Pledge Allegiance by Rider England Page A

have an opportunity to place it there, then yes, of course they did. But I’ve worked with all three of them for years. I trust them. They wouldn’t do anything like this without telling me.”
    The transporter door opened and we walked out onto a suspended steel walkway that ran across a large room. Below, the engine pulsed with a deep hum. Its turbine gave off a ghostly blue glow that lit the entire room.
    “Down here,” Tegan said, descending a set of metal steps toward the monstrous piece of machinery. I followed her down to a floor that was a metal grille. Half of the engine was below us in the blue-tainted shadows.
    Tegan opened a hatch in the floor and dropped down onto a ladder. As she began to climb down, I felt dizzy watching her. I wasn’t afraid of heights but my nausea from earlier was coming back to haunt me and staring down at the ladder that descended into the humming darkness made my stomach lurch.
    I gritted my teeth and lowered myself through the hatch. When my boots contacted the first metal rung, I stepped down gingerly until I was below the grille floor and climbing down into darkness.
    The low thrum of the engine seemed to resonate through my entire body, making my stomach and limbs feel heavy. I wondered if it affected the machinery that made up the left half of Tegan’s body. I wasn’t going to ask her. If she wanted to talk about her mechanical modifications, that was up to her but until then, I wasn’t going to force her into a conversation she might be uncomfortable with.
    I finally reached the steel floor at the bottom of the ladder and stepped onto it, grateful that I hadn’t puked on the way down.
    Tegan took a flashlight from her belt and turned it on, playing the beam across the curved underside of the engine. She crouched down and shone the light between an array of steel pipes that snaked under the turbine.
    I got down on my hands and knees and peered at the place where the light hit steel. I didn’t know anything about engineering beyond the basics I’d been taught at the academy, but I knew that the device I was looking at now did not belong on the Finch ’s engine.
    It was shaped like a dome, maybe a foot in diameter and half that in height, and made of dark gray metal. A tiny red light was illuminated on the metallic surface, probably to show that the device was functioning.
    One thing was certain: it didn’t look like a bomb or the detonator for a bomb. There were no wires running from the dome to any explosive material. The device was self-contained and sitting among the pipes, perhaps attached by magnets on its base.
    At first I told myself that I was paranoid if I thought someone was trying to blow up the Finch , but then I reminded myself that somebody had put this device here in secret. It had some purpose. If it wasn’t here to blow us up, it was here to track us through space. But why? It made no sense.
    “It looks like a tracking device,” I said to Tegan, “but not like any tracking device I’ve seen before.”
    “I’ve never seen anything like it either,” she said. “So what do we do? Who put it there? Why are they tracking our ship?”
    I got to my feet. “If the device was placed there recently, do you think the person who put it there is still on board?”
    “I don’t know. It’s possible. But a lot of technicians, engineers and mechanics have been on the ship lately. Even after the engines were upgraded and I performed my last diagnostic check, the onboard weapons systems were still being worked on, as were the crew quarters and the bridge. The Finch has had a total refit and that takes a lot of work. There must have been hundreds of people on board.”
    I pointed to the shadows beneath the turbine. “But only one of them planted this device.”
    She nodded, her long red hair tumbling over her face. She brushed it away and said, “Should we disarm it?”
    I thought about that for a moment. If we disarmed the device, we might not be trackable