Page 71 of Kai
I clicked open the casing, fiddled with the wires, and called out. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” Cece yelled back. “We’ve got red all the way.”
I unscrewed and reattached the main wires. “And now?”
“No change.”
“Dammit.” It would take me some time to figure out why the damn batteries had failed. It would take me even longer to replace the state-of-the-art batteries with the backups I’d brought along. If they worked at all. Meanwhile, we were naked to the eyes of our enemies and vulnerable to attack.
Okay, all right. Think K-man. The longer we remained unshielded, the higher the probability of detection.
Sweating buckets in the oven-like compartment, I flipped the switches, disengaging the power for all areas ofSerenityexcept the fridge and the surveillance systems. I hated to do this. It left us dead in the water. But restoring the shield took precedence. I rerouted the power into the batteries and switched them on.
The batteries flickered on and off. This was a no-go. With the batteries shot, the shield’s energy requirement surpassedSerenity’scapabilities.
“The power has gone off,” Cece announced, standing above the hatch. “We got some green there for a few, but now we’re back to red.”
“I’m gonna add the backup generator to the mix.” I met her worried gaze and wiped the sweat off my brow. “Tell me if something changes up there.”
It took me a few tries, not to mention some consultation with the manuals stored down there, but in the end, I rerouted all power to the shield’s systems.
“Green!” Cece shouted from above, piercing the generator’s racket and reappearing on the ladder’s highest rung. “We’ve got green! You did it, Kai!”
“It’s a workaround,” I explained, climbing up the stairs and taking a fresh breath of air at the top. “Now comes the real work. We need to power the shieldandthe catamaran. Right now, all power is going to the shield.” I opened a nearby storage hatch and extracted a case. “I’m gonna need to replace the batteries.”
“And if you can’t?”
“I’ll get it done.” It was the only way to get us operational again, the only way to keep Cece safe.
“What can I do?” she asked, brave as always.
“I’m gonna need you to monitor the surveillance systems. Watch them like a hawk.” Dropping the case on the deck, I rushed to the navigation station and pulled up the radars, cameras, and infrareds on the screens. I showed her how to adjust the controls and zoom in and out. “Let me know if any of these alarms go off. Keep an eye on these.” I pointed at the mercs’ boats, the ones I was tracking, and then tapped on Booming Voice’s vessel. “Especially this one. If any of these change course and come our way, I need to know.” I grabbed the case and made my way back to the engine room. “This is gonna take a while.”
It took the rest of the afternoon and half the night to replace the damn batteries. The current design was cumbersome and didn’t play well with other energy sources in the vessel. Cece came down several times with cold water bottles, ice wraps for my neck, a towel to wipe the sweat drenching my body, and even a couple of sandwiches, which I devoured in minutes, sitting at the top of the ladder.
Somewhere around midnight, I noticed how exhausted she looked. Between the swimming lessons and the stress, sheseemed depleted. I was used to going without sleep during my missions, but she’d been staying late working on her laptop for too many nights, and now her energy sagged.
“You need to go to bed, Sorceress,” I suggested the next time I came topside.
“Who is going to stay on watch?”
“I am.” I tapped on my Tak and headed down the steps again. “It’s been hours since the shield went down, and we have detected no changes in the mercs’ search patterns. They seem stationary so far. I can bring my Tak down here and multitask. I can take it from here.”
“Wait.” She stopped me halfway down the ladder, then softened her voice. “You need to rest, too.”
“I’ll go to bed as soon as I’m done here.”
She cocked her pretty eyebrows at me. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
She looked around me as if trying to figure out if I was telling her the truth.
“I won’t rest easy unless I know that you, too, are getting some rest,” she ventured. “How about you come to my cabin for a sleepover when you’re done?”
“It’s gonna be really late—”
“I’m talking about sleep, Kai,” she clarified. “I want to know you’re following your own advice. Bring your Tak along. We can have a threesome if you’d like.”
