Page 44 of Lyk


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Hitting the button to disconnect, he ran his hands over his face.How in the fuck did they find me? It’s been decades. Why would they come looking for me now?

Dropping his hands, he saw Ally on the bed, her face a question mark.

That’s why. Fuck.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but we’re going to have to cut this short.” He tossed her coveralls to her. “Get dressed. We’re about to have company.”

“What are you talking about?” Ally asked as she hurried into her undergarments.

“Your little interstellar call has summoned the Vartik royal family. You wanted their help? Well, you’re about to get it. Let’s hope it turns out like you hoped.”

He couldn’t hold back the hostility in his tone, and Ally noticed, flinching. Her face went blank, and she calmly stepped into her coveralls and zipped them up. Lyk closed his eyes at the rushed sound of the zipper. It was like everything that had just happened between them was erased in an instant.

“Let’s go.”

It was a short trip to the bridge. Celdrake was sweating, which was rare for the cyborg. “Do you mind telling me what the fuck is going on here? Who is on those ships? And why do they resemble our cruisers?”

Lyk ignored his second in command and headed straight for a console. Scanning the viewscreen, he spotted the battle cruiser with the markings that indicated it belonged to the king. With no hesitation, he pinged the ship.

The image on the viewscreen shifted, the face of his eldest brother Marek appearing. “Lyk,” he said, his face impassive. “It’s been a long time.”

“And yet your visit isn’t entirely unexpected. Care to clue me in on how you got here so quickly? Even at full propulsion, it should have taken you the better part of two days to reach me here.”

“We’ve made some progress since you were on Vartik,” Marek said, his expression filled with pride. “It’s a golden age on the home world, baby brother.”

“Huh. That’s funny. I thought you were involved in some kind of holy war against the Crown Prince of Hell.”

Marek’s grin faltered, but before he could retort, the viewscreen split and Zelup’s face appeared. “Don’t let Marek take all the credit like always. He wasn’t the one who discovered the wormhole. That was a combination of all our wives’ efforts.”

“A wormhole? How did you manage that?” Lyk was shocked. Wormholes were notoriously difficult to locate, especially one that had a useful entrance and exit. The odds against finding one near enough to Vartik that led this far out into the quadrant were astronomical.

“My Gemma led the charge,” Calabez said, his face appearing as the image on the viewscreen split again. “She’s brilliant. She was looking through astronomical charts one day and pointed out a minute irregularity. It turns out to be an unstable wormhole.”

“Gemma wasn’t working alone,” Zelup growled. “If my Dawn hadn’t worked out the correct calculations to make the wormhole stable, we never would have been able to use it.”

This time when the screen split again, Lyk was expecting it. His brother, Juston, appeared, his scarred face holding a deadpan expression, which was his default. “If Midnight and Mayra hadn’t used their powers to split the wormhole intomultiple streams while Dawn was stabilizing it, it would have been useless. Now we have a fast track to every quadrant in the galaxy.”

Lyk was speechless. A wormhole like this was an enormous opportunity, one that would give his people a serious advantage. “Who else knows about this?”

“No one,” Marek replied, “which means you keep your mouth shut, pirate boy.”

Pirate boy? It wasn’t even inventive. Marek always did have a lack of imagination. “How do you plan to keep it hidden?”

Zelup’s smile was wide. “Dawn set up this ingenious mechanism that fools scanners so that they don’t show up in regular readings.”

“And Midnight cloaks them in darkness, so even if you put a naked eye on it, they’d still be unable to see that it was a wormhole,” Juston added.

“Brilliant. Do you—”

“I’m sure all of this is very important talk,” Ally said, stepping forward and interrupting Lyk’s question, “but I’d like to get back to the reason I assume you’re here. Your wives sent you to help me get my sister back. Isn’t that right?”

Four sets of eyes turned in her direction. A lesser female might have been intimidated, but not his. Ally stared them down in turn, not speaking until she got her response.

“Well,” Marek said, dropping his gaze. “Not exactly.”

CHAPTER 18

ALLY