"Stay here," he ordered, his voice tight as he set me down behind the cover of the lift's thick metal doors. The doors opened onto a kill zone. Enforcers had taken up positions behind cargo containers, their weapons trained on our position. Our ship, theWandering Star, sat on its landing pad a hundred meters away, a lifetime in this storm of blaster fire.
He pulled the Regalia from the pouch on his flight suit and shoved it into my hands. "Protect this."
Then he was gone, a blur of motion as he charged into the firefight, drawing their attention.
I watched, my heart in my throat, as he moved through the bay. He was a predator in his element, using the containers for cover, his rifle spitting fire. But there were too many of them. He was pinned down.
We were trapped.
My mind raced. The docking bay doors were sealed. They had us boxed in. But there had to be another way. My father had always taught me to look for the forgotten doors, the back-end systems no one bothered to maintain.
My eyes landed on a secondary control panel on the far side of the bay, near the main doors. It was an old auxiliary system, probably for emergency venting. It was also our only hope.
"Talon!" I yelled into my comm, my hand pressed tight against my side. "I need to get to that panel! Cover me!"
"Negative!" he shouted back, the sound of his rifle punctuating the word. "Stay put!"
He didn't understand. There was no 'staying put'. There was only this, or death. I secured the Regalia in a deep pocket of my jumpsuit, took a deep, steadying breath against a wave of dizziness, and ran.
The world dissolved into a terrifying sprint. Energy bolts seared the air around me. I didn't look back. I just ran, my focus narrowed to that single, sparking panel.
I slid the last few meters, crashing against the bulkhead beneath the console. My hands were shaking, but my mind was clear. I pulled my data pad from my toolkit and jammed the connection cable into the panel's port.
Code scrolled across the screen. The lockdown protocols were a nightmare, a tangled mess of emergency overrides, but they were sloppy. Built for force, not finesse.
Behind me, the firefight intensified. Talon was roaring, a sound of pure, primal fury as he fought to keep them off me. He was buying me these precious seconds with his own blood. The thought sent a surge of adrenaline through me. I wasn't going to let him down.
"How's it coming, Tamsin?" His voice was strained.
"Five layers of encryption," I grunted, my vision swimming for a second before I forced it back into focus. "Give me another minute."
"We don't have a minute."
A plasma bolt hit the bulkhead above my head, showering me with sparks. I flinched but didn't look away from the screen. Three layers down. Two to go. The final layer was a brute, a nasty piece of work that fought back, trying to lock out my pad.
"Talon, they're almost on top of you!"
"I see them," he bit out.
With a final, desperate command, I broke through. The screen flashed green. ACCESS GRANTED.
"Got it!" I yelled, redirecting all available power to the docking bay's primary airlock.
With a deafening screech of tortured metal, the massive outer doors began to grind open, exposing the bay to the vacuum of space. Alarms blared as the atmosphere began to vent. Enforcers who weren't bolted down were sucked out into the void, their screams silenced instantly. The ones who remained were thrown into chaos.
It was the opening we needed.
"Let's go!" Talon grabbed my arm, pulling me toward theWandering Star.
We were halfway to the ship when a final, catastrophic explosion rocked the station from deep within its core. The deck plates buckled. A massive gantry crane, its magnetic locks failing, tore free from the ceiling and crashed down directly onto our ship. TheWandering Starcrumpled like a cheap toy, its hull breached, its landing gear collapsing in a shriek of tortured metal.
Our escape route was gone. Crushed.
As the adrenaline began to fade, the pain in my side returned not as a sharp heat, but as a deep, sickening cold. I looked down.The dark stain on my jumpsuit had spread, soaking through the fabric. It was so much worse than I'd thought. The last thing I saw before the world went black was Talon's face, his expression a mask of pure horror.
TALON
TheWandering Starwas a tomb. Twisted metal and shattered plasteel, our only way out crushed beneath a collapsed gantry. The docking bay was a chaotic mess of venting atmosphere and the few remaining Syndicate enforcers scrambling for cover. And Tamsin was bleeding out in my arms.
