offered him the basics more than once, but he never took me up on anything. He was big, quiet, and stoic in the extreme.
I liked him. And I’d better go get him.
Will he even fit into an escape pod?
Fiona shook her head. “He left the lab only once, and I couldn’t stop him from poking around the cargo holds. He wanted to know where we were taking everything.”
Nowhere anymore. At this rate, those things had no chance of getting to where they needed to go. The food and seeds were for the dirt-poor colonies out in Sectors 17 and 18 that would never recover from the war. The books were for the Intergalactic Library’s rare and archaic section, and the drop-off I’d planned would have been stealth itself. The vaccines were for Starway 8. Orphanages never got cure-alls. I would know.
“What did you mean by ‘superpower stuff’?” I asked, suddenly zeroing in on what Fiona had just said about the vaccines.
“I meant give a few rounds to Jax, and he’d be unstoppable. Strength. Speed. Boosted healing.” Fiona huffed. “Hell, give some to Shiori, and she’d kick ass like she was twenty years old again.”
I felt my jaw loosen. “An enhancer?” The enhancer? I’d thought that was a myth. Or a bad dream. Or something that would never work.
And then it hit me. No wonder the lab had been so discreet, so empty of personnel that it shouldn’t have drawn a single eye while it floated around out in bumblefuck Lyronium. That was how the Overseer worked. Hide your best science. Destroy what you don’t understand.
Shit! I’d almost genetically modified thousands of kids.
“We can’t give that to orphans!” All those shots clearly labeled as cure-alls were in reality the abomination the galactic government had been working toward for years.
Fiona shrugged. “You can if you want to call the concoction a vaccine and turn people into super soldiers without telling them.”
I gasped. Wasn’t the military already unstoppable enough?
An earsplitting hammering started on the starboard side just as the edge of the Dark Watch ship came into view. It was immense and intimidating. Too bad I couldn’t incinerate it with just the heat of my glare.
Apparently, the galactic generals weren’t only lying to civilians anymore; they were lying to their own.
Furious on behalf of just about everything that lived, I slammed out a combination on my console. “I won’t give it back. I’ll die before the Overseer gets his serum back and uses super soldiers to terrorize the Outer Zones even worse than he already does.”
The bridge lights flickered from the sudden power drain, and the hammering abruptly stopped.
“I just electrified the whole starboard side,” I announced. Best-case scenario? I fried their jackhammer, and they’d have to return to the warship for another. Worst case? We were pretty much already living it.
Bridgebane’s voice barked across the com again. “You are now accountable for an attack on the military, three burn victims, and a damaged Type-4 Heavy Armor Hammer. Galactic records show no Captain T. Bailey and no cargo cruiser matching your ID numbers or called Endeavor. We’ve definitively identified the floating lab. We will fire on the bridge if you continue to resist.”
Jax looked at me. “They can blow up the bridge and still recover the lab.”
I watched the behemoth warship hovering over our starboard side. DW 12 definitely wasn’t behind us anymore. “If they board, we’re dead.”
They’d consider us all repeat offenders simply for breaking out of prison. Now I had the vaccine heist and an attack on the military against me as well. There’d be no jury, no trial, and no more wasting food and space on a criminal like me. Jaxon was in the same position, but not for theft. I called what he’d done in the Outer Zones heroic. The galactic government called it murder—because they’d won.
Shiori had never technically been arrested, but Fiona was a bio-criminal who’d created at least three major airborne plagues when she’d been fighting alongside the rebels out in 17, just like Jax. And Miko had cut off her own left hand to get out of shackles, so I was pretty damn sure she didn’t like being chained up.
I glanced at my navigator. Miko’s glossy black hair, fine-boned features, and delicate-seeming beauty had landed her in a position she didn’t want to be in when she was nineteen years old. I could only guess at the details, but Miko’s sporadic comments about the violent appetites of powerful men spoke volumes. And Miko’s death sentence