Dark Beneath the Moon (47 page)

“Will do.” The
Tane Ikai’
s burst drive was a thing of beauty with the modifications the Corvids had made, and once Paixon gave the word I pushed it to its limit. I had to swing wide around the station to avoid the firefight still raging around it, but it didn’t put us far off course.

“PrimeCorp ship has cleared the asteroids,” Baden said, too brief a time later. “Staying on our tail—and just fired at us again.”

“Shields have as much juice as I can give them,” Viss said.

“Sord, try to evade with the maneuvering jets, but not if it slows us too much,” Paixon told me. Her voice sounded fainter, as if she was reaching the end of her endurance.

I punched the vertical thruster, and the ship dropped, making my stomach lurch. I wasn’t used to such a quick and thorough response in a ship this size. Not quick enough, though. The
Tane Ikai
shuddered as the shields took the hit. Paixon gasped behind me, and I hoped she wasn’t going to throw up.

She had me really confused now; I didn’t know anymore what could be going wrong with her bioscavs. From my experience—limited, sure, but still more than most people had—she should not have survived this long without bioscavengers in her system, when she’d been dependent on them for so long.

Mamma had lived a whole twenty-four hours once her bioscavs were gone. At first she’d rallied, symptom-free. But that only lasted long enough for us to get our hopes up. It started that night with a headache and a nosebleed we couldn’t seem to stop. The convulsions came not long after that. The vomiting, shivering, and body-wracking shakes as her entire body rebelled and, once it wore itself out with rebellion, shut down for good.

I glanced at Luta Paixon. She’d put a hand to her temple, rubbing it absently as if she could erase the pain behind it with her fingertips.
Should I warn her?

Would she believe me? What good would it do, anyway? They seemed to think that getting her to her mother might save her. Might as well let them do that. For all I knew, it would, if we could make it.

Then it hit me as hard as one of those PrimeCorp torpedoes. Her mother. Emmage Mahane. The woman I’d set out to hurt. The woman I’d targeted for revenge, the one I’d marked to bear the brunt for all the years of running, and hiding, and scrimping, and lying. The years of trying to save my parents from themselves.

Of trying to save
me
from myself.

It was all her fault, wasn’t it?

I hadn’t known exactly how I was going to hurt Emmage Mahane. I thought Paixon might lead me to her, or maybe an opportunity would present itself to get my revenge on Mahane through her daughter, or her granddaughter. I figured I’d know my chance when it presented itself.

And here it was.

Paixon was going to die. All I had to do was let it happen. Fly a little slower. Stray off course a bit. Stretch out the time so that she didn’t make it to Emmage Mahane.

So easy.

I’D NEVER UNDERSTOOD
what people meant by an “icepick headache,” but I thought I did now. I put a hand to my temple, blinking away tears that welled up in response to the pain. It really did feel as if someone had stabbed my head with a sharp instrument. Jahelia Sord with her fork, I thought, trying to distract myself from it. Sometimes the way she looked at me, I thought that was exactly what she’d like to do.

I glanced at her, so incongruous in Rei’s seat. Not now, though. Now she was saving all of us—herself included. I still didn’t understand her, but I was damn glad that she’d come aboard the ship.

“No response from the station,” Baden said. “I’ve signalled them three times on the channel Fha set up, but nothing.”

The embattled station still showed on one of the side viewscreens. There seemed to be no let-up in the assault, and no side clearly emerging as a victor yet.

“Maybe the coordinates we have will work,” I said, but in my heart, I didn’t believe it. I’d expect them to change all the asteroid field settings as soon as the assault began, to try and prevent further incursions into the system. That the attackers had apparently found a way to override one field—the one we’d come through—wouldn’t change that protocol.

“I hate to say it, but we have more trouble,” Baden said. “Two ships have broken off from the attack on the station and are headed after us.”

I pressed my lips together until they hurt. “So our stalker has called in some friends. Sord, Viss, can we get anything else from the burst drive?”

Viss answered without hesitation. “I’m sorry, Captain. It’s full-out. The only other thing I could do is take the shields offline—”

The PrimeCorp ship fired another torpedo, and it battered into the shields, answering that question. I glanced at the rear screens. The two ships coming to join their fellow—I couldn’t tell for sure, but were they gaining on us? If they caught up and added their firepower to the first—

But at this rate, we’d never reach the asteroid field before the shields gave out. We couldn’t weaken ourselves further by returning fire. And I feared that when we reached the asteroids, we’d have to stop anyway. If the coordinates weren’t right, Sord couldn’t fly through the field on her own. Even Rei hadn’t been able to do it without my help, and I’d been a lot healthier then.

I stood from the chair. I couldn’t think. I needed to move, needed to pace, clear my mind. I always thought best while I walked, letting the motion shake disparate thoughts into a shape that made sense. My legs wobbled, and I swore under my breath, clutching at the chair arm.

I hate being sick. I hate being weak.

Forcing my back straight and willing my legs to hold me up, I slowly paced the width of the bridge. I caught Hirin’s eyes on me, dark with concern. I managed a half-smile for him, turned and started the other way. It wasn’t easy.

I hate the pain. I hate the uncertainty.
And I hated feeling this much self-pity.

I tried to bludgeon my mind clear. Most of all, I hated the PrimeCorp ship behind me. We had to escape them, or we had to stop them.

Stop them.

Stop them.

I whirled toward Hirin, almost toppling over. The empty skimchair next to Baden, where Maja usually sat, saved me. I grabbed the arm and fell into it. “Hirin! When the Chron were chasing us before—before we all went out—Rei said something to you about the activator drive. What was it?”

Hirin frowned, shook his head slightly. “I don’t—what was it? She wanted to use it. But I didn’t understand why.”

“Right. Because we weren’t near a ghosting artifact.” I dropped my eyes to my hands, gripping the arms of the skimchair.
Think.
The smooth armrest felt oddly rippled, but I knew it was the scarring on my fingertips. The only scars I had that my nanobioscavengers had not healed.

“But one stopped our drives once,” I said suddenly. “That’s it! At the artifact moon—we were caught in it and it stopped our drives, remember? It shut down everything. It
wrecked
things!” I held up my burned fingers, where the datapad had seared them. “Viss—”

“Already on it, Captain,” he said, his hands flying over the engineering console. “Activator drive is online.”

“Fire.”

A bright flash lit up the rear viewscreens as the drive activated, sending its pulse of—whatever it was—directly into the path of the oncoming PrimeCorp ship. There was no flash of impact, no explosion. The ship kept coming. But—

“Its drives are shut down!” Baden shouted. “No weapons systems, no thrust. They’ll keep coasting, but they’ll have to reboot everything, just like we did at the artifact moon.”

I struggled up out of the skimchair to get to my own. “All right. That gives us a little more time to make the wormhole. Sord, you all right?”

“Perfectly fine, Captain. Running full out, straight for the asteroid field.” Her voice sounded strained, belying her words, but if she said she was
okej
, I’d take her word for it.

“Baden, still nothing from the station?”

“Sorry, Captain. Not a thing.”

I pulled in a deep breath and smelled blood. Startled, I glanced around the bridge, then realized it was me. I put a hand up to catch the wet, hot drop that threatened to spill over my top lip.
Not again.

“Three minutes to the asteroid field,” Hirin said.

I swallowed hard, tried to focus. “Can you tell yet if the coordinates will work? Extrapolate our course at all?”

He was quiet as he worked, pressing commands one-handed into the nav computer as fast as he could. Finally he looked up. “It’s hard to tell—the asteroids are moving, not static like the last field. It’s impossible to predict the course this far in advance. I can find Fha’s designated entry points into the field—but not whether an asteroid will be in that location three minutes from now.”

“The other PrimeCorp ships are still coming on,” Baden said. “Not gaining, but they’ll catch up quick if we have to stop at the field.”

Pain stabbed into the side of my head again, blinding me with sudden tears. “We have to fly straight into the field when we get there,” I said. “Sord, can you do that?”

She hesitated a long time before she spoke. “I don’t think so, not on my own.”

I knew it must have cost her to make that admission. “What about your datapad—Pita? No super navigational abilities we don’t know about?”

I heard a smile in Sord’s voice, a rare thing. “She can do a lot of things, Captain, but she can’t fly a ship by herself.”

I swallowed again. My mouth had gone dry, and my throat felt like sandpaper. But we couldn’t let ourselves be blown up or captured by PrimeCorp. We had to warn Nearspace. Unsteadily, I pushed myself out of the chair. “
Okej
. Then I’ll try to help you. Maybe between us—”

I made it halfway to the co-pilot’s seat before my legs buckled. Baden tried to catch me, but my arm picked up a heavy tremor and he couldn’t hold me. I crashed to the metal decking, legs kicking feebly, completely out of my control. My head banged painfully onto the floor, so hard I felt the lump begin to swell immediately.

“Luta!” Hirin was up from the nav console and at my side, awkwardly turning me on my side. Oddly, I smelled strawberries. The word
asteroid
seemed to be stuck in my head, my mind looping it over and over
asteroid asteroid field asteroid orbit asteroid belt asteroid asteroid.
Black dots starred my vision, expanding like the mouth of a wormhole until I could see only black. My eyes were wide open, but I couldn’t see.

I could still hear, though. I heard Jahelia Sord telling Baden something that didn’t make any sense.

“That storage room behind the head,” she said. It sounded like speaking hurt her throat, but the words tumbled out, terse and sharp. “Rear wall, behind a box of dried pasta. Inside a bag marked ‘filters’. There’s some stuff there—get the med injector—it’s the one that Chron doctor used on her. Still a dose in it. I don’t know if it will do any good. But if the convulsions have started, I can tell you it can’t hurt.”

Skimchair rolling across decking. Running feet. Yuskeya’s voice . . . Maja’s voice, too? She must be all right. Tears pricked my eyes at that. Hirin’s hand under my head. Someone clutching my hand. Words and voices spinning around me, cluttering up the air, meaningless, noisy.
Asteroid asteroid asteroid.

The running feet returning. Something cool and round pressed to the base of my neck, and a familiar spreading tingle that was half-pleasant, half-pain. I thought about drawing in a deep breath, tried, and found I could. Specks of light like tiny fireworks danced in my vision, and sight returned as they cleared. My body returned to me. It had stopped shaking. The lump on my head felt tender where Hirin’s hand held it, and I managed to get a hand on the decking and push myself upright. In the space of a few more heartbeats, I felt clear and light and absolutely purposeful.

“Whoa, Captain,” Yuskeya said, her hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy. I don’t know what just happened, but you’re in no shape—”

“No, that’s the point, Yuskeya. I
am
in the shape—the shape I need to be in to help Sord navigate the asteroids. Look.” I held out my hand to her. Rock steady. I put the hand on the comm board next to Baden and pulled myself to my feet, a little wobbly but a thousand times better than I’d been minutes ago. “But we don’t know how long it will last, so there’s no time to lose.”

“The other PrimeCorp ships are almost in torpedo range,” Baden said.

“And the asteroid field is dead ahead,” Jahelia Sord said. “Decision time, people.”

“Yuskeya—the coordinates?”

She gave me one more hard, searching stare, then crossed hurriedly to the nav board and keyed in commands. When she turned back to me, her eyes were dark with concern. “No good. The configuration has changed.”

“All right.” I squeezed Maja’s hand—she’d been the one holding it, still pale-faced and trembly, but moving under her own power—and let it go, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat. “Sord, you’re dock. I’ll take starboard. Viss will shut down everything but the maneuvering jets. We’re going to weave our way through this to the wormhole, and then engage the skip drive,
okej?
”