She hadn’t needed to give them a wake up to reality. They’d been staring reality in the face since being summoned that morning. Mitzi had simply confirmed what none of them had wanted to say: they had very, very bad odds of completing the mission and even worse odds of making it off the planet alive. They didn’t need shaking up. They needed their hands held.

“Jeeze,” Mitzi hissed. I’m rubbish at hand holding.

She stormed into the lounge area, grabbed one of the folding seats, then brought it back into the equipment room. She flicked it open, slammed it on the ground at the head of the two rows of seats, and collapsed into it with a sigh. “Okay, you four, sit down already. Someone get Ellen a tissue. Eoin, I’m sure it’s riveting, but would you please put your book down for half a minute?”

For a second, she thought he wasn’t going to comply, but then Eoin closed the paperback and tucked it into his suit’s pocket. His sunken eyes were red rimmed.

“I want to make a deal with you.” Mitzi tried to moderate her voice to be slower and calmer as she gazed at her new team. “Yes, this mission sucks. Yes, your life expectancy took a nosedive the moment you were signed up for it. But it’s not impossible, and it’s not a death sentence.” Skye and Adam risked looking at her. Mitzi took that as a good sign. “Here’s the deal: I’m going to do my absolute best to get every single one of you out of there alive. But in return, I need you to trust me.”

“Okay,” Skye said at once.

Mitzi flashed her a tight smile.

“Good. Now, I know a tiny bit about all of you. It’s your turn to learn about me. As you know, I’m Mitzi DeLacanto. I was a recon team leader for twelve years until my retirement.”

“I heard it wasn’t a retirement,” Adam said. His voice had a smug, accusatory edge, and Mitzi had to fight the urge to slap the smug disdain off his face. “I heard you were discharged.”

“Yep.” Mitzi’s voice was full of forced brightness. “Dishonourable discharge, at that. Do you know why?”

He smirked. “Yeah. You shot your commander.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Mitzi closed her eyes. She could still see him, just as clear as if he were in the room with her, his chiselled face creased in concern as he raised his hands in a placating motion. She shook her head to clear the image and hoped her new team wouldn’t notice how abruptly she was changing the subject. “Okay. How much do you guys know about the Cymics?”

Murmurs came back to her:

“Not much.”

“I know they’re dangerous.”

“They’re a plant, aren’t they?”

“Right.” Mitzi sucked on her teeth. Even with the media being suppressed so heavily, she would have thought Central would have provided at least a basic overview for the civilians it had called into service. “Let’s start there, then. To the best of my knowledge, the first Cymic attacks began eight weeks ago with the corruption of a fringe station near the extremes of our network. The crew put in an emergency help request, but they had been turned by the time rescue arrived a week later. The crew that had been sent to them were also turned, and they began stopping off at other stations as they made their way back through the system. The Cymics are sort of like a virus; they spread, and spread quickly. Those other stations sent out their own ships, and the ones without ships put in assistance requests to lure humans to them. The threat became—to keep with the virus analogy—an epidemic.”