Operation: Marauder
Chapter 14

Zoey watched Rowan and his men turn back down the hallway. He didn’t say a word. She had seen something in his eyes, a fire that burned bright and fiercely; it seemed to make his eyes appear more purple. She thought he might make Sergeant Timber go away, like Mave had, and finally talk to her. But then he yanked his gaze from her and walked away.

That was the last time she gave a guy a second chance. Or a third. She didn’t care what was going on, it didn’t give Rowan the right to ignore her. She thought he cared about her, that they had shared a connection. Nope. She was an idiot, apparently desperate for any man to love her.

Angry at him and herself, she marched back to Jack’s room. The shower was on when she arrived, so instead of being furious in the shower, she plopped down on the couch and fumed at the ceiling.

Jack came out of the bathroom minutes later, slipping into his military grade jacket as he headed for the door. Zoey sat up, wanting to talk to him, but he waved her off. “I have to go. The boys have something urgent they want to talk about.”

“But you’ve been working all day!”

Hand on the doorknob, he stopped to look at her. “This is important, Zoe. I don’t have the luxury of time off.”

He left her feeling more like a child he was stuck to babysit than his sister who needed protection. She hated it. Hated this place and everyone in it. She wasn’t a child. She could take care of herself. Had been up until she decided to trust Rowan. It had been a mistake to come here, but now she doubted she could escape.

She paced around the room, biding her time, really, because what else was she going to do? Jump out the window? There was no window. Overpower Timber? It had been years since she had practiced martial arts; he could probably stop her in five seconds flat. She could read her novels, pretend to be in a fantasy land with dragons, charming princes, and kick ass heroines. But she had been stupid and selected romance novels, at the time in the mood to be swept away into a man’s arms, even if he was a fantasy man.

So what did she settle with? What she did best. Dog-fighting alien ships threatening to invade Earth in Jack’s simulator; to really put her in the mood, she had the good old “Master of Puppets” album rocking in her ears.

Until she was interrupted by a knock on her door.

Frowning, she got up from the chair, realised she had been sitting in it for quite some time when her back cracked, and stretched her arms over her head. When she bent down to stretch her legs, she saw the piece of paper that had been slipped under her door.

Want to try out the real thing? the note read. Follow these instructions exactly.

The instructions were detailed directions through the base with landmarks, times to stop and wait for a patrol, and when the shift change for Timber was supposed to take place.

In exactly three minutes.

It wasn’t enough time for her to decide if she wanted to blindly trust this person, but what did she have to lose? If she got caught, she could say she got lost looking for the cafeteria, and Timber hadn’t been outside when she left.

Three minutes passed. Time to decide.

Holding the note close, she peeked outside the room. Timber was gone. The instructions said to follow the hallway and take the first right, so she shut the door softly behind her and went. There, she had to wait a minute while a patrol passed by. She plastered herself against the wall, willing herself to be invisible. There was no need. The two soldiers went on without looking back at her. She checked the note for the next set of directions and followed them word for word.

So far, whomever was guiding her hadn’t let her down and had proven themselves to be quite the ally. Escaping might not be such a feat after all if she could convince this person to help her. They seemed to have a very thorough understanding of the base and personnel.

At this time of night, there was no one around to give her trouble. She had made it as the note predicted. Now the instructions promised one final door. When she opened it, she nearly tripped at the sight before her. The note had been very clear for her to keep moving, no matter what she saw, but they hadn’t taken into account what a big deal this was to her. To anyone.

There was a bloody spaceship parked in the middle of the hangar! It didn’t look like a prototype to get the big wigs excited either. It was fully functioning with technology beyond her understanding, flashing lights, and a ramp beckoning her inside.

She heard voices in the corridor behind the door, swore under her breath, and then ran for the ramp. As soon as she was inside, it raised behind her with a hydraulic hiss. Feeling a lot like how Alice must have felt when she fell down the rabbit hole, Zoey inched her way deeper into the ship, afraid to touch anything. The hallway led straight ahead to the main deck, only passing two side doors as she went; she imagined one was for the engine and the other for sleeping quarters. But honestly, it could have led to the pool room. She had no idea what this ship was capable of. Why not be bigger on the inside?

“Hello?” she called, glancing around the main deck for anyone. Not that there was anywhere for them to hide. There were five chairs with straps on either wall near the front of the craft and closer to the back, where she stood, was the most futuristic kitchen she had ever seen.

The door at the front of the ship opened. The cockpit. There was a three ring ladder to climb before entering. She stopped at the sight of a familiar mop of brown hair hovering behind the pilot’s chair. “Mave?”

He spun the chair and nodded to her in greeting. “How did you get here?”

Considering he didn’t seem surprised to see her at all, she thought it was a dumb question. “You gave me this note, didn’t you?”

He refused to look at the note she waved around. “No, I didn’t. There is no note. How did you get here?”

Ah. He had given her the note, but for the sake of covering his ass, and she supposed hers, he didn’t. No one did.

She crumpled it up and shoved it in her pocket to be thrown away later. “I got lost looking for the cafeteria.”

He nodded in approval then gestured for her to join him in the co-pilot’s chair. “You must have many questions,” he guessed, turning some knobs and pressing a few buttons. “I cannot answer them. You must come to your own conclusions. I can, however, show you this.” He pressed a final button, and the windshield suddenly viewed an airway strip, not the hangar. It was as if a projector was screening the strip on a sunny day onto it, but there was no projector. “The ship is now in Practice Mode. We use this to train our pilots. The simulator I gave Jack is very similar to this, just a more condensed version and adapted for a computer.”

“Which is why you can show me,” Zoey surmised, “because I already know about it. You said I couldn’t ask you questions, but you never said I couldn’t share my thoughts with you.”

A small smile touched his lips, and if Zoey had to guess, it didn’t happen often with him so she should be beaming. “I think this is going to go very well. We only have four hours before you need to head back if you don’t want to get caught. Let’s see how well you do.”

“Okay, let’s see. . .” She looked around the cockpit, trying to figure out how to get this baby moving--and to understand the secrets of this technology Mave wanted her to uncover. “I can’t believe we’ve developed something this advanced and haven’t adapted it to other technologies.” She found the button she pressed in the simulator to start the engines; it came to life with a soft purr, something that shouldn’t be possible in a craft this big. She had expected a great big roar for such a beast.

Mave cleared his throat and gestured to the compass casually. She froze in the middle of waking all the systems up. The symbols on the compass weren’t anything like she’d ever seen, not in any language she had heard of.

She glanced at him, then back to the symbols. It was crazy. . . wasn’t it? He couldn’t be saying what she thought he was. But it explained the wonders she was belly-deep in.

“It’s an alien craft,” she whispered, appreciating the ship in a whole new way. She was sitting in the co-pilot chair of another race, one far more advanced than her own.

So many questions buzzed through her mind, so many she couldn’t ask Mave.

Instead of getting frustrated with the situation, she went back to going through the motions of getting this wonderful gift airborne. Only a few more switches and a lever, then the ship vibrated. She gasped, hoping they weren’t actually taking off. She couldn’t handle it if she had crashed it.

“It’s part of the simulation,” he assured her. “It’ll make all the noises and motions, but we’ll stay on the ground.”

Amazing.

She angled them up and held it at a constant altitude, the highest she had ever been. It was remarkably realistic; she could see the whole city beneath them, mapped out perfectly.

“With something this advanced,” she wondered aloud, “I’m surprised we could get it up and running after a crash.”

Mave cleared his throat again and gestured to the barely visible stars above them. “Perhaps try a different angle?”

Something told her he wasn’t talking about increasing the altitude, though she was certainly going to do that. If this baby was an alien ship, it was definitely space-ready and Zoey had never wanted anything more than to see space. She had given up on that dream, but it appeared it wasn’t as far from her as she had thought.

“It didn’t crash,” she murmured, slowly increasing the altitude. She was dying to see what was up there, but was nervous. What if it didn’t live up to her expectations?

Then she thought about what she was saying. If the craft hadn’t crashed, that meant the aliens had landed here. There were aliens on Earth.

She looked at Mave. “We’ve actually made contact with aliens? Wait.” She gave it some more thought, horror striking her hard. Would aliens really let her people play with their spaceship unsupervised? She doubted it. “Don’t tell me we killed them for this.”

The corner of his mouth quirked into a secret smile. “I can see why he likes you.”

“You better not be talking about Rowan,” she snapped. “I don’t get him. I don’t get it.”

“Get what?” He raised a pair of intrigued eyebrows at her.

“This feeling. A never-ending curiosity about him. I want to know everything about him, and it drives me crazy that his entire life is apparently classified. And now he’s ignoring me, and I feel. . . ” She didn’t know how she felt about it, but she wouldn’t be able to describe it anymore now that they had left the atmosphere. Her mind turned away from her frustrations to the wonder that laid before her.

She sat on her knees to get a better look out the narrow horizontal window. Earth laid before them, blue, vibrant, beautiful. Never in a million years did she think she would see it like this. Even if this was just a simulation. She knew they weren’t really in space, but she was in a spaceship, she could fly it, and it looked so, so real. She was so close to her dream she could touch it.

She was only mildly aware Mave was typing something into the system. She should have paid more attention because suddenly there was an asteroid hurtling their way. Screaming, she hopped back in the seat and yanked the stick to the left. The motion sent the ship out of control. The hull rumbled so violently she swore they were actually spinning in space.

“Where are the stabilizers on this thing?” she demanded, fighting to get the ship under control again.

He reached across the console, perfectly calm, and flicked a small red switch. She felt the stabilizers kick in, but they were still spinning.

“You need to counter the spin. Remember, we’re in space, there’s no friction to slow you down.”

Just like that, she knew what to do. Remembering some of the controls from Jack’s computer, she found the side thrusters and put them to fifty percent. The spin began to slow down until, finally, they stopped.

Panting, she leaned back in the chair and glared at Mave. “You couldn’t have let me have one moment to look at her?”

“You can’t afford distractions as a pilot,” he reminded her. “Your team is relying on you to keep them alive. Or they’ll be sucked into the vacuum of space. It doesn’t matter what planet you’re from, no one can survive that.”

Rolling her eyes, she relinquished the controls to him. “I’m barely a pilot. I’m definitely not the pilot of a spaceship. I never will be.”

“Never is a long time.”

She cast him a doubting glower. She didn’t believe in false hope. “We have one of these--that I’m aware of. Why would they let someone like me drive their ship?” There was no way the military would let a civilian anywhere near this; she was only here tonight because Mave had snuck her in.

Mave bit his lip, clearly wanting to say something to change her mind. After some thought, he said, “It’s not up to them who pilots it. It’s up to the owners.”

She wanted to laugh. Something held her back. Maybe it was the ludicrousy of what he was saying. Or maybe because she wanted to believe him. “You’re telling me I should ask the aliens if I could be their pilot?”

“You don’t have to,” was all he had to say about that. “Do you want to fly around some more? We have a few more hours.”

She looked at Earth, the moon, the brilliant glow of the sun, then down to the console. She was never going to get an opportunity like this again. As soon as she stepped off the base, she would never see the ship again, see the galaxy. There was so much she wanted to see, so much she didn’t know but was driven by curiosity.

“Don’t throw any more asteroids at me.”

“Done.” He plotted a course around Mars. “Follow this path.”

“Isn’t there an autopilot option for that?”

“Yes, but do you want to be driven around Mars, or do you want to fly around Mars?”

Damn him. He knew what drove her.

“Next stop, Mars, Captain.”

The past four hours were the best of Zoey's life. She saw things on Mars no one had ever seen in person. She let her heart soar as they flew between its two moons, let herself enjoy this moment. It was incredible, beautiful, unimaginable. Everything and nothing like she thought it would be.

And then Mave turned off the simulator. The windows viewed the inside of the hangar, and Zoey was jolted back to reality.

Until he offered to show her more tomorrow. How could she turn him down?

At day, she practiced on the simulator more seriously, now knowing what she was driving was real. At night, she put everything she taught herself to the test through Mave’s rigorous training. Jack barely visited her--barely came back to his room. Whenever she saw him, he was too busy to talk. Had too much to do. She knew his job was important, but he couldn’t have taken ten minutes to ask her how she was doing? She wasn’t allowed to ask how vampire hunting was going? Even if all he could say was “classified.”

And then one morning, Mave slipped a note under her door. She hardly had any time to wake up, let alone brush her teeth.

Change of plans today. Be in the hangar in one hour or miss out.

Zoey wasn’t sure what to make of it. The change was so sudden, and Mave was usually so calculative; he’d at least give her directions to make her way to the hangar undetected. Today, there was no such instruction. She had to replace a way to get away from Timber and sneak into the hangar before he found her, all within an hour.

She didn’t know what to expect, so she pulled on a pair of yoga pants and one of Jack’s hoodies with ARMY written across the front. There was no time to grab breakfast, but she made Timber think that was where they were going. She had gained enough of his trust over the past few days that he didn’t cling to her like a leech, more like cheap glue that faltered when water came into play. Today, that water was the oldest trick in the book.

“I have to pee,” she told Timber, instantly making him uncomfortable.

He withheld a grimace while they waited in line for their food. “Then go.”

He waited in line, gaze unmoving from the person in front of him, and she slowly retreated to the washrooms until she was sure he wasn’t going to look back. Then she spun around and sped-walked for the hangar while looking as inconspicuous as possible. Jack would have been proud if she wasn’t going against his wishes.

She made it to the hangar with no troubles and caught Mave standing on the ramp, waiting for her. He waved her over without delay. “You got here sooner than I expected,” he observed with the small smile she was learning he only held for those he respected. “Quickly, now.”

He ushered her inside, straight for the cockpit. Usually he’d at least ask her what new moves she had been trying. Not today.

“What’s going on, Mave?”

“Shh. They’ll be coming soon and will hear you. Sit here and stay quiet, no matter what you hear. Got it?” He had that stern, “cross me and you’ll regret it” look about him, so she nodded and sat still, watching the door close on his way out.

He never mentioned anything about not using the cameras on board, so she turned the monitor on. There were two cameras; one kept an eye on the comings and goings of the ramp, the other observed the main deck. She saw Mave standing on the ramp, just as he had been when she arrived. It was then when she noticed he wasn’t wearing the usual tee shirt and jeans; he wore black cargos and a breathable long-sleeved shirt that athletes wore. He also had a knife strapped to one leg, a side arm on his other.

She held her breath when Jack came into view, wearing identical clothing. Along with Rowan, Cassian, and two other members of the crew.

She sat back in the chair as it dawned on her what the change of plans was. They were going on a mission and Mave was bringing her along.