Who am I to argue? I wrapped my free arm around him and tightened my grip on my vibrating console.
The damaged ship rattled around us, noisy and frightening, but I had faith in her. The Endeavor would hold tight until something happened. Because something was bound to happen, right? You didn’t fly into a black hole and then just…nothing.
Boom! Tiny pinpricks of light streaked past us. I did a double take. Stars?
What was happening? It looked and felt exactly like flying through hyperspace.
Holy shit! We hadn’t set a destination. We could race straight into a moon, a planet, an asteroid belt. A fucking star!
“Jax!” I screamed.
Jax bellowed something incoherent and took us out of warp speed without the usual slowdown, which was already jarring enough. My feet flew out from under me, but Big Guy stayed upright and kept me upright, too. I lost my hold on my console and swung in his grip, my upper body smacking against his chest while everyone else fell down like dolls with floppy legs.
I got my feet back under me faster than a shooting star when my console started flashing out emergency warnings. Damaged circuits—bridge sector. Living quarters—oxygen at 57% and falling. Starboard door—open.
I hastily typed out the command that would close the safety hatch to the lower deck and cut off the bedrooms from the rest of the ship. They would lose their air, but we wouldn’t. The outer starboard door probably had a hole the size of Bridgebane in it, but the rest of the air lock was still intact. We could fly like this, as long as the engines didn’t conk out.
“We’re not dead!” Jax leaped off the floor, whooping like a maniac and pumping his fists in the air. “We’re not fucking dead!”
We all took a second to absorb that. It was unbelievable. Shock and amazement left my limbs trembling and weak. At the same time, it felt as though someone had just slammed a shot of adrenaline straight into my heart. Numbness gave way to a burst of life, and we laughed and screamed together, jumping up and down. We were completely hysterical.
Except for Shiori, who sat up facing the wall. And Big Guy. Nothing seemed to surprise him at all.
His lack of a reaction calmed mine, and I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. My smile shrank. The Black Widow hadn’t eaten us, but that didn’t mean we were safe.
No one had reached out to us yet, but I used radio waves to verify that we were alone. Nothing came back to me, and the monitors weren’t picking up anything unusual other than low levels of blackbody radiation.
“I’m seeing Hawking radiation behind us. It looks like a small black hole,” I said. Had we come through that? Was it like using a front and back door?
I craned my neck to look around us, but the views outside the window panels seemed perfectly normal. No rip through space, no bright tear, no vast nebular cloud. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and my best guess as to how we’d gotten here was something I could barely wrap my mind around.
Whatever luck had come our way, though—I would take it.
Relief breathed new life into my lungs, driving out some of the remaining fear and tightness. “The Dark Watch didn’t follow.” We’d stolen the serum, we weren’t dead, and the fact that no one knew where we were anymore was the sweetest frosting on this whole messed-up cake.
“We just went through a black hole,” Fiona said, disbelief still heavy in her voice. “And lived.”
Jax gave her a rare, big smile, one that actually stretched his face. “And left those goons in the dust.”
“Maybe the Black Widow is only masquerading as a black hole.” Excitement glimmered in Fiona’s expression. “Maybe it’s using similar properties to camouflage something else.”
“Wormhole?” I suggested, voicing my unlikely thought.
“Yes!” Fiona’s eyes widened. “A shortcut with two mouths.”
If that were true, how had no one figured it out? “But there have been experiments. Probes. They never reappeared anywhere else.”
“Maybe it had something to do with going in at warp speed?” Jax offered.
I shrugged. “Could be.” That was as plausible as anything else.
Everything about this was fascinating and mysterious, but right now, figuring out our new location in the galaxy was more important.
“Where are we?” I asked. We needed to land in a place where we could repair the Endeavor and get new numbers up on her. Then we’d be anonymous again, just one more lonely cargo ship making its way through the Dark.
“From what I’m seeing, it looks like Sector 2.” Miko grabbed the old and yellowed manual to double-check the coordinates that were popping up in rows of green numbers across her controls. “Yes, definitely somewhere in 2.”
Shiori finally turned and groped for Miko’s unoccupied chair beside the navigation console. A thin line of blood trailed down the center of her forehead and curved along the side of her nose.
Damn it. She must have hit something when she’d fallen. She was conscious, though, and looked calm, which was more than I could say for myself.
Miko reached out to steady her grandmother and helped Shiori into the navigator’s chair. Shiori wiped the blood away when it dripped to her chin, leaving a smear of red across the back of her hand.
Miko shot her grandmother worried glances while still dealing with our most pressing issue—locking down our exact location in the vastness of Sector 2.
I tore my eyes away from them.
“Fiona, can you do the honors?” I pulled the first aid kit out from under my console and handed it to our resident scientist. I could fix Shiori up myself, but Fiona could do it better.
Using sterile compresses and saline solution, Fiona started cleaning Shiori’s cut and wiping the blood off her face, all the while telling the blind woman what she was doing in a quiet voice. Shiori was really a grandmother to us all, and Fiona treated her with a gentleness she showed to no one else.
While she worked, I turned my mind back to our new location, a good half a galaxy away from where we’d just been, give or take a few solar systems. Sector 2 wasn’t beaten and battered like the Outer Zones, but it wasn’t exactly a thriving hub of civilization, either. I’d only been here twice before and had never lingered. I didn’t know the Sector well, and I was still a little bowled over by recent events. Ideas weren’t coming to me clearly. A big part of me was still stuck on the fact that we weren’t dead. We were possibly the only living beings to know that the Black Widow did not, in fact, kill you. It spat you out in Sector 2.
The hypothetical wormhole had just gotten real. I was pretty sure we should keep that to ourselves. Having a handy escape route only we knew about was like winning the galactic lottery or raking in all the chips from the biggest game of poker ever played. This could be our future ace in the hole.
I glanced out the windows, still uneasy for several reasons. A random Sector was fine. Leaving Dark Watch 12 and Captain Bridgebane behind was more than fine, but it was too bad we didn’t have enough power left to get us back to a place we really knew.
“What’s in Sector 2?” I asked, hoping someone else’s brain was already up and running better than mine. “We need a place that can sustain life and has a bright enough sun to recharge the Endeavor.” Unfortunately, there weren’t that many. Asking for a sunny, habitable planet was a tall order.
“Flyhole,” Jaxon suggested.
“Full of criminals,” Shiori declared from behind Fiona’s ministrations.
Well, technically speaking, so was the Endeavor, but no one mentioned that.
And Flyhole wasn’t a planet. It was a spacedock orbiting a barren moon. It had decent sunlight, though, and would have what we needed for repairs, just not at an acceptable price. Also, the Endeavor was as likely to be stripped by space rovers as restored to working order.
Fiona deftly patted down the sides of the sterile tape she’d used to seal Shiori’s cut, her steady hands those of someone who’d patched up plenty of people.
“Good as new,” Fiona said.
Shiori murmured her thanks.
“What about Nickleback?” Fiona asked, straightening as she tossed the bloody compresses into the trash.
Nickleback. Nickleback. What do I know about Nickleback?