Chapter 5
The bridge of the Vett'an wrapped around the pilot's chair in a sweep of dark composite and sleek displays.
Thyaar dropped into the seat, ran through the pre-flight sequence from memory, and tried very hard not to think about the medical scan results still glowing on the panel he'd left open in medical.
He failed. Completely and utterly failed.
Behind him, Amelia was curled up in the co-pilot's chair with Barnaby draped across her lap like a furry blanket.
Thyaar slid them a sidelong glance. The cat had gone boneless again, purring like a generator with a fault, and she was stroking him with one hand while the other picked at the hem of his borrowed shirt.
His shirt. On her. A fuzzy warmth spread out from the center of his chest.
"Strap in," he said.
She looked at the harness, then at Barnaby.
“Just hold onto him. Strap in.”
“Yeah, yeah… I heard you the first time," she muttered, but she pulled the straps across her chest and cinched them down. Barnaby protested the rearrangement with a grunt and then settled back down onto her lap as she put her arm around him.
Thyaar brought the engines up. The Vett'an was ridiculously smooth. He'd flown combat interceptors that rattled your teeth and troop transports that handled like a brick with ambitions, but the Emperor's yacht lifted off the cracked concrete of Earth as smooth as silk.
Rain hit them sideways, sliding off the front viewscreen as they climbed. The city dropped away below them, all smog and broken lights. He wasn’t sorry to see it go. In fact, if he ever had to set foot on the place again, it would be too soon.
But that thought didn’t hold his attention for long.
Draanth, that scan.
He'd left the medical system running on passive when she'd been on the bed with Barnaby, because it was standard procedure. He wasn’t an idiot either, even if some had accused him of it. She might be a non-combatant, but she was human, and he was taking her to a planet she’d never been to before.
He’d have been an idiot not to scan her and make sure she wasn’t bringing anything nasty along for the ride.
Like the purists had done with Lady Emily.
Not that he seriously thought that the Purists had gotten to Lady Emily’s one-time roommate, or infected her, but… stranger things had happened, and he was the Emperor’s bodyguard. It was his job to make sure strange trall didn’t happen, especially around the emperor.
So he’d had the system scan them both. Barnaby's results he'd dealt with. Amelia's results… Well, he hadn’t known where to start.
His jaw worked as he thought about the results he’d scrolled through.
She was underweight and not by a little.
By a lot. And it wasn’t a recent thing either.
The medical system had laid it out in neat columns for him, color-coded by severity.
There was a lot of red. A hell of a lot of red.
Every marker he scrolled past… deficiencies, depletions, damage that the system noted dated back years. Not months. Years. He blinked at that.
Her body had been running on fumes for so long it didn't know anything else.
He'd seen her in that doorway, soaked through, and that thin fabric had hidden nothing.
He hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since… Then the scan had thrown her body up on the panel in columns of red, and he’d been disgusted with himself.
She'd been starving for years, and he'd been busy enjoying the view.
He punched them through the upper atmosphere harder than was strictly necessary. The Vett'an didn't complain. She could take it. He hadn’t expected anything else from the emperor’s personal vessel.
The patches he'd given Amelia were the best he could do with what he had. He wasn’t anywhere near healer level.
The best he could do was battlefield medic training.
He could stop a warrior bleeding out long enough for the healer teams to get to them, but faced with a malnourished female, he’d all but locked up.
The immune booster was standard, but he'd loaded the second one with a broad-spectrum nutritional compound designed for Latharian warriors who'd been running on emergency rations too long.
It wasn't a perfect match for human physiology, but the medical system had confirmed compatibility, and it would start filling in the gaps. Slowly. Not fast enough though. All he wanted to do was put her back in that bed and make her rest. She shouldn’t be walking around with those numbers, let alone anything else. She needed to rest. He wanted to —
He cut that thought off.
She wasn't his to fix. She'd made that abundantly clear with the frying pan, and with the baseball bat before it, and again with every glare she'd leveled at him since he'd walked through her door.
And she was right. He bit back his sigh.
He'd broken into her home, hauled her off-planet without permission, and his only excuse was that he had a cat he’d needed to collect.
No wonder she glared at him all the time.
Draanthing stellar diplomatic relations there, Sub-Commander.
They cleared the atmosphere, punching through the cloud layer and beyond.
Earth's curve fell away behind them, all blue and green through the haze as the stars opened up in front of them. He didn’t miss the awed little gasp from beside him.
Without drawing attention to what he was doing, he made sure Earth was in the corner of the view in front of them.
He set the course for Parac'Norr, leaned back, and let the nav system do its work.
"It's pretty," she said quietly but she wasn’t looking back at Earth like he’d expected. Instead, she was staring at the star field ahead of them with something close to awe. Stars, the hard black of open space… he'd seen it a thousand times but he tried to see it fresh anyway. For her.
"It is," he said, surprised to find he meant it.
The engines on the Vett’an were top notch, experimental he was sure, so before long they’d left the Earth system behind. She wrapped herself tighter around Barnaby, who had fallen asleep before they’d left Earth orbit, and watched the stars in fascination.
He let her. It was probably her first time off the planet she’d been born on and he wasn’t going to shatter her illusions that half the stars she was staring at were surrounded by traalhole planets worse than her own. He’d let her keep thinking it was all beautiful a little while longer.
An hour or so later the console pinged.
He sat up instantly. That wasn’t the soft chime of a routine update. Instead, it was the hard, double-tap ping of a proximity alert. His hand was on the scanner controls before the sound had finished, pulling up the tactical overlay.
“Draanth.”
Contacts. Three of them. His eyes narrowed. They were moving fast and closing on an intercept vector.
"What was that?" Amelia asked from beside him.
"Quiet."
He expanded the sweep. The contacts were running with transponders dark, which meant one thing. They didn't want to be identified, which meant they were either black-ops or—
The lead ship's energy signature resolved on the scanner and his stomach dropped into his boots.
Draanth.
C'Vaal pirates. Real pirates, not the opportunistic kind who hit cargo haulers and ran at the first sign of a patrol. The C’Vaal were the real deal.
The pirate clan had operated out of the dead zones between systems since the empire was an empire.
They’d been founded by the grandson of one of the original princes of the Lathar, and they’d never forgotten that.
Control of the pirate clan had been handed down from ‘prince’ to ‘prince’ since then.
They were ruthless and brutal, and most of their ships had enough firepower to make Imperial cruiser captains think twice about pursuing.
And they were heading straight for them.
He sat back, thinking furiously. The Vett'an was fast, but the C'Vaal ships were already inside the engagement envelope, which meant they'd been tracking him before he'd even cleared atmosphere. Waiting. Trall, they'd known the ship was on Earth.
Sighing, he thumped his head back against the seat. Of course they draanthing had. The Vett'an was the Emperor's personal yacht. It was the most recognizable ship in the fleet. He might as well have painted a target on the hull and sent out gods-damned invitations.
"Draanth my life," he muttered, and his hands moved across the console, pulling up every system the Vett'an had. Shields first. The yacht's defensive screens were rated for diplomatic incidents, not naval engagements. Then navigation… he needed an exit vector, something tight enough to —
"What's happening?" Amelia's voice was tight.
"We have company," he said, not looking away from the console. "Three ships. They're not friendly."
The shields expanded and a section of the console he'd never seen before lit up. His eyes widened. Weapons systems.
Not the light defensive array he'd expected either, but a full tactical suite.
He whistled between his teeth. The ship might be compact, but this weapons system was vicious, packed into housings that had been invisible until the ship's threat assessment triggered them.
Targeting, countermeasures, point defense, and something in the forward array that he didn't recognize but whose power draw made his eyebrows climb.
Draanth yes, the Emperor's yacht had teeth and then some.
Thyaar almost laughed, but this was Daaynal’s ship. The male walked around with four personal drakeen, so this was totally in keeping.
"Define 'not friendly.'"
The threat assessment on screen wiped the smile right off his face.
The three C'Vaal ships closing on him were all twice the Vett'an's size, and he had a civilian and a cat on board. Whatever the yacht was packing, it wasn't going to change those numbers.