He dropped his arm and looked down at her. "I have to go to the Command Center."
Harper scrubbed at her face with her sleeve, eyes fixed on the empty bed and then to the the corridor they’d taken her cousin through. Kirr’s ship. They were taking Delilah there, and she remembered the way. "I need to follow Delilah.”
"No."
Her head snapped up. "What?"
"You're coming with me."
"My cousin is in a coma that might break at any moment and you want an audience—are you insane?" Her voice cracked. "I'm going with Deliah!”
"You are under my supervision," Kirr said. He slid his hand into her hair, holding her head steady so she had to meet his gaze. "That is non-negotiable. Especially now. The station is unstable. I am not leaving you alone in a sector with failing power. Kellat is with your cousin, he will keep her safe. Believe me."
"Kirr, please?—"
"No." He pulled her toward the exit. "Trust me.”
He didn't wait for her reply.
Instead, he towed her out of the medical bay, his strides eating up the corridor. She had to half-jog to keep up, fury knotted with the terror in her gut.
He was an arrogant, controlling, overbearing ass of an alien.
They navigated the station's labyrinthine halls. Every sector they passed seemed to be in a different state of panic. Some lights flickered. Some doors were jammed open. Security teams rushed past, nodding sharply to Kirr as he stormed by.
If Medical had been organized chaos, the Command Center was a war zone. The room was massive. A central holographic tank dominated the space, displaying the station's schematic. Dozens of Latharian warriors manned consoles in concentric rings.
A console sparked somewhere to their left, making her flinch. The warrior standing in front of it slammed his palm down on an override, bellowing, "Reroute the tertiary conduits!"
"Denied! The coupling can't take the load!" another roared back.
"We're losing atmospheric scrubbers in Sector Four!"
Deep, booming voices bounced off metal walls, pressing against her chest. Kirr didn't even flinch. He strode into the center of the room, dragging her along in his wake.
"Report!" he ordered, his voice slicing through the chaos.
A harried-looking warrior hurried over, followed by three men with different colored sashes over their leather uniforms—technicians or engineers, judging by the grime on their uniforms and the diagnostic dataflexes in their hands.
The engineers barely spared Harper a glance as they crowded around a holo-display.
Sweat beaded on the lead engineer's temple as he dragged two holo-windows into alignment. "It's a virus. Has to be. Or sabotage. Failures in sequences we can't predict."
"Explain," Kirr ordered, arms folded over his broad chest. She stood at his side, trying to make herself look small. She might be pissed at him for dragging her here, but these people had a job to do. She wasn’t going to make that harder by being a brat.
"All our containment attempts keep failing," the lead tech said, gesturing wildly. "We patch to try and get ahead of the failures, but new faults appear within a cycle of every patch. We had a spike in Sector Seven, isolated it, but then the suppression field in Sector Two dropped. It’s like the station systems are fighting each other."
"Fighting?" Kirr asked.
"Priority contention," a second engineer chimed in. "Multiple subroutines seize the bus, collide, and the grid browns out in waves. We can't find the source because the source keeps moving."
"Draanthing B'Kaar," the first engineer muttered, wiping his forehead. "Don't fix trall, just stick a warrior in there and hope for the best. No thought to what happens when they draanth off and leave!"
Harper peered around Kirr's bicep at the holographic display hovering over the table. It showed the station as a web of light. Red blotches bloomed and faded in an erratic dance.
She watched it for a moment. Part of her brain noted it was almost pretty—the blooming red, the fading pulse. The rest of her wanted to scream. Then her eyes narrowed.
It wasn't erratic.
