Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The flyer banked hard to starboard, and Emma’s stomach lurched as the artificial gravity struggled to compensate. Through the viewport, she caught a glimpse of one of the Grorn ships—angular and predatory, its hull bristling with weapons that were definitely pointed in their direction.
“Hold on,” Doren said again, his voice tight with concentration.
She was holding on. Her knuckles had gone white around the armrest, and Ari was pressed so firmly against her chest that she worried she might be hurting her. But the baby seemed calm, those large dark eyes fixed on the chaos outside with something that looked almost like curiosity.
The flyer dove, and her stomach dropped with it. Warning lights flashed across the console—red and amber, a symphony of impending doom that she couldn’t read but could definitely interpret. Bad. Very bad. Extremely, catastrophically bad.
“Can they catch us?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.” His hands flew across the controls, his movements so fast she could barely track them. “This flyer’s a luxury model. The previous owner clearly had reasons to need a quick escape. Apparently diplomacy doesn’t always work.”
The ship shuddered as something hit their shields, and she bit back a scream.
“That was just a warning shot,” he said, although his jaw had tightened. “They want us alive. They won’t risk destroying the ship with Ari—”
Another impact, harder this time, and the lights flickered.
“They’re getting less patient,” she observed, her voice coming out remarkably steady considering she was fairly certain her heart had stopped beating entirely.
“So am I.”
He pulled the ship into a spiral that should have been impossible, threading between two cargo freighters that blazed their warning lights in outraged protest. The Grorn ships followed, but they were slower and less maneuverable. The gap between them widened by precious meters.
“I need thirty seconds,” he said. “Can you watch the rear sensors and tell me if they’re gaining?”
“I don’t know how to read—”
“The red dots are them. The green dot is us. If the red dots get bigger, we’re in trouble.”
She stared at the display he’d indicated, forcing her eyes to focus despite the adrenaline coursing through her system. Two red dots, both smaller than she’d expected. “They’re... they’re falling behind, I think.”
“Good. Keep watching.”
The station was receding behind them now, its massive bulk shrinking in the rear viewport. The traffic around them thinned as they hit the outer shipping lanes, and Doren pushed the throttle even harder. The engines whined in protest.
“Come on,” he muttered. “Come on, come on, come on...”
The red dots flickered and grew smaller. Then—
“They’ve stopped,” she whispered. “The dots aren’t moving anymore.”
“They’re giving up the chase.” His shoulders relaxed fractionally.
“They know they can’t catch us in open space, and they don’t want to waste resources on a pursuit they can’t win.
” He entered a rapid sequence of commands.
“I’m plotting a jump to hyperspace. Once we’re in, they won’t be able to follow. ”
“How long?”
“Sixty seconds. Maybe less.”
The longest sixty seconds of her life. She watched the rear sensors with the intensity of a hawk, barely daring to breathe, while he muttered calculations under his breath and the console beeped its confirmations.
Ari cooed softly against her chest, apparently unbothered by the near-death experience they were all sharing.
“Jump in five,” he announced. “Four. Three. Two—”
One moment they were in normal space, surrounded by stars and ships and the distant bulk of Bragar’s Rest. The next, the viewport showed nothing but swirling patterns of light, hypnotic and strange. The engines hummed at a lower pitch, and the warning lights faded to a comforting green.
“We made it,” she said, not quite believing it.
“We made it.” He slumped back in his seat, his head falling against the headrest. For a moment he just breathed, his chest rising and falling as the pressure eased. Then he turned to look at her, and something in his expression made her stomach flip. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” She looked down at Ari, checking for any signs of distress, but the baby seemed perfectly content. “We’re both okay. Are you?”
“I’ve had better days.” He ran a hand through his mane, and she noticed for the first time that his fingers were trembling slightly. “I’ve also had much worse ones, so I’ll take it.”
The silence stretched between them, heavy with unspoken questions.
She waited, giving him time to collect himself, while she tried to process everything that had just happened.
Twenty minutes ago she’d been sitting in this same seat, watching the empty docking bay and trying not to imagine all the terrible things that might be happening to him.
Now they were hurtling through hyperspace, fleeing from reptilian religious fanatics who wanted to kidnap a baby for reasons she still didn’t fully understand.
“How did they find us?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know.” The admission seemed to cost him something, his voice stripped of its usual confident charm.
“Someone might have made a lucky guess. Bragar’s Rest is the closest station where someone might go to hide.
Or they might have resources we don’t know about.
Or...” He trailed off, his eyes going distant.
“Or?”
“Or they’re tracking something on this ship.” He straightened abruptly, his expression sharpening. “I need to run a diagnostic and look for any signals we might be broadcasting.”
He turned back to the console and began entering commands, his movements quick and precise. She watched him work, feeling useless and out of her depth. This was his world—ships and sensors and hyperspace jumps—and she was just a passenger, carried along by forces she couldn’t control.
Ari squirmed against her chest, and she automatically adjusted her hold, murmuring soft reassurances. The baby’s small fingers curled around a strand of her hair, tugging gently.
“Hey, little one. You okay?”
Ari burbled something that might have been agreement.
“I’m going to take that as a yes.”
“Diagnostics are running,” he announced. “It’ll take a few minutes. In the meantime...” He swiveled his chair to face her fully. “We need to talk about where we’re going.”
“I thought you wanted to find the other Keys.”
“I do. But first we need to make sure the Grorn aren’t following us. We need to go somewhere they can’t go.”
“Do such places exist?”
“Yes.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“So far they’ve been careful to avoid any direct engagement with the Kaisarian Empire.
They stay on the Outer Rim and the fringes of occupied space.
I think we should go to Sherae. It’s deep in Kaisarian space and I have...
friends there.” He didn’t seem entirely confident about the term, but she let it go.
“You really think it’s safe?”
“I think it’s safer than anywhere else right now.” He stood abruptly, moving toward the back of the cockpit. “I’m also going to need to retrieve my own ship. The Vagabond. I left her there when I took the job with the Ithyians.”
“You have your own ship?”
“Did you think I made a habit of working for slavers?”
The sharpness in his voice made her flinch, and he immediately softened.
“I’m sorry. That was... I shouldn’t have snapped.
” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncharacteristically uncertain.
“The job with the Ithyians was supposed to be simple reconnaissance. I’d discovered information that the Grorn were interested in something they were transporting, and I wanted to find out what.
I didn’t expect...” He gestured vaguely at her and Ari. “This.”
“Neither did I,” she said quietly. “I didn’t expect any of this.”
Their eyes met, and for a moment the air between them felt charged with something she couldn’t name. Then Ari made a demanding sound, breaking the spell, and she looked down to find the baby grabbing at her robe.
“Someone’s hungry,” he said.
“Someone’s always hungry.” But she smiled as she said it, adjusting Ari into a more comfortable position. “Can you...?”
“Already on it.”
He went into the back room to prepare the bottle.
She watched him, struck again by how natural he looked doing something so domestic.
This was a male who flew spaceships and outran religious fanatics, who carried concealed weapons and didn’t hesitate to enter a lawless space station.
And yet here he was, warming formula for a baby like it was the most normal thing in the universe.
“You’re staring,” he said without turning around.
“Sorry. I was just...”
“Admiring my devastating good looks?”
“Wondering how you know how to do all this.” She gestured at the bottle, at the makeshift changing station he’d set up the day before. “You said you’ve never had kids.”
“I haven’t.” He brought the bottle over and handed it to her, his fingers brushing against hers in the exchange. “But I’ve spent a lot of time around people who did. You pick things up.”
“What kind of people?”
“The kind who needed help.” He settled back into the pilot’s seat, his expression growing distant. “When I was younger, I spent some time on a refugee transport full of families fleeing a civil war. Lots of children and not enough adults to care for them all.”
“So you helped.”
“I did what I could.” He shrugged, as if it was nothing, but she could see the memory weighing on him. “Most of them made it to safety. Some didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago.” He turned back to the console, checking on the diagnostic. “Speaking of safety—the scan’s not finding any tracking devices. Either they’re too well hidden for my sensors to detect, or the Grorn really did just get lucky.”
“Which do you think is more likely?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. And that bothers me more than I’d like to admit.”
She offered the bottle to Ari, who latched onto it with eager enthusiasm. The baby’s eyes closed in contentment as she drank, her small body relaxing against Emma’s chest.
“What about Ari?” she asked quietly. “Could they be tracking her somehow?”
He went still. “That’s... not impossible. If she’s really one of the Keys and the Grorn have been searching for her species, they might have technology designed to locate them.”
“Can we check?”
“Not with the equipment on this ship. But Rjmar gave me some supplies. There might be something useful in there.”
He retrieved the satchel he’d brought aboard and began pulling items out, laying them on the narrow table between the cockpit seats. Identity chips, a portable scanner, clothing in various sizes, medical supplies. And at the bottom, wrapped in faded cloth—
“What’s that?”
He unwrapped the object carefully, revealing a metallic disc about the size of his palm. Even from where she sat, Emma could see the intricate engravings covering its surface, patterns that seemed to shift and move in the dim light of the cockpit.
“Rjmar gave it to me before I left,” he said, his voice hushed. “He thinks it might be precursor technology, which mean it might be connected to the Vault.”
She leaned forward, drawn by curiosity despite her better judgment. The engravings really did seem to move, forming and reforming into patterns that made her eyes water if she stared too long. Geometric shapes within shapes, spirals that led nowhere and everywhere at once.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “In a strange way.”
“It’s also potentially dangerous. We don’t know what it does.”
“Then why did he give it to you?”
He flashed her his usual confident smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Because he trusts me. And because he thought I might need it.”
Ari finished her bottle and pulled away, making a satisfied sound. She set the bottle aside and shifted the baby to her shoulder, patting her back gently. As she did, Ari’s head turned toward the disc in his hand, those large dark eyes fixing on it with sudden intensity.
“She’s looking at it,” she said quietly.
“I noticed.”
The baby reached out one small hand, her fingers stretching toward the artifact. She pulled back instinctively, but Ari made a frustrated sound and reached again, more insistently.
“Should we let her touch it?”
He hesitated. “I don’t—”
But Ari had already made the decision for them. With a determined lunge that she hadn’t expected, the baby grabbed the edge of the disc, her tiny fingers closing around its rim.
The engravings flared with light, and Emma gasped as the disc began to glow, the shifting patterns suddenly becoming brilliant, pulsing with colors she couldn’t name. The light spread up Ari’s arm, outlining her small form in a nimbus of radiance that made her silver skin shine like starlight.
“What—” he started.
The cockpit filled with sound, a harmonic resonance that seemed to vibrate through her bones, through the ship itself, and through the fabric of space around them. It was beautiful and terrifying, a chord struck on an instrument she couldn’t see.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
The light faded. The sound died. The disc sat inert in Ari’s small hands, its engravings motionless once more.
Ari looked up at Emma with an expression that seemed almost smug.
“What was that,” she whispered, her heart pounding against her ribs.
He stared at the baby, his face unreadable. “I have no idea. But I think we just confirmed that our little friend is exactly what the Grorn believe she is.”
Ari cooed and waved the disc happily, apparently delighted with her new toy.
“She activated it,” she said numbly. “Just by touching it. What does that mean?”
“It means the Grorn aren’t going to stop looking for her.” His voice was grim, all traces of his usual lightness gone. “It means she’s even more valuable than we thought. And it means...” He trailed off, his eyes meeting hers with an intensity that made her breath catch.
“It means what?”
“It means we need to get to Sherae. Now. Before anyone else figures out what she is.”
He turned back to the console and began entering coordinates, his movements urgent. She clutched Ari closer, her mind reeling with questions she didn’t know how to ask. The baby gurgled contentedly in her arms, still holding the artifact, completely oblivious to the danger she represented.