I scoffed. As if I’d ever have chosen that over a day with Jaxon, even if the mines had meant breathing in toxic fumes, risking the explosions, and breaking my back under the heavy loads.
At least Dagger Bently never tried to force me. He was a beefy, power-abusing turd, but he wasn’t a rapist, which had made me glad he was my cellblock guard.
I leaned into Bonk, and he rubbed against my chin, making that running motor sound again.
“We’re home,” I told him. I rubbed back with my nose, and he purred louder. I hoped that meant he liked his new digs.
As Bonk and I got better acquainted, I couldn’t help wondering why Shade hadn’t answered my question about how he knew Susan. Had he just been more interested in confirming that he’d get his money for the armored door? Or was he hiding something I might want to know?
Speculating was useless, but the turn of my thoughts brought home how little I knew about the man who was going to be all over my ship for the next week.
Chapter 11
“What do you say we fire up the tablet and see what’s going on out there?” I asked about forty-eight hours after our perilous descent onto Albion 5.
Jax looked iffy. Miko wrinkled her nose.
“We encrypt everything,” I reminded them. “What could go wrong?”
“Famous last words,” Jax muttered, sliding out from under my console and wiping his hands on the rag he’d tucked into his belt. Between the two of us, we’d managed to fix the ship’s electrical systems, and the Endeavor was running smoothly again—or at least without sparking and spontaneously shutting down sections of the bridge.
Better still, with Albion 5’s steady sunlight on our solar panels, we were up to almost a quarter of our power capacity again after only two days. Life was good, all things considered.
It would be even better as soon as Shade Ganavan came back with a big pile of parts.
I scratched between Bonk’s ears, listening to him purr. Bonk had conquered the entire crew in less than a day and was now king of the Endeavor and grand master of the bridge, despite the fact that his main activity was to curl up on one of Jax’s old sweaters and sleep.
“What a tough life you’ve got, Bonk,” I said, smoothing down the white fluff under his chin. He tilted his head for better patting, and his little motor sped up. “Do nothing and still rule the roost.”
We’d already seen significantly more of Fiona and Shiori on the bridge, when Fiona usually stuck to her lab, and Shiori preferred the kitchen or her bedroom to the busier section of the ship. Such was the appeal of Bonk, his Feline Majesty, Lord Tabby. I was seriously contemplating hanging a sign over his sleeping sweater that read Pat here to feel good.
I smiled, enjoying my cat’s steady rumble. He was so slight that the sound made his whole body vibrate.
So far, I’d fed him the same food we’d eaten. Some beef stew. Cooked vegetables. Rice. He seemed to like it. And it was convenient, just scraping leftovers onto his plate. None of us ever wanted to reheat the canned stuff anyway. It wasn’t good enough for that.
Earlier, we’d all followed him outside when he’d leaped down from the ship and started exploring the docking platform. He’d had a grand old time chasing a twirling feather around, and we’d all laughed our asses off at his springing, stalking, and pouncing until his antics had taken him too close to the edge, and then we’d all freaked out and started shouting at him to come back.
Hey, you! had worked like a charm, thank the Powers for that.
I’d heard that cats always landed on their feet, but I seriously doubted that applied when falling from three hundred and fourteen platforms up the Squirrel Tree.
Now Bonk was safely back inside along with the rest of us, and I was ready for some news, especially from Starway 8.
I logged on to the right channel and then sent a message to Mareeka, asking how things were and sending my love to her and Surral. While waiting for a response, I scrolled through various articles. There wasn’t anything about a stolen lab, missing vaccines, or a confrontation in Sector 14. Of course not. Those things would never have made it into the public feeds.
There was something about a natural gas explosion half-destroying a weapons plant on Switchtide, and then there was a long article about troop deployment on one of the large inhabitable moons just outside of Sector 17.
Reading between the lines, I saw a rebel attack on a galactic armament facility and then a clear message to the insurgents hiding in the Outer Zones. We’re here. We’re watching. We control you.
But in fact, they didn’t. Despite forty years of hard-core looking, the military still had no idea where the rebel stronghold was. That was the cool thing about thinking outside of the Overseer’s tight little box: you could find a hole.
A message back from Mareeka pinged and popped up on my screen.
Viral epidemic. Possible quarantine in sight. STAY OUT OF SECTOR.
I sucked in a sharp breath, tapping her message and making it full-screen. It still said the same thing, only bigger now.
“What?” Jaxon asked, frowning over at me.
“Disease on Starway 8.”
His mouth thinned. “It’s either something new, or…”
“Yeah.” I nodded, my stomach knotting up.
With our efforts, our thefts of cure-alls over the last five years, the director and other personnel on Starway 8 were fairly well-protected against disease. So were many of the children. But we hadn’t managed to get any inoculations to them in almost a year. That meant this was either a mutated strain of some already-known sickness, which would make it even more dangerous; something entirely new that could hit anyone; or something that had been around for a while, and it was the newcomers and the little ones who were dropping like bees covered in pesticides.
My heart turned over like lead. There had to be something we could do.
I sprang up, disturbing Bonk enough for him to crack open one greenish-yellow eye. “You want this?” I asked Jaxon, holding out the tablet.
He shook his head, so I powered down and then slid the tablet back into the cubbyhole under my console.
“Where are you going?” Jax’s question, or rather the wariness in his voice, made me hesitate midstep.
“Nowhere.” I glanced at him over my shoulder, my hand already reaching for the touch panel adjacent to the automatic door. “Staying on the ship. I’ll be back soon.”
He nodded, and I let myself off the bridge, heading for the lab attachment I’d closed up tightly two days earlier. My heart pounded a little harder with each step I took along the Endeavor’s corridors, across the central cargo bay, and then through the rear air lock and accordion-like vacuum seal. What am I doing?
Then again, I’d acted on some pretty bad ideas in the last several days. Why stop now?
The second I entered the stolen lab, the stale air hit me like a dirty sock in the face. My breaths tasted like crap on my tongue and didn’t quite satisfy my lungs.
I shut the door again and cautiously sniffed, adjusting to the stuffiness. We’d kept the lab sufficiently ventilated for Big Guy’s sake, but I’d stopped doing that when he’d left, and I hadn’t thought anyone would be back in here, least of all me.
The oxygen levels seemed okay—although definitely not ideal—and if I hadn’t been about to do the unthinkable, I’d have gone back and opened all the doors to let in some fresh air again. Being locked inside a silent metal can with rank O2 and no systems running was totally unnerving, but there was no way I was risking an accidental audience for this.
In finding the concealed test tubes with my initials and ID number on them, Big Guy had helped me link the enhancer to my blood. I never got sick, and Fiona had said the false vaccines boosted healing. What if I could boost healing at the orphanage without giving the children something invasive, altering, and possibly dangerous like that military-engineered cocktail? The Overseer’s serum did who-knew-what to a person, but what if Fiona could use her knowledge or her medicinal plants to make something less risky out of one of the serum’s main ingredients?
At least, I hoped it would be less risky. I didn’t know what made my blood different, but I’d been carrying it around inside me for twenty-six years and it hadn’t killed me or made me sick or insane. Chances were, it wouldn’t harm the kids, either.