In less time than Nicole could believe, Reza was ready. With but a proud glance at her adopted son, Tesh-Dar moved quickly into the corridor, one of the guards’ weapons clutched in her huge hand, her own weapons locked away in a security vault somewhere else in the ship.
When she signaled it was clear, Reza asked Nicole, “Where are we to go?”
“The only place we can get transportation off the ship,” Nicole said, leading Reza into the corridor, her own weapon held before her. “Hangar deck.”
After ringing at Nicole’s cabin and receiving no answer, Zhukovski opened the door with his command override.
The door slid open to reveal Tony Braddock sprawled in Nicole’s bunk.
“Tony!” Enya gasped as the two of them rushed into the room, the admiral closing the door behind him after casting a wary eye about the corridor to make sure no one had noticed them.
To be discovered now would be disaster, he muttered to himself. Around them, Warspite shuddered and boomed as the battle raged. Good luck, my friend, he silently wished L’Houillier.
“What happened?” Enya demanded as she shook Braddock back to consciousness.
“Nicole…” he rasped, “stunned me.”
“Why, councilman?” Zhukovski demanded. “Why would she do this? What does she plan to do?”
“Reza,” Enya knew the answer instantly. “She’s gone to free him, hasn’t she?”
Braddock nodded stiffly. He felt like someone was pricking him with a million needles. The feeling was not exactly painful, but it was hardly pleasant, either. “That must be it,” he managed, shaking his head to clear it. His vision gradually began to clear. He took a breath of air through his nose, trying to clean out the sharp smell of ozone that was a peculiar side effect of being stunned.
“We must stop her,” Zhukovski said. “They will know–”
“Security alert, Brig Four!” the ship’s intercom announced. “ISS detachments to the brig, on the double! Intruder alert! Intruder alert!”
“That tears it,” Braddock said, getting to his feet. He went over to a cabinet boasting a cipher lock, punched in some numbers, and opened it.
“What are you doing?” Enya asked.
Braddock withdrew two blasters. “Jodi was always paranoid that Nicole should have something to protect herself with,” he told them. “She gave these to her on her birthday a few years ago, and Nicole promised Jodi she would keep them with her.” He shook his head. “Nutcases, both of them. Thank God.”
After checking to make sure the weapons were loaded and carried a full charge, he handed one to Enya, keeping the other for himself. Zhukovski wore his own sidearm.
Zhukovski opened the door, leading the other two out into the corridor. “Where do you think she will go?” he asked Braddock.
“Where else would a pilot go?” he replied. “Hangar deck.”
Nicole had led Reza and the others through a maze of passageways and service tunnels to avoid being spotted by the alerted security teams and the damage repair crewmen whose duties required them to move through the ship while at battle stations. They were only a few yards from the last set of blast doors separating them from the hangar deck when Warspite shuddered and her metal body screamed in agony. The four of them were hurled against the bulkhead as the battleship recoiled under a direct hit, the already dim corridor lights flickering, dying.
Even as the echoes of the hit died away, Nicole could hear the sound of thunder beyond the blast door. The red tell-tales on the control panel told her all she needed to know.
“Hangar deck has been hit! It’s venting air to space!” she shouted above the howling of hangar deck’s air supply whirling away into vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead, just as the dim red emergency lights flickered on.
“Behind us!” Shera-Khan warned as several dim shapes appeared from the crimson murk of the corridor.
In the blink of an eye, a shrekka appeared in Tesh-Dar’s hand, its lethal blades already tearing into their target in the elder warrior’s mind. The muscles of her arm tensed in a pattern no less precise, yet infinitely more elegant, than any machine could have calculated.
Evgeni Zhukovski would have died had Reza not been an arrow’s breath faster than his priestess.
“He is a friend,” he told her as his hand gently touched her arm. He did not have to grab her or restrain her. She reacted instantly. Her arm relaxed. Slightly.
“Tony!” Nicole exclaimed, her face a mask of anguish as her husband embraced her. It had nearly killed her to stun him, but there was no way she could have explained what she had to do, and she did not want him to be associated with her crime. Then she noticed Zhukovski. “Admiral! What are you doing–”
“We have no time for unnecessary words, commander,” he cut her off. Nodding to Reza, then to the two Kreelans, he said, “After forty years in Navy was I ready to commit mutiny, commander. This day even that has gone awry. Now we are all fugitives, with no way to escape.” He gestured to the blast doors.
Warspite took another hit, worse this time. They found themselves curled up on the floor against the starboard bulkhead, a cloud of dust in the air from the shock.
Zhukovski noted with alarm that Warspite’s return fire was starting to lose its cadence, becoming more random, sporadic. Fire control was breaking down. “Flagship is hurt,” he told them. “Badly, I think.”
Reza felt a minute fluctuation in the artificial gravity. It was a very, very bad sign. “Engineering has sustained damage,” he told them. “Our warships” – Kreelan warships – “must be concentrating on Warspite. We must get away, and soon.” He turned to Nicole. “What is left on this ship that could get to the moon orbiting the Homeworld?”
“The captain’s gig, but that is all the way forward.”
“Then that is where we must go.”
“But Reza,” Nicole said, “we will have to go through the main corridors! There will be no way to avoid the security patrols.”
He glanced at Tesh-Dar, then turned to Nicole, his face a grim, alien mask. “They shall not stop us.”
“There may be another way,” Zhukovski growled. He stood at the wall, scrutinizing a miniature data display he held in his hand. Reza could see the trace of a smile, well hidden in the older man’s beard, shining in the crimson light of the battle lanterns. He looked like Satan himself. “Borge has sent for Golden Pearl, as I thought he would,” he told them. “He is abandoning ship.”
“If we could get to it first…” Enya mused. The thought sent a chill up her spine. They were actually trying to make their way to the enemy’s capital. But to do… what?
She shook her head. Whatever it was they were about to attempt, it was the only thing left that they could do.
“They are going to attempt docking at main gangway airlock,” Zhukovski repeated from the interface. “We have less than eight minutes to get there.”
“Let’s move it, then,” Braddock said gruffly.
Had Jodi been there, she would have recognized the voice of the hard-bitten gunnery sergeant who had looked after her on a backwater world, seemingly so long ago.
The battle was not going well, President Borge lamented angrily. He was furious at the failure of Grand Admiral L’Houillier and Warspite’s captain to keep the ship – and himself – safe from peril while annihilating the enemy. He would have had them both shot, but the second Kreelan salvo to penetrate Warspite’s failing shields had speared through the hull and destroyed the bridge. It was only a stroke of divine intervention that Borge had been in his private quarters, watching the battle develop with the Confederation’s chief leaders: his own subordinates.