by Calinda B
“Or we might not be able to get there,” Eril countered.
Shaxi nudged the moon a bare longitude. “I suggest we hole up here, a few clicks from Rampakh. We can send a team to the port for repair materials while keeping the ship concealed.”
Evessa blinked her starfield eyes—the black on black stare speckled with pinprick white lights that marked a gene-modified sheerways navigator. “I thought you were just the babysitter?”
“Let’s do this,” the captain said crisply, “before we fall out of the sky.”
Though most non-sheerspace navigation was handled from the bridge, Evessa’s fingers danced over the console. “There’s a good—or I suppose I should say bad—storm front massed at the foothills. We could disappear behind that veil, but the EM radiation would fry us on our way.”
Shaxi stared at the screen where airborne grit moved likes waves through the sky. “I’ve been studying the shriving winds. If we run a positive charge through the hull, we can deflect the worst of the damage.”
Evessa sucked in her cheeks. “But storms on Khamaseen contain negative ions. A positive charge will just bring the storm down on top of us.”
Shaxi shook her head. “The shriving winds are zwitterionic. Both negative and positive states exist simultaneously on the same molecules, but the positive ions of the alien compounds would be worse for the ship. If we draw the negative charge toward us, we should be able to form a protective shell around us.”
“Become one with the storm,” the captain murmured. “Very poetic.”
Eril stared at Deynah. “You think poetry will keep us from crashing and burning?”
“I used it on Benedetta to excellent effect just last night. There were explosions, but only the kind I like.” The captain grinned as if the prospect of flying into a ship-swallowing sandstorm was also on his list of orgasmic pleasures.
Of course, Eril reminded himself, this was the same man who’d stolen the last l’auralya in the universe as his personal plaything. Was the man so blinded by sex to not see how dangerous her kind could be?
The captain turned to Evessa. “How long?”
“We’ll be at the storm front in an hour. Sooner if it keeps rolling this way.”
“It will,” Shaxi said. “The storm is coming.”
Deynah snorted. “It always is. Make sure the hull charge is ready before then.” He pointed at Shaxi. “I should strap you to the Asphodel’s prow like one of those mermaid busts on Old Earth ships.”
“I would be honored,” she said solemnly.
He huffed out another dismissive breath. “Etta went to unlock the twins from their suite, so they have someone watching them. I want you two—” his dark gaze added Eril to the command “—to do a shipwide recon. I want to know how we were found.”
Shaxi straightened. “Sir, as the last to join the crew, I think your suspicion would naturally fall on me.”
“It already did.” The captain gave her a hard smile. “If only it was that easy. But we’ve had these encounters long before you. No, I’m wondering if we picked up a tracker somewhere. Use that notorious Hermitaj tech of yours to find it and you’ll be worth your weight in pixberries.”
Shaxi gave a half bow, but Eril wanted to bristle on her behalf. Was being compared to a tart little dessert so flattering? Although now that the captain had said it, the color of her mouth was almost the same hue as the berries, just a few shades lighter, as if mellowed by creamer.
He jerked his attention off her lips as she wheeled away to follow the captain’s orders.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Shall we start with engineering, auxo?”
He cocked his head at the faint whine vibrating in the bulkheads. Usually the Asphodel’s engines were silently smooth, but they were working hard between the attack and the thickening sand in the atmosphere. At least they were still aloft and flying straight.
Time for him to do the same.
“Skip it,” he told her. “Fariz is his engines. If there was a tracker in his section, he’d know it.”
She balked. “Unless he’s the traitor.”
He stared at her, unease seizing the muscles in his shoulders. “Traitor? The captain said to look for tech.”
“Everyone relies on technology and usually hates it at the same time, but most often, it’s not tech but other people who are the trouble.”
“Says the robot girl,” he muttered.
The gold around her irises flashed. “Which gives me an unbiased perspective.”
“Undoubtedly.” When she drew a sharp breath, he waved one hand. “We’ll stop by the med bay first.”
She lifted one eyebrow. “Why? Did you cut yourself on the knife?”
He gave her a look. “Because we can repurpose one of the scanners to look for out-of-place additions to the ship.”
“I can do that myself.”
“Well, I can’t.”
She gave a long-suffering sigh.
At least this time she followed him.
Chapter 7
Shaxi grumbled to herself as she followed Eril into the med bay. She’d never grumbled before she lost the link to Hermitaj. There’d been no reason to grumble. Then, she had clear purpose. And quiet comrades. Plus, sometimes her vocal cords had been remotely paralyzed.
The crew of the Asphodel, they talked all the time. And yet she wasn’t sure what they were up to. And she had to work too hard to keep her own tongue still.
She shouldn’t have taken this position. She should have waited for the shriving on her own. Maybe she would have starved—her fleshly components were her weakness—but that at least would have been a certain kind of peace she hadn’t found since she’d been cast out on her own.
The Asphodel was not her place; it was just another ship. She had no place, and her own mind seemed determined to rob her of the harmony she’d once felt, even in the midst of borrowed wars.
She couldn’t walk out now—since none of her implants included wings—but when the Asphodel landed in Rampakh, she’d continue on her way alone. That was how she’d intended to greet the shriving, and the unprotected city offered a clearer shot than Levare to the center of the storm.
As plans went, hers lacked a certain style, but it would be effective.
And at least it would get her away from the temptation named Eril.
The Asphodel’s med bay—like the rest of the ship—was more sophisticated than a standard cruiser’s should be. While many smaller ships had automated medical facilities, since it was unlikely there’d be a qualified doctor on staff, the Asphodel had a full med suite, including a stasis chamber. Eril had a hand-held med scanner out on the counter and was hooked into its array with his own personal tablet.
She drifted closer, intrigued, but he straightened abruptly and slapped the cover back on the scanner. He swung it toward her, and when she stiffened, he turned it around to show her the screen, with her implants outlined in yellow.
And the rest of her in a deep purple.
For some reason, the image of her body held in his hands made her stomach clench.
“Any tracker or spybot is going to have its own power source,” he said, “just like your tech. If we can isolate everything drawing power that isn’t contributing to ship functions, we’ll find our leak.”
“Unless its power source is a human heartbeat,” she reminded him. “If the leak is one of your friends.”
He stared at her. “Or maybe it’s me.”
She tilted her head. Her ocular implant strained to focus on him, to read his response, but she locked down on the impulse, keeping her gaze steady. “You were surprised by the attack. You did not call them down on this ship.”
He inclined his head. “So let’s find how they found us, and then stop them.”
They started their deck-by-deck survey of the ship. Other than calling out system checks as they went, they worked in silence.
Until they came to the nav chamber. Evessa huffed at their intrusion, but with their course set and no infi
nitesimal and constant sheerways corrections to be made, she stomped off the dais toward the door.
“Don’t touch anything,” she warned. “Or it won’t be my fault we crash.”
Eril held up both hands. “No touching.”
Shaxi averted her gaze from the scanner screen between his fingers where her outline had been. No touching, she reminded herself.
The amount and kinds of energies in the nav chamber made scanning slow, and though Shaxi kept her ocular implant directed on the comm screen where she interfaced with the ship’s internal scans, her mind wandered.
“It’d be easier to identify a foreign energy source if I had a clue what sort of signature we’re looking for,” she mused.
Eril gave her a hard look; apparently she hadn’t been as subtle as she might’ve hoped. “It’s the captain’s secret to tell or not,” he said. “And he’s not telling.”
“But you—the crew, I mean—must speculate.”
Though she was focused on the scan, she sensed the weight of his regard. “What do you know about corps gossip? I doubt Hermitaj allowed loose lips.”
She found her gaze wandering from the scan to his mouth. She’d never thought much about lips before, but they were the gateway of breath, of words and emotion. Somehow she knew it wasn’t just her inexperience that made his mouth a mystery; he wore silence and stillness like sheerspace itself. But she’d been trained to always move forward. That was all she could do. Although she suspected if anyone might teach her another way, it would be this enigmatic man.
After a moment, she said, “During missions, off-topic conversations were not permitted.” Between the mental conditioning and programmed silence, it wasn’t even possible. “But en route, monitoring was considered unnecessary.” It wasn’t like they could leave, anyway.
He sighed and leaned against the console where they were working. “I don’t want to restrict our search prematurely, when I’m not entirely sure what we’re looking for.”
“We could be running parallel scans,” she argued. “One generic, one specified. For the secrets you aren’t telling me.” She paused her scan to give him her full accusing attention.
He crossed his arms over his chest. The stance only broadened the already wide set of his shoulders, flexing the unfinished coiled pattern of the black tattoo. It was half fractal, half foliage, she decided; some fragile sequence spiraling into infinity. His gray eyes were half closed, but she felt the piercing intensity of his gaze like ultraviolet light burning through her. “Have you heard of qva’avaq?”
She consulted her link to the ship’s resources. Data streamed through her consciousness, but most of it seemed more like a fever dream than fact. “Benedetta Galil… She is the last l’auralya?”
He inclined his head. “You put the pieces together quicker than I did.”
She shifted uncomfortably at the note of praise in his voice. Her usual reward for a job well done was not being dead.
“Are you certain it’s not a fantasy?” Even as she spoke, she found that for each reference to lustful wish fulfillment, there was an equally persuasive research paper with proof. Admittedly, the research was dated, as the l’auraly had become rare to the point of extinction more than two hundred years ago. Still, the explanations were laid out in precise biochemical detail how the crystalline qva’avaq altered certain susceptible sub-groups of humanoids into physically and emotionally resonant empaths. For no other reason than to turn them into sexual companions.
And here she’d been complaining about being made into a killer.
Shaxi shook her head, as if she could empty the baffling information. “And the twins? Benedetta’s sisters?”
“Not related by blood, but by crystal,” Eril said. “They aren’t true l’auraly yet because they haven’t gone through their keying ceremony. The key crystal—matched to the crystal in their bodies—hasn’t been activated. But the twins are already exuding the resonance that draws potential mates. That’s the reason the men in the cantina attacked us.”
Shaxi furrowed her brow, sorting the data. “That’s why they fired on the ship?”
He was silent a moment, and she had the sense he was reordering information in his mind, just as she did. “It isn’t the same attackers or the same motivation, not quite. The men in the cantina just wanted to take the girls for sex. Ugly but simple. What just happened, they wanted the girls too, but for a more complicated reason. There is a faction that wants to subvert the effects of the crystal to influence the most important figures in the sheerways. From there, they could control…everything.”
Shaxi weighed what he had said. “Benedetta has confirmed all this to you?”
“No. She and the captain trust no one. I worked it out myself, as I know you will. I see it in your eyes.”
“It’s ridiculous,” she protested. “Mind-controlling love slaves ruling the sheerways? You have watched too many entertainment vids. This is why Hermitaj permitted nothing besides educational and inspirational programming.”
Eril quirked his lips. “You had inspirational vids?” He held up one hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Well, I didn’t want to know this,” she countered.
“You asked,” he said.
“And I’ve never missed the Hermitaj mind wipe more than this moment,” she shot back.
They stared at each other.
“You swore you would keep the girls safe,” he said softly. “And it’s not just them. If the twins are taken and the crystal reverse engineered for mass dispersal, the universe itself is at risk.”
She let out a hard breath, and to her disgust the air rattled unsteadily in her throat. She’d seen the effect one young l’auralya had on a lonely drunkard. But more, she’d felt the unfocused desire pull her off course from her aim to wait for the shriving, landing her instead on the Asphodel. If that same power could be used to divert the leaders of worlds, high-ranking diplomats, prominent industrialists, and more… Yes, she could understand why the twins were a target. “This is too much for one soldier.” How could she be expected to save the universe when she hadn’t been able to save Hermitaj, her fellow soldiers, or herself?
“You aren’t alone,” he said. “We’re together.”
The statement, even issued in his low, lilting voice, was absurd. Who did he think he was? What could he give her?
Other than a sense of belonging that even a squadron of her comrades, linked mind to mind, sentenced together to battle, hadn’t given her. In the UTC-year she’d been on her own, she’d found nothing to replace her broken connections and she’d thought those pathways were burned out forever. So how did this icy-eyed man bring her so achingly to life?
She didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with this. The best she could do was focus on the problem in front of her. She straightened, casting off the urge to lean toward him, as if the connection was real, not imagined, and slowly tightening between them. “What do you know—or guess—about the attackers?”
He gave her a fleeting smile but didn’t otherwise acknowledge her tacit acceptance of the new mission. “From the little I’ve overheard, Benedetta and the captain blame the system government of the l’auraly homeworld for selling them out. They destroyed all remaining reserves of the crystal rather than let it be misused. But I believe someone else is behind these efforts.”
She stared at him expectantly. “And that would be…?”
He stared back at her.
She crossed her arms. “What happened to ‘we’re together’? Unless you’d like to keep unraveling this puzzle on your own.”
His eyes flared wider, as if he hadn’t expected her to throw his words back at him. “You’re right,” he mused. “Maybe you’ll see something I haven’t.” More briskly, he said, “The explored universe is divided into almost a hundred competing systems, unions, coalitions, federations, and alliances, and several hundred smaller organizations. But the one thing they all hold in common, the one place where they all work together
for peace and harmony is management of the sheerways.”
“Because if they didn’t, they’d cease to exist,” she said. “Or maybe they would exist, but no one else would know about it because they’d be cut off from the rest of the worlds.”
“Exactly. But what if one person or one group controlled the sheerways?”
“They’d control the universe and everyone in it.”
He nodded. “Hold the threads and you hold the entire web.”
“Why bother? The resources required for an undertaking of this magnitude imply an enormous amount of wealth and power already. Why seek more?”
His smile twisted. “For a cyborg mercenary killer, your innocence charms me.”
She tightened her crossed arms around her body. “I’m not innocent.”
“I suppose not,” he murmured. “No one is.”
The soft lilt in his accent cracked, and she thought she might finally have a glimpse inside him, but then he lapsed into silence.
“If you know the why,” she pressed, “you’ll have a better sense of who.”
“Hermitaj never bothered itself with the why. You fought for those who could pay. As do most of us.”
This time, she refused to wonder at the sudden bitterness in his voice. “So, follow the payments. This entity or group isn’t doing the ugly work itself. If there are other mercenaries, like me, they’ll have info.”
“All of it leading to dead ends,” he said. “Sometimes very dead. The captain doesn’t aim to wound when his people are in the line of fire. And it seems our target leaves even fewer dangling threads.”
“But if the target is that fanatical about maintaining control…” She turned back to the scan she’d paused. “Pull up the ship’s security data from the hangar.”
Eril lifted his eyebrows at her order, but then he turned to the console screen beside him. “Here are the vids of the ground troops as they came in.”
“Play audio of any transmission signals.”
He swept his finger over a slider bar. They listened to the burst of chatter like people talking underwater backward. In gibberish.
“Encrypted,” Eril said. “Polycyclic algorithm. It’ll take time to unlock.”
