He cleared his mind and reached a hand to push on the panel in front of him. There was a small recess inside where a battery, the size of the tablet that was now floating somewhere to his right, was tucked away. He reached in and pulled it out, turning it in his hands. With relief, he noted that the covering that protected it from solar storm damage was still intact.
One thing is going right today, at least.
“Is it OK?” CJ asked, looking at his hands as he unwrapped the battery.
“We’ll soon see,” he replied, reaching into his pocket for his multi-tool. He flicked the case open on the battery and pulled out the wires that would connect it to the pod.
“Wires? Old school.”
“What has education to do with wires?” Domik asked, his head tilted to one side and his heavy brows drawn together.
CJ laughed. “All the super fancy Taurean tech and I expect everything to be wireless, you know?”
Domik shook his head and huffed out a breath before turning back to the wires separating the ones he needed from the mass and attaching them to the battery. “Sometimes the easiest way is the oldest. What you call fancy,” he paused over the pronunciation of the word, making the ‘c’ sound more like a ‘z’, then shook his head, “if it works, why change it?”
He cleared his throat and focused on securing the wires before pressing a button on the side of the battery, hoping that the circuitry would connect.
“That’s it?” CJ asked, tilting her head to one side as she watched Domik set the battery back in the recess.
“No.” Domik prized off another panel, this time to flick a switch.
“Well, don’t hold me in suspense, Dom.” The slight irritation in her voice was music to his ears. At least she wasn’t afraid anymore. He couldn’t stand her being afraid. Not CJ, who had been nothing but a small pocket of fire and cheeky comments since the first day she had blown like a wind storm into his life.
Nothing had been the same since.
“The pod needs to do systems checks and a full reset before it will start back up again. That shouldn’t take too long, maybe a few minutes.” He shrugged, then tapped the panel near his right arm. CJ needing to crane her neck around him to see what he was pointing at. “See that?” he asked, distracted by the brush of her breast against his left arm.
“What am I looking at?” She braced her hand on his bicep and he couldn’t help the reflexive flex of the muscle as her delicate fingers gripped his arm.
He stared at her, the tousled blond of her hair speckled with specs of ash, the short strands moving with every one of his breaths. She was so close. He lifted a hand to see if the strand was as silky as they appeared, but stilled, his hand in mid-air, when she spoke.
“Dom?”
He dropped his hand and looked away. “The lights on the panel.”
“Oh! I missed them. They were so faint. Does this mean the pod has power again?”
Domik nodded. “I need to override the autopilot and change to manual.”
“If it’s working again, can’t we just set the autopilot and go back to the Zataras?”
“No.”
CJ crossed her arms. “Why not?”
Domik gestured out the window of the pod, at the Xakul and Taurean ships that were still scattered, lifeless between them and the great hulking mass of the Zataras that they could now see in the far distance.
On the face of it, what CJ proposed made sense. Just set the thing and go back. But if they had got their pod going, it was only a matter of time before the Xakul ships were up and running, and the cloak was out. And the pod was completely bereft of any weapons.
“See what lies between us and the Zataras?”
CJ nodded.
“What if they get their weapons up?”
She paled at his words. “I see.”
“And we don’t have any way of communicating.”
