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It was a trail. Someone had been bleeding and had been going up this corridor.
I sucked in a breath. I thought about going back for Holston. He was the one with weapons. Even if he wouldn’t come in with me, maybe he could loan me a knife.
But no.
This was my mission. I did not need him.
I sucked in another breath, this one determined, and I went faster, avoiding walking in the droplets of blood, but following the trail through the ship.
It took me to a closed door.
Someone’s quarters.
I palmed the controls to open the door.
“Unknown occupant. Access denied,” chirped the door.
“Override, code crimson,” I said.
“Access code?”
“Five seven bravo eight echo,” I said.
The door opened.
The stench hit me like a wave of awfulness.
There was a woman sprawled out on the bed. She was human. She was dead. She’d been shot with a blaster several times, and the trail of blood went to her bed. Her chest was a mass of pooling blood. She was curled up around her wound, cringing as if in pain. She must have bled out here.
I backed out of the room, shaking all over.
This… this wasn’t what I’d expected.
I had thought that maybe the ship had crashed, and people had died when it went down or that maybe they’d left the ship and the vvoln had gotten them, but this?
Shot with a blaster?
This was murder.
And I was horrified, but I thought the signs pointed to it having been carried out by someone on the ship. Another member of the resistance.
What could have happened? I couldn’t even imagine it.
I turned in a circle outside the door, struggling to think, to breathe. Well, I didn’t know who’d done this, but there was a chance that the person who did was still alive on the ship, perhaps infected with some madness that made them murderous, and maybe I should get the weapon schematics and get the stars off the freaking ship before I got hurt too.
I stepped back into the quarters and approached the corpse.
She had a blaster in a holster strapped to her waist.
I eased it out and took out the power cartridge, checking to see if it was charged.
Mostly.
I slammed it back in.
When I left the room, I led with the blaster. It was a Falco-L10, the kind of hand blaster favored by law enforcement and security guards. It was lightweight but deadly, giving off a concentrated beam that could sizzle anything to death if it hit in the right place. I wondered why the woman in the room hadn’t used it against her attacker.
On the other hand, maybe she had, I thought, because after I went a little further, I encountered another trail of blood, but this one was different. There was less of it, and some of it was smeared on the walls, as if someone had their hand in against a wound, trying to stanch the blood and had then used that hand to steady themselves.
