Mitzi swore, earning herself dirty looks from a knot of elderly women. Heart in her throat, she looked at the timetable. The next shuttle to Port Four wouldn’t come for another forty minutes.

The ship was set to launch in less than two hours, and if she wasn’t there on time, it would leave without her.

She’d guessed she must still have some enemies in Central who hadn’t been able to forgive her for what she’d done to Captain Jones—and this tight schedule confirmed it. Captain Jones had been well liked, and Mitzi wouldn’t have been surprised if someone, or possibly a few someones, were subtly sabotaging her chance to reenter the defence sector. Bumping her name to the bottom of the list when selecting captains would have been easy, or they could send her summons out a few hours too late so that there was a good chance she wouldn’t make it on time.

Central didn’t give second chances very often. If she missed that ship, she would be blacklisted. If she were ever summoned again, it would be when the war was all but lost.

She couldn’t miss the ship.

Mitzi ran back up the hallway she’d just come from, pushing against the flow of traffic. If she took the shuttle to Redding, she could change to a service taking her to one of the suburbs that clustered around the ports then get a direct line to Port Four.

Desperation made her ruder than she normally would have been, and by the time she was boarding the shuttle to Redding, she thought she must have shoved ahead of at least half of the commuters.

She settled into one of the cylindrical shuttle’s padded seats just as it pulled away from the station, and she pulled the harness on, panting, a stitch developing in her side.

Damn, Mitz, you’ve let yourself go these last four years.

The man in the seat to her left shot her a dour look before returning to his novel. Mitzi closed her eyes and took a moment to enjoy the sensation of the shuttle rocketing along its tracks, then pulled her communication block out of her pocket and opened the attachment that had come with her summons.

“Oh, good,” she murmured, a wolfish grin spreading over her face as she read through the mission description. “This is going to be even crazier than I’d hoped.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The change at Redding went without a hitch; the crowds were thinner there, and she was able to run the eighteen stations and leap through her shuttle’s doors just as they were closing. She collapsed into her seat in the nearly empty carriage, panting and grinning to herself. Her grin didn’t die until the shuttle ground to a halt six minutes later.

This is a direct service. It shouldn’t stop for another twenty minutes.

Mitzi hesitated for a second then unbuckled her harness and scooted over to a window. The shuttle had stopped in one of the downtown shopping sections. Brightly coloured signs coated the metal-plated buildings on either side of the street. Strangely, there were no pedestrians in sight.