So it was there after all, the Tsarina.
Jax tugged at his gloves. The entire ride had been too quiet. Too easy.
Through the starshield, the kingdom’s largest planet, Cerces, loomed like a dying sun. It was a planet of deserts, and underground cities built of topaz and emeralds, and the infamous prison mines that supplied rare jewels to the rest of the kingdom.
On the other side of the planet, in its shadow, rotated Palavar, Cerces’s largest moon. What a dreary place to park a starship. Aside from the ruins, nothing had existed on the dismal dark moon for the last thousand years.
As the crew filed into the cockpit, a small silver ship materialized ahead in the darkness. The uneasiness that had settled into the crew turned electric. He could taste the anticipation like a sharp drop of lemon on his tongue.
This was Rasovant’s fleetship, and even if the Iron Adviser didn’t know where his own ship was, Jax hardly thought the old man would sit around twiddling his thumbs. For all he knew, a Messier fleet was right behind them, and Jax wasn’t sure he could get get away this time.
You’re just worrying too much, he told himself, sliding out the controls from under the console to take the ship off autopilot, slowing the Dossier out of its sailing speed with a sigh.
“How’s it looking?” asked Lenda, fitting on her shoulder armor. The crew wore a hodgepodge of raiding gear, mismatched and worn. It wasn’t the look that mattered, but whether it saved your hide. LED lights hummed against their chests—their comm-links, live and ready.
The captain came into the cockpit last, helmet under her arm. “All right, crew. Hope you had a little catnap after last night’s . . . ordeal.”
Robb winced, embarrassment tingeing his cheeks, although Jax had to admit the color looked rather good on him. It matched his lips.
Jax turned back to the console and brought up a diagram of the Tsarina. “I’ve scanned the ship already, and it seems to be abandoned. Can’t say how long it’s been without solar power, but on the dark side of Cerces, it’d take a miracle to get that thing running again.”
“Nothing living?” asked Wick.
“There is only a two-point-seven percent chance of anyone surviving for seven years on residual power,” said Di.
Jax glanced over at him, hoping Di had heeded his warning to say good-bye to Ana.
“But there is a chance someone could be alive,” Robb pressed. “There has to be a chance.”
“It is unlikely.”
The look Robb gave Di could have melted steel.
The captain massaged the bridge of her nose. “All right, noted. We won’t have much time either way. Without solar light, we’ll only get about thirty minutes before the Dossier powers down, so we’ll have to tackle this like we did the one near Eros a few years back. Jax’ll swing around, and we’ll board from the stern and make our way up to the bridge. Di, what are we looking for?”
“A memory core,” the Metal replied.
“Oh, is that all?” Talle scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest. “They’re so small—how on earth is anyone going to find one?”
“They will probably be in the ship’s mechanical bay,” said D09, “or a lab.”
“Are the ones in active Metals still off-limits?” Riggs asked. “I hate to be the one to say it, but if worse comes to worst, you could just upload yourself into one of those.”
“That’ll overwrite and kill the Metal already in that memory core,” Ana argued. “I mean, as a last resort—”
“No,” D09 interrupted.
Ana pursed her lips. Jax could see the disagreement in the creases of her brow. It had always been an option—kill an innocent Metal to use its memory core. He wished they could use a Messier, but the HIVE took control of the memory core—and no one knew how to un-HIVE a metal yet.
Goddess, Di really was a beacon of morality. If uploading Di into some other Metal’s memory core could save him, then Jax didn’t see why it couldn’t be an option—especially since Metals couldn’t feel. It wasn’t like Di could feel guilty over rewriting some stranger’s code.
“All right, and if we can’t find an empty memory core, loot everything you can. Let’s make this trip worth it. The more dangerous it looks, the better.”
Talle chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I’ll stay back on the ship with Jax, then, in case we need to break and run.”
“That might be for the best,” replied the captain, glancing up at the schematics of the Tsarina on the starshield one last time. Her hair blazed like sunshine. “Everyone should keep your wits about you. May the stars keep you steady.”
“And the iron keep you safe,” they echoed, and dispersed, leaving Jax alone in the cockpit again.
He turned back to the starshield, tapping his fingers impatiently on the armrest as he studied the drifting ship.
Something wasn’t right, and it made him feel things he would rather keep locked up, his father’s voice telling him in that slow and confident cadence, Stalo ban ach van’en. Stars are not afraid.
Screw the stars—he was terrified.
He heard the captain stop Ana in the hallway. He paused, about to summon the grapplers to hook onto the Tsarina, and listened. “You’re staying with Jax to monitor the radio frequencies.”
“I’m what? Captain, you can’t do that!”
“We had an agreement. I’m leading this mission, and I tell you what we do.”
“I’m not staying!” She stomped her foot. Jax winced. “I’m your best shot! You can’t honestly want me to stay? Get Riggs to stay! I need to go—Di, tell her I need to go.”
“He’s staying, too,” the captain informed them. “There might be something on the Tsarina that could compromise you, Di.”
“I understand,” D09 replied.
“Understand?” Ana raged. Angry Ana was a meteor who left craters in her wake. “Bullshit! Nothing can compromise Di! And I suck at radio chatter—I need to go, Captain. You can’t stop me—”
“Can’t?” Siege’s voice cut like a knife.
Oh, she can, Jax thought, slowly turning back around in his chair so he could say that he hadn’t been there to witness Siege plunging her hand into Ana’s rib cage and ripping out her still-beating heart. Even with his back turned, the changing color of the captain’s hair, from yellow to fiery orange, snuck in from the hallway and cast a shine over the starshield.
That was her super-angry color.
“Ana. You are staying.” Then, with thinly controlled rage, Siege left to go meet the rest of the crew in the cargo bay.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jax watched Ana take a seat in the communications chair, staring out at the starshield with a defeated look, as he prepared the grapplers.
Obviously Siege was right to keep Ana on the ship, but it wasn’t to monitor radio frequencies. Ana was being reckless. She wasn’t thinking straight. When you cared for something too much, you tended to do impulsive things.
. . . Such as sneak into an Ironblood garden to steal coordinates to a ship that might be a seven-year-old death trap just waiting to be sprung.
Ana turned to him. “Jax, is there another way onto the ship?”
“Ana,” D09 warned.
“No, we should be going,” she snapped. “We’re the only ones who know what to look for. Jax, you know this ship better than anyone. Is there another way onto the Tsarina?”
He hesitated, because he couldn’t lie, and Ana knew that with a vicious certainty.
“There is, isn’t there?” she went on. “I can see it on your face.”
On his face? That was funny, when desperation was written in the crease of her eyebrows and the downward slant of her bow lips. If there wasn’t a fix for Di on that ship, he wondered who she would be without him.
For a moment, he wished he could read Ana’s stars just so he would know.
I’m going to regret this, he thought, tugging nervously at his gloves.
“I . . . would probably check where the emergency air locks are on the Tsarina—left side, by the way—and jump from one of ours onto the other ship. It’s tricky, and I’d never attempt it, but if I wanted to get on the Tsarina, that’s how I’d do it.” He whipped around in his chair to her. “At least try to hit an air lock on the other ship and not splatter your brains all over it, okay? I don’t want your death on my conscience.”
She smiled, and he hated how much he loved it. “Thank you!” Springing out of the communications chair, she rushed toward him.
“No, no, no, no!” he cried, flinging out his arms to stop her.
She stopped herself mere inches from him and eased back sheepishly. “Sorry, I forgot you don’t like being touched.”
“Not that I don’t love you,” he replied tightly.
“I owe you. This is going to be a breeze!”
“A breeze?” D09 asked. “How hard a breeze—”
She pulled him out of the cockpit with her but not before he caught Di’s moonlit eyes and knew that the stubborn Metal hadn’t done what he’d advised.
Di quickly looked away and let Ana pull him out of the cockpit. He breathed out a sigh of relief. Too close.
She’d come much, much too close.
A holo-screen blipped up in the corner of the console, and he turned to inspect it. Which would have been D09’s job. Of course he was stuck doing all the grunt work. He frowned at the console. It was a signal—from a long way off. A ship? No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t have the right permissions. And the frequency wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. It made every program on the ship blitz.
And if it pinged the Dossier, then it also pinged—
“Ak’va,” he cursed, turning back to the scans of the Tsarina.
And like fireworks bursting across the schematics, from one room to the next, blinking on like a long-slumbering monster, the ship awoke.