mean his ship was weaponized after all?
“We can sit here until the armada catches up to you. They’ll pay me a hefty bounty before taking the Legacy and throwing you in a Martian prison. Or you and I can work together and give Mars the finger while getting what we both want. So…” Tonlet leaned closer to the camera, his fat nose taking up an alarming amount of Denver’s screen. “Ready to negotiate now, brother?”
“I’m not your brother, you son of a bitch,” Denver hit the button to terminate the communication with Tonlet. He might hail them again in two seconds flat, but it’d buy them a bit of time. “Tonlet sabotaged the ship,” he said to the blank screen, knowing Laramie could hear him. “Get to the engine room with OPAL. See if you can track down whatever he’s planted down there and disable it, now that the engine’s off.”
The comm beeped, just as he’d expected. But it wasn’t Tonlet hailing them. It was Dusty.
“What’s going on?” she asked as soon as Denver opened the comm. “Why have you stopped?”
“We have a problem.”
Chapter Seventeen
An hour later, Denver called his meager crew together to discuss their waning options. They crammed themselves into the cockpit—even Gru, Ginn, and Treesa—with an open comm to representatives from five of the armada ships. The latter were comprised of three women and two men. The crews of the three smallest ships had declined the invitation, having already deferred to Dusty as their leader.
“The good news,” Denver said to the five grim faces staring back at him from the monitor on the wall, “is that we think we’ve discovered the location of the device Tonlet’s using to sabotage us.”
One of the men sat forward. Zahn, if Denver remembered right. He captained the largest of the ships in the armada, and something about his attitude made Denver uneasy. “Something tells me there’s bad news coming next.”
Denver nodded. “The device appears to be wedged into the back of the casing.” He could curse OPAL all day for not noticing it years earlier. He could blame Poppy for allowing Tonlet to bribe her. He could blame himself for not wondering sooner how Tonlet always managed to find them.
In the end, it was all moot.
One of the women cleared her throat. Mona Houck, a grandmotherly figure who led a ship captained by her nephew. “I’m sorry, but I’m not familiar enough with engines to understand what the issue is.”
“The problem”—Laramie took up the tale here—“is that in order to reach it, we’ll need to let the engine cool for several hours, then dismantle it piece by piece until we find the device. And then of course, we’d have to put it all back together before we could start it up again.”
“It’s time we don’t have,” Denver summed it up. “The militia will be halfway up our asses before we finish.”
“Then you have to give us the coordinates and let us move on,” Zahn said. “My people have waited too long for this to be waylaid by some personal grudge this man holds against you.”
Houck and Dusty looked mutinous at this declaration. The other two faces on the screen were harder to read. But Denver had already been thinking along those lines.
“I agree. The problem is, he’ll be able to beat you there. You’re stuck hanging back with the slower ships in your group. All Tonlet has to do is stay on your tails and monitor your trajectory until he sees the Legacy. The Zenith’ll be able to fly right past you.”
“And based on the threat he made about us loading your crew onto one of our ships, it’s entirely possible his ship is weaponized,” Verpaelst, the last female of the group, said. Her eyes moved as she took in all the faces on her own screen. “I can’t speak for the rest of you, but our ship isn’t equipped for any kind of confrontation. It wouldn’t take much more than a simple explosive warhead to rupture our hull. I don’t want to risk it.”
“Denver, I may have a solution.”
“I’m listening, OPAL.”
“I could be the eye of the tiger, stalking our prey in the night.”
Denver laughed at the confused expressions on everybody’s faces. “You’re going to need to elaborate. Preferably without musical innuendo.”
“It’s possible I could take the spider bot and disable the Zenith.”
“Disable it from the outside, you mean?”
“Exactly. It won’t help the Jiminy, but it may buy Dusty’s