Jorry yawned and leaned back in the pilot’s chair. The consoles around her displayed standard levels; a full supply of ionic fuel, oxygen recyclers running normal, pressure seals all functioning. Everything was in place. All they needed now was for Devon and Seach to get back. Then they could depart Neptune Jumper station and make their run for Saturn. Stopping was dangerous, she knew, but unavoidable. They couldn’t carry enough fuel to go directly to Mars unless they dumped some of the cargo, and with food scarce in several sectors of the universe Jorry couldn’t see doing that.

She shifted restlessly in the seat and wished the parking shield didn’t have to be down. Neptune was pretty to look at. Not as pretty as Saturn, but still a sight to see up close. But regulation required the shield remained down while the ship remained docked to the station, maintaining the shared gravimetric pressure for the duration of their stay.

Jorry’s earwire squealed to life and she nearly toppled out of the chair. Cursing, she touched the base of her left ear. It crackled and sputtered after years of being unused, but after a moment the sound came clear.

“Oh … maybe it was dock four hundred,” Seach’s voice rang clear.

Jorry slowly stood up, listening to the sounds of what could only be a beating. Seach grunted and hissed but didn’t apologize for the outrageous lie. Every station was only equipped with three hundred docks.

“I read you,” she said, knowing Seach couldn’t respond to her directly.

She stood in stunned silence, momentarily immobilized by the reality that they’d been caught. And then Seach groaned, a clear sign that his captors had managed to hit a soft spot, and Jorry launched into action. She moved around the consoles and to the west wall.

“Zephyr, I want a layout of the station. Pinpoint where Seach and Devon are and unlock hold two.”

The wall lit up with a three dimensional rendering of the station. Jorry followed the rendering, coaching herself to stay calm, to focus. They would get through this.

Seach and Devon were being held in the customs office, which was sequestered off to the left side of the main customs bay. Their position flashed yellow for her and she traced a route from the office to the docking bay in her mind before running out of the nest.

Hold two was just beside the central chamber, hidden in the wall. Paul, Kenzie and Zoe were sitting at the table when she rushed into the chamber. In her panic she’d forgotten about their passengers. She scowled at the lunch preparations they had sprawled across the table.

Was it noon already?

“Get to your rooms now,” she ordered them. “Don’t come out unless you hear my voice.”

“What?” Kenzie asked, rising from her seat beside Zoe.

Jorry ignored her and focused on Paul. “We’ve been caught. I’m getting Devon and Seach. You three need to get to your rooms now.” She turned to the hold door, assuming they would do as they’d been told. “Zephyr. Open.”

The three-layered door slid away, revealing her main weapons cache. She heard someone gasp behind her but was too busy running through their inventory to respond. Walking into the small room, she grabbed her advanced all-purpose lightweight carrying equipment, otherwise known as an ALICE V, from its position just right of the door.

Shrugging the straps over her shoulders and around her waist, Jorry snapped it closed, feeling the reassuring hum as it engaged its armor mechanism. The magnetic pulse shielding her torso could protect her from everything save a point-blank fifty-caliber blast. And no Jumper station would risk a fifty caliber weapon on board since it could interrupt the pressure on the station if fired.

The ALICE V belt and straps were preloaded with gas cans, two extra asps, two galvanizers and the ever-ready laser F9. But she couldn’t really use the F9 on a station; lasers had a tendency to melt through metal, so if she missed she risked rupturing the hull and killing them all. She couldn’t use a velocitor either, not without destabilizing the station’s gravimetric pressure.

That left her with two asps, two galvanizers, and gas cans.

And her taps.

Jorry took a steadying breath. She was going to have to use her taps.

God, she hoped Neptune was so remote that the Consulate ignored the mess she was about to make.

“Holy God Almighty,” Kenzie said from behind her. “Who are you?”

Jorry felt her eye twitch as she suppressed a remark, remembering that the Consulate was already watching Neptune, waiting for Zoe to surface. It didn’t matter what she did at this point, the Consulate was coming for them. So she grabbed three gas masks from the back wall, tossing them onto Seach’s work bench. His reloading equipment sat silent at the far end of the table and for half a heartbeat she mourned that their peace was over. They had always known it would end at some point, that they would have to fight again, but dammit all if she hadn’t hoped they could hold on a little longer.

She took a large black bag from under the cabinet and stuffed two of the masks inside. Grabbing two more ALICE V’s, one for Seach and one for Devon, she packed them as well, thinking quickly for anything else they might need. Cinching the bag tight, she slung it over her shoulder and scanned the walls. To her left were more C.S. 12 gas canisters.

Cover and confusion, she thought. She took two more cans and shoved them in her cargo pockets.

“Kenzie, we have to go,” Paul said.

“Do you see all of this?” Kenzie asked.

Jorry ground her teeth and scanned her options again, trying hard to ignore Kenzie. Above the workbench several assault velocitors hung neatly arranged, all of them prepped for immediate use in case of emergency. Jorry scowled and wished for a second that Seach and Devon were planet-side. That would at least have given her a few more options. She heard Kenzie continue to protest and fought back the impulse to turn around and smack her. S~ᴇaʀᴄh the FindNʘᴠᴇl.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“Subdue your girl before I do,” Jorry said over her shoulder.

Jorry waved a hand at the lower left wall and a drawer snicked open. It stretched out, showcasing several small computer hacking devices. No bigger than the size of her pinky finger, the slender devices could magnetize to any computer terminal and bypass the security codes.

Much like they had on Gliese thirty years ago, she thought as she stared at the devices. Her mind flashed back and for a breathless moment she remembered the sound of Seach’s weapon as it fired at the window. She could smell the gas again, remembered the itch and burn as it clogged the cafeteria where they’d been forced to make their escape, but mostly she remembered the pop-pop-pop of the velocitor as it resounded through the room.

Swallowing back a sense of dread, Jorry took three of the devices and shoved them in her upper vest pocket. The drawer slid back into place. Thus armed, she turned to find all three of her passengers staring at her. For a blank moment Jorry stared back at them, the born and bred military officer in her screaming against their blatant disobedience.

“Get out of my way,” Jorry said sharply.

Paul’s eyes widened in horror and he hauled the two girls out of the doorway. Jorry followed them and pointed toward their rooms, suppressing a very real urge to use more violent means of persuasion. They finally took the hint, sharing equal looks of terror before running down the hallway.

“Zephyr, seal hold two.” She heard the door close but was already moving for the docking bay. “Lock the passenger doors when they’re inside. Go to Relo command. Only core personnel are allowed on or off this ship.”

The lights switched from white to pulsating red as she made it into the docking bay and Zephyr acknowledged. Jorry put her own gas mask on, then leapt from the catwalk. Her feet struck ground a second later, mag-boots jolting pain through her calves at the unexpected impact. She straightened, forcing the tingle of pain into the back of her mind as she moved to Zephyr’s bay entrance.

The mask gave everything a dark green tint but her eyes adjusted quickly. She reviewed the private docking area from Zephyr’s loading plank, looking for anything out of place. Everything was quiet outside the ship. She knew that each bay had a standard security system installed. Five cameras focused on the bay and the loading plank and she didn’t need agents crawling around while they were trying to escape.

Stripping off her gloves, Jorry straightened her arms, palms open so that the taps embedded at the base of her palms could more easily feel out the energy in the room. A moment later she’d pinpointed all five cameras and drained the power reserves. There was no explosion, just the click of each camera as it died and she felt the sudden buzz in her skin as her taps soaked up the energy.

She reallocated immediately, transferring that power to pure kinetics as she ran through the fifty foot wide bay, stopping at the station doors. The burst of speed left her dizzy and for a disoriented moment she had to grip the lip of the private bay door in order to gain her equilibrium back.

Great, she thought, I’m rusty.

She hadn’t felt like this since the first week after the surgery. Jorry shook her head and blinked several times until the station quit tilting in her vision and she could trust herself not to fall over. Once she was steady she glanced out into the hauler’s forum and pulled two cans from her belt.

Neptune Station wasn’t as congested as Pluto but there were still several people milling through the curving hallway. Jorry pulled the pins and tossed both cans out into the unsuspecting public. Several people screamed, a natural reaction to a sudden chemical attack, and then began hacking. Jorry breathed in her mask, forcing herself not to think about the civilians she was exposing to harm. She counted to three, waiting for the gas to take full effect before making her next run.

Gas crept into the bay, wisps like murky, yellow water curling around her ankles. Jorry turned and ran out into the corridor. Her foot slipped on vomit twice and she nearly tripped over a hunched, kneeling woman, but she made it to the closest terminal. The station alarms sounded just as the terminal opened and Jorry ground her teeth, cursing the security systems for being too fast.

Or maybe she was too slow.

God, she couldn’t be slow. Not today.

Two startled haulers stared at her from inside the terminal but Jorry ignored them and hurried inside. Taking one of her computer devices, she connected it to the underside of the terminal controller. The console lights turned from white to green, letting her know that the system was overridden and she immediately went to work. She drew up the security systems for the hauler’s forum, bypassing its main control and sufficiently locking the station out. No ventilators would power on until she was damn well ready for them.

“What …” One of the haulers choked and coughed behind her. “What the … hell?”

A moment later she heard two solid thumps as the haulers fell down.

God bless the scientist who added a sleep agent to C.S. 12, she thought.

She punched the command to open the secondary doors; the ones that would normally only open when the terminal had reached the station entrance, and unhooked the grappling device built into her belt. The doors opened, revealing the length of the terminal leading down to the station. Squinting into the dark, metal tube she aimed her spindly hook at approximately forty-five degrees and fired. It took a long moment but she felt the hook secure to something and hoped she’d hit the doors at the other end of the tube. Jorry stabbed the anchor into the terminal door and then snapped her belt’s C-clamp to the line.

She stepped off the edge of the terminal and let the mechanics of the belt take over, zipping her down the line steady and fast.

If she’d thought a terminal was bad, dangling from a cable in the black, eerie tube was worse. But she gripped the straps on her vest and forced herself to focus as she plummeted through the tube. She’d made this sort of trip before, ages ago during the war. She’d survived then and she would survive now.

Because Devon needed her to.

She came to an abrupt stop at the base of the tube, just at the station’s doors. Her body swung once before her toes caught the ledge between tube and door. Jorry unhooked from the line and balanced on the ledge, pressing both palms to the outer terminal doors. She let her taps feel out the energy on the other side of the door before stealing the power from its control unit.

She felt the vertical crease of the doors under her fingers and reallocated the electricity, pouring it into the door as she pried it open. Her arms strained under two tons of pressure holding it in place, but she dragged more energy from the control unit and poured it into the effort. Metal squealed as she pushed past the locking mechanism until it finally jerked free and she was able to squeeze through.

She braced the opening with her shoulder and her leg, fumbling in her cargo pocket for one of the other asps. She grabbed the asp, then jammed it into the terminal door’s track overhead. It stuck there, holding the door in place, and Jorry stepped through.

The customs bay was in chaos. No one on Neptune Station had ever been through an attack, she could see that much. Popping two more cans open she tossed them into the fray of confused agents and people and ran for the customs offices.

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