The Stowaway (6 page)

“What the fuck is going on?”

Arek didn’t look up from the helm controls as he worked frantically to outmanoeuvre the incoming fire. “Fennrus Mercenaries. Looks like they were using the solar storm to mask their approach.”

“Shit!”

Arek sent them into a sudden spin to avoid another unexpected volley of phaser fire and Devlynn stumbled forward, finally managing to brace himself on the back of the third officer’s chair. Rachel looked up at him, pausing as she worked the operations console—her face pale and drawn, but tightly controlled.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to make sure she was okay, or offer any comfort if she wasn’t. He lunged for the co-pilot’s chair and fell into position, letting years of experience take over—he’d need every one of those years to help get them out of this giant cluster-fuck.

“How the hell did they find us?” Devlynn snapped, desperately trying to locate a clear escape route while working to reinforce the shields at the same time.

“I don’t fucking know. Just find a vector to get us the hell out of here.”

“Shit! They’re everywhere! Incoming! Two-eight-six-nine!”

Arek banked hard then spun away on a crazy angle to avoid the approaching torpedo of their starboard bow.

Behind him, he was vaguely aware of the sounds of Rachel working away—doing what she could to help. In a quiet corner of his brain that wasn’t busy trying to keep them alive and get them the fuck out of there, Devlynn felt a sense of pride flow over him. He would have completely understood if she was too terrified to move, or even ended up hiding under the bloody console. But no. Not Rachel. She jumped right into the fray and beat back with whatever was on hand.

“Incoming transmission,” Rachel announced.

“Put it through. Audio only,” Arek shot back, still busy manoeuvring them through the enemy fire.

The comm. burst to life with an annoyingly familiar cackle of laughter.

“Hello, Arek. Nice of you to be so easy to sneak up on.”

“Razzein!” Arek spat in a low, angry hiss—his voice infused with the same loathing Devlynn felt for the puffed up, arrogant bastard currently trying to wipe them from the face of the universe.

“Oh! You remember me!” Razzein replied.

The staccato wash of high energy phaser fire splashed across the forward shields as a dozen fighters buzzed over their bow.

“You’re pretty hard to forget, asshole.”

“Why, thank you. Tell me, is Devlynn still alive and panting at your heels, or did you manage to get him killed off too?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Devlynn snapped, wanting to reach through the comm-link and wring the Lathorian’s skinny green neck.

He couldn’t spare the time to look over at Arek as he deployed the torpedo decoys, but he knew the reminder of Danni’s death would have hit the man hard.

“Ah! So good to hear you’re still with us, Devlynn. Though, of course, that’s about to change.”

“You’re so fucking dead, Dev!” a gravelly voice snarled through the comm-link.

“Ren sends his regards.” Razzein chuckled.

Fuck!
Could this get any worse? Ren was a psychopath. A psychopath with a grudge. Devlynn hadn’t intentionally taken the man’s eye out in a brawl when he’d caught the man cheating at holocards, but when you ran with pirates you didn’t hold back or you might as well space yourself.

“Say what you’ve got to say and fuck off,” Arek said between clenched teeth as he banked hard again.

The Wyvern
groaned under the strain and the console shuddered under Devlynn’s fingers.

Razzein tsked. “The boss wasn’t pleased when you up and left like that. I think your decision really hurt his feelings, Arek.”

“Fuck you!”

“Hardly.”

“We’re not going back.” Much as he didn’t like scratching and scraping to make a living running dead-end cargo, Devlynn didn’t want to go back to pirating with Fennrus. They had fallen into pirating by accident in the first place. The adventure and thrills had been exciting at first, but the cold viciousness that had gradually crept in over the past few years since the new ‘alpha’ had taken over turned Devlynn’s stomach. He wanted something different, something survivable—at least theoretically survivable. And he wanted it with Arek. And Rachel.

“No one said you’d be welcome,” Razzein observed nonchalantly.

“Nah!” Ren sneered. “The last thing the boss said was to bring some-a them back, Razz.”

“Oh yes! I think it was their heads, wasn’t it, Ren?”

“Yep. Don’t think he much cared for the rest though.”

“Shut him up, Rachel,” Arek snapped.

The comm-link instantly disconnected with a sharp chirp.

“Assholes,” Devlynn growled.

“Just as well he’s a fucking lousy tactician as well,” Arek replied.

Devlynn grunted in agreement. Razzein always was too keen to hear the sound of his own voice. As a pirate, he was notorious for playing with his victims. He could and should have made the first shot the last shot. Devlynn wasn’t going to complain, but it really was badly done on Razzein’s part.

Still, at least this way gave them half a chance. Slim as it was.

At that precise moment another torpedo slammed into them, shaking them violently—like a mowc caught in the jaws of a wrataar. The warning klaxon blared to life again as the stabilisers fought to control their erratic movement.

“What are we going to do?” Rachel’s cried out over the din of the battle—obviously fighting the panic that was edging into her voice.

Devlynn looked over at Arek—his captain, the man who’d got them out of more scrapes than he cared to remember—before he was forced to pay attention to his console again as the fighters and torpedoes continued to bombard them.

But even as he worked, he was completely focused on Arek’s silence. The blank look, devoid of any response or reaction to Rachel’s question, haunted him. For the first time in his life, Devlynn wasn’t sure there would be an answer from his commander. A wash of fear swept over him, leaving a cold sweat in its wake.

He risked another look, and saw Arek’s jaw clenched—a course of action and the determination to follow it through clearly evident in his expression.

“Deploy decoys to clear a path on heading seven-four-nine-one.”

Devlynn forgot to breath. “But…that’s heading right into the storm.”

“Yep.”

“But—”

“Those bastards aren’t going to stop until we’re subatomic particles on their shields. At this stage, the storm’s the more forgiving option.”

Devlynn studied Arek for a few precious seconds—all stoic confidence and screw-you attitude—then turned without a word to follow orders. He only hoped they weren’t some of his last.

Rachel’s heart felt like it was beating in her throat, but no matter how hard she swallowed she couldn’t get the unruly organ to move back down. Swallowing wasn’t all that easy actually—the saliva in her mouth had long since dried up and left for parts unknown. She was, quite literally, scared spitless.

Explosions rocked the ship fiercely now as the pirates seemed to realise what Arek was doing and got desperate to finish them off before they reached the ‘safety’ of the storm.

“They’re calling the smaller fighters in,” Devlynn observed.

“Stupid bastards are going to follow us.”

While Arek’s assessment of the enemies’ lower-than-average IQ might have been accurate, Rachel wasn’t at all sure who won the prize for biggest idiot right now. She had a feeling it might have been her for jumping on an ex-pirating-turned-transport vessel instead of being curled up in a nice warm farmstead.

“Hold on. This could get a little rough,” Arek said as he accelerated to full speed, straight into the undulating waves of energy ahead of them.

Rough didn’t even begin to describe the brutal shock of entering the storm. Rachel was pretty sure her teeth were going to be bruised—if they all managed to come out of this alive that was.
The Wyvern
was battered mercilessly from all sides and all at once. Left and right, up and down. There would be a lull as they were swept between eddies, then the pounding would start again as they were swept up in another wave while they tried to bully their way through the solar storm.

“Fuck! What the hell’s going on?” Arek yelled above the incessant noise of the storm and
The Wyvern
battling to the death. “Feels like I’m steering a fucking brick!”

“Damn it! The lateral vent’s jammed closed,” Devlynn shouted back, fingers still rushing across the controls in front of him.

“Recalibrating it.”

“Already tried. I’m going to have to go down and open it manually.”

“I’ll go,” Rachel offered—though it was hard to force the crazy words out through her clenched teeth.

Under her bed in the crew quarters was about the only place she wanted to go right now.

“No. You stay here and help Arek navigate the waves.” Devlynn was already staggering towards the hatch and Rachel couldn’t bring herself to argue as she watched him being slammed against the ship and various pieces of equipment along the way.

“Be careful,” she managed to say as he passed.

“Always am,” Devlynn replied, but the smile he gave her was tight and strained.

“Rachel! Run a sensor sweep and the emergency nav prediction programme. We need to see if we can start riding this storm instead of getting ridden by it!”

Arek’s orders snapped her into action. It was almost a blessing to have something complicated to do. The intricate, fluctuating calculations and data at least gave her a focus other than the lurching, violent movements of the ship and the knowledge that Devlynn was currently walking about in it.

The minutes seemed endless and the storm relentless and cruel. What little she could do to find a smoother course through the storm she fed through to Arek, but it didn’t seem to make any real difference. Although, on the other hand, at least they hadn’t been pulled apart yet.

As the minutes stretched out, she began to worry about Devlynn. He hadn’t checked in and it seemed like days since he had left the cockpit.

“I made it,” Devlynn suddenly announced over the comm-link, just as she was about to start climbing the walls. “How is it now, Arek?”

“Better!” Rachel gave them the benefit of the doubt—felt just as gods awful to her. “Get back up here.”

“On my way!”

“Rachel, what’s going on with Razzein?” Arek shouted above the squall of another energy wave pounding the shields. “Are they still with us?”

Rachel manipulated the console display until she could lock on to the pirates behind them.

“Still there.”

At least the storm had stopped the enemy ships from actively attacking them. She imagined they were too busy trying to navigate through the mess as well.

“Shit! The bounty on us must be pretty damn spectacular if they’re putting up with this shit!”

Rachel was just about to ask what rated as spectacular when something about the swirling eddies of energy she could see in the imagine behind them caught her attention. They’d changed. The unpredictable, completely random pattern of colours and movements were shifting and aligning right before her eyes. Suddenly they weren’t waves and a choppy mess of energy. They were forming a smooth spiralling design that even Rachel, with her limited experience of space travel, recognised.

“Arek!”

“What?” Arek shouted, fighting the controls as the storm continued to toss them about.

With quick, efficient movements born of terror Rachel segmented off a section of the front viewport to show the aft view. The swirling maw of a maelstrom forming behind them froze everything for a moment.

Then the universe seemed to jump forward into chaos. The enemy, obviously trying to break away and outrun the deadly spiral, were drawn slowly back towards the eye. At the same time, Rachel felt the pull on
The Wyvern,
the shudder of the hull as she watched the desperate struggle behind them.

“Arek!” She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say or hear from the man, but his name erupted from her lips regardless—bypassing her conscious mind altogether.

“Hold on!”

The emergency thrusters fired, jolting them forward for an instant. On the view screen, she watched the enemy ship try the same manoeuvre a moment later. But it didn’t do either of them any good. The maelstrom was too strong and continued to pull them backward long after the thrusters had overloaded.

Breath sawing in and out of her lungs in panicked gasps, Rachel was aware of every pore on her skin, as if her entire body went on full alert, desperately looking for a way to survive. A way to save them.

The hull of the ship behind them started to buckle under the stress of the storm—as if the maelstrom needed to squeeze them tight to fit them through the eye of the spiral. The hull of
The Wyvern
moaned in sympathy.

“Hold on, everyone!” Arek yelled then swept his hand over the helm controls, sending them into a hundred and eighty degree spin until they faced the maelstrom head on.

“Arek! What are you doing?” Rachel screamed.