"Strap in," he said.
She looked at the harness, then at Barnaby.
“Just hold onto him. Strap in.”
“Yeah, yeah… I heard you the first time," she muttered, but she pulled the straps across her chest and cinched them down. Barnaby protested the rearrangement with a grunt and then settled back down onto her lap as she put her arm around him.
Thyaar brought the engines up. The Vett'an was ridiculously smooth. He'd flown combat interceptors that rattled your teeth and troop transports that handled like a brick with ambitions, but the Emperor's yacht lifted off the cracked concrete of Earth as smooth as silk.
Rain hit them sideways, sliding off the front viewscreen as they climbed. The city dropped away below them, all smog and broken lights. He wasn’t sorry to see it go. In fact, if he ever had to set foot on the place again, it would be too soon.
But that thought didn’t hold his attention for long.
Draanth, that scan.
He'd left the medical system running on passive when she'd been on the bed with Barnaby, because it was standard procedure. He wasn’t an idiot either, even if some had accused him of it. She might be a non-combatant, but she was human, and he was taking her to a planet she’d never been to before. He’d have been an idiot not to scan her and make sure she wasn’t bringing anything nasty along for the ride. Like the purists had done with Lady Emily.
Not that he seriously thought that the Purists had gotten to Lady Emily’s one-time roommate, or infected her, but… stranger things had happened, and he was the Emperor’s bodyguard. It was his job to make sure strange trall didn’t happen, especially around the emperor.
So he’d had the system scan them both. Barnaby's results he'd dealt with. Amelia's results… Well, he hadn’t known where to start.
His jaw worked as he thought about the results he’d scrolled through.
She was underweight and not by a little. By a lot. And it wasn’t a recent thing either. The medical system had laid it out in neat columns for him, color-coded by severity. There was a lot of red. A hell of a lot of red. Every marker he scrolled past… deficiencies, depletions, damage that the system noted dated back years. Not months. Years. He blinked at that.
Her body had been running on fumes for so long it didn't know anything else. He'd seen her in that doorway, soaked through, and that thin fabric had hidden nothing. He hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since… Then the scan had thrown her body up on the panel in columns of red, and he’d been disgusted with himself. She'd been starving for years, and he'd been busy enjoying the view.
He punched them through the upper atmosphere harder than was strictly necessary. The Vett'an didn't complain. She could take it. He hadn’t expected anything else from the emperor’s personal vessel.
The patches he'd given Amelia were the best he could do with what he had. He wasn’t anywhere near healer level. The best he could do was battlefield medic training. He could stop a warrior bleeding out long enough for the healer teams to get to them, but faced with a malnourished female, he’d all but locked up.
The immune booster was standard, but he'd loaded the second one with a broad-spectrum nutritional compound designed for Latharian warriors who'd been running on emergency rations too long. It wasn't a perfect match for human physiology, but the medical system had confirmed compatibility, and it would start filling in the gaps. Slowly. Not fast enough though. All he wanted to do was put her back in that bed and make her rest. She shouldn’t be walking around with those numbers, let alone anything else. She needed to rest. He wanted to —
He cut that thought off.
She wasn't his to fix. She'd made that abundantly clear with the frying pan, and with the baseball bat before it, and again with every glare she'd leveled at him since he'd walked through her door. And she was right. He bit back his sigh. He'd broken into her home, hauled her off-planet without permission, and his only excuse was that he had a cat he’d needed to collect.
No wonder she glared at him all the time.
Draanthing stellar diplomatic relations there, Sub-Commander.
They cleared the atmosphere, punching through the cloud layer and beyond. Earth's curve fell away behind them, all blue and green through the haze as the stars opened up in front of them. He didn’t miss the awed little gasp from beside him. Without drawing attention to what he was doing, he made sure Earth was in the corner of the view in front of them.
He set the course for Parac'Norr, leaned back, and let the nav system do its work.
"It's pretty," she said quietly but she wasn’t looking back at Earth like he’d expected. Instead, she was staring at the star field ahead of them with something close to awe. Stars, the hard black of open space… he'd seen it a thousand times but he tried to see it fresh anyway. For her.
"It is," he said, surprised to find he meant it.
The engines on the Vett’an were top notch, experimental he was sure, so before long they’d left the Earth system behind. She wrapped herself tighter around Barnaby, who had fallen asleep before they’d left Earth orbit, and watched the stars in fascination.
He let her. It was probably her first time off the planet she’d been born on and he wasn’t going to shatter her illusions that half the stars she was staring at were surrounded by traalhole planets worse than her own. He’d let her keep thinking it was all beautiful a little while longer.
An hour or so later the console pinged.
He sat up instantly. That wasn’t the soft chime of a routine update. Instead, it was the hard, double-tap ping of a proximity alert. His hand was on the scanner controls before the sound had finished, pulling up the tactical overlay.
“Draanth.”
