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Ben and the other flight attendants spread the call to action through the plane. Passengers scrambled like ants as the flight attendants barked orders: “Pull the carts in front of the doors! Lower the shades so they can’t see inside!”

There were enough military personnel to station one individual at each door. They were unarmed, yes, but three were young Marines—admin types, not combat soldiers, unfortunately. The others were reservists of various shapes, sizes, and ages. Jordan hoped that zeal would make up for any lack of experience and proficiency.

Natalie brought Jordan a straw breadbasket filled with an assortment of objects including several scissors, a pocketknife,
two oversized nail files, and a set of brass knuckles. “Our arsenal,” she said sarcastically.

The bounty of an eternally faulty security system, Jordan thought with equal cynicism.

“And of course there’s me,” Natalie said.

“You?”

“I’m a cardio-kickbox instructor. I guarantee I can kick some butt if you need me to.”

Now Natalie’s sleekly muscular body made sense. Jordan smiled for the first time in hours. “I have no doubt you can.”

She grinned back. “Should we let the military folks have first pick?” she asked, lifting the basket of weapons.

“And give the civilian volunteers what’s left over.” Jordan peered into the darkness. “You never found any law-enforcement types onboard?”

“Not a one. Aside from that mall security guard.”

“Well, I still say that the hijackers are going to have their work cut out for them if they think they can get inside this airplane.” Jordan pondered something she hadn’t considered. “Of course, they could use explosives. . . .”

Natalie pursed her glossed lips. “Why go through all the trouble to capture the plane whole only to blow it to bits?”

“It doesn’t make sense, I know. I’m going to assume the hijackers wanted to keep us in one piece, and that’s how I’m going to play my hand.” She might not be a GI Joe, but she was a pretty mean poker player. Play her cards right and she’d see Boo again. Fold and—she winced. She didn’t want to go there.

Jordan made her way back to the cockpit, supervising the well-orchestrated progress of readying the airplane for assault as she went. Ben, the purser and chief flight attendant, walked with her. Though he wore a brave face, his expressive dark brown eyes reflected the worry eating at him. She avoided meeting those eyes, or she might remember her
own fear. His fingernails were freshly gnawed, and she saw him biting them whenever he thought no one was looking. And his once stylishly gelled black hair was a mess. Jordan realized then that her own hair had spilled out of her French braid. Corkscrew tendrils sprouted everywhere. Where the curls touched her skin, they were stuck to her damp cheeks and neck. She pulled off the blue scrunchie and started over, scraping the entire thick mess into a hasty ponytail.

“Oh, captain . . . my captain.”

The slightly flirting, melodic voice caught Jordan’s attention. It was the red-haired Irishman who’d insisted that they fight back. He walked to her, flanked by several other disheveled men she recognized from business class. “What are you going to do when they come aboard?” he asked in his brogue. “They will, you know. We won’t be able to keep them out for long.”

“You don’t know that.”

He shrugged. “Pragmatism is my middle name. If they worked this hard to net the oyster, they’ll work just as hard to pry open the shell. You need someone like me to stop them.” He winked and gave her a killer smile.

She hardened herself to his European charm. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Ian Dillon—but I go by Dillon.” His hand was warm as he shook hers. “Senior Vice President of Network Global Technologies. Based in Dublin. Million-miler, many times over.”

Jordan was so rattled, it took her a second to realize that he’d given her his frequent-flyer credentials. “And your area of expertise is?”

“For one, I can take normal electronic gadgets and transform them into what might be useful to us.”

“Like weapons?”

“Like weapons,” he confirmed.

She and Ben exchanged glances. Was Dillon’s plan rash? Maybe. Would it save them? It could. Or it might cause a lot more of them to wind up dead than if they simply cooperated. But maybe there wasn’t a right answer. Maybe she was going to have to rely on gut instinct and lots of prayers.

“Okay. We don’t have a lot in reserve for defense. Anything extra will help. Go ahead and gather what information and helpers you think you need for manufacturing the weapons. Just don’t take any chances with my crew or the other passengers.” She held up one finger. “Any and all plans of action go through me. I make the final decision. The
only
decision, Mr. Dillon. This is not a democracy. Understood?”

Ben appeared vaguely unsettled by her monologue. She could see why: she was beginning to sound like a character from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Dillon, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered by her abruptness. In fact, he appeared to approve. “Understood,” he said. “Now, Captain, I’d like to requisition the defibrillator for defensive purposes.”

“The AED?” Ben frowned. “No dice. We might need it if someone has a heart attack.”

“We do have two,” Jordan reminded him. “But, Mr. Dillon, the AED delivers a shock only if it detects that one is needed. You can’t use it to shock someone, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Dillon’s mouth tipped, and he jerked his chin in the direction of her holster. “Whatever I come up with will be better than that toy gun you’re sporting.”

The man was right. If they were going to fend off an invading horde, they’d need more than a single stun gun. “Do it,” she said.

Dillon gave her a two-fingered salute and walked back to his huddle of waiting businessmen. Jordan departed in
the opposite direction, her hand resting on the stun gun. Back in the cockpit, she settled into the captain’s seat—
her
seat now—and watched for any changes in the wide-open wall in front of the airplane. The wall was still too bright to look at directly and too intense to see past. So she sat there, waiting for something to happen, which was the worst kind of waiting there was.

Her watch beeped, telling the hour. It was eight a.m. at Jordan’s parents’ house. By now, Boo would be eating breakfast and watching cartoons. Then she’d go off to school, expecting to find Jordan waiting to pick her up at three when the kids poured onto the playground. Only this time, Mommy wouldn’t be there.

Jordan tipped her head back and closed her eyes. This wouldn’t be the first time that her airline job had wrenched apart her family. Craig, her deceased husband, had wanted to be a pilot, too. But she had been hired by an airline and he wasn’t. Her home life went to hell after that. Craig stopped working and started drinking. God, sometimes he’d seemed more like a high-maintenance child than a husband. Her father and brother had never acted that way. Big hearts and quiet strength, that’s what they had, the kind of guys who were there when you needed them. Why she’d sought different characteristics in a husband, she’d never know. Youthful inexperience maybe; Craig’s emotional volatility and chattiness had been a novelty after the more reserved men of her household. It wasn’t until later that she realized the magnitude of her mistake.

She’d tried to help him work through his jealousy, feelings of inadequacy and depression, but it was made painfully clear that she’d failed when his drinking culminated in a fatal head-on with a parked car. Roberta was only nine months old.

It had taken a long time, but finally, after months of counseling and the unwavering support of her close-knit family,
Jordan capitulated, accepting that she wasn’t to blame. Now this:
She
might die as a result of her job, leaving Roberta with no parents at all. What a nightmarish example of circularity.

A soft tinkling sound broke into her glowering trance. Music. She lurched forward and squinted outside. The white radiance obliterating the wall had transformed into a sheet of light, undulating in a rainbow of colors. A melody played. Inexplicably beautiful. Eerily foreign. And hypnotic.

She tensed. Were the music and lights designed to soothe? Were they purposefully mesmerizing to put her off guard? She noticed that when she averted her eyes from the colors, the effect was not as strong. She pushed away from the instrument panel. If the hijackers wanted to drug her, they were going to have to try a lot harder than this.

Ben and Ann burst into the cockpit. “We’re all ready down below,” the purser announced. His gaze flew to where Jordan still stared. “When the hell did
that
start?”

“Just now.” The music faded into a husky female voice enunciating words in a monotonous beat, as if she were counting numbers and not speaking.

“It sounds like words picked at random.” Jordan cocked her head. “And in several different languages.”

Ann said, “I speak Korean. She just said ‘best wishes.’ ”

“I heard ‘olive tree’ in Spanish,” Ben said. “And also ‘blue.’ ”

On and on the verbal presentation went, with no apparent pattern. “Earth” was repeated many times, but the monologue might as well have been gibberish, so unrelated were the string of words.

Jordan sagged back in her seat. “How could they not know what language we speak? United Airlines is a flag carrier. The stars and stripes are painted on the fuselage. You can’t miss it.”

The voice went silent. The music ended, too. Then two people walked onto a platform that she hadn’t noticed before in the shadows off the nose of the 747.

So . . . these were the people who had taken them.

The man and woman were fit and athletic. The man was tall, and he had medium brown hair, while the woman’s was so blond that it was almost pure white. Her skin was unusually fair, almost pink. Was she an albino? The woman stood too far away to reveal whether her eyes were red.

“Behind them,” Jordan murmured. “There are more.”

At least four burly men loomed in the shadows behind the couple. Bodyguards? Soldiers? They wore similar clothing to the first pair, which struck Jordan as uniforms. Crisp, blue-gray jumpsuits with thick black belts, from which hung various pieces of hardware, some with illuminated faces and other things with blinking lights. Communications equipment? Hi-tech computers?

She could hear Ben’s breathing accelerate. “They’re armed,” he said. “All of them.”

Jordan nodded grimly. “I don’t recognize all of what they’ve got on their belts, but it’s hard to disguise a gun in a holster.”

“Six people, six guns,” Ann muttered. “At least. There have to be others. Whatever this thing we’re in is huge. Who are they? Or what are they? Russians? Scandinavians? A white-collar terrorist group that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about international borders?”

Jordan shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“This is bad,” Ben whispered shakily. “Real bad.”

Jordan glanced over her shoulder.
Don’t fall apart on me, Ben. I need you
. “Stay positive, you guys. They’re acting calm. We have to, also.” Bringing a damp hand to her neck, she rested her fingers over her throbbing pulse, willing it to slow, willing herself to calm down, to think clearly. To do the right thing. “The presence of those weapons means
that they’re damned serious about what they intend to do with our plane—and us. And it also says that it’s no accident that we ended up here.”

“Wherever
here
is,” Ann muttered.

Hijacked, Jordan speculated, in a plot that defied anything she understood about modern-day technology.

The white-haired woman outside raised her hands in an obvious greeting—not quite warm, but still welcoming. Jordan didn’t see malevolence in the man’s face, either. But still, the four stony-faced guards stood behind them.

“She looks like she’s trying to be friendly,” Ann said.

Jordan huffed. “Forget it. We’re not taking the bait. Unless they use explosives, they’re not getting onboard this plane.”

The albino woman brought what looked like a handheld computer close to her mouth. It must have been wired to the speaker system, because simultaneously a familiar husky voice boomed, the same one that had accompanied the music. In a strong accent, the woman repeated Jordan’s exact words: “We’re not taking the bait,” she crooned. “Unless they use explosives, they’re not getting onboard this plane.”

“Oh, crap,” Ben blurted.

Jordan fell back against her seat. “ ‘Oh, crap’ is right. They just heard everything we said.”

“That didn’t go over very well, Ensign,” Kào stated as he watched the refugees flee the cockpit of their vessel from where he stood in the cargo bay with the four security guards and Trist Pren. “What did you say to them?”

“I’m not sure. I merely repeated some of their conversation.” Trist’s colorless, almost nonexistent brows drew together. “I assumed they’d find it more comforting than words issued randomly.”

“Well, it didn’t. It frightened them. Look at their craft,” he said. “It reminds me of the type of craft the Alliance flew eons ago, in the early years of atmospheric travel. If their civilization has begun manned space travel, they haven’t gotten very far. They might not recognize that they’ve been taken onto a spacecraft. We’ll have to try another way to coax them out.”

“How about turning their ship upside down and shaking them loose?” Trist typed data into her handheld. “Or we
can cut off all power in the cargo bay, leaving them to cower in the dark until they grow hungry and filthy enough to be lured out with promises of food and showers.” She pursed lips that were dyed permanently lavender. “More realistically, let’s inundate the ship with sedative gas and render the ungrateful boors unconscious.”

Kào battled exasperation. It was hard to forget what those of this woman’s ancestors’ world had done to his home and family. The albino race had been the scourge of the galaxy for many years. They had imprisoned him. Now he was forced to cooperate with one of them to achieve his goal of helping his father. And although he was hardly a diplomat, her aggressive solution rubbed even his military-trained senses the wrong way. “No, Trist. That’s not the way we’re going to do it.” Aside from its cold almost Talagarian expediency, her plan did not account for human fear, which would certainly soar higher with such induced helplessness.