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I stood, frozen on the ground outside of the cell. Had I heard Neptune correctly? Had he just said his code—the code to the dark security network—was Daila Teron? As in, the original uniform lieutenant who I’d hacked my information on top of to take her place on the very ship I was trying to save?
“Stryker.”
The sound of my name snapped me out of it. I ran to the computer. The ten rectangles blinked at me. I activated the keyboard and pecked the letters out one by one. D-A-I-L-A-T-E-R-O-N.
Access granted.
I didn’t have time to stop to think about the why of it all.
The first thing I did was run diagnostics on the ship. If there were truly a problem that required Neptune—or me, in my save-the-day gesture—to leave the safety of Moon Unit 5, armed only with two canisters of oxygen and an untested tether to a ship that was still moving through the galaxy so fast we’d disintegrate before blacking out, then I needed to know what it was.
The ship’s systems were listed as Code Green. Totally normal. I set the timer to backtrack and show me the diagnostic logs for the past twenty-four hours.
All clear.
There was no threat. There had never been a threat. The emergency mission was a ruse to get us out of the way.
I closed the dark network and returned the computer to its normal state. Someone else had been down here long enough to attack Neptune. I didn’t know when or how or why. I didn’t know if they’d seen him on the computer in the repair chamber or me climbing the rungs to the hatch. I didn’t have the time to stop and worry about it.
I stuffed the containment uniform underneath Neptune’s computer and crept toward the cell.
“Stryker,” Neptune said. His voice sounded weak. The hot beams of light cast a bluish glow over him, and the blood on his shirt looked purple, not red. He pulled his hand away from his chest and slid his space gun across the floor. It glided between the beams and hit my boot. “Save yourself.”
I picked up the gun and felt the heft of it in my hand. “Don’t die on me, Neptune.” He held my stare for a long, tense moment. There wasn’t time for anything more.
I ran to the elevator. The doors swished open and I jumped in, sidestepping something blue on the floor. It was a uniform—a medical uniform. One band on the sleeve. Medical ward, first officer.
Doc.
My heart raced as the elevator sped to the floor with the uniform ward. The doors opened and I scanned the hallway. At the far end, Beryn and his green Martian cronies stood in a group. I raced toward them. When they spotted me, the group collectively backed away.
Beryn took the position in front of the rest of them with his arms held up. “Get away from us. We pose no threat to you.” His eyes moved between my face and the space gun, and then back to my face.
I dropped the gun to my side. “Neptune is in the holding cell in security. He’s injured. Get help.”
“You’re a uniform lieutenant. You don’t give us orders.”
Captain Swift joined us from the other side of the hallway. “But I do,” he said. He pulled his radio from his side and spoke into it. “Emergency in the sub-basement. Officer down.” He looked at me. “Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
Captain Swift turned to Beryn and the others. “Disperse throughout the ship. Be on alert for intruders, stowaways, and anyone acting suspiciously. Code Red.” He turned toward me. “Do you know who’s responsible?”
I thought I did, but so much depended on me being right and I didn’t want to screw this up. “No,” I said tentatively.
“Captain,” Beryn interjected, “the passengers. How will we know who’s supposed to be here and who isn’t?”
“Call Purser Frank,” I said. “He’ll know.”
Captain Swift nodded once. The little green men scattered into the hallways. I went the opposite direction toward the uniform ward. It was the closest place I could think of where I could activate the emergency alarm to warn everyone on the ship.
In the uniform ward, I ran straight for the console and the button to communicate with the bridge. The cover was stuck. I set down Neptune’s gun and clawed at the plastic bubble. The gun fell off the console. The bubble didn’t budge.
I turned around, looking for something to use to smash it. My eyes rested on the iron I’d used to press the closet of uniforms earlier that day. It was too far away. I grabbed the makeshift BOP that I’d hidden in the center console, whirled around, face to face with the captain.
“Lt. Stryker,” he said. “We have to get you to safety.”
“I have to notify the bridge.”
“I already did. You’re in danger. Come with me,” he commanded. He was calm. Stoic. In control, like a captain should be. He moved toward me and I willed myself to stand still. “Neptune will be fine. Doc Edison will see to that. Neptune went on a risky mission, and something must have gone wrong.”
“Not Doc,” I said. “He’s—” I stopped. Something wasn’t right. For the first time since being on the ship, Captain Swift was disheveled. His uniform jacket was wrinkled and the bottom closures weren’t closed properly.
No. Not Captain Swift. Please, no.
I clung to the BOP with both hands, wishing there was a way to trade it for Neptune’s gun. Gone was the rational side of me that defaulted to the knowledge I’d learned at the space academy. I was panicking. Nothing felt right.
But I knew. Captain Swift must have stolen a Medical uniform to frame Doc when he attacked Neptune. He’d discarded it in the elevator. He hadn’t known I was in the repair hatch at the time.
There was no way to unknow what I’d figured out.
“You sent Neptune to repair the exterior of the ship,” I said slowly.
Captain Swift stopped a few feet in front of me. “You know about the mission?”
“You came here to the uniform ward to talk to Neptune about it. I overheard your conversation.”
“Then you know what Neptune knows.”
He said it slowly. Too slowly. My instinct was to answer quickly, in the manner expected of a subordinate officer in private conference with the captain. But he wasn’t looking for a yes or a no. He was reading me to see how much I knew.
If I knew he killed the second navigation officer, leaked CO into engineering, and invented a fake mission designed to send Neptune to his death.
Yes, I knew. I didn’t know why he’d done any of it, but in that moment, I was sure he was behind everything.
“You’re a criminal. You sabotaged the ship and risked the lives of everybody on board. What I don’t know is why. Maybe why doesn’t matter.” I stepped backward to put space between us.
“You know all that? I’m impressed. Here I thought approving the faked application of a low-income Plunian would be a safe move. Far safer than letting Neptune’s protégé on the ship. She would never have accepted that her brother’s death was an accident.”
“Her brother?”
“Dakkar Teron, the second navigation officer.”
My mind raced. I’d hacked my credentials into the computer on top of Daila’s credentials. The position of uniform lieutenant was minor enough that I’d assumed approval would be conducted by automated computer systems, or that someone would click a box and upload my files to the crew manifests. I hadn’t expected my files to be reviewed by the captain himself.
“I can tell from your expression you’re surprised. Did you think I was going to let a wild card onto my ship and potentially ruin my plans?”
“What do you need with a Moon Unit?”
“I don’t need the ship. I need the passengers on the ship. The space pirates waiting for me at the destination point on Ganymede are looking for slaves. Worker bees. They’re willing to pay top dollar.”
“You’re selling the passengers and the crew into slavery to space pirates?”
“Not the crew,” he said. “They’ll die in an unfortunate explosion shortly after the passengers disembark.” He picked up one of the loose canisters of oxygen that had rolled across the floor. “These Moon Units. They sure are unlucky.”
As we spoke, he’d crept toward me and I’d crept back. There was only so much room left in the uniform ward, and once my back was up against a wall, I’d have nowhere to go. I took another backward step past the console. My eyes cut to the plastic bubble over the button.
“Funny thing, you reporting a Code Blue on your first day,” Captain Swift said. “Your CV didn’t indicate you had any knowledge of our BOP. I couldn’t take the risk of you being allowed to act on your own a second time.” He knocked on the plastic bubble covering the red button. “Welded into place by Yeoman D’Nar. Following instructions to keep you from manufacturing reports of any other crimes.”
“The crime I reported was real.”
“Yes. But what are the odds that there would be two emergencies coming from the uniform ward? Yeoman D’Nar already thinks you’re a nuisance. She might not even be all that upset when the chip in your head malfunctions and kills you.”
The chip in my head. There was no chip in my head. I knew it. Neptune knew it. Pika knew it. But nobody else knew it.
Captain Swift thought he could take me out by short-circuiting a non-existent chip. He raised his space gun and spun one of the knobs on the top, and then pointed it at my temperature-adjusting lounging uniform that I’d discarded in a pile on the floor when I’d changed. He fired. A white beam shot out from the gun, and the garment glowed like it had been plugged into a power socket. Seconds later, the supposedly indestructible fabric was a mound of hardened mass, melted into a useless paperweight.
There might not be a chip in the back of my head, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I needed a weapon. I had nothing but a dogeared BOP. Neptune’s gun sat on the console by the alarm button I couldn’t activate. The iron was on the pressing board on the other side of the ship. Captain Swift had kicked the loose canisters of oxygen behind him, where they’d rolled up against the wall. It was him, me, and a pile of newly pressed and folded uniforms.
He raised his gun. “Maybe I should include you with my drop off to the pirates. Like a bonus. I bet a part-Plunian, part-earthling slave would earn me a little something extra.” His eyes trailed down from my face to my torso, lingering in a way that told me exactly what kind of extra he hoped to get.
My stomach turned. I’d backed up so far that there was no place left to go. The bench with the folded uniforms jutted into the back of my legs. But somewhere in my brain, risk assessment told me the captain wasn’t going to use the gun on me. Not if he expected to turn me over to the space pirates. I’d be of more value to him—and them—alive than dead.
“It’s over, Lt. Stryker. Look on the bright side. You probably have a long, exciting life ahead of you. That’s what you wanted when you left your planet behind, right?”
Whatever I’d wanted when I left Plunia was gone. Dreams, hopes, desires, goals. Destroyed by one man, one ship, one experience. Which was worse: that the man who’d granted my dreams was corrupt to the core, or that he’d only granted them because he’d expected nothing of me?
Anger built up inside me, ten times stronger than what I’d felt before attacking the Martians in the hallway. My skin turned neon purple. Captain Swift’s eyes widened. I dropped the BOP and lunged. The attack took him by surprise and we fell. I got on my hands and knees and crawled toward the exit. He grabbed my ankles and yanked me backward. I clawed at the ground and kicked at him.
“You killed my mother!” I cried.
He wrapped his arms around my legs, restricting my movement. “You were supposed to be a cipher,” he said between panting breaths. “A zero. A farmer’s daughter with a dad in jail. Couldn’t even pass the physical requirements to be on this ship.” He bound my legs with a pair of crew trousers. “Why’d you try so hard, Stryker? Nobody cares. Especially now. Not your mother—she’s dead. I made sure the pirates saw to that when they destroyed Plunia. And not anybody else who lived on your pathetic planet, unless that explosion blew them so far into the atmosphere that they caught up with the ship. Nobody will miss you when you’re gone.”
I spread my arms wide, grasping for a weapon. My fingers connected with my bubble helmet. I grabbed it in my right hand and rolled myself over, swinging it toward Captain Swift’s head as hard as I could.
The fiberglass bubble connected with his skull. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the side, his upper body draped across my legs. I was pinned.
His gun had fallen from his fingers. I twisted and strained to reach it. I could end this. Now. I was less than an inch away from the gun when the doors opened and Vaan entered. His foot connected with the gun and knocked it close enough to grab.
My hand wrapped around the grip and I aimed at the captain.
“Don’t do it, Syl,” Vaan said. “Don’t throw away your future. If you shoot him, I can’t look the other way.”
“He’s a criminal. He killed one crew member and poisoned two others. He had pirates destroy Plunia. He needs to die.”
“That’s not your decision,” Vaan said. “Let Federation Council decide his fate.”
I kept the gun trained on Captain Swift. Vaan secured the captain’s wrists behind his back with council cuffs and shifted his body off my legs.
“Give me the gun,” Vaan said. He held out his hand, palm side up.
I looked at Captain Swift, slumped on the ground, unconscious from my strike to his head. I looked up at Vaan’s face, filled with forgiveness for a crime I hadn’t committed.
The doors opened again, and this time Neptune came in. His shirt was torn away from his chest and a makeshift bandage was on his shoulder. Blood had seeped into it. He looked at me, and I saw in his expression everything I felt.
Neptune didn’t have a title. He didn’t have security clearance. He belonged on this ship about as much as I did. But he was here to do a job, just like me. And the reality of that job was nothing like he’d expected.
He aimed his gun at the captain. Fired. Once. Twice. The captain’s body flinched with the first impact but not the second.
Captain Swift was dead.
Vaan spoke. “I have to report your actions.”
“Do your job. I just did mine.” Neptune handed the gun to Vaan. “Stryker is innocent of any accusations. Get her to Medi-bay.” He left without looking back.