Arne seemed dazed, but did as Roar had shown him, and knocked two darts off the grid. “I think I can manage it.”
“Good.” Oline turned to Roar. “Grab a razor and comm me when you’re outside the ship. I’ll direct you to the pods and you blast the suckers away.”
Roar nodded. “Team effort.”
She narrowed her gaze. “Don’t get caught.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Roar said.
He left the bridge at a full run, rounding corners and jumping over debris until he reached the nearest razor bay. Grabbing a case from the wall, Roar hit the switch to open it and pulled out a suit. He shoved it on in less than five seconds, then came the helmet. He smashed the door button and stepped out into the small bay, heading for a razor. Small and black, and nearly invisible to radar, razors cut through dimensions like Equinox did in a leap, but the small scale kept it off the grid.
There was space inside for one, and with a RomTek suit, it felt snug. Roar ignored the hint of claustrophobia closing around him and shut the hatch, flicking switches and preparing to cut through the small opening used to vent waste. There was one in each bay with razors, and the specs were built so a razor just slid through. “Threading the needle,” Brage Enersen had called it.
When he reached the space outside Equinox, Roar switched frequencies and hit the razor’s comm. “You read me, Princess?”
A second passed, then Oline answered, “Loud and clear, Romeo. I hate that name, by the way.”
Roar smirked. “As much as I hate mine.”
“Next time we won’t let Stein choose them.” Blowing out a breath, Oline said, “Boarding pod quadrant three, section K is almost through the hull. What can you see out there?”
They were everywhere. Shiny black spheres swarming around Equinox like flies, pouring from a Woede destroyer. The battleship spanned black space, seeming to go on for miles. He counted twenty pods, then gave up. He had a job to do.
“We’re going to need to take out that destroyer. As for the pod, I’m on it.” Roar punched in the coordinates and shot the razor around Equinox, where he saw the pod latched onto the hull, thick anchors holding it in place.
Shooting the anchors seemed like the obvious choice, but the wrong one. He knew from experience that caused minimal damage to the pods. You had to aim for just the right place, underneath the pod. A thin membrane covered the pod’s brains. They were constructed that way so the destroyer controlling them could reach over longer distances without interference.
He swerved, dipping the razor under the pod, aiming for the sweet spot. At the right moment he locked onto his target and fired. The anchors jerked away from the ship. The pod shuddered under the blast and an unholy screech tore through the airways. Roar flinched and shut his eyes for a second as he mentally filtered the sound from his speakers via the suit’s neural link.
When he opened his eyes, he blinked a couple times. The razor’s tight cockpit was filled with tiny glowing bugs.
So not the time to lose your head.
He waved his arm through the air and the creatures shuffled aside, floating right through the razor’s cockpit window and surrounding walls like bright ghosts.
“Nice shot, Romeo,” Oline said through the comm. “But quit wasting time. I see eleven other pods trying to break through the shields and get to the hull as we speak.”
“Sorry,” Roar mumbled and pushed the glowing bugs to the back of his mind. In the corner of his visor, a couple of sets of coordinates appeared.
Choosing the nearest one, Roar pushed the razor to full speed, locking onto his target on the fly. The pod did the same as the previous one, but he didn’t stick around to watch. He headed for the next, and the next, knocking them out in succession.
“What the hell is she doing on the bridge?” Oline’s panicked voice shrieked over the comm.
Roar’s skin prickled. “Who?” he said.
No response.
“Princess? You reading me?”
Roar cleared the last of the pods from Oline’s list, then angled around for a final check, his mind whirring with possibilities. Three boarding pods snuck past the razor while Roar had been distracted, and two of them were heading for the bridge. He watched them change course like they were drawn there. On instinct, he followed, punching through dimensions, the glowing bugs around him almost humming, the sound rising in octave. Any other time he’d study the creatures further, but not now.
The third pod had just attached itself to the ship. He made a split-second decision to duck back and finish it off before going back to the two that were still aiming for the bridge. The pod didn’t have time to react before Roar kicked a full-force charge at the bottom, and the shell exploded open. Slimy black suckers drifted out in open space, their arms furling and unfurling as they puffed up and froze. The blast knocked the razor off course, and Roar righted the little ship before going after the others.
When a scream tore through his comm, Roar’s attention snapped back to those on the bridge. He tried them again, changing channels to see if they’d switched, but got nothing. At his wit’s end, Roar pulled up the cameras on the bridge. They flickered for a moment, static in the connection, then Roar saw clearly.
It couldn’t have been more than a minute since Roar heard Oline’s voice through the comm, but a minute must have been long enough for their fortune to turn.
Roar saw Oline’s rumpled body draped across the nav panel, her hair stained silver. Her right hand had been hacked off above the wrist. Standing less than a foot away was Nils’s mother, her attention fixed on Oline’s lifeless form. It took a fatal wound to kill an Aurelite, and time. And Nils’s mother seemed to have both.
She can’t be dead. Oline cannot be dead. She isn’t dead. Someone’s messing with the cameras.
The possibility of Oline’s death hit him like a full-force plasma blast in the stomach, and he dropped his hands from the controls. For one more second, he let her death wash over him, and then, as he’d been trained, Roar boxed it up and shoved it to the back of his mind. Don’t dishonor your people by weeping for their souls while others still live and need your protection, Elder Esfric would have said.
I won’t, Roar thought, but I’ll smear the blood of the Woede across the universe in Oline’s name.
The razor’s targeting system beeped, stealing Roar’s eyes from the bridge scene playing out on his visor. He had a lock on both pods, which were aiming to breach Equinox via a set of panels on the underside of the bridge. A moment of indecision flickered in his mind. Roar could almost hear Oline screaming for him to get the pods, though, and in the end, that choice won out.
The sharp focus of battle rage settled on his shoulders as he jerked the controls, the razor diving down. In a flash he was on the pods, aiming at their brains. He took them both out at once.
An alarm sang in the razor and Roar glanced at the dash’s rear cameras to see a Woede dart coming in his direction but he didn’t care. He was forcing the razor at full speed to the emergency razor bay on the other side of the bridge. Besides, the dart couldn’t see him in the razor. They were invisible, both to visual detection and radar.
Or so he thought.
Roar felt the pressure of the blast on his rear port thrusters, taking out control on that side. He focused on starboard thrusters and used the razor’s drive to flip around, and leveled a shot at the dart. Grim satisfaction blossomed in his chest as the blast tore through the dart like it had been made from paper and the Woede inside drifted away in pieces.
The now useless razor kept spinning Roar, and the stabilizers weren’t coming online. Got to get out of this thing. He managed to punch a hole close to the nearest razor entrance, then ejected and used his suit’s thrusters to steer back into the ship. Once he had his feet on the ground, Roar pushed himself faster than ever to the bridge, hoping he wasn’t out of time. There might still be a chance…
Slim was better than none.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Patience was nothing like her name. For one, the ship had a jump drive, which worked on a completely different set of principles to Equinox. Rather than using dark energy and never running out of a fuel source, Patience’s drive would eventually fail. And unlike Equinox, the stolen ship could “jump” through space, from one set of coordinates to another. Like, one second it was there, and the next, someplace else. It boggled her mind.
“These drives are always temperamental, though,” Stein had told her when they made it past Liider’s security range. “So we’ll only use it as much as we need to. Besides, I don’t know how many jumps the drive has left before it’s toast.”
He calculated that the distance between Liider and Aurelis would take them about nine days to cross at top speed, and after a thorough scan of the surrounding space, decided to punch it while they rested for a full sleep cycle. Patience had several cabins, though none were as nice as Equinox’s had been, but they did the trick. Leda and Stein picked cabins near the bridge.
A small part of her almost asked Stein if they could share a double-bunk cabin, but she realized he’d need his space as much as she did. They’d been living in each other’s pockets since they left Tuva’s ship. A little time apart couldn’t hurt.
Unlike her cabin on Equinox, the showers were shared here, and she’d probably run into Stein during the night. Before going to bed, Leda showered with a proper water system and dried her hair under a monster of a machine on the wall. She still had no crutches, but Stein found some pipes and bent them to resemble a pair of canes. It worked better than relying on her own legs, and when she woke up, she’d have the suit to keep her upright.
The upside to stealing a long-haul ship was that there were clothes already on board. Leda rifled through the other cabins until she found something suitable for sleeping in—a long T-shirt with no holes or stains. It smelled clean, too. Just in case, she ran it through a clean cycle in the machine in the hall just in case. A minute later, the shirt came out smelling fresh. With nothing left to do, she went to her cabin, changed for bed, and fell into her bunk, exhaustion weighing on her like a mantle.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
Thoughts of Roar swarmed her, eyes open or shut, not giving her a moment’s peace. Since Charlie shot her, Roar had spent every night at her side. She’d gotten used to someone always being there.
After a while, she gave up and lay on her side, staring at the bunk across from her. Most of the memories she had of Roar were verbal sparring and the warm press of his mouth against hers, his arms folded around her. Once, before they left Earth, he told her about his parents. Leda realized that, even though her mom turned out to be a back-stabbing traitor, she had been alive and around for a lot longer than Roar had either of his parents in his life.
She thought of everything he’d missed. Sure, they were raised in completely different worlds, and under opposite circumstances, but Roar never had his father teach him how to play catch or kick a ball. At least he had a little time with his mom before her execution.
It felt like Leda had just drifted off when she woke to a god-awful sound, like metal rubbing against metal, with a bag of gigantic, screaming space-crickets stuck in the middle. She tumbled out of bed and landed on the hard floor. That’ll leave a bruise. Leda groaned and pushed herself up, then, grabbing the homemade canes, she hurried out into the hall. Stein was already there, bleary-eyed in a pair of shorts, his unmoving Dravu on display.
Leda noticed it wasn’t moving, like Roar’s. She pushed that to the back of her mind. “What is that sound?”
“Annoying,” he replied on his way to the bridge.
She followed and dropped into the pilot’s chair to read the panel. “It’s an emergency beacon.”
Stein leaned in close, his shoulder brushing Leda’s cheek. “Coming a few days’ from here. An Aurelite ship.” He sucked in a breath and fixed a hopeful look on Leda. “Do you think…?”
She didn’t dare hope. If Equinox had raised the alarms, that could only mean one thing: they were under attack. “If we use the jump drive, how soon can we reach them?”
He was silent for a minute, working out the distance. “Twelve seconds in a direct jump.”
Leda gaped. “Well, that’s fast.”
Stein hit a button on the dash and the alarm shut down. “You’d better go get suited up. Who knows what we’ll be dropping into over there?”
With that warning, Leda hurried back to her cabin. She didn’t have time to run her clothes through the cleaner but if someone was in trouble, it didn’t matter if she smelled a little. By the time Leda made it back to the bridge, Stein had gotten his suit on as well, and took the pilot’s chair. She dropped into the co-pilot seat and strapped in.
“We’re jumping now?” she said, clicking the harness in place.
Stein leaned forward and flicked a switch at the top of the dash. “Yup. Get ready.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Different.”
“Different how?”
He fitted his gloved hands over the controls. “It’s difficult to explain. You’ll see what I mean, though. Don’t hold your breath when we jump.”
And then Stein hit the jump drive button.
Blackness drowned out everything, and Leda was tempted to reach out beside her to see if Stein was still there. There was no sound, no light. Nothing.
Leda didn’t know how long they were stuck that way. She couldn’t even hear the sound of her own breathing. A brilliant flash of white blinded her, and Leda squished her eyes shut. She almost held her breath but at the last second remembered Stein’s words and filled her lungs. It felt like a heavy weight had been dropped onto her chest, and each breath became more difficult to draw.
Then, in an instant, the flash of light dimmed to normal, the weight vanished, and the world came back in sharp focus. They had jumped right into the thick of it—a battle between a massive black ship with long legs like a spider, and numerous others of varying size, all firing at Equinox.
Boarding pods were everywhere, swarming around Equinox. Several looked close to breaking through the hull, and they kept pouring from the main ship without end. Leda’s mind whirred. How can we stop them?
She went over the weapons on Patience. Much the same as on Equinox, with a few exceptions. Whoever owned the small ship must have expected trouble. There were two newly installed turrets with precision canons, and if the user manuals were correct, they’d blow a small ship into stardust.
“After-market add-ons,” Stein said, seeing her wide eyes. “Who knows what you’ll encounter among the stars.”
Leda jumped to her feet. “I’ll take the starboard turret and get some of these pods off their backs.”
Stein shook his head. “Won’t work on the pods.” He filled her in on the pods’ nearly indestructible shells, except a small weak spot on the bottom. “But I know what will. Can you take the controls?”
Leda wasn’t the sore loser type, but she did feel a pang at not being the one to take out those Woede creeps. At least if she was steering, she’d be doing something. “Sure,” she said and slid into his seat when he vacated it. “Where are you going?”
Stein pulled his helmet on and sealed the connection. “You’ll see. Send them a hail so they know we’re friendly. Then bring us around Equinox’s stern. Tell me when you’re in position.” He ran off the bridge so fast Leda felt a breeze.
For a second, she stared at Equinox surrounded by black pods, then remembered the first of two tasks Stein doled out. Right, hail. Locating the communications program, she dialed up Equinox’s frequency and spoke into the mic.
“Equinox, this is Patience. Friendly vessel in the area. Do you read?” She felt a little stupid, but couldn’t think what else to say. She’d been concise and to the point.
“Patience, this is Equinox. We read you.” It was Uncle Arne.
She gave a yelp and grabbed the controls, steering the ship into position. “It’s Leda! Guys, we’re here to h
elp.”
“Leda?”
The sound of Roar’s voice brought a delicious warmth to her belly. “Yeah, it’s me. And Stein.”
“How…?”
“There’ll be plenty of time to explain when these guys are gone. For now, just don’t shoot at us, okay?”
A pause stretched over the airway.
Then Grams spoke. “Leda, you know what you have to do.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
Silence.
“Grams?”
When Grams didn’t answer, Leda ran a scan of Equinox. A Woede boarding pod had taken out communications. You’re on your own for now. Leda shut her eyes.
I’m the weapon. But how does it work? She thought there’d be more time. Now, in the thick of battle with the Woede, Leda came face-to-face with her biggest challenge to date.
She squeezed her hands into fists. Think! How would a biological weapon work? By thought? Emotion?
This is a lot harder than it should be. Why didn’t I come with an instruction manual or something?
“Leda,” called Stein through the ship’s comm. “Did you get through?”
“Yeah, and they’re shocked but happy to hear from us.” She flashed her eyes open. “Hey, Stein?”
Patience shuddered and Stein’s voice screeched through the speakers in a joyous cheer. “Hell yeah! Take that, you slimy bastards.”
“What was that?”
“That,” Stein said, “was Patience’s guided laser system. My own design. Only three were made, and that’s why I needed this ship.”
Leda switched the cameras just in time to see a couple dozen Woede boarding pods exploding. She had to admit, the weapon was effective. “You designed it?”
He fired again, a buzz this time. “Sure did. Takes a little warming up, then she shoots like a dream. Soon you won’t feel a thing when I fire.”
“That’s great, really. But I need some help.”
“What with?”
Leda bit her lip. “This whole weapon thing. I could probably use it now, right?”
“The way Roar explained it to me was this: we bring you to Aurelis, and all the Woede would be obliterated. No one said how.”
All the Stars Left Behind Page 25
