But all of her termites were focused on detaching the hijacker, so she couldn't get them to check out the state of the ship for her. She was left with only her ears and knowledge of the ship to judge and guess what was happening.
So, she could estimate about when they successfully ripped their way in. And judging by the distance and the size of the vibrations, they did so at the secondary side entrance, the smaller one they used most often. That made sense to her since that would be the most logical spot to enter safely for their crew, and it was also probably the easiest location to do so.
That's why they'd concentrated their defenses there. Tanin, the twins, and Vytln would all be down there, while Trove worked the ship's weapon systems.
They'd be okay. She was sure they would.
The lights seemed to be a bit brighter. Was Alred coming back to them fully?
Her termites were doing so great she didn't even need to give them further commands. They were well trained and precisely programmed. So, all she needed was to-
A loud bang echoing sharply down the halls made her jump. She quickly scrambled to her feet, heart racing, because that didn't sound like it was coming from the storage room. That sounded like it was echoing from directly down the hallway.
As did the heavy grunts of force and pain.
Until they were drowned out by the shrill alarm overhead.
Chapter 41
Vytln
They were ripping holes in his ship!
With a furious roar, Vytln slammed the back of his opponent’s head onto the ground. He didn't hear his helmet and skull break over all the other noises, but he felt the force of it going up his arm. He honestly didn't know if that was a cousin of his or one of the people his family hired. He couldn’t recognize any of the droves of people coming in as they were all suited up to protect against the vacuum of space.
Because they were ripping holes in his ship!
It was infuriating. He had spent so much time working on it, and theyjustfinished that big remodel. But now the entire main storage area had a huge hole in it.
They'd used a feirnan tunnel to bore their way into the side of main storage. Named after its inventor, it was originally designed as an emergency boarding tunnel for ships in distress that couldn't allow a proper boarding connection – in the event of total power loss or crew illness or whatever.
Pirates had, of course, found another use for it. They didn't care about killing anyone on board, nor if the ship could still be flyable after they were done.
That was why Vytln and the others had to drop back from their positions to run for their envirosuits. They had no choice. If his brother broke that connection, they'd be exposed to space, and they'd be dead before they could do anything to save themselves.
The ship alarms weren't going off yet, but that had to be because of the hijacker, because any hull breach should have triggered them as well as the bulkhead doors all shutting to try to minimize the areas of damage.
The brief retreat and taking turns throwing their suits on cost them, and now the halls of the Humility were filling with enemies.
His brother was an ego maniac, but he was a careful one. He wasn't going to underestimate Vytln or the crew he ran with. And to that end, he was throwing a variable army at them.
As a team, Vytln and the others were good. They were damn good, in fact. But even they could be overwhelmed.
That's how Vytln and Tanin found themselves fighting in the halls, separated from Sorbet and Tebros. Tanin had his helmet in one hand. Vinyl had his on, but he hadn’t sealed it to his suit yet. They were trying to block the hall and succeeding just because their enemy was being forced to bottleneck themselves. But their numbers were unending.
“How much longer?” Vytln snarled, annoyed, as he grabbed another one of his maybe-relatives and threw him bodily into another.
He came from a big family. These could very well be his many cousins. He didn't know. He still didn't care. It didn't matter at the end of the day, because they were all dead anyway.
“Soon,” Tanin responded, the red of his ribbon the brightest mark in the room. The unbreakable silk was currently wrapped around someone's neck, his entire body bent up backwards as Tanin simultaneously stepped on his lower spine and pulled up on the ribbon. Thanks to his suit, it wasn't choking him, but it did nothing to stop Tanin from using brute force to snap his neck. The now dead body went limp as Tanin turned his attention to the next person.
Their enemy was gaining ground.
Not much. But every time they stepped over the bodies of their fallen comrades, they forced Vytln and Tanin to take a step back. The two of them had the advantage thanks to the bottleneck of the hall, but they had to fight to keep it and their enemy was relentless.
But Vytln's problem wasn't their slow regression. He could keep this up forever if he had to. They'd run out of corpses to throw at them eventually. Vytln would fight until his body broke if that's what it took.
Except that Haven was down this hall. The shelter was this way. If they kept losing ground, they'd come upon her, then she'd be in danger. And Vytln would rather hand himself over than let something happen to her.
