It’s really looking like a potential game over, and it’s not because it’s only a matter of time before they find a way to undo my system lock on that door.
“Tien,” Aran speaks in my ear, his voice stern and commanding. When I don’t respond, he cradles my face between his hands and forces me to look at him. “What’s wrong?”
I gaze into his eyes. “We have a problem. I offloaded some monitoring apps when I gained access to the hidden network and they just got triggered because someone issued a fatal drone strike on the ship.”
Everyone goes still, pausing whatever they were doing as they comprehend the gravity of our suddenly very and really deadly situation.
“I’ll call Kwanchai,” Aran rushes out, phone already in hand.
“There’s no time. The little bugs will be here in twenty minutes,” I counter, my mind racing as my fingers try and fail to find a way out of this checkmate.
“We need to get off this ship!” Mong huffs out, his chest rising and falling too quickly. “Are they seriously going to kill everyone?”
It makes sense, if they wanted to destroy all the evidence and kill any witnesses. After all, better safe than sorry.
“Can’t you hack the drones?” Aran suggests, sounding genuinely worried now.
“Don’t you think I would have done it already if I could? Intercepting them requires special tools, which, if you haven’t noticed, I don’t have! Hacking is not that easy, you know. Sometimes all I need is a device and access to the network, other times it takes a lot more than that!”
Fuck, fuck, fuck, I need to do something or we are all dead!
[Attention. This is an emergency. Please head to the lifeboats on Decks Two and Three.]
Lifeboats. Yes, of course! There are lifeboats on every ship and that must be how the evil billionaires plan to get off! I imagine there isn’t enough space for everyone, but they wouldn’t care. As long as they save themselves, everyone else can suck it.
Yeah, no thanks.
I quickly navigate through a bunch of systems, locating the one responsible for the boats. There are a total of forty-one, with forty of them accessible via those two decks from the emergency message. Wait, just forty? For this massive ship? Isn’t that a little too few? Before I can arrive at an answer, I get distracted looking for the last boat. It’s not in any of the official menus, so it takes me a while to actually pin it down.
Holy shit.It’s right here, just outside the lab’s smoking area!
Grinning, I issue a bunch of nasty commands, overriding the stand-by status of all but the lab lifeboat. This immediately triggers the holding mechanism to release and drop the boats into the water. None of the cranes were manually activated, and the system didn’t detect any weight on any of these boats, so this means that no one had time to reach them before my sabotage.
Next thing I know, I’m cackling like the villain in an action movie, my companions staring bewildered at me. But I can’t help it. The evil billionaires are stuck here with their prototype drug. For safety reasons, they don’t have another copy, just the useless failed variants. I can end this suckass conspiracy here. I am. This will set them and their plan to take over the world with the help of brain-zombie soldiers back by years. Maybe even decades.
Holy shit, I’ll be a hero.
It’s taking me everything to contain my excitement. I’m buzzing. I need to move, to jump, to run, to have wild sex with Aran.
“There’s a boat by the smoking area. Let’s go!” I press the tablet to my chest and tug on Aran’s sleeve. “I released all the other ones. This is the only one remaining. And it’s ours. None of the bad guys are getting off this ship. They are stuck here and will die along with their shitty drug. And as for the rest of these assholes”—I squeeze the tablet closer to my chest—“we’ve got their names. They’ll get what they deserve, just like the ones here.”
Aran squeezes my hand and bolts, running so quickly I can barely keep up. Mong is right on our heels, helping Eleanor so they don’t fall behind. She’s elated right now, going on about penguins and ice cream and secret balls in Paris. It must be the drugs or the sedative.
Everything turns into a blur as we race against the drones. It’s like I’m in the process of separating from my body, so my spirit can fly off and have a rave party in Heaven. Or Hell. Cold ice licks my spine as I realize what I have done. I prevented the bad guys from escaping the ship, but what about all the staff? What about the people here in the lab?
“No, no, no! We have to go back!” I thrash against Aran’s hold, my heart trying to hammer out of my chest. “Fuck the billionaires, but we need to help the rest of the people!”
Aran squeezes my hand tighter when I try to slip away. “Hex, listen to me. We don’t have time. We have to get away from here.”
“But the people—I did this!”
“No. There weren’t enough boats. The staff would’ve never gotten to them,” he argues, his words hard to comprehend. “We don’t know if an alarm even went off across the ship.”
“No, but… We heard it! In the labs!”
He cups my head and gazes into my eyes. “In the labs that they own. Where their product and specialists are. Whoever ordered the strike is probably the only one aware it’s happening. And they would never let the staff get off the ship. It would be too risky.”
I can’t think. This is too much. We have to help these people, but we also need to run or the drones will kill us.
