Rebel (Rebel Stars Book 0) (18 page)

The soft-voiced man said something more.

"This ship is mine," Evans barked. "I will not leave it." He lowered his tone. "Besides, Taylor, think this through. If they're here, they're here for this. They'll want to keep it safe just as much as we do. It will be the least dangerous place in the fleet."

The security officer drew his feet together and saluted. He gestured to his people. Three of them detached and ran back toward the tunnel entrance. Rada shrank behind the cover of the cylinder. The three officers entered the tunnel, footsteps fading. When Rada risked a look out, the last of the others was climbing the ramp into the ship.

She glanced up at the catwalks. Empty. She got from behind the cylinder and walked toward the segmented ship. The airlock's outer doors clunked and began to close. She broke into a sprint and squeezed inside.

She knew the way ahead: it was the same way she and Simm and Yed had taken when they'd first stepped aboard. The passage was clear. She reached the intersection where the laser had cut Simm down, then turned down its right branch, moving deeper into the ship. Footsteps rasped ahead. She ducked into the exercise room and hid herself behind a wide, alien-sized treadmill. The room was dark, the light of the hall casting spindly shadows from the bars of the equipment.

Her device beeped. She muted it and killed the display. A silhouette appeared in the doorway, glanced across the room, and withdrew.

Rada still had her icepick strapped to her calf. She unsealed her suit from her boot and withdrew the blade. It felt good in her hand, but the security detail had guns. She cast about the room, looking for anything more substantial. She wished she'd thought to have Sollivan find Ferri—Rada had a strong feeling the other woman would have an idea or three about dealing with security—but everything had happened so fast. She didn't even know if Ferri was still alive.

While she was trying to pry a metal bar from one of the machines, the whole ship began to rumble. Rada got in a corner and pressed herself into it. With a lurch, the ship tore free of the ground and took to the sky.

SHIP'S LOG: 4

A blue beam sliced into the captain's skull. He died on his feet.

The room erupted in violence. Perhaps the plumbs of my mind suspected this was coming. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps it was the Way. Whatever had caused it, I was beside the door. Unarmed, I fled into the tunnels.

Within seconds, the captain's loyalists were slain. Tton's mutineers chased me into the halls. But I was the tender of the ship, in contact with its mind. I asked it to assemble its defenses. The weapons inside its body meant to repel foreign invaders.

Blue beams lashed from the ceilings, cutting down my pursuit. One by one, they fell to their graves in the halls that had once been their home. Yet Tton was crafty; he hid himself from the hellfire and vanished. The ship could not recognize me from the others. To avoid its wrath, I took the side ways to the second command center in the aft.

And found that Tton had arrived there first.

"You are all that stands before me," he said. "Now we will see who the Way favors."

He raised his laser. By instinct, I whipped it from his grasp. He fell upon me, hammerpods lashing me, battering my limbs. He was trained and I was not. He beat me to the ground. I felt my blood pool around me. A final blow cracked my skull against the floor.

His claws clacked in laughter. He stepped back from my broken body and moved to the controls, intending to launch the nukes. "As you die, so will Earth."

13

The ship jostled and jerked. Fearful of jabbing herself with the icepick, Rada shoved it into the orange mat lining the lower half of the wall. The material had thawed and the pick slid in easily. She braced her arms against the walls, pressed against the floor by the ship's upward acceleration.

The ride smoothed out. The
Turtle
had mapped the ship's interior, but Rada's memory wasn't nearly good enough to trust. Besides which, the IRP could have established a command center anywhere onboard. She would have to go room by room.

Except she wasn't dealing with an engineer or a war-hardened captain. She was dealing with Hobart Evans. He would want to command from the aliens' bridge. Proof the ship was fully his. She didn't remember the precise route to the bridge, but she knew its general location.

She dislodged the icepick from the mat on the wall. It was better than a pipe, anyway. Much easier to conceal. She didn't know what good it would do against an armed force of unknown number, but it was better than nothing. The only other option was to hide out and wait for the ship to be captured by the Hive. She didn't think that was a sure thing, though. The attack hadn't been scheduled for another half a day. Somehow, the IRP had gotten wind of it in advance.

Besides, if Toman took the ship, she knew he wouldn't put Evans down.

She peeked past the doorway. The hallway was silent. So far, she hadn't seen any internal modifications of any kind, including surveillance. Were probably trying to keep the ship pristine for whoever they'd bring in to reverse-engineer it. Just in case, she walked down the hall as casually as she could.

All of the doors had been opened. Most of the rooms were dark. The light of the hall outlined large, oval furniture. As she neared the end of the passage, a man in a red and white suit swung around the corner. A white pistol was holstered on his hip. His hood was down and when he saw her his eyes went wide.

He stopped in place, rocking on his heels. "Perez?"

"Holly Rhodes," she said. "Squires sent me. Last-second add."

"And you're only now telling us you're here?"

"Didn't have time to sync up my device. Given our passenger, I didn't think it prudent to be broadcasting over public channels."

The man nodded. "What are you doing back here?"

"I barely got in before launch. Had to buckle down on a damn Swimmer treadmill or something." She laughed, then grew sober. "I was on my way to find someone. When I was crossing that intersection, the gun on the wall was tracking me." She pointed down the hall. "It's not supposed to be doing that, is it?"

His gaze slid down the intersection. "What gun?"

"Wall-mounted sentry. Alien make. The ship's internal defenses—I think they've gone live."

"That's not possible. Everything's dead except our own systems."

"The airlock has power, doesn't it? The lights? I'm telling you, that gun, I saw it move."

He took a few steps down the passage. With a solid rumble, the engines throttled up, bending their knees. He threw out an arm and planted a palm on the wall.

"Know what, this is beyond my pay grade. I'm calling Donsun."

He lifted his wrist to his chest and bent his head, exposing the curve of his neck. Rada shuffled behind him, drew the icepick, and slammed it up through the base of his skull. His rumpled hood was in the way, but the pick passed through cleanly. He made a dry squawk like a cat yawning. His limbs thrashed. The back of his fist struck her ear and she danced back, drawing the pick with her. He dropped and shuddered.

There was little blood. He hadn't had time to activate his comm. She dragged him two doors down to a room with a concave wall of floor-to-ceiling blue mats. Large round holes stood in a row at chest level. She got his gun from its holster and popped his device from his forearm. She ejected hers and replaced it with his.

"Moles, you all right?" a woman said through the comm. Rada stiffened. "Your heart rate went nuts for a second. Then stopped altogether."

She deepened her voice. "I'm fine."

"Yeah? Figured you must have run into an alien back there."

"All clear."

The woman was quiet a moment. "Finish up and get back here. May have some maneuvers ahead of us."

They were only accelerating at about half gravity and Rada was able to hoist the body and stuff him into one of the holes. Her heart rate climbed again, but nobody said anything about it. She picked up the white gun and turned it over in her hand. It didn't appear to be keyed. She went to the door, confirmed the hall was empty, then went back inside, stuck her arm in one of the holes in the blue matter, and squeezed the trigger. The round fired with a low clap and whapped into the rubbery blue cubby.

Without warning, nausea cramped her stomach. She folded to her knees. She had stabbed him; he was dead. She swallowed down bile. Reminded herself that the security team had vented those people at the airlock. Shot the others. Back on the surface, hundreds of workers had been disposed of like spent cans of O2. That's why they'd made such a big deal about hiring people without families: so no one would raise a peep if they went missing.

She lifted her head. This death, the purge of Plan Red, everything—none of it would have happened without the attack on Nereid. The storm that ensued had been precipitated by Hobart Evans. Rada knew that didn't absolve her of the actions she took in response. Those actions, in the end, were hers.

But she did believe it justified them.

She surged to her feet. She had a gun now. More importantly, she had one of their devices. Installed on her arm, it showed orderly rows of icons. Many weren't intuitive, but she'd spent enough time with Sollivan's device to recognize the commands she needed. She tapped the icon of a globe.

A wireframe map of the ship appeared on the screen. A number of dots were concentrated in a large oval room near the fore. Three of the dots were red. Security—the remaining members of Evans' team. Three of the dots were green: possibly a second team, but more likely to be crew. And one of the dots was white.

Evans.

Making sure her comm wasn't live, she practiced roughening and deepening her voice. She clambered up into the hole where she'd stuffed the body and turned on her suit's light. His suit had armored plates on its chest, abdomen, groin, and joints. The rest was more flexible, but when she stabbed it with the ice pick, it had a tough time penetrating. He had an auxiliary O2/life support pack fixed to his back.

She was still studying the map when her comm reopened. "Hey Moles, you taking a nap in there? Let's get moving!"

"There's something here," Rada whispered hoarsely. She switched her device from the map to the vitals it was constantly measuring as provided by her suit.

"Moles? What the hell are you blathering about?"

"There's something here. In the ship."

The man's voice grew cold. "Calm down, Moles. Flip your camera on, will you?"

"Contact! Donsun, Perez! You have to help—!" She tore the device from her wrist. On its screen, the vitals flatlined.

"Moles?
Moles!
"

"What's happening out there?" another voice said. "Why don't we have visual?"

"We gotta get out there. Moles!"

Rada reached inside the cubby where she'd deposited Moles and tugged him back out. Once his lower back cleared, he slid down, landing with a clatter of armor. She secured his hood and dragged him to the front right corner of the room, arranging one foot behind him. From the door, to get a good look at it, you'd have to step inside.

She went back for the device. On it, two red dots had left the bridge and were hurrying down the ship's central corridor, headed her direction. She carried the device to the right-most hole on the concave wall. Once it was safely inside, she went to the left-most hole, crawled in, and turned around to peek past its yielding blue lip, gun in hand.

Two minutes later, boots scraped outside. A light shined from the doorway, blinding; her mask's visor darkened to compensate. A trooper in a plated suit swung inside, sweeping his rifle left to right. Rada didn't flinch. The light came to a rest on Moles' sprawled body.

"Moles?" the man said. "Perez, he's down."

A second trooper moved inside, gaze arrested by the body. "Is he hurt? What's wrong?"

"He's not moving. No vitals, but his comm is showing from over there."

He kneeled beside the body. The other man moved behind him. Rada took aim at the auxiliary pack on his back and pulled the trigger.

The first shot ricocheted off and spun into the thick mats on the walls. One of the men shouted. She continued to fire. As they spun, bringing their rifles to bear, a round penetrated the man's air tanks.

Rada dropped beneath the lip of the hole. Fire screamed through the entrance, washing over her suited hand. A shock wave hammered into the mat. The boom was so loud her suit dampened the audio, leaving her with nothing but the whoosh of her breath.

The light and fire faded as fast as it had appeared. Rada popped up her head. The man whose tank had gone up was nothing but a dark spot on the floor. His partner was no longer recognizable as a cohesive object. A hand lay against one wall. One and a half boots rested against the other. His suit was tangled and scorched, pads smoldering. Smoke swirled in the air, drawn away by the recyclers. Inside her suit, Rada couldn't smell anything.

She hopped down from the hole. Both their rifles were slagged. She went to the right-hand hole where she'd concealed Moles' device and got it out. On the other end, men were arguing, panicked.

"What do you
think
it is?" one yelled. "It's aliens, man!"

"We've swept this barge a hundred times," a gruff voice said. "If there were anything here, we would have seen it."

"They're coming out of the walls. That blue shit. We're meat on a platter, Captain!"

"These men are
gone
!" Evans yelled. "That much is evident, Lieutenant Olden. The question now isn't what we can do for them—it's what we can do for ourselves."

"You're right," said the gruff-voiced man, Olden. "Captain, seal off the bridge. Turn the ship around."

"Belay that order, Captain," Evans said.

"Admiral! The ship has been compromised. This is the only way we keep you safe."

"You're right—the ship
has
been compromised. But we cannot land. That guarantees it will fall into the hands of the enemy."

"Sir," Olden said. "I understand the ship is your first priority. But your safety is mine."