Chapter 5 #2
"Pirates. The worst kind." He adjusted course, angling for a gap between two of the approaching signatures. "They think the Emperor is on this ship. They're wrong, but I don't think they're going to take my word for it."
Her hand tightened on Barnaby's fur.
"So what do we do?"
He opened the throttle and the Vett'an surged forward, pressing them into their seats as the stars streaked past them.
"We run like draanth."
She'd never been in a car crash, but she imagined this was what it felt like.
The Vett'an banked hard to port, and she smacked into the side of the seat, her harness digging into her collarbone.
The stars outside the viewport swung sideways, snapped back, then swung the other way.
Her stomach stayed about three moves behind the rest of her.
Barnaby had his claws sunk into her thigh through the borrowed pants, hanging on with the grim focus of a cat who'd decided this latest indignity was definitely her fault.
"Thyaar? Can you—" She gasped, trying to hold onto Barnaby while trying to disengage his claws from her leg. "Can you maybe not do that?"
Thyaar didn't look at her as his hands flew across the console. The light from the screens caught the line of his jaw and the hard set of his mouth.
Right. Shutting up now.
They took another hard turn. The harness bit into her side this time and Barnaby yowled, a sound of pure feline outrage that said he was absolutely going to remember this and someone was going to pay for it later.
"I need you on that console." Thyaar jerked his chin toward the secondary station to her left. The display was dark.
What? She looked at it.
"I can't read alien."
"You won't need to. I'm going to route the shield frequency to your station. When I tell you to hit the button, you hit the button. That's it."
She stared at him like he’d grown another head. "You're giving me a job?"
"I'm giving you a button." He tapped something and the console flickered to life. As he said, it was a single display, a circle that glowed a soft amber. "When I say now, you press it. It cycles the shield harmonics so they can't get a weapons lock. Can you do that?"
"I can press a button, yeah."
"Good."
Unclipping her harness one-handed, she kept Barnaby clamped against her chest with the other as she slid into the seat at the secondary station.
The chair was enormous and her feet didn't touch the deck.
She felt like a kid sitting in a grown-up's chair, feet swinging, except this grown-up was an alien and the chair was on a spaceship being chased by pirates.
So… not quite the same.
She breathed out slowly. It was one panel. A button. Easy peasy.
"Now!" Thyaar said.
She hit it.
Something shimmered across the viewport, little more than a ripple in the light, like heat haze. The ship behind them fired and she squealed, but the shot went wide, skating off into the dark somewhere.
"Again."
She hit it again. Another shimmer. Another miss.
"You're a natural," he said, and she couldn't tell if that was sarcasm. Probably. Didn't matter. His voice had dropped into that clipped, flat register she'd heard on holofilms. Command voice. No humor in it.
She risked a sideways glance at him. He didn't look like the man who'd fixed Barnaby's diabetes. He looked every inch an alien warrior about to do something dangerous, and her stupid pulse picked that exact moment to notice.
Great timing. Pirates now, ogling later. If there was a later.
The Vett'an shuddered as something hit them. Not hard, but enough to rattle the deck plates under her bare feet.
"Shit. Was that—"
"Glancing hit. Shields held." His eyes didn't leave his console. "They're herding us. Trying to box us in."
"That sounds bad."
"It's not ideal. Again."
She pressed the button again and again. She got into a rhythm with it, watching him for the call, hitting the panel the instant the word left his mouth. Then she started to watch the console and she was already hitting the button before he said the word.
A thrill ran through her. It was working. She could see the shots going wide on the display, the shield cycling fast enough that nothing got a clean lock.
Barnaby, however, was not getting into a rhythm.
He'd tolerated the first few maneuvers from her lap, claws dug in, body tense, ears flat.
But his tolerance had a shelf life, and it had just expired.
He squirmed and she tightened her arm around him.
He squirmed harder, back legs kicking. His claws raked down the front of her thigh, deep enough to make her wince as fire trailed in lines.
"Barns, stop— fuck—"
He launched himself off her lap and twelve pounds of ginger fury hit the console like a furry fucking cannonball. His back paws landed on the dark section to the right of her station, the part that wasn't her button, and something underneath it made an odd sound.
A whine, high and sharp, climbing fast before it cut out completely.
Every light on the console went red.
Not amber but red. Flashing, angry we-are-all-going-to-die red.
"What the—" She grabbed for Barnaby. He'd already jumped to the deck and was walking away with his tail lashing side to side. "What did he do? What was that?"
Thyaar's hands had stopped moving.
That scared her more than the red lights. Since the pirates had started chasing them he hadn't stopped moving but now his hands were still on the console, and he was staring at a display she couldn't read.
"Thyaar?"
"The lateral drive array," he said. His voice was very even. Too even. "Your cat just stepped on the lateral drive array."
"And that's...?"
"That's the thing that lets us outrun them."
Oh… shit.
"Can you fix it?" she asked, crossing her fingers. He had to be able to fix it.
His jaw worked as he pulled up schematics. She watched him scroll through screens of alien text and diagrams. With each scroll, his expression hardened.
"Not while we're running." Killing the schematics, he pulled the navigation overlay back up. His gaze tracked across it, calculating something she couldn't see. "I need to put us somewhere they can't follow. Somewhere small enough that their ships won't fit."
"And will the Vett'an fit?"
"She'd better or we’re all dead."
Grabbing the flight controls, he banked them hard and it felt like the ship dropped out of the sky. Or space… or whatever. Her stomach went sideways again and she clutched the edge of the console. On the console display, she saw the three pirates change course behind them, adjusting to match.
But the Vett'an was moving differently now.
Not the wide, sweeping evasions from before.
These were tighter, more controlled. She leaned over, still clutching the arm of her chair, until she could see what he was looking at.
He was heading for a cluster of shapes on the display, a tangle of overlapping signatures that looked like rocks or debris or—
"An asteroid field?" She'd seen enough holodramas to recognize it. "You're flying us into an asteroid field?"
"Debris belt."
“Rocks in space! Same difference!” She gasped as they made another hard cant to the side.
“It makes all the difference.” He didn't look up. "This is listed as an old mining operation. Which means the shafts go deep enough to hide in and the gaps are too narrow for anything bigger than us." He spared her half a glance. "It'll be tight."
"Define tight."
"Do you want me to answer that honestly?"
Biting her lip, she didn't answer.
The debris field swallowed them. Rocks the size of buildings tumbled past the viewport, close enough that she could see the mining scars gouged into their surfaces.
Thyaar flew through them like he'd been born in the pilot’s seat, threading gaps that she would swear were too small, but he made them fit somehow.
The pirates fell back. She watched them on the screen… the three signatures slowed and started to circle, holding position at the edge of the debris field. Shit, he’d been right. They were too big to follow.
"They're waiting," she said.
"They are."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes. Okay, this should do."
Thyaar turned the Vett'an and brought the ship to rest inside a hollowed-out mining shaft. The engines dropped to a low idle, barely a vibration through the deck. Thyaar unbuckled his harness and crossed to another console, muttering under his breath.
She sat on the edge of her chair, eyes wide. The walls of raw rock were close enough on either side that she could have reached out and touched them. Well, if there'd been a window to open anyway.
The red lights on the console were still flashing though.
Barnaby jumped up onto the pilot's chair, circled twice, and lay down on the warm spot Thyaar had just vacated.
She looked at the cat, then at the red lights. Glancing over her shoulder, she winced. Thyaar stood with his arms folded, staring at the console in front of him. He sighed and rubbed at his eyes.
Shit, they were in so much trouble.
"I'm sorry," she said. "He's never— Well, no, that's a lie. He's always doing shit like this. But usually it's just knocking mugs off tables, not..." She waved at the console.
Thyaar looked at her, then at Barnaby. His left eyebrow took up residence in his hairline.
"The Emperor's lateral drive array," he said slowly, "has been disabled by a cat."
"He's…” she shrugged and tried, “thorough?”
The hard line of his mouth twitched. And then he barked a laugh.
"The Emperor is never going to believe this."