part0098

The proximity alert chattered on. Although the tempo had not increased, it sounded more insistent. Sela knew what she would find if she were to access the sens-con: a Ravstar carrier.

Suddenly, the deck bucked. Metal creaked somewhere to her left and overhead. It felt like the fist of a giant pounding the tired old Cass. It was the signature turbulence of disrupted ions pushing forth in a tremendous wave that could be created only by a massive vessel exiting the conduit. The Cass, still adrift, had been too close to the flex point when the Ravstar vessel emerged and as a consequence had borne the brunt of the ion displacement of a far larger vessel.

Sela folded over Jon, trying to keep his head from smacking the bulkhead as they were rocked in the fading backwash signature. His breathing seemed fine. He was essentially asleep. She exhaled a shaking breath.

Her fury blossomed. Erelah. I will take this out on her pallid hide if I live through this.

Sela turned in time to see the closing cargo bay door and the girl’s pale face just before it shut. The lights on the magseal flipped to red. Locked.

She sprang to her feet and raced to the door.

The dream about Atilio, watching him flip through nav charts. It had been her own hands entering the coordinates of this destination. Somehow, the girl had slipped inside of her sleeping mind and used her to program the nav like some puppet.

In futile rage, Sela kicked the door. Even if she managed to wake the Cass’s engines back up, they could not spool up the velo drives in time. They were locked out, adrift. Erelah had wanted to be sure that Jon did not intervene.

Sela ran back to the command loft, leaping over Jon’s sprawled form.

The ion wake of the Questic had sent the Cass into a slow spin, but the external vid feeds still tracked the newly arrived vessel. She regarded its image on the screen. It was not the same raptor class vessel that had attacked Merx. This was a deacon class carrier as large as the Storm King . Now it lumbered like a spiny, coiled monstrosity. The black hull gleamed in muted starlight. Her velo drive glowed in a sinister cool yellow.

It was a ship meant to inspire fear and awe. All it evoked from Sela was unadulterated fury.

“Oh, you’re an ugly bitch, aren’t you?”

Sela jabbed off the proximity alert. The Cass drifted in silence now. The occasional hiss of fried circuits sounded under the uncertain flicker of the lights. Coolant dripped from unseen leaks to bubble and pop, releasing a sickly burnt smell. At least nothing was on fire yet.

There was nothing she could do here.

She rushed back down into the companionway to Jon. He’d not stirred.

She looked overhead at the meshwork of conduits and exposed junction nodes. It was a tech’s nightmare of patches, and creative bypasses. Even if she started pulling wires at random to override the computer, she would likely make it worse.

“Damn it all!” She pounded a fist against the cold metal wall.

She looked down. Jon shakily pushed up onto an elbow. He shook his head as if to clear it.

“You’re alright?” It came out as a breathless sob as she knelt at his side.

“What’s happened?” His voice soggy and dazed. “Am I dreaming?”

“No. It’s real. She did this.” Sela helped him to sit up.

“Erelah?” His face folded with lingering confusion. “Where is she?”

She jerked her chin toward the bay. “Cargo bay. With that bloody stryker.”

His voice sharpened. “What did you do?”

Sela felt the blood rush to her face. The plan. Erelah’s stupid plan. Had I only bothered to listen, could I have prevented this?

“She planned this. I never thought—”

Jon climbed to his feet. Weaving from wall to wall, he approached the cargo bay hatch. In a replay of Sela’s actions moments before, he beat and kicked ineffectually at the metal.

“Erelah, damn it! Open this door!”

“There’s no time,” Sela said. “Ravstar is here. Their carrier just exited the flex point behind us. There has to be a way around the command lockout.”

He looked back at the hatch, laying a final dull smack against it with the palm of his hand. Grudgingly he allowed Sela to pull him toward the command loft.

Sela opened the only operational system they could access: Sensory horizon .

Of course, the viewers still worked. She wants us to see, to witness this.

“Still in command lockout.” She tapped ineffectively at the interface to her right.

“There has to be something…” Jon frantically tabbed through a flurry of screens. Each new command settled on the same override lockout.

“Even if we could move, we burned out the nodes when we left Merx.” Sela tapped at the reads. “The carrier will be on us before we can reach full spool-up.”

“We have to do something.”

“There’s nothing left!” she said with sudden fury. “Erelah has seen to that! We’re dead.”

A new, excited pinging sounded.

“She’s prepping to vent the bay.” Sela snapped off the strident warning. The Cass’s androgynous voice echoed her observation in Commonspeak.

Jon tried to open the vox link. Only dull static answered. He turned to Sela.

“You knew .” He glared.

“Only that she had a plan. But not this—”

“You knew something . And you didn’t say a thing.”

Sela turned away, unable to answer. The guilt twisted in her gut. Erelah had tried to tell her, and she had refused to listen.

“She knew you wouldn’t go along with it, so she came to me and asked me to help.”

“And so you did.”

“No. Jon, I refused. Because it meant betraying you.”

He slapped the console away. The screen flew back, striking the bulkhead.

“Just go. Try to talk to her.” Her voice simmered with defeat.

Jon watched her in the warning glow of the useless tell-tales.

“There’s nothing for you to do here anyway.”

Jon’s voice issued from the speaker on the wall and came muffled through the thick bay door. Erelah’s spine stiffened with the impulse to obey.

“Whatever it is you’re planning, you don’t have to do this!”

Hands trembling, she grabbed the last of the environmental scrubbers and sprinted back to the Jocosta . The ruined components clattered to the floor as she exchanged them for the fully charged ones. She kept her back turned to the hatch. She knew what she would see there: her brother’s distraught face hovering at the other side of the thick glass.

“Don’t do this!”

There was a hollow tug in her chest. She paused halfway up the side of the Jocosta to look at the door. Jon pressed his open palm to the glass. She could see the pale curve of his face beyond. He took this as a hesitation. His pounding on the glass renewed. She forced herself to look away.

There was no time. She willed her limbs back into motion. Sliding down into the cockpit that still smelled of charred filaments and ozone, Erelah donned the headgear.

The flight computer accepted her passkey and rolled through its familiar protocols. To her primed imagination, the stryker’s sounds seemed more menacing, as if the ship knew her intent. The Cass’s computer continued to count down the bay depressurization as she sealed the Jocosta ’s canopy.

The engines hitched once but activated. There was no time for a pre-flight check. There was time only for luck and prayers. The j-drive spool-up took mere seconds, not the plodding forever of a velo. A deep hum resonated through the body of the stryker. It vibrated her bones and wrapped her brain with its numbing harmonics.

It failed to drown out the insistent voice on the vox headset:

“Just answer me.” There was a fierce desperation in the plea that she could not shut out.

She could not choose a fate for Jon and Tyron. They did not deserve that. For a moment, another weak moment, she paused. Her fingers actually hovered over the abort sequence.

Instead, she triggered the vox open.

“I’m sorry, Jon.”

Then cut the channel.

The Jocosta glided effortlessly from the hangar.

Nyxa make me your vessel. Nyxa make me your fiery sword and your instrument. Nyxa guide my hand and my eye. Nyxa clear my Path.

The prayer rolled on and on, a litany in her head. She muttered it under her breath in a tuneless humming, unthinking. It was something to fill the empty air of the cockpit.

Uncle would not have been pleased.

He would not have condoned this destructive and violent act. The man was long dead, having abandoned them both to a place of hard choices.

The Jocosta was nothing, a mote of dust compared to the Questic . A science vessel named in ancient Eugenes to mean the quest for knowledge. The word had a darker meaning too: to interrogate under torture. That was not an innocent accident. Nothing within Tristic’s power was ever innocent for long.

Erelah felt the hybrid’s presence push against that barrier in her head. It held, firmly. She had learned that the harder the force Tristic exerted from without, the more solid the barrier would become. Her voice would never torment Erelah’s mind again, but she could sense her excitement. The beast thought her broken, surrendering and finished.

Erelah relished the correction that came next. Although, delivering it was likely to bring her end.

The message she wanted to see rolled onto the heads-up. The Questic ’s engines were nearing a powered-down state. Their fuel reserves were low. The image of the drive field around her midsection glowed a hot yellow-orange, like the smoldering embers of a forge.

Here she would make a different weapon. Here she could become a fiery sword.

Everything that came next seemed from far away: a story she was telling in her head. Her hands did not shake as she keyed in the final commands. They were the hands of someone else, a warrior twin. She was braver. Her spine did not quiver. She sat bolt upright in the seat. This twin did not waste thought on failed farewells or lost futures. She did not flinch as she felt the surge of energy engulf the stryker. The radiance grew around them, blinding and fierce.