by Debra Jess
The noise grew closer, and another light turned dark. She backed away from her dad's body and slapped her hand on the big, red emergency icon next to the vid screen.
No alarm sounded, so she hit it again. The light in the living area snapped off, and she saw an impossible sight: stars filling the back portion of the cabin, stars surrounded by a black cloud.
Her dad wasn't going to wake up. If she were going to escape, she had to do it on her own. As slow as she could, she tiptoed toward the door, her feet leaving wet impressions in the carpet. The cloud hadn't moved, but the stars snapped as she made her way around the room without getting too close to it.
The door dissolved and out she ran. Bodies of the crew and other passengers lined the hallway, all their faces covered in the same red splotches. Leaping over the bodies, Kelra raced toward the nearest escape pod. At the pod, high above her head, the sign flashed instructions to open the pod door with arrows pointing to icons displayed on the palm pad. Kelra jumped to reach the icons, but missed.
She jumped again, but missed again. The snapping and hissing sound returned. She looked over her shoulder. The light at the end of the hallway blinked off. The cloud had reappeared, the stars inside crackling with power.
Kelra needed something to stand on, but her only option had been the body of a dead crewman. To get to him, she had to walk toward the cloud. She really didn't want to get closer to it, but she had no choice. Stepping lightly, she reached the crewman and tugged on his arm, half hoping he would sit up alive and healthy enough to help her escape, half hoping he wouldn't. He was heavy, too heavy.
Another light blinked off as the cloud advanced, inches at a time. Kelra's fear spiked and gave her strength. She grunted as she dragged the body closer to the escape pod door. Balancing as best she could on the dead man's shoulders, she slapped her fist on the icon. The door dissolved, knocking her off the man's body onto her backside.
A fourth light blinked off. Kelra sat up. The cloud had stopped halfway down the hallway.
Without warning, the cloud moved closer, faster, the stars snapping louder. Kelra tried to get into the escape pod, clamoring over the dead man, but her bare feet lost their footing on his torso. Slipping, she slammed her knee on the door track. Pain radiated through it. The cloud was on top her of her now, her skin turning pink as the stars electrified her body. The cloud meant death. It had used the pretty stars to kill Mom and Dad, everyone.
She should have screamed, but instead she froze, too cold and too hot at the same time. The rivulets of water left over from her bath evaporated. Her hair, long and brown, stood up on end. The stars continued to snap but didn't sound as angry as they had in the cabin.
Too scared to move, Kelra did the only thing she could think of to calm herself. She sang the song her mother would sing whenever she was scared. The verse painted a picture of the Unity Homeport where she had been born—blue sky, green grass, a slight breeze, with puffy, harmless, white clouds floating by.
The black cloud pulsed and withdrew, just a little. Not sure what else to do, Kelra continued to sing, her voice growing stronger with each repetition as the cloud backed away. She sang the song three more times while the cloud stopped and then shrank. It looked at her, as much as a cloud could look. A last drop of water had dribbled from her hair down her forehead until her eyebrow forced it along her nose. Still too scared to wipe the water away, Kelra let the drop travel down the side of her nose to her lips.
A funnel from the cloud reached out to touch the water drop. With all the hissing and snapping from the stars, Kelra expected a shock of electricity when the cloud touched her, but the thin line touched only the droplet, not her skin. Nothing happened. The funnel retracted. The stars started to spin within the cloud, dancing faster, hissing louder.
It was Kelra's turn to take a step back. She hit her head against the pod. The jolt reminded her she needed to escape. Would the cloud follow her? Could it seep through the sealants and force its way inside?
She waited, but the cloud neither advanced nor retreated. After a moment, she stepped over the door track and into the pod. The smaller space had forced the keypad to be installed at her height. She pressed the green icon where the arrow pointed. The door reformed. Outside the port window, Kelra saw the cloud advancing right up to the door.
She stared at it through the thick view pane, getting the impression it stared back, until a prerecorded voice instructed her to press one more icon. She did as instructed. The loud noise of tethers retracting sounded harsh, but it wasn’t until after the pod spun away from the Majesty of the Stars, until Kelra's line of sight with the cloud of stars had been broken, that she remembered to seat herself and activate the restraining straps.
Three days later, after she had eaten most of the rations and drank most of the water, the pod drifted beyond the nebula's veil, guided by the science station's homing beacon.
Soon after, warm arms wrapped around her shoulders as she shivered in the cold, her body unable to stop shaking even as one of the station’s doctors held her close. No…wait…that's not what happened…
Looking around, the faces she remembered disappeared as if they were never there. But they had been there. Nothing in the universe could force her to forget the faces of the science station's rescue team. So why couldn't she see their faces? Where were they? What happened to them? Who in the Stars was holding her, if it wasn't the people she remembered?
Putting all her power behind her swing, she slammed her fist into whoever held her back.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was a good thing Kelra still operated at reduced speed, or Darvik wouldn't have had a chance to dodge her fist. With his arm tucked securely around her shoulders, there wasn't much room for him to move.
"Kelra! Snap out of it! Now!"
Wary eyes blinked with heavy lids. Behind him, the compression gate opened.
"Can you calm her down?" he asked Naz, as his friend knelt on the other side of Kelra.
"What by the Guardians happened here?" Naz pulled an injector out of his white coat pocket.
"I don't know yet. She just took a swing at me."
Kelra squirmed in his arms, so he had to use brute force to keep her still while Naz injected her with a sedative. Now, her attention shifted to Naz, so Darvik had to keep his grip on her, in case she tried to hit his friend.
A heartbeat passed, then two, three, and four. Kelra stopped squirming, her face turning passive as her eyes became sharper instead of becoming unfocused.
"Naz, she's not…"
"I know," his friend said, squatting down to join both Darvik and Kelra on the ground. "The sedative sometimes has a reverse effect when the subject is already agitated. Not always, but not unusual either."
"How long will it—" Before he could finish, Kelra tugged away from him.
"I'm sitting right here," she groused.
While she slid a respectable distance away from him, Darvik watched, ready to move in case she fell over if the sedative had a delayed effect.
"How do you feel?" Naz pulled another one of his instruments from his pocket.
Kelra waved it away. "I'm fine."
Naz's raised eyebrow must have matched his own because Kelra glared at both of them.
"Really. I had…a bad moment."
"A bad moment that lasted two hours?"
This time, she opened her mouth and closed it again. She stared at him, not saying anything. Darvik looked at Naz and gave him a “get out of here” gesture with his chin. Naz didn't hesitate, but he did slip his injector into Darvik's hand, probably loaded with another sedative, just in case.
With Naz gone, it was only him and Kelra staring at each other. Since she refused to give him any sort of acknowledgement about what had happened, he would have to start the conversation, no matter how awkward it was.
"Do you have any recollection of what just happened to you?"
Her pink tongue slipped between her lips, wetting them down as she thought. "I had a
flashback to what happened on the Majesty of the Stars. It was so real, as if I were there again, living the nightmare again." She paused. "Was I really out of it for two hours?"
"Give or take. I was trying to track you down. I kept getting the runaround. One of the puppets saw you pass through the emergency backup storage unit. Another saw you poking around the armory." He waved a hand over toward the equipment. "You were a ghost until I came here and found you curled up in a ball on the floor, clutching your chest."
"Yeah."
She offered no apology, no explanation.
"You were going to betray me, weren't you? You planned to incapacitate the entire ship so you could get to the Majesty of the Stars first."
Her gaze met his—dark, defiant, and painful.
"What was the plan? How were you going to do it?" Her betrayal should have triggered his anger. Instead, all he could feel was the dark weight of nothingness where his heart used to be.
She took a deep breath, uncurling her long legs in front of her as she leaned back on the sofa. "I was going to drop a box of Z-nip bricks into the water supply."
He reeled at her answer. "Z-nips? That's what you were really doing on Station Seven? You were there for a buy?"
Her long, silky hair bounced as she nodded.
"Where is the brick now?"
"I gave it to Mayla. It should be in her quarters by now."
His outrage outpaced his disappointment. "You would drag a helpless puppet into your plan?"
"You didn't give me any options," she snapped back.
"You had an option—not to go through with it. Do you care so little for me that you would betray me like this?"
"It's because I love you so much that I was willing to go through with it."
He blinked. "All right. For now, we’ll leave the Z-nips with Mayla. She, at least, won’t be tempted to use them. After this is over with, I’ll get the box from her and send it down the garbage chute. Until then…do you really think this alien is going to kill us and not you?"
Her face crumpled, but her actions had blunted his sympathy. Not even the tears gathering in her eyes shook his resolve to stay away.
"I know you don't believe me, that you think I'm crazy." Pushing farther away from him, she used the space to lower her head, digging the heels of her hands into her eyes, rubbing them for a few seconds before raising her head again. "What I don't understand is how a pirate who has spent his life fighting against a corporate behemoth and a government too weak to defend itself could believe anything that Unity or Manitac say about the existence of aliens."
She had him there. Was her madness spreading to him? Was he so besotted with her that he would entertain the notion that she was right? Or maybe she was right. Maybe it was time he started believing in the woman who had captured his heart instead of the corporation that manipulated everyone and everything.
If he wanted to explore what lay between them bad enough, he would have to believe her.
She chose to risk her life to avenge her parents, but he decided not to let her go alone. What would he tell the crew if he flip-flopped and let her go over the Majesty of the Stars alone?
It didn't matter. He was the captain. They respected and trusted him in the end, even if they disagreed with his decisions, he knew that deep down. But their opinions and thoughts mattered. As did Kelra. She more than mattered to him.
"Okay."
Her anger turned to confusion, bringing her eyebrows together. "Okay, what?"
He couldn't blame her suspicions at this point. "You can go over to the Majesty of the Stars on your own, with one condition."
Her voice hitched. "Name it."
"We monitor you the entire way. I'll set you up with an ear jack and operations tracker. You'll use them to transmit everything to the Queen of Hearts, your location at all times, your health status, your ammunition expenditure…"
She started to interrupt, but he slapped the floor with his hand, startling her into silence. "I know projectiles won't work with a cloud, but I don't care. If you want to go over there without backup, then by the Guardians, you're going over there with everything you can possibly throw at it so you can kill it or escape whatever it is and come back to me a whole person."
Her shallow breath hitched. "You really want me to come back to you?"
"Yes." The forcefulness of the word broke him. He was helpless to stop her, he knew that, but he wasn't convinced she knew how much he cared. How could she know? Aside from her confession just now, not once since she boarded the Queen of Hearts had either one of them expressed anything even approaching love.
Not a second passed and she was in his lap, lips plastered against his. He accepted her kiss, basked in the passion pouring off her. This wasn't sex, or even desire, but her sealing the deal. She would do as he asked without saying another word about it.
When she pulled herself away from him, they were both breathless.
"Only for you, Kelra." He ran his hands through her hair, drinking in her beauty and her strength. "Only for you would I change my mind despite every cell in my body screaming that this is wrong."
"I'm not wrong about this, Darvik. I swear I'm not. This thing has waited for me to return. When it chased me into the escape pod bay, I could sense its movements. It knew what I wanted to do, and it could have stopped me at any time. I knew I couldn't outrun it. I'd seen what it had done to my father. It knew me, Darvik. I don't know how or why, but it anticipated my mad dash, and it…let me go."
"If it's intelligent, why kill it?" He grasped at a fine thread of hope. "You could capture it, bring it to Unity or Manitac. Get it off your ship and let it suffer the mercies of a corporation that has none."
She pushed herself off his lap to stand, so he followed. "What Manitac would do to it wouldn't be enough. I want my revenge, and I won't give the soulless monsters Unity created the satisfaction of torturing it. Besides, they would probably find a way to create a weapon out of it. Which is another reason I need to destroy it."
The crazy, tousled hair should have had him tossing her over his shoulder for a long romp in bed. If he kept staring at her, he might just try it, but now wasn't the time. He wouldn't touch her again until this nightmare…her nightmare…was over.
Flicking his ear jack, he channeled the bridge. "Do we have a signal yet?"
After a pause came Rusa's voice. "No, sir. We're still crunching data."
"Keep at it. In the meantime…I've decided to let Kelra enter the Majesty of the Stars first when we find it. We're going to monitor her from here. Ezick, the second we link up with the Majesty of the Stars, I want you to establish holo feeds of every deck, every pad, every closet. We need to monitor every corner of that ship at all times. Johza, has the shuttle completed decon?"
Another pause, then Johza's rough voice came across. "Yes."
"I want you to corral three puppets. Bring one of them to Kelra's quarters with a medium-sized grav-resister. We have some nonstandard equipment we'll be transferring over to the Majesty of the Stars. Then I want you to head for the armory and get a plasma rifle with grenade launching capabilities."
"How much ammo?"
How much, indeed. Too much ammo would weigh her down at a time when she would need split-second reaction times. Not to mention that bullets and grenades more than likely wouldn't even harm the creature. He had no doubt the crew of the Majesty had tried every weapon in their possession, which would have included such things.
"Enough to take down a single fully armored Manitac trooper."
"Are you sure?" Johza asked. "That's not a lot of protection."
"If we're lucky, she won't need any of it, but add an ops tracker as well. We'll sync it to Kelra's ear jack, so it'll follow her like a child looking for candy."
No further response to his commands came, but Darvik could see in his mind's eye Johza transferring his controls to Mirin before stepping away from his station.
Kelra mouthed "Thank you."
He clicked off his
ear jack. "Don't thank me yet. We still haven't found the Majesty of the Stars."
"What will you tell the others about the alien?" She started to arrange the equipment she’d need once she was on board the Majesty. "I mean, they'll obey your orders, but if they're going to monitor my movements, they won't know what to look for if you don't tell them."
He'd ask Naz, who would better know how to break that kind of news, but Kelra didn't need to know that. "I'll tell them the truth, as I always do. Whether they believe me, or you, is irrelevant. It would help though if you gave us a sketch of what you remember. I mean, I know what I see in my head when you talk about a cloud full of stars, but if we have something visual to guide us, it could shave a few seconds off our reaction time if we see the creature on our monitors before you do."
She was in his arms again, her lips playing havoc with his own. As much as he wanted this to last forever, he'd feel better keeping busy while he worked out the logistics of this operation.
Kelra swiped his stylus before she pulled her lips from his. Stars, he'd let down his guard for a second… At least she had something to get started on her sketch. He'd have to get himself a new one. In the meantime, he counted up the pieces of equipment she'd filched from their supplies.
Clouds. How in the Guardians did one kill a cloud full of stars? Was there something she was overlooking?? Maybe Naz could cook something up in his lab?
More than likely not.
If Kelra searched the ship top to bottom with no alien attacking her, he had no idea of how she would react. It was the one thing he couldn't imagine: Kelra committing herself to a mission so intently and failing. For all the times she had failed to capture him, she hadn’t once thought about how Manitac would react because pirate hunting wasn’t her primary goal.
Darvik glanced up at Kelra, curled up on her couch, the stylus weaving in short staccato bursts across a tri-3 palette in front of her. The intensity of her gaze burned a hole through his doubt.
