“That’s good, right?” Galish asked.
“Yes, but the problem is that all that information is heavily encrypted—as you can imagine.”
“Then how do you even know it’s the right data?” I asked.
“The indexes aren’t encrypted. I know what’s there: controls for the security grid, the storage location of the Kryrk. I just can’t read it. Yet. But give me time.” She began to usher me out of the bay.
“How much time? We’ve got less than two days before the end of the mission.”
“It’s not going to go any faster with you hovering over me. Scoot!”
After leaving Chiraine, I made my way to the main hold. No one was there. I slumped down in one of the flight seats and stared out a porthole into space. The stars glittered like gems against an impossibly-black background.
I couldn’t stop thinking of my dad and his last mission into Bandala. There were still so many unanswered questions. How did he know that the Tabarroh Crystal was on Bandala? According to Chiraine, there were at least a dozen other Yueldian treasure vaults around the system.
It might have been possible for the Dodelan Alliance to have obtained the location of the Tabarroh Crystal. The Shima weren’t the only ones employing an army of researchers to comb through data extracted from the Ambit. But something about this didn’t feel right.
And why wasn’t my dad more cautious about entering Bandala? It wasn’t like him to be caught unawares—about anything—let alone the defenses of an orbital fortress on a hostile world.
I thought I knew Sean Beck as well as anyone. After my mom died, it was just me and him—for sixteen years. True, most of that time he was away on missions, but we talked a lot. He drilled into me what he expected. He talked a lot about the Beck legacy—what we stood for. He trained me, educated me, and pushed me—hard. And I tried to keep up, I really did. But I could never shake the feeling—no, the belief—that I wasn’t living up to his standards.
But here on this ship—in his shoes—I had a little better understanding of what he had to go through. The stress, the danger, the life and death decisions. And he had been running Beck Salvage, going on missions, risking everything for over twenty-five years. That must have worn him down.
But not enough to make a stupid mistake. I didn’t believe that. Not for one minute.
At some point I must have dozed off and started dreaming about stupid stuff. Lir’s horses. Playing whisper ball when I was a kid with Dahr and Cappy. Mr. Jeris and his magical cabinet of goodies.
My dreams were interrupted by the ship’s klaxons blaring loudly. Red alert. We were under attack.
I raced to the bridge. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the Faiurae. I don’t know what the hell has gotten into them, but they just fired on us.”
“What?”
The Rhya had imposed strict rules on each expedition they allowed into the Fountain. Interfering with another party was forbidden. Attacking another expedition had serious consequences. And everyone adhered to those rules. You did not want to piss off the Rhya. That’s why it was inconceivable that the Faiurae were blasting hyper-V arrays at us. But I saw it for myself.
“Can you shoot?” Ana-Zhi asked me.
“I think so.”
“Good. We’re down a gunner. You’ve just been promoted. Get down there.”
As I ran to the gun turret on the other side of the ship, I took a deep breath and tried to remember what I knew about operating an ion lance. Like everything else on the Freya, the weaponry was a few generations out of date. This Lektor model III ion lance didn’t belong on an expeditionary vessel. It belonged in a museum.
An explosion rattled the ship as I threw myself into the turret’s swing seat and flipped on the ion lance’s activator. The targeting controls flickered to life and I went to punch the AI-assist, but then I realized that the model III didn’t have one. This would be up to my own reflexes.
“You there, kid?” Ana-Zhi Agrada’s voice sounded from the comm unit. “We’re swinging around.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do this!” I tried to sound confident, but I knew I hadn’t trained enough on this old equipment.
The Freya zoomed through space, turning to face its attacker. There in front of me was the polished, sleek form of a Faiurae cutter.
I had done hundreds of ship-to-ship combat simulations, with all sorts of craft, but I had never fired upon an actual ship before—with real live beings on it.
So I choked.
And while I froze like an idiot, the Faiurae fired on us again. Their hyper-Vs flashed and a bolt arced into our proximity plates, jarring the Freya. The lights flickered off and then on again as the aux power kicked in.
“Shoot, damn you!” Ana-Zhi yelled.
I squeezed the trigger of the Lektor and missed, of course. Its twin bolts of ion missiles discharging into empty space as the Faiurae craft roared past.
Ana-Zhi or Galish—or whoever was flying this thing—turned us around again as my swing seat ratcheted noisily into position. The controls briefly locked on the target and chimed loudly. I shot again, and this time scored a grazing hit on their starboard side. It wasn’t enough to slow them down, though.
The Faiurae switched to a burst tracer which locked on our thermal dispersers. Multiple concussions rocked the Freya. Too late, I realized what they were trying to do.
“Get us away!” I screamed into the comm unit. “They’re trying to—”
I never got the chance to finish my sentence. Millions of jagged little snakes of energy suddenly emerged from every nook and crack in the ship. For a fraction of a second, the energy bolts danced in front of my eyes. Then everything went black.
I wasn’t dead.
Although I wished I was. My head felt like it had been trampled by a herd of banthoris, and every bone in
