Chapter 3
Jen didn’t think.
Her body moved before her brain caught up. Out of the lift, away from the attackers—escape was the only option. A gunshot cracked loud enough to punch through her eardrums and leave them ringing.
She pelted down the narrow corridor, careened through a maintenance door. Hit the ladder access and went down without touching half the rungs, palms sliding hot on the rails. Her tool kit banged against her hip. Her boots hit the deck, the sound booming as if she was running inside a steel drum.
Max. Smith. Cutter.
She didn’t look back.
Had Max’s sacrifice bought her enough time, or had they killed him the second she ran?
Her throat closed.
Not now. She couldn’t think about that now. She could fall apart later. If there was a later.
But Max’s voice echoed anyway. Run, Chief. GO!
An alarm split the air, the sound so sharp her vision lurched with it.
Red strobes washed the corridor in violent flashes, turning the steel walls into a pulsing nightmare.
“Lockdown protocol initiated. Lockdown protocol initiated.” The calm, automated voice made her want to scream.
Her breath came in ragged gasps, and her temple throbbed where the gun had struck. Blood dripped warm down her jaw. She swiped it away, smearing red across her knuckles.
Lockdown sealed the weapons systems behind blast doors and firewalls. Hours to breach, even if you knew the architecture. But it also meant she was locked down on Seven with an unknown number of armed terrorists, with no idea what they wanted.
Not good.
She slowed.
What now?
Think. Think.
Communications.
Get a signal out. Alert someone, anyone, before the terrorists accessed the missiles.
She took off again, rounded a corner too fast, and almost skidded out. The east corridor stretched ahead—long and exposed. She stumbled to a halt.
The corridor was too quiet except for the alarm’s mechanical scream. Where was everyone? Over forty crew on Seven, and she’d seen no one.
She slowed her pace.
Nothing.
No footsteps or voices.
No breathing but her own.
North corridor. Comms room ahead.
She dropped to her knees at the corner, peering around.
The corridor to the comms room stretched empty. Thirty feet of exposed passage. The door at the end stood ajar.
Her pulse crashed in her ears.
A trap?
Or abandoned?
You’re achieving nothing hiding here, Jen.
She surged to her feet, sprinted, slammed her back to the wall beside the comms room door.
No sound inside.
She pushed it open with her fingertips.
The room was destroyed. Shattered monitors. Dark screens. Wires ripped like torn veins. A console fizzed in intermittent white flashes.
She stepped inside. Glass crunched under her boots. She reached for the backup keyboard—hard-wired to the satellite uplink.
Her fingers pressed into something tacky.
She lifted her hand.
Blood.
On the keyboard. On the console. Pooling beside the chair where someone had—
Her stomach heaved. She staggered back, wiping her hand on her coveralls. The stain smeared but didn’t disappear.
God. She wasn’t sending a mayday out from here.
The missile command center.
“Missile Command.” She keyed transmit on her radio. “I’m en-route—”
Shit. If they’re monitoring the frequencies—
She cut the transmission.
But she had to know if they’d breached Missile Command. If they hadn’t, she needed to make sure they didn’t. Either way, standing still wasn’t an option.
She hurried back out into the corridor. Her legs felt distant and numb. Command was dead center in Seven’s core. A short walk from where she was now.
Her breath sawed in and out of her chest.
The heavy fire door that led to Command was straight ahead.
She hurried toward it, then paused, sucking in a deep breath before she pushed through.
Voices.
She froze, hand on the door, and peeked through the small window of reinforced glass. The corridor leading to the missile command deck was empty. She crouched, opened the fire door a sliver, and squeezed through.
The lights flickered—emergency power cycling on and off, lighting the metal in ghostly jumps. A voice barked from somewhere ahead, sharp and irritated. Russian.
The alarm klaxon cut.
The silence was worse.
Suddenly every breath she took sounded like a shout. She crept to where the corridor opened onto the hexagonal security foyer and pressed herself to the wall.
Beyond the foyer was the two-stage airlock to the Missile Command deck. Biometric scanners. Blast-rated doors. Designed to be impenetrable.
The terrorists hadn’t gotten through. Not yet.
She forced her breath shallow, straining to catch what she could with her patchy Russian.
A voice crackled from a radio. “...missile deck is sealed. No access...”
Another voice responded through the static. “Can’t remove the missiles without disarming them…too long…manually.”
A third voice, deeper and frustrated: “We don’t have time for this shit. The buyers…”
Jen’s stomach knotted.
Buyers?
She dropped to her haunches and risked a look.
Four terrorists in similar gear to the ones who’d threatened her earlier. They surrounded two security techs kneeling between them in gray coveralls, hands trembling.
One terrorist stepped forward. Older. Grizzled chin and eyes like wet gravel.
He grabbed one tech by the collar and hauled him closer.
“Open door,” he said in clipped, accented English. “We access missile deck.”
Access. Not launch codes.
They weren’t here to launch anything. They were here to steal the interceptor missiles. A fortune in hardened steel and guidance tech.
The tech shook his head, voice cracking. “I—I can’t. System’s locked down.”
The grizzled man turned slowly and aimed at the second tech still kneeling on the floor. “Just so we understand each other.”
He fired.
The shot exploded through the corridor. The tech dropped.
The surviving tech crumpled forward, a raw, broken moan escaping him.
No—
The sound that tore from her throat wasn’t a scream. Barely more than a strangled cry. But her hand clamped over her mouth a second too late.
Voices shouted.
Coming fast.
Jen sprinted for the engineering stairwell.
Down, not up.
The missile deck was sealed. The lockdown was holding. But if they broke through the airlock, she needed to stop them.
And everything she needed was in the guts of Seven.