Chapter 19
Ysathea
We got a call from Mitnick hours after they’d departed for the planet: they were coming back.
It had been so long that I had actually napped for a while, stretched out in one of the jumpseats at the back of the bridge.
The females with babies had come and gone, putting their young down for naps and later retreating as night fell.
The ship had grown dim, but the rest of us had stayed on the bridge and waited.
Never before had I been as anxious as I was now, with the guys out on missions.
Even though I’d adopted Ivo and Grunn as my little brothers and considered them part of my family, I was not nearly as worried about them as I was about Thatcher.
That wasn’t because I was scared he’d get killed, though that was a real risk, of course.
I was worried that his heart and mind were in conflict.
He thought he was just like that other guy, but I knew better, and I wanted him to come back to me and realize it too.
Harper had been sitting down for a while now, sprawled back with her hands on her belly and her eyes closed.
An empty bowl of this “popcorn” sat on the console in front of her.
Evie paced at the back of the room and kept sharing looks with Lyra.
That was because Lyra had learned via her telepathic bond with her mate that Aramon had gotten hurt.
Aramon had stubbornly denied it to Evie, though, but she was worrying anyway.
“Everyone is okay,” Harper murmured for the third time, aiming to soothe our normally unflappable Evie.
“They’re departing now.” There was no news on whether they’d completed their mission successfully.
No word on whether they’d caught or killed the two murderers we were here to stop.
That message could mean so many things, but at least they weren’t warning us to go on alert or prep for prisoners.
Then my comm beeped with a message, and I glanced at the block of text that had arrived.
A lot of it, but all of it in precise, succinct lines.
Words that were to the point and far more enlightening than the vague things Harper had relayed from Mitnick.
I jolted upright as I scanned through them.
“They’re coming up all right,” I said, and all eyes snapped to me.
“They killed the Pretorian, but the human is in the wind. Thatcher seems to think it’s hitching a ride to one of our ships.
We need to prepare for another stowaway, and a far more impatient one than the last, though probably just as deadly. ”
I rose, jogging to Harper’s side, and began working on the console usually manned by her mate.
“I’m calibrating the sensors,” I said. “Someone needs to get to the hangar bay and monitor the renewed containment protocols.” When I looked up, I discovered that the others present were staring a little helplessly back at me.
Damn it, only Dravion knew how to work these, and he had gone down to the planet with the rest of the males. We were just a skeleton crew up here.
My eyes shot to Dani, an Aderian and a healer.
She had knowledge, but she was a scientist, not a female of action.
“I can go with you,” she said firmly, “and bring medical supplies for the wounded to assist Dravion.” I was very grateful when she seemed willing to take charge enough of the situation that I did not need to make a final call.
Technically, next to Mandy, I was probably the one in charge here, since I was the Chief Engineer, but I wasn’t happy commanding these ladies about.
They weren’t soldiers or mercenaries; they were “civilians,” as Ivo would call them.
“Harper, stay in touch. You’re going to watch the sensors,” Dani said.
She was used to bossing people around as head scientist, and she had experience doing so.
“Let’s go, Ysa. We’ll take care of our males.
” Then the powerful empath leveled the pair mated to the Asrai twins with a look.
“You better come too. I bet they’ll need you. ”
That left Harper alone with Tass’s mate, Elyssa, on the bridge, but neither complained.
Our little group trotted through the hallways in a hurry while I kept a close eye on further communications from either Harper or Thatcher.
I’d sensed all kinds of frustration in the long explanation I’d gotten from my male, but it wasn’t quite enough to piece together a picture of what had transpired on the planet.
I was surprised he’d sent me this much, because he’d been anything but talkative so far.
My comm beeped for Thatcher just as we reached the right hangar bay.
“Scan first, enter when clear.” That was all it said, but I patched myself through to Harper right away to do as he said.
Turns out I didn’t need to, but I leaped for a console anyway to keep track.
Mitnick had taken charge from a distance, relieving Harper of her task and doing what I would have done otherwise.
That left me to monitor the new protocols we’d put in place after that damn black goo entity had managed to infiltrate.
“How is it looking?” Evie asked, probably to distract herself from worrying over her mate even more.
I gave her a thumbs-up, a gesture I’d learned from the humans to indicate all was well.
Nothing was popping up at all, and a human, even one like Thatcher, could not slip onto a ship nearly as easily as a few drops of goo.
I frowned at the readings, but they all held steady, indicating the right numbers, the right amount of people, with zero malfunctions.
Ten minutes later, all four of our shuttles had boarded the ship, and the hangar bay had finished pressurizing.
The moment I gave them the go-ahead and opened the doors, Dani and the pair of human females were through the doorway.
Dani hauled a surprisingly heavy load of medical supplies for such a small female.
She dropped them the moment her mate, Jaxin, emerged from the first hatch and she leapt into his arms. Lyra and Evie disappeared into another shuttle, but I waited anxiously to see which one Thatcher would emerge from.
I saw him moments later. A grim-faced warrior in all black, his hair pulled back in a knot at the back of his head.
Scowling, as was usual, but his expression did not lighten when he saw me.
I wanted to go to him, but the sight of Ivo being carried past on a stretcher briefly distracted me.
My friend grinned, but it was to mask pain, waving with his thumbs because, like me, he’d picked up that human gesture.
“Idiot,” I said, because he was definitely hurting.
When I lifted my eyes back up, I discovered that Thatcher had been enlisted to carry the next stretcher to the med bay.
On it: Aramon, which meant all hands on deck, because the Asrai was not a quiet patient, and Solear was being a tad too protective.
Fine. As much as I wanted to assure myself my male was fine, it would have to wait.
I could tell with one look at the captain’s face that there was work to be done.
I’d napped and sat around all day doing absolutely nothing, but with one of the pair in the wind…
I was certain I was going to be asked to come up with a way to track him if he wasn’t on the planet.
I jogged off as I thought about it, but finding a human with the biosensors wasn’t exactly hard.
If he had any chance of getting on the Varakartoom, it wasn’t through our own shuttles…
That left only one option: he’d used another vessel to reach either the Varakartoom or the Vagabond.
That I could find, because no ship existed that could truly cloak itself.
Yeah, a ship I could track, and if anything tried to dock, I’d know that too.
***
Thatcher
I dropped the end of Aramon’s stretcher roughly onto the end of the cot and shot him a glare that finally shut him up.
“Enough whining. The doc is checking you out, and that’s final, you numbnut!
” He stared, Solear rumbled with a growl, and Evie sighed, but I paid none of them any further attention.
I’d already been forced to forgo greeting Ysa, and now she’d gone her own way while I was in the med bay surrounded by idiots.
Aramon had gotten hurt being rash; Raukesh was so out of it the doc had only eyes for his injuries.
And Ivo was the worst, because he was loudly worrying about Ysa too, and that made me antsy as hell.
The bridge was closer, so I ducked out of med bay and went there first. If she was working with Mitnick to further check the ship, that’s where she would be doing it.
The bridge was filled with crew, as well as the captain’s mate and a loudly wailing baby.
There was no sign of Ysa, though, but I halted just long enough to get an update on what was happening.
Ziame’s face filled the viewscreen, a big, bullish green snout and a pair of massive horns.
“We’ll find the bastard,” the former gladiator said.
“The Vagabond will circle the planet to check for vessels. You monitor from this side. He can’t have gotten far.
” No, he really couldn’t have. We’d determined they’d gotten to this Rummicaron outpost by hitching a ride on a cargo vessel.
They’d slaughtered the crew just as the ship had landed and escaped detection by using one of their shuttles to hide in the forest beyond the base.
That shuttle was still missing, so if the Shadow Unit soldier had not stowed away on one of our ships, he’d used that one.
It could only take him to the next solar system, and that one was uninhabited.
In fact, it was home to a water world on which our very own Sineater had found his mate, and also gotten our ship infected with that nasty black goo entity.
I thought that the massive keep out signals placed in that system by the Rummicaron and the Kertinal wouldn’t deter the human.
A chance at a second round against us, however, would be far more tempting.
Then I thought about where I’d go once I boarded an enemy vessel and could think of only one answer: the engine room.
I broke into a run without thinking, skidding off the bridge and colliding with the wall before righting my course.
Behind me, a shout went up, and the baby finally fell silent. “Where is he going?” someone demanded.
I was bolting from the elevator when it happened.
The ship had turned away from the planet at that point to do its own search loop to locate the missing shuttle.
I felt the engines kick into gear through the thrumming of the deck beneath my feet.
An urgency filled me with the same kind of certainty I’d felt when the entity had posed a threat.
Images flashed through my brain of that bastard holding a knife to Ysa’s throat as he ordered her to set the ship’s self-destruct.
I was certain he’d draw out the moment and inflict pain in careful slices on her skin.
He was the bastard who liked the knife; the Pretorian had liked fire.
Then the lights went out in the hallway.
My heart leaped into my throat, and I swore loudly.
It lasted, and it lasted, well past the ten-second mark.
I reached the entrance to the engine room, and it was still dark.
This time, I didn’t even think about that invisible line I’d drawn across the floor there.
I was ready to leap across anyway, but I didn’t need to.
Haloed in blue light from the engine itself, Ysa came rushing out just as I reached her.
Her eyes were huge in her face, but she did not seem surprised to see me.
She had a large box of tools in one hand and was holding a handheld scanner in the other.
A comm call was also open, as a small hologram of Mitnick’s face projected above her wrist.
“What do you mean? The pilot and nav consoles have locked out?” she demanded, staring at Mitnick’s face.
She raised her tools in my direction, and I took them without comment, just as the lights flickered back on.
“Could that Shadow Unit soldier have done this?” she asked me.
I was pretty sure the answer was no, but I didn’t know for sure.
Trained as a soldier and an assassin, I had been a force of destruction and death.
Taking control of a ship had never been part of my skill set, or that of any of the others I knew.
There was one creature we knew was capable of this, though it was supposed to be dead. When I shook my head slightly, Ysa’s blue eyes went grim. She bit her lip. “Forget about a possible human stowaway. It could be the entity. Can you do a sweep?”
I cocked my head and listened, certain that if it was indeed the entity, it would come for Ysa first. Ysa was already turning down the hallway, moving with the clicking of the beads at the tip of her braid for company.
I followed, just like I had for months, not once letting her out of my sight.
“Found it, sending location. How did it survive?” Mitnick announced, followed by a rougher, “Oh, blazing stars. I am now reading an extra human life sign too.” So the Shadow Unit soldier had made it onto the ship after all.
I really hated being right, on both counts.