Would he even fit into an escape pod?
Fiona shook her head, the tip of her dark ponytail sweeping her shoulders. “He left the lab only once, and I couldn’t stop him from poking around the cargo holds. He wanted to know where we were taking everything.”
Nowhere anymore. At this rate, those things had no chance of getting to where they needed to go. The food and seeds were for the dirt-poor colonies out in Sectors 17 and 18, which would never recover from the war. The books were for the Intergalactic Library’s rare and archaic section, and the drop-off I’d had planned would have been stealth itself. The vaccines were for the orphanage on Starway 8. Abandoned kids never got cure-alls. I would know.
“What do you mean ‘superpower stuff,’” I asked, suddenly zeroing in on what Fiona had said.
“I mean give a few rounds to Jax, and he’d be unstoppable. Strength. Speed. Boosted healing.” Fiona huffed. “Hell, give some to Shiori, and she’d kick ass like she was twenty years old again.”
I felt my jaw loosen. An enhancer? The enhancer? I’d thought that was a myth. Or a dream. Or something that would never work.
And then it hit me. No wonder the lab had been so discreet, so empty of personnel that it shouldn’t have drawn a single eye as it floated around out in bumblefuck Lyronium. That was how the Overseer worked. Hide your best science. Destroy what you don’t understand.
Shit! I’d almost genetically modified about three thousand kids.
“We can’t give that to orphans!” It was the abomination the galactic government had been working toward for years.
Fiona shrugged. “You can if you want to turn people into super soldiers without telling them and call the drug a vaccine.”
I gasped. Wasn’t the military already unstoppable enough?
An ear-splitting hammering started on the starboard side. I closed my eyes.
They’re going to tear apart my ship.
I inhaled slowly and then glanced up, seeing the edge of the Dark Watch ship come into view. Too bad I couldn’t incinerate it with only the heat of my glare.
The galactic generals weren’t just lying to civilians anymore. Apparently, they were lying to their own.
Furious on behalf of just about everything that lived, I slammed out a combination on my console. “I won’t give it back. I’ll die before the Overseer gets his drug back and uses super soldiers to terrorize the Outer Zones even worse.”
The bridge lights flickered from the sudden power drain, and the hammering abruptly stopped.
“I just electrified the whole starboard side.” Best case scenario? I fried their jackhammer, and they’d have to return to the warship for another. Worst case? We were pretty much already living it.
Bridgebane’s voice barked through the com again. “You are now accountable for an attack on the military, three burn victims, and a damaged Type-4 heavy armor hammer. Also, galactic records show no Captain T. Bailey and no Cargo Cruiser Endeavor. We’ve definitively identified the floating lab. We will fire on the bridge if you continue to resist.”
Jax looked at me. “They can blow up the bridge and still recover the lab.”
I watched the behemoth warship hover over our starboard side. DW 12 definitely wasn’t behind us anymore. “If they board, we’re dead.”
We were all repeat offenders. With the vaccine heist, I had four black marks against me. Now I had an attack on the military as well. Five offenses meant no jury, no trial, and no more wasting food and space on a criminal like me. Jaxon was in the same situation, but not for theft. I called what he’d done in the Outer Zones heroic. The galactic government called it murder, because they’d won.
I wasn’t sure where Shiori and Fiona stood in terms of black marks, but Fiona was a bio-criminal who’d created at least three major airborne plagues when she’d been fighting with the rebels out in 17, just like Jax. And Miko had cut off her own left hand to get out of shackles, so I was pretty damn sure she didn’t like being chained up.
I glanced over at my navigator. Miko’s brown-skinned beauty had landed her in a position she didn’t want to be in when she was nineteen years old. I didn’t have the details, but Miko’s sporadic comments about the violent appetites of powerful men spoke volumes. And Miko’s death sentence spoke volumes about her violent response. She’d escaped with her grandmother’s help the night before she was slated to die, and Shiori went where Miko went, even if that was a galactic prison or a cargo cruiser that looked like a good place to hide.
Five years together now—Jax, Fiona, Miko, Shiori, and me—and my obsession with orphans and their health was about to get my loyal band of misfits killed. If I hadn’t taken the whole floating lab, no galactic warships would have been looking for us. There wouldn’t have been a Dark Watch frigate in Sector 14. Captain Bridgebane would have been stalking someone else.
I looked out the windows at the looming Black Widow and curled my hands into fists. Such nothingness was terrifying. I could almost feel its unholy pull.
I should have stayed away from the vaccines—the super soldier serums. I should have known the almighty Galactic Overseer could never produce anything good or pure.
The ship lurched—the DW’s boarding cruiser latching on again with new equipment. Probably insulated this time. My tricks never worked twice.
“I’m getting some of those vials before it’s too late,” Fiona said, racing for the door. “I can work backward and figure out the organics, I’m sure!”
“Stay put.” My voice rang out over the bridge. “I’ll get the samples. And the big guy.”
Fiona pulled up short. At least everyone here listened to me. When I said stop, they stopped. When I said move, they moved. My father may have stripped me of my identity and tried to get rid of me when he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, but I’d obviously inherited his imperial vibe and knew how to use it, despite eighteen years of abandonment and four Sectors of separation.
I looked at my crew one by one. At my friends. My real family. “Anyone in an escape pod when I get back can take their chances with the authorities. If you’re still on the bridge, you’re dying today with the Endeavor, me, and a hell of a lot of super soldier serum. You have less than five minutes to decide.”
*
I quickly worked my way through the succession of air locks and the vacuum seal and then strode into the stolen lab, spying the massive man immediately. He was two heads taller than anything else in the room, including the dozens of metal shelves stacked with vaccines.
I took him in, surprised all over again. No one was naturally that big. Maybe he’d been shot up with super soldier juice, and this was the result.
He looked up at my entrance and then set down the vial he’d been holding. It wasn’t a vaccine. It was blood.