“Good. Now get out of here. Before anyone has the chance to start asking questions.”
With a quick nod, I switched my scales to black. My pressure suit was a light grey, and in the dim light, that would offer me as effective camouflage as was possible in a ship full of straight hallways and metal walls. My jet black face, though, would hopefully give the pirates a good scare, and even half a second of hesitation could win me enough time to make a difference.
Then I reached down and switched off the magnetic sensors on my boots. Before I could start floating away, I pushed off the floor, leaping halfway up the wall, then propelling myself towards the door. I landed lightly beside the release button and jabbed it, the doors hissing open smoothly. Then I turned and looked back at my master, one fleeting glance that I wassure I would remember forever. He was watching me with an expression of concern and longing that made my heart twist in my chest. I’d lived for so long without believing I’d ever see such an expression on my master’s face.
Then I pushed off the doorframe and floated silently out into the hallway.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AIDEN
“Corporal Hill! Come back here!” Major Tolvorez shouted after Jai, as the door closed behind him. “Commander? Where the hell is he going?”
“He had some urgent business to deal with,” I replied, not feeling any need to explain myself to Tolvorez. His attitude was beginning to grate on me, and as concerned as I was about Jai’s safety, I was running out of patience.
I heard the clomping of magnetic boots, then a far more welcome presence arrived beside me. “Where’s he going?” Bryce asked, his tone far more reasonable.
“To take the bridge,” I replied. In my defence, Bryce was currently my team leader, for all that Tolvorez still out-ranked me. “He was trained for high risk solo missions. I seriously don’t know if he can do it,” I admitted, worry gnawing at my gut. “But he’s pretty convinced he can.”
“That’s a suicide mission,” Tolvorez declared. “If any harm comes to him, I’ll see that you’re held responsible, CommanderHill. As a soldier under your command, you have the responsibility to-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Bryce snapped at Tolvorez. Thankfully, being a major himself, he wasn’t going to get into trouble for talking back to a superior officer. “Aiden knows more about the relationship between a master and his dimari than anyone on this planet. And we have a very limited amount of time to get control of this ship before the pirates get the engines running again and jump us through the wormhole into heavens knows what sector of the galaxy. Here,” Bryce added, handing me a metal rod about half a metre long – likely some sort of spare part for one of the mechanical systems that kept the ship running. It wasn’t great, but it would do as a makeshift weapon. “A couple of the engineers are helping Sergeant Jens hack into the ship-wide communications system,” he explained, nodding down the hallway to where a small cluster of people were working feverishly at a panel on the wall. “The idea is that if we can put a trace on every comm on the ship, we should be able to map out where all the pirates are and get the jump on them.”
“Doesn’t that mean they’ll know where we are, as well?” I asked.
“Jens is going to code us in. Only the people with the right code will be able to see the map. Or that’s the idea, at least,” he admitted, not sounding entirely confident about it. “Given the time limit, it might be a bit hit and miss. But right now, it’s still the best option we’ve got.”
“Any chance we could patch Jai in on that function as well?” I asked. If he could see the pirates coming, that would greatly increase his chances of success.
“Let’s go ask Jens about it,” Bryce said. “Tolvorez, how about you get the rest of these soldiers armed as well as possible and get them ready to move out. Anyone with significant injuries can stay here with the crew.”
Tolvorez huffed, but made no more complaint than that. “Very well,” he said grudgingly, then turned around to go and round up more of the recently freed soldiers.
Bryce and I clomped down the hall to the cluster of engineers, and in light of the noise from our boots, I immediately understood why Jai had disabled the magnetic function. The way the magnets worked was to pull our feet towards the floor once they were within an inch or so of the metal walkways, and that necessarily meant our steps landed with more force than usual. Operating with stealth while walking in zero gravity was almost impossible.
But there were significant risks to going completely weightless, the worst being that if we misjudged a jump or a landing, we could get stranded floating in the middle of a room with no way to get back to a wall. The only way out of that sort of scenario was to try throwing something in the opposite direction from the way we wanted to go, and hoping we gained enough inertia to eventually reach a solid surface again. As much as I told myself that Jai would have been given rigorous training in zero gravity manoeuvres, I couldn’t help the knot of worry sitting tight and uncomfortable in my chest.
“How’s it going?” Bryce asked Jens, as we came up to the panel they were working on.
“It’s going to be dirty,” Jens replied, without looking away from the panel. “I’m only generating one code to access the system. Everyone here will have to enter it manually, and they only get three chances to get it right. After that, they’ll be locked out of the system. That’s to prevent the pirates running codebreakers on it. Aside from that, I can’t guarantee it’ll pick up every comm on the ship, so don’t go thinking you have an iron clad guarantee that you’re going to see any enemies coming. And it will, of course, miss anyone who isn’t wearing a comm. Pirate tech tends to have a fair few stealth capabilities, but I’m nottrying to get into their devices. All we need to do is detect their presence, so hopefully that will work in our favour.”
“That’s a lot of ifs and maybes,” Bryce said.
Jens shrugged. “If I had three hours to engineer the whole thing, it would be a lot cleaner. You’ve given me ten minutes,” he said, shooting Bryce a wry look. “So you’re getting what you pay for.”
“I was hoping we could patch Jai into the system,” I said, as Jens continued poking at the console, the engineers occasionally offering tips as to how to get the system to respond. “He’s gone on a solo mission to try and take the bridge. He was specifically trained for that sort of thing,” I added, at Jens’s startled look.
“Brave kid,” Jens muttered, and I let the ‘kid’ reference slide. For all his young age, Jai had more experience than soldiers who’d been in the Alliance military for three or four years. “Like I said, he’d have to enter the code manually. And there’s no way in hell I’d let you send it to him, even if it’s encrypted.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. Knowing where the pirates were would make his job a hell of a lot safer. And easier, and quicker. I thought about how to solve the problem. “Can I send him any message at all? Would that alert the pirates to our location?”
“Shouldn’t do,” Jens said. “There’s plenty of comm static on a ship like this at the best of times. A short message wouldn’t stand out against the background noise. It would have to be in code, though. And I don’t mean encrypted. Military encryption is top notch, but so is pirate hacking tech.”
Bryce stepped in then. “Is the code you’re going to create autogenerated, or can you choose what it’s going to be?” he asked.
Jens paused in his work, looking at the pair of us fully for the first time. “I can choose it,” he answered succinctly.
“Is there some way you can tell Jai what it is without actually telling him what it is?” Bryce asked me.
