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Rohan pinged my implant just before the san door opened.
“You ready?” he asked, and I wondered why he’d gone direct to my implant.
He answered that by highlighting the half dozen bugs scattered around our cabin, and then he highlighted the motion sensors rigged by both entrances.
Sonuva... I let that thought trail off. Just because the boy might have heard all the bad words before, was not a reason to keep using them in his presence.
“Yeah,” he said, and showed me what he’d done to silence the alarms attached to the motion sensors.
I smiled.
“You know your stuff.”
“Mack made Tens teach me,” he said, and I stared at him in surprise. “I’d finished the programming lessons they had on board, and he was looking for some way of extending what I knew.”
Well, that explained it.” I thought.
“He said we had to keep what I could do a secret, and mum...” his thought trail hiccupped, and I discovered you could hear sadness, even in an implant, but Rohan pulled himself together, and kept going. “Mum agreed.”
He went dark on me, after that, keeping his feelings secret, I guessed, but I didn’t push him. Not on that, anyway. Not when there were other things that were more important.
“We need to go,” I said.
“Yes. They’re coming,” he agreed, and I didn’t ask him how he knew.
I figured if my own alarms hadn’t pinged me, the boy must have put his own safeguards in place... and, if he’d been trained by Tens, then they’d be good ones. I didn’t say another word, but led the way into the closet, and through, to the passage beyond.
“Better hurry, then,” I said, and started to jog.
I’ll give Mack this, he kept his crew fit. All his crew, as in everyone on board, and Rohan had been no exception. The kid kept up with me, and wasn’t even breathing hard when we stopped, although he did ask why.
“There are three of them,” I said, and he gave me a look of pure mischief.
“I locked them in the storage hold,” he said, “and then I jammed the opening mechanism, cut the security feeds, and locked out the comms. Captain will be very upset.”
“Excellent!” and we bolted for the ship.
I stopped at bottom of the stairs leading into the shuttle proper. “Let me make sure the inside is clear.”
Rohan nodded, and shifted toward the rear of the small craft. It was a good thing he did, because Bendigo was just as quick and deadly as I’d seen him when Tens had had me shoot him loose in Bastien’s dungeon. Only, this time, I didn’t appreciate it as much.
He’d reached out and wrapped a hand around my throat before I’d had time to register his presence by the door.
“Run!” It was all I had time to send via the implant before I was slammed into the bulkhead beside the entryway.
My heart plummeted as the door slid closed behind me.
“Secure the cargo hatch,” Bendigo ordered, and I hoped Rohan had already gotten on board and found somewhere to hide. If he hadn’t.... I didn’t want to think about what would happen if he hadn’t.
But I really wanted to breathe, and I really didn’t like the fierceness in Bendigo’s gaze. I reached up and wrapped my hands around his wrists, trying to get some of my weight off my neck. I was never so happy to hear the lieutenant’s voice as when he spoke from the direction of the cockpit.
“Do we really have to keep her, captain?”
Bendigo looked over his shoulder, frowning as he thought about that. I tried to draw in as deep a breath as I could manage. I took a second breath, feeling it rasp past the web of his thumb and finger, while hoping it wasn’t my last.
After a long moment’s contemplation, Bendigo lowered me enough that my feet could touch the floor. He curled his fingers into the front of my shirt, releasing my throat so I could breathe easier, and looked at me.
I watched him as he studied my face.
“Where’d you stash the brat?”
I shrugged, earning another bruising encounter with the bulkhead. From the looks of his arms, I was just another free weight. I really hoped he got it into his head that I really had no idea where Rohan was, or he might change his mind about needing me on the mission. He was about to ask again, when the cargo-hold door opened, and another of his officers stepped through.
“Find anything?”
“No,” the officer replied and I tried not to react, tried not to show just how relieved I was to hear it... It wasn’t hard. If Rohan hadn’t been found in the cargo hold, then he’d either not made it on board, or he’d managed to find a hiding place—and I couldn’t relax until I knew he was safe.
Actually, I couldn’t relax until I knew for sure that Bendigo wasn’t going to change his mind about my usefulness, and the mission be damned. If he didn’t need me as much as he said he did, then I was toast, and Rohan... I tried not to think about Rohan.
Bendigo jerked me forward, and then slammed me up against the bulkhead once again. It was like he was pressing weights.
“Where is he?” he demanded, and then repeated the question, emphasizing each word by slamming me back into the bulkhead. “Where. Is. He?”
At least I could answer that honestly.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I couldn’t help laughing, as I repeated the answer. “I don’t know.”
If he’d let go, I would have sunk to the floor at his feet, but he didn’t. Instead, he stared at me in consternation, before dragging me over to one of the seats behind the cockpit.
“Strap in,” he said, pushing me across, so he could take the seat beside me.
I sat in the seat closest the shuttle’s hull, and strapped in.
“Take us out,” Bendigo ordered, and, as the tiny craft lurched into freefall, I sure as shit hoped Rohan had found a hiding place inside the shuttle.
“I’m fine,” sounded briefly in my head, and I almost wept—both with relief and frustration.
He was fine. What was that supposed to mean? He was 'fine' aboard Marl’s cruiser? He was ‘fine’ aboard the shuttle?
“Did you review the files?” Bendigo’s voice cut across my thoughts like an axe, and I jumped.
“Did you?” he asked, his voice menacingly soft.
“Yes,” I lied, and he opened a screen in front of us.
“Show me,” he said, and we went over the entry plan, with me hoping I could improvise fast enough to cover what I lacked.
“Almost,” he said, when I’d finished, and then I learned what he had been keeping from me: Odyssey was still there. Its people were still digging through the rubble of the first explosion, exploring the tunnels from which we’d extracted Bendigo, searching everything they could find for more.
They were nothing, if not thorough, and I was glad to see it carried to everything, and not just their questionable methods of recruiting. Not so glad, when I remembered they’d be applying their thoroughness to their search for me. It was going to make it very hard to slip away,
“What are they looking for?” I asked, and Bendigo gave me a smile.
It was a tight-lipped affair, and as bleak as any I’d seen from my mother’s last boyfriend. Not the sort of smile I had ever wanted to see again, and definitely not from someone sitting beside me and blocking any chance of escape.
“Me.”
I felt my skin tingle, as the blood drained from my face. My voice was hoarse as I asked, “Why?”
But he didn’t answer, giving me orders, instead.
“Go over it again.”
So I did. We went over the plan, again, from the point of touch-down to the hidden entry on the other side of the hill overlooking Bastien’s mansion, to the secret passage leading to the complex I’d helped rescue Odyssey’s agents from.
“Captain, we’re going to warp.”
“We’re what?” I asked.
“This isn’t just a glorified escape pod,” Bendigo told me, and then the seat extended around me to form a capsule, and the world gave an all-too-familiar shudder.
I wondered if Rohan was in the hold, if his hiding place was enough to cushion his passage through the warp—and I drew comfort from the fact this was a normal jump, and not being done as an evasive maneuver. The kid might just be okay, if he was aboard... and inside the ship.
As jumps go, this one was shorter than I expected.
“That was quick,” I said, studying Bendigo’s face. “I thought we were three days’ out.”
He regarded me with an emotionless gaze.
“It was getting hard to keep you alive,” he said. “I thought it would be better to get the job done before I had to kill you.”
Well, that was honest—a little blunt for my taste, but definitely honest, and Bendigo hadn’t finished explaining, so I shut up and listened.
“The ship will follow our path,” which made me wonder exactly what tech was on the thing we were flying in, but Bendigo wasn’t finished. “We will be there in three hours; it will come in an hour behind us.”
And he turned off the screen, making me flinch as he loomed toward me.
“What equipment do you need?” he asked, and I stared at him like a stunned rabbit.
“What equipment?” he repeated, and my brain unstuck, running over what I now knew of the setup.
“Can I use the terminal?” I asked. “I plan better on-screen.”
“I thought you’d be good enough to run it from the top of your head,” Bendigo said. “Mack gave me the impression you were exceptional.”
“That was nice of him,” I muttered, then shrugged. “Fine. If you’d rather it was said out loud, here’s what I need.”
I closed my eyes, bringing what I knew into my head. I scrolled forward through the mission, listing each item as I anticipated using it, and listing alternatives as I tried to plan contingencies for problems I couldn’t see. Bendigo sat silently beside me, until I came to the end of the list, and opened my eyes.
“Good,” he said, and unlocked the screen in front of me. “Now, write it down.”
I bit back a curse, and started typing. It wasn’t as easy the second time around, and I kept having to stop, and re-run the incursion in my head. The shuttle hit atmo just as I entered the last item.
“Done?” Bendigo asked, as I lifted my hands from the keyboard.
“Done,” I said, and he transferred the document to his lieutenant.
“Fill in the gaps,” he said, and I figured they’d already had a bag prepped for me.
Nice of him to tell me. The way things were going, I wouldn’t be able to go over my gear before we left.
I settled back in the seat, and closed my eyes. It was bad enough that Bendigo had moved the schedule up, worse that he had condensed the time to prepare—and it was really bad that he hadn’t given me any notice of the changes. It made me wonder what other surprises were in store for me.
