Enemy Within (8 page)

ARI
didn’t bother answering. She saw what she wanted, an enormous storm system rearing up out of the solar furnace. The
Sen Ekir
shuddered, metal creaking. Then she glanced at the data Sindrivik was working on his panel, swiftly and adroitly patching relays around her station to lock her out of piloting. Swearing, she shut him down.

“What the . . . Captain!” he yelped. “I’m locked out!”

“Captain Seaghdh! Relieve your man. I need your steady hand at navigation,” Ari commanded.

Seaghdh heaved his young crewman out of the nav chair and shoved him down at geo-scan, the station Jayleia usually used to survey and map research sites. He growled something in the man’s ear. Busy with trying to keep the ship generally upright and fighting the high-level solar wind with all her strength, she couldn’t hear a word. Seaghdh dropped into the nav seat, pulling the restraint straps over his chest.

“Slingshot?” he asked, his expression tight with concentration.

She unlocked his station. “That’s the plan. I want to ride the rim of the cyclonic winds. Find them for me. Hull stress data, here. Shield loss calculations are critical.”

He nodded. “Heat gain and hull friction. I’ve got it. You’ve done this before?”

The ship jounced, rattling her teeth. “In a Prowler.”

“A
Prowler
?”

“Particle levels rising on the hull,” Raj said. “Levels are adequate. Permission to cut radiation shields granted. Repeat, granted. Give me a count on your mark, Ari.”

“Negative, negative,” Seaghdh replied when solar wind shear grabbed the ship and flung it off course. The engine whined in protest. “Wait until we’re riding the beast.”

“Agreed,” Ari said.

Seaghdh teased the nav numbers into order, shunting them to her panel before she could ask for them. Damn, he was good. When she got her command back, she’d recruit him.

“There’s your course, Captain,” he said. “Laid and locked.”

“Acknowledged,” Ari said. “Mr. Turrel, stand by to drop radiation shielding on my mark. Once it’s down, give me a by-second count if you please.”

“Standing by.”

“Give me the stabilizers,” Seaghdh said. “I’ll keep us upright.”

She did. “Going in.”

“Particle level increasing, Ari!” Raj warned.

“I see it. Gods I hate not being able to steer by the engines.”

“Let me bring your atmospherics online,” one of the men interjected. “Just enough to give you some steerage!”

Ari glanced at him. Copper skin, bloody coveralls. He’d been the one with the broken arm. She didn’t yet know his name. “I can’t afford the hull stress.”

The lights died. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sindrivik shift to a systems panel and begin working. The lights flickered back on.

“Yes, you can!” the other man hollered back over the racket of the engine and the creak of hull plates. “Reduce your star drive output when you drop into the groove.”

Without her okay, Seaghdh began reworking his calculations with the new parameters. Ari scowled.

These men had hijacked the ship and imprisoned her family and friends. She didn’t trust them. She couldn’t. But this wasn’t about trust. It was about survival. Theirs as well as hers.

“Do it,” she said, reconfiguring her piloting plan.

Through the noise of protesting metal, and the howl of stressed engine feeds, she thought she heard Seaghdh mutter, “Good girl.”

New formulas fed into her panel from Seaghdh’s station and it struck her how much trust and familiarity—almost intimacy—existed between a good pilot and navigator team.

Seaghdh helped her wrestle the ungainly boat into the course he’d plotted. For a moment, they spun helplessly in the grip of the solar winds.

“Atmospherics at thirty! Give the port side a blow!” the man in bloody coveralls yelled.

Ari fired the port engine. Their spin slowed. Wobbling, the ship strained, then abruptly leaped forward, riding the solar wind current. She cut the thruster.

“Raj? Levels?”

“Acceptable, but go now!”

“Acknowledged. Mr. Turrel?”

“Still standing by,” the big man rumbled.

“Cut power to radiation shielding on my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”

“Radiation shielding off-line,” he replied and began counting off the seconds.

The men listened intently, counting with him. Seaghdh shot her a glance when Turrel reached twelve, then thirteen and she didn’t order the shields back up.

“That’s it!” Raj yelled. “Saturation!”

“Get those shields up!” Ari shouted.

“Shields online!” Turrel replied. “Power fluctuating . . . Shields optimal.”

“We’re clean,” Ari said. “Nice work. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They picked up another burst of speed. She nudged all three engines. For several seconds nothing happened. Then, engines whining and metal straining, the
Sen Ekir
’s nose lifted and they broke free. The devilish winds hadn’t finished with them, though, and they bounced, skipping like a stone once, twice, before the star relinquished its grasp.

Ari banked down the atmospherics, locked in a course that would take them out of system, switched the view screen to watch Occaltus’s sun diminish in their wake, and then glanced at the man sitting at engineering.

“I take it you’re V’kyrri?”

Pale, sea green eyes looked back at her. His light brown hair contrasted with copper-colored skin. He nodded.

“Thank you,” she said. Sure, he’d talked her through using the atmospherics so that she didn’t get them all killed. Survival. She could respect that, but a good captain knew to recognize a valuable contribution.

The man nodded again. “Never seen atmospherics quite like the ones you have strapped to this tub, but I have seen fuel feed clogs like I cleared from your starboard intake all the damned time. The valve is all but shot. You’re riding tolerance right now. Next venture into atmosphere may cause a fuel bleed. Your engineer needs a good swift kick.”

“So I’ve long thought,” Ari replied, then sighed. “He doesn’t keep spares. We’ll have to risk putting down at the supply depot on Kebgra.”

“Captain Idylle.”

V’kyrri glanced at the geo station. His expression tightened. Ari followed his gaze. The kid. Sindrivik.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Sindrivik?”

The young man stood at attention, his gaze focused above her head. Damn it. They were military. Recently enough to still be habituated to chain of command and protocol.

“I apologize for my comments earlier. They were inappropriate,” he said, his tone neutral.

Had Seaghdh threatened him into the apology? The man’s expression again turned to ice, until his gray eyes were the only color in his face. Ari detected the flicker of anger buried beneath the mask and admired the young man’s control.

“I regret trying to take the ship from you,” he went on. He hesitated and Ari could see the discomfort and the sincerity at last. “I endangered the ship and the crew.”

“I appreciate the apology, Mr. Sindrivik,” she said, glancing at her panel and tweaking a specific light filter on the view screen. “But jettison the regret over trying to take the ship. In any other circumstance, your instinct to get me off the controls would have been right on. It’s a damned risky maneuver in the best of ships.”

From the tightening of the muscles around his eyes, she gathered he would have preferred she’d yelled at him. Ari glanced at Seaghdh’s patently neutral expression. What the hell was she doing treating four pirates like crew members?

It didn’t matter. She was still the captain with the most practical experience with the
Sen Ekir
. Whether they liked her command methodology or not, they’d hijacked her ship and were letting her fly it. They’d all but volunteered as her crew, at least until they shot her or shoved her out an air lock.

Scanning the drained, tight expressions of the men around her, she nodded at the view screen. “Watch this.” Ari tweaked a filter setting on the view-screen input sensors.

The brilliant, raging inferno of Occaltus’s star dimmed. Luminous, intense color flooded the field behind the star.

Sindrivik took a step toward the screen, his expression scrunched in concentration. V’kyrri said something in a language Ari didn’t recognize, though the wondering tone of his voice was clear. Turrel grunted.

“What is it?” Seaghdh asked as if awestruck.

Ari realized she’d leaned over her panel, her elbows propping her up as she delighted in the play of ancient light and color. She glanced at Seaghdh, grinning. Pleasure gleamed in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at the view screen. Something sparked in the short distance between them, and Ari found it hard to draw a full breath.

“Our reward for a job well done,” she said.

He answered her smile, his eyes on her mouth.

Ari forced herself to look away. She cleared her throat, but still it took a moment before she could answer his question.

“It’s a supernova remnant.”

“Several thousand light-years away?” Sindrivik asked.

“Around twenty. That cooling debris cloud is all that’s left of the massive star that blew,” she said. She worked a few more filters. “If I mess with the resolution a bit, you get . . .”

“Stellar nursery!” V’kyrri said, his tone enchanted as pinpricks of white light appeared in the darker gas clouds.

“Stunning,” Seaghdh murmured next to her. At the relaxed enjoyment in his voice something warm and comforting blossomed within her.

“Is this important?” Turrel demanded.

“Not from a tactical standpoint,” she said, studying his impatient expression, “but from a morale standpoint, it is. You’ve had a rough few days, I gather. Consider this a reminder that there are sights and experiences out here that are worth dying for.”

The impatience crumbled for a moment, exposing the exhaustion and something much grimmer riding his tight features. He looked like a man who wished he’d died. Ari blinked and clenched her teeth. It had only taken a few days of Chekydran captivity for her to know the feeling. She couldn’t do a thing for him there, but the exhaustion . . . “Mr. Turrel, when was the last time you slept?”

“Wh . . . I . . .” he fumbled, startled into meeting her eye. He looked so nonplussed she had to struggle not to smile.

“You’re off duty,” she said. “All of you.”

Seaghdh chuckled but didn’t sound the least amused. “Nice try. Turrel, six hours. V’k, twelve. Sindrivik, eight hours.”

“Aye,” three voices replied.

“We take turns manning the galley,” Ari said. “You’ll have to fix and clean up your own. Watch supplies. The ship’s not stocked for a crew of nine. The commissary unit here in the cockpit only dispenses soup, water, and tea.”

“Acknowledged,” Seaghdh said before glancing at his crew. “We’re off when you report for duty, Turrel.”

“There are six cabins,” she said. “Shift Jayleia in with Raj. They’re cousins. They won’t like it, but they can share. Then, if one of you takes my cabin . . .”

“Belay that,” Seaghdh commanded, his tone sharp. “Don’t even open that door.”

Turrel scoffed. “After seeing her lockouts? Hell, no, I ain’t going in that room.”

V’kyrri and Sindrivik laughed. They tromped off the bridge as Ari watched with growing trepidation. She did not want to be left alone with Cullin Seaghdh. Or did she? Maybe now she could get some questions answered.

She glanced at him.

He’d studied her, speculation in his eye. “The reminder,” he said, pointing at the infant stars on the view screen. “For us? Or for you?”

Ari found she had no answer. How did he manage to see so much she tried so hard to keep hidden? Nonplussed, she swiveled back to her station, scanned her panels, and then let her hands drop to her lap. She didn’t even know where he was taking her.

“Destination?”

“Plotted and laid in,” Seaghdh said, rising.

She looked at the coordinates as he accessed the tiny commissary unit. The savory smell of vegetable soup made her mouth water, but she shook her head.

“I strongly recommend a more scenic route, one that at least looks like it’s headed for TFC space,” she said.

He returned, two cups in hand. Settling into the nav chair, he put one in the holder beside his panel, then leaned across her to fit the other cup next to her.

Ari held her breath at the shock that went through her at the proximity. He hadn’t even touched her. She felt his gaze prying into her head as he straightened and glanced at the course he’d given her.

“You think the Chekydran cruiser’s still out there?”

“I guarantee it. I have some acquaintance with that particular captain,” Ari replied, ironing her voice flat.

He picked up his cup, sipped, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the newborn stars in their gas-cloud crèche for several seconds. “Tell me about this acquaintance.”

Her heart trembled in her chest and her hands knotted in her lap. She had to remind herself to breathe. “It’s none of your business. The only thing I’m willing to say is this: don’t provoke him. I said I wouldn’t turn you over to them. I mean it. We do the expected. That means pointing the nose toward Tagreth Federated. They’ll follow us to the border, but they won’t cross in and face the Armada. Once we’re out of their sensor range, we can route to Silver City.”

The impression rose in her that he was watching her too closely as he put his cup back in the holder, gauging everything about her, measuring, assessing. She felt like one of her own specimens. Time to turn those tables, to start thinking. The coordinates he’d laid in would take them to a crowded, racy trade station in the border zone between TFC space and the independent, brutal commercial sector governed by the United Mining and Ore Processing Guild. It was an area she knew well. Prowler crews spent plenty of time chasing down drunken miners who’d deviated from their flight plans and strayed into TFC space. Or so they’d claim.