The fever dreams receded like a tide pulling back from a wounded shore, leaving Adrian stranded in the gray light of the cell. He did not know how long he had been unconscious. The flickering bulb still buzzed overhead. His hands were still blackened claws. But something had changed. The ship's engines had shifted pitch, a deeper thrum that vibrated through the bulkhead. The Nyx was no longer drifting. It was moving.
He pushed himself upright, his back scraping against the rusted steel. The movement sent fire through his forearms, but the fever's fog had lifted enough for him to think. Alvord's offer hung in his mind like a baited hook: Tell me where the evidence is, and I'll see to it that your men are rescued. It was a lie, of course. Triton did not rescue people. Triton erased them.
But Alvord had revealed something without meaning to. The Nyx was not just a support vessel. It was a cleanup crew. It existed to dispose of problems that the factory ships created—damaged equipment, inconvenient witnesses, captains who had outlived their usefulness. And now it had a new problem to dispose of.
The door opened.
The man who entered was not Alvord. He was younger, broad-shouldered, with the neck of a wrestler and eyes that held nothing but professional indifference. He carried a tray with a metal cup and a bowl of something gray and steaming. Behind him stood a second man with a stun baton, his gaze fixed on Adrian with the unwavering attention of a predator watching wounded prey.
"Captain wants you fed," the first man said, setting the tray on the floor. "Says you're no use to him dead."
Adrian looked at the food. The smell of it turned his stomach, but he knew he needed to eat. His body was consuming itself, burning through what little reserves remained. If he was going to survive whatever came next, he needed fuel.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"Didn't ask. Don't care." The man straightened up. "Eat while it's hot. Won't get another chance for a while."
He left, and the door clanged shut.
Adrian ate slowly, forcing down the gray sludge one spoonful at a time. It tasted of salt and machine oil, but it was calories. His hands throbbed with every movement, the infection a steady drumbeat beneath the skin. He had seen wounds like this before, in field hospitals in the Tarkhan highlands. Without antibiotics, the infection would spread to his bloodstream. Without surgery, the hands would never heal properly. But he had survived worse. He had survived a mortar blast that had killed three men. He had survived a helicopter crash that had left him the sole occupant of the wreckage. He would survive this too.
When the bowl was empty, he leaned back against the bulkhead and listened to the ship. The engines were definitely pushing forward now, driving the Nyx through the swells with the lumbering determination of a vessel that had somewhere to be. Through the steel walls, he could hear other sounds—footsteps on the deck above, the distant clang of machinery, the muffled voices of the crew. The ship was alive in a way it had not been before.
And then he heard something else.
It was faint, almost lost beneath the engine noise, but unmistakable once he recognized it: the sound of a helicopter. Distant at first, then growing louder, its rotors beating a sharp rhythm against the sky. Adrian pressed his ear to the bulkhead. The helicopter was close. It was hovering. And it was not one of Triton's—the Nyx had no helipad, no reason to receive an aerial visitor.
The Valkyrie's helicopter. It had to be. The corvette had found the rafts. It had found the survivors. And now it was searching for the missing.
The ship's engines suddenly surged. The Nyx heeled sharply to port, throwing Adrian against the wall. Above him, footsteps pounded across the deck, and voices shouted orders he could not make out. The helicopter's rotor noise grew fainter, then louder again, as if the aircraft was pursuing them, matching their course.
The Nyx was running.
Adrian dragged himself to his feet. The cell was small—three paces wide, four paces long—but he had memorized every inch of it during his fevered hours. The door was the only exit, and it was locked from the outside. The ventilation grate near the ceiling was too small for a man to fit through. But the bulkhead panels, the steel sheets that lined the walls, were old and poorly maintained. In the corner near the floor, where rust had eaten through the metal, a seam had begun to separate.
He knelt down and worked his forearms into the gap. The pain was immense, but he ignored it. The metal gave slightly, then a little more. He braced his shoulder against the panel and pushed with all the strength he had left.
The panel popped free with a screech of protesting rivets.
Behind it was darkness—a narrow maintenance space between the bulkheads, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Adrian had seen similar spaces on the Misericordia, passageways that the crew used for smuggling and hiding and surviving. The Nyx was an older ship, and older ships had older secrets.
He crawled into the darkness.
The space between the bulkheads was a labyrinth of pipes and cables, hot and close and black as the inside of a coffin. Adrian navigated by touch, his broken hands brushing against the walls, sending jolts of pain through his arms with every movement. The ship's interior was a maze, but he had learned to read ships during his weeks on the Misericordia. The engine noise was loudest toward the stern. The bridge would be forward, high up. The cargo holds would be amidships, where the superstructure was thickest.
He moved toward the stern, toward the engine room, where the noise would cover his movements. The helicopter was still out there, its rotors a distant pulse against the sky. The Nyx was still running, its engines straining against the weight of the ocean. And somewhere on this ship, Harrow's body was lying in a refrigerated compartment, waiting to be delivered to men who would want to know exactly how he had died.
Adrian found a hatch in the maintenance space, a narrow door that led into a storage compartment stacked with crates of ship's supplies. He slipped through and crouched behind a pallet of canned goods, listening. The compartment was empty. Beyond it, through another door, he could hear voices.
He crept forward and pressed his ear to the door.
"—can't outrun a naval helicopter. We need to dump the evidence before they board us." The voice was unfamiliar, tense with barely controlled panic.
"Alvord says we hold course. The helicopter can't force us to stop. We're in international waters." This voice was calmer, older, more authoritative.
"International waters don't mean anything if they decide to board anyway. The Ashby ruling—"
"The Ashby ruling protects Triton's officers from prosecution. It doesn't protect us from a naval interdiction if they find Harrow's body on board. Or the survivors' testimony. Or the records from the Misericordia."
Adrian's pulse quickened. The records. The records from the Misericordia. Alvord had them. Of course he did—the Nyx was a cleanup vessel, and cleanup vessels collected evidence before they destroyed it.
"—and what about the prisoner? The one with the broken hands?"
"Alvord's dealing with him. Says he knows where the rest of the evidence is hidden. Once he talks, we dump him with the others."
"And if he doesn't talk?"
"Then we dump him anyway. We're running out of time."
The voices moved away, fading into the ship's ambient noise. Adrian stayed crouched behind the pallet, his mind racing. The records from the Misericordia were on board. Harrow's body was on board. And Alvord was planning to dump it all—the evidence, the survivors, the truth—into the ocean before the Navy could find it.
He thought about the helicopter, still circling somewhere above the waves. If the Valkyrie's crew could locate the Nyx, if they could force it to stop, there was a chance. But Alvord was right about one thing: in international waters, the Navy's authority was limited. The Ashby ruling had seen to that. A Veridian naval vessel could not simply board a foreign-flagged ship on suspicion alone.
Unless it had probable cause. Unless someone on board provided it.
Adrian looked at his broken hands. They were useless for fighting, useless for climbing, useless for almost everything. But they were not useless for this. He could still walk. He could still talk. He could still find a way to signal the helicopter, or disable the ship's engines, or do something that would give the Navy the justification it needed to intervene.
He slipped out of the storage compartment and into the ship's main passage. The corridor was empty, lit by the same flickering bulbs that had illuminated his cell. The engine noise was louder here, a steady roar that vibrated through the deck plates. He moved toward it, following the sound the way a drowning man follows a distant light.
The engine room of the Nyx was smaller than the Misericordia's, but it was built on the same principles: a cavernous space full of pipes and turbines and the immense, pounding heart of the ship's diesel engines. The noise was deafening. The heat was suffocating. And the lone engineer on duty, a thin man with grease-stained coveralls and the hollow eyes of someone who had spent too many years belowdecks, did not see Adrian until it was too late.
Adrian hit him with his shoulder, driving the man into a bank of control panels. The engineer crumpled, more from surprise than from the force of the blow. Adrian knelt over him, his forearm pressed against the man's throat.
"I need you to listen to me," he said, his voice barely audible over the engine roar. "There's a Veridian naval helicopter above this ship. I need you to send a signal. A distress call. Anything that will give them cause to board."
The engineer's eyes were wide with terror. "They'll kill me. If Alvord finds out I helped you—"
"Alvord is going to kill everyone on this ship if it means destroying the evidence. You're not safe just because you follow orders. You're a witness. And witnesses don't survive Triton's cleanup operations."
The engineer stared at him. Then, slowly, he nodded.
"The emergency beacon," he said. "It's in the radio room, two decks up. If I activate it, the helicopter will pick up the signal. They'll have grounds to board."
"Then do it."
"I can't leave my station. Alvord's men check in every ten minutes. If I'm gone—"
"I'll cover for you. Tell them you're running a diagnostic. Just get to the radio room and activate that beacon."
The engineer hesitated for only a moment. Then he scrambled to his feet and disappeared through a hatch at the far end of the engine room. Adrian watched him go, then turned to the control panels. The ship's systems were spread out before him, a bewildering array of switches and gauges and warning lights. He did not know how to operate most of them. But he recognized the fuel flow monitors, the ballast controls, the emergency cutoff switches. Isak had taught him enough, during those long shifts in the Misericordia's engine room.
He reached out with his forearm and began to flip switches at random. Alarms blared. Warning lights flashed. The engine pitch fluctuated wildly, then began to drop. Somewhere above, the ship's bridge would be in chaos, the officers scrambling to understand why their vessel was suddenly losing power.
The door burst open. Alvord stood in the doorway, his pale eyes blazing with cold fury. Behind him, two crewmen raised their weapons.
"Kane." Alvord's voice was barely controlled. "What have you done?"
Adrian turned to face him, his broken hands hanging at his sides, his body swaying with exhaustion and fever and the last reserves of his strength.
"I gave them cause," he said.
Above them, the helicopter's rotors grew suddenly, deafeningly loud. A searchlight blazed through the engine room's ventilation grates, white and blinding as a falling star. The Navy had found its target.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!