Page 88 of Tempting Jupiter
Jupiter swung her off his back and plopped her on the floor. “Stay here until it’s clear.”
Then he disappeared around the corner as a blaster pulse zipped past. She edged toward the corner, twisted, and peeked around.
Damn. The man had just thrown a second armed drone into the air. Her first instinct was to hack it, but without Bug she’d have to get closer.
If his explosives were armed, time was ticking.
She saw Mercury, his body a blur of motion, dodge another blast.
Jupiter ran toward the fight, kicked off a wall and flipped into the air. He swung out and swatted down one of the drones. Cervenka’s man reached out and grabbed Jupiter’s leg. They ended up grappling on the floor together and a black bag came off the mercenary’s back and slid down the corridor. It was the only storage the man had been carrying.
And the explosives had to be in there.
Feeona belly-crawled along the floor. The sound of the blast pulses was getting closer.
She snatched the bag and scooted back around the corner. She could feel Jupiter’s eyes on her, but he didn’t or couldn’t come to defend her. She was glad of that.
She pulled open the bag and her heart sank. The bomb was armed and had more explosive power than any of the others. Damn. She lifted it carefully out of the bag and examined the mechanism. Damn. Damn. Damn.Thatwas different, too. She closed her eyes and, using just her neural implant, tried a near-field hack.
Oh, God. She couldn’t even connect.
She looked up and down the hall for something, anything she could use to keep the thing from killing them. A bomb-proof lock box would be handy.
She struggled to her feet. “Knock.” She knew he’d be monitoring. “Patch me through to Sen.”
A brief pause, then Sen’s voice. “Fee, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t disarm the bomb. The only thing I can think to do is to get it as far away from Jupiter and Mercury as I can.” She didn’t know what else to say. She’d just wanted… So many times they’d complained that she hid her plans from them.
She took one last look toward Jupiter. The last remaining drone had Jupiter and Mercury penned down. It had to be running on AI without a kill switch command, because the mercenary was very dead. They were using his body as a shield. They were going to be okay. She had to believe that they would be fine, if she could just get them clear of the explosion.
She got to her feet and ran.
“Fee!” It was Seneca. “There’s an emergency airlock, not far. Will that work?”
“Yes!” She’d even headed the right direction on instinct or luck. Hope renewed her strength and added speed to her pace. Her lungs burned.
The hatch came into view and she pushed harder, faster. She slammed into the wall next to it, panting for air. She grabbed the manual emergency access ring, turned, and pushed.
Nothing happened. A wave of nausea hit her. That shouldn’t be possible. It was an emergency airlock. They were never shut down.
Eyes fixed on the red glowing light over the sealed interior doors, she initiated a hack. The interior hatch opened, giving her access to the airlock itself.
She could see the blackness of space through the small porthole in the exterior door. Sliding the bomb carefully into the lock, she looked for a way to reclose the door just short of a seal. She wanted enough air to be able to escape to push the bomb far out into the black.
The mental equivalent of tripping over a wire shook her. A rush of panic squeezed her heart. “Knock! Something just happened. I’m locked out of the airlock controls.” How could she not have seen something like that in any of her data on the security systems? “Knock!”
“Looking!”
He had to find it and shut it down. “It has to be some kind of master override implemented recently.”
“Shit.” Knock’s voice wavered. “I haven’t even dug into the part of the system that deals with airlocks.”
Over the rush of her pulse pounding in her ears, she heard Jupiter calling her. They’d dealt with the drone. That was good.
No! Not good. “Knock, keep Jupiter and Mercury away from here.”
“I can’t do two things at once.”
