***
Ysathea
I hated watching Thatcher fight, even if the male was poetry in motion when he did so. For the past five years, I’d been surrounded by males capable of feats of strength and agility, all trained fighters to the core. Top athletes who never lost their edge, even when we were between missions. But Thatcher… there was something so graceful about the way he moved his body. Economical, precise, like each motion was calculated by a lightning-fast computer. A sweep of his leg, a twist of his spine that made him avoid a blow by mere millimeters, no more. It was almost like a dance as the pair of them exchanged blows. This was life or death, however, and it made my chest growtight with fear.
I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how. Even if I had a weapon, I didn’t know if I could bring myself to use it. It was hard to discover that, when I’d always been so furious at my parents, especially my mom, for not defending themselves when the slavers came. It was just too ingrained in me to ever raise a hand, but Thatcher seemed to act as my shield between me and that creature, never letting it pass, never even giving me an opening to help.
So I did what I was good at: I focused on the mechanics. The parts dangling from the wall, the pipes behind the exposed panel, and the bundles of cables that were the lifeblood of theVarakartoom. The entity had lured us in here, and now I was starting to think it had planned the whole thing with the Shadow Unit soldier too. It wasn’touridea to trap it in there at all, which meant it wasn’t trapped. I had to assume more of the entity was still somewhere in the ship.
I was right, and perhaps thinking I was distracted, it wasn’t blocking me from accessing some of the sensors. Maybe it hadn’t counted on the extremely low-tech manner in which I tackled the problem: hooking my tablet directly into theVarakartoom’s network and writing a quick protocol to handle the unparsed information. It took a tediously long moment, or maybe it just felt that way because of the fight going on behind me, but then I had the sensors. I knew then what we were truly up against. Knew it, and a plan formed. Scary, dangerous, but definitely decisive if it worked.
Chapter 24
Ysathea
The fight ended so suddenly that the silence felt like noise. I jerked to my feet, datapad clutched to my chest, and backed up against the wall. My heart leaped into my throat as if the fight had only started now. Fear that Thatcher had lost collided hard in my brain with reality. He was standing, a black shape silhouetted by the harsh lights in the brig. His head hung low, his shoulders heaved, and his fists were clenched at his sides. Blood dripped from his hands, from which sharp metal glinted; some of it wasn’t red, but black.
At his feet, what was left of the Shadow Unit soldier lay. Dark green fabric, pale skin, and a surprisingly soft face in death. I shuddered, because death was not something I regularly saw. Then I forced myself to scan the floor andmake absolutely certain there was no sign the entity was escaping in some way. Thatcher was doing the same, but in a much more brutal fashion, kicking a leg aside, then nudging the head to roll. That was the side covered by black tendrils, and they appeared the same as before. “Dead,” Thatcher declared.
“Not dead,” I answered. “This was yet another trap. But I’ve got a plan.” I outlined it in a hushed whisper, just in case the entity could overhear us. That seemed unlikely, because it was very busy right now controlling theVarakartoomwith the little bit it had set aside to escape. It couldn’t be very big, because it had left a very significant chunk here as bait. Mitnick had also begun throwing up defenses, and slowly but steadily, itwasgetting locked out of systems—sensors to start with, which was very clever on Mitnick’s part.
“No,” Thatcher vehemently denied. “No, you are not doing this. Not on my life, Ysa.” He yanked me into his arms, dragging me so tightly against his armor-clad chest that I couldn’t move much more than a finger. I had to crane my head all the way back to see the bottom edge of his chin and the tattoos that peeked over the edge of his collar. Of course, he immediately grabbed hold of my braid and tugged, forcing me to arch my spine. “I forbid it, Ysa. You are not doing this.”
I gave him my best stubborn glare, which felt pointless because all I saw was his chin. “I am. It’s the only way, Thatch. We’ll make it work.” I was pretty sure he’d deny it again. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but then he deflated, and his jaw clicked as it ground together in frustration. The silence that now stretched felt as long as that fight had seemed, and I felt time running out. The ship washumming, its engines pumping away at full speed to bring us to a planet that would spell the end for us all and perhaps doom the quadrant. “Now or never,” I said to him.
“Fine. For the ship, for the future,” he practically snarled, as if he liked neither of those things. His head lowered, teeth gritted, dark eyes flashing with that fury he seemed to carry so deep in his bones. “But you get out—no acting noble—and you fucking do as I say, got that? Got that, Ysa?” When I nodded, it was barely perceptible because he held onto my braid so tightly, but I knew he saw it. “I love you,” he growled next. “I swore I’d protect you,” he added with a sigh.
My gut twisted, my heart did a funny little jump, but even as I felt joy at hearing him say those pretty words, the fear of what we were about to do was stronger. I didn’t like any of it either, but for this to work, it had to be me. “We’ll make it work. I’m not going to stand by and do nothing. This is my job. I have to fix this.” This was my home, my ship, and this entity had wreaked havoc on it long enough.
With a groan, he lowered his head, mouth covering mine, our breathing mingling. It tasted like him, dark, salty, angry. Lips pressed too firmly, tongue stroking too deep, too rough. I didn’t want to think of that kiss as goodbye, but it felt like that. Perhaps he did too, because his grip only grew fiercer around me, his breathing speeding up, desperate. “No,” he said again, but not to stop me from doing as planned; it was simply an expression of how vehemently he hated this.
Pulling away, he glared, his mouth pulled into a snarl, and began dragging me toward the exit of the brig area. “There will be bulkheads in our path. Can you raise them?” he demanded. We halted in front of the very first obstacle, and I shot him a glare of my own. ThenI rewrapped my braid around my waist and tugged on the beads woven into the tip, centering myself.
“Easy. The bulkheads all have manual overrides if you know where to look.” Well, that wasn’t strictly true, though key locations—like the one for med bay—did have them. I just knew exactly how those bulkheads worked; it was the work of a moment to rig one to raise again. The moment it began going up, my own comm buzzed with several incoming calls at once. We’d just opened up the blackout zone the entity had created around us. That was good; it would make some parts of this plan a lot easier.
I’d missed calls from Mitnick and Asmoded, but it was Ivo who was still trying to hail me right now. My thumb flicked the answer button while I waited for Thatcher to agree the way was clear. He’d ducked under the rising bulkhead before it had cleared more than two feet, his laser rifle at the ready as if he fully expected the entity to be waiting on the other side. I could see his boots, then his legs, and then the rest of him as the thick, blast-resistant door raised. As fast as they slammed down, raising them was a pain.
“Ivo, are you okay?” I demanded as soon as the call connected. I raised my device in front of my face, scanning the details of the small holographic projection. He was in the med bay with Dravion and some of the other wounded. Grunn was with him; he’d no doubt been unwilling to leave his best friend’s side. Ivo had bandages across his chest and wrapped around several of his arms, but he was upright and awake.
“We are, but where are you? The bulkheads all came down and trapped us, and you fell off the sensors entirely.We could not see or reach you.” It was said almost like an accusation, but that was just the anxious energy bubbling beneath his red skin. He’d been worried sick, I could see that in the nearly black spots across the bridge of his nose. I was pretty sure he’d continue by furiously warning me that I could have been in danger, and that I needed to do a better job of staying safe. Grunn looked geared up to give me the same lecture.
It was, thankfully, Dravion moving closer to the comm that acted like the voice of reason. He patted one of Ivo’s many arms with a tentacle and then moved closer until all I saw were huge, mirror-like black eyes and anthracite skin. “We could indeed not hail you, but we knew you had gone to search for the entity and the Shadow Unit soldier. The rest of the ship has been able to freely hail one another; we are just trapped for now. You look unharmed. Do you require assistance?”
I gave the many bandages on Ivo’s chest a second look, then focused on the Rhico hovering behind his shoulders. “I have a task for Grunn if he’s able.” The male snorted, his way of saying, “I’m listening.” Even though I was pretty sure the entity hadn’t tapped into the internal cameras or couldn’t overhear our comm calls, my voice hushed as I explained what I wanted of my still able-bodied engineer. “I need you to make a path to the engine room and manually shut down the main engine. Can you do that?”
The med bay was a very central location on the ship for good reason; it wasn’t terribly far to get to the engine room on a normal day. Except, right now, with every bulkhead down along the way, it would take much longer. I calculated quickly in my head that he’d have tooverride forty-two bulkheads and crawl through to get there. That would also include taking the narrow ladder passageways down two decks, as the elevators would have been locked down as well. It wouldn’t be fast, especially if he was going by himself.
“How fast do you need it?” Grunn asked gruffly. He cocked his head so his good ear was closer to Ivo’s comm. It quivered with tension, and a scar at the base pulled it slightly crooked. Ivo was already protesting, insisting they could do it together and that he was well enough to walk. When Dravion retreated, I thought it was so he could sternly put my Pretorian brother in his place. I was wrong. He returned with an injector and pressed it quickly to Ivo’s throat. I knew what it was: Dravion’s very own blend of stimulants. They assisted in healing, replenished nutrients, and helped a person power through just about anything.
Thatcher’s hand found my wrist when the bulkhead cleared all the way. Silently, he drew me into the hallway and down it toward the hangar bay we needed for my plan to work. He said nothing, just listened as I continued my conversation on the comm. “As fast as possible.” Now came the bit of acting required to make this work, just in case the entity was watching after all. “We have to prevent the entity from taking the ship to the water world. You’re going to have to halt our path, or at the very least slow us down. I’ll be taking a shuttle to get help from theVagabond. We have to move fast, before the entity realizes what we’re up to.”
We’d reached the next bulkhead in our path, and I quickly got to work overriding it, peeling away a panel to short-circuit the wires in the walls. Ivo had ordered Grunn to help him off the cot, and now the image of them on my comm was bouncing as they rushed from the med bay. Idiscovered immediately that not only had Dravion not stopped Ivo from leaving, he’d overridden the med bay’s bulkhead doors himself. That was one obstacle less.
“We’ll keep you updated,” Ivo panted as he jogged. His spots had gone white around the edges, slowly growing a sickly, pale color. That could mean shock, but more likely he was just in pain and struggling to mask it. The call ended then, and I bit my lip and tried to keep my focus on my own job. Nerves wanted to consume me whole and threatened my concentration. The bulkhead rose, and I followed Thatcher under the slowly rising metal more quickly this time. We fell into a rhythm that way as we cleared our path toward the hangar bay. Only seventeen bulkheads to go.
Ivo and Grunn were working in turns: one would override a bulkhead, the other would slide through the crack and race for the next, and so on. It would increase their speed, perhaps not by a whole lot, but it should help. As long as Ivo wasn’t so badly wounded that he’d collapse halfway through… I didn’t think Dravion would have let him go if he thought that was likely, and I tried to hold onto that thought.
“The turret is behind that hatch, isn’t it?” Thatcher asked with a grim expression as we turned a corner in the hallway. In the distance, the hangar bay doors loomed, but he was correct. The hatch at the other end of the path led to one of the many turrets that theVarakartoomboasted. They were automated, controlled from the weapons station on the bridge, but each of thesecouldbe manually controlled too, in case of emergency. I nodded, briefly contemplating whether we dared risk going for it straight away or ifthe entity was aware enough of what we were doing to try and stop such a move.
