Page 40 of Leviathan

Happiness and contentment welled up in my heart, smothering out the fear of the unknown.

We were in this together. We would get through this together.

No matter what the future held, I was not alone, because right now, my entire world wanted to love me and support my dreams.

The stars spun into view, and I pressed gently on the 'gas' moving us closer and closer to the opening. It was small, and as we got closer, it was clear there was a problem.

"We can't fit through there," I said.

"I know," Lyrian replied. "I expended some of my water reserves to build up the ice around the edges to make it smaller, so it wouldn't be an obvious place to fit. I made it thin enough so we could break through in a hurry, but that will draw attention. Give me a moment, and I will crack it open."

Neurofilaments reached out from the edges of the hamster ball as we approached the small opening, cracking off chunks of ice and reeling them back in towards me. They vanished once they touched the edge of the hamster ball.

"Are you storing the ice?" I asked.

"I'm layering it on top of me so that if they're looking over here, we might look like a piece of ice just breaking off from the whole," he said.

"We're not hiding," I told him firmly. "If there is a hunter ship waiting, we are going to follow the plan we came up with. Got it?"

"Yes," he said. "But if it goes wrong..."

"It's not going wrong," I said with the full force of confidence I didn't feel but was great at projecting. I didn't know anything about space battles. The idea of a plan I'd come up with after looking through the blueprints of the hunter ship I barely understood was based on a lifetime of watching science fiction, not on what it was like to be a giant space whale being hunted by cyborg whale-riding wanna-bes. "Your weapons system is top-notch. We're going to hit them so hard and fast they won't be able to chase us even if they want to. You want to know the number one rule of fighting on a planet where you develop a fast nervous system?"

"The first rule is always run away," he said.

"If you run away, you get eaten by the bear!" I said. "Bears and men will chase you and are faster than you unless you're regularly training. So no, you don't run, you don't act scared, you don't play dead. You act like you can shoot lasers from your eyeballs, and you make it absolutely clear to that man-bear-pig that if he comes at you, he is going to deeply regret it, if he even manages to survive the encounter. If you act scared, you're telling them they can take you. If you act like a crazy person, they know you aren't scared to go to jail because you already have a great spot to bury bodies."

"Your people can shoot lasers from their eyeballs?" he asked. "It doesn't say anything about that in your medical data."

"Don't ignore the point in favor of the metaphor, Lyrian," I said.

"Your point is that you think acting crazy is the correct tactic," he said. "That explains why you want to charge straight at them if they're out there."

"I want to charge straight at them because it is going to make them feel like they should run away," I said. "We're going to make them flinch."

The hole opened wide enough for us to fit through.

"Let's go," I said, and pressed down on the gas.

We slid out into open space.

Mostly open.

Rocks tumbled by me on every side, and the view of the huge expanse of open stars around me was impacted by the whizzing form of boulders. I froze, the sense of vastness overwhelming me, like I was floating in the ocean, watching as the shelf dropped off suddenly below me to plummet into a deep depth so dark I couldn't see the bottom, all the while shapes moved around me, threatening to clobber me and knock me down under the surface.

"Don't worry," Lyrian murmured, his voice soft and warm in my ear. "I have the wheel."

"You are the wheel," I whispered back.

We slid through the asteroid field, weaving between the rocks.

"There is a hunter here," Lyrian said, his voice tense. "They haven't spotted us yet, but they will eventually if we stay here or approach. We're too far away to just charge at them; it will take some time to close the distance. The distance is great enough that if we kept enough asteroids behind us and moved like we were a part of the field, we would be able to increase the distance enough that we could make a real run for it, maybe even getting out of the system entirely before they spot us."

There was a sound of hesitation in his voice. Every time Lyrien had proposed running as our main strategy, he had sounded certain it was the right choice. Now he said it like he was torn, like it hurt to suggest it. I knew him well enough to know that the change in his tone wasn't because of me.

"What is it?" I asked. "What is different from what you expected?"

"It's not a normal hunter ship," he said, a note of deep sadness infusing his voice. "It's one of my kind, an enslaved Vaurelcar."