Chapter 28
The familiar gut-wrenching lurch of the hyperspace drop-out slammed Carmen back into her command chair. The swirling chaos of the vortex vanished from the viewscreen, replaced by the unsettling, star-flecked emptiness of normal space.
And yet, nothing felt normal. The tension aboard Antilles was tight and thick.
It wasn’t just the fear that the patched-together drive would tear itself apart again, stranding them for good this time.
Nor was it the ominous presence of the Forbidden Zone perimeter that now loomed before them like the jaws of some savage beast ready to devour them.
No, the real weight on her shoulders was the disapproval of her crew.
Norvik had barely spoken to her in the sixteen hours since he’d insisted locking up Mila was in everyone’s best interest. She tried to tell herself that wasn’t unusual.
He wasn’t really one for casual conversation or small talk.
But it was hard to believe he wasn’t giving her the silent treatment.
Letitia, too, had been standoffish. Honestly, she had been since the pheromone revelation.
Was she regretting pushing so hard for Carmen to rescue Mila?
Would she cast a different vote if she had it to do over again?
And how much of her attitude was simply anger at Carmen rebuffing her desire for more than casual sex?
And Sark remained a trembling mass of fear. She’d known him long enough to know he wasn’t angry. He was just terrified by the potential consequences of Carmen’s decisions. Which was strange. He’d never mistrusted her judgment before. Even after The Buccaneer.
So here they were on the edge of Forbidden space. She’d brought them all here, yet it felt as though she were alone on the bridge of the Antilles, as if she had come here with no one at all.
Not even the woman they were here to save.
The memory of the kiss in Engineering haunted Carmen. What had she been thinking? Was it just the overwhelming smell of Mila’s pheromones? Did the scent get so deeply inside her brain that she abandoned all sense?
Surrender.
What was the matter with her? How could she even have contemplated such a concept, let alone acted on it? Somehow Mila was changing her, making Carmen Díaz into someone she didn’t fully recognize. She needed the XenX woman in a way she had never needed anyone.
But with her quarantined to Engineering, Carmen couldn’t feel her. It was as if she didn’t really exist, while Carmen sat staring at the doorstep of the contraband alien’s home.
They’d made it. Mostly. The drive’s deep, wounded growl vibrated through the deck plates, a constant reminder of its fragility, but it hadn’t shattered. Yet.
“Perimeter confirmed, Captain,” Sark announced, his voice tight. He tapped the nav console, bringing up tactical overlays. “No sign of patrols. Passive sensors running silent. Target dead-ahead.”
Carmen’s gaze turned to the main screen. There it sat, a cold, unwinking eye against the backdrop of distant nebulae and the oppressive darkness of the Forbidden Zone beyond:
The security satellite.
A sleek, predatory wedge of dark metal, bristling with sensor arrays, it looked deceptively harmless on the screen. But it was anything but. If they got too near, if they passed by it without disarming it …
A knot of anxious anticipation, wound tight during the jump, tightened further in Carmen’s chest, pressing against her ribs like a vice.
This was it. The gatekeeper. The automated sentry that stood between them and delivering Mila home.
Between survival and becoming another cloud of expanding debris.
“Norvik,” Carmen said, her cool tone cutting through the tense silence on the bridge. “Initiate the hack. Zed, feed him everything you’ve got on that bird’s protocols. Sark, keep us steady. Minimal emissions. We’re a freaking ghost.”
“Acknowledged, Captain,” Norvik replied, his tone as unnervingly calm as ever.
He swiveled his chair towards his comm station, his blue fingers already flying across the interface. The Collectivist’s impassive face showed no hint of the stakes. Just another variable to manipulate.
“Transmitting,” he reported. “Schema cross-referenced with known UPA perimeter defense protocols. Initiating primary intrusion vector.”
Carmen’s knuckles whitened on the armrests of her command chair. She forced her breathing to stay even. In. Out.
Control. It was all about control. Control the ship. Control the situation. Control the impossible odds.
On the viewscreen, a thin, almost invisible beam of coherent light lanced out from the Antilles towards the distant satellite. The hack. A digital probe seeking a chink in the fortress’s armor. Silence descended, thick and heavy, broken only by the frantic clicking of Norvik’s console.
Each tick of the chronometer on the console felt like a hammer blow.
Sark fidgeted in his pilot’s seat, his orange skin looking sallow under the bridge lights.
Letitia stood rigid near the now-useless weapons console, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her dark eyes fixed on the viewscreen, radiating a tension that mirrored Carmen’s own.
The unspoken fracture from Carmen’s defense of Mila hung between them, a cold wall neither had breached.
“Status, Norvik?” Carmen demanded, the words snapping out.
“Encryption layers are formidable,” Norvik replied, his voice still infuriatingly level.
His yellow pupils flickered as he scanned scrolling data.
“Secondary counter-intrusion protocols activated. Zed is deploying adaptive decryption algorithms. Processing.” He paused, a micro-frown briefly touching his blue features.
“Resistance is unexpected. Exceeding Collective predictive models.”
“Intrusion attempt repelled,” Zed announced abruptly. The beam on the viewscreen winked out. “Security subsystem Gamma activated. Firewall integrity at 98.7%. Adaptive countermeasures detected.”
“Mierda,” Carmen hissed under her breath. The knot in her chest tightened another notch. “Again. Try the secondary vector Zed identified. The backdoor protocol.”
“Executing secondary intrusion vector,” Norvik confirmed. Another beam lanced out, subtly different in frequency. The wait resumed, even more oppressive than before.
Carmen’s mind raced. Eleven-point-four percent. Had she gambled everything – the ship, the crew, their last shred of defense – on a number lower than a crapshoot? For what? A moral stance that felt increasingly like a millstone?
She glanced at Letitia. The weapons officer met her gaze for a fraction of a second, her expression unreadable, before looking back at the screen.
No support there. Only Sark’s fearful eyes briefly met hers, full of unspoken questions she couldn’t answer.
Norvik might as well have been carved from ice.
The isolation she’d felt after the containment argument settled over her again, colder than the void outside.
“Secondary vector failure,” Zed reported. “Countermeasures deployed with increased efficiency. Probability of successful remote intrusion recalculated: 0.03%.”
“Damn it!” Carmen slammed her fist down on the armrest. The sharp crack echoed in the tense silence. “What’s the block? Why can’t we punch through?”
Norvik swiveled his chair fully to face her. For the first time, his usually impassive expression held a flicker of something resembling frustration.
“The satellite possesses a military-grade comms shield, Captain. It’s not just encryption. It’s a physical barrier. Our transmission beams are being scattered, absorbed. We cannot establish a stable data link sufficient for intrusion. Remote access is impossible.”
The words sliced through her like laser beams. Impossible.
The hope she’d been desperately hoarding – the fragile belief that Zed’s brilliance and Norvik’s cold logic could find a way – turned to bile in her mouth.
Anxious anticipation curdled into a cold, sinking dread that pooled in her stomach, heavy and nauseating.
They were stuck. Trapped between a kill-sat and the vast, unknown dangers of the Forbidden Zone.
Sitting ducks with a drive that could blow any second.
Options? They had none. Turn back? To what? The void? Or straight into the waiting guns of COPS patrols, Velasco’s hunters, or opportunistic pirates?
But staying here was death. That satellite would detect their UPA chip signature eventually. Passive sensors or not, it was designed to find intruders.
“Anyone got a solution?” she said, trying to keep the defeat from her tone.
“Yes,” Norvik said. “Though the risk factor is incredibly high.”
For moment, she stared at him in stunned amazement. He’d opposed her so hard throughout this insane mission. Now, he had a suggestion? That was high-risk?
“I’m all ears,” Carmen said.
“The code cannot be beamed to the satellite,” he said, “but it could theoretically be input manually.”
Utter silence engulfed the bridge. Everyone gaped at Norvik. Carmen struggled to get her mind around what he was saying. She didn’t know what was crazier – the idea or that it was Norvik who suggested it.
“What?” Letitia said, giving voice to what everyone thought. “How?”
“Most satellites are hardly larger than any of the known sentient lifeforms,” he explained.
“They have just enough size and mass to carry out their function. They are otherwise comprised of computer chips and their associated hardware, and the software the equipment runs. Software must be programmed, and this is typically done from external interface boards built into the chassis.”
Carmen blinked. Was he serious?
“Norvik, are you suggesting what I think you are?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Someone must spacewalk to the satellite and manually input the code to hack the mainframe and order it to ignore Antilles’s recognizer chip.”
Holy shit. It was a simple solution, one so obvious that it might never have occurred to her.