Page 22 of Stealing Mercury
Carn shifted. “But she provided for us. And that lurch in the ship’s responses when the whip-master attacked you—she tried to protect you. Lo is wrong. She’s not the enemy.”
Emotion shredded Mercury. Relief that Carn would defend her. Fear for her safety. Rage that he couldn’t protect her. Hunger to claim her. Useless emotion that brought him no closer to redeeming his past mistakes.
***
“What in hell?”
Sam lurched up, nearly falling out of her seat. She recognized the voice without looking up—Drake.
Damn, she’d fallen asleep and at the worst possible time. Her passengers had taken to sleeping in shifts to keep an eye on her. Two days of nervous energy had finally pushed her to her limit.
He clamped her shoulder with a firm hand. “I asked you a question. What is that?”
The control panel showed the ship had dropped out of skipdrive exactly as she’d programmed it to do. “I don’t know why we’ve stopped. Something must be—”
“We’ll get back to that.” He pointed to the external view screen, which had apparently been engaged while she slept. “First, you tell me whatthatis.”
Samantha blinked her eyes and tried to clear her vision. A large hunk of equipment crowded out the space that should have been visible on the screen. Beyond that a nearby sun hovered. The sensor readouts showed several planets circling the Sol class star. She’d found it on one of the unofficial nav-charts stored in theDove’s database. The planets hadn’t come up on the commercial charts, so she was more than relieved to see them and their sun chasing away the darkness.
At first she’d only planned to create a delay to hope the resistance could still intercept, but as the tension on the ship had wound tighter, she’d decided to look for a delay spot that would give her more options.
She focused on the equipment visible on screen and made a show of initiating a fresh sensor sweep. She’d seen similar equipment enough to recognize its function, but the glyph-based writing on the hull didn’t come close to any language she’d seen before.
“It’s a terraforming platform. Inactive. Sensors don’t show any signs of heat or electromagnetic fields, so it must be unmanned. Whatever company owns it probably parked it here waiting for their next project.” She turned to face him and noticed Resler hovering at Drake’s shoulder and looking ready to chew nails. “But we have bigger problems. We’re smack in the middle of a solar system,” right where she wanted them, “and I have no idea why we dropped out of skipspace.”
Drake pushed past Resler and toward the section of storage compartments built into the back wall of the pilot’s station. The sharp thwak of his fist slamming into one of the half-meter square doors made Samantha cringe. Resler shouldered his way next to her, hunching forward to put his face near hers. “The ship came out of skipdrive pretty smooth. Not like it was a malfunction.”
“Unless you’re a pilot, maybe you should let me deal with this and clear out of my way.”
“I know a thing or two.” Resler puffed out his chest like a cockle-bird strutting for dominance. “I worked at a lunar mining colony for ten years. I’ve flown plenty of shuttles.”
“Shuttles!” She tried to play off the nervous energy bubbling through her circulatory system as anger. “This isnota shuttle.”
Drake leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Resler, you can check our position, right? You know how to read nav charts.”
“Yeah.” Resler leaned over the console. “But I can tell you now, if we were on track, we should have dropped out in a shipping lane. Not a solar system.” He lifted his face as if he were talking to the bulkhead above them. “Computer response.”
TheDove’scomputer remained silent.
Resler glared at Samantha. “Voice control locked out, sneaky bitch.” He reached across her and pounded away at the controls.
Samantha wanted to smack his hands away, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Damn. She hadn’t been prepared for them to have any actual knowledge of the ship’s systems. If she’d known, she would’ve locked it down tighter.
“Here it is.” Resler shook his head. “Not even close to where we should be.”
Drake humphed and shook his head.
“Wait.” She swallowed past the tightness in her throat. “If the navs have been malfunctioning along with everything else on this cursed ship, we might be off course, but it won’t be by much. There’s an auxiliary nav check at every skip-point in the course. Let me pull up the charts.”
She reached for the controls, but Resler grabbed her wrist. Sharp pain spiked up her arm, but she managed not to react.
“Let her do it,” said Drake. “But watch her.”
Resler released her.
“Look, I’ll do this real slow.” She rubbed at the tender joint, then called out the steps. She unlocked the skipdrive navigation, then pulled up the charted course and their course log. “See. We’re off track, but not by much. It had to be a small nav error at the last skip-point. The computer must’ve pulled us out of skipdrive when it detected this solar system in our path.”
Resler snatched her up by the shoulders and shook her. “We’re not going to fall for your crap.”
