All those years of manning the machine gun in the cabin of the airship, working as a corporate mercenary, and the cynicism that she lived around, had slid off her. Sure, she found herself an outsider, slow to make friends. But that hadn’t made her any less outraged by what had just happened to what friends she had.
And, she realized, thinking about Commander Michel Claude, friends she might have had without realizing it.
She couldn’t sit still. And suddenly thought about the kids from the
She knew the layout of the ship, how the crews worked. She was going to get out.
If there was a nuclear device floating around out there, then she was going to help track it down and stop it.
She wasn’t going to allow chaos to descend into her world and turn it upside down. Not if she could do something to stop it.
She waited until the earliest hours of the morning. There were two watches worth of crew trying to get sleep in their darkened bunks, now. The bustle of the day and clanging of boots on metal floors had faded, which meant only seven or so crew were awake and on watch.
Osterman, still stuck with guarding her and yawning, followed her past the crew quarters back to the adapted conference room. She’d been getting him used to a docile routine.
But instead of meekly going inside this time, Anika whipped around and pulled him in with her.
He didn’t have time to shout because she had her belt around his throat, choking him. He instinctively grabbed for it and pulled it off, which is exactly what she’d hoped for.
She pulled his gun out of the holster and placed it against the back of his head. “Shhhh.”
He froze.
She backed up and shut the door. “Now, get down on the floor, and place your hands behind your back.”
He did. He looked very, very scared. But holding it together. She wanted to pat him and tell him it would be okay, that it was her that would probably end up shot.
Instead, she checked his pockets until she found what she was looking for: more zip ties.
She looped two together to tie his hands and feet behind his back and to one of the bunks. Then she used a torn piece of sheet to gag him. “Can you breathe through your nose okay?” she asked.
He nodded, looking suddenly hopeful.
“Do you know where the man is, that they captured with me? Prudence Jones?”
He nodded. She pulled the balled up strip of cloth part of the way out of his mouth.
“Upstairs in the mess,” he said, voice garbled by the partial unstuffing.
Anika stuffed his mouth again. “I’m very sorry about this,” she told him.
Someone knocked on the door.
She whipped around and trotted up to it, the gun in front of her at the ready. Damn it. She’d barely had time to put her plan into action and it was already falling apart.
Who was this going to be?
The door eased open, and Anika jammed her newly acquired gun against a familiar set of dreadlocks. “Roo?”
He looked at the hog-tied crew member on the floor as she yanked him inside and shut the door. “You looking to escape as well?” he asked, looking over at the tied-up crewman.
“They won’t tell me where they are taking me. I don’t like that.”
“Yeah, I hear you. Usually when I get picked up, I can give my credentials and after a few phone calls, things get all cleared up. This time, they just handcuffed me to a bunk upstairs and put a guard on me.” He held up a gun of his own. “My guard’s relaxing inside a large fridge right now.”
The fact that he hadn’t killed his guard to escape clarified a lot about Roo in that second. Vy was right. Roo was someone she could trust.
She lowered her voice so that the tied-up guard couldn’t hear them. “That rigid-hull inflatable dinghy, the big one? It’s designed to be launched from the moving boat. It has a top speed of thirty knots, which is roughly the same as this ship’s speed,” Anika said. Nanisivik had a number of them at the UNPG station, and she’d trained on them like any other UNPG member. “Can we get somewhere safe with it? You know the area better than I do.”
Roo sucked his teeth loudly and shook his head, his locks slapping his neck and shoulders. He kept his voice low as well. “Depends on how much fuel the dinghy carries. And if we can really outrun this beast once we get away. We been headed west for the last day. Add in two good days of sailing on
“And we can’t get to Pleasure Island by dinghy?” Anika asked.
Roo shook his head. “No. Too far. Is dangerous enough out here in that thing, and if a storm kicks up who knows what happens to us. But we dead for sure even if we had enough fuel.”
“Okay, Victoria Island then,” Anika agreed. And from there she’d get to Thule and start hunting. “When we get on deck, I won’t fire at the crew. The gun is only for show. I will not be shooting at someone who is innocent, who is trying to do their job. Understand?”
Roo nodded. “Is a running escape, yeah.”
They ghosted up the stairs, then out onto the deck, guns out, tense. But they met no one. “They are all up in the pilothouse, staying warm and dry,” Anika said, glancing upward in the direction of the lighted windows. Roo leaned over the side of the dinghy to look in while she kept an eye out for anyone coming out onto the deck.
“Do we have enough fuel in the dinghy to get where we need to go?” Anika asked.
Roo leaned over and shook one of the two large red plastic gas cans loosely tied down in the back of the dinghy. “They’re full. Yeah. I’m willing to bet.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“You said you’ve trained on a ship like this? How do we raise the transom?” Roo asked, moving back over behind her.
Anika pointed at the manual controls on the deck. “One gets in the dinghy, another opens the transom then jumps in quick.”
“You ever do it?”
“No. I’ve been on a UNPG patrol boat, but I have never used those controls.”
Roo shrugged. “I spent more time on boats, I’ll go look.”
Out in the rush of wind and cold, they moved quickly across the deck. Anika crawled into the large dinghy and kept low.
“Last chance to back out,” Roo said.
“Do you think we’re really going to a normal jail? Where we could call our lawyers? And talk to our families?”
Roo shook his head. “No, whoever waiting for us at dock, it ain’t police. Trust me. They had the pull to send a ship after us and access to live satellite data to backtrack all ships from Baffin. Including my little one. That scares me.”
“Then we go,” Anika said with a bit more determination than she felt, glancing worriedly back up at the lit-up pilothouse.
“Then we go,” Roo said, and scuttled over to a set of deck controls. He studied them for a moment and then pushed a lever all the way up.
The large metal slab at the end of the ramp clunked upward as motors whined into life, and Roo ran and back leapt into the dinghy.
They both looked up at the pilothouse. The five men inside moved to the rear windows to look out over the deck. Then there was an explosion of movement.
