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He was still frowning, thinking, while he engaged the hyperdrive.

The familiar whine filled Elissa’s ears.

As they made the hop, the ship lurched in a way that was also becoming familiar. Warning lights lit up, and when the display screen for the hyperdrive came back on, it was flashing red text. Elissa’s eyes went straight to it, and the message on-screen made her go ice cold.
Error. Error. Error
.

“No,”
said Cadan. “Damn it, not
now
.” He flicked open a panel below the screen, tapped in a code, and waited. The error message flickered, blinked slowly, and then was replaced by a page of gibberish code. The warning lights went off.

“It’s going wrong, isn’t it?” said Lin.

“No, it can’t be!” Elissa’s voice jumped with nerves. “Cadan, it’s working again now, isn’t it? It could have been just a glitch? A display problem? You said the hyperdrive lasts
five years
.”

Cadan clicked the panel back into place, his fingers moving slowly, carefully. “I wish I thought it was just a glitch. I think . . .” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I think it’s malfunctioning.” A pause.
“Damn!”
He flung his hand down, thumped the edge of the control panel. “We can’t afford this now! Our only chance of getting there without detection—” He broke off, hand clenched, visibly getting himself back under control, then opened up the communicati to start with”rtons channel. “Markus, can you come to the bridge? Thanks.”

He looked at Elissa and Lin. “We’re going to have to fly straight for a while. I’m setting up the widest enviro-scan I can manage running. We’ll see if anyone’s coming.” His face tightened, a grim look. “That is, if they’re using normal flight. If they track us precisely enough to hop here . . .”

He opened the door for Markus and turned briefly in his seat to summon him to the control panel, then gestured to the hyperdrive screen. “Markus, can you make sense of this? I don’t even recognize what it’s saying. God, I always
thought
they should give us training in maintaining the damn thing. I have to use it again, I
have
to, but if I just knew what it might do, what strain it’ll put the ship under if the whole thing breaks down halfway—”

But Markus was shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know any more than you. It’s not meant to break down at all. The only thing they ever told us was that
if
it malfunctioned—and they were very firm that it wouldn’t—we were authorized to
call for the emergency maintenance crew.” He and Cadan shared a look of frustration.

“If we’re attacked now, and I have to deal with that when I don’t know if I can safely use the hyperdrive . . .” Cadan’s hand was still clenched. For a moment he rested his forehead on his fist, staring at the screens. Then he straightened. “Okay. Markus, we have to get into the hyperdrive chamber. If there’s any chance at all we can find out what’s happening with it, we have to do it.”

“It means breaking government seals.”

“Does it look like my big concern is not breaking government seals?”

Despite everything, Markus laughed, a sudden bark of laughter. “Mine neither. They’re tricky, that’s all.”

“Can you do it?”

Markus shrugged. “I can certainly try.”

Cadan engaged the autopilot and stood. “Try.”

The two of them went down the steps to the sealed door Stewart had shown Elissa and Lin when he’d first brought them to the flight deck. Elissa remembered his cheerful, humorous voice rattling out the penalties for attempting to gain entrance to the hyperdrive chamber.

After a couple of seconds’ hesitation, she and Lin followed Markus and Cadan off the bridge and stood a distance behind them while they bent to inspect the door.

“It’s fingerprint-locked,” Markus said. “Laserproof, of course. And I can’t unscrew the hinges. The heads of the screws—look, they’re unique. We don’t have any tools that’d fit them.” He ran his finger down the edge. “I’d suggest crowbars, but look at this thing. It’s sealed so damn tight—I’m not going to be able to get anything in to pry the edges apart.”

“How about pushing the door in?”

“If we can do it without damaging the hyperdrive,” said Markus. “I don’t know where it is in relation to the door. I’d consider a controlled explosion if I knew what the risk was, but as it is . . .”

“O reflected”rtkay,” said Cadan. “If we can push it in just enough to open up a space at the edge, we can get a crowbar in.” He straightened, scrubbing his face with both hands. “What have we got that’ll do that?”

“I can do it,” said Lin behind him.

He snapped a look at her. “You can?”

“Yes.”

Relief swept over his face. “Okay, then.” He stepped back to make room for her. Markus grinned, looking at her with approval and respect.

Lin went forward. She’d just bent to touch the door when the attack came.

From the first second it was as if the other attacks had been nothing but rehearsals. There was no warning at all. Just, all at once, other ships exploded out of hyperspace around them, blasts hitting on every side. Flames shot over the glass nose of the ship, licking fast across the glass walls before they winked out of existence.

The impact rocked the
Phoenix
sideways—almost ninety degrees, too powerful for her stability drive to withstand and too fast for the internal auto-cushioning to keep up. Elissa was thrown right off her feet and halfway across the flight deck. She landed hard, pain cracking from her shoulder down her arm.

Lin fell forward, hitting her head against the door of the hyperdrive chamber so hard, it made a hollow clang. She went boneless, a rag doll on the floor.

“Lin!
Lin!
”

Cadan had been knocked off his feet too. Now he shoved himself upright again, grabbing for the stair rail and leaping up the steps to get to the control panel.

Another blast came as he jumped onto the bridge. Elissa went sprawling again. Lin, still limp, slid across the floor to end up against the glass wall of the flight deck. For a heart-stopping moment Elissa’s brain played a trick on her, made her think the glass wasn’t there, that Lin was going to slide right over the edge to fall and fall and fall . . .

“Lin.”
Elissa managed to crawl across to where her sister lay. Pain shrieked through her shoulder.

Markus was behind her. “Get her up to the bridge. Get her into a harness.”

They managed to do it, one on each side of Lin, who slumped, almost unconscious in their hands as they brought her across the shuddering floor, up the steps. She started to come to as they reached the bridge, and Elissa strapped Lin and herself into the side seats with fingers that shook on the buckles, her brain blanking out as if it couldn’t hold the knowledge of how to fasten them.

We were so close. We were nearly there. And now, with the hyperdrive going wrong . . .

Warning lights flashed, and the beep, beep, beep of an alarm. “Shields at seventy-five percent,” came an uninflected, mechanical voice.

Cadan swore, arms braced against the console as he fought to get control of the ship. “Markus, check that for me. They can’t be taking our shields down that fast. What the hell kind of tech have they got—”

He broke off as suddenly as if someone had struck him
across the throat. One of the ships had just swooped up into the view on a screen, and the logo on the side was plain to read.
SPACE FLIG gave a breath of laughter. a thoughtHT INITIATIVE
. They were SFI ships.

Elissa’s stomach dropped so fast, it was as if she were falling. Falling out of control, losing hold of everything she’d fought for, seeing it slip out of her hands and spiral away like dust.

“No freaking way,”
said Markus from Cadan’s far side, his voice so shocked, it sounded flat.

Cadan’s face had gone bone white. “Elissa, I apologize,” he said.

Another blast. “Shields at seventy percent . . . Shields at sixty-eight percent . . .”

Cadan’s hands flashed over the controls. Elissa knew he couldn’t return fire, not while the
Phoenix
was wallowing as the power of the blast fought with her stability drives, and not while the shields were dropping so fast. But he was busy taking power from every nonessential function on the ship, shutting everything down he could, throwing everything he had into getting them shielded again.

He moved his hand to unlock the hyperdrive. He wouldn’t dare use that yet, not with the
Phoenix
as heavily under fire as she was, but the minute he could, the minute he could fire back, distract them for long enough . . . He could get them out of this. He could save them the way he had before—

Even as she had the thought, the ship rocked with another blast. Were the SFI ships actually planning on destroying the
Phoenix
and all her crew? Had they decided she and Lin were too much of a risk to allow them to live?

Or were they just trying to intimidate them? Were they planning on pounding the ship half to pieces, sure that,
before Cadan and his crew were anywhere near in danger, he’d have to give in?

And he will have to. He can’t sacrifice everyone just to save us.

Oh God
. She’d never thought it would come to this.

Cadan swore again, viciously, and put his hand up to the com-channel. Elissa’s throat closed. He was opening dialogue with them. But to do what?
He won’t give us up. I know he won’t. Not Cadan.

“Phoenix,”
Cadan said, his voice coming out like a snarl. “What the hell do you think you’re doing to one of your own damn ships?”

Silence. A long silence that crawled out forever. Elissa kept expecting a voice to come through, an official-sounding voice demanding that Cadan release her and Lin. But after an endless minute, punctuated only by the sound of the blasts against the ship’s sides, by the automatic warning voice—“shields at sixty-five percent . . . sixty-three percent . . . sixty”—she realized that no response was coming.

The SFI ships didn’t want to communicate. They didn’t want to bargain. They were beyond stealth now, beyond discreet damage control. They just wanted to wipe them out.

She saw the realization hit Cadan, saw his face go stiff. He switched off the com-channel. “Okay,” he said through his teeth, throwing open all the viewscreens he could. “Hang tight. The second I get a chance, we’re going into hyperdrive.”

A million
but
s exploded activated. Security breached at Section clhi across Elissa’s thoughts.
But we’ll get hit. But it’s faulty. But it could tear the ship apart
. She knew, though, that none of those things mattered. If the
Phoenix
didn’t get out of here, within minutes her shields would be down at zero, and it would all be over.

Next to her Lin gave a sound like a bitten-down sob. Elissa reached out and took hold of her twin’s cold hand. “I don’t regret it,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure it was true, even though terror broke through her like a wave. “I don’t regret it. I don’t care.”

Lin said nothing. Her hand was shaking, and her nails dug into Elissa’s skin.

The hyperdrive whine began, powering up to maximum, Cadan’s hand on the controls, his head whipping back and forth to check every screen he had open.
“Now,”
he said, as if he had to command himself to do it, the way he’d have snapped out a command to his copilot or his crew, and threw the ship into hyperspeed.

The whine became a shriek, the power kicked up to full, and the ship made the hop—

Except it didn’t.

The shriek of the hyperdrive cut out so suddenly, it was like going deaf. The ship gave a horrible shudder as if she would shake herself apart. And the lights on the hyperdrive display went dead.

No. Oh no, not now
.

The hyperdrive, the thing that was going to hop them out of range of the attacking ships, that was going to take them to safety, that was irreplaceable unless you could get to SFI headquarters . . . it wasn’t just faulty. It had stopped working.

Another explosion rocked the ship.

“We have to get into the hyperdrive,” said Cadan. “Lin, tell me you’re up to opening the door.”

Lin raised her head. There was a nasty purpling lump on the side of her forehead, and her eyes were huge and black in her white face. “I’m up.”

“Okay, then. I’m going to reroute everything to get our shields and stability up to full. I can buy us some time. If we can get the hyperdrive working for another hop . . .”

It still won’t be enough. One hop won’t do it. They’ll come straight after us.
There was no point in saying it. It was a feeble hope, but it was their only one.

Cadan snapped a warning through the internal com-system, received confirmation from Ivan and Felicia that they’d moved into the core sections of the ship, then began to shut sectors down. Elissa watched on one of the screens as, on the plan of the ship, section after section showed outlined in amber, then red, then went dark. Cadan was pulling everything—oxygen, heating, electricity—from those sectors, concentrating energy on the essential core of the ship. On the plan, dotted lines became solid as door after door clamped shut, sealing themselves so tightly, it was as if they were forming a ship within a ship.

The shields began to climb. Sixty-six percent, seventy, seventy-two . . . The stability drive climbed too, and although Elissa could still hear the blasts hitting the ship, the floor didn’t heave with each impact.

“Shields at ninety-five percent,” came the computer’s drew in a breath, cbland announcement.

“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” said Cadan. He snapped to his feet, adjusting his earpiece. “Markus, you stay here. Okay, Lin.”

Having seen what Lin had done with the ship’s repairs, Elissa hadn’t expected her to have any difficulty easing a door open. But within minutes Lin was shaking all over, her teeth clamped into her lower lip, her breath coming so heavily, it sounded as if it must hurt her chest. And the door hadn’t so much as trembled.

“It’s not just locked,” she said on a gasp. “It’s sealed all around. And there’s a force field.”