Claimed by the Zandian (Zandian Brides 6)

“Oh, we took a hit from that anthracite asteroid!” The tech’s voice is panicky. “Zina, did you take us off auto already? Are you—”

“No, I didn’t do anything!” I tap on the screen in front of me. Where’s the off button on this thing?

The pod lurches to the other side, even harder, and swings around in a crazy circle. “It’s like you’re aiming for them. Are you, Zina?”

“I can’t do this.” I try to do something with the controls, but I have no clue. It's not even like the practice program I did with Tarek, although it’s not like I mastered that. But I have no blasted idea of how these controls even work.

I push a button in front of me.

The pod screams, metal on metal, a bearing turning somewhere in its guts, and the chair locks me into a soft stranglehold as the ersatz ship does a full roll. And another one.

“Zina! What in the veck?” The tech shouts and an alarm blares. “Abort. Zina abort now!”

“I don’t know how!” I bend down to peer at the armrest. “You do it for me!”

“Warning. Hull breach imminent. Warning. Pull up. Pull up.” An automated voice resonates in my headset.

“Zina, come on! Get ahold of this.” The tech sounds pretty pissed. Does he not understand that I don’t know what in the stars to do?

“I need help!’ I shout, but it’s buried in the sound of some kind of blast.

I tap wildly at the screen, and then I see an odd red button at the bottom of my console. It’s under a little glass dome and it has a hazard sign on it. It looks sort of like the “stop” signs that I’ve seen in the training driving dome.

Well, this feels pretty hazardous. And I want to stop.

I flip the lid, fighting nausea, as the pod rolls again, and hit the button.

There’s a sudden pause and we drop back around, my stomach sinking into my pelvis. For one brilliant second, I think that it’s over. The sim has stopped.

But then there’s a ferocious groan, like a storm is ripping huge metal pylons from hard-baked earth, and the chair hugs me even more tightly.

“Executing eject pod sequence,” intones the voice. “Launching emergency life support pod with partial masking. Three, two one.”

And then my vision goes black as an egg-shaped shell closes around my chair and screen, and the whole thing hurtles out of the pod.

Tarek

I’m talking to Drayk when I hear the simulator thrum into life. Someone must be doing a demo for Seke. Good. I hope he’s impressed with my software.

But then the sounds change. Instead of the soft engine thrum, I hear the unmistakable tone that indicates craft damage. What the veck? Obviously, it’s a sim, so the craft isn’t actually damaged. But the sim employs realistic sounds to replicate the full experience. But whoever is navigating must have messed up pretty badly, because—

“I need to go.” I tap my comm and race over, only to see the whole pod spin on its axis like a giddy wheel about to fly off a child’s cart.

“Override the program,” I shout at the tech. “Shut it down this instant.”

“I can’t, because she’s pushed the eject button. I don’t have override for that.”

“The eject button is activated? Who authorized that?” She? Who the veck is inside that pod? It better not be...

Before I have a chance to parse this, something terrible happens. The whole training pod shudders and twitches, then the emergency escape mini-pod crashes through the hull and rolls to the ground beside our group.

As we watch, the lid glides open.

And Zina stumbles out.

She coughs in the acrid blue smoke caused by the grinding of metal on metal.

“Hi,” she says. A beat goes by. “I was just demonstrating my skills to Master Seke,” she explains, and cou