Page 102 of Journey to the Forbidden Zone
“In addition to the Xena,” Corso said, his face alight with a vicious grin, “you turn Díaz over to me, unarmed and alive.”
Letitia’s heart stopped. Oh, no. Oh, hell, no.
She spun in her chair and stared at Norvik, pleading with her eyes for him not to do it.
His profile was unreadable. Was he calculating odds? Regretting the gambit? Or coldly assessing the value of cutting their losses right now?
The memory of Carmen’s face when she’d left the bridge – not angry, but hollowed out, defeated – twisted something sharp in Letitia’s chest. She’d trusted them. Surrendered command. And Letitia was standing here, watching Norvik play high-stakes poker with Nick Corso, using Carmen herself as a bargaining chip.
Norvik didn’t blink, didn’t move a muscle. He just stared coolly at Corso’s image on the screen.
“Agreed,” he said.
CHAPTER 38
Carmen stood frozen,her hand still outstretched towards the comm panel near Zed’s primary interface station, fingers inches from the button that would let her scream denial, rage, betrayal into the void. The metallic scent of hot circuitry, the lingering sweetness of Mila’s pheromones – it all congealed into a suffocating blanket that enveloped her mind, stealing her breath.
Agreed.
Norvik had sold her. Just like he’d wanted to sell Mila. Traded his captain, his oath, for safe passage and a pile of credits.
The cold stone of dread that had been her constant companion since Waystation Alora liquefied, flooding her veins with icy betrayal. It wasn’t just the fear of Corso’s hands on her, the certainty of torture, humiliation, a slow death. It was the shattering of the last fragile thread of control. The crew she’d bled for, the family she’d built, had cut her loose.
A choked sound escaped her – half gasp, half sob. She staggered back a step, her boot heel catching on a loose power conduit on the deck grating. She barely registered the stumble.Her vision tunneled, the banks of flickering status lights on Zed’s console blurring into streaks of meaningless color. The low grumble of theAntilles’s wounded engines vibrated up through the soles of her boots, a mocking echo of the ship’s dying heartbeat.
Herdying heartbeat.
“Captain,” Mila soothed, “this is all part of the deception, the bluff. Norvik had no choice but to agree to Corso’s terms. He’s buying time, and there is precious little of it left.”
Carmen wanted to believe her, but she just couldn’t. This disaster was her responsibility. Every scar on theAntilles’s hull, every near-disaster, every COPS fine – they all traced back to her command decisions. Her failures.
W’Ooshlee’s blood on the deck. Zed’s body vaporized in silent fire. Now this. Her crew, cornered, desperate, choosing survival over a doomed captain.
Could she blame them? The bitter taste of stomach acid flooded her mouth again. Logic, cold and brutal as Norvik’s own, whispered:
No. You led them here. This is the price.
The crushing weight of despair threatened to buckle her knees. She braced a hand against the console edge, the cool metal a shock against her suddenly clammy palm. Surrender wasn’t freedom this time. It was annihilation. The end of Carmen Díaz. The end of everything.
But beneath the icy flood of betrayal, beneath the suffocating despair, a different heat ignited. A fierce, protective burn. Hercrew. Sark, trembling in his seat. Letitia, who’d pledged her loyalty only minutes ago, her dark eyes blazing with defiance even as she feared Carmen was compromised. They were still aboard. Still alive. Norvik’s bargain, his cold pragmatism, might actually work. Corso would get his twisted victory over her, but theAntilleswould fly. Her people would live.
That was the only victory left. Not freedom. Not justice. Just survival for the family she’d failed.
The data corridor pulsed with the frenzied, guttural growls of the watchdog pack. Three constructs of pure deletion code, claws sparking against the grid floor, closed in from the junction behind Zed’s avatar. Ahead, the thick, pulsing door to the central processing unit remained half-severed by the white-hot energy beam still lancing from his reconfigured hand. 41.7% compromised. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Threat proximity critical.Evasion probability:0.3%.Engagement probability of survival:2.1%.
Standard protocols dictated consolidation. Preservation of core consciousness. Retreat was impossible. Defense was statistically negligible. The optimal path was termination of the intrusion attempt and immediate reintegration to the primary chassis.
But the mission parameters were absolute: breach the core, implement the hack code, disable the satellite’s recognition protocols. Failure meantAntilleswould be detected, destroyed, crew terminated.
Optimal paths vanished. Only suboptimal solutions remained. Drastic ones.
Zed fractured his processing power, normally a unified code collective. A secondary consciousness stream branched off, a copy spun from the primary algorithmic matrix in a microsecond.
It required instant manifestation within the data-space. Resources were limited. The primary avatar’s form flickered, its resolution degrading slightly as processing cycles were diverted.
From the shimmering data-streams of the corridor wall beside the primary avatar, new polygons coalesced. Not sleek and humanoid. This form drew on different archetypes stored in Zed’s cultural interaction database: broad shoulders plated in angular, overlapping shields of hardened firewall code; limbs thick with simulated musculature rendered as dense data bundles; a featureless helm where a head should be, glowing with a single, baleful crimson sensor slit.