Page 57 of The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
Chapter 16
Until this very moment, Nor would’ve sworn on the most expensive bottle of ghost-mead—since he didn’t believe in gods, Thorkon or otherwise—that he could watch Azthronos burn with nothing more than a smirk.
He’d have been lying then, but now he couldn’t even pretend.
If he’d been able to keep his masks just a little longer, maybe he and Trixie would be safety tucked into the exosuitand rocketing through space, free. But she’d stripped him bare, in more ways than one, and now he was racing back through the access corridors with his little mishkeet right on his heels.
She’d refused to be left behind, even though he’d explained that she could stay hidden indefinitely in the dreadnaught’s empty halls.
“I’m not hiding anymore,” she said.
He had only one option: deactivatethe ship’s incredibly powerful weapons systems the same way he’d done the internal sensors.
“Sadly,” he told her, “I didn’t trust the technician who created the countermanding options, and when I reprogrammed myself, I had to add a physical fail-safe. So I must disarm at either the weapons control room or the bridge.”
“Which is closer?” she asked.
Now they were sneaking through the ship’s servicecorridors. One nice thing about noblemen, even on their warships they liked tidy decorum—keeping the rabble out of sight, really—so junior crew used the smaller walkways. Blackworm’s crew might not even realize the passages existed, and they encountered no one in their frantic sprint back. He paused at a narrow access hatch and Trixie was only a few steps behind.
“Don’t get caught again,” hetold her.
“Don’t get shot again.”
They both nodded, and he released the hatch.
In two steps, he cleared the doorway and dropped three of the intruders at their stations before they could do more than gape at him as he—seemingly to them—materialized through a wall. A fourth managed to squeeze off one answering blast of plasma fire before Trixie stunned him to the deck.
Nor blinked at her. Hehadn’t thought to bring her a weapon…
She lifted a second pistol from the unconscious Thorkon mercenary she’d floored. When she caught his sidelong glance, she pocketed the second blaster and shrugged. “I’m not going to run out of charge again.”
He strode to the tactical station and hauled aside the body slumped over the controls. With swift fingers, he took the controls—
The comm beeped onceat him, and he cursed.
Trixie stiffened. “What’s wrong?”
“This larf-licker”—he toed the unconscious mercenary irately—“found my lock-out. And locked me out. He must’ve noticed the countermand on the sensors.” Pushing away from the control, he hurried to the central comm station and quickly reviewed the log. “He already started disallowing any hijacking of the comm too…” At engineering, he foundhis secret bypass was disabled for the environmental systems too.
A cold, emptiness—as if space was leaking in—slowed his steps as he approached the captain’s chair. Blackworm, born noble, wouldn’t have let any of his minions sit here. Certainly not some for-hire mercenary. So maybe the clever merc hadn’t yet had his hands on these controls.
It was their last hope.
Nor settled into the seat.He stifled a sigh, although his beaten body wanted to collapse into the plush cushioning.
Even on his own ship, before theGrandy, he’d been a restless captain, rarely sitting, preferring to pace if he was on the bridge or be somewhere else entirely if there was nothing to do but pace. The command chair had never felt quite right.
And it was worse on theGrandiloquence, though the seat hadbeen engineered and tailored specifically to his body when he’d bought his commission.
Maybe he’d never really believed it was his.
He ran his hands down the elegant design, the metal sleek under his palms, to the controls. He flicked through the menus and into the hidden sub-controllers…
He slumped, his guts clenching so hard he thought he might be sick for the first time since he’d beenshoved out an airlock in his mech suit to scrub the hull and the whole universe had spun sickeningly around him. Grimly, he stared down at the smear of blood on his boot until he could control his voice. “TheGrandymustn’t make it back to Azthronos.”
Trixie stepped up beside him, a plasma rifle in her hip holster and a pistol in either hand. Clearly she was taking her re-arming very seriously.“The internal sensors are still down, right? We can find every one of Blackworm’s crew and end them.” Her voice was violent.
Ah, his little mishkeet. “There are too many of them and not enough of us. And we can’t risk the whole solar system.” He flicked through to the last, red-lined directive. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m locked out of the helm. And the course is already set to pass theevent horizon and return to Azthronos.”
