Gage doesn’t answer. I whirl around to find him passed out several feet from the bridge door with Kali kneeling at his side.
“Get back in your seat!” I roar, unfastening my harness and running across the bridge to her.
“He needs—”
“He needs to be strapped in, and so do you, or you’re going to end up with the next concussion.” I sling him over my shoulder and carry him to the nearest open chair. Max is already there, waiting to fasten him in.
“You get back to your seat as well,” I snarl as the Starlight zips to the right to avoid more projectiles.
The jump is effective, but it’s not nearly as smooth as it was the first time, and I nearly end up going ass-over-ankles myself.
“Maybe you should take your own advice,” Max shoots back with a raised brow.
Before I can tell him to fuck straight off, the Starlight jumps again—and this time I end up taking a header straight into Max. We land in a heap on the floor while Gage lolls about, blissfully unconscious, strapped into his chair.
“We need to stop fucking around and get out of here,” Merrick growls as I try to stand up and nearly go flying again as the Starlight does yet another fancy maneuver.
I land on the floor next to Rain this time, and fuck it. Just fuck it. I start crawling to the captain’s chair, determined to get there before who the fuck knows what else happens.
But the torpedoes are coming so fast and furious now, one after the other, that even crawling is difficult as the Starlight does the most bizarre evasive maneuvers I have ever been witness to in an attempt to avoid them.
“Why isn’t she flying away?” Rain asks, sounding like she’s going to cry.
“Because those are Corporation catamarans bearing down on us,” Max answers grimly. “The fastest ships ever made. No way we can outrun them.”
“Yeah, well we should at least try,” I shoot back. “This damn sentient spaceship and her fucking agenda. I knew she was going to be trouble. I just fucking knew it.”
“What about her solar-flare-beam thing?” Kali asks. “Can we fire that?”
“Which part of ‘we’re not in control of this fucking ship’ do you not understand?” Beckett snarls at her. “We can’t do anything!”
“Yeah, well, we better start doing something, or we’re all gonna die.” Max looks over at me. “Any suggestions?”
“Besides blasting them out of the whole fucking system, which she seems incapable of doing?” I growl. “No, I’ve got nothing.”
Another torpedo slams into us, just to the right of the nose, and the whole fucking ship shudders like it’s about to collapse in on itself. An alarm goes off—the same one from our first day on board, when Gage pressed the big red button. Something tells me pressing it now isn’t going to turn the alarm back off this time.
“We need to know what that is,” I shout to Beckett to be heard over the alarm. “Can you pull up the video feed—” I break off because she’s already doing it.
“Is anything vital breached?” I ask as she whizzes through the pictures.
“It doesn’t look like it, but that alarm means something.” She blows out a long breath. “And if this keeps up, it’s only a matter of time. We have to—”
The Starlight emits a sound that can only be described as a high-pitched, mechanical scream. It chills me to my bones and has all of us whipping around, trying to figure out where it came from.
“What the hell was that?” Merrick demands.
I turn to the pilot. “Beckett?”
“I don’t know.” She sounds frantic. “I don’t fucking know. This ship isn’t telling me anything, and it’s not doing anything I want it to do. I don’t know what—”
Another high screech echoes through the bridge. And then the Starlight finally—finally—starts to fly.
Chapter 55
Beckett
“No, no, no, no, no!” I shout as I realize what’s happening. The relief I felt when the Starlight started to fly dies an instant death as I realize she’s not trying to outrun the ships after all. No, she’s flying straight toward them.
“Umm, shouldn’t we be turning around?” Rain asks in what is probably the politest voice used on this bridge since this whole clusterfuck began. “Why are we flying toward the scary spaceships when we should be flying away from them?”
“Good fucking question,” I mutter as I do the same thing I always do to make the Starlight turn. It doesn’t work.
I try again. Still doesn’t work.
“Beckett?” Ian asks in his best captain voice. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know.” I push the buttons that help with turn maneuverability. Nothing. I pull back on the control that handles her speed, trying to slow her down. It makes her go faster.
As does pushing on the control.
As does leaving it alone.
“I think she’s angry,” Kali volunteers.
“Spaceships don’t get angry!” Ian barks at her.
“Yeah, well, she’s hurt,” Kali points out. “She’s acting just like Beckett did when I punched her in the nose. Hurt equals angry equals make them pay.”
“But she’s just a—” He breaks off as the Starlight lets out what can only be described as a full-on, bloodcurdling war cry.
I’ve gone into battle dozens of times. Never have I heard anything that sent ice down my spine as quickly as this scream does.
“Oh, yeah.” Ian changes his tune pretty fast. “She is fucking pissed off.”
“Oh, really?” I drawl. “I never would have guessed.”
More torpedoes are firing at us now, and I brace myself for the one that blows us into a million different pieces. But before that happens, the Starlight throws out some kind of pulsing green beam that makes every single torpedo veer off in different directions away from us.
“Wait! She could do that the whole time?” Merrick yells. “Why did she let us get hit at all?”
I don’t have an answer for him, about any of it. The Starlight has gone rogue, and there is nothing I can do to change that fact. So for now, I’m just going to sit back, watch the show, and hope we don’t all die.
We’re getting very close to the other ships now—uncomfortably close—and they must feel it, too, because they switch from torpedoes to laser blast after laser blast. One after another after another.
There’s no way the Starlight’s going to be able to evade them all unless she’s got another pulsing green beam up her sleeve. If she does, she doesn’t fire it, and as the first blasts approach our hull, I brace for impact.
Except we’re not there anymore. Out of nowhere, the Starlight pulls the coolest maneuver I’ve ever seen, doing a vertical somersault over the three spaceships before coming in behind them.
The second she does, the blaring alarm stops, and so do the random screams—because she’s not there anymore. I don’t mean like she’s gone into stealth mode and cloaked herself from the other ships.
I mean she fucking disappears from us, too.
We’re still strapped in—I can feel the pilot’s seat beneath me and the harness holding me in place—but I can’t see either of them. And I can’t see anything else on the ship, either. No console. No walls. No floor. It’s like I’m sitting in an invisible chair floating through space while six other people, one of whom is still passed out, are doing the exact same thing.