Even as she thought that, Gus found herself powering down her ship.
The time to run was long past.From the moment she’d stepped between Anandra and his fate, she’d set herself on this course.There was no choice but to follow it through to the end.
The engines throttled back and then went silent.The lights on the ship blinking before everything switched to auxiliary power.
About to turn away and head out, Gus paused, noticing the icon in the corner of one of her screens.
She frowned.“A message?”
This far into the wreckage of the Falling she shouldn’t have been able to receive anything.The metal used in the Tsavitee ships blocked transmissions and would have made communication largely impossible.
“Did it arrive before I lost contact?”
Possibly.
After she got Brooks’s message, she’d silenced all incoming communication so she could concentrate on not dying.It was possible this had come in before she lost contact and she just hadn’t noticed.
Curious, Gus opened up the message.
A second later, she slammed a fist down on the console.
“Kira!”
That crazy woman.
Sitting forward, Gus hurriedly scanned the rest of the message, her stomach sinking further with every word.
Massive damage to cargo docks.Millions of dollars’ worth of damage done.Months of repair predicted.
Gus clicked on one of the images attached to the message.The sound that slipped out of her was a high-pitched whistle of distress.
A chunk of the Tombs was gone.
A massive crater stood where the shipping containers had once been.A bird’s eye view of the scene showed that the floor under them had collapsed, sending those containers crashing into the deck below.They were now a twisted mass of metal that would take months, if not years, to untangle.
From this vantage point, she couldn’t tell if her sanctuary had gotten swept up in the destruction, but the chances were good.
“Why does she always have to be so damn high profile?”Gus lamented.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Gus could see evidence of her sister’s passage through the docks where passenger ships came and went.Reports from station security recorded massive damage to that section of the station as well.
Gus read the words “depressurization” and “Phoenix Protocol” with an increasing sense of resignation.
Mars and Cleo.
That’s who she blamed for this.They were the ones who brought Kira down on Titan.They should have been the ones who suffered her sister’s wrath.Not her.
Gus shoved out of her chair, grabbing her cloak off the back as she stalked toward the hatch.Reading between the lines of the reports she’d received, she didn’t have long before Kira arrived.She needed her business taken care of before that happened.
Otherwise, it might not just be Mars and Cleo caught in Kira’s gravity well.
*
“What a creepy place,” Gus muttered, glancing at the Tsavitee hibernating not far from her.
The creaks and groans of the ship’s walls expanding and contracting due to temperature differences sounded almost sentient.As if the mountains of lives lost were giving voice to their suffering.
An unsettling thought that did nothing for Gus’s nerves as she drifted further into the honeycomb.
