Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3)

by Elsa Jade

  “We won’t be stopping for anything.” Sting spun the Maserati key around his finger.

  Evens blanched and rolled his eyes toward Lana. “Maybe you should drive?”

  “Well, I was driving the Diatom when it crashed. Both times. But if you’d rather…”

  With a groan, Evens stepped back. Lana hugged her mother and Thomas one more time, and then the three who were staying behind stepped back to the edge of the fountain pool.

  Sting gazed at the statuary in the middle of the still water. The white stone was sculpted into the fluid lines of a creature that he knew the Earthers called a mermaid. It didn’t make any sense to carve a being of the sea perched on a rock in the air, but even if he didn’t understand that, he recognized the yearning angle of her body as she tipped the empty mouth of her vessel toward the pool. As if she was waiting for that flow of water that would never come, never realizing she had to leave her perch and slip into the dark water to find the hidden depths of the byzantine waterways.

  Swiveling away, he opened the door to Evens’ vehicle. “I am ready to go.”

  She gazed at the trio on the steps and then slipped into the car. But she didn’t look back as they sped out of the driveway.

  Instead she drummed her fingertips on the safety belt across her chest. “What are the chances we can get to Tritona before the Cretarni?”

  “Zero.” He considered. “Less than, since we may not be able to launch at all.”

  She cast a look at him. “But you’re still willing to dive right in.”

  He blinked. “I am Titanyri.”

  “I’ve always run away,” she murmured.

  The melancholy in her voice bothered him. “From what you’ve told me, you had reason.”

  “But it didn’t get me where I wanted to go.”

  “Diving doesn’t always go anywhere either, but since I like swimming, I don’t mind.”

  After a moment, she grinned. “I should be more like you.”

  Except she wasn’t a monster anymore.

  But she showed him how to choose music through the vehicle’s sound system, and she taught him the words to Earther songs. And they sang together. In no time they were at the path to the Atlantyri’s resting place. He almost regretted the end of the journey and the end of their music.

  The quiet of the woods—quiet except for Lana grunting under the weight of her pack—was a different kind of music, and the silence of the Atlantyri was deeper yet as they swam to the most remote edge of the exodus ship.

  They surfaced in the tight confines of what had been the hangar. When the Tritonans who’d crashed on Earth had dispersed to start their new lives, they’d left behind most of the technology that would’ve betrayed their extraterrestrial origins. That they’d never returned and their descendants had merged with the local population—until the Wavercrest syndrome symptoms emerged in some subset of the lineage—spoke well of their adaptability.

  It also meant there was a survey runabout left in the hangar.

  The vehicle had been intended for short-range trips, such as scouting likely landing spots for the exodus ship, so it was only a few times larger than the Earther vehicle that had carried him and Lana. There was enough room for a crew of four to stand and move around, plus enough storage for samples and rudimentary food and hygiene facilities. But it would be close quarters for the run to Tritona.

  Assuming it launched at all.

  Lana stared at it too. “Small,” she murmured. “This wouldn’t survive a crash.”

  “You did,” he reminded her. “Twice. And you are small.” When she still didn’t move, he added, “And your zaps are gone, so you don’t have to fear anymore.”

  At that, she jolted forward. “Right. No fear.”

  Maybe he was getting better at feelings because he had the feeling she wasn’t telling him the truth.

  But since moving forward was all he’d ever known, he followed her to the runabout.

  The outdated ship didn’t respond to the first hail from his datpad, so he revised with an older signal. That too failed.

  “Ridley only found the hidden passage because the ship identified her as a descendant. Your blood as Titanyri and mine as nul’ah-wys are too altered.” Frustration tightened her throat. Too come this far and be locked out was not an option. “What else do we have as a relic of that time that it would recognize?”

  “A song.” Taking a step back, he licked his lips and began to hum.

  “The spaceship won’t know Disney tunes,” she whispered.

  He rolled his eyes toward her as he sang aloud the chorus from the song she’d played for him during their drive about a little mermaid. “Kiss the girl!”

  She rolled her eyes back at him as the hatch parted. But as she passed by, her lips breezed over his. “Seems the words don’t matter as much as the feeling.”

  Though the hangar smelled of damp stone after the centuries of the Atlantyri’s submersion, the runabout had been sealed tight. When the door opened, the only scent was a faint wisp of dust. They loaded in their supplies and settled in the cockpit.

  The exodus ship had been a huge resource expenditure for Tritona, under the pressures of war and threatened with extinction. Although his training had never included much history, he could imagine that trying to purchase, stock, and crew the ship when the Cretarni had controlled access to land and sky must have been an undertaking equal to the war itself in demands for strategy and execution. And in return for success? Tritona had sent away the very souls they were fighting for.

  In the midst of powering up the runabout, he turned to Lana. “You coming back is why we fought.” When she blinked at him, he amended, “Not you, exactly, but any of the Atlantyri’s descendants, anyone who chooses to join us in restoring our world. We were fighting for you, even if we didn’t know you then.”

  She’d been running diagnostics as the ship’s systems came online—he hadn’t even asked, she’d just known to do it—but she paused to give him a fierce look. “We’ll get there in time. Nothing is going to stop us.”

  He let himself float a moment in her focus and resolve. Even if she was wrong. “Whatever happens, I would fight again. For the others. For you.”

  Her breath hitched, just a tiny sound but somehow amplified in the silence of the tiny, obsolete ship. “And I’ll be there alongside you, no matter what power I have. Or don’t.”

  He averted his gaze while he adjusted the power feed, and the ship began to hum quietly around them. “I have something for you. Not so worthwhile as a grenade though.”

  She smiled at him. “A rifle? I’m not sure I’d be any better with that than the pistol, but…”

  He held out his fist, webbed fingers curled tight, and after a moment she opened her palm under his. He dropped the tiny shell that he’d shown her what seemed like millennia ago.

  She gazed at the perfect little spiral. “This is what you had in your prison and with you all during the war.”

  As soon as she said it, he realized it was a terrible gift. A twisted reminder of pain and sorrow and death. No wonder Evens had been reluctant to let him test for the Intergalactic Dating Agency. He reached out to reclaim the tiny token, but her fingers closed around it, hiding the shell.

  “It wasn’t just that it was small and pretty and shiny, was it?” She gave him a gentle smile. “It was your hope.”

  “Even so tiny, it still sings of the sea.” He smiled back at her, and this time he thought he got it right. “Also, it is very shiny.”

  She tucked the shell into one of the many pockets of her e-suit, this one just above her left breast. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Through everything, small as it was, I never lost it,” he said. “If you have it…”

  He couldn’t finish. Even though he had tracked her across galaxies, maybe she didn’t want to be found by a monster.

  “I won’t lose it,” she promised.

  But that hadn’t been what he was saying, not at all.

 
A warning beep sounded in his head. No, it was the ship. The runabout was too archaic—and second-rate, even for its time—to host a useful data gel so there was no AI interface. Just a panel of cautionary indicators in front of him as the systems booted.

  “Great,” Lana muttered. “We’re gonna blow up right here. So much more efficient than launching and then crashing.”

  “We won’t blow up,” he reassured her. “I don’t think we have enough power to blow up.”

  Which meant they also didn’t have enough power to launch.

  She blew out a hard breath. “The one time I could actually use my zaps…” Her hands splayed over controls in front of her. “Can we do what we did when we crashed, but in reverse?”

  “Divert all power to launch,” he translated.

  She nodded. “Like you said, we can hold our breath. Once we’re outside the pull of gravity—and the immediate threat of crashing—we can rebalance power needs to keep ourselves alive.” She grimaced slightly. “At least until we get to Tritona.”

  He could sabotage the launch. He’d stopped many Cretarni ships. He could keep her safe, here on Earth. Carefully, he ventured, “What if this fight isn’t yours anymore?”

  She put her hand over the pocket where she’d tucked the shell. “I’m not running away anymore,” she told him. “I’m running to.”

  He took one last moment to admire her steady, clear-eyed choice, then he adjusted the controls as she’d suggested. “I’ll keep the intakes open for as long as possible. Breathe.”

  “I never knew how much that mattered before.” She sucked in a lungful let it out with a hard breath. “Let’s go.”

  The runabout was still blinking cautions across multiple indicators but he’d seen worse.

  While crashing with her.

  The runabout shivered around them as they started their slide toward the external corridor. Lana gripped the arm rests at her sides. “Uh, we’re not going to exit into solid rock or anything, are we?”

  “This vent, like most from the Atlantyri, leads through waterways. We might take on some silt, but no rocks.” He hoped. The exodus ship had been submerged a long time. Whether they were running away or running to, they would always be running through.

  The scans and sensors, already subpar, showed them only a rough approximation of their route through the earth and then into the aquifers—which was marked only by the switch-off of the intake to internal atmosphere. So they’d have fewer breaths as they made their escape.

  Lana reached to grip his hand. And suddenly he was glad of the shuttle’s cramped space.

  She looked at him. “Are you sure this is what you want? I would never take you back to a fight that was no longer yours.”

  “I said I would fight for you. And I say what I mean.” If he hadn’t always told her everything of what he felt… Well, he was Titanyri.

  With one last deep breath, she nodded and gestured to the ignition sequence in front of him. “I’m with you.”

  And with that, they burst from some unnamed pond in Big Sky Country and aimed for the stars.

  Chapter 18

  When they finally crossed into the Tritonan space, the comm blared with the incoming chatter of battle.

  “Last evacuees cleared the Hall of Moonless Hours. School up, Tritonyri. Close on my signal. But stay out of the charge zone.”

  “Lost contact with Spindrift Squad in that ray. What the kak is that thing?”

  “Hai-aku Three, watch your dorsal. Suckers coming down fast sunside.”

  This time, a brisk Earther voice answered. “I see ‘em. Diving to draw them off the evacuees. Try to chase me in the deep black, sucker-fuckers.”

  Lana clamped one hand over her mouth, even though it was her ears she wanted to cover. When Sting silenced the comm, she realized she was shaking.

  He eyed her. “This is the first time you’ve heard a battle.”

  Swallowing hard, she mumbled through her knuckles, “That was Ridley. She’s in the fighting.” And too near the charged ray that had silenced an entire squad.

  “She was a warrior on Earth too.”

  True, but… “I swear, this still won’t make me run away.” And when the moment came to see battle? “Can we contact Marisol and Coriolis and the rest? Tell them we’re coming.” She grimaced. “I’m nothing, but the return of the Phantom could turn the tide.”

  “Any choice by any being may turn the tide,” he reminded her. “That’s why we’re here.” He gestured at the crisscrossing streams of messaging. “We have no weapons, and the runabout’s mimic shield is obsolete even if we risked pushing more power priority there. Our best chance of landing intact is to hide our path down. Since we’re small and our signal is obscure, with the Cretarni focused elsewhere, we might be able to sneak past. But not if we call attention to ourselves prematurely.”

  He’d never been small and obscure. He’d never hidden. Once again, this was her fault. She nodded and dropped her fist into her lap. “Where do they need us most?”

  Not since she’d set her prom date’s truck on fire had she felt as hopeless and complicit as she watched the simplified scan outlining the battle below—almost as bad as a screenshot from the old Space Invaders video game, except real lives were being lost. Would it even make a difference if they could tell the Tritonesse what kind of weapon they were facing? They’d already hated and feared the nul’ah-wys—with good reason. Maybe it was already too late.

  But with Tritona right there below, she wasn’t running again.

  Sting pointed at the screen. “The Cretarni are focused here. They have their armada in an offensive array, and from the lack of Tritonyri signals where fighters should’ve been arrayed here and here—and here—it seems our forces have withdrawn to a defensive position above the Abyssa’s chasm.” His voice roughened even more than usual. “We’ve never retreated so far, and that it’s happened so fast…”

  It meant the Cretarni attack—wielding the weapon they’d taken from her blood—was the worst that Tritona had ever endured.

  She squelched the impulse to blame herself again. Drowning in guilt had never gotten her what she wanted. She could only join the fight with what she had.

  On their return trip, Sting had shown her some fighting moves effective against specific Cretarni liabilities and he’d drilled her with a plasma pistol although obviously she wasn’t able to live fire on the runabout. She still wasn’t a warrior, but she was willing.

  So how far would that take her?

  “We’re going to crash the runabout,” he announced.

  She sighed. Yeah, that sounded about right. “Third time’s the charm,” she muttered.

  “Kill the power, go dark, drop fast and deep. We’ll be underwater before the Cretarni can destroy us.”

  Biiiiig sigh.

  And worse than definitely crashing and maybe drowning or blowing up, if they descended to the trenches, what help would she be? The Phantom would go back to fighting the Cretarni, except now more endangered than ever.

  When he hadn’t been showing her how to kill and how to survive, he’d been constantly rebalancing power to get them to Tritona sooner. When the air in the runabout had gotten thin and she’d tried to sleep, to conserve her own power, she’d lie there, watching his stillness broken only by the occasional flick of his fingers over the controls, as if he sought to propel them through the vacuum with his own webbed hands.

  Only once, without words, had he come to lie down beside her, those hands holding her instead of empty space.

  “I thought I was going to die when the Cretarni ejected me,” she’d confessed in a whisper. “Even though you were right there, I thought I was going to die alone. I couldn’t believe you’d find a way.”

  Finally he spoke. “Believe.” And he held her while she cried until she’d finally fallen asleep.

  Now, she had to fight.

  But how? Except for the ability to read fast, snack constantly, and maybe lob a couple grenades, she’d lost the only pow
er she’d ever had.

  “We have to go to the Abyssa,” she said.

  Sting nodded. “If Coriolis has pulled the Tritonyri back, then he’ll need us at the chasm—”

  “No, I mean we have to go deeper. All the way to Abyssa.” When he didn’t answer, she swiveled her seat to face him. “You said yourself, one being can change the tide. But we can’t go to the Tritonesse. To them, we’re monsters, and they aren’t going to forget that just because we’ve come to save the day. And we can’t call on the intergalactic community, not when the council rep is watching to see if Tritona is salvageable at all.” She spread her hands. “It’s just us, Sting. But if anyone would remember what the switch charge was meant to be—and how we might stop it—it’d be the Abyssa.”

  She held her breath as he considered.

  “I only went once to the Abyssa’s shrine to receive an omen, as most Tritonyri do before their first battle. I saw her light, but never her voice. She gave me no words as a warrior to carry into battle. I don’t know that she would help us now.”

  “Now or never,” Lana reminded him grimly.

  After a moment, he inclined his head. “If we don’t want the Cretarni to stop us, we can’t risk a message to Coriolis and the others. We can send one burst before we submerge, but the signal may be intercepted by the Cretarni as well. What should we tell them?”

  What would she tell the women who were like sisters she’d never had, knowing that she might be overheard by those who had never accepted her and those who sought to kill her?

  She thought for a moment. “I guess there’s not much to say except… The Phantom and the fire-witch are coming home.”

  He huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Message recorded. It will transmit before we vanish under the waves.”

  She gazed at him. “You’re very handsome when you smile, did you know?”

  He did it again, and she would’ve sworn she caught a glimpse of dimples. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he admitted. “Most don’t like to see my teeth.” His smile faded. “Once you see them inflicted the way I was meant to be, maybe you won’t think I’m handsome anymore.”