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I refused to think about that dream.
It meant nothing.
I went slowly down the darkened corridor, clutching my blaster with both hands.
Most of the doors were shut tight, and there was nothing to see.
We came to a ladder to the upper deck, which was where the bridge was, and I wasn’t sure if we should climb up there or—
I heard a noise—not a scream, but a kind of frustrated yell—coming from this way, not up the ladder, but further down this corridor, which led to the front of the ship. I started that way.
Holston thrust himself in front of me, running down the corridor with his bolts and bow, and I glared after him, annoyed, before I picked up my feet and ran too.
The corridor turned slightly, and we rounded it.
There were two donen men on the ground there, and Jini was standing over them, with a metal foot from one of the beds which she had turned into a makeshift weapon. It was dripping blood.
Both of the donen men had been stabbed with it in the throats.
They were dead.
Jini was in her pajamas and they were ripped. There was blood all over her face and her ripped clothes. She pointed her bloody weapon at us, recognized us, and then slumped into the wall.
“What the stars?” I said, pushing past Holston. “How’d they get in?”
Jini shook her head. She was trembling all over.
Holston nudged both of the corpses with his hooves. Neither moved. He looked at Jini. “Any more?”
“It was just this one,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to… if this one hadn’t shown up and started fighting him, I would have…” She let out a shaking breath. “They were distracted.”
He nodded. “I’ll get these out of here,” he said to me, gesturing to the corpses. “You take Jini to the sick bay and look her over?”
“But how did they get in?” I said.
“Okay, I’ll do a perimeter check first,” he said. “I’ll make sure if there are any breaches, any obvious places they’ve broken in, we’ll know. But I need you someplace safe, got it?”
Jini shook her head. “No alarms went off. If any part of this ship was damaged because something was trying to get in, we’d have been alerted. I checked over all of that when I was doing diagnostics before I sent off the message to the resistance.”
“So, what?” I said. “They had access?”
“You said people can download codes,” said Holston.
“Diagnostic report,” said Jini.
There was a beep, and the ship’s AI voice said, “What system?”
“External access,” said Jini.
“What time frame?”
“Past twenty hihors,” said Jini.
The computer began spitting out every time myself or Holston had entered the ship, categorizing them as using the resistance override codes I’d been given, but then it said that less than a hihor ago, the ship had been accessed by a key scan.
Jini’s eyes widened.
“Report complete,” finished the ship’s AI.
