Chapter 23 #2
She grabbed a thick, fast-drying insulating paste and smeared it generously over the metal collar at her throat, especially where she could feel an uneven seam, likely where Horos had placed whatever “transmitter” he had bragged about.
She waited a few seconds for it to harden and block the signal, then dug a pair of cutters out of the tools.
Jaw clenched, she set the jaws against the collar’s rim and squeezed.
This was the moment of truth.
If Horos was right and had actually built something clever, the paste would not be enough to block communication or fry the internal wiring.
And then she was dead.
But if it worked, nothing stood between her and revenge.
Lily pressed down. The casing cracked, then the cables inside snapped.
The collar sprang open. She wrenched it wider until she could slip free.
One glance was enough to understand Horos had lied again. No self-destruction protocol. No transmitter. Just a bent strip of metal with a light.
Lily could have killed with her stare, but she could not afford even a second of rage. She grabbed the toolbox, pivoted, and sprinted out of the cargo bay, leaving Saxum alone with the vukri.
She was running for the nearby service hatch, planning to slip into the maintenance channels around the hangar and strike Horos from there, when Vitro shuddered.
That was a bad sign. Very few things could make a ship this size tremble.
“What happened?!” Horos boomed in her ear.
“The vukri are better than we thought,” Lily said. “But we’ve got it under control.”
“Lily, I swear, if the ship takes damage and the deal collapses because of this…”
“All right, don’t get worked up.”
She cut the line before he could spit disbelief and glanced at her console, now flooded with Vitro’s fault alerts.
To an untrained eye it would have been a meaningless stream of codes. Lily saw through it instantly.
B10350 — relay failure in Sector C
B105FZ — no response from Sector C cable network
H56SS — reduced pressure in Sector C
And more. And more. And more.
A riot of errors.
Lily smiled.
She did not believe in divine intervention, but it felt like fate had handed her an opportunity on a silver platter.
The alerts told her a vukri had chewed its way into one of Vitro’s service corridors and damaged something important.
She was already waiting for the system-wide notice as the new plan formed in her mind.
Warning: Critical error
Shield generator operation unsafe due to supporting system failures.
Shield generation suspended until further service.
No shields meant nothing stood between them and the frozen, murderous vacuum except the ship’s hull, a skin that a careless plasma shot could tear open and turn the entire hangar into a death sentence.
Even the greenest off-worlder knew running without shields was not a game and that one had to be cautious when it happened.
Space, however, was only one threat stalking them.
Lily suspected the smugglers had arrived with more than one ship, and only Vitro’s shield had kept them from grappling the cruiser the moment they sensed weakness. She could not be sure, which meant she had to move fast, before they could strike.
She slipped into the service hatch and headed for the hangar.
This service channel ran along the hangar wall and in places above the ceiling, broken at intervals by vent grates.
She could not fully stand inside the tunnel, but her height worked in her favor and she moved quickly in a crouch.
At the first ceiling vent she flattened to her stomach and peered through.
As she expected, the smugglers had not stayed put. They were closing in on Horos in a tightening ring, the way hyenas circle a wounded animal.
“You cheated us, Corvus trash. The price we paid was for an intact ship. Without shields this junk isn’t worth half.”
“What are you talking about?” Horos snapped. “It’s a minor service issue. My partner can fix it with her eyes closed.”
“Then call her back. I’ll send someone to deal with the vukri before they do more damage to the ship.”
“No. You can’t go on the ship unsupervised.”
Horos tried to shout, but it came out thin and squealing. The smuggler boss stepped close and poked Horos in the chest with one gelatinous limb, as if already deciding where to aim when things did not go according to plan.
“You don’t have much choice, bureaucrat worm. I accepted that the ship isn’t yours and you can only grant limited rights, but I’m not budging on this. Call. Your. Partner. Back.”
Horos tried to resist, but the snot-green alien did not care. He twisted Horos’s arm and used his wrist console to call Lily.
Lily had blocked him long ago.
The smuggler cursed and sent three of his men after the golem. Then he shoved Horos against the wall by the collar and forced him to continue registering the rest.
Lily backed away from the tunnel and followed the smugglers.
When they passed the maintenance channel, she shadowed them, waited until they opened the door to the vukri-infested cargo bay, then slid in behind the last one and pressed the restart rod against his neck. The smuggler dropped like a rag doll.
Lily looped cable ties around his hands and feet and dragged him into a storage nook off the corridor. Then she went after the other two.
The cargo bay door stayed open behind them. Lily peeked inside.
The golem lay on the floor, apparently unconscious, his body marked with animal bites from the vukri.
Pinkish blood seeped weakly from the gray, rocklike skin, pooling into a wide slick that vukri and smugglers had tracked across the deck.
The vukri bounced and darted like rabbits, vanishing into cover as the smugglers chased them.
Lily used the chaos to slip between the locker rows.
She had lost direct sight of her target, but she could track him through his own comms, because he kept reporting to the boss through his wrist console.
“Saxum’s hurt. Might be dead. The Corvus’s minion is gone too. Maybe the vukri got them. We’re chasing them, but without plasma weapons it’s damn hard to catch the little pests.”
“Selor,” the boss replied, “don’t tell me a few vukri are outsmarting you.”
Selor sounded more afraid of his boss than of the situation. He stammered excuses and ended the call, breaking into a run.
Lily heard his footsteps thudding and ran parallel behind the next locker row. He might have been taller and wider than her, but when he turned the corner and hit the restart rod she held out, he went down in a red-brown blur, bellowing in pain as he hit the metal floor.
“What in the void!” he gasped, staring up at her.
Without Horos’s black hood, he was clearly trying to make sense of who she was, but even the slowest alien would have understood one thing. She was not a friend.
Before he could move, she treated him the same as the first. Shock to the neck with the restart rod, loops on the limbs, stuffing in the mouth, then a firm kick to slide him out of sight.
Lily was almost proud of the efficiency, though in a cleaner moment she might have wondered when disabling smugglers had become routine.
“Selor! Where are you?”
Lily’s head snapped up.
Before the last one could spot her, she climbed onto the storage units and waited until he bent over his fallen partner.
“Cradle, Selor. Who did this to you?”
Lily brought the restart rod down hard on the crouching alien’s head.
He did not pass out, but he toppled to his side clutching his bleeding skull.
Lily grabbed the rod, cranked it to maximum, and pressed it to his back.
The discharge ruined the tool, burned her palm, and left him twitching and helpless at her feet.
She used metal cable to bind him to the main locker post, then squeezed her throbbing hand and turned her attention to the vukri.
Vitro’s sensors showed five heat signatures scattered among the stacked crates, one inside the wall.
Lily ran to the medical kit on the side wall, slapped insulating gel onto her burned hand. It disinfected and sealed the wound, but the cold was brutal, almost freezing.
Teeth clenched, she searched for the vukri in the wall, trying to figure out how she would reach it, when she spotted the massive hole torn into the wall that housed Panel C, likely from Saxum’s plasma weapon.
The vukri lay inside the breach.
In its final moments it had tried to chew into the cable bundle, but the golem’s fist had crushed its spine. The heat map suggested it had happened recently. It was not breathing, but the body was still warm.
Lily set her console to alert her the moment any vukri left hiding, then got to work restoring Vitro’s shields.
She ignored every official safety step the service manual would have demanded.
In minutes she cleaned and reconnected the damaged cables.
She slapped a repair film over the hole and sealed it with the same paste she had used on her collar.
Then, through the service panel, she forced Vitro with manual overrides to restore vacuum integrity in the channel and stabilize conditions for shield restart.
Was it perfect? No.
Would it hold long term? Also no.
But it worked. For now, that was all that mattered.
When she finished the shield generator patchwork, she ran out of the cargo bay and, at the external control, dropped oxygen levels inside to the minimum required for survival.
The reduced pressure would ease the strain on the repair film and leave anyone inside barely able to stand. They would pass out soon.
Lily was starting to tire, but she moved at a near run down the corridor toward the service tunnel.
She needed to bring the shields back online.
She needed to hunt Horos.
When she turned the corner, she hit something hard. Black. Solid.
She lost her balance and dropped onto her backside, then looked up at what had stopped her.
The fall had taken only an instant.
It was long enough for disappointment to flood her, bitter and sharp.
Damn it.
I was so close.