It was a call for immediate help from the Hissa warship Ardent.
“One of our fellow warriors needs us,” Lazil said after scanning the message. “He’s on a ship called the Assist in orbit around the Diniki planet Tulsin I.”
Miran felt a wave of disgust. “Diniki?”
“I guess I know where we’re going next,” Nerin said, trying to sound cheerful. “They need a team with a gunship, and we are a team with a gunship.”
“It could put Nova at risk,” Miran objected. “We should tell Ardent’s command that we can’t go.”
Nerin gave him a look. A fellow Hissa was in trouble, and Ardent’s message hinted that many other lives were in danger also. They couldn’t hold Nova’s safety above many others.
“Fine,” Miran snapped. “We’ll help. We can always shove Nova in a biosuit and lock her in the escape pod. If there’s trouble, we can launch her to the nearest planet. At least we know she’ll do well no matter where the pod lands.”
Chapter 14
Nova
Although she planned to stay in the room for days to show Miran how upset she was, she only lasted a few hours. She was used to being active and after all the down time in her dome, staying cooped up in the room was impossible. Especially after a night spent with the last medicated wrap. Her ankle felt good, she was well rested, and all that meant she was restless.
She half expected the door to the room to be locked, but of course it wasn’t. Miran had never purposely lied to her, even if he was good at lying to himself.
Thinking of the life they couldn’t have together made her want to slap him around and demand he see the universe for the cold, harsh place it was, not the idyllic myth he’d been told.
There was no green planet full of happy families waiting for her. There never would be. That wasn’t the life Decanted humans ever expected. They were engineered, often for specific purposes, then sold off to be used, abused, and discarded when they were no longer useful.
Whoever these Hissa were working for couldn’t possibly mean to do anything good to her when they got to their destination.
Dismissing those depressing thoughts, Nova explored the quiet gunship. It wasn’t very big and soon she found herself in the command room, where everyone was frantically talking.
“The Diniki sent a fleet from the planet!” Nerin announced, his hands moving rapidly over his console. “They’re demanding we leave the area. What do we do?”
“An entire fleet?” Miran asked, staring at the display in his console.
“None of the ships are as advanced as ours,” Nerin said. “But there are too many of them for us to take on by ourselves.”
“We have skill on our side,” Lazil said. “We can take them.”
“How did this situation get so bad so quickly?” Miran asked. His voice was deeply frustrated with a hint of helplessness. “Our arrival was supposed to help defuse the situation, not escalate it.”
She almost snorted. She could’ve told them that showing up in a well-armed, sleek gunship was going to make the Diniki upset, even if they weren’t already.
The comms in the room were on so she heard a Diniki demanding that a ship called Assist allow the Diniki to inspect it and that the gunship leave the area.
There was a response from the Assist in Diniki, but it seemed like they were having issues with their comms. Their words came out chopped and strangely truncated. Diniki wasn’t easy to learn and the only reason she knew it as well as she did was because they visited four different Diniki colonies every year, and if you spoke even a small amount of Diniki, you got great tips.
“Who’s on the Assist?” she asked, making the three Hissa in the room startle.
Miran recovered first. “A Hissa warrior named Warik, a Decanted woman named Nisha, and about twenty-five vats full of children.”
She gasped in a shocked breath. “There are kids there?”
“Yes, and we might have to go to war to try to save them. If the Diniki board that ship, they’ll claim everyone on board. The children will all be sold, that is if they survive being Decanted by people who couldn’t care less about them.”
Nerin gave her a little more context. “Warik and Nisha are pretending to be Diniki so they don’t get boarded. But it’s not working.”
“I can help!” Nova said, moving to the center of the room. “I can tell your Hissa friend what to say to the Diniki. Their accent is good, but they’re not saying the right things.”
“You speak Diniki?” Nerin asked.
