Today was a new day, a new evening. She’d come to find Hysterian to apologize for breaking protocol and to reset boundaries between them, to figure out where the bugs for Titan’s ambassador were, to finally get into the bridge, and most of all, remember why she was here in the first place.
Alexa inhaled and looked around her some more. She didn’t know how much time she had.
She moved away from the door after waiting another few seconds, just in case Hysterian watched the security feed later. He could be heading back at any moment if his business with Daniels was done.
She closed in on Daniels’s station first, slowly making her way to her target: the captain’s logs. If she knew she wouldn’t be caught, she’d have followed Hysterian to overhear his and Daniels’s conversation. Maybe she’d find out what Daniels was looking for in Hysterian’s quarters…
She shook her head.I’m not here for Daniels.
The screens ran continuous feeds at Daniels’s station. Numbers and alerts popped up in the air directly above the hardware. There were calibrations and readings of theQuestor’ssystems, their usages, and maintenance specs. It was strange information for someone on the bridge to be viewing but not wholly unusual.
The ship’s water supply and recycling were at their max. TheQuestor’sAI suggested water replacement immediately due to an unusual number of unknown substances in it. Strange.
Alexa pretended to stretch and swiped her finger across the specs, pushing them away. New information came up. Navigational specs, random coordinates, and more popped up. A correspondence from Elyria? Her eyes widened at the planet’s name coming out of nowhere, and when she stretched again, she was dismayed but not surprised the correspondence was locked.
She moved away from Daniels’s station, cutting her gaze to the ship’s windows in the front.
Titan was a beautiful planet, but the tarmac was not. Condensation evaporated off the cement, making the view foggy.
She made her way to Horace’s station next.
His station was a complete disaster, and she wondered where the cleaning bots were, but she had also interrupted the officers in the middle of something, so maybe they hadn’t had time to clean up and organize their stations before the next shift cycle.
Horace eluded her. She’d barely spoken to him in the weeks they’d been traveling. He was a quiet man with a testy demeanor. Neither she nor Horace made the effort to get to know one another.
But his screens were filled with correspondences, and her curiosity piqued. It made sense. Horace was the communications officer, their expert on the various sects of humans across the universe. Snooping on his mail would be satisfying, but she wasn’t here to get distracted. She backtracked to stand beside Hysterian’s chair.
The captain’s seat was front and center, and above the others—even the empty stations across the bridge. Power, it screamed. Authority. Leadership. She didn’t belong anywhere near it.
Alexa would never be a captain of anything. She was lucky enough to have the position she trained for. She’d been poor growing up and only had her dad. He taught her how to survive up until his own death. He never taught her how to survive without him though.
He would’ve made a great captain.
Dad never left Elyria. He never so much as stepped onto a spaceship. He’d been a Trentian half-breed. Part-human, part-alien. Alexa reached out and ran her fingers over the back of Hysterian’s chair, soothed by the soft, rich leather she felt.
Dad never had a chance to be anything more than what he was. He could work for neither government nor any organization affiliated with both. Humans didn’t trust him; Trentians tolerated him. And since Elyria had more humans than either Trentians or half-breeds combined, life had been hard for him.
He found work wherever he could, using whatever resources were available. There were half-breed communities that helped, but when every half-breed had the same problem, some just got shuffled to the end of the list. Dad spent his free time giving help in return.
He cared. So much.He wanted a better life for me. For us. For all half-breeds.
Women like her didn’t have it nearly as hard as a man with the same predicament. They had it hard, but in an entirely different way.
Purebred Trentians overlooked the human part in the women of her community. They didn’t care. They needed women to replace the countless they lost in the war, and so half-breed Trentian females were a desired commodity. Knights from Xanteaus, the Trentian homeworld, would come to the slums once a year to gather willing women of age, and offer them a chance at matehood, and a way off Elyria—a better life.
Many took the opportunity, while some, like herself, hid.
Dad made her fully aware of her predicament. Alexa’s heart fell. He protected her with every ounce of power he held, which wasn’t much.
Then a Cyborg killed him.Her eyes narrowed.The same Cyborg I tempted to kiss me.Alexa snatched her hand back, rubbing the feel of the leather from her fingers.
And if anyone found out she was a half-breed…she was doomed.
Or as good as dead. She’d been on Earth, in the presence of her species’ greatest enemy. An enemy who would either kill her on the spot because of it, or turn her over to the authorities.
She’d paid a lot of money for her fake medical records and for the glamour surgery to change her eye color. She tried to blend in.
Her eyes snapped to the screens in front of the captain’s chair. Screens with dozens of different windows to search through.
