Free Aries Revealed by Mina Carter

this thing months ago. The minute it took to reach the command deck was feeling like a lifetime.
    “Unable to comply. No link to station.”
    “Fuck it!”
    Milly bit her lip as she shoved a hand through her hair in frustration. They were jamming the damn signal.
    “Unable to comply. Please restat—”
    Several things happened at once. The computer cut off mid-sentence as the lift ground to a halt, leaving her looking at a blank wall rather than the unopened doors of the bridge she was expecting. A distinctive rumble shuddered up through the deck plates, the low sound shivering through her body and settling into a warm knot at the base of her skull as the Starflame’s subspace engines were started up.
    “No, you bastards !”
    Frustration and anger exploded through her as she flew to the wall, hammering on it with her fists. Her only reward was a dull metallic clang and sharp pain shooting up her arms. She ignored it as the sound swelled and grew. Even without being on the bridge, she knew what was happening, could feel it as the docking clamps disengaged. A little drop, the shunt sideways as the ship scooted past the restraining utilities arm as it retracted back to the station, felt the swell in power as whoever was at the helm opened her up to take her out into deep space.
    “Shitshitshit shit!”
    What did she do now? Milly looked about her in the close confines of the lift and had to bite back a chuckle of bitter amusement. Of all the places to get caught during a hijack, she had to get caught in the damn lift. It was worse than getting caught in the head, although both scenarios had her metaphorical pants around her ankles. At least in the head she had options. She could have escaped through the ventilation shafts or fashioned a weapon from the toilet seat and the paper-dispenser, made napalm from the soap dispenser or something. Anything.
    In the lift she was shit out of luck. The smooth walls were oval in shape, the only gap where the doors should be, the blank metal there mocking her. And because it was an antigravity lift, there wasn’t even a roof or cable to the thing she could crawl on and climb up. She was literally stuck, hanging around until whoever had control on the bridge decided what to do with her.
    “If I get out of this, I’m installing bloody stairs,” she muttered, plastering herself against the side of the lift and trying to see how far up the door to the bridge was. The half-assed notion that she could somehow use the small lip of the lift wall to balance on, and open a pressurized door by hand died a swift death. She could just see the bottom edge of the door in the darkness beyond the floating light above her but she’d need to be ten foot rather than five foot nothing to reach it.
    “Bollocks.”
     
    “What the fuck?”
    The first notion Johnny had that there was something wrong was when the lights flickered in the cargo hold and the ship started to move. Swearing, he dropped the pretty little soaps and the pink loofah—who the hell kept a pink loofah in their locker?—Milly had sent him down to fetch in favor of grabbing hold of the guardrail around the balcony.
    Eyes widening he looked around and up, more feeling through his feet and the hand in contact with the ship than seeing. The dull grind and inertial movement said they were moving, but why? From the conversations he’d overheard between Milly and her crew, the ship wasn’t due out until Tuesday and he couldn’t see the station asking her to move a leviathan like this to another berth. The fuel cost alone would negate any saving they might make having this berth earlier. Nor could he see her as the kind of person to cut and run with what she thought was an expensive, experimental android.
    Instantly the only other option came to mind. Hijackers. Cargo ships like the Starflame were always at risk because of the high value and the sheer amount of cargo they could carry, but it was a bold team that jacked a ship while it