Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(81)

“Three guns are better than two, Punchy.”

“The World Ship’s technicians will have the secondary gravity generators online at any moment. If Finian and Dariel are compromised, your presence in a close-quarter battle will not outweigh the cost of delay.”

I kick through a doorway, sail into another turbolift.

“Are you saying I’m no good in a fight?”

“I am saying this is no time for diplomacy,” Kal responds.

“Listen here, you pointy-eared, pretty-boy jer—”

“We have arrived. I am going in.”

I curse, hit the turbolift control, engage my boots as the thrust pushes me down. I hear a crashing noise over my uni comms channel, the sound of weapons fire. My heart is racing now, stomach in knots as I kick out of the lift and into the residential sector. I hear a scream over comms, disruptor fire.

“Kal?” I shout. “Zila, report!”

More shouting, wet thuds, another scream. I hear Kal swearing in Syldrathi, and though his tone is ice-cold, I realize he’s far more creative at cursing than I thought.

“Tiir’na si maat tellanai!” (Father of many ugly and stupid children!) “Kii’ne dō all’iavesh ishi!” (Stain on the undergarments of the universe!) “Aam’na delnii!” (Friend of livestock!) And with a sizzling crack of disruptor fire, my comms channel dies.

“Kal?”

I kick off a wall, gliding past two bewildered-looking men crawling out of a storage cupboard, stripped down to their underwear. One of them is wearing an Uncle Enzo’s cap.

“Zila, can you hear me?”

I make the stairwell, engaging my magboots as I kick my way upward. My pulse is really hammering now, sweat in my eyes as I disentangle myself from this ridiculous dress, bustle it up and stab another channel on my uni.

“Ty, I think Kal and Zila are in trouble, I—”

I fall silent as I make it up to Dariel’s floor. There, waiting for me in the corridor is a figure in a drab gray suit. Featureless gray helmet. Looking over its shoulder into the den, I see Finian hunched in his chair, pale pink blood leaking from a split in his brow. I see bodies floating in the zero gee, the walls charred with weapons fire.

The GIA operative stows a disruptor in its jacket.

“Legionnaire Jones,” it says. “So nice of you to join us.”





24


    Tyler




I’m feeling a little naked without my uniglass, but presumably it’s somewhere in that ultrasaur’s stomach and I’m not about to wade through the mess to get it back.

Pushing myself off the broken foliage, I sail across the enclosure, gently scooping up Auri’s limp body. She stirs, frowning at the shift in momentum as I bring myself to rest at the edge of the wall to Bianchi’s office. The polarized silicon has been cracked wide. Fragments of glass drift in the air above the pressure-sensitive floor—luckily, whatever else Aurora did, she seems to have killed the power in Bianchi’s office and the alarms along with it.

Whatever else she did?

Call it what it was, Tyler.

Telekinesis.

I touch her cheek, speaking softly. “Auri, can you hear me?”

Cat comes to rest next to me, blood-stained and dirty, looking as shaken as I feel. But as terrifying as what we both just saw might have been, her voice doesn’t shake.

“She okay?”

“I don’t know.” I reply, glancing through the broken glass wall. “But we have to move, security have got to be on their way by now. Look after her for me.”

I leave Cat cradling Aurora and push through the crack into Bianchi’s office. The spotlights are dead, the air filled with floating pieces of sculpture, objets d’art, alien artifacts, all knocked off his shelves by the force of Auri’s blast. A wide desk is ringed by large chairs, glass cases arranged in a widening spiral around the huge room. My heart surges as I see our target—the three-fingered statue wrought in strange metal, floating inside a tall glass case.

The Trigger.

I glance back to Aurora, see her stir again in Cat’s arms. The power she’s displaying—this small, frail girl out of time—is like nothing I’ve ever seen. If I wasn’t a believer before—if Admiral Adams’s and Battle Leader de Stoy’s warnings, what happened on the Bellerophon, Auri’s visions of the future weren’t enough to convince me that we’re caught up in something way bigger than ourselves, seeing her squeeze that ultrasaur like a zit sure would’ve been.

Looking into Cat’s wide eyes, I can finally see it, same as mine.

Belief.

I hope it hasn’t come too late.

Cat pushes herself into the office, floating above the ground with Aurora in her arms. Auri groans and opens her eyes, blinking hard. She takes a long, slow moment to focus, to find me, to remember where she is. But then her mismatched eyes fix on the Trigger, and she tenses, coming suddenly, completely awake. Breathing quicker, jaw clenching. She looks at the sculpture, looks at me. Her voice is hoarse, as if she’s been screaming.

“That’s it,” she whispers.

I draw my disruptor, fire it into another of Bianchi’s display cases. Splintered silicon sprays across the room, the four-headed statue inside goes crashing into the wall. Lowering the setting, I shoot another case, and watch the glass crack but not shatter.