Fine. As much as I wanted to assure myself my male was fine, it would have to wait. I could tell with one look at the captain’s face that there was work to be done. I’d napped and sat around all day doing absolutely nothing, but with one of the pair in the wind… I was certain I was going to be asked to come up with a way to track him if he wasn’t on the planet. I jogged off as I thought about it, but finding a human with the biosensors wasn’t exactly hard.
If he had any chance of getting on theVarakartoom, it wasn’t through our own shuttles… That left only one option: he’d used another vessel to reach either theVarakartoomor theVagabond.ThatI could find, because no ship existed that could truly cloak itself. Yeah, a ship I could track, and if anything tried to dock, I’d know that too.
***
Thatcher
I dropped the end of Aramon’s stretcher roughly onto the end of the cot and shot him a glare that finally shut him up. “Enoughwhining. The doc is checking you out, and that’s final, you numbnut!” He stared, Solear rumbled with a growl, and Evie sighed, but I paid none of them any further attention. I’d already been forced to forgo greeting Ysa, and now she’d gone her own way while I was in the med bay surrounded by idiots. Aramon had gotten hurt being rash; Raukesh was so out of it the doc had only eyes for his injuries. And Ivo was the worst, because he was loudly worrying about Ysa too, and that made me antsy as hell.
The bridge was closer, so I ducked out of med bay and went there first. If she was working with Mitnick to further check the ship, that’s where she would be doing it. The bridge was filled with crew, as well as the captain’s mate and a loudly wailing baby. There was no sign of Ysa, though, but I halted just long enough to get an update on what was happening.
Ziame’s face filled the viewscreen, a big, bullish green snout and a pair of massive horns. “We’ll find the bastard,” the former gladiator said. “TheVagabondwill circle the planet to check for vessels. You monitor from this side. He can’t have gotten far.” No, he really couldn’t have. We’d determined they’d gotten to this Rummicaron outpost by hitching a ride on a cargo vessel. They’d slaughtered the crew just as the ship had landed and escaped detection by using one of their shuttles to hide in the forest beyond the base.
That shuttle was still missing, so if the Shadow Unit soldier had not stowed away on one ofourships, he’d used that one. It could only take him to the next solar system, and that one was uninhabited. In fact, it was home to a water world on which our very own Sineater had found his mate, and also gotten our ship infected with that nasty black goo entity. I thought that the massive keep out signals placed inthat system by the Rummicaron and the Kertinal wouldn’t deter the human. A chance at a second round against us, however, would be far more tempting.
Then I thought about where I’d go once I boarded an enemy vessel and could think of only one answer: the engine room. I broke into a run without thinking, skidding off the bridge and colliding with the wall before righting my course. Behind me, a shout went up, and the baby finally fell silent. “Where is he going?” someone demanded.
I was bolting from the elevator when it happened. The ship had turned away from the planet at that point to do its own search loop to locate the missing shuttle. I felt the engines kick into gear through the thrumming of the deck beneath my feet. An urgency filled me with the same kind of certainty I’d felt when the entity had posed a threat. Images flashed through my brain of that bastard holding a knife to Ysa’s throat as he ordered her to set the ship’s self-destruct. I was certain he’d draw out the moment and inflict pain in careful slices on her skin. He was the bastard who liked the knife; the Pretorian had liked fire.
Then the lights went out in the hallway. My heart leaped into my throat, and I swore loudly. It lasted, and it lasted, well past the ten-second mark. I reached the entrance to the engine room, and it was still dark. This time, I didn’t even think about that invisible line I’d drawn across the floor there. I was ready to leap across anyway, but I didn’t need to.
Haloed in blue light from the engine itself, Ysa came rushing out just as I reached her. Her eyes were huge in her face, but she did not seem surprised to see me. She had a large box of tools in one hand and was holding a handheldscanner in the other. A comm call was also open, as a small hologram of Mitnick’s face projected above her wrist.
“What do you mean? The pilot and nav consoles have locked out?” she demanded, staring at Mitnick’s face. She raised her tools in my direction, and I took them without comment, just as the lights flickered back on. “Could that Shadow Unit soldier have done this?” she asked me. I was pretty sure the answer was no, but I didn’t know for sure. Trained as a soldier and an assassin, I had been a force of destruction and death. Taking control of a ship had never been part of my skill set, or that of any of the others I knew.
There was one creature we knew was capable of this, though it was supposed to be dead. When I shook my head slightly, Ysa’s blue eyes went grim. She bit her lip. “Forget about a possible human stowaway. It could be the entity. Can you do a sweep?”
I cocked my head and listened, certain that if it was indeed the entity, it would come for Ysa first. Ysa was already turning down the hallway, moving with the clicking of the beads at the tip of her braid for company. I followed, just like I had for months, not once letting her out of my sight. “Found it, sending location. How did it survive?” Mitnick announced, followed by a rougher, “Oh, blazing stars. I am now reading an extra human life sign too.” So the Shadow Unit soldierhadmade it onto the ship after all. I really hated being right, on both counts.
Chapter 20
Ysathea
I was almost at a full-out sprint through theVarakartoomto reach the area where Mitnick had located the nasty entity in our systems. Thatcher was hot on my heels, carrying my tools with him, as well as far too many weapons still strapped to his body from the previous mission. He did not appear hurt, and that’s about all I’d been able to reassure myself of before we’d gotten separated.
It was hard to describe how relieved I was that he showed up by the engine room when he did. That blackout—I’d held a vague hope it was something else, but I knew, almost right away, that the entity was back. It shouldn’t have been possible, given all that Thatcher had thrown at it, but somehow, it had survived. Again. I tried very much not to let that get me down, but it was hard. How were we ever goingto defeat it? How much of my home and my family was it going to destroy before it was through with us? What in the blazing stars did it even want?
“Mitnick, please confirm: is it still where you found it? Both signatures?” The communications specialist agreed right away, confirming that, for some reason, both the entity from the waterworld and the Shadow Unit soldier were located on the aft deck by the brig. I could see why the entity would be there, as a bundle of important cables ran past that deck not far from it. It wasn’t a bad spot to set up camp and slowly prepare to seize control of the entire ship. As for the human… there was a very well-stocked armory right by the brig that might have been his target.
“Hold steady, Ysa,” Captain Asmoded answered, and he leveled a glare at me that would wither even when miniaturized on my comm’s display. “You’re not going in alone.” I responded by aiming my camera toward Thatcher just behind me. “Good. I’ve informed theVagabond; they’re coming back around to us. Give me back control of my ship.”
I nodded, but in my gut, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to. What options did we have left? Would we have to blow up a portion of the ship to destroy it? The brig was empty, and nobody appeared to be there, but the deck above had bunk rooms and a recreation area, while the gym was below. With everyone back from the planet, such a tactic could be very dangerous.
The lights flickered, almost luring us to step inside. Then I saw it, and my breathing faltered. “Oh stars. Are you seeing that, Thatch?” A black knot sat on the wall at the back of the lockups. It pulsed like it had a heartbeat, andveins spread over the walls and tunneled beneath the panels. He swore, which I took to mean yes. This wasn’t nearly as big as the thing we’d encountered in that maintenance shaft before, but it was definitely terrifying. How had it regrown to this size in such a short time?
“Take a breath, Ysa,” he said, catching me by surprise. I twisted to look at him over my shoulder and discovered he had his dark eyes locked on my face, not the threat on the brig wall. There was such unshakable confidence in his eyes that it made my belly twist. “You know more about theVarkartoomthan anyone. You can figure this out.” Then he added the kicker that almost made me cry: “I believe in you.”
How did he know to say exactly the right thing? This male rarely talked at all, but he had a shocking way with words. This was either the worst or the best moment to pull out that card, because for long seconds I struggled to do exactly as he’d advised: breathe. Overwhelmed with emotion—fear, doubt, and an overpowering feeling of being loved, of being seen. Ah, Thatch, how did you do that?
There was noise coming from my comm, but I didn’t hear a thing. I turned to Thatcher, held out my arms, and let him sweep me into his protective embrace. He tucked me against his chest, and some of that doubt and stress eased, the weight on my shoulders lifting. He was a solid shape I could curl into, and I felt safe. His head bent to mine, his long black hair falling forward to brush against my face. As his warmth settled like a blanket over me, I realized this was the first time we’d touched since he’d come back from the planet.
“Okay, okay,” I murmured against the black armor I’d created for him. “I got this. I just need to think.” To figure out how to finally deal with this invader, we needed moreinformation. Arm ourselves with data. I was beginning to think that black stuff was indestructible, but the Sineaterhadmanaged to kill it when it had “possessed” a body. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a spare body lying around to trap it in. That would be extremely unethical.
“There’s still the Shadow Unit soldier to deal with, too. He’s on this deck, isn’t he?” Thatcher said against my hair, again timing his words with uncanny accuracy. He was not a mind reader, and couldn’t possibly know what dark possibility had occurred to me. Yet the mention of that Shadow Unit soldier gave me a hint of hope, a spark of possibility. It also made me realize the danger was much bigger than I’d thought.
I lifted my hand scanner, checked the readings, and frowned. “I see the entity, but Mitnick is confirming the human vanished off our sensors again… We don’t know where he is, but they think he’s still here.” Here, as in on the ship, but they didn’t think he would have continued to hang around the brig. Thatcher and I were on our own again to deal with the entity.
That’s what the noise on my comm had been about. When I checked it, I discovered that both Mitnick and Asmoded had been trying to reach me. “We’re sweeping the ship top to bottom,” Asmoded warned when I confirmed I was still here. “You’re without backup for now. Proceed with caution.” Mitnick added that he’d monitor our situation, but that was all he could do for now.
