Home > Nightchaser (Endeavor #1)(3)

Nightchaser (Endeavor #1)(3)
Author: Amanda Bouchet

The Endeavor jolted from the hard bang of Dark Watch 12’s boarding cruiser latching on with a vacuum seal. Obviously, we hadn’t opened the port.

“Starboard side has our most solid door,” Miko said. “It’ll take them a while to break through.”

I nodded. But break through they would. They had all the tools.

“I don’t get it,” I muttered out loud. The intensity of this chase was baffling. Vaccines were important, yes, but the military was acting as though this particular batch were liquid gold.

I turned back to Fiona. “Has the big guy said anything about the vaccines?” He hadn’t threatened the crew in any way after we’d carted him off by accident along with the floating lab. He hadn’t tried to reach the bridge. He hadn’t complained about the near-constant jumps. He hadn’t so much as asked for food or water or a freaking loo in the three days we’d had him. I’d offered him the basics more than once, but he never took me up on anything. He was big, quiet, and stoic in the extreme.

I liked him. And I’d better go get him.

Will he even fit into an escape pod?

Fiona shook her head. “He left the lab only once, and I couldn’t stop him from poking around the cargo holds. He wanted to know where we were taking everything.”

Nowhere anymore. At this rate, those things had no chance of getting to where they needed to go. The food and seeds were for the dirt-poor colonies out in Sectors 17 and 18 that would never recover from the war. The books were for the Intergalactic Library’s rare and archaic section, and the drop-off I’d planned would have been stealth itself. The vaccines were for Starway 8. Orphanages never got cure-alls. I would know.

“What did you mean by ‘superpower stuff’?” I asked, suddenly zeroing in on what Fiona had just said about the vaccines.

“I meant give a few rounds to Jax, and he’d be unstoppable. Strength. Speed. Boosted healing.” Fiona huffed. “Hell, give some to Shiori, and she’d kick ass like she was twenty years old again.”

I felt my jaw loosen. “An enhancer?” The enhancer? I’d thought that was a myth. Or a bad dream. Or something that would never work.

And then it hit me. No wonder the lab had been so discreet, so empty of personnel that it shouldn’t have drawn a single eye while it floated around out in bumblefuck Lyronium. That was how the Overseer worked. Hide your best science. Destroy what you don’t understand.

Shit! I’d almost genetically modified thousands of kids.

“We can’t give that to orphans!” All those shots clearly labeled as cure-alls were in reality the abomination the galactic government had been working toward for years.

Fiona shrugged. “You can if you want to call the concoction a vaccine and turn people into super soldiers without telling them.”

I gasped. Wasn’t the military already unstoppable enough?

An earsplitting hammering started on the starboard side just as the edge of the Dark Watch ship came into view. It was immense and intimidating. Too bad I couldn’t incinerate it with just the heat of my glare.

Apparently, the galactic generals weren’t only lying to civilians anymore; they were lying to their own.

Furious on behalf of just about everything that lived, I slammed out a combination on my console. “I won’t give it back. I’ll die before the Overseer gets his serum back and uses super soldiers to terrorize the Outer Zones even worse than he already does.”

The bridge lights flickered from the sudden power drain, and the hammering abruptly stopped.

“I just electrified the whole starboard side,” I announced. Best-case scenario? I fried their jackhammer, and they’d have to return to the warship for another. Worst case? We were pretty much already living it.

Bridgebane’s voice barked across the com again. “You are now accountable for an attack on the military, three burn victims, and a damaged Type-4 Heavy Armor Hammer. Galactic records show no Captain T. Bailey and no cargo cruiser matching your ID numbers or called Endeavor. We’ve definitively identified the floating lab. We will fire on the bridge if you continue to resist.”

Jax looked at me. “They can blow up the bridge and still recover the lab.”

I watched the behemoth warship hovering over our starboard side. DW 12 definitely wasn’t behind us anymore. “If they board, we’re dead.”

They’d consider us all repeat offenders simply for breaking out of prison. Now I had the vaccine heist and an attack on the military against me as well. There’d be no jury, no trial, and no more wasting food and space on a criminal like me. Jaxon was in the same position, but not for theft. I called what he’d done in the Outer Zones heroic. The galactic government called it murder—because they’d won.

Shiori had never technically been arrested, but Fiona was a bio-criminal who’d created at least three major airborne plagues when she’d been fighting alongside the rebels out in 17, just like Jax. And Miko had cut off her own left hand to get out of shackles, so I was pretty damn sure she didn’t like being chained up.

I glanced at my navigator. Miko’s glossy black hair, fine-boned features, and delicate-seeming beauty had landed her in a position she didn’t want to be in when she was nineteen years old. I could only guess at the details, but Miko’s sporadic comments about the violent appetites of powerful men spoke volumes. And Miko’s death sentence spoke volumes about her violent response. She’d escaped with her grandmother’s help the day before she was slated to die. Shiori went where Miko went, even if that was a galactic prison—or a cargo cruiser that looked like a good place to hide.

Five years together now—Jax, Fiona, Miko, Shiori, and me—and my obsession with kids and their health was about to get my loyal band of misfits killed. If I hadn’t taken the lab, no galactic warships would have been out looking for us. There wouldn’t have been a Dark Watch frigate in Sector 14. Nathaniel Bridgebane would have been stalking someone else.

I looked out the front and portside windows at the looming Black Widow and curled my hands into fists. Almost the entire view outside the ship was darkness, the stars that edged the rim of the black sphere so startlingly bright in comparison. I wondered how long it would take before they were swallowed up, and then the whole Sector, and then the neighboring ones, too. How far could oblivion expand? Such nothingness was terrifying. I could almost feel its unholy pull.

I should have stayed away from the vaccines—the super soldier serum. I should have known the almighty Galactic Overseer could never produce anything good or pure. But I’d been so set on giving the orphans on Starway 8 a defense against some of the things that killed in silence, since I could do very little about those that did it loudly.

The ship lurched—the Dark Watch’s boarding cruiser latching on again with new equipment. Probably insulated this time. My tricks never worked twice.

“I’m getting some of those vials before it’s too late,” Fiona said, racing for the door. “I can work backward and figure out the organics, I’m sure!”

“Stay put.” My voice rang out loudly over the bridge. “I’ll get the samples. And the big guy.”

Fiona pulled up short. At least everyone here listened to me. When I said stop, they stopped. When I said move, they moved. My father might have stripped me of my identity and tried to get rid of me when he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but I’d obviously inherited his imperial vibe and knew how to use it, despite eighteen years of abandonment and four Sectors of separation.

I looked at my crew one by one. At my friends. My real family. “Anyone preparing an escape pod when I get back can take their chances with the authorities. If you choose to stay on the ship, you’re dying today with the Endeavor, me, and a hell of a lot of super soldier serum. You have five minutes to decide.”

Chapter 2

I quickly worked my way through the air lock and vacuum seal at the back of the ship and then strode into the stolen lab, spying the massive man immediately. He was a head taller than anything else in the room, including the dozens of refrigerated shelving units jam-packed with vaccines.

I took him in, surprised all over again. Not many people were naturally that big. Considering I’d found him with the lab, there was a good chance he’d been shot up with the super soldier mixture, and this was the result.

   
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