If Horos was right and had actually built something clever, the paste would not be enough to block communication or fry the internal wiring.
And then she was dead.
But if it worked, nothing stood between her and revenge.
Lily pressed down. The casing cracked, then the cables inside snapped.
The collar sprang open. She wrenched it wider until she could slip free.
One glance was enough to understand Horos had lied again. No self-destruction protocol. No transmitter. Just a bent strip of metal with a light.
Lily could have killed with her stare, but she could not afford even a second of rage. She grabbed the toolbox, pivoted, and sprinted out of the cargo bay, leaving Saxum alone with the vukri.
She was running for the nearby service hatch, planning to slip into the maintenance channels around the hangar and strike Horos from there, when Vitro shuddered.
That was a bad sign. Very few things could make a ship this size tremble.
“What happened?!” Horos boomed in her ear.
“The vukri are better than we thought,” Lily said. “But we’ve got it under control.”
“Lily, I swear, if the ship takes damage and the deal collapses because of this…”
“All right, don’t get worked up.”
She cut the line before he could spit disbelief and glanced at her console, now flooded with Vitro’s fault alerts.
To an untrained eye it would have been a meaningless stream of codes. Lily saw through it instantly.
B10350 — relay failure in Sector C
B105FZ — no response from Sector C cable network
H56SS — reduced pressure in Sector C
And more. And more. And more.
A riot of errors.
Lily smiled.
She did not believe in divine intervention, but it felt like fate had handed her an opportunity on a silver platter. The alerts told her a vukri had chewed its way into one of Vitro’s service corridors and damaged something important. She was already waiting for the system-wide notice as the new plan formed in her mind.
Warning: Critical error
Shield generator operation unsafe due to supporting system failures.
Shield generation suspended until further service.
No shields meant nothing stood between them and the frozen, murderous vacuum except the ship’s hull, a skin that a careless plasma shot could tear open and turn the entire hangar into a death sentence. Even the greenest off-worlder knew running without shields was not a game and that one had to be cautious when it happened.
Space, however, was only one threat stalking them.
Lily suspected the smugglers had arrived with more than one ship, and only Vitro’s shield had kept them from grappling the cruiser the moment they sensed weakness. She could not be sure, which meant she had to move fast, before they could strike.
She slipped into the service hatch and headed for the hangar.
This service channel ran along the hangar wall and in places above the ceiling, broken at intervals by vent grates. She could not fully stand inside the tunnel, but her height worked in her favor and she moved quickly in a crouch. At the first ceiling vent she flattened to her stomach and peered through.
