by Debra Jess
"Where is it?"
"I reviewed the scans of the sector for the past forty-eight hours. Our radar showed a burst of energy from behind one of the slipstreams. It appears to be…"
"You're wasting my time. Where is the Firelight?"
"Sector 1138.5150."
The coordinates meant nothing to him.
"The science station located near the haunted nebula," the second clarified.
"There's nothing to haunt in the nebula," Silt said, fighting not to roll his eyes, but at least he knew where the nebula was, and it wasn't anywhere close. "I won't have you encouraging that suspicious nonsense among the crew. What you will do is recall all personnel from Stations Four, Two, and Six. Plot a course through the slipstreams to get us there. I want to be underway within the hour."
"Aye, sir. However, we have another problem."
For the love of the Guardians… "What is it?"
"As I was saying, the reason we know where the Firelight escaped to is because they managed to acquire the passcode to open the fifth slipstream, sir."
"What fifth slipstream?" With a kick, he knocked over the chair with the kid strapped to it, stepping over his whining form and into his second's personal space.
"It's a smaller gateway, built twenty-five years ago to create a direct pathway to the haun—the golden nebula. The board of directors had approved the creation of a station out there, a small science station to study the nebula."
Why had he never heard of this station? Who was responsible for building a station so far away from occupied space? "The only reason why anyone would build a station out there was if they knew it contained something of value."
His second bobbed his head. "Agreed, sir, but we don't know what the science team was looking for or if they had ever found anything. All I've been able to dig up in the archives here at Vaynix is that twenty years ago, an accident occurred, the station was shut down, and Manitac ordered the slipstream closed."
"Until now."
His second nodded again but offered no further insight.
"There was no accident." Silt bent over to haul the chair upright, jerking the kid back and forth, causing him even more agony. "The board of directors wouldn't have cared about an accident."
"If we opened up communications again, I could dig deeper," his second offered. "Perhaps the archives on the Unity Homeport will have more information."
"No." Why the fifth slipstream existed didn't matter to him, as long as it brought him to the Firelight. If he found the Firelight, then the Queen of Hearts wouldn't be far behind. "While you waste time on pointless speculation, Hart and the Queen of Hearts run free. Get the passcode for that fifth slipstream. We're going through."
"It will be a tight squeeze, sir. The slipstream is only a quarter of the size of the other four. Manitac never considered sending larger ships through to the nebula."
"If the Silt can fit, then we go through. No more delays." How tiring it was to have to continue to explain his orders.
"What about the boy, sir?"
Silt looked down at the pathetic creature sniffling in the chair. "No point on wasting resources on this one. He's useless to us. Shove him into the garbage chute. We'll dump the garbage before we enter the slipstream."
Silt ignored the boy begging for mercy as he left the interrogation room. Shade thought she'd ditched him. He had the advantage now, with neither her nor Hart the wiser. He was so close to success he could taste it.
Tonight, for once, he'd sleep just fine.
Chapter Thirty
Darvik stepped through the compression gate to see Kelra already facing him, arms across her chest, with fingers digging into her biceps. The distressed look on her face surprised him. He’d been expecting anger. This would make his argument all the more difficult. Distress required a soft touch, one he didn't have at the moment, which was why he wished Naz had followed them. That man’s bedside manner never changed, no matter how he was feeling on any particular day.
But Naz wasn't here, and it would have been a cowardly act to drag him into the middle of an argument, particularly the one between himself and Kelra, the woman he wanted to stay by his side through the cold, harsh landscape of space. Excuses for ignoring her wouldn't fly with Kelra, not after the intense intimacy that had developed between them, which left him considering a life with her. Did that dream hang in the balance? Would he lose her in his attempt to protect her?
"Why?" she hurled at him before the compression gate closed. "What do you think I'm going to do on the Majesty of the Stars? Are you so worried that I'm going to steal everything valuable over there that you want to keep me trapped on the Queen of Hearts?"
"On the contrary, I'm worried about your safety. You can't just go charging onto an empty ship after all this time."
"Who said anything about ignoring safety protocols?" Her breath hitched, and in that moment, the fire under her anger died, replaced with cold ice. "You don't believe there's an alien waiting for me, so why won't you let me find out for myself?"
How could he explain his fear to her, when she was afraid of nothing and believed he was afraid of nothing as well? "What happens if you don't find the alien? What if there's something else over there that could kill you? Do you know how you're going to react once you're surrounded by the debris of your childhood?"
"Are you talking about skeletons?" Her voice rose along with her outrage. "You think the Majesty of the Stars is a ghost ship filled with the bones of the passengers and crew? C'mon, Darvik. The lack of activity would have shut down the power systems. Outside a human-tolerance atmosphere, the lack of power would lower the temperature to subfreezing. Any sort of vibration after that would shatter the bodies and turn them to dust."
True enough, he knew, but keeping her from the seeing the dead wasn’t really what he was worried about. "Even though the ship hasn't changed, you have. What will you do if your expectations aren't met?"
"What by the Guardians do you think my expectations are?"
"I think you've spent twenty years obsessing over this one moment in time. You're stuck in this myopic view of what you think you'll find on board the Majesty of the Stars. The second your plan goes wrong, you won't be able to react fast enough."
"There's nothing wrong with my reactions."
He took another step closer, using hand motions to force her to look at her own body. "Do you even hear yourself? You're out of breath just talking about this. You're in no shape to board the Majesty of the Stars, never mind confronting an alien. Have you even considered how you'll kill it? You said it was a cloud filled with stars. How do you kill something like that?"
Arms crossed her chest, Kelra was not hearing his arguments. She started tapping her foot in agitation. "I've had twenty years to figure out how to kill it. What do you want, a laundry list?"
"Yes." If the only way to get through to her was to let her run down her energy by describing her own plans, so be it. "Start with the simplest and work your way down. I'll wait."
"Darvik…"
This time he moved into her personal space, letting the full force of fear pour off him and onto her. "If you want me to even consider letting you go over there by yourself, which I'm not, you're going to tell me how you plan to kill a damn cloud!"
With a huff, she backed away, her breathing heavier than before. He waited for her to get herself under control, trying to monitor her without staring at her chest, the urge to get his hands on her breasts running smack into his desire to keep her safe, if not sane.
"All right. Simplest first," she started. "We all know that clouds are made of ice particles. All I have to do is let it chase me into the surgical suite. Once it's in there, I seal the room and turn up the temperature, and the cloud will evaporate."
"What about the stars inside?"
"I figure that's the mechanism it used to kill the crew. I…I remember the scarring on my father's face. When I searched the wound database at the academy's hospital, it didn't match your typical burn
injury. Rather, it resembled a spinner's web, as if all the capillaries burst under his skin first before exploding outward around his mouth."
That description sounded familiar. "A lightning strike."
"Exactly, but from what I remember, it looked as if the stars control the cloud, rotating in an orbit centered on something I couldn't see."
"What would stars or lightning orbit around?" Darvik asked.
Kelra’s face softened as she talked, her anger disappearing now that he was listening to her. Maybe he’d learned something from Naz after all these years: Let other people talk about what they wanted to talk about instead of what he needed them to.
Guess it's never too late to learn how to handle people. I just hope it's not too late for Kelra.
"I don't know." She started to pace back and forth, so he stepped out of her way.
She didn't even notice. Her gaze was on the ground as she speared a path between one end of the sofa and the bar. Her thoughts, however, were so deep in their own world, he doubted she saw anything except her own plans, written inside her, the details worked over for the past twenty years.
"I couldn't see the core of the cloud, but that doesn't matter. Once the cloud evaporates, the stars will shed their energy trying to maintain a structure they can cling to. They'll need more moisture to create a convection, but the heat will prevent that. No structure, no stars, no alien."
"And you'll be trapped in the sick bay with it."
She shrugged. "I'll do what I can to get out before I seal it, but if I can't—well, I've withstood six months of freezing cold. A couple of hours of high heat will leave me dehydrated, but I'll live."
It took all Darvik's control not to imagine Kelra lying on the floor of an empty sick bay, surrounded by dead equipment and degenerated systems. If he weren’t confident that no alien intelligence existed, never mind would remain on board an empty ship, he would have poked more holes in her plans than she could plug, and no way would he let her go that far, regardless of how simple this operation appeared to her.
"What else do you have?"
Without hesitation, she answered, waving her arms about as she described the next scenario. Instead of standing in her path, he sat on the sofa, careful to keep himself tucked to one side, giving Kelra plenty of room if she chose to join him. Back and forth, she paced in front of him, hands behind her back, hair bouncing over her shoulders, as if giving a lecture to a class of rapt students.
"…if that doesn't work, then we go back to sealing it in sick bay, but this time instead of heat, I'll use a fire-suppressing foam. This will disrupt any conductivity within the cloud and destabilize the stars’ orbit. They will smother within the foam."
"And you'll still be in the room with the cloud as it chokes to death."
"It's foam." She waved away his concern. "I'll take a shower afterward.
"Umm-hum." It was all he could think to say without drawing attention to his disbelief. Until this moment, he'd thought he would be able to talk her out of his madness. Once the Majesty of the Stars was within their grasp, the reality of what happened would drive away any crazy notions of aliens. But the more she talked, the more he realized this wasn't just a survivor's fantasy, a childish dream concocted to protect a young girl from undue grief. Kelra believed, and worse, she expected him to believe right alongside her. "What's next?"
"If the stars are intelligent, then they have to be able to communicate. All I need to do is disrupt that ability. The best explanation for communication between the stars would be through a laser using the infrared light because the wavelengths are longer than visible light. However, to maintain the cloud, the water vapor would have to be turned to ice. If that checks out, then all I would have to do is set a bunch of organic matter on fire, which would render the fifteen-micron wavelength necessary for infrared useless."
"And where do you intend to find enough organic matter to burn? We discussed this. Anything organic would have been cleaned by the vacuum system even if it froze and turned to dust due to oscillations from exterior debris impacting the ship."
Still pacing, Kelra waved away his concern as if it didn't matter. Maybe he didn't matter to her as much as thought. A piece of his heart tore open, but he'd be damned if he'd let her see it.
"There would still be plenty of food in the kitchens. Majesty of the Stars had three full-service restaurants, six cafés, twelve bars, and a few sundry stores with premade foods. All of them had their own airtight and frozen storage systems. I would use whatever I can find in there."
"Food poisoning," he muttered, hoping for a reaction to his joke.
She didn't hear that either.
"And speaking of oscillations," she continued unabated, "there's the ship's sound system. My parents had it enhanced for the ballroom. I prepared a recording of a high-pitched note, above human hearing. I'll bring that recording with me to play at two hundred and fifty decibels aimed into the core of the cloud…nothing could survive that."
"Death by D sharp." This time Kelra stopped pacing. She saw him for the first time since she started her lecture.
"You're making fun of me."
"Oh, no, I'm taking you more seriously than you realize." At this point, he had to stand up because sitting down wasn't going to give him any advantage. With as gentle a touch as he could manage, he placed both his hands on Kelra's shoulders. The confusion in her eyes probably reflected his own discordance with this situation. He'd figured she'd had a plan to kill the alien, but he didn't think she had so many of them. And she was just getting started.
"You're not going to let me go over there first, are you?"
Her steady gaze turned hard, leaving him to scramble to find a way to make her understand. "No, I'm not. Have you heard yourself? All these plans…it doesn't matter how well you thought them out…you're still going to need backup. You don't know any more about this alien than you did when you were six, watching through the porthole in the escape pod door. One little mistake could destroy all these careful plans and put your life in danger. It might even get you killed.”
She shrugged his hands off her shoulders and took a step away. He had to take a deep breath before the next part. “And I'm sorry, Kelra, I should have told you before this, but I have come to care for you very much. Too much, maybe, but there's no turning around my emotions now. I want you to find closure on the Majesty of the Stars, but I cannot allow you to go over there myself."
The look on her face changed from cold indifference to outright rebellion. "You don't have a choice."
"Yes, I do. I'm the captain of the Queen of Hearts. My word is law inside this ship. If you go over there, it will be with all of us. We'll have your back for this operation—don’t think we won’t because of who and what we are. If anything, that means we will support you even more. In case you hadn’t noticed, the crew has started to accept you, and that’s no small thing. Before one finger is lifted to remove a single item from the Majesty of the Stars, I promise you, we will scour every deck to find this alien of yours. If it's anywhere on your ship, I'll see to it personally that you get your revenge."
It should have worked, but from the furious look on her face, his words clearly fell flat.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
"I could ask the same of you. Any captain of any ship would welcome backup. Why won't you?"
"Because it will kill you."
"The alien?"
"Yes!" She shoved him away from her, but she still didn't have the strength to push him to the ground. "That thing killed over fifteen thousand people in less than an hour. If it's still there, if it's survived all this time, it will take you and your crew down in even less than a minute."
"But not you." She gave him no response. "Kelra, if this thing is so dangerous, how could you possibly believe it won't kill you just as fast?"
Her gaze darted around his quarters, looking at the artwork on the walls, but not at him.
"Kelra, what aren't you telling me? What happened
to make you think this alien won't kill you like it did everyone else?"
"It could have. It wanted to, I'm sure it did, but at the last second, it stopped. It was right there, not even an arm's length away, and it just stopped. I don't know why, but it gave me enough time to get into the escape pod and seal the door. Then, I got the sense that it was staring at me. I could see the stars through the port window. They'd slowed down, not spinning as fast as they had. It was thinking, but I don't know about what. It hovered there, not moving, and for a moment, I wanted nothing more than to open the door and jump into the cloud myself…"
She sniffed away the tears forming in the corners of her eyes. "I would have done it too, but the tethers disengaged, the thrusters came online, the pod launched, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I didn't know how to return, but I swore to the Stars and Guardians that I would some day."
He reached out to comfort her, but she jerked away from his touch, sinking his heart into his boots.
"I don't want you to die, Darvik, and this alien is a killer, but it won't kill me. Don't ask me how I know this because I can't explain it. It won't kill me, which will give me the time I need to set a trap to destroy it. I have to do this, and I have to do it alone. Anyone else won't survive. I need you to respect my request, Darvik. You have to make the crew understand. I'm not here to steal their booty. I want everyone to live. Please let me do this."
This one moment in time would determine the rest of his life. The last time he felt like this was right after he heard the Iron Heart had been destroyed and he vowed to continue his family's tradition. If he let Kelra board the Majesty of the Stars by herself, all manner of horrible things could happen to her, but if she survived, she would be his. That was a big if. Derelict ships had dangers and traps that even a seasoned captain in top shape shouldn’t attempt to navigate alone. And on a ship as large as the Majesty of the Stars, how could he risk her on what could only have been a stress-induced hallucination?
But if he refused her, he would lose her forever, based on nothing more than the assumption that something terrible would happen to her if she boarded the cruise liner alone.
