosi?" Marc said. "Maybe with that cave…"

  "No," Soo-jin said. “Alliance scanners will burn right through that cave. Unless we can cool the Nemina down enough, which would require more than an hour, and then hide in a location that wasn't so obvious… But they’ll probably still search the planet. I mean, where else would we go? Even playing with radio shadows may not help us. I don't think any of us are experts on that, unless Karin took a quick espionage warfare studies class in her Belenar flight school."

  "I didn't." She frowned. "But even if we run, they’ll still find us. We need a better plan." She lifted her head back toward the Nemina. "Soo, you comfortable staying here alone with these people? Or—Marc, would you stay with her?"

  "I'll stay with her. Why? What are you planning?"

  She shook her head. "Probably something very stupid, but I won't know until I get back to the bridge."

  Chapter 12

  Karin slapped off the Nemina's warning notifications as she skipped through the navigation commands, racing back into the script to fix the errors. In the corner of the screen, the Enmerkar grew steadily closer and closer. In sight now, the Nemina’s second outboard camera fixed on its position and fed it into a mid-sized square at the side of her screen. With its nose toward them, it looked like a U-shaped juxtaposition of metal fractals, barely visible against the black of space.

  She ignored it, swearing when the backs of her knees knocked against the pilot’s chair behind her as she hunched over the desk. After the second time it happened, she kicked it back. The chair made a grinding sound as it slid back on its track.

  Sol.

  She paused, scanning through the course route, her heart hammering in her chest as she re-checked the error report. I never want to do this again.

  Except, despite the swirling kind of anxiety that clutched through her chest, a little thrill went through her as she reached the end of the route again. She straightened.

  Everything looked all right. And she’d had most of the route already set, thanks to the plan she’d made for them coming away from Amosi a few weeks ago.

  It was the unknown factors that caused the most worry, and those were things she couldn’t change. She meant the auto-pilot course to race over to Amosi, drop down to a flat plains area on the opposite side of the planet, then lift up again, hoping the Alliance craft broke atmo by itself instead of sending shuttles or fighters down to nab them.

  They should break atmo. They wanted her alive, after all, and their shuttles and fighters didn't have the grappling capabilities to bring the Nemina in. Outside of atmo, they could make some kind of towing line—another worry in itself—but the Nemina should be able to out-accelerate them. With enough burn on her engines, she should be able to sprint back to the Ozark and pick them up.

  Bless Fallon and their superior engines. Even though the Nemina was an older model, she could out-sprint all Alliance craft but the Noven racers… And she'd even beat them in a long-term run, considering how delicate they were. Fighters might be a problem, if the Alliance launched them right, but, despite
Cookie's insistence that an Alliance-Fallon war would be short and victorious for the Alliance, Fallon’s engine technology far outstripped anything else in the system.

  Partly why it had pulled out of the Alliance.

  So the Nemina was not the problem. The problem was, she wouldn't be on board. The whole point of the course was to buy enough time to get the Ozark's people up and running. If anything were to happen during the route, she wouldn't be able to fix it.

  It'd be on Marc and Cookie.

  "I think this is a stupid idea," she told him.

  "It was your idea," he said. He stood behind her, watching her work, his arms folded over his chest. "I think it'll be fine," he added.

  "I don't really have time to check over this course." She shook her head. "If anything needs to be changed…"

  "Then I'll change it." His eyebrows lifted. "You know, I’m actually a half decent pilot. I can fly if I need to."

  "So long as there aren't any trees around?" She slipped him a sly smile.

  He groaned. "I'm never going to live that down, am I?"

  "Nope." A deep frown cut across her face as she checked the course again. "This makes me nervous."

  "It should. That Alliance cruiser is no joke."

  "That's not helping."

  "Sorry." He paused.

  For a moment, the bridge was silent except for the clicks and whirs of the dashboard computer. A new notification popped up on the screen as the Enmerkar came within calling distance. She stared at it, neck tense.

  "You better come back," she said.

  "If you programmed your course properly, I'm sure I will."

  "My course is fine. Not gonna lie, takeoff and landing are going to be a bitch. You need to make sure they follow you in, even better if they land. Otherwise, they'll just catch you out of orbit and fuck you." She winced as she caught sight of Ethan by the door, his wide eyes on her, and the look of surprise as he heard her swear. "Just don't panic. Follow the flight instructions."

  "I'll be fine. Even if they do catch me. It's not me they are after."

  "What about your history? This is a Fallon vessel." And the military down on Enlil had not been impressed when they’d found out he was a veteran from the other side. It was him they’d been shooting at first, not her.

  "It's a decommissioned Fallon vessel that has been operating in their space for the last two years, following all Alliance protocol. Even if they do take umbrage, they can’t do too much. Hold me for a few cycles, maybe a week. If they weren't in such a crisis right now, they might make a point to send me back to Fallon space and drop me in an embassy or something. I'll be fine."

  A new notification chimed on the holoscreen. The Enmerkar was less than thirty minutes out. She bit her lip, retracing the route. Movement caught her eye to the side, and her attention snapped to the door as Ethan, who had hesitated before when they’d been talking, made his presence known.

  "They're waking up," he said.

  She turned to Marc. "I—"

  "Yeah, go.” He waved a dismissive hand. “I got this."

  That's not what she'd been about to say, and she had a feeling he knew it, too, but she let herself be shooed out of the chair. Before she left, she pushed her navigation license into the receiver and pressed her thumb to the reader, registering in the course.

  "You better come back," she said to Marc as she walked out. "Soo-jin would be pissed if you left with all her stuff."

  "I live in fear, then. See you in a week."

  Gods, a week. He was taking Cookie with him, but still…

  Ethan grabbed her hand, and they walked down the hall. Something clunked from farther down the ship, and Cookie’s shadow danced in the light of the Rec room past the junction in the hall, muttering and swearing to himself. Karin’s throat tensed again.

  Gods.

  Ethan’s fingers tightened around her hand. They passed her room without stopping, having already tossed a few sets of clothes into the first hallway of the Ozark. Everything else, she left behind. The air bridge passed around them in a series of low thumps as their shoes hit the hollow floor.

  Soo-jin shut and locked the Ozark's door behind them, then tipped her head to the comms mic in her lapel. "All clear."

  The radio crackled with Marc's voice, "Good. We’re off, then."

  A clunk sounded on the inside of the door, then a faint hiss that cut off as the vacuum filled the broken seal of the air bridge. No window looked outside in this hallway, so they had no way of telling if he was really gone until they found one and looked.

  “Good luck, guys,” she said.

  "Don't worry about us, sweetie," came Cookie's voice over the comms. "I'm working on something to royally screw with their signal. We are golden."

  Karin's jaw tensed. Golden. The last time he'd said that, they'd run into two unseen Alliance patrols and several weird, floating, electrical attack balls.

  They’ll be okay. They’ll come back. And if they don’t…

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Best not to finish that thought. She shook her head and glanced up, skimming across the dark metal walls and dim lighting. It felt more like the cramped, inner compartments of the space station rather than a floating, working colony ship.

  “Okay, let's get started. Ethan said they're waking up?"

  "All awake now." Soo-jin nodded to the opposite end of the hallway. There was movement, and the murmur of low conversation.

  She nodded.

  "All right, let's go."

  *

  They led two of the first group, Arren and Charise, to the Mess and set them up, leaving one of Soo-jin’s medical bags with them. After more than two weeks, the two plates of food on the room’s counter had moldered, but the cool, closed environment of the ship had kept it from putrefying the air too much. As they left, Arren, a thin man with wispy brown hair and hesitant, ponderous movements, stood up from his chair and fetched a cleaning rag from a nearby table. A clinking sounded as he began to clean up.

  Shock, she thought, playing his drawn features back across her mind. Even if they didn’t remember the Shadow attack, losing time was not an experience anyone loved. She had some experience with it, thanks to the people who had raised her. Sometimes, when she was on a particularly nasty self-righteous bent, she’d decide she didn’t feel quite so bad about the people she and Nomiki had killed to get free.

  Except, inevitably, those kinds of thoughts made her feel worse.

  She grit her teeth. Now wasn’t the time to think about the past. Not when they had Lost to find and an Alliance cruiser closing in on them.

  It’d pass by close. It had to, with the route she’d set.

  “Karin? You all right?”

  She glanced up into Soo-jin’s eyes. She walked beside her, her body tilted away from the two medkits she’d hauled onto one of her shoulders. Though she’d been prompt and professional in the Mess, and her business-like walk had set a quick pace for them down the hall, her analytical frown softened into something deeper as she studied Karin’s face.

  Child, just what do I look like?

  Soo-jin had always been observant. It’s what made her such a good scrounger.

  But sometimes, that gaze was just a little too knowing.

  It followed her as she straightened and gave a flippant, dismissive gesture with her hands. “Yeah. Fine. Just thinking.”

  That seemed to clinch it. The immediate concern in Soo-jin’s expression broke. Re-shouldering the medkits, she turned her gaze back to the front, a small smile tugging the corner of her mouth. “Gotta be careful. Some thoughts will kill you.”

  Karin didn’t return the smile. Although it was a line from a neo-espionage franchise that had flooded the Alliance-planet theaters several years ago, the stiffness underneath Soo-jin’s expression belied the joke. She watched her out of the corner of her eye for a few moments, waiting a few beats to see if she’d say something more, then turned her attention back to the front.

  Soo-jin rarely spoke
of her past, but Karin knew there was bad blood in it. Her friendship with the Songbird Sanctuary on Enlil was more than just a happy coincidence. She may have learned her scrounging from her parents and siblings, but she never spoke of them. Karin didn’t even know their names.

  Up ahead, the door hissed open. Nick, the third former Lost and the ship’s engineer they’d found without a shirt, ducked through the threshold adjusting his new change of shipboard clothes. His head ticked up as he saw them. “We going?”

  “Yeah.” Soo-jin hauled one of the packs off her shoulder and held it out for him. “Here, you take this.”

  A small frown knit his face. He glanced up, his gaze going between them, then to Ethan who trailed behind them. It took him a few more moments before he spoke, dropping his gaze back to the bag and straightening, but Karin could see the question forming.

  She and Soo-jin watched his expression, waiting.

  “Are you…” He stopped, hesitating. “Are you sure that everyone is… sick? I mean—”

  “We’re sure.” Soo-jin met his uncertain gaze with her usual blunt, no-nonsense realism, and ticked her head toward Karin. “She and Marc had you all running around last time, playing hide and seek.”

  His frown deepened. “Yeah, but—”

  “They’re gone, Nick.”

  Ethan’s sullen face had the hallmarks of a storm. A kind of darkness dimmed the skin around his eyes, along with a blotchy redness that made it look like he had been crying—but his eyes were dry and sharp, with a vividness that made their green irises jump out amid the gray corridor.

  “I was the only one left,” he continued. “Me and Dad. Then… he…” he trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. His throat quivered as he looked away.

  Karin put a hand on his shoulder, speaking softly. “Do you want to go back to the Mess? I’m sure Charise and Arren would love some help.”

  The muscles in his jaw and neck stiffened. “No.”

  Though he didn’t look up, his tone was resolute.

  A low grief pulled at her heart. She gave his small shoulder a squeeze and let go, her hand falling back to her side.