Supernova (29 page)

One end
of the hallway ended in a wall, and the other had a few doors that looked like
they could house more cargo bays. There was an elevator at that end, too, but
she didn’t want to take it unless necessary.
Stairs
, she thought.
Preferably ones that would lead her to an empty office with a comm console so
she could figure out how to send an SOS. Or an unmanned control panel. Maybe
she could take over the ship and steer it to friendlier skies.

Like
that was going to happen. She wouldn’t know a Nym control panel if it were
right in front of her.

The ship
shimmied and tilted to the left.
Oh, God, what next?

She eyed
the elevator and forced herself to stay on her feet. She was well and truly
screwed, but she wasn’t going down without a fight to save the universe as it
was supposed to be.

* * *

Rian’s
laser pistol had been set to stun, and he woke Ashford with a kick to the ribs.
The man sputtered and sucked in a labored breath. Rian wanted to beat him until
he was nothing but a pile of bloody pulp on the floor, but instead he aimed his
weapon at the doctor’s head.

The ship
sharply jerked upwards, and Rian stumbled. Ashford made a feeble grab for his
weapon, but a security officer pressed his foot against the doctor’s neck and
kept his own weapon aimed at him. Medical instruments that hadn’t been securely
strapped down clattered to the floor.

Steg,
roused from sleep, was in charge of a security detail that Rian had ordered to
sick bay. The ex-prizefighter made a move to pound Ashford into oblivion, but
Rian didn’t want that to happen just yet and held up his free hand. Steg
shrugged a little and strapped the doctor’s hands in plasticuffs.

He had
to find Lily, and this bastard knew where she was.

He
entrusted bridge duty to Commander Kostin. He felt a rumble and a series of
heavy thumps throughout the
Defiant
as the ship’s tractor beam
activated. His first officer deserved a commendation after this; it took a
great deal of skill to steer the ship directly above the Nym cruiser that had
appeared out of nowhere.

Rian
tapped his comm badge. “Captain to Kostin. Status!” he barked.

“Tractor
beam engaged.”

“The
ship?”

“Our
sensors indicate it’s trying to cloak, but it can’t even under our traction.”
He heard the commander’s glee through his badge. “We’ve got it locked for the
time being, but we’re keeping our shields up as a precaution.”

Rian
understood. Most ships were rendered immobile and defenseless by a tractor
beam, but he wouldn’t put it past the Nym to develop a craft that could fire
through that. It looked like they hadn’t, though. They probably hadn’t
anticipated a Fleet ship—an antiquated patrol ship no less—to ever take them
hostage.

“Hold
the beam, Kostin,” he said. “What’s the ETA for help?”

“Thirteen
minutes for
Bishop’s Pride
, twenty for the
Magna
.”

Well,
praise the gods for that.
The
Magna
was a battleship, the kind of craft Rian had once dreamed of
commanding.

Ashford
coughed. “You can’t hold the Nym much longer,” he wheezed. Rian leveled his
weapon at him. “They’ll get through your shields eventually.”

“We’ll
destroy them before that.”

“She’s
on there.”

Rian
wasn’t surprised to hear that; it was the most logical place for Lily to end
up, and a team was trying to break into the Nym’s systems to find her. “Start
talking,” Rian said.

“I want
amnesty.”

“Start
talking,” he repeated through gritted teeth.

“I’ll
tell you everything I know if Fleet gives me amnesty.”

“I can’t
offer you that. I’m only a commander.”

“You can
help talk them into it.”

He was
wasting time. Rian resisted the impulse to shoot him. “I’ll consider it,” he
said.

“I want
your word.”

Killing
him wouldn’t get Lily back. “I promise to do what I can,” Rian lied. “Tell me
where she is.”

Ashford
hauled himself up to a seating position. “That’s your problem, Commander,” he
spat. “You’ve been letting your emotions get the better of you.”

“Quit
stalling.”

“You
should be worried about Fleet and the Commonwealth. You should be worried about
the Nym.” He struggled for breath and held his ribs where Rian had kicked him.

“I am.
Lily is part of that.”

“You’re
an idiot,” he spat.

“Fuck
you.”

There
was a buckling under their feet. “Shields holding,” Kostin reported over his
comm link. Rian had deliberately kept it open, and Kostin could hear every word
of his exchange with the doctor. He half-listened to the bridge crew as they
scrambled to keep the tractor beam and shields engaged.

The
device Ashford had used to transport Lily beeped. It was a few inches from his
hand, and he made a grab for it. Rian kicked it out of his reach.

“They
didn’t want her, you know,” Ashford said. “She was an accident. She’s no use to
anyone, dead or alive.” He winced as he shifted his bulky frame on the floor. “She’s
probably dead by now. If she isn’t, she will be soon. Nym ships are set to
auto-destruct before they can be taken prisoner. You know that, Commander.”

An icy
chill gripped Rian’s heart, but he didn’t lower his weapon. He would not—could
not—believe Lily was dead. He had to believe that she had found a way to stave
off the Nym to get through this.
Had
to.

“Amnesty,”
Ashford snapped.

Steg was
overseeing the security detail and heard Ashford’s demand. The security chief
muttered something damning in his native tongue before uttering a sarcastic, “Sure.”

* * *

Ensign
Taz Shraft had been forced away from his communications panel by higher-ranking
crew members. He relinquished his post reluctantly and followed the security
team to sick bay, listening to snatches of conversation. The Nym were back;
they were under their feet, and they had one of his friends in their clutches.
He wanted to help and could, but no one would listen to him. Captain Marska
hadn’t noticed him, and Taz’s frustration felt insurmountable. He felt his
stomach turn over at the mention of the Nym’s auto-destruct sequence.

He hated
feeling powerless.

Unless...

He ran
for the transport bay. There was a tertiary access panel there, and he knew it
probably wasn’t in use. Unbeknownst to his superiors, he wasn’t a total idiot,
and had gone into engineering in an effort to direct his fondness for hacking
and tweaking code into something positive. Reprogramming equipment was supposed
to alert his superiors about design flaws. Fleet just didn’t see things his way
and forced him into a boring desk job in communications as punishment for
things that didn’t warrant it. He knew he would have been an asset as an
engineer.

He was
right about the shuttle bay and was relieved to find it was abandoned. He
logged into the ship’s systems using a senior access code he ripped off from a
former commanding officer he had in his first days in Fleet. He was lucky, and
the computer read the code as if Captain Flitt were actually on board. Data
flowed through the console, information a mere ensign wouldn’t ordinarily have
access to.

The data
on a vessel held in traction could be accessed by the holding ship, and he
pulled up the Nym’s primary systems interface. Other crew members had been
doing the same, and he saw that they were focused on the auto-destruct sequence
that was going to go off shortly and trying to override it in time. They were
doing it incorrectly; the better way was to find out where that command was
hidden and disable it from the inside. A vessel built in almost any shipyard
could be taken out using the methods they were trying, but they had forgotten
that this was a Nym ship.

He found
a pathway another officer had opened on the enemy vessel. It looked like the
coding for a transport beam. If they had been able to get a hold on Lily, they
could have used that bit of code to hack into the transporter and bring her
back here, but they couldn’t get a lock on her. There was a shield of some kind
hiding all life forms on the ship.

Taz
stared at the Nym cruiser’s data. The only way to get Lily back was to shut
down the entire ship by hacking into their primary systems interface, rendering
the life form shield and auto-destruct useless. It would also shut off the air,
and if Taz were more familiar with Nym-built hardware he would have tried it
anyway. But this wasn’t a Commons or Empire ship, and he had no idea how long
the emergency air circulated, or even if the Nym utilized such devices. Under
ordinary circumstances, he would have welcomed the challenge, but he had to get
this done in a bare few minutes, without anyone on board the
Defiant
noticing. They would certainly find a way to stop him.

The line
of code for the transport unit was linked into communications and security
aboard the cruiser, which was good. The pathways that branched off each program
began with the same string of numbers, and he memorized them. That likely
indicated the beginning of the PSI’s coded address, buried deep in the computer
systems. He searched along other lines of data, looking for a link beginning
with that sequence, and came upon a cluster of them. He followed the line of
code with his hands on the console’s smooth surface.

There it
was. That had to be the controls for the PSI.

All he had
to now was circumvent around the PSI and knock out their defense systems
without shutting off life support or blowing up the ship. When he did that, he
could link the
Defiant
’s PSI to the Nym’s, essentially turning the
latter into an extension of the Fleet ship. If the tractor beam could hold on
long enough to successfully worm his way into the enemy ship, he could control
it remotely. Like a bunch of cargo bots.

If this
weren’t a life or death situation, this would be fun.

Chapter 17

Lily
held her weapon at the ready and pressed a button next to the elevator. Its
doors opened; she stepped in, and it immediately began to ascend.
Shit
.
She examined the smooth walls for an emergency stop button to no avail. There
was a short ladder built into the wall that reached the ceiling, which gave her
hope. Even a group of people as arrogant and advanced as the Nym had to have
emergency protocols in place for something as simple as an elevator.

She
heard a series of barked commands over an intercom panel near the ceiling. She
didn’t understand a word of it but had no doubt that the ship’s crew was on to
her.

There
was a single, tiny button near the floor. She pressed it and prayed. The
elevator ground to a halt.

Relief
coursed through her, but it was short-lived. She whirled around the elevator
but couldn’t find any means of escape. She hoisted herself up the ladder and
pounded at the ceiling panels with her fists. One gave way an inch or two, and
she slammed the butt of her gun against it. A small burst of energy jolted her
arm and seared a black spot on the floor.

Oops.

She hit
the panel with her fist again and it loosened. Her hands aching, she forced it
aside just enough to wiggle her body through and sit on the roof of the
elevator.

She
looked around. “Holy shit,” she breathed softly. She could see a network of
metal beams, cables, and the stark bodies of other elevators around her,
arranged in a semi-circle. She looked up and saw the floor above her, about
fifteen feet. She would have to climb to the next deck and pray that her luck
would hold out.

Her gun
in one hand, she grabbed onto one of the support beams hugging the elevator’s
body and wrapped herself against it. She forced herself to remember climbing
ropes in high school gym class. She took in deep breaths and concentrated,
inching up the support beam, made more awkward by the weapon in her hand and
another in her waistband.

An
elevator on the other side of the half-circle whirred into action and stopped
on a deck two levels below her. A new fear gripped her: What if the elevator
she had broken out of started moving? She hurried her pace, picking up a rhythm
that would have made her gym teacher proud. Finally she approached the metal
decking of the next deck, a bare few inches, and held on to the beam. She let
go of it with the hand gripping her gun and thought quickly about how to get
through the doors without drawing attention to herself. If she shot through
them, someone would notice before she could get through. She would have to
launch herself at the doors and push her way through.

She had
one chance to do this.

She
could. She would fall through and roll.

Lily’s
toes touched the floor’s edge and she swayed slightly, gripping the beam beside
her. She threw all of her weight against the doors and crashed through them to
the floor. She crouched down on her knees, grateful for the solidity beneath
her. Then she saw the pair of black boots a few inches away.