Splinter missiles. They lurched sideways just as space folded and stretched in front of them.
Worried they had been knocked far off course, Maisie gritted her teeth as her body protested the painful force of hyperspace travel. She braced herself on the seat and closed her eyes as the ship seemed to squeeze all around them. Time and space overlapped as the ship’s hyperdrive created a brief but stable wormhole to zip them from one point to another.
When they dropped out of hyperspace at the other end, their ship shuddered and suddenly lost power. Maisie shot a worried glance at Terror before unlatching her safety harness and getting out of her seat. She ignored the throbbing ache in her ribs and back as she hurried to the rear of the ship and slipped down the short access staircase to the mechanical compartment.
Smoke filled the small bay, and she flinched at the sparks flying off the overworked equipment. One entire panel had been crunched from the missile that had struck the ship. The third fuel cell, the one that had been completely full, had sustained serious damage from the missile, and the safety systems had deployed pressure sealant. Even so, the ship’s computer kept trying to suck power from the failed battery, sending sparks and risking a fire.
She found the manual override levers and shutdown the hyperdrive. She slapped the electrical fire suppression system button and covered her nose and mouth with her arm to avoid breathing in too much of the aerosolized chemicals. Across the mechanical compartment, the general power cells should have had plenty of juice to run the ship in normal mode, but when she checked their gauges, only one cell was active. It had a reading of less than fifteen percent.
She eyed the battery bank and traced the lines snaking out of it. She realized the general power cells were tied into the hyperdrive cells across the compartment for redundancy. When the hyperdrive’s last cell malfunctioned, power had been leeched from the general cells to complete the jump.
Shit.
After making sure the fire hazard was handled, Maisie climbed back up to the main deck. She paused as she passed Devious and put two fingers against his neck to check his pulse. It was shockingly even and only slightly weak. Confounded by his ability to survive this long, she hoped he had enough fight left in him to make it to rescue.
When she reached the cockpit, Maisie noticed Terror leaning heavily against the control panel. He had removed his safety harness and seemed to be struggling to breathe. She rushed to his side and crouched down next to him. Was it a collapsed lung? A sucking chest wound?
His skin was so hot. He was burning up with fever and leaned into her palm as she tried to judge his temperature. The blood loss worried her, and she pushed him back in his seat to triage his wounds.
When she lifted his torn shirt, a wave of nausea washed over her. His entire torso was covered in a blistering rash from the virus he had contracted. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Black and green tendrils arched out from the bullet wound in his upper belly.
Panicked, she stared up at him. He nodded with resignation. “One of them fired off a shot. The round is lodged in there.” He grimaced. “I think they figured out the delivery system on those pronged rounds.”
Horrified, Maisie examined the wound on the front and back of his torso. He was correct. It hadn’t exited his body. When she pressed hard against the buried round, she could feel the prongs that had torn through his body. Even if she could dig out the round, she didn’t have the antidote necessary for whatever poison had been delivered with the bullet.
Terror touched her face. His hands were clammy and trembling. “I’m sorry, Maisie. I really didn’t think it would end like this.”
“Stop.” She angrily spoke the word with her unpracticed mouth. “It’s not over yet.”
He seemed to have understood maybe two or three words she had signed to him. His eye was glassy as he dragged his thumb along her jaw. “Take the escape pod. Get out of here while you can.”
“No.”
“Yes,” he insisted. “Save yourself. Please,” he begged, his eye drooping shut. “Do it for me. Go.”
All the strength left him, and he slumped forward. She caught him with both hands and guided him to the floor, groaning under his weight. Looking at him, his skin flushed