Chapter 42
Grim Tidings
The crack of pain across her back sent her lurching forward, but she turned in time to catch the leg that struck her before it could strike again. Fia wrapped her arms around the calf and sent her attacker spinning into the ground with a furious yank, pinning her knee into the small of his back.
“Yield!” Vek husked into the sparring mat, and she relented. Standing up, she offered him a hand to get back on his feet. “Much better. Feeling the dust shake off your scales now?”
She smoothed down the short-sleeved, short-legged sparring suit that had bunched up around her waist. She hadn’t realized how out of practice she had been.
It was bittersweet to feel back to her old self.
Feeling like her old self felt like an admission of the inevitable.
That she was leaving the strange, delightful detour in Tau Ceti behind.
“A bit, yes. You’re not doing too badly yourself.” She grabbed a hydration pack for both of them out of the supply chest, and they both sat against the wall as they drank. “I suppose we’ll need to be in peak shape before we are sent into cryostasis again,” she grumbled.
The doorway to the sparring room opened, and both of them turned their heads to watch as a nervously fretting junior communications officer jogged in, a datapad clutched in his claws.
“Commander, Officer, there has been a sudden flare of activity with the data groups you had a watch on. The … er, I believe it was tagged as the Retrieval Incident?”
Fia rolled her eyes. “Again? I swear, it’s like chasing down vent-rats.”
She didn’t hold it against the junior officer.
He was just doing as asked. He wasn’t a Sentu, like her.
The remaining Icthians with her abilities were dead, lost, or slumbering in the emergency reserve several star systems away.
All this poor, nervous soul could do was try to watch the impossibly wide breadth of datastreams she had keyed to feed into their buffers.
Vek cocked a brow-ridge and rose to greet the junior officer, holding his hand outstretched.
“Show me.”
The junior officer held out the datapad towards Vek, and the commander made a few noises of acknowledgment as he swiped along the display.
“Who else has been notified?” he asked flatly.
“Nobody, it had explicit instructions to bring — well, I was supposed to bring this to Sentu Leucifia, but—”
“Understood. We will handle this. Pull the alert flags off this data group and return to your work.”
The junior officer nodded and bowed his head before leaving the room.
“Finally realizing that keeping tabs on that is a fool’s errand?” Fia murmured, rising to her feet and striding over towards Vek. “They will just keep re-hashing this until they find a new ghost to chase.”
Vek stalked over to the doorway, rapping his claws on the underside of the datapad. “Get cleaned up, back in uniform, and meet me in my office.”
When Fia arrived at the commander’s office, he was actually present, for once. An odd change of pace. She was usually waiting for him to saunter in late to greet her.
“Sit,” he commanded, gesturing to the chair across from the desk.
She raised a wary brow-ridge. He could often be cold and clipped in his speech, but whether this was due to him being short on time or short on patience was a hard thing to discern.
“What’s this all about?”
She attempted to keep the annoyance out of her voice as she sat, but it was futile.
She had grown tired of having this incessant fear of his constantly brought to the forefront.
Trying to stop the Federation from rehashing data about how they lost the Son of the Sovereign was a fool’s errand, and he knew it.
Rel Parovek was not one to obscure his emotional resonance to this degree, but he was silent in the Chorus as she examined the displays. Only her own anxious fluttering echoed around her.
“Before I tell you, I need to set an expectation.” He dismissed the screen and peered intently at her as he spoke. “You will bury your impulses and remain in this room until we have both agreed to a resolution. Understood?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “That is vague and oblique, but I don’t have any other options, do I?”
“I suppose you don’t,” he said with a weak smile. “I will rephrase. This is not a request, but a warning: trust me, or be prepared to meet insurmountable opposition.”
He placed both of his palms on the desk, summoning up the command control panel, and Fia heard the door behind her lock with a crisp mechanical thunk.
“This is not a reprimanding session, is it?”
“No, I am sorry to say, it is not.” He knitted his fingers together and looked directly at her, his dark eyes filled with some complicated emotion she was struggling to register. “There has been an arrest made in relation to my departure from Federation custody.”
“Who? How?! I destroyed all of their records, what happened?” she demanded, leaning forward and clutching the arms of the chair she was in so hard that the frame squeaked slightly in protest.
Theos, Carissa, perhaps? Maybe I was so focused on hiding Davik that I left traces of them in the waves. Or, curse it, maybe The Argent was not as obscured as I had hoped, or—
Vek didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled up a datastream, clicked a few commands, and brought an arrest record to view on the screen that faced her. What met her were warm, golden-brown eyes. Deep umber skin. One dimple.
The impulse she had been warned to tame flared, hot and urgent.
She was here, back in the doomed Fleet, staring down this impending failure of a third exodus. All because of him. This man who showed her how it felt to be seen, to be known. To be loved.
She could grab her pack and bolt for the docking bay.
She was no pilot, but she could charge into this void-forsaken Federation vessel that held him.
And if she made it there alive, she would reduce it to nothing but ashes.
She could access the extinction-protection weapons on the flagship and unsheathe the worst devices of destruction that her people had created, the ones they had been too cowardly to wield.
The Federation thought her kind were feral, brutal things. She could show them the depths of brutality they were truly capable of.
They would not take him from her.
“Commander,” she said in a tightly held whisper.
It took every fragment of self-control to keep the sharp edge of frenzy from engulfing the Chorus around them.
“I might not be able to incapacitate you, but the probability is not zero. Say something that persuades me not to test that probability, quickly.”
“If you think I brought you here to tell you we would abandon the one you have tethered your soul to, you must think me a fool,” he said with an exasperated sigh.
That was it, wasn’t it? She had fallen so deeply for this man, this human, that she had bound her own heart to his. Before Bhrella withered, that was the closest word for it: tethered, tangled, or bound.
There was long-lost ritual where lovers would lash their hands together to symbolize the strength they wielded as one. A beautiful thing, performed under a starry sky in the shallow shoals.
Perhaps in this new world locked skyward, bereft of seas, she had stumbled into a different way to entangle her heart. And now, her ilsuir’a was abandoned, alone, and trapped. Because of her.
She let out a slow, shaking breath. Reluctantly, she did her best not to stare at Davik’s detention image on the screen as she spoke.
“Then what is your suggestion?”
“TCIP is aware of the situation. Davik is not the only person of interest who is at risk here. Many of their supporters, operatives, innocent bystanders, and Federation turncoats are aboard. Some of our own are even being held on this ship, ones we had counted as losses. TCIP is planning an assault, but they are unprepared.” He pulled up a few datastreams, furrowing his brow.
“They have never attempted a coordinated attack on this scale. If we can convince the Council to let us join the fight, we can ensure they do not do this in vain.” He brought up a screen with an extensive list of captives aboard the F.V. Karnel, and Fia read with slowly growing understanding.
“Tell me what to do.”
“This rage, this fire that you feel in your heart, that drive you have to save him? I can feel you muzzling your Chorus to keep it at bay. Drop your guard,” he commanded, tapping a clawed fingertip on his temple.
“Now is not the time to chastize me for my decorum, commander,” she seethed through gritted teeth.
“You misunderstand me, Sentu,” he said, his voice low and reverent. “This is not a matter of civility. You are the weapon I will use to force the Council’s hand. This is how we will spark the last war of the Sovereign Fleet.”