Loralynn Kennakris 1: The Alecto Initiative Read Free Page B

urges after the first couple of times . . .
    She felt a push in her center back. Not hard, not gentle—just
unmistakable and insistent. She gritted her teeth and screwed her eyes shut.
    No—wrong. She couldn’t resist. If she resisted, she lost
control. She had to turn, to smile. She had to . . .
    There was a jarring, subacoustic thud and a feeling like
time ripping. Kris thought it was her. Then came a savage jolt and a great
sharp-flat ringing like sledgehammers on hull plate. She and Strich were thrown
to the desk. She was lucky, slamming her shoulder up against the side of the
recycler port. Strich was not. Being taller, he caught his head on a corner. He
slumped to the desk, blood flowing freely. She tried to stand up. Another jolt,
even more violent than last. The deck bucked and she went down again.
    What the hell’s happening?
    The proximity sirens went off with an ear-splitting wail.
People were babbling and moaning, some stupidly crying for help. You’re a
slave, dipshit. No one’s gonna help you . Then she heard the whine of the
fusion drives waking up.
    They were in space! Real space! Someone had punched
them out of the wormhole. But that couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t . . .
    Crawling now—she didn’t dare try to stand—she made for the
hatch. The rest of the cleaning crew was trying for it too, the ones who could
move anyway. A claxon raised its undulating wail, adding to the cacophony of
the proximity sirens. There was a crumping noise and three loud bangs tattooed
the side of the ship.
    Someone was firing on them—not warning shots either. She
heard the weird little kzing of the ship’s batteries returning fire.
Sudden acceleration squashed her down against the deck. She felt, then heard, a
launch transient shudder the metal beneath her, then two more, then a fourth.
    Trench was dumping his missiles—fast. They couldn’t have
possibly gotten a firing solution so quickly. Trench was scared—bad scared. A
hot, delicious joy filled Kris. Something bigger and meaner than him was after
his ass.
    The inertial dampers kicked in, too many seconds in coming.
Something must’ve busted for it to take so long. Lucky they weren’t all smeared
to jelly. She peeled herself off the deck, bolted for the hatch now that it was
safe to run. The batteries were firing constantly.
    More banging on the hull, then a loud crump—louder than the
others. The emergency reds came on. Kris dove for a lift ladder; swarmed up
using the rungs—you never could tell when the gravity might give out in a
fight. More noisy crumping—armor plate slagging off, she realized—and a sudden
veer the inertial dampers didn’t quite handle. She swung around to the other
side, knees hooked around the rails, and kept moving. Less noise from the
ship’s guns; just the forward batteries firing now. The shudder of a missile
launch.
    Kris boosted herself out of the ladder well on to the
afterdeck. Trench stood in the passageway just outside the cabin they shared.
He held a sidearm in one hand and was trying get into his space armor with the
other. He wasn’t on the bridge! He’d been sleeping . He wasn’t on
the bridge ! Kris’s joy turned savage. She hadn’t expected so much.
She sprinted at him.
    He hadn’t seen her yet. Another sudden uncompensated veer
staggered them. He turned, reeling—saw her, waved the gun at her. The boarding
alert drowned out part of what he was shouting: “. . . below! Goddammit! Get
the fuck outta here!” Her eyes widened. He thought she was afraid .
Kris laughed but it came out a scream. He continued to wave at her. “Evac,
goddammit! Evac!”
    There was a huge clang. The ship shuddered and rolled
violently. They’d been docked. Trench went down, clumsy in his half-on armor,
tumbling across the deck and hitting the rim of a sealed hatchway. The breath
went out of him in a grunt. Kris skidded into a bulkhead feet first, kicked
hard and launched herself across two meters of intervening deck