Chapter 20

Jonesy screamed almost as loudly as the Jinx ’s alarms. COLLISION ALERT flashed across the main display. Half the panels started blinking frantic warnings.

She couldn’t believe it. Norcross’s ship was right there. And not right there in space terms, either, like the pirate ship she’d seen as a speck in the far, far distance. It was as close as the first time she’d seen it out the window at Canary Station three years ago.

But the Jinx shot past it. One instant, the Seraph’s dark gray hull was a blur outside the right-hand windows—the next, the gray ship was behind them.

The alarms switched off, the COLLISION ALERT message went away, and Jonesy stopped screaming and took a breath. “Did they see us?” she cried, just as the flight computer’s screen flashed WARNING: WEAPONS LOCK DETECTED.

“Cass, arm countermeasures!” she shouted, because that was the first thing you had to do in her space sims if you didn’t want to get blown up.

“DON’T HELP!” Cass shouted back. “Flight computer, tac code zipper!”

“Confirmed,” the Jinx’s flight computer said.

A hundred things happened at once. All the displays turned red, and the full instrument holo popped up in red, too, flashing dozens of messages like:

//PMCS/PROPULSION/TSS/SCANNERS SET +COMBAT MODE

//COMMS SET +DEADFACE MODE

//CMDS SET +ARMED +AUTO

//PDLG SET +AGGRESSIVE

—on and on and on. Things started humming or droning around the Jinx that had never hummed or droned in all the time Jonesy had been aboard, and she gasped as a strange sensation gripped her head and chest and limbs, like she’d fallen in a tank of invisible, breathable syrup.

“That’s the inertial dampers switching to combat mode,” Cass told her. “Stay right where you are—they’re strongest up here in the cockpit. Don’t want you bouncing around and going splat if I have to do something crazy.”

“Something like what?” Jonesy exclaimed, wondering why she’d ever hoped to run into the Seraph again. “Cass, I—what do we do?”

Cass jabbed a control. “You’re going to be quiet,” she said as the instrument holo flashed COMBAT MODE: SEMI-MANUAL, “and the Jinx and I are going to get us out of here.”

Cass grabbed the flight stick in one hand and rammed the Jinx’s engine controls to maximum with the other. The engines snarled, and the dampers squeezed Jonesy harder. On the scanner screen, a dot labeled HOSTILE CONTACT (CORVETTE) (SERAPH(?)) dropped behind so fast that it fell off the bottom before the scanner managed to zoom out. After a few seconds, though, the dot stopped falling behind.

Cass tilted the flight stick, and the big red planet CAB13 swerved out of view. “Flight computer, queue solution for double bug double bug nine three pronto to fire as soon as we can jump at emergency safety margins. Pre-arm authorization two two whiskey four. ETR to HIC and full note-mute except confirmations until final ten-count.” She reached up and pulled the red hyperdrive lever, then pushed it back.

“Confirmed, armed, verbals off,” the flight computer said as the hyperdrive added its rising whine to the rest of the noise and ETR TO THRESH: 03:34 appeared in the display.

More alarms started chirping. The display flashed WARNING: MISSILE LOCK DETECTED, then !!MISSILES DETECTED!!. The scanner showed red arrows pouring from the HOSTILE CONTACT in swarms and closing fast on the Jinx’s arrowhead marker. Jonesy heard rapid thumps behind her as the screens started scrolling messages about countermeasures launching.

“Cass—?”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Cass said as the red arrows started vanishing. “They’re not trying to blow us up. Those were all EDMs—knockout rockets—and they aren’t too tough to swat.”

Jonesy crossed her fingers on both hands and watched the ETR counting down.

03:26 left. 03:25 left.

The last red arrows vanished and the !!MISSILES DETECTED!! warning went away. Then it came back. The countermeasure launchers started thumping again. The Jinx’s defensive lasers joined them, filling in between the THUMPs with loud HISS-CLACKCLACKCLACKs.

The stars wheeled and jerked as Cass suddenly yanked on the flight stick. The timer stopped counting down, hesitated at ETR TO THRESH: 03:23, then counted all the way up past 30:00. Something clattered against the hull, and they both ducked as half a dead missile tumbled past the windows. “Geez, that was close,” Cass said. “Wreck ’em, Jinx!”

Cass kept maneuvering, and the Jinx’s defenses kept thumping and clacking, but none of it helped the timer make any headway in the right direction. CAB13 slid into view, whipped away, then drifted back until it was nearly dead ahead, red and ominous. Jonesy watched in alarm as the timer counted up in a blur and didn’t stop until it was over six hours.

“Cass, you have to go the other way!”

Cass shook her head. “Can’t. They’re hemming us in—chasing us deeper.” She pulled the engine control back, flipped up a red safety cover on a console, and punched the button beneath it. The flight computer screen flashed:

!!SAFETY-CRITICAL WARNING!!

POWER/PROPULSION EMERGENCY OUTPUT ARMED.

RISK OF CATASTROPHIC CORE CONTAINMENT AND/OR ENGINE FAILURE.

Cass punched the button again and snapped the cover closed. The warning went away. “So let’s see if they can outrun my sweet little Jinx to the far side. Flight computer, tac code bunny.”

“Confirmed,” said the flight computer, and everything outside—stars, red planet, white rings—vanished behind a silvery, glittering cloud of what looked like foil confetti.

“Catch us if you can, fools,” Cass muttered, settling her hands on the flight controls again. Then, louder, she told Jonesy, “This’ll hurt, okay? Just hang on.”

Before Jonesy could ask how much, Cass pushed the engine control to halfway and she found out.

The answer was a lot.

The Jinx roared like a ferocious animal that had just devoured its zookeeper and smashed free of its cage. A silvery blizzard battered the cockpit windows, then vanished, and the stars and the giant red CAB13 were there again.

Jonesy tried to scream, but it came out like wheezing. The dampers were squeezing her with agonizing, suffocating force. She could barely turn her eyeballs to look around the cockpit. She felt like she was about to die.

The Jinx seemed to feel the same way. Half the screens had begun flashing WARNING, ERROR, or FAILURE messages, and a giant box appeared across the display that said (until Cass canceled it):

!!OVERACCEL WARNING!!

CHASSIS DESIGN LIMIT (WORKING) EXCEEDED!

Then Cass pushed the engine control the rest of the way, and Jonesy hissed and clenched her teeth as everything—the noise, the pressure, the pain—got ten times worse.

Then Jonesy noticed the ETR TO THRESH timer. The numbers were changing in a blur again, but now they were counting down. And on the scanner display, the HOSTILE CONTACT (CORVETTE) (SERAPH(?)) was falling behind so fast it looked like it was flying the other way.

“Yes!” Jonesy wheezed. “Go, Jinx, go!”

Somehow Cass heard her through all the noise. “That’s right. Ain’t nobody laying hands on my sister.”

Jonesy laughed, sort of, and kept her eyes on the timer. It was counting normally again, but instead of six hours it said ETR TO THRESH: 12:10. She still felt like she was about to die, but she thought she could hold out for twelve minutes.

Another warning appeared:

!!OVERACCEL WARNING!!

CHASSIS DESIGN LIMIT (SAFETY) EXCEEDED!

10%+ RISK OF CATASTROPHIC STRUCTURAL COLLAPSE WITHIN 15 MINUTES.

TOTAL CHASSIS OVERHAUL NOW REQUIRED AT NEXT SERVICE.

Jonesy grinned painfully as Cass canceled it. The Jinx felt like it was about to die, just like her, but it thought it could hold out, too.

ETR TO THRESH: 12:04.

ETR TO THRESH: 12:03.

ETR TO THRESH: MM:SS/??#.#0∼*.AADS.J.SYS∼

“What?” Jonesy gasped.

It came out like a shout—not because she’d meant to yell but because suddenly the Jinx had gone quiet. The dampers had stopped trying to squash her. The engines had stopped, too. All Jonesy could hear now was a faint, dying whine that sounded like the hyperdrive losing its charge.

“Oh, no,” Cass whispered.

The timer blinked an error message and disappeared, along with the rest of the instrument holo. The cockpit screens went black, except for one in a corner that seemed locked into a glitchy death loop of alternating FATAL and CATASTROPHIC ERROR messages.

“It’s the bugs!” Jonesy howled.

“No way,” Cass said. “Not with the comms deadfaced. There’s no way for viruses to get in.” She reached under a console and toggled something that clacked loudly but didn’t seem to do anything. “It’s—it’s got to be a system crash—something couldn’t handle the Gs—”

Cass clacked the thing under the console a few more times, and the last screen went black. The flight computer display blinked and said it was rebooting.

Jonesy sighed in relief. “That was scary. That looked like when—”

“System rebooted,” the Jinx’s flight computer interrupted.

Jonesy frowned. The system didn’t look rebooted. Nothing else had turned on. Cass tapped a few screens and controls, but nothing happened.

“It’s time to stop running, girls,” the flight computer said.

“That’s not possible,” Cass insisted. She reached under the console again—clack, clack, clack—but nothing changed. “There’s no way!”

Out the windows, the big red planet swung out of view, even though Cass wasn’t touching the flight stick. The Jinx’s engines kicked back on with a roar.

“Cass?” Jonesy wheezed as the dampers clamped down again. “Cass, what’s happening?”

“We’re in a braking burn! They got their viruses into my ship, don’t ask me how—they didn’t touch us!”

“What—what about that missile, though? Parts of it touched us—”

“Oh, crap. And maybe it wasn’t all debris. I’ll bet you’re right—ugh, there’s probably some Legion limpet drone out there with its dirty face shoved in a diagnostic port.” Cass slammed her fist against a dead console. “Holy crap do I hate these guys.”

“You will not be harmed,” the flight computer said. “Stand by for pickup.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” Cass said, unclipping her straps. “Get up here.”

“What—?”

“NOW!”

Jonesy scrambled into Cass’s lap. She hadn’t realized how scared Cass was until her back was pressed against Cass’s chest and she felt how fast her sister was breathing.

Cass fastened the straps around both of them and snugged them tight. “Hold on, sis. This’ll get rough.”

Cass opened an overhead panel to expose a plain black handle and an old-fashioned nine-digit number pad. She punched in a code, then pulled the handle three times in a row.

Everything went quiet again. Except this time, it seemed like everything had turned off, not just the screens and displays and engines. The gravity was off. The dampers were off. Jonesy couldn’t even hear the air circulators.

Cass opened another panel to reveal at least a hundred numbered switches. “Hopefully I remember how to do this,” she said as she began clicking them out of order. “We’re on the emergency backup control system—never thought I’d have to use it, but this is what it’s for.”

Systems began activating again as Cass flipped switches. The air circulators started whirring with the first one, and gravity returned a few clicks later.

“Just a teeny backup brain,” Cass went on, “and enough wiring to run the important stuff. Absolutely nothing with any writeable memory for a virus to live in. The trouble—”

Jonesy cut her off with a shriek as the engines kicked back on and slammed her head into the hawk pendant hanging on her sister’s chest.

“The trouble,” Cass gasped, “is we’ve got no dampers, no hyperdrive, and no flight computer.”

Icy, helpless fear prickled down Jonesy’s spine. “No flight computer? What can we do with no flight computer?”

Cass took the flight controls, cursed when they didn’t do anything, clicked a few more switches, then tried again and swung the Jinx back around toward CAB13’s vast red horizon. Without the dampers, the spin jerked Jonesy hard against the straps and rattled her head like a maraca.

“Not much,” Cass finally answered. She nosed the Jinx down a little bit with another head-rattling jolt. “Keep quiet for me, and tilt your head back this time.”

“Okay.” Jonesy leaned back against Cass—with a shake of her head to push the pendant aside first—and this time they didn’t bash together when Cass pushed on the engine control.

“M45 should be close,” Cass muttered. The stars swung left, then right, then down, shaking Jonesy so hard she felt like she might break loose and fly through the windows.

“Ow, Cass! Can’t you fly gentler?”

“Not really, sorry—there, look!” Cass pointed to what looked like a small gray marble gleaming bright against the stars ahead. “Right there. Hard to say without the flight computer, but I think we’re close enough to beat the Seraph there. And it’s orbiting the same way we’re already going, so hopefully I won’t mess this up too bad doing it by hand.”

Jonesy watched in terror and amazement as Cass lined up the Jinx well ahead of the little moon and started flying them in. “I didn’t know you could do this by hand,” she said.

“When there’s no option B, you can bet I’m gonna try,” Cass replied. “We’re going to find one of the old mining facilities, okay? There’s nobody here anymore, but some companies have a policy of leaving a few lights on when everybody pulls out of a system. Just so there won’t be nowhere to go in an emergency.”

“That’s pretty nice.”

“Yeah, pretty nice PR for them. Don’t expect much. Just keep your eyes peeled. We might not have much time to pick a place to land.”

The moon M45 was getting closer fast. Jonesy had never seen a more battered, used-up-looking place—it was tiny and gray and puckered, scarred by dozens of huge dark pits that looked like they went halfway to its core.

Closer and closer. Soon M45’s mottled gray face filled half the view out the windows.

“There!” Jonesy exclaimed, pointing. “Look, lights—past that pit shaped like a peanut.”

“Good eyes,” Cass said, changing course with small stomach-churning adjustments until the Jinx was aimed closer to the lights.

Closer and closer. Now the cratered gray landscape was all Jonesy could see out the windows, and it was rushing up at terrifying speed.

“Three,” Cass said. “Two. One. Hold on!”

Cass hauled on the flight stick and flipped the Jinx backward with a jerk and a jolt, then pushed the engine control forward. Suddenly Jonesy weighed too much to move, and she felt Cass’s breath whoosh out over her head as she sank backward—the sensation was horrid, like her sister had turned to rubber and taffy beneath her—and Cass quickly eased back on the controls.

“Shoot,” she panted. “I didn’t think about that. Okay. Okay, I’ll just have to hold this burn, um, a lot longer. And hope this looks a lot less like a transfer orbit when I turn us around.”

They were both quiet for a few moments. Jonesy tried not to think about how they were flying backward straight at a moon with no flight computer to warn them before they crashed into it. She looked for the Seraph among the stars, but she didn’t see it anywhere, which was a plus, at least. Cass must have earned them a huge head start with her emergency burn earlier.

“Listen, Jonesy,” Cass said. “It’ll look bad when I flip us again, but just—trust me. We should be okay. If anything happens to me, though, you need to get away. Don’t hang around to see if I’m just knocked out or something. You throw on your suit and run. As fast as you can and as far as you can. Promise me.”

Something in Cass’s voice made Jonesy’s mouth go dry. “Why?”

“Back when we were training—when I was talking about exploding ourselves?”

“Yeah?”

“There was something I didn’t mention. Sometimes when Fluxers die, our bodies just—do that. Even if we aren’t Fluxing when we die, sometimes it just happens. And it can be as bad as if we’d thrown our valves all the way open and run out of juice.”

“Why?” Jonesy wailed.

“IT JUST DOES, FOR HEAVEN’S—CRAP, HANG ON—”

Jonesy looked up just in time to see gray dust and rocks streaking by overhead—she hadn’t considered that the Jinx was upside down as well as backward—before Cass killed the engines and pushed on the flight stick. The stars spun upward, and the gray moon swung back into view ahead, right side up again. Cass activated the braking thrusters that Jonesy guessed, from her sims, would slow them enough for a safe landing in about ten minutes.

They hit three seconds later.