Chapter 38
- Nora -
For a moment none of us move. Krix'vorr's arms are still around me, and I can feel his great heart hammering hard enough that it resonates through his carapace.
I'm not sure if I should feel relief yet. We're in the middle of enemy territory, and Sophia may be in grave danger.
“I didn’t end the fight, the way you said I must.” My voice is raspy.
“But I did,” the Space Locust rumbles. “Because you made it possible.”
My hands are getting wet. When I look, they're full of blood. “Krix'vorr! You're injured!”
He looks down on himself as if surprised. His carapace is cracked and dripping with dark red blood. “I feel fine. Just some bruises.”
“Your head,” I gasp and touch a discolored spot radiating spiderweb cracks. “You're hurt all over!”
“The guards did their best. Fair punishment for being so slow to understand how deeply I love you. And for not coming on your rescue mission.”
“But…” My face scrunches up. “But I didn't want you to kill yourself for me!”
He looks around, impatient. “Very good, because I didn't. Though I'm perfectly willing to. This will all rinse off. Ah, there's the machine.” He picks Lucius off the floor and hands him to me.
"Lucius," I sniffle, cradling him against my chest. "Are you—"
"Damaged," comes the whisper. "But present, Captain. I would like to stop being carried like luggage as soon as that's feasible. Not right now, I imagine."
A dry, surprised laugh through tears escapes me, entirely against my will. Krix'vorr's arms tighten around both of us for one more second before he finally lets go.
"We can't leave," I say, before he can suggest it, before I can even let myself feel the pull to. "Sophia. The others. This room…" I don't finish the sentence. I don't need to.
"Yes, I can guess the purpose of this room." His voice has gone hard again, that same fury I felt carrying him through the wall a minute ago. "There are others like it. I have no intention of leaving this place intact."
"Lucius," I say. "Can we do anything about that? Easily?"
I can feel him thinking even through the strain in his voice.
"Possibly. This station is almost entirely automated.
The guards you've fought are a large chunk of what actually runs this place.
Drones, restraint fields, the locking mechanisms on every cell — all of it is centrally controlled.
If I can reach the core system, I believe I can disable the whole apparatus at once.
But not from here. I'll need direct access.
A control node, not a maintenance panel.
There won't be many of those. Maybe only one. "
"Then let's find it," Krix'vorr says, already moving.
“But Sophia first,” I insist. “The robots took her out that way.”
Two corridors later I see a nightmarish monster clinging to pipes on the ceiling. For a moment I think we're done for - if that's a guard, we'll struggle to leave this station.
Then the monster taps on the pipes, making them ring with dissonant tones.
“I think it's Deeg,” I whisper. His tentacles are faintly stained dark, watching the corridor below as if he's already finished his work and is only waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
Then I see her. Sophia is on her feet, steadied by Inquisitor Brax'tok, and for one long second I don't trust my own eyes.
"Nora." My name comes out of her like something she's been holding underwater for days.
"You absolute—" She doesn't finish it. She tries to come towards me, but the Inquisitor is holding her back.
Her wrists are still bound in front of her with some kind of leather-like strap, which to me looks more locust-like than Gzet.
"Why are you bound?" I ask, puzzled. Then I raise my voice. “Inquisitor! Why is Sophia bound?” My voice echoes from the alien walls.
“Simply a safety precaution,” Brax'tok says smoothly. He unties her and puts the straps in a utility pouch strapped to his belt. “My safety. She's a fighter, this one.”
Then Sophia staggers towards me and I hurry to meet her.
"You came for me again," she says, and her voice breaks as she grips my arms, checking me over with quick, clinical eyes before she lets herself actually look at my face.
"Of course," I manage, throat too tight for anything more.
She looks past me, at Krix'vorr. She takes in his size, the blood dripping from him, the fury still radiating off him in waves. Something in her expression sharpens with recognition rather than fear. "These appear to be Space Locusts."
"They absolutely are," I confirm. “And they are just the way you think. Except… actually, it's a long story.”
"Uh-huh," she says. “Have we gone from one captivity to another?”
“I don't think so,” I tell her, because I actually can't be entirely sure. “I think these guys mean to set us free.”
"We can't stay here,” Krix'vorr says. “Inquisitor, we're looking for a control node. A control chamber, I assume.”
"Ah,” Brax'tok says. “Then Deeg might come in handy again.
He dealt with Sophia's handlers before I could stop him.
Enthusiastically, I'm afraid. I haven't seen a control room, but looking at the station from the outside, there's a command spire near the station's core.
Heavily defended, I assume, but nothing Deeg and I can't manage. "
Krix'vorr doesn't look pleased at the arrangement, but he doesn't argue either. There isn't time.
"Then we should move," he growls, and for once, the two of them don't argue about who leads the way.
The push to the spire is fast and brutal and entirely without grace.
Krix'vorr and Deeg rampage ahead of us, one flying and the other moving fast on his tentacles.
They clear corridor after corridor of drones and the scattered, disorganized Gzet guards who never expected anything like this and clearly have no routine for it.
Brax'tok saunters behind us and deals with ambushes from that side, showing a ferocity that I never expected from the icy courtier.
Sophia is at my shoulder the whole way, silent and steady, watching my back the way she must have learned to watch her own for however many weeks this place had her.
We reach the spire's core chamber with alarms shrieking around us and Lucius practically vibrating with impatience against my chest.
"There," he says, the moment I set him down in front of a wide, glowing console unlike anything else we've seen on the station. "Yes. This will do very well."
He extends what's left of his thin manipulator arm. It's bent and scratched, but he still presses it to the console's surface.
For a long moment, nothing happens except the whine of failing components and Lucius's soft, effortful hum of concentration.
"Come on," I whisper.
"I am trying, Captain, this system was not designed to be hospitable—" His voice cuts off mid-sentence, and for one terrible moment I think he's failed. Or worse, broken entirely.
Then every alarm on the station changes pitch at once.
The whole station shakes and somewhere far below us, I hear it before I understand it. There's a vast, cascading chorus of mechanical clicks, hundreds of them, and it takes a second for my mind to catch up to what it means: Every cell door on this station, unlocking, all at the same time.
"Drone control, disabled," Lucius reports, flashing green, his voice thin with effort but unmistakably, gloriously satisfied.
"Restraint fields, offline. Cell locks, released, station-wide.
I've also taken the liberty of purging their auction records and client manifest. It seemed a shame to waste the access.
I will delete everything except the life support systems."
Sophia lets out a short, disbelieving laugh beside me, and even Brax'tok's mouth twitches into something that might, on another day, be called a smile.
"Good machine," Krix'vorr says, and it sounds as if he means it.
We hurry towards the Beast and the calf. On the way we meet captives, dozens of them already, from dozens of alien species. They seem dazed, but determined, no longer confined to cells that no longer exist.
“It's not a rescue,” I mutter to Sophia. “Not really.”
“Hey, it's a door left open,” she replies. “I would have killed for that. What they do with it now is up to them.”
"We should hurry," Krix'vorr says finally, one hand resting against my back. "Before the Gzet navy remembers we exist."
We move fast through corridors that look nothing like they did on the way in.
There are blast marks on every wall, shattered drones sparking in corners, freed captives pressing themselves flat against the walls as we pass, staring at Krix'vorr with expressions I can't tell apart from the ones his own crew wears.
Lucius, cradled once more against my chest, manages a small, tired chime as Krix'vorr leads me back toward the breach the Beast tore in the outer hull.
The Beast is waiting exactly where we left her, pressed against the station's flank, and beside her, still lodged in its own smaller wound, the calf trembles with what I can only call relief.
We climb aboard. The membrane closes behind us, sealing out the alarms and the wreckage and the whole ruined machine of the place. Sophia and the Inquisitor follow us, Sophia's eyes wide as she tries to comprehend the living space ship she's inside.
Krix'vorr's hand finds mine. “Navigation chief, take us out.”
“Yes, Chief Harrower!”
For a moment it's just Krix'vorr and I, standing together at the back of the command chamber, watching the station recede through the great dark eye.
The Beast draws back from the station's hull in one long, unhurried motion, patient and enormous and finally free to leave.
A moment later the calf pulls itself loose as well, small and quick beside her, and falls into place at her side like it never once considered doing anything else.
Mother and calf, moving away together into open space.
"We did it," I marvel, hoping I'm right.
"We did." His hand tightens around mine. "Not the way I expected to, when I sat on that Nest's threshold a lifetime ago."
Sophia comes in, followed by the Inquisitor. “This thing is insane,” she says, running her fingertips over the living wall as she moves further inside.
I look up at Krix'vorr. "What did the Queen say?"
He looks away. “I didn't go to the Nest after all.”
My jaw drops. “You didn't go?!”
“There's nothing the Queen can offer me that you can't do better.” He reaches out to touch my hair. “I will never leave you again. On the way there I finally understood. You're my galaxy.”
I punch his hard chest, very gently. “You're crazy. But what will she do now? What about the Royal Mate thing?”
He taps his lips. “Yes, I want to make absolutely sure that I can never be Royal Mate. And I was thinking, I can't very well be Royal Mate if I already have a mate. Say, a wife. Are you aware of the concept?”
My mind goes blank at the sudden change of topic. “Of course I am. But I'm astonished that you are.”
“My kind sometimes enjoys getting married. It's not a common occurrence, but it happens.” He straightens and looks down at me. “Then what do you say, Nora? Will you be my mate and wife?”
I stare at him. "Are you…" My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to, all the fight gone out of it at once. "Krix'vorr, are you actually asking me to marry you? In the middle of a getaway? With Lucius still smoking in my arms and Sophia standing right there?"
"I find that timing has never been my strength," he admits. "I considered waiting for a better time. But then I thought that we have already survived a minefield, the Gzet, and a space station full of monsters, and we have no idea what's next. I didn't see why a little urgency should stop me now."
Behind me, I hear Sophia mutter something that sounds a great deal like oh my God under her breath.
"You do know what you're giving up?" I ask, to make sure. "All of it. The legend, the power, the respect…"
"I know exactly what I'm giving up." He takes both my hands in his, careful the way he always is, like I might break. "And I have never wanted anything less in my life, compared to what I'd be keeping instead."
I look up at him, at the blood still drying on his hands, the fury only just now starting to fade out of his eyes, the impossible, patient warmth underneath all of it that I fell for in a training room a lifetime ago. And I understand that there was never really a question here at all.
"Yes," I say. "Obviously, yes. You giant, ridiculous, wonderfully crazy locust."
He makes a primal sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear, and picks me up entirely off my feet and kisses me right on the mouth.
“'Dirty',” he says. “You forgot 'dirty' with alien blood. And my own, I suppose. And I know I've seen you cleaner, too. Let's find a washing chamber.”
Sophia stares at us both for a long moment. Then she turns to the Inquisitor. "Is this normal for Space Locusts?"
"Nothing about this is normal," Brax'tok says.
Sophia looks back at me and shakes her head slowly, but she's smiling.
"I was a prisoner for weeks. I get rescued by aliens.
And the first thing I see is my best friend getting a marriage proposal from one of them.
" She reaches out and squeezes my arm. "I'm happy for you, Nora. I think. Ask me again when I've slept."
Lucius pipes up, faint and dry: "For the record, Captain, I fully support this. Though I would appreciate being set down before the celebration proceeds any further. I doubt I'm watertight anymore."