ABOARD THE ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again. He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving, pushing Katarina ahead of him.
Clear of pursuers for a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s storerooms and listened.
Some kind of strange alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was about to dive.
“What’s that?” Katarina asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Seconds later a recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat. Stand clear of midships array.”
“We’re running out of time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes left.”
“And we’re going the wrong way,” Kurt said.
They’d had no choice, each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward instead of aft.
In their favor, the ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now dead.
Working against them was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.
The alarm and recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array, larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the top of the Onyx’s hull.
“Let’s go,” he said, pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once again.
She was struggling to keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.
Kurt found a ladder that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down with his feet on the outside rails.
“Come on,” he said. As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand was soaked right through in red.
He went to look at it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Keep going.”
Another ladder dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on, off, and back on.
It gave him an idea.
“Wait here,” he said.
Kurt crept forward. Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster Unit.”
Behind him, Katarina leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow motion.
“I’m okay,” she said as he started back toward her. “Just… taking… a little rest.”
She wasn’t going to make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at breakneck speed. And they were running out of time anyway.
The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big locked into place.
“How much time?” he asked.
“A minute,” she said through her exhaustion. “Maybe less.”
She slumped onto her side, the blood-soaked rag over her hand smearing blood across the metal deck.
He couldn’t help her now. He had to do something about the Fulcrum before it was too late. With a fire ax he pulled from a bracket on the wall, he broke open the lock on the door in front of him. The sound of throbbing machinery echoed throughout the room.