Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At the door to her cabin, Nissa tried to ignore the taste of Justyn lingering in her mouth. If she wasn’t careful, she’d fall headlong into an addiction for that flavor. Her body was still tingling all over.
Her cabin door was closed and looked normal, but the tension pumping off Justyn and Rynan behind her reminded her that it wasn’t. She opened the door and gasped.
All her things were tossed about the cabin like a rabid dog had been let loose inside. The bunk had been ripped open and synth-stuffing littered the room like snow.
“What the fuck?” Justyn swore.
Her stomach did a fast turn. “The notes!” She raced to the desk.
All her handwritten notes and the few original documents she’d been looking at were gone. Her Sync lay in the center of the desk, blue screen blinking.
“No.” As she tapped in commands, she already knew what she’d find. “They uploaded a virus into my Sync.” She looked up. “Everything’s gone.”
Justyn swore again, snatching the Sync from her. “We have backups, but we have to see how far the virus went. If it made it into the Nomad’s system…”
“Nico’s up in security control.” A forbidding look was etched on Rynan’s face. “He’s one of my best with tech. I’ll get him running security checks on the system.”
“We need to get to the office and check the stuff we had stored on the consoles,” Nissa said.
The three of them jogged to the cabin housing their makeshift office and accessed the computer consoles.
The virus had targeted everything they had referencing the Nero and the Constitution. It had all been wiped clean.
Nissa pressed a shaky hand over her mouth. “Who would have done this?”
“Someone who wants the Constitution.” Justyn scowled.
Rynan had just finished talking with Nico. “At least the virus only targeted the records referencing the Constitution. The rest of the Nomad’s systems look okay.”
Justyn nodded, his gaze distant. “We have a mole onboard.”
She sank back into a chair. It had to be one of the crew or one of the passengers. “How would they know what we have planned?”
“Who did you tell about our hunt?”
Nissa’s heart skipped a beat. No way was she telling him that Admiral DeRuyter knew. Besides, the admiral wouldn’t have sabotaged the hunt. “No one.”
“Your crew, your bosses?”
“I told them I was taking a leave of absence.” She gave a small laugh. “Goddess, if I told them what I had planned, they’d have thought I’d lost my mind.”
“Sorry.” He rubbed the nape of her neck with his thumb. “Don’t worry. We’ll stick with our plan of going to Hydrae.”
She swallowed. Why did it feel so terrible to lie to him?
He glanced at his brother. “Ry, you able to get anything back?”
A brief nod. “We should be able to get most of the records back. It’ll take some time, though.”
“And we’ll be able to recreate the important stuff,” Justyn said. “Besides, we’d found everything we could. Now we’ll just have to see if Hydrae really does have any answers.”
“Wait!” Nissa sprung to her feet. “I found something. It was the reason I came down to your cabin in the middle of the night.”
“Oh, so you weren’t after my body?”
She pulled a face. “Unlike your lost friend.”
Rynan cleared his throat. “Think I’ll join Nico in the security center. When you’re ready, Nissa, I’d like to hear what you found.” He made a swift exit.
Justyn held his hands up. “Hey, I told you the pretty little colonist was after Dare’s body, not mine. He usually takes his pick of the ladies on a convoy, keeps one for the duration.”
Nissa tilted her head. “Never longer?”
“Never. A bit better than Rynan. He never sleeps with the same woman twice.”
“And you?”
A wicked smile. “A gentleman never tells.”
“You are no gentleman.”
“Right. Well, let’s just say I’ve had my eye on a certain Patrol captain for a while.”
Her insides warmed. Those words affected her, even if she suspected they weren’t true. She cleared her throat. “So, I was going to tell you what I found.”
He leaned a hip against the table. “Let’s hear it.” He touched a finger to her cheekbone, stroking softly. His voice lowered. “I am incredibly happy you found whatever it is since it brought you to me in the middle of the night.”
She tried to fight the smile, but it won out. “I found a reference in the document that I’m sure is talking about Griffin.”
He straightened. “What?”
“It talks about a group of Terran adventurers whose ship was attacked. They barely survived, but were rescued and brought to Hydrae. The timing’s right. About a thousand years ago.”
He rubbed his nose against hers. “Sounds like we’re definitely on the right track.”
“You haven’t heard the best bit.”
“Hit me.”
“It talks about the fact they were carrying a sacred old-Earth treasure.”
He punched a fist in the air. “We’re going to do this, Nissa. We’re going to find the US Constitution.”
She answered his wild smile, but then it slipped away. “Unless whoever destroyed my notes also saw the information. And passes it onto someone else.”
Justyn straightened and used a few creative curses. “We need to get to Hydrae. Fast.” He leaped to his feet. “And we need to tell no one where we’re headed or when. Let’s keep our mole in the dark.”
“Strapped in?”
At his question, Nissa glanced up from the co-pilot’s chair in the Mercury. “Strapped in.”
Justyn set about firing up the engines. It was nice to be back in his little runnership. He loved the Nomad and the company of its crew, but there was something about being off by himself, in charge of his direction, headed wherever the hell he wanted to go that appealed strongly to him.
Though—he stole a glance at the woman beside him—it was kind of nice having Nissa in the chair beside him.
He tapped the console and Rynan’s face filled the screen. “Ry, we clear to leave?”
“Yes. See you at Hydrae, and be careful, bro.”
Justyn tossed his brother a salute, then focused on the viewscreen. The main hangar of the Nomad was big. It housed Justyn’s runnership, Rynan’s medium-sized cuttership called the Pathfinder, Aurina’s scoutship she’d named the Ariel, and two shuttles.
With a touch of the controls, his girl responded instantly and rose just a few centimeters off the deck. Another touch and she turned to face the external door covered with the purple shimmer of a huma-field.
“All right. Next stop Hydrae.”
Justyn maneuvered the Mercury out of the hangar, and moments later they were alongside the bulk of the Sky Nomad. He set the course. “Once we hit interstellar speed, we’ll reach Hydrae in just over an hour.”
Nissa rubbed her hands together. “Great. I can’t wait to see what we find.”
He didn’t warn her they might not find anything. He liked seeing the flush of excitement on her face.
Soon they hit interstellar speed, the stars turning to a stream of silver-white blurs that streaked past them.
He sat back. “Hey, I have something for you.”
She eyed him, trying to hide her interest. “Another present?”
“Yep.”
“I’m not so easily bought.”
“Nothing easy about you, Captain Smooth.” He pulled the small object from his pocket and handed it over.
She studied the small blue box wrapped with a slightly crooked cream ribbon. He had big hands, that weren’t designed for tying neat bows, but she didn’t seem to mind. She pulled the ribbon off, opened the box, and lifted the tiny metal dog out.
It sat on the palm of her hand. “He’s so cute.” She smiled. “Thank you.”
Damn, he’d do just about anything to see that smile. Justyn reached out and touched the switch on the side of the dog. The minute robot came to life, emitting a tinny bark, sitting, then bounding to his feet to turn in circles.
“Wow.” Nissa’s smile widened. “It’s wonderful.”
“My cousin, Malin, makes them. They’re modeled after a real-life droid dog.” Justyn watched the little thing sit down on Nissa’s palm, tongue lolling. “Krypto’s a hell of a lot bigger than this guy.”
“Your cousin’s a talented metalsmith.”
“She’s a salvage mechanic. Since she shacked up with a cyborg on Centax, she learned how to make these guys from her boss at the salvage yard there.”
Nissa’s eyebrows rose. “Your cousin lives on Centax? With a Centaxian?”
“Cross-eyed in love with the guy. And he’s a CenSec to boot.”
Now Nissa’s mouth dropped open. “Your cousin is in love with a Centax Security cyborg? A lethal, emotionless, feared-across-the-galaxy CenSec?”
“Well, since he’s just as in love with her, I think the emotionless part might not be accurate. The rest of it…well, Xander is one scary son of a bitch?—”
“Xander Saros?” Nissa said incredulously.
“Yep.”
“He isn’t just a CenSec, he’s the head of Centax Security.”
“Yep.” Still shocked the hell out of Justyn, but he’d seen them together and didn’t doubt the cyborg would kill anything that harmed a hair on Mal’s head.
Suddenly, the sound of an alarm cut through the cockpit.
Nissa frowned. “Problem?”
He tapped at the screen. What he saw chilled his blood. “That can’t be right.” He tapped a few more commands and studied the sensor readings. “Fuck!”
“What is it?”
“Three starships en route to intercept us. And their weapons are hot.”
She tensed. “Can you tell who they are?”
“Nope.” Justyn altered the Mercury’s course. “Time for me to use some of my mad evasion skills.”
“Yes, I’m aware that you have a few of those,” she said dryly.
“I need to drop out of interstellar speed to engage the cloak.” That would take them off their pursuers’ screens and give him time to lose them.
“Do it.”
The ship slowed, the stars turning back to pinpricks of light. “Engaging cloak now.”
He programmed in a couple of his standard evasion flight patterns. They zigzagged across space, moving well away from the location the ships had on them but still in the general direction of Hydrae.
“Nissa, pull up the sensor readings and the maps Ry uploaded. See if you can find any nearby planets, an asteroid field, or a moon. Any place we can use to hide.”
With a nod, she set to work.