Hitching up her dress, she sprinted down the hall and into the lobby, rudely knocking aside anyone in her path. She never looked back, focusing only on the double doors leading to the docking lot. She was close enough to smell shuttle exhaust when she heard shouts of “Stop!” and “Seal the exit!” behind her. With only a few yards to go, she pumped her legs harder and faster, head down and barreling through the doors just as they began to close.
She made it into the lot, but the instant her feet met concrete, an invisible force jerked her backward, and she slammed into the sealed fiberglass doors. Whipping her head around, she discovered that half her skirts were trapped on the other side. She tugged the fabric in vain while her heart pounded a frantic staccato. A glance through the glass showed two security officers pointing at her and shouting orders at the receptionist. When her gown refused to tear, Solara reached a trembling hand behind her and jerked down the bodice zipper. She pushed the dress over her hips and stepped free, then ran like hell toward the shuttle, wearing nothing but a pair of government-issue underpants and the long strips of linen she’d used to support her breasts.
Renny must have seen her coming, because he’d already fired up the shuttle and opened the rear hatch by the time she reached him. She sailed inside headfirst, screaming for him to “Go, go, go!” and the craft lifted off the ground before the door had even shut. She sealed the hatch and scrambled on her hands and knees toward the cockpit, then strapped in beside him.
“You forgot your dress,” Renny said, staring straight ahead while he white-knuckled the control wheel and jettisoned toward the security checkpoint.
“Never let anyone tell you,” she panted, “that I don’t know how to make an exit.”
He laughed for an instant before his features hardened. When Solara followed the direction of his gaze, she understood why. Red alarms flashed all around the guard station while security officers scrambled like ants behind the wraparound glass. A billboard message flashed NO EXIT, and the line of shuttlecraft waiting to leave the complex jerked to a stop, nearly causing a pileup.
“Renny…” she said, then went mute.
Instead of slowing down, he pushed the accelerators to the limit, sending Solara jerking back in her seat. As they zoomed toward a single shuttle halfway through the exit point, she began to understand Renny’s intentions. He was going to try to follow the craft out before the shield closed behind it. But if the shield caught their back end, the energy surge would destroy their circuitry, leaving them drifting right outside the satellite. They’d be easy pickings for the Enforcers, assuming the surge didn’t electrocute them first.
“Hold on,” he warned. “I’m gonna have to ram them to get out.”
She gripped the armrests and held her breath, watching in horror as they approached the rear of the shuttle with dizzying speed. The guard station buzzed past her periphery, and she braced for impact. Instinctively, her eyes clenched shut. The scream of steel on steel tore through her ears as she slammed against her harness. Her head flew forward and back just as quickly, and the next thing Solara knew, they were outside the security shield with a chorus of alarms blaring inside the cockpit.
Renny’s glasses had flown off, but he didn’t miss a beat. He veered right, separating them from the other shuttlecraft and away from the cannon’s line of fire. An energy blast nicked the port hull and forced them into a barrel roll, but he corrected quickly and hit the boosters. The shuttle rocketed toward the nearby moon, and an instant later, they were out of the cannon’s range.
But that didn’t mean they were safe.
Renny was too busy hugging the moon’s gravity field for a slingshot of acceleration to tend to the dashboard, which lit up like a Christmas tree. The buttons and switches were unfamiliar to Solara, and without her diagnostic equipment, she couldn’t tell which systems had failed.
“What can I do?” she shouted above the beeping alarms.
“Radio the Banshee,” he said, and clutched the trembling wheel. “Tell the captain we need a track-and-intercept. He’ll know what that means.” Darting a glance at the dashboard, he added, “Make sure he knows our emergency system’s fried. We’ve got, maybe, thirty minutes of oxygen left.”
And nowhere safe to land, Solara thought. Then she realized that if they died, so would Doran, because the Banshee would never find them in time to deliver his medicine. The possibility made her shiver. She sent out a distress call, but there was no reply. “I don’t know if our com is out, or just the receiver,” she said.
“Keep trying.”
She did, over and over again, until her skin puckered into goose bumps and her teeth chattered. Without heated oxygen coursing through the cockpit, the temperature had plummeted so low that her breath condensed into clouds—not the best conditions to fly half naked.
Renny shrugged out of his jacket. “Put this on,” he said, then unbuttoned his shirt and handed her that, too. “And cover your legs.”