Chapter 16
Fifteen
Several Hours Later
An unobtrusive chime pulled Gus out of the rest state she’d settled into while waiting for word from Brooks.
Straightening, she glanced at the ship’s console.
“Just what I’d expect of an Oleander,” Gus whispered.
Brooks never just followed instructions. He anticipated. He planned. Every obstacle. Every delay. Anything that might impede her plans; he’d already run the calculations and come up with the solution.
Gus considered the tiny blinking dot and its flight path for several seconds before shaking her head. Brooks hadn’t just given her the location for Belladonna’s hideout, but a flight path through the Falling’s wreckage. Something salvagers would kill for.
“How does he do that?”
Not for the first time, Gus wondered what someone like Brooks was doing in a place like Titan.
With his talents, the man could go anywhere. Centcom. Any planetary intelligence agency. Even a couple of the major corporations would pay a pretty credit to have someone with his capabilities on staff. It made his insistence on hanging around Titan all the more questionable.
Normally, Gus didn’t like things she couldn’t explain, but in Brooks’s case, he’d proven himself uncommonly loyal.
Gus kept reading, finding the message Brooks had included at the end.
Be careful, Boss. These guys don’t fuck around.
“Your warning is unnecessary.”
But Gus appreciated the sentiment.
Taking control of the ship, Gus piloted it away from the stray piece of wreckage she’d been floating next to in a bid to disguise her ship’s energy signature while she waited for word from Brooks. It had been a bit of a gamble, positioning herself this far out from Titan, but it had paid off.
By her calculations, she wasn’t far behind Brooks and the rest. Maybe an hour or two at most.
“Guess Cleo and Mars aren’t so smart after all,” Gus murmured, making the first turn into the halo of debris known as the Falling.
Several hours of careful navigation later, Gus sat forward to get a better look at the massive alien wreck coming up in her window, unable to believe her eyes.
A honeycomb.
So named because of its distinct dome-like shape, comprised from thousands of hexagonal cells and the golden amber of its exterior.
Any planet where one of these had been deployed suffered catastrophic losses. In the rare case where the populace managed to fight off a honeycomb, they spent the next decade hunting down any stray Tsavitee who’d managed to escape into their atmosphere.
On one of those planets, a member of the forty-three nearly got swept up in the slaughter. Only making it out by the skin of their teeth and the timely arrival of Kira’s forces.
Even with a third of the structure broken off and several engines missing, the honeycomb cut an intimidating sight drifting in the endless expanse of space. Pieces of wreckage floating around it like mini missiles, ready to take out any idiot who got close enough.
“What moron thought using this as a base of operations was a good idea?” Gus muttered.
Her siblings were supposed to be smarter than this.
Gus swallowed hard, her fingertips tingling with the desire to turn her ship around and run.
The ramifications of a honeycomb in such close proximity to Titan were terrifying.
When this thing woke—and it would wake up since some idiot with more greed than sense had decided to disturb the not so final resting place of an alien army that had already almost destroyed humanity once—the station, surrounding mining colonies, and outposts would be overrun.
A honeycomb’s inhabitants were more insect-like than mammalian. They spread like a virus, devouring everything in their path.
The military detachment on station wouldn’t even know what hit them.
They would die. The rest of Titan would follow shortly after.
The lucky ones anyway. The unlucky ones would be taken captive, used as food or breeding stock.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
This was outside of Gus’s pay grade. Even the weakest Tsavitee in a honeycomb was enough to separate her head from her body before she even got off a scream.
Despite that knowledge, Gus made no attempt to haul ass in the opposite direction. Instead, she cut her engines and let her ship drift the rest of the way into the honeycomb so as not to arouse the hive’s slumbering defenses. It arrowed toward the hexagonal cell she’d identified as her destination.
There was a bump as she breached the cells exterior barrier.
Setting down, she ran a quick diagnostic to make sure there was breathable atmosphere outside her ship.
There was.
“Now what?” Gus asked herself.
She could leave. There was still time. No one knew she was here yet. She didn’t have to blow up her life to help a pair of strangers. She didn’t owe them anything. Not her life. Not her future. Nothing.
It would be easy. All she’d have to do was forget everything she’d seen and learned over the past few days and fly her ship back the way she’d come.
Past the wreckage of the Falling. Past even Titan.
All the way out of this sector until she found someplace safe.
Preferably somewhere uninhabited and unwelcoming of visitors.
Even as she thought that, Gus found herself powering down her ship.
The time to run was long past. From the moment she’d stepped between Anandra and his fate, she’d set herself on this course. There was no choice but to follow it through to the end.
The engines throttled back and then went silent. The lights on the ship blinking before everything switched to auxiliary power.
About to turn away and head out, Gus paused, noticing the icon in the corner of one of her screens.
She frowned. “A message?”
This far into the wreckage of the Falling she shouldn’t have been able to receive anything. The metal used in the Tsavitee ships blocked transmissions and would have made communication largely impossible.
“Did it arrive before I lost contact?”
Possibly.
After she got Brooks’s message, she’d silenced all incoming communication so she could concentrate on not dying. It was possible this had come in before she lost contact and she just hadn’t noticed.
Curious, Gus opened up the message.
A second later, she slammed a fist down on the console.
“Kira!”
That crazy woman.
Sitting forward, Gus hurriedly scanned the rest of the message, her stomach sinking further with every word.
Massive damage to cargo docks. Millions of dollars’ worth of damage done. Months of repair predicted.
Gus clicked on one of the images attached to the message. The sound that slipped out of her was a high-pitched whistle of distress.
A chunk of the Tombs was gone.
A massive crater stood where the shipping containers had once been. A bird’s eye view of the scene showed that the floor under them had collapsed, sending those containers crashing into the deck below. They were now a twisted mass of metal that would take months, if not years, to untangle.
From this vantage point, she couldn’t tell if her sanctuary had gotten swept up in the destruction, but the chances were good.
“Why does she always have to be so damn high profile?” Gus lamented.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Gus could see evidence of her sister’s passage through the docks where passenger ships came and went. Reports from station security recorded massive damage to that section of the station as well.
Gus read the words “depressurization” and “Phoenix Protocol” with an increasing sense of resignation.
Mars and Cleo.
That’s who she blamed for this. They were the ones who brought Kira down on Titan. They should have been the ones who suffered her sister’s wrath. Not her.
Gus shoved out of her chair, grabbing her cloak off the back as she stalked toward the hatch. Reading between the lines of the reports she’d received, she didn’t have long before Kira arrived. She needed her business taken care of before that happened.
Otherwise, it might not just be Mars and Cleo caught in Kira’s gravity well.
*
“What a creepy place,” Gus muttered, glancing at the Tsavitee hibernating not far from her.
The creaks and groans of the ship’s walls expanding and contracting due to temperature differences sounded almost sentient. As if the mountains of lives lost were giving voice to their suffering.
An unsettling thought that did nothing for Gus’s nerves as she drifted further into the honeycomb.
Unfortunately, even with all Brooks’s skills, he’d been unable to provide her a blueprint of the ship or the location of Belladonna’s hideout, leaving Gus to figure things out on her own.
A difficult undertaking since honeycombs were designed to confuse would be invaders, leading them in circles until the residents saw fit to deal with them.
Actually, it was a little impressive that Belladonna had managed to explore as much of it as they had without getting eaten.
Despite the honeycomb’s dormant status, there were internal defenses that should have dealt with any infiltrators. Belladonna was bound to have lost several exploration teams before securing themselves a foothold.
Gus didn’t know if that was an indication of their determination or stupidity.
Most likely stupidity. And having access to a large quantity of expendable humans desperate for a way out of their current circumstances.
Just one more thing she could chalk up to Kyle’s influence.
Under normal circumstances, she would have been notified if a larger than average number of humans were disappearing from station for supposed “work” opportunities.
Usually, that meant only one thing. Human traffickers.
Not unexpected in a place like Titan, but something she and her lieutenants tried to keep at a minimum.
A shift in the flow of air notified Gus of company up ahead.
Casting about, she saw a cell to her right. She ducked into it, tucking herself tight against the wall. Only to realize too late that a Tsavitee slumbered right next to her. Its form trapped in amber resin.