CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
AIDEN
I froze, taking the pirate’s advice, even as my mind raced.
“What the fuck?” Bryce muttered. “Jai? Carver?”
I realised, in the smoke-filled room, that he couldn’t see what was happening, and I glanced down, trying to get a glimpse of the person behind me. Except that, according to the thermal scans, there was no one there.
Instead, I looked at the hand on my shoulder, managing to make out three elongated fingers and a bony thumb through the smoke. The hand was covered in muddy green scales and had sharp claws at the end of each digit.
“They’ve got me,” I informed my team, cursing at our own stupidity.
“It’s a Fenton.” We’d only seen Anicrians and Polvrons so far, both of which emitted strong heat signals.
But Fentons were lizard-like creatures, and just like lizards, they were cold-blooded.
This one would have been the exact same temperature as the room, and so he’d been invisible on a thermal scan.
I tried to figure out how he’d got past our scatter fire, but then realised he’d probably sneaked down the stairs just after the smoke bomb went off, and then waited for a good opportunity to ambush us from behind.
Jai had already warned us not to underestimate these bastards, but they seemed to be a step ahead of us all the way.
The other pirates had fallen back now, and the Fenton pushed me forward, out of the stairwell.
Doing so pushed me into Bryce and Jai, and so we were all herded out into the hallway, where the smoke was less thick.
Bryce whipped around, pointing his laser at the man holding me captive…
but then his face fell, and he lowered his gun.
I couldn’t see what sort of weapon the Fenton was holding, but from Bryce’s expression, it was a bad one.
From behind Bryce, a Polvron stepped out of the shadows, with two Anicrians flanking him. I could see more of them further down the hall, including at least one more Fenton. The Polvron was holding a pulse projector – a weapon that could be used to pulverise an entire person in a single shot.
“Put your weapons down,” the Polvron instructed, his tone expressionless.
“Fuck,” Bryce muttered. But he placed his gun on the ground, and Carver followed suit.
“All your weapons,” the Polvron insisted. While Bryce and Carver divested themselves of their spare pistol and their knives, an agile Anicrian came forward to take my gun from my hand and pat me down, removing the other weapons I had as well.
But it was then that I realised that Jai hadn’t moved.
He was loitering at the edge of the hallway, gun held low and aimed at the floor, but he hadn’t put it down.
Oh, fuck me, he wasn’t thinking of doing something heroic, was he?
We were in a confined space, surrounded by people who outgunned us, and they had at least two Fentons on their team.
Fentons were extremely agile, and no matter how well trained he was, I couldn’t see Jai being able to take on two of them and win.
“Weapons on the floor!” the Polvron barked again, having noticed Jai’s disobedience.
I felt my gut lurch at that. Over the past week, Jai had proven that he had a unique gift for being disobedient, but as much as I wanted someone to stick it to these pirates, now was not the time for that sort of lunacy.
“Jai,” I said, the words to order him to obey on the tip of my tongue.
This mission was going south at an incredible rate, but at the end of the day, no one would fault us if we were forced to abandon the cargo in exchange for our lives, and the lives of the crew.
If we were lucky, the pirates would lock us up, rather than killing us.
For that matter, if they wanted to kill us, they’d likely have done it already.
Unless Jai continued to provoke them.
But a split second before I spoke, I found I couldn’t quite get the words out.
Neither then, nor later, could I have explained why.
It was a gut feeling, an odd instinct that said regardless of the odds stacked against us, I should continue giving my dimari as much free rein as possible.
If I really thought about it, I could probably have justified the decision with some sensible-sounding bullshit.
Jai knew what the mission was. He knew what the stakes were in terms of loss of life, not just for us, but for the rest of the freighter’s crew as well.
And in the last forty-eight hours, he’d made remarkable progress in apparently beginning to trust me.
I tried to tell myself that that was a good reason to try trusting him in return.
But the reality was that none of those fine-sounding reasons meant shit. Jai had proven himself, in the last week, and in the last hour, to be both a loose canon, and a tactical genius. And at the end of the day, it was pure instinct that had me holding my tongue.
Finally, after far too long a pause, Jai began to remove his weapons, setting them carefully on the floor. Guns, knives, explosives and a couple of bottles of chemicals all joined the pile. Then he stood up… but still refused to raise his hands.
Nonetheless, the two Anicrians darted forward to collect the supplies, and two Polvrons stepped up behind Bryce and Carver, securing their hands in electronic cuffs behind their backs.
In an odd way, that was a good sign – further evidence that they meant to hold us captive, rather than killing us.
So long as we were alive, there was always a chance we could find a way out of this mess.
I felt strong hands guiding my arms behind my back, and then I, too, was cuffed.
“Hands behind your back,” the Polvron ordered Jai. But rather than complying, Jai’s head came up, and he stepped away from the Anicrian beside him, snarling and widening his stance. Oh, for fuck’s sake, he was going to get himself killed.
A second later, he charged into the Anicrian, shoulder-tackling him and managing to get in one good punch to his face before the two Fentons were on him.
Their long, lanky limbs and elongated fingers were designed for catching prey by hand, and they had a series of small suckers on each finger, that helped them to grip things in their native landscape – a planet covered in swamps and where everything was constantly wet, due to very high natural rainfall.
Jai went down underneath the two of them, and a moment later, his arms were confined in cuffs, just like the rest of us.
One of the Fentons, sitting on his back with a knee between his shoulders, pulled Jai’s head back by his hair. “Not a Solof,” the woman said, examining his purple scales. “He’s Vangravian.”
“A dimari?” the Polvron said, his tone equal parts surprise and disdain. “Which of you is his master?”
“I am,” I said, not seeing any point in denying it.
The Polvron came around and got his face up in mine.
I suppose he didn’t think we were much of a threat now, given that we were all unarmed and in cuffs.
But he sneered as he took a look at me, then slapped a meaty hand over my visor and yanked it off.
“The air is perfectly breathable,” he said.
“And this should make you less inclined to blow a hole in the side of our ship. Take them off,” he snapped at the other guards, and the rest of my team promptly had their visors removed as well.
Then he stared me in the eye again, as he had at the start. “You better make sure your boy behaves from now on,” he said to me. “I’m running out of patience.”
I didn’t reply, nor did I look Jai’s way.
When I’d first adopted Kade, he’d figured out very quickly what was an order and what wasn’t, and regardless of his attitude, I knew Jai was just as observant, and just as clever.
I didn’t want to give him any hint that I agreed with the pirate’s order.
Jai was free to do whatever he saw fit. Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little concerned about him picking a fight with the Anicrian.
It had achieved nothing, and had only annoyed our captors more.
“Take them to the rear storage units,” the Polvron ordered the Fentons. “Make sure they’re locked up securely. Then track down that other group of the crew. I don’t want them roaming around my ship causing trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” the Fentons replied, then we were being led away, two Anicrians in front of us and two Fentons behind us.
The freighter was a massive ship, designed for the efficient interstellar transport of large volumes of cargo, and the walk to the storage facility was several hundred metres.
I did my best to make note of any significant landmarks on the way, but the vast majority of it was bland, empty hallways, with occasional signs on doors to indicate what the rooms were for.
The bulk of the ship was nothing more than storage holds, and I wondered why we were being taken to the particular one we were heading for.
Perhaps they’d simply decided to keep all the captives together for convenience?
Or was one part of the ship more secure than the rest?
I’d never spent much time on freighters, so I knew relatively little about their layout.
But as the door slid open, revealing our new ‘jail’, I could immediately see why the pirates had chosen to house their captives here.
In this part of the ship, there were a series of containment rooms, each with their own environmental controls.
The large storage containers – about two metres wide and four metres long – were used to store any goods that needed particular environments that were different from the rest of the ship – cold storage for food, for example, or chemicals that needed to be kept frozen.
I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, wondering whether they intended to freeze us to death.