“Where are you going?”
“Not here.” Phares headed out of the bar. His mind flew in a thousand light years a second.
He was furious, partly because his parental was the big hero, but the other part of him fumed over the asteroids.
Aster 5, gone.
From the way the debris scattered, they might never be able to collect what was lost.
And who was in the mines when it happened? How many miners were killed?
He’d been gone a day.
A single day and an asteroid exploded, almost destroying their home base ship. How in the stars had they broken an asteroid?
It was a piece of a planet. Not exactly a tiny, delicate thing.
Yet it managed to explode right after he left.
He shook his head.
Fwan would rip into him over this.
He was surprised his communicator hadn’t gone off yet from Fwan demanding his return. He pulled the device from his pants pocket and checked it. No messages.
While it had been Fwan’s idea for his miners to come here, the fact that less than a day after the three of them left, an asteroid exploded…
How messed up was that?
Phares’s head throbbed, and he headed down the corridor, past other food and entertainment locations.
If he remembered the layout of Disguised Serenity, transports docked close. Maybe a level up or down, not far from the outermost wall, so the commercial transports were nearby.
It was also why there was so much traffic in the corridor. People both disembarking and boarding the transports. Here, the hallway resembled an old luxury cruiser’s passageway between cabins, the stores in what had been quarters before. Plenty of other humanoids jostled past each other in their determination to get wherever they were going.
Well, except him.
No one got too close to a Xianan.
At least here, he was just another Xianan, and their species' reputation preceded him, so most people left him alone.
As long as they didn’t know his parental and thereby had heard about what a failure he was, then they would not mess with him.
He glanced around when he reached a fork. To the right led to the dating agency’s offices.
So he went to the left.
This was stupid. What was he doing here? It was ridiculous, and he wasn’t doing it. He needed to get back to the Guild and find out what happened. What had his paternal done?
No matter what was reported, Shoval probably knew more about what happened than he’d claimed in the video.
Everything was stable when Phares left. He’d made sure of it. There shouldn’t be—
“Move it, Barney,” snapped a female voice, and she pushed past him. “I have to get out of here.”
“Barney? What’s aBarney?”
The female, who came to his shoulder, didn’t seem to care that she’d just touched a Xianan.
