Home Front (Star Kingdom #7) - Lindsay Buroker Page 0,150

and hoping to get lucky, but Zee startled her by picking her up and moving her aside. He’d handed Casmir to one of the other crushers. He reached inside, hands shifting into something like scissors. Another crusher came forward and held him down. The device’s defenses tried to knock Zee away, as it had done the first crusher, but his buddy kept him in place, and if electrical surges were threatening to destroy Zee’s innards, he didn’t let them stop him. He pulled out the warhead and the detonator, not trying to stop the timer from counting down. It was still attached, still ticking down. Less than thirty seconds now.

“What are you doing?” Kim asked, even though she knew they couldn’t hear her.

With one arm wrapped around the warhead, Zee pointed at the ceiling, as if he planned to leap up there. To try to get it away from them?

Kim shook her head. “It’s not going to be far enough.”

Zee crouched and would have sprung, but one of the other crushers stepped forward. Reuben. He pointed at Zee, pointed at Casmir, and pointed at the warhead.

Zee looked at Casmir. He’d stopped twitching and hung limply in another crusher’s grip.

Kim had no idea what they were debating via that wireless link, but there wasn’t time for debate. If they had an idea, they needed to do it now. Less than twenty seconds.

Zee handed the warhead to Reuben. With all this manhandling, Kim couldn’t believe it hadn’t gone off yet. Reuben looked at her, then pointed at his chest and the ceiling again. He crouched to spring.

“Wait,” Kim blurted and lunged for the device. A surge of electricity ran up her arm as she reached in and grabbed the biohazard canister. Pain shot through her entire body as she twisted and pulled it out, but she managed to hand it to Reuben. If the bomb went off out here and the hull of the station somehow wasn’t breached, the explosion could damn well take the virus with it.

One of the crushers pulled her back. She was gasping for air, her entire body tingling and her heart pounding in her ears.

With the canister and the warhead in his arms, Reuben sprang away from the hull, his legs easily carrying him to the ceiling in the fractional gravity. The station had spun a full rotation and was back to where the device had drilled in. Reuben scrambled along the ceiling toward that hole, creating an extra set of arms to propel himself along the lumpy rock. He wouldn’t have time to pull himself out of the mile-thick wall of asteroid around the station, but maybe if he got far enough before it blew…

Zee pointed downward, and he pushed Kim and Casmir down to the hull. The other crushers hurried over and shifted their forms, melding together to create a barrier, a protective dome. As it closed over Kim and Casmir, the last thing she saw was Reuben turning himself into a box—an amorphous container with the bomb and the canister inside—and disappearing up into the hole.

Then all went dark as the crushers-turned-dome blocked out her view of everything. She and Casmir lay on their stomachs with their faceplates pressed to the hull when the explosion went off. The hull quaked, and she squinted her eyes shut, expecting the worst.

But the quaking subsided, and the blast of pain she expected right before the end of her life did not come.

The crushers pulled away from each other and resumed their bipedal shapes. Pieces of rock from the asteroid floated free, and there was a great crater up there now, but the station was still intact. Reuben was gone.

32

Qin and Mouser trotted through the dark corridors of the Scimitar, the ship familiar to Qin, though the smoke and scorch marks on the walls and the lack of lighting or power anywhere gave it the strange feel of a derelict. She didn’t peer into the faceplates of the broken unmoving bodies they passed, not wanting to see people she recognized. Even if the pirates had been her owners and not her friends, it was hard not to feel something at seeing them dead.

She tried to focus on the mission—getting to the bridge to help Asger and Bjarke—but every turn brought back memories. The sounds of battle drifted to them from side corridors, as well, as they passed through intersections. She glanced warily down them, anticipating ambushes.

If she had been wearing the same armor as her sisters, she might