Page 4 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)

Dex met her gaze without flinching or apology. “There was always the chance you were right, and Corporate loves to put money on the dark horse.”

And that right there was the difference between GIASS and Corporate, no matter how many expeditions it sanctioned. With Corporate, everything came down to profits.

The means to an end , Lissa told herself, fighting to keep the withering reproach from showing when she looked at him.

If this was the find that washed her name clean again, then it would be worth it, no matter who she had to work with or how badly their motivation.

Even if some of them were more interested in profit over the pure thrill of raw, new discovery.

“Stay together,” Dex ordered, frowning at Boaz until the man stopped smiling. “No one leaves the main hall until the mapping is complete, and it’ll be a buddy system all the way.”

“Want to be my buddy?” Boaz asked, slinging an arm around the shoulders of the guy next to him.

Now Lissa did roll her eyes. This was serious, and the man didn’t have a single one of those bones in his body.

Putting distance between them, she followed behind the photographer.

That gave her a chance to look into the other archways as she passed them, but she saw nothing beyond the immediate corner in yet another part of the maze.

From the hidden speakers, click after soft click, the voice droned on, repeating whatever it had to say in yet another language she didn’t know.

By the time she reached the fifth doorway, they were on their seventh version of the recorded message, and she was just far enough into the bend of the circular hall that if she went any further, she wouldn’t be able to see the open door and the brick wall they’d cut their way through.

Looking forward, she saw only a continuation of more open archways into the growing mapped maze beyond…

right up until Boaz let out a caw of victory.

“Hey, look at this!” His hand was on the wall and the lighted symbols were flashing wildly around his fingers. “I think there’s a pattern.”

“Don’t—” Dex started to say, but in three quick presses, Boaz completed the pattern.

Lissa wasn’t so far down the hall that she missed seeing the door they’d all entered through slid quickly shut, cutting off their only entrance… and escape.

“You idiot!” Dex snapped, stalking him. “What did you just do?”

“I don’t know,” Boaz stammered. “I thought it was going to open this door.”

Every lighted letter and symbol down the length of the entire hall abruptly dimmed, then flicked from pale blue to bright red.

Alarmed, Lissa started back toward them. “Open the door.”

“Whatever you just did, un-fucking-do it,” Dex ordered.

Boaz shrugged. “Like I know what I did in the first place?”

“Uh, guys?” Stine interrupted, his eyes glued on the mapping tablet. “Something just happened to one of the drones.”

Picking up the pace, Lissa ran to join Dex and, together, they all studied the tablet. Sure enough, the second drone was still mapping, but the first had stopped with unfinished pathways yet to be pinged.

“Maybe the way is blocked?” Lissa suggested.

Before their eyes, the second drone abruptly stopped too. She stared at the map, frozen in its state of unfinishedness, willing the pings to start again. They didn’t.

“Recall them,” Dex said, to the technician who was already poking at the touch-screen controls.

“They’re not responding,” he said, then shrugged. “I’ve got nothing. It’s like they’re not even there anymore.”

“Maybe they went too far?” Lissa suggested. “There might be too many walls between us and them, the signals can’t get through?”

“Uh… guys…” someone else called.

Glancing up from the tablet, Lissa looked first to the man standing now almost directly in front of the door Boaz had closed, and then followed the direction of his stare straight up to the ceiling where one square of marble tile had slid back.

A silver sphere was slowly descending through the gap.

There were no wires that she could see, nothing holding it pinned. Another drone?

The others backed out from under it, retreating together in nearly perfect unison.

Lissa’s scholarly brain found this synchroneity oddly fascinating, a reminder that humans were, once upon an ancient time, mere animals that other animals fed on.

Those prey instincts were still there, it seemed, bringing the herd together as they eyed the approach of something that might be a threat.

The silver orb wasn’t moving like a threat, though. It was just hovering there, a little red light on the underside blinking rhythmically in a way that reminded her of the mapping drone’s start up procedure.

“We are going to be so rich,” Boaz said again. “If nothing else, we just made the phrase ‘battery life’ obsolete.”

The plating on the underside of the sphere opened up and two small discs on metallic extenders descended.

“Is it a mapper?” the man who’d first noticed it asked, just as the discs took aim at him, then fired.

He dropped before she could shout, his body twitching and jumping under the crackling white snakes of the energy that had killed him.

“Shit!” someone screamed, and then they were all running.

Dex grabbed her arm, forcing Lissa to duck with him through an open doorway into the maze just as the sphere took aim on its next victim and fired. “Run! Run!”

And just like that, she went from being co-leader in a party of twelve, to running for her life in a party of three.

She and Dex followed at the heels of Stine, racing down the blood-red-lit corridor with his empty satchel and mapping tablet clutched to his chest. In every corner and corridor they ran down, the disembodied voice droned on in yet another unknown language and the shouts from the men they’d gotten separated from echoed sharply behind her every time someone else died.

All too soon, they found one of their mapper drones, not floating stalled at a blockage or mapping on beyond the reach of the signal from the tablet, but lying in pieces all over the stone floor where it had been attacked. Destroyed.

A soft grinding caught Lissa’s ear and she looked up. She was still staring at the smooth orb descending from its hiding place behind another ceiling tile when Dex grabbed her arm again.

“Run, damn it!”

They were in unmapped territory now, hitting their first dead end almost immediately.

The quick about-face as she was pulled out of it immediately into the next one quickly had her hopelessly lost. The maze walls went all the way up to the ceiling.

There was no climbing over, and she lost all sense of direction.

Then they lost the map technician. One minute they were three, racing down a long corridor, ducking from one open archway into the next, and in the next, Stine shouted. When she turned, he was gone. It was just her and Dex now.

“What—” she panted.

“I don’t know,” he said shortly. “Move!”

We are going to die in here, the practical part of her brain said. They were going to get turned around, stymied by the same dead ends over and over until either that sphere found them or they became so hopelessly lost that lack of food and water got them first.

The practical half of her engaged, and she began hugging the right side of the wall.

“No!” She grabbed Dex, stopping him before he could lead them right back into the same dead end they’d already found. “This way.”

She had no idea where they were going, but she hurried them through the maze, mapping it the only way she knew how, by constantly following the same side of the wall in the hopes it would eventually lead them out.

It didn’t. They found a door instead.

A single hand panel without glowing symbols waited to the right of the solid, unadorned stone access.

Someone shouted in the distance, a high-pitched cry of terror and pain, and she didn’t need to see the flash shot from another hunting sphere 9r the collapse and thrash of electrified limbs to know another man had just died.

She had her own hunting sphere to worry about, and it was so close behind them she could hear its energizing hum.

She barely hesitated before laying her hand on the panel. The door opened and without waiting for it to fully rise, both she and Dex rolled underneath.

That the room wasn’t empty hit her the second she straightened, only to come face to glowing silver-white face with the impossible.

She’d never seen anyone like the being that stood in front of her, wraith-thin, its too-long limbs twice the length of hers. Black holes bored into her where eyes should have been; its thin, lipless mouth unsmiling as it moved, speaking without sound.

Holographic projection, her brain supplied, a bare second before the being reached out and pressed its very solid palm to her forehead.

Her head snapped back as an electric jolt punched through her. For a moment, she was sure the sphere had shot her, except she was still very much aware of what was happening as she hit the floor, every inch of her jerking in response to the invasion of the being that injected itself into her.

Two things happened then.

She lost control of her body, pissing herself as she jerked and flopped like a fish on the river bank. Then the soft drone of the recording playing from hidden speakers above her in yet another language she’d never before heard… and which suddenly made sense.

“Warning,” it said. “You have entered restricted space. Leave immediately, or you will be annihilated. Warning. If you disregard this message, you will die.”

Her ears were ringing, crackling with the sizzle of all that energy now filling up every inch of her body, spreading from nerve to electrified nerve inside skin much too small and tight to contain it.

Dex appeared over her, his shocked face snapping from hers to something beyond her.