Chapter 1
Ysathea
We were going to Strewn. It was knowledge that burned into my brain, sat on my shoulders like a weight, and tasted like failure in my mouth. Strewn, not to buy parts, not for a job, but to consult their mechanics. I’d failed for months to locate the source of the power fluctuations. They’d seemed harmless, just little flare-ups on the decks of the lights and little else. An annoyance but not a worry, and for months I’d chased them all over the ship and found absolutely nothing.
Pacing through the engine room, I listened to the quiet, steady hum of theVarakartoom’sengine. Normally, that was plenty to soothe my nerves and remind me of my purpose in life. I fixed this ship, kept her running, and, with it, protected the rash, bold men of theVarakartoom. Now, morethan ever, that task was important. There were women and children on the ship now; the Captain’s mate and baby; even Jaxin had a female. If we had to pursue a target or ended up in a space fight, I could no longer guarantee that we’d come out on top. That was unacceptable.
“Why?” I snarled at the console I’d ended up in front of. It was the one that had most frequently lost power, and I’d taken it apart and put it back together at least three times already. Everything aboard the ship was built on redundancies; if one failed, there were two more parts to take the load. It shouldn’t be possible for systems to fail at random. Now that it was no longer just lights… What if the engine went next, or life support?
“You’ll figure it out, Ysa,” Ivo not so helpfully offered from where he was working at his workstation. The Pretorian engineer had been part of my engine crew for years, and I knew him better than anyone aboard the ship. There’d been a time when everyone had assumed we’d end up dating at some point. I just couldn’t get over the Ysa-and-Ivo names together, and he was more like my little brother anyway.
“Thanks,” I drawled, and subdued the impulse to shoot him a rude gesture. You couldn’t win that kind of interaction against a guy with four arms; he had a few more hands to be rude with if he was so inclined. Across the room, my other engineer, Grunn, snorted loudly, full of disbelief. Him, I gave a glare, but that bounced off his thick Rhico skin like it was nothing. Grunn didn’t think I would ever find the answer, even though I’d barely slept a wink since we’d changed our course toward Strewn. Stars, I’d barely slept in months, ever since these power fluctuations began.
“Grunn, you’re a dick,” I said, and watched from the corner of my eye as Ivo straightened behind the console he was working on, his four arms shifting into an intimidating stance as if he was ready to fight the other engineer on the spot. I swear, the pair were like toddlers, any excuse to brawl, they’d take. Grunn had already responded by rounding the glowing engine at the center of the room, fists balled and horn lowered.
It was an endless cycle in here. Grunn would find some way to act like he disrespected me, which was just that, an act. I knew that because in any emergency or crisis, he flew to follow my orders, his blind faith in my abilities obvious. It was the perfect way to get under Ivo’s skin, though, and that’s why he did it. If Grunn wasn’t misbehaving, Ivo was sure to pick a fight anyway. They were a pair of misfits, but they were my family. In any other engine room, they’d be reprimanded, disciplined, and eventually kicked out. It had happened to both of them on multiple occasions, until I’d taken them in.
Family to a Ulinial like me was everything. Without a family, we were lost, adrift, unmoored. It could kill us to lack the bonds we needed. So when I said Grunn and Ivo were my family, that meant a lot. They both wore my family mark with pride on their wrists, closer to me than any of the other males aboard the ship.
When Asmoded took me in almost five years ago, that was the start. TheVarakartoomwas my home, but the engine room was my domain, and these males were my unit, my anchor. Yeah, my family, even if they were a pair of annoying, oversized toddlers I had to wrestle into submission on a daily basis. Too bad that even with such a crackteam, I hadn’t been able to solve the massive issue plaguing my beloved ship.
“I’m going to trace fluctuations again,” I announced, for once deciding to ignore the pending brawl. “I’ve changed the parameters on my scanner; perhaps I’ll pick up something I missed before.” They both paused in their pre-battle stare-off to look at me with matching disbelief. The number of times I’d said just that and come back with absolutely nothing numbered in the triple digits at this point. I couldn’t blame them, but it still annoyed me.
I stalked off, my hand scanner clutched in my fist and my boots thumping loudly against the metal floorboards. The sway of the loose end of my braid brushed against my hip as I walked. It should have been a reminder to find calmness, to breathe, but it did absolutely nothing. In that, the Ulinial were similar to the Rummicaron. Both our species valued meditation tools to find inner peace and calm, but where the Rummicaron used them to suppress their feelings entirely, the Ulinial just sought them for peacefulness—a tool to aid them in their pacifistic convictions.
Thatcher was waiting for me by the engine room’s massive doorway. He’d stayed out of sight all morning, but I’d known he was there, lingering and watching. No matter what I did, he kept doing it, and short of going to Asmoded to complain, I was beginning to fear I’d never get rid of him. Going nuclear like that was a last resort, though, because I knew it would be bad news for the guy, and my tender heart wasn’t quite there yet.
I shot him a glare as I passed him, and he smirked back in that stupid, sexy way of his. I swear, I should be as mad as the twin gods Baltaz and Ultaz with him. The pair had tornthe Ulinial homeworld apart in their rage against one another. That’s precisely how angry I could feel myself get when I saw my unwelcome shadow. Except… then he smiled like that, as if he knew a secret and wasn’t going to let me in on it, not yet. My stomach would grow all twisty, like I’d swallowed some Sivian Bloodworms alive. Yuck, I shuddered just thinking about it.
Normally, I ignored him, because by now it was a fact of life that he followed me everywhere I went outside the engine room. I was pretty sure he’d follow me into the engine room too, except that wasmydomain, and I had the ability to put up a shield to keep him out. Once was enough to teach him that lesson, but unfortunately I couldn’t do that on the rest of the ship. It would interfere a little too much with the day-to-day of the rest of the crew.
Today was not a normal day. I was furious that I was about to be forced to give up control of my ship to a bunch of incompetent alpha males from Strewn. The ship was still misbehaving, and I swore it was like the blackouts were playing with me. I needed a stiff drink and at least ten hours of solid sleep, but I wasn’t going to get either until I solved this problem. Lives depended on it, damn it.
“What do you want from me, Thatcher?” I demanded as he detached himself from the wall and, like a shadow, glided after me through the hallway. I turned on him so quickly that he shouldn’t have been prepared. He was human, and I was Ulinial, with faster reflexes and enhanced eyesight. In theory, I should even be stronger than the average human male, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking I couldoutmuscle him.
His eyes didn’t so much as twitch; he didn’t flinch or startle. My finger jabbed into his incredibly firm, temptingly wide chest, and he just let me, staring into my face with that always-present, sexy half-smirk. “Why are you following me?” I asked, but my words began to falter because he looked so… I didn’t really want to think it, admit it to myself, but he was beyond handsome, and absolutely my type. Well, besides the whole stalker thing. Not that he broke into my quarters and left me gifts or messages. He just went everywhere I went on the ship, like my personal, unwelcome bodyguard.
I don’t think he ever said a word—at least, not to me—but I knew he talked. To the other members of the crew, on missions, during debriefings. It wasn’t my presence that tied his freaking tongue, either, because I’d been to plenty of mission debriefs and heard him speak. He just never talked tome. Not once did he respond to my demands to leave me alone or go elsewhere. He just kept showing up. So not only did I have to deal with his presence, he didn’t explain a thing, and yet I still dreamed of his husky, sinfully low voice every time I went to bed.
It was no surprise when he didn’t answer this time either, but I definitely didn’t imagine the way he leaned into the jabbing touch of my finger. As if the bastard enjoyed that single point of contact, and he was challenging me to do it again. I hissed, withdrawing my hand, and in a very exaggerated manner wiped my finger on a clean spot on my pants. “Damn it, Thatcher…” I sighed, too tired to let the fury ride me for very long. Fine. He was going to do what he always did anyway.
I turned on my heel and continued through the hallway to where the last power fluctuation had been not long ago. He could follow, stare broodily at me from the shadows, and choke on his own darkness while he was at it. I was going to do what I always did and pretend he wasn’t there. He was harmless anyway, and I trusted him with my life if it came down to it. He wouldn’t be on this ship, part of Asmoded’s crew, if he were a danger to me or anyone else.
As I turned into the right hallway a short while later, I wondered if that was true, though. I’d seen the darkness in his eyes more than once when another crew member got a little too close to me for his liking. He’d kill them in a heartbeat if he thought they were a threat to me, or even if they were just flirting harmlessly. Everyone gave Thatcher a wide berth, just like they gave Solear space. That wasn’t because these guys were all rainbows and flowers; they were deadly, and they lacked impulse control.
A few months ago, there’d been a pretty scary incident, in fact. One of the temporary crew members theVarakartoomhired on a regular basis had decided to get cozy with me. He’d barely walked away alive, and Asmoded had taken the male’s hazard pay out of Thatcher’s salary. Thatcher himself had spent three weeks in the brig as punishment, right up until he’d been needed on the next mission. I suppressed a shiver as I recalled those silent three weeks, because they’d been shockingly lonely—a fact I was pretending didn’t exist and kept thoroughly shoved to the back of my mind.
The man was a walking disaster and probably the least healthy dating material in existence. As soon as I figured out how to get him to stop obsessing over me, I would. I really would. Remember, he’d gone all feralthe moment that Tarkan had tried to cup my back with his wing. I’d never seen so much blood come from a Tarkan before. Their stone-like skin protected them from pretty much anything, yet Thatcher had torn into him with his bare hands and somehow done more damage than a stampeding herd of hungry Fantreal would have.
I’d witnessed a hungry Fantreal herd tearing through a pasture of livestock when I was young, visiting family on a Sune world. It had not been a pretty sight at all, and my family had huddled with me inside the barn, terrified for our lives. I still got a little nauseated thinking back to the bloody cleanup afterward. Thank the stars I hadn’t had to deal with that after Thatcher’s attack; the ship’s bots had taken care of it on their own.
Despite my best efforts to both ignore him and not remember that bloody moment from several months ago, my eyes dropped to his hands. He was a couple dozen feet behind me, casually propped against a bulkhead—like we hadn’t been walking moments ago, and he’d been paused there long before I’d decided to stop walking and turn around to look at him. He was uncanny, and he was human, but he didn’t move like one, and that made my brain hurt and my heart thump wildly in my chest.
Human hands, big, strong, calloused, but still only equipped with blunt nails. Those were not the hands of someone who had shredded Tarkan skin like it was tissue paper. Under my gaze, his fingers curled, tightening into fists, and the tattoos inked onto his knuckles pulled taut. Symbols that meant nothing to me, but probably held meaning in human culture. He hadn’t arrived with those twoyears ago. All the ink had been added shortly after he’d finally recovered from his dreadful injuries.
I thought sometimes that Thatcher was like Solear, feral to the point of madness. A male driven so far to the edge that his mind had splintered into a million pieces. I didn’t know the details of his story, only that he’d been recovered on a mission to a mining planet owned by a crimelord. That he’d been tortured so badly he’d barely been recognizable as human at all. It was a testament to Dravion’s skills as a doctor that Thatcher was walking around at all. When I thought of that, I felt all kinds of dangerous sympathy.
Swiftly turning away, I made myself focus again on the only task that mattered. My scanner beeped in a steady rhythm as I checked each cable and circuit, each conduit that lined the hallway. Nothing, not a blip, not so much as a hint that anything was wrong or had been wrong ten minutes ago. How was that possible? It shouldn’t be. Everything I knew about these systems denied the possibility, and that terrified me.
