A soft beeping rose from the cockpit and filled the silence of the ship. Reyer was pulled out of her restless sleep by the endless noise. She shook her head and opened her eyes.
“Captain.” Lynx was standing over Vas, who’d fallen asleep in the seat across from hers.
Vas opened his eyes, then pressed his thumb and index finger over them. He took a deep breath, hoping he could inhale consciousness. “Lynx.”
“Captain, we have a problem.”
Consciousness achieved.
All four humans were on their feet a moment later. Ciro was stumbling toward the cockpit, while Lynx and Vas were already mounting the stairs. Reyer had to stop for a Tranomine dose before she could join them.
“Is that a proximity alert?” Ciro asked.
“Yes, Master Ciro.”
Vas swore.
Reyer leaned on the deck by Lynx’s chair, trying to take weight off her aching back. “That has to mean—”
“They’re here,” Vas said.
Dr. Jane walked up to all of them and passed out canned coffee. When she handed Reyer hers, she said, “Sorry, Alix, no time for tea.”
Ciro stepped aside so Reyer could sit down on the bottom stair. “But all our calculations—”
“They were guesses, Master Ciro,” Lynx said from the copilot’s seat. “We could make calculations based on facts and generalizations, but we had no way of knowing how long it would take the xenos to gather together—an essential fact that reduced all of our calculations to guesses.”
“I guess they gathered faster than we thought?” Jane asked.
“Yes,” Vas said. “Lynx?”
“They are in velox with us. We will overtake them, but not before we should return to normal space.”
“Gardner wasn’t kidding,” the captain said. “This was a well-executed plan.”
“Ah, but plans are what my enemies think they have before I get there,” Reyer said.
Vas smiled at her. “Are you going to make things interesting?”
“I would like to think so.”
“Pulling out of velox now,” Lynx said.
The empty black of their view suddenly filled with the body of a TRU14-class battleship. Vas pushed down hard on the control wheel, taking the nose of their ship down by almost ninety degrees. Their forward momentum was somewhat mitigated by the artificial gravity, but not enough. Ciro grabbed onto Jane and pulled her close while holding hard to the back of the pilot’s chair. Lynx braced himself against the console. Reyer slid up the stair she was sitting on and had to push against the next two with both arms to keep herself from flying into the panel in front of her.
The Golondrina dove past the side of the battleship. Vas curved their path until they were sitting below her belly. Both ships cruised toward the planet before them.
“Lynx, match their speed as exactly as you can,” the captain said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Ciro, get on some gadget and tell me if they’ve spotted us.”
Ciro didn’t even acknowledge the order before he rushed for his tablets.
Adan reached down and took Reyer by the hand. “Are you all right?”
“If I say no will you promise not to do it again?” She stood up and stretch out her back.
“Uh…news, Captain,” Ciro said.
“What kind of news?” Jane asked, walking over to where Ciro was working.
Lynx explained, “The lack of an adjective usually indicates that the news he is about to relay has both positive and negative aspects, Doctor.”
“They’re running completely blacked out,” Ciro said.
Vas didn’t react, so Reyer had to ask, “What does that mean?”
“It means they aren’t sending or receiving any signals at all,” Adan explained.
“That makes sense considering they wouldn’t want to be found,” Lynx added.
“But that’s good, right?” Jane asked. “That means they won’t have seen us.”
“That’s correct, Doctor,” Vas said.
“Not unless someone was looking out a window,” Ciro added.
Reyer pointed to the ceiling. “There are cannons on those ships. If they’ve seen us out the window, I think we’ll know soon enough.”
A tense silence filled the ship.
“Let’s go with the assumption that we’re safe…for now,” Vas said. “All right, we have less time than we had hoped—”
“At the current rate, we have thirty-three minutes until we reach high atmosphere,” Lynx said.
“A lot less time than we had hoped. Ideas, people!”
“Clarify, Captain,” the bot said. “What are our objectives?”
“Save as many people as possible,” Reyer said.
“Without letting them create any more human-xenos!” Jane added.
“While those objectives are not mutually exclusive, there is a great deal of possible conflict between them,” Lynx said.
“Why?” Vas asked.
“Because the easiest way to prevent them from creating any more human-xenos would be to kill all of their hostages.”
There was a short silence.
“You’re sick,” Jane said. To Ciro: “Are you sure he wasn’t damaged in that emp blast?”
“He’s being logical,” Alix said.
“Miss Reyer is correct. I was not advocating for that solution, merely pointing out that there exists an almost infinite number of plans, all of which would be viable depending on our priorities.” The robot paused. “Which is more important? Saving their lives or preventing the xenos from possessing more human bodies?”
“Both!” Vas said.
“Captain—”
“Lynx,” Ciro shouted, “this is a complex comparative analysis. Consider—saving the lives of innocent people is so important that we would risk our lives and property to do so. We would give up our lives to do it. But preventing the xenos from possessing more human bodies is so important we would—” here Ciro hesitated— “we would kill the innocent to prevent it from happening.”
“What? No!” Jane yelled.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Vas shouted over his shoulder, “but he’s right. Did you think this would be easy?”
Reyer stepped toward her friend and put her hands on Jane’s arms. “Jane, think about it. If we can’t save them, they’ll be dead anyway. We can’t let this danger loose on the galaxy.”
The doctor looked away. “Yeah. I get it.”
“Parameters accepted,” Lynx said. “My understanding is that both are of sufficiently high importance that all efforts should be made to secure both ends.”
“Yes,” Vas said.
“Then the conclusion is that the safest way to do so would be to prevent the ship from reaching the planet.”
“Explain—” Ciro started to say, but Reyer interrupted.
“That would be ideal. The xenos probably won’t harm the people on board if they want to use them for bodies, and keeping them off the planet would make it impossible for them to create more human-xenos.”
“Yes, Miss Reyer,” Lynx said.
“But even if we found a way to stop the ship, what would happen then?” Jane asked. “We wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a human and a xeno if we got on board.”
“I’m going to go out on limb and make a shrewd guess that the xenos will be the ones holding the guns,” Vas said.
“Captain,” Reyer said, “what would stop one from putting down their weapon, waiting for you to pass, then picking it up to shoot you in the back?”
Vas grimaced. “Not so simple then. And the only way we can tell them apart is having Lynx do the blood test.”
“That would take time, Captain,” Lynx said, “and it’s doubtful they would agree to go along with it.”
“Ciro, I want this bot promoted to Captain Obvious.”
“Sarcasm registered.”
“They are Supremacy,” Ciro said while avoiding Jane’s gaze. “We could take them all prisoner, then run the test on them one by one.”
Alix shook her head. “It would be almost impossible—even if only twelve of them were fighting back. They’d know we were there when they heard us dock. We’d have to come out of a tight airlock into a ship with limited space. That would put us in a line, cutting our already small fighting power down ever further. Only two of us can really fight—”
The robot said, “You are including me and excluding yourself, correct, Miss Reyer?”
“Lynx, shut up,” Vas said.
“Two of us and a bot are trained how to fight,” Alix said. “We have blades, but they’ll probably be using e-weapons to keep their hostages under control. All we have left is four e-pistols and two XM4s.” She shook her head. “It’s not enough to make a reasonable attempt. In those circumstances, we’d probably be shot before we managed to take down four of them.”
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“What if we found a way to take as many of them out as possible, all at one time?” Ciro said.
“How?” Vas asked.
“Ciro,” Jane said, “could you hack in and adjust the oxygen levels in the life support system? If we manipulate the air correctly, we could knock them all unconscious at almost the same time.”
“All of them? The humans and the xenos?” Vas asked.
“The xenos are slightly tougher, Captain, but not by much.”
“Dr. Jane, doing something like that would put the human’s lives in danger,” Lynx said. “Humans only have two to four minutes in a low oxygen environment—”
“Yes, it would be tricky, and we would have to be careful, but I think it would be a damn sight less dangerous to those humans than if we came in with all our guns blazing! Captain, could we board and secure them fast enough they wouldn’t die?”
“With Ciro’s help, I can force a board by the back airlock, yes.”
Jane continued, “It would keep them on the ship, away from the planet, and give us a chance to secure them and run the blood tests.”
“Hate to rain on everyone’s parade,” Ciro said, ‘but that’s not going to be possible. Ships have an almost impenetrable security system to prevent people from doing exactly what we’re talking about doing. I might have been able to ride in on a signal if I had enough time, but they’re running black, remember?”
“So there’s nothing you can do?” Vas asked.
“I can’t even stop the ship—let alone mess with their life support systems. The only way we could do it is if we had someone over there to physically put a signal receiver-transmitter into their closed systems. And without a signal, there’s no way that we could force our way onto a ship like that from the outside.”
“Yes, there is.”
Both Lynx and Reyer had spoken at the same time.
The rest of the crew watched as they stared at each other.
“I have your entire file committed to memory, Miss Reyer. You were our primary mission for a long time. I thought it might be useful.”
“What’s the bot talking about, Reyer?” Vas said over his shoulder.
“There was a mission I went on,” she explained. “My squad had to intercept a ship in space. An engineer and I worked out a way to short circuit the catches on the airlock so we could gain entry from the outside. It isn’t an easy process, but it works. Lynx, does that model ship have the access panel out where I would need it to be?”
“Yes, Miss Reyer.”
“Can you show me schematics?”
“Yes, Miss Reyer.”
“What’s this going to involve?” Vas asked.
“You have a space-worthy suit, don’t you?”
Ciro answered her. “You always have to have at least one for outside repairs.”
“Lynx! How much time do we have left before I can’t spacewalk anymore?”
“Twenty-seven minutes. However, assuming it takes you five minutes to gain entry, another four minutes to make your way to a usable console without being seen or heard, then two minutes to place the device, you will need to leave quickly in order to give Master Ciro enough time to stop the ship and gain access to the life support systems.”
“How much leeway do I have?”
“You have roughly nine minutes to leave the airlock before it would be too late.”
“Wait!” Vas called. He clicked over to autopilot and turned in his seat.
“You heard the bot, Captain.” Reyer was already partway down the ship. “I don’t have time to wait. Ciro, you have one of those transmitter-thingies?”
“Yes, Miss Reyer, but—”
“Will you be able to tell me what to do over a com?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m going to need your multi-tool again. And I’m afraid you won’t be getting it back this time.”
“Then you do know it’s a suicide mission, Miss Reyer?” Lynx said. “If you choose to pursue this course of action, you will not have an adequate means of self-preservation or escape. Any chance you might have of surviving may as well be zero.”
“I didn’t ask what my chances of survival were!” Reyer yelled. “I want to know what are the chances that I can do it? What are the chances of it working?”
There was a swift zoot-zoot noise as Lynx lowered and raised his head. “Given your experience, my best estimate is a fifty percent chance of success.”
Reyer huffed. “That’s not bad. Where’s the suit?”
“Not bad!” Vas stood up from the captain’s chair. “What are you talking about!” He jumped down to the main deck. “You’re going to die for a coin-flip chance of saving those people?”
“That’s my intention, Captain.” Reyer checked her knife and walked to the back of the ship to pick up a machete.
“There has to be a better way!” Vas said.
“Try and find it. You may need a plan B. But we don’t have time to waste if we’re going to do this. The clock is ticking. Lynx, how long before it’s too late?”
“Eight minutes, twenty-three second and counting, Miss Reyer.”
“You don’t have to do this!” Adan said.
“I know. But if I try, it’ll be one more chance those people have. I would have preferred better than fifty, but I’ve done harder things with less hope. Now, where’s the suit, Vas?”
“No. I’m not sending you.”
“Who else could it be? I can’t train you or Jane to blow the catch in under ten minutes. They’d hear Lynx coming from a mile away, and Ciro has to be here to hack their systems when I get in. This has to be done, and I’m qualified and able to do it.”
Vas stared at her, shaking his head.
“I’m not your soldier,” she said, “and I don’t have to follow your orders. I’m going, and you can’t stop me.”
“You’re so damn ready to die! You always have been.”
“Wake up, Vas! The xenos know where their home planet is! They have no reason to be after me anymore, so there’s no reason to protect me! Your mission is over, Captain.”
“It’s not about my mission!”
“This is important!” she yelled.
“You don’t get it!” he yelled back.
Forgotten on the sidelines, Jane leaned over and tickled Ciro’s ear with her whisper: “Ten coin says he still won’t tell her.”
Ciro muttered, “Oh, he’ll tell her.”
Vas held his hands up by his head, his fingers curled around in claws, before jerking them down to his side and letting out something between a growl and a roar. He shouted, “This is important to me!”
“Then why—”
“You’re important to me! You mean everything to me. Dammit, Reyer! I don’t want to send you off to die! I want to spend every day of my life with you!”
Ciro held out his hand. Jane made a soft tsk noise as she dropped the coin into it.
Feeling fairly sure that such sentiments were not supposed to be shouted across a ship, Vas forced himself to calm down. He came toward her. When he spoke again, he still sounded frustrated, but at least he wasn’t yelling. “I know that you have nothing left, and I can’t give you anything, but I’m asking you to decide to live. Please!” He forced himself to look at her. “I don’t want to lose you.”
Her face was pale, sad, and still. “Vas, everyone dies.”
“Not everyone volunteers for it.”
Reyer took a step toward him. They were close now, barely a hand’s breadth between them. Her eyes were focused on his. “There’s a chance I can help those people. Are you going to ask me not to try and save them?”
There was a short silence before he said, “No.”
She put her hand up on his cheek. He put his own on top of hers, holding it there. As they kissed, he could taste the salt when one of her tears ran into his mouth.
“I love you, Alix,” he whispered, still holding her cold hand to his face.
“I love you too, Adan,” she whispered back.
He took a shallow breath. “Good. Then maybe you can forgive me for this.”
His hand instantly closed over hers. Pulling her crushed fist away from their bodies, he reached down to his belt, slapped the security cuffs over her constrained wrist, then slapped the other end onto a mounting bracket on the wall.
He was careful to step well out of her reach when he was done.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she screamed at him, struggling against the cuff. Her teeth were bared.
“Stopping you from doing something reckless! Call me an optimist, but I think we can work out a plan that doesn’t involve people dying when they don’t have to.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I’d like to give it a try before you go charging off.”
“Unlock these, now!”
“Your problem, Miss Reyer, is that you’ve spent your whole life using your knights, so when you have to think fast, all you see are those solutions.” He walked away from her toward the front of the ship. “Lynx! I want the schematics of that ship and all the information we have on the geography of the planet.” He caught sight of Ciro and Jane out of the corner of his eye. “Is there a problem?” he demanded.
Ciro’s mouth opened and shut a few times before he could manage, “No, Captain.”
“Let me out of here this second, Adan Vas!” Reyer cried.
Instinctively aware of the fact women want to use the longest name possible when yelling at someone, Ciro helpfully offered, “His middle name is Javier.”
Reyer refused to be distracted. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Vas ignored her and said to his brother, “I want those four tablets hooked up together so we can get a full display of everything. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Lynx descended from the copilot’s chair. “I have all the information requested, Captain.”
Vas noticed the bot gazing toward the struggling figure at the back of the ship. “Do you have anything to say to me, Lynx?”
“Yes, sir. You may want to move some of the materials around Miss Reyer. Nothing in her file indicates she would be able bypass the security on the cuffs, but it’s not a certainty.”
“Do it, Lynx. Then go to Ciro so he can hook you in.”
As Lynx was removing any objects that might be useful for a break out, Alix hissed at him, “Traitor.”
“I was not aware you and the captain were on different sides, Miss Reyer.”
“You’re okay with this?”
“It seems to have adequately achieved the desired end. Impulsive but practical.”
Lynx left and walked over to Ciro.
“The minute you let me out of here, Captain, I’m going to kick your ass,” Alix yelled.
“Is that a promise?” Vas said.
“Yes!”
“Excellent!” He looked up from where he and Ciro had been setting up the tablets. “You have no idea how much I prefer you alive and kicking.”
Reyer yanked against the security cuff.
“If you hurt yourself,” Vas said, turning back to the task at hand, “it’ll be your own damn fault.”
When Reyer caught Jane looking at her, she felt herself flush. Jane shrugged, but Alix could see her trying to hold back a laugh. She felt an echo of it bloom up from her anger, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from giggling. She cursed the captain soundly under her breath.
“What are the tools at our disposal?” Lynx asked.
“The Golondrina, all of her contents, myself, Ciro, you, and Miss Reyer”—Adan turned toward her and said loudly—“on the condition that she’s calmed down and is willing to follow the plan.”
“Fuck you.”
He sighed. “Don’t I wish.”
Jane slapped the captain’s chest with the back of her hand. “I’m here too! I’m not a soldier, but I can help.”
“I can’t ask you to do this, Doctor. There’s a high risk of us dying, even if we’re not trying to.”
“I don’t care. This is important.”
Ciro let out a long low whistle. “Don’t you sound like a little Uprising recruit.”
“In your dreams, Wonder Boy.” He was about to give her the accustomed shrug, but was interrupted by her reluctant, “But I’m with you on this one.”
He grinned.
“This one time!” she insisted.
“Do we have any other advantages?” Lynx prompted.
“No,” Vas said, “but we have a lot of disadvantages.”
“We have a faster ship,” Ciro said. “We’re cruising with them right now, but we can move much faster, especially in atmosphere. We’re more maneuverable.”
“But we have no guns!” Jane moaned. “How are we going to stop a battleship with a runner?”
“Stopping the ship before it was able to reach the planet was only an ideal suggestion,” the robot said.
“Lynx is right,” Vas added. “Considering the constraints, we’ll have to plan for what happens if the ship does get down to the planet.”
Their thinking was interrupted by the sound of the security cuffs rattling against the bracket.
“Then we have a few other advantages.” Reyer spoke with surly reluctance at first, but it faded as she went on. “We know where the xeno’s pool is. We have a better knowledge of the geography of the planet, and that means we know where we can land and where they’ll be forced to land.”
Lynx said, “With that, I would be able to guess with fairly high accuracy the path they would be required to take to get from their ship to the pool in question.”
“An ambush?” Vas said.
“Even if we followed them long enough to make sure they were going where we thought they’d be going, we’d be able to get down there before them,” Ciro pointed out.
“Same problems, worse position!” Jane said. “We still don’t have what we need to capture them, but this time they’ll be on a planet instead of in a contained ship, and it’ll be the planet we most want them not to be on.”
“But if we’re ambushing them on the planet, we can surround them and take them by surprise,” Vas said. “Lynx, are you done transferring the data?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go fly the ship. I’m nervous having it on auto this close to another ship.”
“Yes, Captain. Maintain course?”
“No. Follow the battleship. Analyze what it’s doing and where it might be going. Try to predict where it will land.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“Keep listening. We need your advice.”
“Yes, Captain Obvious.” The bot was already walking up the stairs, so he missed Vas’s double take.
Ciro stopped rubbing his temples and lifted his hands away from his head. “All right, so how do we do an ambush?”
Vas looked up from the tablets as the silence stretched on.
“Why are you two looking at me?” he asked.
“You’re the captain,” Jane said.
“I’m a special reserve officer who works alone ninety percent of the time. I don’t do battle maneuvers.” He pointed down the ship. “Our expert is currently cuffed over there.”
Ciro called out to her, “Miss Reyer, hypothetically speaking, how would you take down at least a dozen people that are holding twenty more hostage, without hurting the hostages?”
“With only five people and six weapons?”
“Four people,” Lynx said. “I’m afraid I’ll be unable to walk on the planet’s surface.”
Ciro swore. “I forgot about that.”
Reyer closed her eyes to think. “I wouldn’t focus on the people. I’d get rid of their weapons. Even the four of us should be able to manage a crowd if we were the only ones with guns.”
“How do we do that?” Jane asked.
Vas strolled back to where Reyer was restrained. He gazed at her, a half-smile on his face. “I know someone who’s really good at improvising emp bombs.”
“I’ll need a power source,” Reyer said. “It’ll have to be bigger than what I can pull from a gun—big enough to take out the whole group at once.”
“You can use mine, Miss Reyer,” Lynx said.
“But that’ll put you out of commission!” Ciro cried.
“Yes, Master Ciro, but it is, by far, the most useful thing I can do to help this mission. However, I would advise you to wait as long as possible before removing it.”
“You do see it’s too late for the old plan?” Vas said to Alix.
“Yes,” Reyer grumbled.
“Are you willing to help us with the new plan?”
“I don’t think you can do it without me.”
Vas pulled out the chip and key. “And you understand that we’re going to need everyone for this mission, so you’ll have to wait to kick my ass until it’s all over?”
“Understood, Captain.”
He still had that damn half-smile. Reyer had to work to hide her own.
Vas undid the cuffs.
She rubbed her wrist. “You’ll let Lynx tear out his power source to use as a bomb, but you won’t let me go on a suicide mission? That doesn’t seem fair.”
“You are forgetting I’m a robot, Miss Reyer,” Lynx said. “Master Ciro will be able to bring me back online quite easily. Even if my body was destroyed, all my programming has a backup. You would be much more difficult to replace.”