Girl Gone Nova (50 page)

She turned her palm up and a schematic of his ship appeared above it. It spun in the air between them.

“We’re here.” This place on the layout lit up, painted in red. “Your bridge is here, isn’t it?”

The proper place lit up. “Yes.” How did she manage this…magic?

“I’ve already messed with your surveillance cameras so no one can see us once we leave this room—the feed on this room is running on a loop so your cousin thinks you’re still sleeping by the way—and I’ve closed off all access to the bridge except for this route—” It lit up on the hologram. “Locked down access in or off the ship and disabled all transport devices. Oh, and cut off communications.” She looked at him. “Did I miss anything? Any system they can use to come after us?”

“Can you disable bridge controls?” He wasn’t sure if it was a serious question. Surely she jested about this?

“Did that with the lockdown. Don’t want them starting a war without us.” She paused, then added, “Why hasn’t he attacked yet?”

“He has…had control of this ship, but cannot order the other ships to attack without my command codes.” This was not strictly true. If the other ships’ commanders had been co-opted, and they took back the outpost, the Council might forgive their action—if they didn’t find out Glarmere had used Dusan mercenaries. All who knew this would have to die in “battle.”

“Right.” Her gaze flicked to the goons Glarmere had assigned to persuade him to surrender those codes. He could not fault her timing. “I can see why you were playing possum.”

He did not know this word, but forgot to ask what it meant when her expression shifted.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shifted her shoulders as if she were uncomfortable. She turned back to the hologram, as if she sought to deflect more questions.

Life signs were added to the schematic.

“What’s the mix of friendly to unfriendly along our route?”

He might have looked puzzled.

“How can I tell who is on your side? Don’t want to shoot the wrong people.”

He considered this, studying her hologram carefully. “It appears that all that support me have been confined.” Glarmere had brought his support onboard with him. He’d brought Dusan mercenaries onto his ship. “My cousin’s forces number sixty. We are outnumbered. Perhaps you wish to reconsider your participation.”

Her brows shot up. “That’s not outnumbered. That’s an opportunity to excel.”

He frowned, the question coming from deep inside. “Who are you?”

“I’m their worst nightmare.” She pointed at life signs that were now highlighted in red. “So those are the bad guys?” He nodded. “And you’re okay with shoot to kill? Cause I hate leaving bad bogeys behind me. They have a nasty habit of popping up when I least want them to.”

“I, too, prefer not to leave enemies at my back.” She would have made an excellent Ojemba. The sense he’d said these words, or thought them before, got lost before it could fully form.

“Does this plan work for you, Leader?”

“It is acceptable. You will do what I tell you.”

She looked more curious than annoyed. “Why do you get to be in charge?”

“This is my ship.” Her mouth moved as if to open. Instead she bit her lip. Heat flared in his midsection. “You have something to say?”

“Not anything I haven’t already said.”

He might have been a prisoner, but it was her fault. He grabbed her wrist and turned it over. Knew he was not himself, but couldn’t hold back the words, the worry behind them. “This weakened me.”

Expression, all hint of warmth and life, drained from her face, like blood from a mortal wound. He looked into her eyes for signs of pain and found worse than pain. He found nothing.

“When this is over, I want a divorce.”

Why did it feel as if he’d killed something that mattered to him? “Divorce?”

“You gone from my life. For good.”

“That is impossible. The bond is permanent.”
 

She checked her projectile weapon, with deadly decisiveness, angled it so it was pointed down but ready to deploy. Her voice was icy cold. “The impossible just takes longer. Let’s get this over with. I’ll catch your six,
Leader
.”

He knew he should say something, but did not know what. Instead he turned to the door. It slid back for him. He took a quick look out.

“Our path is clear.” He stepped out.

“Got three bogeys, next corner.” She shifted to his side to clear her sight line.

He wondered how she knew this, but lacked time to ask. He brought his weapon up and the three “bogeys” went down without firing a shot. He paused, frowning. He’d heard this sound before, the soft pop, followed by the thud of a body hitting the ground.

“Is there a problem, Leader?”

He shook his head, tried to shake the weight off his heart. It refused to go. He’d been…not himself. If they were to die…

He looked back, but down, not able to look into the chill of her blue eyes. “It was unworthy of me to blame you for this.”

Silence greeted his words. He forced himself to look at her. There were signs of a thaw, though it tightened the vice in his chest to see wary so dominant in her eyes. They’d flared with lavender he remembered now, when he’d lay on top of her in the bed behind them. Nothing flared in them now.

She half-shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

She shouldn’t be. He wished to say more, to make things right between them again, but was not sure it was possible. It had been wrong since she arrived, and he feared this was also his fault.

“We should hurry. At some point, your cousin has to notice he isn’t in control of
your
ship.”

Doc felt the shift when Hel apologized but shoved it to a brain stream off the front line. Felt a bit Scarlet O’Hara about deciding to think about it later. That was new. If she’d ever compared herself to a fictional character—and she hadn’t—she wouldn’t have expected it to be Scarlet. Of course, this was an altered timeline.

Glarmere knew they were coming, despite or because of Doc’s spanners in his works. He threw what he could at them. Put someone onto trying to break her hold on the ship’s systems. They were pretty good, but they didn’t know what they were up against. She’d been focused on many things since going nova with the peeps, but even with her mind running multiple data streams, she had time to feel their power flowing in, around, through her and this ship. The feeling of power wasn’t unfamiliar. Her track record of doing the impossible had made her arrogant. Events in the other timeline had dented arrogant, but falling in love with Hel had changed her in ways she was still trying to process.

The power was nice, the ability to basically toy with Glarmere was nice, too, but none of it satisfied when put up against what she’d lost. All those peeps in her system made her more, not less, aware of her humanity in a way she’d never felt before. All the things she could do only made her more aware of what she couldn’t do, what she couldn’t have. Watching Hel’s six didn’t help either. Maybe she should have insisted on taking point. Mental whining depressed her and the peeps, so she pushed it off the front line, too.

They had about one hundred yards left to navigate. Now she was deep enough into the ship’s systems to sense Glarmere’s attempts to take back control. Not that he was doing it himself. He had people for that.

“Your cousin’s an asshole,” she said, as a large Dusan mercenary tried to get his tree limbs around her. The bigger they were, the harder they went down. This one made a dent in the decking when he face-planted into it. It should have taken her three moves to take him down, not one. Had the peeps boosted her physically, too? She rubbed the blood from the side of her mouth. She’d caught the edge of his fist as he went down. It healed as her fingers wiped the blood away.

She caught Hel staring at her.

“What are you?”

Okay, that hurt. Her chin lifted. “Your cousin’s worst nightmare.” Her peeps gave her a heads up. “He’s trying to lock us out of the bridge.”

Someone was trying to cut controls through the panels. She had C-4. They could blow the door, but it was a delay they couldn’t afford. Doc sprinted to the door and put both hands on the other side of the wall from Glarmere’s only smart goon. Beads of light lit up her arms and hands and then the wall.

“Flash bang in my top pocket, right leg. It—”

“I know what it does.”

“Oh, right.” He had been on the receiving end of one just before the battle with the Dusan started. “Get ready.” Doc’s warning was terse. “Toss it when the door pops.”

In her mind she saw the goon positioning his cutters on the wiring. Power surged through her, through her peeps and into that wiring. As the metal tip of his cutters connected with the wires, that power went into the goon. The force of it threw him back several feet, knocking down a couple of other goons in the process.

Cause and effect. Had to love them.

The door popped open and Hel tossed in the flash bang. They both looked away, covered their ears. First came the flash. Then came the bang. Then they went in. The results were predictable. Doc put some moaning goons out of their misery in one direction. Hel worked in the other direction. They met in front of the command chair. The man crouched in it, his eyes spinning in the sockets and reeking from voided bowels, wasn’t too pretty anymore. Doc wasn’t convinced he’d ever been pretty. His eyes were too close together.

“I take it this is your cousin?”

“On my mother’s side.”

That was pretty defensive. Doc hid a smile. “You can’t choose your relatives.”

“Just your friends.”

There was something in Hel’s voice, something new that pulled her attention his way, though not her weapon. She found it in his eyes, too, though she didn’t know what it meant. Her life experience had not given her this kind of knowledge. And she didn’t have time to learn what it meant.

“We’ve cleared most of the hostiles. I can release your people and tweak your scanning system before I go.”

“Go? Where?”

The sharpness in his voice and the frown were a surprise. She’d have thought he’d want her off his ship ASAP.

“Back to the
Doolittle.
” And then onto the outpost. They needed the ships and enhanced shields before Conan started shooting. Halliwell wanted her to try to unlock it before they brought Hel into that mix. She disagreed with the General and made the mistake of saying it. He’d ordered her not to tell Hel he was a Key.

“You are my
ma’rasile.
You must remain with me.”

Okay, not exactly a declaration of love. Not even first cousin to a declaration of love. She pulled out a couple of pairs of flex cuffs. “If you aren’t going to kill him I should put these on him.”

“I wish him to stand trial for his crimes.”

“Right.” She quickly secured Glarmere, her peeps helping her out with the smell. “You should have full system control. I’ve kept the areas with bogeys locked down, but you or your people can access them.”

She kept her gaze off Hel, though she knew he watched her, as she went to scan control and pretended to adjust the settings while her peeps did the upgrade. As soon as she finished, warnings blared as it detected the alien intrusion.

“They’ve shifted into attack position.” But they hadn’t powered up weapons systems. Were they still hoping the Gadi and expedition would go at it first?

“We are too late?” Hel’s voice came from closer than she expected. Warmth bloomed along her back.

“Not yet, but you’ll need to attack soon.”

“Attack?” His hand on her shoulder turned her to face him. “I thought we were to be allies again?”

Doc waited. Her Hel would get it without the long explanation. He had a wonderfully devious mind. What did this man have?

“We are to pretend to attack as a diversion?”

She couldn’t stop the smile any more than she could stop breathing.

“If you start moving your fleet into attack position, that will give us time to deploy small phase cloaked ships, each with a small attack force. We plan to board and neutralize their weapons.” If she and her peeps could figure out how do to that in time. She’d be an attack force of one and would go in ahead of the others. Halliwell had wanted her to target any ship but Conan’s, but Doc didn’t dare. They didn’t know how automated their systems were. It was possible he had override authority. And it was always good strategy to go after the top of the command structure.

“You are going on one of these ships.”

She looked at him. “If we can’t stop Conan, we’ll die anyway.”

“You plan to go alone. I will go with you. I will catch your six.” His smile was wry, a bit crooked for a guy so into perfection.

She’d been hoping he’d say that, though him going with her onto Conan’s ship wasn’t part of her plan. “And who will mind this store while you’re gone?”

“This ship, all our ships have commanders. They will follow my orders, once they learn Glarmere has brought Dusan mercenaries aboard the Gadi flag ship.”

“I don’t have time to wait—” Before she finished, his crew began to flood the room. They checked at the sight of the Dusan, their pretty faces unexpectedly grim. The one in the prettiest uniform and with a decided air of command approached Hel.

“Leader. I am pleased to see you are well.” His gaze flicked toward Doc, but did not stay there. In addition to pretty, the Gadi were polite.

“You will wait while I brief my commanders.” Hel had no problem looking at her, she saw. Just in case she was inclined to protest, he added, “You cannot move freely through this ship without me.”

She could, she already had, but she didn’t tell him that.

Hel angled in the co-pilot seat so he could see his
ma’rasile.
Her skin was smooth and pale, her features flawless. She was younger than he’d first thought and beautiful, despite her military wear. The thick, dark braid hung almost to her hips. When he’d pinned her to his bed, she’d smelled uniquely female, the scent enticing to a man long focused on everything but a woman. Had he thought he would not want her? His temporary detainment must have clouded his judgment. She’d gone quiet since they boarded her ship—he looked around—a Garradian ship that should belong to the Gadi.