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He nodded, but she knew she hadn’t convinced him, just as she hadn’t been able to lift Craig out of his doldrums, her husband’s constant state in the last years of their marriage.
Don’t think of that. Not now
. Sighing, she rested her hand on Ben’s forearm and squeezed. “Hang in there. Stay strong for me. I need you. You’re doing a great job—a fantastic job. Keep it up.”

His face creased into a haggard smile. “Thanks.”

She gave him another squeeze and tried to return his smile. Then she pulled herself up the stairs.

Numb, she stepped around Brian’s blanket-draped body and trudged into the cockpit. The instruments were indeed powered, and she intended to take advantage of that.

“This is United Flight Fifty-eight,” she said into the radio handset. “Does anyone read?”

There was no side-tone, the sound in the speaker that
indicated the radio was working. She tried all the radios, and various frequencies, but with the same frustrating result. Her hand slid down to the console between the seats. Even if the radios didn’t work, maybe the transponder would be functional and would bring help in their direction—wherever
that
was.

First, she dialed in “7500” on the aircraft’s transponder, and followed it with the code “7700.” The emergency numbers were used to alert air traffic control that they had both a hijacking-in-progress and an emergency. Only after transmitting her emergency messages did she notice that the tall, dark-eyed man was standing outside, in front of the plane. More importantly, he was alone. The goons who had accompanied him before were nowhere to be seen. The albino woman was absent, too.

Hands on his hips, he waited patiently for her attention. When he saw that she watched him, he withdrew his gun—or what she assumed was a gun—from his belt and laid it on the floor. A gesture of peace? Palm toward her, fingers spread, he raised his right hand. He paused, as if expecting her to respond.

She mirrored his gesture, and somehow withheld the powerful urge to show him her middle finger.

He brought his hand to his mouth and then pointed at her. He wanted to talk to her. Well, she could certainly do that without letting him inside, she thought.

Walking away, he disappeared from view under the fuselage of the aircraft. Then it hit her: Door 1-L. It was the only door that didn’t have a slide! An unprotected entrance.

Her heart flipped in her chest, and she dashed out of the cockpit, leaping over Brian’s body. Bolting downstairs, she shouted, “Take your stations!” The flight attendants echoed her call. Passengers and crew darted in all directions. The children—there were fourteen under twelve, three of those infants—took shelter in the bulkhead between economy
and business class, along with three pregnant women to watch them.

The efficiency of their defensive preparations surprised Jordan. Many passengers had passed the hours sleeping, having succumbed to shock, exhaustion, and poor air quality. Others showed symptoms resembling those of motion sickness. Already the air was rank with the odor of feces and vomit. Before long, all their lavatories would be clogged and unusable. But when called upon to defend the plane, none of that mattered. “Natalie, Ben, we need a slide-raft at One-Left!
Now
—”

Mid-shout, she crashed into Dillon, the red-haired Irishman. He was slim, but he was as solid as a bank safe. She stumbled backward and fell hard on her rear. A businessman caught Dillon, but the AED he’d clutched went flying—into the hands of one of the Marines, Garrett Brown, who caught the defibrillator like a football.

From where she was sprawled in the middle of the first-class aisle, Jordan felt as if she were watching a screwball comedy. Unfortunately, her sense of humor was at an all-time low. Would this have happened to the typical, Hollywood-version, six-foot-plus, gray-haired airline captain with the Oklahoma twang? She doubted it.

The Marine, Garrett, helped her to her feet. Her chest stung and her eyes watered as she tried to catch her breath. Then he gave her the AED, and she balanced it in her shaking hands as Dillon apologized profusely. “I’m sorry, Captain. But I couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s ready.”

Jordan’s eyes shifted to the device in her arms. “You mean it works?”

Dillon grinned. “I had to cannibalize my laptop and a couple of cell phones, but, yes, I think it’ll work beautifully.”

“It’ll shock someone?”

“It’ll shock the bloody hell out of someone.”

“Will it . . . kill someone?” she asked carefully.

“Depends on where you aim it and how long you hold it there.” Dillon’s singsong brogue made her wish he was describing purple horseshoes and four-leaf clovers instead of how to electrocute another human being.

The flight attendants had gathered around them. “What’s going on?” Ben asked.

“One of them wants to talk to us. Again.”

Frightened murmurs rippled through the crowd of eavesdroppers.

“This time he’s alone. And I think we do need to open a line of communication.”

The murmurs turned into shouts. Not for the first time, Jordan wished she was deep in the anonymous sea of onlookers and not in the spotlight—not the leader forced into making life-or-death decisions for all of them. “He’s alone, and he made a big show of putting down his weapon. Now he’s down there, waiting for us to open One-Left. Is a slide ready?” The folded and stowed slide rafts were heavy, but they were designed to be ported from door to door if necessary.

Ann called over the crowd. “It’s ready to go.”

“Good.”

Ben tugged nervously on his sleeves. “Now what, Captain?”

Jordan sighed. “Conditions are poor and growing worse. So far, no one’s come to our aid or answered our distress call. None of the cell phones work. The airplane radios don’t work. We’re trapped in this . . . thing, and we don’t know how long they intend to hold us here. Do you agree?”

“Our water and food won’t last forever,” Ann conceded. “And the babies will need milk.”

Ben echoed those concerns. “The rear lavatories and two forward ones are already full and locked. By the end of the day, we’ll lose the rest.”

“Then I say we have no choice but to talk to him.” Grim, Jordan lifted the sunshade covering the window nearest 1-L. Through the inch-high slit, she saw the tall man waiting for her below the door, his arms crossed over his chest. At the movement of the shade, his gaze jerked upward. She snapped the covering closed and turned to her crew. “But no one says we have to let him come aboard. We can shout to each other through the open exit. Keep me covered with whatever weapons we have. If any of his buddies look like they’re going to come aboard, or shoot, or set off explosives, we deploy the slide.”

Natalie raised her hand.

Jordan nodded. “A question?”

“No. An idea: Let’s take him hostage.”

Jordan’s jaw dropped. Natalie’s flawless nut-brown skin was accentuated by dozens of tiny braids worn pulled back into a thick ponytail, revealing an open, pretty face that was totally at odds with her aggressive suggestion. “You want me to take him
hostage
?” Jordan asked.

“Well, yes. Not just you. We’ll all help.”

Dillon waggled the AED paddles. “Once we get him on the plane, we can incapacitate him.”

A squeak bubbled up in Jordan’s throat. She listened, stunned, as one of the two doctors offered, “I saw Valium in the emergency medical kit. Once you get him pinned, I’ll give him an injection. It’ll put him right out.”

“And then we’ll have one of them,” Natalie summed up. “There’s nothing like a little leverage.”

“Leverage.” Jordan snorted. “He won’t be easy to overpower.” She doubted the guy had an ounce of body fat.

“The stun gun,” Ann reminded her.

“Right.” Jordan almost blushed. In the quest for do-it-yourself methods of attack, she’d forgotten about the best weapon she had. She withdrew the gun from her pocket, testing the weight of it in her hand.

“The Advanced Taser—the third generation of Taser Technology conducted energy weapons,” Ben said, as if reciting text. “Capable of sending a series of electrical signals called Taser waves or T-waves similar to those used by the brain to communicate with the body. Like radio jamming, the T-waves overpower the normal electrical signals within the body’s nerve fibers.”

Everyone stared at the purser as he droned on, a faraway look in his dark brown eyes. “The human target instantly loses control of his body and cannot perform coordinated action, falling to the ground.” He lifted his brows. “I guess it’ll do the job.”

Jordan whistled softly. “That was almost word for word out of the training tech manual.”

“It
was
.” He shrugged. “I have a photographic memory. It comes in handy sometimes.”

“Yeah. I bet it does.” She stored away the discovery about Ben.

Natalie spoke up. “Once he’s down, we have handcuffs to keep him there. Plenty of them.”

“Exactly.” The nylon cuffs were a staple of every aircrew member’s suitcase. They used them for everything from quick-fixing broken seats to quelling unruly passengers. Jordan was pretty sure they’d be the first airline crew to use the handcuffs to take a hostage, though. “So we incapacitate him, cuff him, and drug him. Then we’ve got our hostage. At that point, we’ll be able to negotiate for his release—and hopefully ours.”

Everyone fell silent. Jordan pushed her hair away from her forehead. Was she doing the right thing? Hell, what was the right thing?

Her gaze drifted toward the still-closed door. The man was out there, waiting. He was probably wondering why she hadn’t appeared yet. She blinked away an image of him lying bound and unconscious on the floor of the main cabin
and forcibly replaced it with one of herself, back home, burying her face in Boo’s hair. The thought fortified her.

“Ben,” she said. “I’ve got extra handcuffs in my flight bag upstairs. Brian had some, too. Bring them downstairs and have them ready to go. Oh, and the crash ax, too. You’ll find it in the cockpit, left side, next to the fire extinguisher.” It was a heavy, sharp killer of an ax. She couldn’t imagine they’d have to use it. But like Dillon’s turbocharged AED, it would be a good deterrent and a welcome addition to the Taser.

Coolly she glanced at everyone in turn. “If this goes badly, we’re dead meat—you know that, right?”

“We’re dead meat any way you cut it if we don’t do something soon,” Ben said.

Ann wrinkled her nose. “Enough with the food talk. We’ve got too much of it rotting in the galleys as it is.” They all laughed, despite feeling anything but lighthearted.

When Ben returned, Jordan handed the Taser to Garrett. Though he was an admin specialist, he was, after all, a Marine. “You know how to use one of these, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When he climbs inside, nail him.”

Garrett’s hazel eyes sparked. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Everyone else, stand clear.” The crowd backed up. Jordan said a silent prayer. Then she reached for the door handle with both hands and yanked it open.

When the forwardmost hatch of the refugees’ craft finally opened, Kào saw the blond woman standing in the opening. It was then he knew he’d been correct in assuming that she was the leader.

He slipped on the translation glasses. The other pair awaited use, protected in its case.

“I’m ready to talk,” she shouted down to him.

Text scrolled in front of his vision: her words presented in his alphabet and language, Key, the common dialect of the Alliance.
I am ready to talk
.

Her smile was false. But he read no threat in her eyes as she gestured for him to come up to where she waited.

It made perfect sense; distance made it difficult to converse. Using aching muscles that disagreed with his demand for exertion, he wheeled the movable stand to rest against the vessel’s gray and blue fuselage. As he rode the ascending platform, a headache reminded him that after all
the months in solitary confinement, his tolerance for being among people, interacting with them, talking, relating, engaging, all waned after a few hours.

This never-ending day had called for a marathon of interaction. As soon as the refugees were tucked in their beds, he’d withdraw to the peace of the observation deck with its 360-degree view of the stars. There he found rare peace, private solace, the solitude he required before seeking sleep in his equally empty quarters.

The platform stopped level with the Earth vessel. Moist, stale air and a vaguely foul odor wafted from the open hatch. Conditions aboard had already deteriorated. No wonder: They had kept the exits sealed, leaving little ventilation.

The refugee leader stood just inside the exit. She was perspiring, and her white shirt was grubby. Epaulets on her shoulders indicated that the outfit was a uniform. Three gold strips on dark blue, a rank of some sort. Now that he had a better view of her, he saw that a smattering of freckles dotted her nose. Black was smudged under her eyes, appearing to have been rubbed off from a substance coating her long lashes. The purest of blues, those eyes were. Not the icy blue he often saw, but a warm color, like that of a tropical sea. He’d seen one once, a sea. Having spent more time on starships than he had on land, thanks to his adoptive father’s career, he wasn’t widely traveled when it came to planets. But once, on a stopover long ago as a boy, he’d visited an ocean, swum in it even. Ah, what a wondrous day that had been—

By the Seeders!
Now was not the time for reminiscences; nor was it appropriate, or professional, to think of her as . . . 
female
. Her disarming appearance might resemble the images his fellow soldiers had kept of their mates, women who waited for them at home, a different breed than the space-weary, battle-forged females Kào had worked with—and
slept with—during the war, but he knew better than to let down his guard. Heest was hospitalized with a head injury, Trist had a broken nose, and he’d suffered injured ribs, all because he’d underestimated the Earth leader, turning what should have been a simple transfer of refugees into a standoff. He would not miscalculate again.

In a traditional Alliance show of respect, he made a slight bow and spread his hand over his chest. “I am Kào Vantaar-Moray, emissary of the Alliance Perimeter Patrol ship
Savior
. I come in peace.”