Starflight (Starflight, #1)(55)
Renny must have seen her coming, because he’d already fired up the shuttle and opened the rear hatch by the time she reached him. She sailed inside headfirst, screaming for him to “Go, go, go!” and the craft lifted off the ground before the door had even shut. She sealed the hatch and scrambled on her hands and knees toward the cockpit, then strapped in beside him.
“You forgot your dress,” Renny said, staring straight ahead while he white-knuckled the control wheel and jettisoned toward the security checkpoint.
“Never let anyone tell you,” she panted, “that I don’t know how to make an exit.”
He laughed for an instant before his features hardened. When Solara followed the direction of his gaze, she understood why. Red alarms flashed all around the guard station while security officers scrambled like ants behind the wraparound glass. A billboard message flashed NO EXIT, and the line of shuttlecraft waiting to leave the complex jerked to a stop, nearly causing a pileup.
“Renny…” she said, then went mute.
Instead of slowing down, he pushed the accelerators to the limit, sending Solara jerking back in her seat. As they zoomed toward a single shuttle halfway through the exit point, she began to understand Renny’s intentions. He was going to try to follow the craft out before the shield closed behind it. But if the shield caught their back end, the energy surge would destroy their circuitry, leaving them drifting right outside the satellite. They’d be easy pickings for the Enforcers, assuming the surge didn’t electrocute them first.
“Hold on,” he warned. “I’m gonna have to ram them to get out.”
She gripped the armrests and held her breath, watching in horror as they approached the rear of the shuttle with dizzying speed. The guard station buzzed past her periphery, and she braced for impact. Instinctively, her eyes clenched shut. The scream of steel on steel tore through her ears as she slammed against her harness. Her head flew forward and back just as quickly, and the next thing Solara knew, they were outside the security shield with a chorus of alarms blaring inside the cockpit.
Renny’s glasses had flown off, but he didn’t miss a beat. He veered right, separating them from the other shuttlecraft and away from the cannon’s line of fire. An energy blast nicked the port hull and forced them into a barrel roll, but he corrected quickly and hit the boosters. The shuttle rocketed toward the nearby moon, and an instant later, they were out of the cannon’s range.
But that didn’t mean they were safe.
Renny was too busy hugging the moon’s gravity field for a slingshot of acceleration to tend to the dashboard, which lit up like a Christmas tree. The buttons and switches were unfamiliar to Solara, and without her diagnostic equipment, she couldn’t tell which systems had failed.
“What can I do?” she shouted above the beeping alarms.
“Radio the Banshee,” he said, and clutched the trembling wheel. “Tell the captain we need a track-and-intercept. He’ll know what that means.” Darting a glance at the dashboard, he added, “Make sure he knows our emergency system’s fried. We’ve got, maybe, thirty minutes of oxygen left.”
And nowhere safe to land, Solara thought. Then she realized that if they died, so would Doran, because the Banshee would never find them in time to deliver his medicine. The possibility made her shiver. She sent out a distress call, but there was no reply. “I don’t know if our com is out, or just the receiver,” she said.
“Keep trying.”
She did, over and over again, until her skin puckered into goose bumps and her teeth chattered. Without heated oxygen coursing through the cockpit, the temperature had plummeted so low that her breath condensed into clouds—not the best conditions to fly half naked.
Renny shrugged out of his jacket. “Put this on,” he said, then unbuttoned his shirt and handed her that, too. “And cover your legs.”
The coat was warm with body heat, so she wrapped herself tightly between the lapels before it cooled. When she thanked Renny, she noticed a scattering of pink lesions marring the bare skin on his shoulders. She frowned at the scars. Round and precise, they looked like laser wounds.
“What happened to your back?” she asked.
After engaging the autopilot, he reached blindly across the far end of the dash until he found his glasses, then grinned when he saw that they weren’t broken. “Remember what I said about stealing from the wrong people?”
“They shot you?”
“Thoroughly,” he said with a wry smile. “While I ran screaming for my life, a lot like how you did back there at the satellite.”
Solara wondered if those men had known Renny couldn’t control the impulse to steal, but she supposed it wouldn’t matter to the kind of people who’d shoot an unarmed man in the back. “What about the lady?” she asked. “The one who loved you. Where is she now?”
Renny’s mouth lifted in a sad smile. “I wish I knew…or maybe I don’t.” He shook his head. “Look at the mess we’re in now. This is no life, running in the shadows, never settling in one place. I wanted something better for her—a real home and a family she could be proud of. That’s why I left her behind.” A faraway look crossed his face, and he sighed with so much longing that it plucked at Solara’s heartstrings. “Some days, I hope she moved on,” he said. “And some days I don’t.”