The door opened before he had to answer. He stepped out first, forgetting to check to make sure it was clear first. He looked up and froze. Across the hall, only a short walk away, were a group of Union officers. What are hell they doing here?
Kendal took a step back, kinetic rattling in his hand. They were standing in a group around a woman too well dressed for a ship like this. Of the three officers, two of them were low ranking guards, but the third was officer Vernan from the Morana.
Kendal tried to step back into the gravshaft, but Vernan spotted him. At first, he didn’t seem to recognize Kendal, dismissing him as just another one of Nova’s grunts, but then his eyes narrowed and he reached for his kinetic.
Kendal knew he couldn’t run. Even if he went back into the gravshaft, all Vernan had to do was use the controls to send them right back up.
“Detain him,” Vernan said. The two lower ranks drew their weapons and rushed towards Kendal. The proper-dressed woman retreated into the room and shut the door, keeping Vernan outside with the rest of them.
Kendal looked between the officers and Mira, who’d just stepped out of the gravshaft and was starting to realize what was happening.
No way out, Kendal thought, holding his kinetic tight. At least for me.
“Get to the ship,” Kendal said and shoved Mira back into the gravshaft. She hit the ground hard enough to hurt, but at least she’d be safe.
“What are you doing?” Mira asked, trying to get back up before the door shut. But Kendal had already pressed the ‘down’ button and the door closed before she could get back on her feet. Once he heard the mechanism grinding, he shot the controls to keep them from bringing her back up.
Kendal was immediately surrounded. An officer on each side with their kinetics pointed at him and their fingers on their triggers.
Kendal threw his gun to the ground and held up his hands. He wasn’t sure why, but he wasn’t afraid. He felt strangely calm as he watched Vernan approach.
“Officer Vernan,” Kendal said. “It’s been a while.”
“Lieutenant Vernan,” he corrected. “Admiral Tearly sought me to replace you and command one of the lower decks. It’s a shame you had to go and betray the Union like that, seeing as how close you were to getting that command you always wanted.”
“I didn’t betray anyone,” Kendal said, “and you know that. The Union is the one who wronged me. I’ve done nothing.”
“Don’t pretend like we’re not aware of your little adventures on the Bachman.”
Kendal’s posture dropped and he felt like a weight had been put on his chest. No, he thought. They couldn’t.
“How is Sasha Boe now?” Vernan asked. “Because I get the feeling no one will be seeing him ever again, and that’s all thanks to you.”
Kendal grit his teeth. “You bastard.”
“Just you keep on thinking that,” Vernan said. He looked to his guards. “Take him to the Morana, and then send out a team to find his bitch. We’ve locked down the docking bay, so she’s got nowhere to run.”
“I’ll kill you,” Kendal said.
“I wonder how you’d feel if we shot her,” Vernan said, leaning up close to Kendal. “Self-defense of course, but she would be dead all the same. Imagine her laying on the floor with a bullet in her chest, giving out one last pathetic wheeze before she croaked.”
Kendal lunged at him, but the officers held him back before he could get close enough to hit him. They grabbed him by the arms, pinning them behind his back and making him walk.
Back on Nau Cedik, he would have given anything to return to the Morana, but now he wished they would take him to any other ship in the system. Seeing the familiar halls, now tainted by his loathing of the Union, would be like seeing an old friend living in the gutter.
Chapter 26
Fifteen minutes of walking through uninhabited corridors of the ship. Nova’s fake message had sent them on a detour to find the emergency staircase. There wasn’t a doubt in Nova’s mind that Tayla knew she was missing and was already scrambling to get a hold of the two guards. All she needed was a moment’s distraction and she’d have a chance to get free.
She was careful to memorize which hallway they were on and which path she’d need to take to get to the security room. That would be crucial to her plan. Find out where Kendal’s ship was, then get to him before Tayla did.
If she hasn’t gotten him already, Nova thought, dreading the possibility.
One of the guard’s communicator rang. Nova almost wasn’t prepared for it. They stopped and answered before she knew what was going on. Precious seconds were wasted before she got her fingers back to her comm-watch.
While she still had the chance, she typed: Located Nova on corridor 88b. Stole EG-pack and heading towards the shuttle bay. Turn off grav-panels on b-deck to halt progress. Typing on such a small screen was blistering.
The guard hung up and put his communicator away the instant Nova sent the message. A second later and she would have been caught.
“What was that about?” the second guard asked.
“Miscommunication,” the first said. He put the kinetic back to Nova’s shoulder, rubbing that same spot where she no doubt had a bruise from the barrel. As they walked, Nova inched her way towards the left-hand wall through slight influence of direction.
Any moment now.
“How can there be a miscommunication?” the second asked. “What we’re doing isn’t so complicated.”
“Someone filled a report that we’d lost ol’ bitchy here,” the first said. “They’re looki—”
The gravity vanished and Nova felt weightlessness. It caught the guards by surprise, and they flailed and struggled to orient themselves. Nova on the other hand knew it was coming and put her feet on the corner of the wall to right herself.
She raised her legs and flipped her hands under them so she was cuffed to her front. She pushed off the wall towards the guards and kicked the first hard enough to send him flying. This negated her own velocity, keeping her still and allowed her to drew the second’s kinetic from his belt and shot the first guard in the chest from across the hall.
The first guard tried to grab for her, but she pushed off the ground and dove towards the ceiling. She shot the second guard in the side of the face, bullet going through his skull and spraying blood from the wound, pooling in midair as he spun from the leftover kinetic energy.
“Traitors,” she muttered and pointed the kinetic at the chain between her cuffs. She shot twice, breaking the chain and freeing her hands from each other.
The second guard hadn’t died yet, but she didn’t have the time, or the bullets, to finish him off.
Good luck living with half a face, she thought and kicked off the wall to float down the hallway. Traveling weightless was quicker than walking, but she had to go by foot once she left hallway 88B, then she was back on her bare feet.
Once she was down the emergency steps, she took the quickest route back to the main hallways. Her ship was swarming with Union officers. Nova wasn’t sure how they got aboard without her clearance, but she guessed that Tayla had found a way to keep the boarding clearances hidden from her.
Nova cursed herself for not checking up on the systems more regularly. She’d put too much faith in Tayla, and in her crew. Had she done a system check before letting Tayla into her room she might have been able to stop her, but she was too busy with her book to have even thought of it.
Every other hall was swarming with people who would capture Nova without hesitation. She peeked around each corner, waiting until it was clear before she ran across to the next corner. She’d never imagined being an outsider to her own ship. Hiding from the very people she looked down upon hours earlier.
Her kinetic had ten shots left, but it would too loud to use now that she was in the most populated part of the ship. One shot would alert everyone nearby.
The surveillance room was near communications offices. She waited behind a corner, watching the flow of peopl
e in and out of the rooms until there was a moment where the hallway was clear. She pocketed her kinetic and ran for the door.
She opened the panel above the door-latch and typed in her passcode, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one saw her. The door opened. She stepped inside and drew her kinetic in a single motion, sweeping the small room to make sure no one was inside.
Once she knew it was safe, she closed and locked the door behind her. The lights were still on. Monitors and systems in mid-use, and two cup of coffee still warm on the desk. The monitors displayed a selected group of rooms from each sector of the ship. She had to cycle through the channels to look at each room and hallway. There were hundreds of camera’s around the ship, and she could only see twelve at a time.
A search had been mobilized to find Nova. Tayla either found the two guards Nova had dismantled, or was following the fake reports that Nova had put out under Tayla’s name.
There’s too many of them, Nova thought. She flipped through channels, looking over halls and memorizing where people were and where people were going. It was a maze of a ship with dead-end halls and loops and detours that led in odd directions, all designed by Nova herself. She noticed an oddity in Tayla’s strategy. They were spread even around the ship, but clustering in certain hallways. A pattern? She brushed through the blinders on the desk until she found a stack of clean, unused paper. She took the cap off a pen with her mouth and spit it on the floor. There’s a pattern I’m not seeing.
She flipped through the stations, and drew a crude map on the papers. Both floors, will the major hallways outlined. Nova put down an X for every cluster of persons, juggling between drawing and cycling through the camera feeds.
Her map showed a bias towards the shuttle bay, almost forming a perimeter around the area. You think I’m going after the shuttles. Nova cycled the feed over to the docking bay. Well, I don’t need a shuttle to get off this ship.
All the docking bays were empty aside from one. There sat a ship Nova had never seen in her life. An older class transport built before the Union era. Nova smiled, knowing exactly who the ship belonged to.
Nova repeated the directions to the docking bay over and over in her mind, dedicating the safe passages to memory. Once she knew her path well enough to follow, she waited by the door, eye on the camera as she waited for the hall to empty before storming out.
She managed to sprint half way there without passing a single set of eyes. She had expected a clear path, but this was too easy for her comfort. If her past experiences were anything to go by, she was about to run into a field of complications.
She turned around the corner from one section of the ship to the next and had to stop as sharp as she could. Straight in front of her, between where she was and where she need to go, stood a group of Union marines.
On camera, she’d seen officers, but not marines. Where the hell did they come from? She backed away, keeping her steps quiet as she tried to hide before they noticed her.
One of them looked, and Nova dove behind the corner as quick as she could. Her heart raced and her blood shot through her veins enough that she could count her pulse. You didn’t see anything.
“We know you’re there,” a marine said. They were already coming up, footsteps heavy and equipment rattling with each movement. “Don’t make this difficult.”
Oh, but I like difficult.
Nova peeked around the corner and shot one of the marines straight through the chest-plate. No more playing around. They drew their weapons and gave chase. Nova backtracked the way she came, leading the marines around a loop straight and straight back down the hallway where they’d came from. Only now, Nova was in the lead, being chased towards the docking bay. A long straight hall that left her vulnerable.
One of them got in a shot. The bullet passed by close enough that she could feel the brush of wind on her cheek. It hit the floor a few feet in front of her, sparking off the metal and making her heart jolt.
That was too close. She started to run in a zig-zag, making her movements strange and erratic to confuse them and keep from aiming.
She ignored the pains in her bare feet, and the breathlessness in her lungs, as she ran fast enough that she was practically leapt with each step. There were three hallways and forty feet of distance between her and the grunts when she stopped next to an oxygen vent.
She didn’t have time to catch her breath, instead kicking open the grate and climbing inside. It was a dead-end, with a fan at the back blowing fresh air out the vent, but once she closed the grate she was hidden.
The marines ran right by without a second’s hesitation.
Nova counted backwards from one-hundred, then climbed out of the vent.
It was only a short jog to the docking bay, but her lungs had given up. She could barely breathe, taking in harsh gasps that made her gag and sputter with each desperate gasp. If Kendal was there, she didn’t think she’d have enough breath to beg him to let her onboard.
She’d underestimated herself, breathing almost normal by the time she got to the docking bay.
She had to use a clearance code to get in through the alternative exit, the bay normally accessible only from the gravshaft on the other end of the hall.
The airlock had been disabled. Nova tried to override it, but her clearance code wouldn’t let her.
“No,” she muttered. “You can’t be locked.”
Nova gripped the valve and pulled at it with all the strength she had left, but the door wouldn’t open. You can’t be locked. I need to get in there. Her last resort had been sealed off and she was boiling inside. Anger and hatred that started to swell over into a depression. She tried to beat on the door, but only managed to collapse against it, barely keeping on her feet.
“Hold ‘er right there.”
This perked her up. The voice was accompanied with the charge of an EG-pack and the soft patter of boots on metal. One of her own had drawn a gun to her. Nova wasn’t close enough to snatch it from her, nor far enough to run.
She’d have to talk her way out of this.
The girl looked familiar, yet Nova couldn’t place her name. From her clothes she looked like she from the lower deck, yet wasn’t close to being in uniform. Her hair short and self-cut, teeth missing near the top, and a battery pack on her hip that looked custom built.
“Fancy runnin’ into you like this,” the girl said. “Maybe I get to be the one to end you’re pathetic lil’ life.”
Nova rolled her eyes and had to hold back a chuckle. “You took what Tayla said to heart, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“She might say that she promised a place in the Union systems, but I have my doubts that she’ll keep up with those promises. You turn right around and I promise once I get control back you’ll be on your way—”
“Shut it!” the girl said, tightening her grip on her EG-pack. “I ain’t here about no Union business and I certainly ain’t ever heard of no Tayla. You’re going to do a few things for me or I’ll set that bald head of yours right on fire and watch it burn down to your skull.”
Who is this girl? Nova thought, seeing her as a stranger, yet knew she couldn’t be. She wasn’t Union, yet she wasn’t her own.
“First, you’re gonna let me know if you got a way out of here,” the girl said. “And second—”
A kinetic went off. Nova shielded her ears a second took late and could now hear nothing but ringing.
From both ends of the hall they were surrounded by Union officers and marines. Two to her back, and three behind the girl. All of them were armed and a little too comfortable on the trigger. They were low level grunts, no one with any authority, but Nova wasn’t talking her way out of this one.
Nova put her hands up, showing she was completely harmless. “You got me.”
Chapter 27
Mira was packed into a shuttle with Nova and her rogues. A narrow tube of a ship with hard metal seats along both walls that had bars between the thighs of the passengers wher
e they could feed the chain of their handcuffs through.
Both woman had been brought on first and were put at the very end right next to each other, their seats close enough that their knees were practically touching each other’s. From the looks Nova was giving, she was just as unpleased about this as Mira.
One by one, they brought in more prisoners. Each were tired and scraggly looking with handed down uniforms, scars on their arms and face, and hair that had gone months uncut. Back in Benith Town, Mira was used to being the one who looked like a drowned rat, but now she felt almost presentable compared to these people.
Mira kept her eyes sharp, watching each person brought on. She knew it was unlikely, but she hoped they would have brought Kendal onto the same shuttle as her.
Unless he’s dead, Mira thought, trying to keep the image of Kendal laying on the floor in a puddle of blood out of her mind.
When they’d closed the doors and sealed the airlock, Mira lost hope. She sighed and rested her head on the sharp metal headrest and tried not to let her despair sink in. The shuttle took off, and once they were up to speed, Mira felt weightlessness take over. She sat an inch off the seat and her hair had lifted over her forehead.
“Were you looking for someone?” Nova asked.
Mira sat up and looked at her with a raised brow. “Don’t remember me?” she said, trying to keep her voice low.
Nova shrugged. “I don’t.”
“Got no reason to be surprised,” Mira said. “We only met for a couple minutes.”
“That’s the perk of being a leader, you see, being known by all her subordinates. It’s not my job to know all of you.”
Mira laughed, putting a strange look on Nova’s face. “I ain’t your goddamn subordinate. Don’t follow you and I never did.”
“Then what were you doing on my ship?” Nova asked.
“Followin’ captain’s orders,” Mira said, trying her best not to laugh from calling Kendal a captain. She knew that’s what he was, but the thought was still silly to her.
Cast of Nova Page 19
