“This is… fucking awesome.” He looked around him with awe. “Why aren’t the rest of the Lathar using this?”
“It’s Cabal tech. It’s light years ahead of the empire even now. I’d heard whispers and rumors of it, but those were years ago, when I was first activated.”
He leaned through the display in front of him and blew the dust off the bulkhead just under the main windscreen in front of them. “Yeah, looks like it’s old. So why didn’t they share it?”
She shrugged. “The cabal were a myth, no one was sure they existed. The stories said they were there in the shadows, hiding and altering events through history. But if they released something like this? Everyone would know they were there.”
“Ahh, like the Illuminati. We had them on Earth, centuries ago.” He nodded in understanding as he sat back. Although he could read about sixty percent of the screen in front of him, it still wasn’t enough to do more than get in Keris’s way if he tried to help. Frustration rolled through him. He didn’t like to be helpless or feel like he wasn’t pulling his weight. It was totally against everything he stood for.
The shuttle lifted off the pad as the doors in the middle of the floor opened. Space vacuum sucked the air out of the room in a hard rush, a loose panel in the wall opposite flapping.
“Can you contact the Izal’vias?” he asked. “We could do with some backup here.”
She shook her head, using the maneuvering thrusters to bring them into position. “I’d need to access the base’s communications array to do that. The B’Kaar would register that and be able to trace us. I don’t think announcing our departure is a good idea.”
“Fuck no,” Jay breathed. “Let’s keep these assholes in the dark as long as possible.”
“There is only a problem with power in some areas of the base and they have onboard lighting on their kasi—” She paused and looked at him from the corner of her eye. “You weren’t talking about illumination. Were you?”
Jay chuckled. “You’re learning, sweetheart.”
She grumbled under her breath, which only made his smile broader. “Okay, some coordinates are laid in.” Her frown deepened as she flipped between screens. “Looks like the last place this shuttle arrived from.”
“Does it matter?” he asked. “Just get us the fuck out of here and we’ll figure out the rest later.”
“Yes, sir!” she quipped, throwing him a sassy look and a small salute. He didn’t want to know where she’d picked that up from. “When I drop us out of here, we’re going to have to haul ass and run for it. It might get a little bumpy.” She cast a pointed glance at the harness on his seat.
“Got it, boss, safety first.” He winked as he slid into it. “Did we get Miisan on board as well?”
His petite companion’s beautiful face creased in concentration for a moment, the screens changing in front of her faster than he could register. Downloading into a physical body might have hampered her some, but it was easy to see she’d retained a lot of abilities from her nonorganic origins.
“No. I can’t find her in the shuttle’s computer core.”
“Could she be hiding?”
They were almost over the ventral doors now, the darkness of space visible between them and the widening deck.
Keris slid him a sideways look, one eyebrow raised. It was a universal look between men and women, one he’d been treated to on more than a few occasions before.
“I take it the answer is no?”
“This thing’s storage is the size of…” she waved her hand dismissively. “I can’t find the human word but it’s small. Not large enough to hold—”
Because he was looking directly at her, the door they’d entered through was visible in the wrap-around screen behind her, so Jay spotted the first B’Kaar just as the lights on the alien warrior’s suit illuminated.
“Gogogogo!” he bellowed, ducking his head as the cyberwarriors spilled into the room and started firing.
Keris ducked, her face tight with concentration as the shuttle took hits. The next instant they fell from the base. He gasped, instinctively tucking his hands around the straps of his harness as the force of the thrust jerked his ass from his seat.
“Hold on!” she yelled over the sound of warning klaxons as she rolled the shuttle.
He got scattered images as they went into high-g maneuvers, slamming him this way and that in the seat. Stars whizzed past the viewscreen as did suited B’Kaar warriors, their canon arrays flaring as they fired.
“Jay, talk to me,” Keris ordered, her voice sharp. “I need you to activate that screen and tell me what numbers you see. Now!”
“What? Why?” he asked, already waving his hands at the screen as Keris turned the shuttle and gunned the engines.
“I need real-time vectors,” she said as they slewed to the side. A nasty volley of cannon fire peppered space where they’d just been. “This isn’t a combat shuttle. There’s no way it can stand up to B’Kaar fire for long. I need to find a jump vector for the cabal’s portal system.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said as rows of numbers filled the screen in front of him. He started to read them off quickly. “What am I looking for? Wouldn’t the shuttle computer be better for this?”
“It’s maxed out running the systems and there’s no computer better than a biological brain,” she told him shortly. He could hear the strain in her voice, but she was calm. Deadly calm. Pride filled him. She’d come so far. “I need anything that’s lit up in blue.”
His eyes narrowed as he focused down onto the numbers in blue, reeling them off as they appeared.
“Calculating vectors… please wait…” the shuttle said, and Jay bit back his growl. All this alien tech and they still got a “please hold”? All that was missing was the crappy music.
Another screen flicked up on his right side and he didn’t need to be a genius to work out what it was warning him about.
“We got a lock on our tail, sweet stuff,” he warned. “So whatever you’re going to do, do it now!”
“Jumping,” she replied, hitting a button in front of her.
The stars in front of them disappeared as the portal unfurled in a blossom of blue light before swallowing them whole into blackness.
17
“I’ve never been on an alien planet before.”
Keris turned and looked over her shoulder at Jay as they climbed the path up the side of the mountain pass. The portal had spit them out in orbit of a s’tria class planet, and a quick scan had revealed an old Latharian science station in one of the mountain ranges.
They were on their way there now, the shuttle hidden in a nearby cave. Alloy in the rocks of these mountains would conceal its signature if the B’Kaar caught up with them. Perhaps long enough for help to get here.
“Surely you have?” she asked as they approached the top of the pass. “That colony wasn’t on Earth…”
He waved dismissively. “Yeah, but that was still a human planet. This isn’t.”