I take his arm again. He shakes me off.
I stare at him.
“You’re wasting time,” he says. “If you’re right and I’m wrong, your friends will die with us.”
“What about your friends?” I ask.
“I guess we’d better let them know too,” he says. “They’ll leave the lab behind and get away. You’ll be arrested.”
I shake my head. The Empire is the least of my worries.
“If they leave, you really can’t get out.”
He gives me a withering look. “Have some faith in my abilities,” he says. “I know more about stealth tech than anyone, including your little friend.”
My stomach twists. In all my time planning my revenge, I never imagined this moment. I had known I couldn’t kill him after the Room. I had thought this was better; destroy his research, which would be just like killing him.
Only I imagined him living with the consequences for years, mourning the loss, looking at his failure.
I never imagined him trying to pry a bomb off a containment field, dying because of me.
“Either get out,” he says calmly, “or help me with this thing.”
I stare at it. I hear the voices swirling in my head. I remember my mother, her face turned upward, light on her skin before it aged and mummified, before it died.
For one brief moment, she had looked beautiful.
He doesn’t look beautiful. He looks ghastly, the red lining the bones of his face, accenting the hollows, leaving shadows. That’s how I’ve always seen him—filled with shadows.
I sheathe the knife. Then I back away from him. When I get to the doors, I run.
Fortunately, I know ships. I learn them the first time I go through them, whether I’m diving or I’m traveling in them.
I run back the way we came. My lightheadedness has grown worse, and I know I’m still a bit short on oxygen. I force myself to breathe so that I don’t pass out.
I get to the bay doors and slap them open. Then I reach the skip and pause. There should still be two guards inside. I don’t want to alert them. But maybe my father already has. Maybe he has let the group in the cockpit know and everyone overheard.
I poke the knife into the controls for the emergency doors. It’s not recommended procedure because it opens to the doors too fast. But we’re still in the bay, so we’re all right.
Then I hoist myself inside.
Hurst hurries into the galley, followed by the two guards. Odette stands just behind them, but it’s her face I see first.
“I used Squishy’s bomb,” I say. “They built a stealth field.”
“That’s not possible,” Odette says. “Our controls would have registered it.”
“It’s a baby stealth field,” I say. “The device is attaching now.”
Hurst swears and pushes past the guards. They look stunned.
“Either you come with us,” I say, “or you go join your friends in the cockpit.”
“Another bomb?” one of the men asks.
“Yes.” I’m all the way inside now. No one has helped me up. I grab the sides of the door and sway a little. I am very dizzy. I push the controls, putting in a code that will lock them and maybe repair some of the damage I’ve just done.
“Like the one on the Dignity Vessel?” he asks.
Odette starts to answer, but I speak over her. “Yes,” I say.
“Fuck,” the guard says. “That thing destroyed the Dignity Vessel.”
“That’s right,” I say.
Odette closes her mouth. She gives me a little grin. Obviously she was going to tell them that the device was different. She likes my style instead.
The guard heads into the cockpit, knocking Odette aside. His companion joins him. “We have to leave,” he says. “Now.”
I can’t agree more.
“Do you know the codes for the exterior doors?” I ask.
“Don’t need them,” he says, then taps our communications relay. The cockpit of the science ship answers, and he explains the situation. They sound a little calmer than he does. Apparently my father has already contacted them and told them he can remove the device.
“You can stay if you trust him that much,” I say, loud enough for the people in the science ship’s cockpit to hear as well as the guard.
The guards look at each other. Then the guard says, “Open the damn doors.”
The cockpit says something that sounds like compliance. A warning appears on our screens. The bay’s gravity has shut off.
They’re going to open the exterior doors.
Hurst pushes into the guard. “You want to fly this thing?” Hurst asks.
The guard moves away.
The doors start to open just as our lower thrusters come on. When the doors are open about halfway, we fly out of there.
We can’t go back to the Business, not with these guys on board. We have to get away, but we can’t go far. The skip isn’t made for long-distance travel.
Hurst looks at me, then looks at them. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Let’s just find a safe distance from here and see if Squishy’s device works.”
I don’t know what we’ll do if it doesn’t.
Because then the guards will retake us. We’ll all be under arrest for destroying imperial property and attempted murder. We’ll face years of prison. My father will still have his stealth tech.
And both Karl and my mother will go unavenged.
FORTY-TWO
The bomb does not obliterate the ship.
At the designated moment, the ship bobbles.
“It’s still there,” one of the guards says.
Then the ship slowly flips, like a child lounging in zero-g slowly deciding to reveal his belly. Only the ship doesn’t stop flipping. It just turns and turns and turns, spinning with its own momentum—or the momentum of the explosion.
We’re all watching the images holographically. What we can see through the portholes is only the blackness of space.
We’ve been watching since we steered clear. About a half an hour after we stopped—ten minutes before the explosion—the front section of the science vessel separated and flew off so fast that it seemed to disappear.
The guards say nothing. They don’t even try to attack us. They realize there is no point. We outnumber them. Even if they do overtake us again, where will they go? They would have to kill us, and they don’t seem willing to do so.
Or maybe I’m just ascribing motives. Maybe they’re just stunned at the destruction of the ship, giving us time to outthink them.
Either way, their status has changed from guard to prisoner in a matter of moments.
We can’t take them back to the Business. We have to make our own escape before the other ships come back.
Before the front part of the science vessel comes back to see what happened.
Hurst turns on the navigational controls. “Where are we headed, Boss?”
I’m not ready to answer him. I’m still staring at the science vessel. Its spin has already slowed. Eventually, it will stop moving and find its own part of space.
I freeze one of the holoimages and walk around it. There, on the far side, is a hole in the vessel’s hull.
A small hole, like the one we had found in the Dignity Vessel.
My breath catches. Had someone blown up the Dignity Vessel’s stealth tech, and what we found was all that was left? Or had something else happened?
“Boss?” Hurst asks again.
I make myself breathe out.
Then I turn to the guards. “What’s procedure in a case like this?”
“There are no cases like this,” says the guard who initially thought there was no explosion.
“In war or in the face of an attack,” I say. “When your ship is damaged and it’s been abandoned, what’s procedure?”