Page 81 of Seeded By Two

I bent down and scooped her up in my arms.

Feon looked back at me, his glare hard, but I was not the target of his anger.

But the attackers.

He nodded and allowed me to carry her.

If I fell back or became too slow, I would simply hand her over to him, and we would relay between each other, keeping up the same incredible speed we were currently hurtling at.

“Why are they attacking us?” I bellowed between each siren wail. “Why now?”

“It might not involve us at all,” Feon said. “It could just be pirates.”

But he must have known better than that.

The ship hadn’t left the dock yet and pirates weren’t so well-armed that they could risk taking on a Seeding Facility with all its defenses.

No, this was something else.

Something worse.

We reached the exit and turned to peel down the fairway… when we realized it had already been retracted.

We must have been the last passengers to board.

The ship had been preparing to launch, and when the captain had gotten word of two troublesome passengers, he wouldn’t have launched.

Us.

We were the reason the ship had not already launched.

But there was nothing we could do about it now.

After all, without boarding the ship, we would not have found Beth, and being unable to reach her meant failing in our mission to bring her off the ship.

It was unfortunate but necessary.

“Is there another way out of here?” I said.

Feon shook his head. “No.”

Before coming here, he would have researched every possible exit from the Seeding Facility and pored over the plans for hours.

Why? Because the Prince of the Krev Empire would be coming here and it was his responsibility to keep me safe.

“So, where do we go? What do we do?”

“We should get to the escape pods. They might not be active as we haven’t yet launched but maybe I can bypass the security system and launch us anyway using an emergency protocol.”

I didn’t understand a single word he said but it didn’t matter.

We had a plan and it was the only one we had.

I followed behind Feon as he sprinted down one shiny white hallway after another.

Someone screamed, and another yelled, and later still, someone opened fire and I sensed the fuzzy frazzled electronic burst of plasma fire as it soared through the air.

Whoever was attacking the ship was already on board and heading deeper into the ship’s innards.

---