Shades of Treason (9 page)

“Admiral—” A siren cut Rykus off.

“Admiral,” a spacer called out. “Unidentified warships have appeared in-system. They’ve engaged the
Centennial
.”

“Ephron Station is reporting additional bogeys, sir.”

“Close-range radar picking up two vessels approaching at point-five light.”

Rykus took a step back from the command console as the bridge erupted into a flurry of activity. It took several seconds for the situation to sink in, to recognize what was going on and who had just invaded their star system. When the truth finally stabbed through his mind, his gut plummeted like a jump from a sub-atmo fighter.

The Sariceans had just launched a preemptive attack against the Coalition.

The Sariceans had started the war.

Ash watched the life rafts shrink to tiny dots as they shot away from the
Obsidian
. She didn’t expect Bayis to shoot them down. He still needed her to decrypt the files. Plus her supposed death would have made things too easy for her, and she was fairly certain the gods of the universe weren’t finished putting her through hell yet. So when one of those life rafts did explode, she blinked. She stared harder, convinced her vision was failing her. Then, seconds later when more explosions brightened the life systems chief’s office viewport, she cursed. She’d only released three life rafts. There were five explosions out there.

Chewing on her lower lip, she focused on the unconscious chief’s desk terminal. She’d remained virtually invisible since escaping her cell, covertly passing through bulkhead after bulkhead until she’d pried open a panel to the LSC’s office. She’d forced him to initiate an emergency drill for the three life rafts, an action that didn’t raise any alerts until after those rafts shot out into space. A simple diversion code she’d inserted into his terminal made it look like they were fired off from their pods, not fired remotely. Bayis didn’t know where she was right now. Plugging into the desk terminal to determine what the hell was going on outside might change that.

Ash couldn’t risk it. She needed to drop down to the flight hangar, which just so happened to be right under her feet. It was the best chance she had to—

An explosion rang through her ears. She was on the floor, something wet and sticky running from her nose.

Blood. Had to be.

She forced her eyes open. Her vision blurred, blackened, then came back red.

Emergency lights.

Alarms blared through the ship. She was on her back, staring up at a metal beam that, had it not hit and crushed the LSC’s desk, would have dropped one fatal inch and hit and crushed her head.

What the hell was going on?

She gritted her teeth, then rolled to her stomach. The room kept rolling. Staring at the floor, she willed her vision to level out. When it finally did, she crawled out from under the beam.

Her entire body hurt, but only her left pinky and perhaps another bone in her hand were broken. She was lucky. So was the LSC. He was unconscious right where she’d left him, and he looked unharmed as well.

She controlled her breathing and let her gaze sweep the chief’s office. The damn beam had fallen onto the room’s blast hatch. There were only two such hatches hidden underfoot on this part of the ship. She’d already loosened the floor panel’s screws, but there was no way she’d be able to move that beam and slide it aside. Her route to the flight hangar had just been cut off.

She quickly amended her original plan and grabbed two oxygen masks out of the emergency cabinet. She fitted the first over the LSC’s face and the second over hers, then double-timed it to the door. She had to put her full weight against it to shove it open, and still she barely managed to move it.

Good enough. She reached behind her back, drawing the stolen Maven she’d tucked into her waistband. She was about to step into the corridor, but the gun’s weight didn’t feel right in her hand. She looked down, saw that the battery pack was crushed.

She squeezed the grip in her hand.

Piece-of-crap machinery.

Dumb-as-dirt spacers. Fleet refused to allow personnel to carry decent weapons on board their vessels out of a superstitious paranoia that they’d blast holes through the bulkheads. They wouldn’t. Ships were made out of tougher material than that.

Ash chucked aside the useless Maven. Energy-based guns were lethal, but damn fragile. She wanted her weapons and armor back.

She wanted a lot of things back.

Her jaw ached from grinding her teeth. She drew in a deep, centering breath, and reminded herself that only ship security and top brass carried weapons. As long as she avoided them, she wouldn’t need a gun. She hadn’t planned on killing anyone anyway.

She faced the tiny opening to the corridor again, squeezed through it—

—and stepped into chaos.

More flashing lights. Dust and debris everywhere and people—some with O2 masks, some without—stumbling across the dura-steel tiles. The whole wall opposite the LSC’s office was peeled open. No one emerged from those rooms. That left at least half a dozen administrative officers dead.

Do you really care if they die?

That thought felt foreign. Of course she cared. Despite what people thought, she wasn’t the enemy, and she owed her life to the Coalition. She was following Trevast’s order and trying so damn hard to—

Someone grabbed her arm. She locked her hand on the man’s elbow but caught herself before she dislocated it, realizing her O2 mask provided a perfect disguise. He couldn’t have any idea who she was.

“Move!” the man ordered, his words muffled by his own mask. “Admiral’s gonna seal off this sector. Go!”

“Yes, sir,” she said, but he was already turning toward another man.

“Neeson! Where the hell is your O2 mask?”

The dazed man stumbled. He was young. Half his face was covered in bright red blood, and suddenly Ash wasn’t staring at a spacer named Neeson. She was staring at Kris Menchan, the teammate she’d mentored. His mouth opened and he spoke. She couldn’t hear his words, but she could read his lips: why. Why hadn’t she saved him?

Her lungs stopped working. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and the uniform she’d stolen became heavy and sweltering, sticking to her sweat-covered skin. Why hadn’t she saved them? She should have been able to. The Coalition funneled billions of credits into the anomaly program. She was supposed to be superhuman. She shouldn’t have been brought to her knees by a simple stun grenade and the presence of a politician’s aide.

The ship rumbled around her, shaking her back to the present. The
real
present. The tremors running through the
Obsidian
now weren’t secondary explosions. The ship was under heavy direct fire.

Her voice-link gave three quick beeps, signaling a ship-wide message.

“A fleet of Saricean warships has appeared in-system,” Admiral Bayis’s calm, measured voice said into her ear. “Our priority is to protect the civilian population on Ephron followed by the two tachyon capsules and the military installations. Every available pilot, proceed to your fighters.”

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

She’d finally escaped from her cell and the fucking Sariceans showed up. If there was one person remaining on this ship who didn’t think she’d betrayed her teammates and the Coalition, they’d change their mind now, especially since this attack was a guaranteed ticket off the ship. Her original plan—to hijack one of the fighters Bayis would send after the life rafts—was risky. This new setup was damn near perfect. The confusion of battle and the damage to the
Obsidian
—and undoubtedly to the fighters sent out into space—would erase all trace of what happened to her.

She hammered her fist into the wall. She didn’t like this. The timing was too coincidental. Had the Sariceans discovered her team’s data grab and decided to retaliate? Trevast was certain they’d made it in and out undetected, but maybe they’d learned about the security breach later? Why else would they attack now?

It’s so very obvious the Coalition is planning a preemptive strike.

Ash stumbled into the broken wall. Shards of ice raced down her neck and spine. Her heart rate quickened, and her lungs rasped empty despite the air she sucked in. She’d suspected the Coalition might be planning a strike—it was the logical reason for her team to steal the shipyard schematics—but she didn’t
know
that. The voice in her head couldn’t be her own.

The smoke filtering through the almost-deserted corridor stung her eyes despite her O2 mask. She squeezed them shut, then concentrated on the elusive, ghostlike presence that had been nudging her for the past few hours.

“Who the hell are you?” She didn’t have to worry about any spacers hearing her. They’d cleared out of the corridor already.

Finally figuring it out? It took you quite a while
.

She wasn’t hallucinating this. Someone was speaking in her head.

Was it Jevan? She couldn’t tell. The words were clear, but they weren’t attached to a voice.

More pressure surged through her head. It felt like someone was jabbing their fingertips into her temples. She pushed away from the wall, started scrambling toward the end of the corridor as if she could escape the thing shadowing her. She
needed
to escape it. She needed to escape this damn ship.

The smoke filling the corridor made it almost impossible to see. She felt the heat from the hatchway the rest of the spacers had rushed through.

The hatchway she was now stumbling toward.

Stopping abruptly, she cursed, then drew in a deep, smoke-laced breath. She was acting without thinking. She had to get it together and get the hell out of here, and that hatchway wasn’t the right choice. There was another option, one she’d dismissed before making her way to the LSC’s office because there would have been too many spacers to subdue.

The officer’s mess. It should be evacuated now, and like the LSC’s office, a blast hatch was built into the floor. It would drop her down just outside the flight hangar. She could still escape, and maybe—just maybe—once she was off the ship, the pressure in her head would go away.

She crouched low and felt her way along the wall. The red emergency lights did little to light the corridor, and the black smoke twisted and hissed overhead. By the time she reached the open doorway to the officer’s mess, she was certain she could hear someone speaking again. Maybe the telepath. Or maybe there was interference on her voice-link or on a speaker relaying alerts and ship-wide messages. Whatever it was, she’d reached her destination.

Coughing, she crawled to the center of the room. She quickly found the tiny grooves in the floor and took out the multi-tool she’d stolen from the LSC’s office. Within seconds, she had three screws out. She fitted the multi to the fourth, had started to unscrew it when the hisses and whispers became louder, clearer. She finally made out the calls for help.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t the only one who hadn’t escaped this section of the ship. They were all sealed in now, and the spacers were panicking. They didn’t know about the blast hatches—this was an old vessel—and they would succumb to the flames.

It wasn’t her problem.

It really wasn’t.

The last screw loosened, and she slid the floor panel aside, revealing the heavy metal blast hatch below. She gripped the bright yellow wheel in the center with both hands, then strained to turn it.

One of the people calling for help was a woman. Ash tried to ignore her along with the others. It probably wasn’t Katie, and even if it was, it shouldn’t matter. What mattered was getting off this ship.

The hatch groaned as it ever so slowly turned.

The woman yelled again.

Damn it, the voice sounded like Katie. The blood in Ash’s veins quickened, her breath steadied, her muscles tensed—all signs her body was primed for action.

Primed to save the doctor.

She recognized the pull of the loyalty training. She should have expected it. People who were important to a fail-safe were inherently important to his anomalies. It was a damn inconvenient side effect of the brainwashing.

The loyalty training… it’s interesting.

Fury slipped under her skin. She wanted the telepath dead, wanted it almost more than she wanted off the ship.

She managed to turn the hatch wheel another few inches. Sweat trickled down her neck and her jaw ached from gritting her teeth, but finally the wheel loosened. Its hinges squeaked as she let it fall open, revealing a lit corridor below. No sign of smoke. No sign of spacers to witness her entry. Twenty feet to the flight deck’s side entrance and she could get to a bird and fly away. The Coalition would be too busy with the Sariceans to worry about her. She’d land on Ephron and disappear.

If it’s so easy, why aren’t you moving?

The telepath asked a good question. This was her one chance to get off the ship. If she was recaptured, Rykus would make sure she had no further opportunities to escape. Hell, he’d probably execute her on the spot after this. But execution was better than being sent to the institute.

It was better than letting her brothers- and sisters-in-arms die.