instead eyeball the data I’m heisting as it goes by. At a glance, I can tell that a lot of the info is navigational, which is exactly the kind we came for. Hopefully it’ll mark the place something weird happened to the Hadfield. And Aurora.
I set the data streams to encrypt as they store so nobody can get into them except yours truly. It’s a mimetic sixty-four-digit obfuscation cypher—just a special little something I whipped up back at the academy. I had a lot of spare time on account of my nonexistent social life. But who’s laughing now, huh? I’ve got this killer encryption, a state-of-the-art spaceship, and a big handsome friend who shoots people for me whenever I like.
What more could a boy want?
As if to answer that question, Scar’s voice sounds in my earpiece. “Ops team, we have a problem.”
Kal’s eyes narrow slightly. “Please elaborate.”
“Inbound vessels,” Zila reports. “They used cloaking technology to get close, but we have visual now. There are at least a dozen. Rapid approach.”
“Someone’s responding to the Hephaestus SOS,” Scarlett says.
I frown, crunching the numbers in my head. “Already?”
“They must have been a lot closer than Emerald City to have gotten here already. Just our luck.”
Kal looks at me, his voice cool as ice. “How long, Finian?”
“Ninety seconds,” I tell him, mentally urging the data to move faster. Because that’s always worked.
“We will be ready for retrieval in two minutes,” Kal advises.
Tyler’s voice breaks in. “Roger that, we can—oh, Maker’s breath …”
I’m about to ask him to elaborate on that as well, but the sound of Kal cursing softly in Syldrathi draws my attention to the monitor array. Through our tug’s forward viewscreen, we have an unencumbered shot of half a dozen lean, razor-sharp fighter ships speeding in to say hello. They’re shaped for stealth, and my heart drops to my boots as I watch one of them casually execute a strafing run that leaves three security fighters in ruins, debris tumbling slowly out into the black.
More of the newcomers begin to engage, missile and pulse fire lighting up the darkness. Within moments, the Hephaestus security ships that Tyler’s been playing hide-and-seek with all this time are being simply annihilated.
“Kal,” I whisper. “Are those ships … ?”
“Syldrathi,” he replies, his voice subzero.
“But they’re just interceptors,” I protest. “They’re too small to have come here alone. They’ve gotta be with …”
I glance to our rear cams, my heart tightening in my chest.
“Oh shit …”
A dark shape hangs there on the screen, lit from behind by the system’s sun, just a silhouette against a disk of burning red. It’s big and pointy and the most badass thing I have ever seen. All black, with huge white glyfs painted down the sides in a beautiful, furious script.
They’re the glyfs of the Unbroken.
A small crease slowly forms between Kal’s brows, which is about as close to upset as he ever looks.
“The Andarael,” he whispers.
“Kal?” Ty breaks in again. “You know this ship?”
But Scar answers for him, already two steps ahead. “It’s his sister’s.”
A green light flashes by my feet, and I look down. “Download complete,” I say softly, though that’s hardly our biggest concern anymore. Still, I’m an Aurora legionnaire, and I have my orders, so I drop to one knee and set to work frying the black box—that way, the only copy of its data will now be ours. Just in case we get out of this alive to use it.
I hear a burst of static from the Totentanz’s comms panel, and sadly, that starts feeling a lot less likely.
“Hello again, Kaliis.”
Kal stares expressionless at the blinking light awaiting his response.
“Saedii,” he murmurs.
Like a man sleepwalking, our Tank crosses the cockpit to the transmitter. I glance around the bridge, looking for anything that might help us. A grimy mug that says GALAXY’S GREATEST GRANDMA! sits by the copilot’s chair. A jetball team jacket is crumpled on the deck near the nav station. A pair of fuzzy dice hangs above the pilot’s chair. When Kal speaks, he sounds cool, conversational. He talks in Syldrathi, but my uni has enough spare processing power to still run a translation for me.
“We were not expecting your company so soon, Sister.”
“Forgive me,” she replies, her smirk audible. “You left in such a hurry, you forgot to issue an invitation, Brother.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” she purrs.
“… How?”
“Kaliis, I touched your ship,” she says. “Are you telling me that you did not even search for the tracker? You have grown slow and