Page 30 of Across The Stars
“Study.”
“Study what?”
“Lately? Flightpaths for transporters.”
“Sounds boring.”
I chuckled because it was, but I still wanted to know about it.
Suddenly, an alarm blared through the ship, catching me off guard. Sam jumped out of her seat, eyes darting from one side of the cargo bay to the other.
“What the hell is that?” she said.
“Uhh, those are proximity alarms,” Quinn said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Means the scanners are picking something up.”
“What?” I said. “Like something’s coming toward us?”
And with that, the ship came to a swift halt that it clearly wasn’t prepared for. The engines vibrated beneath our feet so hard and so loud that it sent a jolt through my legs. I stumbled toward one of the sypher crates, grasping the straps to stabilize myself while Sam just fell flat on her ass.
Quinn looked pretty composed, her eyes jumping around and soaking in the cargo bay. I followed suit, searching for loose beams or things that might be knocked out of place. Recruits were scampering to the seats along the walls, buckling themselves in, while Penny came rushing down the stairs toward us, using the railings to skip three steps at a time without falling.
“Listen up!” she said. “Everybody buckle in.”
“What’s going on?” Quinn asked.
“We have a spacecraft converging on us. It didn’t appear on scanners until—”
Her words were cut off by the jarring motion of the ship and as I held tight to the crate, I felt everything knock to the side. Penny went flying up into the air as sparks sputtered from various places in the ceiling. Sam screamed, hanging onto one of the seats while Quinn rushed forward to grab the same crate that I was braced against.
“Holy fucking shit!” Sam screamed.
Eyes wide, I watched Penny slam against another crate and held my breath. She flopped to the floor, limp. Hopefully unconscious and not dead, but I couldn’t go to check with the ship as unstable as it was.
“This is not good,” Quinn said. “These are sypher crates.”
“Yeah. And?” I said.
I probably should have known the answer to that if I was a real recruit, but I wasn’t. I was a fake and I really wanted to know why bouncing crates weren’t good. I mean, obviously, something had just run into us, but whyelsewas it not good?
“Sypher is unstable as hell,” Quinn said, eyeing the box we were attached to. “That’s why there are so many boxes. The crystals are heavily padded because if they’re jostled or if they crash into each other, they go boom.”
“Boom?” I said.
“Yeah, boom.”
The other recruits were screaming. I saw Omar bravely unbuckle his seatbelt and rush to Penny with one other worker and wanted to go myself, but there was no way. I was too far and the ship was still rumbling. A man came rushing down the stairs, eyes flitting about in a panic as he stumbled toward Penny.
“Mattie!” Quinn bellowed. “What’s happening?”
The man’s head whipped in our direction. “Security escort was shot down,” he said, frantic. “Slammed right into us.”
“What the hell do we do?” I said.
Quinn opened her mouth to say something when the ship’s computer spoke over the intercoms.
