At first, I thought the sound of breaking glass, cut off abruptly, was a figment of my imagination, then someone slammed into me and flattened me to the floor. The unmistakable sound of a blast pistol being fired next to my head was enough to jerk me back into the present, filled with adrenaline.
I opened my eyes to find Alex poised over me, shooting at an unknown assailant. He shot again and I revised my assessment to unknown assailants, plural. Alex’s body blocked my access to the blaster on my hip, so I reached for the pistol I’d hidden under the coffee table, moving quickly but carefully to avoid ruining his aim.
The sounds in the room were wrong, short bursts that were cut off rather than fading out. The people who had entered were using silencers, albeit poor ones, but it meant that I couldn’t get a clear count of how many we were up against.
I disabled the adhesive and the holster fell into my hands. I drew the pistol. Alex fired again. It was so weird not being able to hear the shots hit. A body sprawled on the floor near the balcony door, unmoving.
A head and gun peeked around the doorway and I shot on instinct. The attacker silently fell to the floor.
The furniture blocked my view of the rest of the room. “How many left?”
Alex shot, then ducked down, his face centimeters from mine. “Five, at least. Aoife is on her way.”
I still wore my shielding cuff. It had been inactive during the race—and wouldn’t have protected me from a fall, anyway—but after the crash, I’d thought it prudent to wear it through dinner. The silver cuff was designed to look like a bracelet that, while a little plain, was fashionable enough to wear with any outfit.
The cuff encircled my right wrist. I swiped my left hand across it, from the inside to the outside and back again, then held my hand in place for two seconds until the cuff buzzed once. Active, the cuff could deflect up to eight shots, but from this close, the protection would likely be halved. I would have to make it count.
When I tried to sit up, Alex pressed a hand to my shoulder, while returning fire with someone near the bed. They must’ve come in the windows in addition to the balcony doors.
“I have a shielding cuff,” I hissed quietly. “Let me up. I can distract them and give you a chance to attack.”
“No,” he bit out without looking at me. Gone was the quiet, soft-spoken man I was used to. In his place was a hardened soldier, focused and deadly.
My cuff pulsed and a blaster bolt was deflected toward the ceiling. One.
I pushed myself up just as the bedroom door was kicked open. “About time,” Alex growled.
Aoife flashed a grin and launched herself into the chaos. She created a wave of death as every shot found a head. She’d taken out three in the space of three seconds. I’d never seen anyone shoot like her, and neither had our attackers. While we froze in shock for a heartbeat, she and Alex took out the remaining two.
Holy shit.
A faint sound broke me from the shock, and I lunged up. “Ying!”
Aoife nodded, already in motion, and I followed her, drawing my other pistol. We darted across the hall. There were definitely sounds of blaster fire coming from Ying’s bedroom, which hopefully meant she wasn’t dead in her sleep. “I have a shielding cuff,” I told Aoife. “It will deflect three more shots.”
She nodded and kicked the door in. She took in the situation at a glance and threw herself into the room, shooting as she went. I followed with Alex behind me. Ying was apparently holding her ground in the bathroom. The five surviving assailants did not expect us to appear behind them.
Aoife picked them off with uncanny precision, while I mostly tried to shoot the enemies without hitting her or Ying. I could shoot with either hand, but I was less accurate with my right. The soldiers in the room turned and my cuff vibrated twice in rapid succession. The next bolt grazed the top of my shoulder, far too close to my head. Alex shot the attacker before she could try again.
“Ying, are you okay?” I asked. My voice felt loud after the weirdly half-silent battle we’d just fought.
She emerged from the bathroom with a blast pistol in each hand. She had on smart glasses and moved gingerly, favoring her right side. Her right arm dripped blood. “I’m hit in the arm, but my nanos are dealing with it. With the silencers, how did you know I was under attack?”
“They hit my room, too. Get ready, we have to leave, now. Is your ship here?” I asked as I bent to examine the nearest attacker. Dressed in black combat fatigues and light body armor, the man could be a soldier or mercenary anywhere in the ’verse.
“No, I took a transport from Honorius,” Ying said.
“You’ll ride with us, then. Call Cira if you haven’t. Tell her to meet us at Chaos.” I quickly searched the body. I pulled out what looked to be the prototype silencer they were using, but he didn’t have anything else of interest. I ran my com down both of his arms, but his identity chip was either disabled, removed, or suppressed—definitely a soldier or merc.
“Cira received my emergency alert and confirmed she is on her way down from her room,” Ying said. “She should be here any second.”
I stood and tucked the prototype silencer in my pocket. “Okay, grab anything you can’t leave behind. Alex, you’re with me. Aoife, hit the office. I want everything in the safe. Ying, are you okay on your own until Cira arrives?”
“I’m here,” Cira said from the doorway. She was slightly out of breath, but otherwise seemed fine.
“Take Ying to Chaos. It’s in the spaceport. We’ll meet you there in ten minutes.” Cira had been a shock trooper in the RCDF for a decade. She would keep Ying safe until they made it to the ship.
Everyone assembled looked ready to argue, so I cut them off. “Now is not the time. We have a very narrow window until we are attacked again or the whole house wakes up. You all know what to do. Go!”
I headed for the back stairs, Alex on my heels, and the rest of the group followed. Aoife broke off on the second floor to hit the office. On the ground floor, Cira and Ying continued toward the back door while Alex and I headed for the study. I clicked on the silencer and vanisher before we left the butler’s pantry.
“How do you want to do this?” Alex asked.
“Speed over stealth.”
The hallway was empty and no light appeared under the door of the study. I’d holstered my second blaster, but kept the first in a low ready position. Alex took me at my word and kicked in the door. We rushed the room but it was as empty as it had been last night when I was here.
I moved directly to the desk and pulled out the codebreaker. I placed the small, rectangular device against the drawer’s control panel and activated it. The codebreaker was designed to open electronic locks, but it took time. The more complex the lock, the longer it took.
And we were sitting ducks until it finished.
While I worked on the desk, Alex had closed and barricaded the door. I suppose that meant we’d be taking a window exit, which wasn’t a bad plan, all things considered. He paced in the dark, watching both the door and windows.
Codebreakers were rare enough that most locks only had the most basic defense against them and would open in a few seconds. The lock on this drawer was proving better than most. As time slid past, I began to wonder if it was going to open at all.
Three minutes later, the codebreaker finally chirped and the drawer opened. It was filled with paper, but I didn’t bother reading any of it. I had been serious about speed over stealth, so I pulled the entire drawer from the desk and dumped it on the pristine desktop.
I searched the empty drawer for a hidden compartment, and found a small one at the very back that included some hard credit chips and a data chip. I shoved them in my pocket, replaced the drawer, and bundled all of the papers into a stack nearly four centimeters tall—there was a lot of paper here.
Someone in the hallway rattled the doorknob, then pounded on the door when it wouldn’t open. Alex had his bag strapped over his back. It would be more secure than my cargo pockets, so I waved him over until he was inside the silence field. “Does your bag have room for this?” I gestured at the stack of paper.
Rather than answering, he silently opened the bag and shoved the papers inside. “We need to go. I haven’t seen anyone outside yet, but stay alert. Aoife is climbing down from the office. She’s going to meet us on the way to the ship.”
Alex and Aoife were obviously wearing mics and earpieces, and once again they’d left me out of the loop. “We’re going to have a long talk about the meaning of teamwork once this is over,” I groused.
He moved to the window, shoved it open, and knocked out the screen. “I’m sorry. I was planning to get you connected before we left, but then everything went to shit and there was no time.” He waved me forward. “Let’s go. And turn off your silencer.”
I gave him a jaunty salute and clicked it off, then hopped through the window, blaster first. The lawn was empty, but we were on the other side of the house from the rooms where Ying and I had been attacked. I moved aside, but stayed in the coverage provided by the landscaping along the building.
Alex silently landed beside me. “Aoife is drawing fire on the other side of the building. At least two attackers. She’s going to distract them while we break for the ship. Move fast.”
“Did she see Ying?”
“She didn’t say.”
Worry pressed on my chest as we dashed across the yard. A glance back showed lights in a few of the upper-level windows. Our fight had finally awakened some of the guests.
A blaster bolt sailed by, close enough that I could feel the heat. With nothing to hide behind, I dove to the side. I spun and came up shooting. Two attackers had rounded the back of the house from the direction of the study.
Alex and I shot the same one, giving the other time to get off another shot. Based on the grunt, it must’ve hit Alex, but he shot milliseconds after me and both bolts found their target. The assailant collapsed.
I pushed myself to my feet and checked on Alex. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll live,” he grumbled. “Grazed my shoulder.”
“Can you walk?”
“Yes. Let’s go before anyone else tries to kill you.”
We veered off the path to grab my trunk—which Alex wouldn’t let me carry—and then we were at the spaceport. I didn’t see Cira or Ying, but Chaos sat where I’d left her with the cargo ramp down and door closed. All of the surrounding ships had been here when I’d landed, so either the soldiers had been lying in wait the whole time, or they had come from somewhere else.
There was a lot of empty ground between me and the ship, but it couldn’t be helped. Delaying would only give our attackers more time to get in position. Alex must’ve agreed because he didn’t try to stop me when I sprinted for the ship.
I swiped my identity chip over the control panel and the cargo bay door slid upward. I ducked inside before the door was all the way open, and Alex came in behind me. The lights came on automatically and I blinked against the brightness. “Chaos, how many people are onboard?”
“Two passengers in the cargo bay, Captain.”
I figured Ying hadn’t hacked her way into my ship, though she probably could have, but that left the question: where was she? She knew what Chaos looked like and this was the only spaceport on the grounds.
Alex set the trunk on the floor. “Aoife is on her way. Her attackers are down.”
I got my first good look at him. His shirt had a ragged hole at the top of his left shoulder and the fabric around it was plastered to his skin with blood. “Holy shit, that’s not a graze. Get to the medbay before you bleed out.”
He glanced down at his shirt with a grimace. “It looks worse than it is. My nanos have already stopped the bleeding. I’ll be healed by tomorrow.” He said it with an oddly expectant look in his eye.
I knew exactly what he was aiming for, but there was no way in hell I was giving him any more of my secrets—even if those secrets were shared. My own blaster graze, which actually was a graze and not a chunk of missing flesh, would be healed in an hour or two. Fast, even for someone with top-of-the-line nanobots.
And impossible to hide.
Thanks to the tests, Father knew I retained my healing abilities, but as far as he knew, that was all I’d kept. Even if this particular secret wasn’t entirely secret, I didn’t need Alex having any more power over me.
“I’m glad you’re not too hurt. Please have Aoife keep an eye out for Ying and Cira.”
If he was disappointed that I didn’t pick up the gauntlet he’d dropped, he didn’t show it. He nodded and relayed the request. I moved to the door and scanned the area around the spaceport. A flicker of movement on the path leading to the house turned into Cira and Ying. Ying had Cira’s arm over her shoulder and both women looked the worse for wear.
“Alex, with me!” I dashed toward the two injured women without waiting to see if he would follow. Up close, it was easy to see that Cira had been shot through the leg. “What happened?”
Ying answered, “We hit a team staging in the backyard, then had to work our way around in cover because of Cira’s leg. You took them out in the yard. Thanks for not leaving us.”
“Of course I wouldn’t leave you. But I only have one diagnostic table. Which of you needs it more?”
Ying and Cira each answered with the other’s name. Ying’s arm was bloody, but it didn’t appear to be dripping anymore, where Cira’s leg was. “Alex, please help Cira to the medbay, then—”
Aoife sprinted into view. “Time to go!”
Alex swept Cira into his arms and ran for the ship. I urged Ying into a run and we all scrambled aboard. Once Aoife cleared the door, I retracted the ramp and closed the cargo bay door. “Alex, medbay is on the bottom floor. Get Cira in the diagnostic scanner. Chaos, take us into orbit.”
Cira complained, but Alex just carried her down the hall to the medbay. The ship’s engines rumbled to life and ramped up as we lifted off. I headed for the flight deck. Ying and Aoife followed. I wasn’t sure if our attackers had a ship, but if they thought to tangle with Chaos, then they would get a surprise. My little ship was well equipped for both defense and offense.
“Where are we headed?” Ying asked as I dropped into the captain’s chair. I waved her into the second console and she sank down with a grateful sigh. Aoife sat in one of the chairs along the wall and pulled out her com.
“For now, we’re headed to space so we have room to maneuver if we need to. After that, it’s up to you. I can drop you back in Honorius for your ship, or you can ride back to Serenity with me. I have to report to Father about everything that happened.”
“You think they’re trying to push us into war.”
The soldiers who had attacked weren’t using stun pistols. They’d been aiming to kill both of us. The only thing that would do was push both of our Houses into war with House James, not each other. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Have either of you checked the news?” Aoife asked. Her tone was oddly flat.
I hadn’t, and I hadn’t gotten any replies from my siblings, either, which was a little weird. I’d expected them to jump down my throat, especially Ada, who was on a planet where it was late afternoon. “What’s going on?” I asked, as I pulled up the news feed on my console.
“Widespread attacks,” Ying whispered, staring at her com in horror, “including Serenity.”
“Who was targeted?”
She looked up, her eyes huge in her pale face. “Everyone.”