A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy by Alex White

Author:Alex White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Frequency

Nilah couldn’t stop thinking about how to get a signal to the others.

She’d tried hacking the network through one of the security cameras, but found the cameras were only connected to one another and projectors, as well as a monitoring station somewhere below. She couldn’t get to anything external to the room: no door access, no power, nothing—and that meant it’d be hard to get a signal out while she was trapped inside. Frustrated, she began to secretly implant malicious code in anything she could touch. As a matter of course, she hacked the lights, electrical switching, climate control, and any other exposed systems. She introduced so many flaws that they’d never know exactly what she’d done until they reinstalled everything.

But she had one real goal: she programmed the cameras to scramble when they received the right series of light pulses from her arms. She’d keep that bit of sabotage ready for later.

Sharp returned a day later with food, but he left the thralls outside behind the thick bulkhead. He turned from the food cart and said, “Security is down for the time—”

“Get him!” Nilah cried, pushing back her sleeves and charging straight for him.

Without missing a beat, Sharp hunkered low, his hands outstretched and eyes narrowed. His fingers curled and uncurled, as though massaging the air. It wouldn’t matter, because he couldn’t grab what he couldn’t see.

Nilah went in for a quick flurry of blows, fanning her left arm to dazzle Sharp’s eyes. Instead of trying to make sense of the pulses, he seized her lit arm with a rock-hard grip and twisted. She popped him in the jaw, but her balance was thrown, and she couldn’t put much power into her punch.

The world spun on the wrong axis, and she found herself flying toward the stone floor, face-first. At the last second, he stopped her from breaking her neck by cushioning her fall—but then he twisted her up like a Harvest pastry. He yanked her arm in a direction it shouldn’t go, and she slapped the ground with a shout of surprise. He didn’t immediately release her, but pulled a little harder.

“Read his mind, Alister!” she grunted, but when he rushed in with a lit glyph in his hand, Sharp ducked out of the way, releasing his grip on her.

“Stop!” he shouted, but she wasn’t going to do this on his terms.

Nilah sprang to her feet and switched both arms to a deep, throbbing violet, flowing through the forms with a dancer’s grace. Flow in and out, as inexorable as the tide, her teacher had once told her. She’d take her time on the approach, confusing him, blurring the lines of her limbs with exploits of his visual cortex. She flashed her dermaluxes white with each extension of her arms, creating a skeletal effect known as the Solar Storm.

And, at first, it worked. She sank a punch into his unprepared gut, winding him, and blasted him across the nose with a surprise kick. On instinct, she flowed into the next form, rising rocket, shifting her dermaluxes to pounding white.

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