Landlocked (Atlas Link Series Book 2) (49 page)

hen the doors opened, a blue shimmering consumed my vision, so bold and so bright I had to bring my arm up to shield my eyes. Inch by inch I slowly pulled my arm away, taking it all in. SeaSat5—but there was more, and I could not believe it. “Holy freaking Hell.”

SeaSatellite5 was a Link Piece. A legitimate, bona fide, Link-freaking-
PIECE
. It stood magnificently before us, waving around like a mirage in the desert, pavement on a hot summer’s day. I knew the others couldn’t see it, but how had
I
not seen this before?

“Chelsea?” Pike asked.

I lifted a finger toward the satellite station, easily the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on, and I’d seen Machu Picchu at sunset. I’d seen many things, sights no one in their right mind could ever fathom seeing. But gazing at SeaSat5 from the outside was the most downright glorious thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

“It’s the station.” I could barely get the words out. My jaw dropped to the floor in awe, my throat constricting with emotion. The adrenaline coursing through my veins was no help. Tears stung my eyes. After two years, here it was. After
forever
, my home sat before me. And it was beautiful.

“It’s a Link Piece?” Trevor asked. He was so close I felt his warm breath on my face. It reminded me of home, too. Of the nights we’d shared and everything of mine I’d given to him, never to be returned.

I nodded and forced myself to snap out of this reverie. “We’d better get going. That’s probably why they wanted the station in the first place. And it’s glowing, which means it’s still a Link Piece that goes somewhere.”

No wonder Valerie said the station was invaluable. She knew. Had she known all along, from the day I set foot on SeaSat5?

“Agreed,” Major Pike said. “Let’s move out.”

We split up from the doorway. Weyland’s team started looking for a way to breach the Heli-Dome, while my and Trevor’s team headed for Shuttle Dock where we then split up again. As we went our separate ways at the inner staircase landing, my eyes lingered on Trevor.

Be safe
, I warned him.
Regardless of what’s between us, be safe.

You too.
He started to climb the stairs then turned back to me.
Please.

Please what? Stay safe? Of course I planned to. But his eyes held something different. They were too full of pleading and sadness, laced with longing, not the determination that should have been there. I didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t respond. My throat constricted and I swallowed hard. Would I always have this feeling when I looked at him? I loved him once, and he knew everything about me. And yet, somehow, we’d become strangers.

After a few moments he shook his head and resumed climbing. I waited a few seconds then directed Dr. Hill and Josh up the stairs after him.

As we climbed up through all the Science Decks, memories slammed into me with the force of a sledgehammer.

Up, up, up we climbed, strangely encountering no resistance whatsoever. Our footfalls echoed off the walls, a loud staccato against the silence that continued until we reached the Residential Deck where my and Valerie’s old quarters were. When we approached my door, I peeled back the casing of the electronic key lock I’d used so many times before. I rearranged some wires as Trevor taught me, then replaced the cover and typed in a code. It beeped and allowed us access. The second I stepped inside, I froze, my entire body ceasing all movement unrelated to keeping me alive.

Everything down to the hair on Valerie’s rug remained exactly how it was the night I’d left for shore leave after the hijacking. Even my bed, now covered in a layer of dust, remained made to perfection. I swallowed hard and blinked rapidly. I wasn’t going to cry, I wasn’t. But this room, being here, being
on board SeaSat5
, caused my heart to swell, and an anxiety pit the size of a watermelon formed beneath it.

We were here. We were
doing this
. And this was our one and only shot.

I stepped forward and yelled for Josh to shut and lock the door behind us. He and Dr. Hill pushed my dresser in front of it. I signed onto Valerie’s computer and pulled USB drives out of my vest pocket, plugging them in one by one. Trevor and I figured Valerie did something weird to her computer during the hijacking so I could contact the Admiral—that I hadn’t done as much as I thought in reconnecting the communications buoy. Valerie, we thought, probably connected her computer to the rest of the main system. If that were true, the macros Trevor wrote should be able to use that connection to run a quick security sweep and general system diagnostic to see how far off we were in our guesses.

“Here goes nothing,” I said as I sent a number of diagnostics to start.

Before they came back with results and fed the data through to the Bridge, my radio went off.

“Lieutenant Olivarez and Dr. Gordon found.” It was one of TAO’s soldiers, but not Sophia. “Repeat, Olivarez and Gordon found. Delivering now. Continuing search. Over.”

My heart stopped. Sunk. Flip-flopped. Swelled again. Burst.

Freddy. Helen.
They were found and being brought to the station. They were
alive
.

I stared down the diagnostics and willed them to move faster.

Who knew how much time we had left before the Atlanteans figured out where we’d gone.

ommander Devins being delivered. Over.”

I drowned out everything after that. All that mattered was getting Hummingbird working again. At least the shield part of it. I gained tunnel vision somewhere between the third and fourth diagnostic parameter, testing and relaying information to a digital buoy on the Bridge. If they found all the senior staff, they’d know what to do with it. If not, I’d be there soon, barring being attacked by Atlanteans or the jerry-rigged system failing entirely.

Six, seven, eight. Everything checked out. I grunted. This was easy, way too easy. I’d brought along a stand-in Hummingbird control column, enough to butcher the old system, save what I could, and rewire something temporary. It wasn’t pretty, but all the system had to do was last an hour. Okay, it was more complicated than that. Ten minutes of fiddling later, the system beeped what I decided to take as an agreement. Then the light fizzled out.

I smacked the side of the console. My palm stung. “What’s wrong with you? Just hold a damn charge!”

“Too much duct tape,” Johnston, a fellow TAO engineer, said. “We didn’t have enough time to—”

“No, I don’t think it’s that,” I said. My work might have been a mess, but it wasn’t non-functional. I refused to believe it was. I fished my tablet out of my pack and plugged it into the old console, sifting through line after line of code. A big red flag waved itself at me. “Ah-hah.”

“What?” Johnston asked.

I ignored him, too busy reading the bullshit in front of me. “Sons of bitches.”

“Trevor?”

Holding up my tablet for him to see, I said, “They tried to fix it, to repair Hummingbird. Why, I have no idea, but they tried and they cannibalized the system. It’s near inoperable.”

He read a few lines then turned to give orders to his engineering team. The Atlanteans repaired parts of the system, but their fix tied some of the other station’s systems together, ones that weren’t meant to be synthesized. You could run the Hummingbird shield or communications, life support or weapons. Which meant our original plan of the Bird or Shield worked fine, but everything else…

I tapped my radio speaker button. “Chelsea, we’ve got a problem.”

“Yeah, I see it,” she said back. “I wasn’t sure what it meant at first, but Josh explained some of the code.”

This guy understood a lot, didn’t he?

“Yeah. So, problem,” I said into my radio.

“No,” Chelsea said. “Shield and life support, the plan doesn’t change. Drop communications. We can work this without it.”

“We’ll need weapons.”

“We’ll have to do without,” she said. “If we can get back to our own home-time, we should be fine.” Maybe. All we had were ships and armies, both things that would take time to arrive if we were attacked in our home-time.

“If you say so.” What happened if they got to us before the military sent anyone to defend SeaSatellite5?

“Get to the Bridge,” she said. “I’ll meet you there. Hurry. They messed with more than the main system. It looks like they inputted a virus as part of their repair system.”