Chapter 23
Thatcher
My Ysa worked on the cables and circuits she’d freed from behind the wall, her small hands working magic with the tools she’d brought.
All I had to do was amplify the signal of my comm to reach the others, and I was bungling that with my thick fingers.
She was hunched low over a circuit right now, soldering something in place and wriggling her ass back and forth.
She probably had no clue what an enticing picture she made when she worked.
“Thatcher, is that you? Come in, please!” A voice suddenly crackled over my comm line, so badly warped it was hard to tell who it was.
Mitnick, most likely. If anyone knew how to get his own comm working, it was him.
That man lived for information. He wasn’t an engineer, but he knew everything there was to know about programming these machines.
“Reading you, Mitnick,” I said, and then I held my comm out to Ysa.
She’d shot to her feet when the comm started working, and now frowned at the lack of a visual and the tangle of badly connected wires I’d created.
I shrugged at her. It wasn’t my fault it was a mess; I definitely wasn’t an engineer.
“What’s your status? We have the entity and the Shadow Unit soldier trapped, but we’ve not yet regained control of the ship. ”
The line crackled. “We’ve been unable to reach you for the past thirty minutes.
Everyone else is fine. The Vagabond is on its way, but we’ve sped up and left the system.
” I shared a look with Ysa. So she was right; she’d sensed the change in the engine and known we’d sped up.
It was also, at last, a clue to what the entity wanted, and I had a feeling letting it have that was a very bad idea.
Ysa had done something to the cables I’d attached, and now the line was much clearer.
It wasn’t Mitnick but the captain who answered, and I realized they were probably still on the bridge, locked out of their consoles—unable to change the course of the ship, with the bulkheads also blocking them from reaching the engine room and manually shutting things down.
It was a very cleverly designed trap, and I feared we hadn’t seen the full extent of it yet.
It had lured Ysa here, and me. Though I suspected the force field and the acid had been meant to fully disable us, perhaps even kill us, we were still here.
“Thatcher, Ysa’s with you?” Asmoded asked, and I nodded before realizing he could not see that, then confirming it out loud.
“We believe the entity wants to return to the water world it came from. It’s not far, and that is our current heading.
We’re thinking we should let it. Perhaps it will leave when it gets back home.
”I instantly knew that was wishful thinking, or perhaps simply misguided.
The captain had not personally tangled with the entity the way I had.
He had not been in its presence and sensed the fury, the evil, the desire to kill.
All that rage had been directed at my Ysa, and for that, I didn’t even want to let it off that easy. I wanted it to pay.
“I wouldn’t do that, Captain,” Ysa said.
She shuffled even closer, and I shifted to curl my body around her back and offer the protection she was obviously in search of.
I did not like having that dead or passed-out Shadow Unit soldier lying beyond a force field behind us, but I’d know the moment it stirred.
Ysa was very on edge, and she kept glancing over her shoulder to check.
As she hurried to explain her statement to the Captain, she appeared to fear the entity overhearing her and taking offense.
I could see why, but I did not think it could be any more eager to kill her than it already was.
“I think it’s been learning all this time—about us, about our systems, and about the Zeta Quadrant.
I know it accessed our databases; it’s been in every single system I can think of.
If we let it get back to the water world…
I fear what it will do. We need to make sure that whatever this thing is, the rest of it stays contained on the planet, and this scout never returns with its knowledge.
That’s what I think.” Ysa was breathing hard as she finished speaking, full of passion and worry.
She wasn’t just afraid of what might happen to the ship and the crew she considered family.
She feared for the rest of the quadrant, too.
My motivations were not nearly so noble, but they aligned, so I cast my vote in with hers.
“I agree, Ysa. We cannot let this entity be united with the others on that planet. They’d never let the Varakartoom go.
” I glanced at the Shadow Unit soldier, slowly stirring on the floor of the cell, and knew instantly that’s what they’d do to all of us.
Make us hosts, control our bodies like puppets so they could go out and conquer the galaxy.
Devour it. “There’s a reason they put a warning label on that planet. ”
The line was quiet for a moment, but it was much clearer now that Ysa had touched the connections with her clever hands.
Then Asmoded sighed. “Very well. I will continue to work on regaining control of the systems. If you have them contained, find a way to kill that thing, permanently, this time.” That was easier said than done, but it was exactly what I planned.
That human was slowly stirring, and I knew that meant I had to get ready for a fight.
The Sineater was the last to get his say on that call, though he had to be elsewhere on the ship.
The Captain had sent him to find the entity when it first popped back up on the sensors.
A trap, a trick, obviously. “This is my mess too, Asmoded. I let that thing hitch a ride onto the Varakartoom. If need be, I’ll cut through every single bulkhead to get to it, and then I’ll destroy it.
” I did not doubt that he would be able to do exactly as he said, but Ysa’s horrified expression made me want to object instantly. Thankfully, the Captain did too.
The call ended there, but from the look in Ysa’s eyes, I knew it was much more dire than the captain realized.
We still didn’t know if the entity had fully gone into the soldier, or if killing him would be enough.
The Sineater would only stand down for so long, and that I fully understood.
The male might be the one thing capable of actually killing the creature, and I had no doubt that was why he’d been lured across the ship and locked behind bulkheads.
I’d have to make up for the lack and kill it myself, there had to be a weak spot.
The force field behind us suddenly fizzled out.
Ysa and I both turned to look, but my reflexes were faster.
I leaped in front of her, arms spread wide, and yelled at her to engage her personal shield again.
The laser rifle was nearly out of charge, but I fired it until it gave out, even as the soldier just kept coming.
Part of his face was covered in black stuff, wrapped around his eye, over his nose, and the corner of his mouth.
The rest of him appeared exactly as before, except my laser fire did not seem to penetrate.
It tore through his clothing, but did nothing else.
“Whatever you plan, you will fail!” the soldier said, his mouth moving and his eyes rolling back into his head.
He stepped out of the cell with an awkward, stumbling gait, but the way he held his knives was anything but weak.
“I am in control now, and soon I will control all of you.” Not on my watch.
Perhaps the creature didn’t know yet that being human made it vulnerable.
The one the Sineater had killed had been down on Xio, not on the ship.
I hoped so, because I was going to tear him apart with my bare hands if needed.
“Oh yeah?” I taunted. “Prove it!” Then we charged each other.
Fire sizzled through my veins, my heart thumping wildly and my processor feeding me details at high speed.
Duck, turn, raise my fist, use that opening.
There was nothing ungainly or slow about how the human-meshed entity moved.
Perhaps this was because the soldier buried deep within liked fighting; their actions were one.
When we clashed, it was a true challenge, and we were so evenly matched it felt impossible to tell who would win.
I would—there was no other option—because if I failed, it would kill Ysa next. That I would never allow.
I had only one weakness as we fought: I kept myself between Ysa and the creature.
Not once did I allow it to turn us so that Ysa was exposed, even if that meant getting sliced by one of its knives.
My armor held off most of it, but not all.
With its nano-enhanced speed and strength, some of those strikes were deep.
The scent of blood filled the air, but most overpowering was Ysa’s fear.
Each second that passed was like a knife to the gut; it was wrong. I’d stop this, now.
***
Ysathea
I hated watching Thatcher fight, even if the male was poetry in motion when he did so.
For the past five years, I’d been surrounded by males capable of feats of strength and agility, all trained fighters to the core.
Top athletes who never lost their edge, even when we were between missions.
But Thatcher… there was something so graceful about the way he moved his body.
Economical, precise, like each motion was calculated by a lightning-fast computer.
A sweep of his leg, a twist of his spine that made him avoid a blow by mere millimeters, no more.
It was almost like a dance as the pair of them exchanged blows.
This was life or death, however, and it made my chest grow tight with fear.
I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how.
Even if I had a weapon, I didn’t know if I could bring myself to use it.
It was hard to discover that, when I’d always been so furious at my parents, especially my mom, for not defending themselves when the slavers came.
It was just too ingrained in me to ever raise a hand, but Thatcher seemed to act as my shield between me and that creature, never letting it pass, never even giving me an opening to help.
So I did what I was good at: I focused on the mechanics.
The parts dangling from the wall, the pipes behind the exposed panel, and the bundles of cables that were the lifeblood of the Varakartoom.
The entity had lured us in here, and now I was starting to think it had planned the whole thing with the Shadow Unit soldier too.
It wasn’t our idea to trap it in there at all, which meant it wasn’t trapped.
I had to assume more of the entity was still somewhere in the ship.
I was right, and perhaps thinking I was distracted, it wasn’t blocking me from accessing some of the sensors.
Maybe it hadn’t counted on the extremely low-tech manner in which I tackled the problem: hooking my tablet directly into the Varakartoom’s network and writing a quick protocol to handle the unparsed information.
It took a tediously long moment, or maybe it just felt that way because of the fight going on behind me, but then I had the sensors.
I knew then what we were truly up against. Knew it, and a plan formed.
Scary, dangerous, but definitely decisive if it worked.