Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1)(77)

Time for shock and awe.

I hit the doors at a run and fired before I had a clear sight line. My firearms tutor would be extremely disappointed, but one of Richard’s guards went down and another had been clipped. I fired again and missed, blowing a hole in a lab table. At least it made the remaining guards wary of leaving cover.

I kept firing, but, unfortunately, I was still badly outnumbered and no longer protected by the shield. A stun round narrowly missed me on the left. I swung the shotgun around and blasted the table the soldier was using for cover.

The shield’s vibration pattern went steady at the same time Richard stuck his head up, so I unclipped it and threw it at him as hard as I could. The shield generator self-destructed midair in a burst of white-hot flames. I didn’t get to enjoy the surprise on Richard’s face for long because stun rounds hit me from two different directions.

I screamed as little bolts of agony licked through my system, causing my muscles to contract and twitch. I caught a glimpse of soldiers in space suits as I fell. The world went distant, and I didn’t feel the floor that rushed up to meet my helmeted face.

When I came back to myself, a blurry Richard stood over me. Someone had removed my helmet. I blinked to clear my vision, but it helped only marginally.

Blood caked the side of Richard’s face from a cut over his eye. With the blood, his handsome face had taken a sinister turn. “It didn’t have to be like this, Ada,” he said. He sounded sincere.

“Then let me go,” I gritted out.

“I’m afraid not,” Richard said. “You know too much, as evidenced by your search. You must not be allowed to alert the other Houses before we are ready. So, you can marry me, save your friends, and live in relative comfort, or you can rot in a cell while your friends die. You have until Santa Celestia returns to decide. Take her to the holding cell.”

I was lifted by two soldiers and placed on a stretcher. They strapped me down, then picked up the stretcher and moved deeper into the building. I tried to keep track of our movements, but the ceiling kept dipping and swirling in my vision.

I couldn’t feel the backpack under me, so they must’ve stripped me of gear while I was out. On the bright side, they hadn’t stripped my clothes. If I could find my helmet or another like it, I’d have a working space suit.

The soldiers maneuvered me through a doorway into a small room. They lowered the stretcher to the ground. The restraints loosened but didn’t fall away completely, then the soldiers left. The door closed and locked behind them.

I forced my neck to work. It looked like I was in an office that had been stripped of furniture. There was a large window next to the door, and a helmeted guard faced me through the glass. Another guard faced out into the larger room.

So much for escaping unnoticed.

It was much more interesting that all of the soldiers I’d seen so far were wearing space suits. Either Richard expected me to blow the atmospheric field or he had only just arrived and they hadn’t had time to change.

It took a few minutes, but I finally made my arms functional enough to pull the restraint strap off of my chest. I sat up with a groan. My abs trembled with the effort. I pulled the restraint from my legs and wobbled to my feet. I would need a few minutes of recovery before the ass-kicking started. I staggered to the window and tapped on the glass in front of the soldier facing me.

He did not react.

Looking past him, I could see a few more soldiers milling around in what appeared to be an office area. Desks sat in neat rows with a cleared space in the middle where a grouping of couches surrounded by a low wall made an informal meeting spot.

Richard stood next to one of the couches, close to another man who had also removed his helmet. The man nodded while Richard talked. By the deferential way he stood, even though he towered over Richard, he was likely the guard commander.

In fact, all of the guards were on the tall and bulky side—not a lanky guy or gal among them. My plan to play guard would go nowhere fast; they’d take one look at me and realize I wasn’t one of them.

I turned around and leaned against the window to better assess the room. Solid plastech walls and ceiling meant I wasn’t escaping unless I found a plasma cutter stashed conveniently nearby. I looked around, but the room failed to deliver. Even the air vent was a tiny rectangle that no human could fit through.

Richard had chosen my prison well.

My only chance of escape would be the window or when the soldiers entered the room to move me. And with a dozen guards standing outside the door, the chance of success rested at approximately zero.

It would help if I knew what Richard had planned for me. We were waiting for Richard’s battle cruiser, the Santa Celestia, to return, which meant it wasn’t here. Telling me that information was a slip on his part because it meant he had no backup except the soldiers with him. And while I worried that the Santa Celestia had followed Rhys to the gate, even if it had, space was vast and the stealth on the smaller, nimbler Polaris was second to none.

It meant that Polaris wasn’t caught yet.

It also meant that I had two hours or so to escape, assuming the Santa Celestia jumped with an alcubium FTL. Escaping from Richard’s ship would be orders of magnitude more difficult than escaping from this barely secured facility.

I just had to get out of this room.

I walked to the back wall. When that was successful, I paced back and forth. The soldier watching me didn’t move his head, but I had the sense that he carefully tracked my movements nonetheless.