Chapter 7 #2
Why hadn't he told her about the bond? He'd felt it as soon as she'd broken his nose with that bat. A broken nose was nothing to him, he’d broken the thing more times than he could remember.
But the moment he'd seen her, all the pain had disappeared. His world, his reality… in fact, his entire existence, had reset with her in the center. A fact he'd been ignoring, or at least trying to ignore, ever since.
But it was no good. He'd known that last night when he'd lain awake just to hear her breathe.
He, one of the Emperor's most feared and trusted bodyguards, a sub-commander, had lain awake all night just to listen to a female sleep.
He had it just as bad as Raaevik, but with the advantage that no other male had a claim on his female.
Opening his eyes, he stared at the interlocking plates of the bridge ceiling. His female. Draanth, that sounded good.
The scanner pinged.
Not the steady ping it had been giving for hours, the one that meant the C'Vaal were still sitting at the edge of the field doing nothing. This was sharper. Different. He sat up in the chair, eyes on the display.
The three ships had changed their sweep vectors.
He recognized the pattern immediately and his blood went cold.
The three ships were intersecting their scan fields for a deep-density resonance scan, the kind that read straight through rock looking for heat signatures.
The asteroid that had been hiding the Vett'an from optics and standard scans wouldn't hide her from this. Powered down and just idling or not, she still generated heat. She had to, or they wouldn’t still be alive.
Draanth. Draanth, draanth, draanth.
He couldn't sit here and let it find them, but he couldn't outrun three ships twice his size on a drive limping along at sixty percent. He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He had one move left and it was a bad one. But when that was the only option, he had no choice.
He had to break them from cover, while they still had the element of surprise, and get a head start.
"Barnaby," he said, "off."
The cat didn’t move. He didn’t so much as crack an eyelid, even though Thyaar knew he was awake.
Reaching over, he scooped the cat out of the pilot's chair, and dropped him on the deck. The yowl in response was outraged and loud enough to shatter glass. He ignored it and dropped into the seat, hands already flying across the board.
"Amelia!" He pitched his voice to carry down the corridor. "Bridge. Now. Strap in."
He brought the drive up. It snarled at him, a rough hitch in the harmonics where the bypass was holding things together with nothing more than a hope and a prayer, but it caught. He kept his eye on the readouts as he pushed it up. Sixty percent and climbing. He just had to hope it held.
Then he broke cover.
He took the Vett'an out of the shaft and down into the asteroid field in one move, fast and low, the nose pitched at the first gap he could thread.
Rock screamed past the viewscreen, building-sized and scarred with old mining cuts, close enough that the proximity sensors shrieked.
He killed the audio alert with a slap and kept flying.
The bigger ships couldn't follow him in here.
That was the whole point. He just had to stay in gaps smaller than they were.
The sound of footsteps behind him reached his ears, then a gasp as he slammed the ship sideways to fit between two boulders almost as big as a war-cruiser.
"What's happening?" Her voice was breathless, a tremor running through it. "Why are we moving?"
"Strap in." He didn't look around. He couldn't. He needed to keep his focus on what he was doing. "They found us, and we're not waiting for them to come get us."
She grabbed at the back of the copilot’s chair, hauling herself into it as he went into another hard arc to avoid smearing them across the side of an incoming asteroid.
He heard the harness click, then Barnaby wailed in protest as she grabbed him and held him close to her chest. Relief filled him.
She was strapped in and safe for the moment.
Heat bled off the drive housing. He could feel it through the deck under his feet, even through his boots.
That was not good. The Vett'an's drives were built to run in parallel, both operating at the same power level.
But with one struggling, he had to overclock the other one to compensate, which was throwing the whole system out.
Every gap he threaded them through, every hard cut, he was asking the ship for thrust she didn't have, and she was giving it anyway.
Which meant that somewhere a temperature gauge was creeping toward a number he really didn't want to read.
The third C'Vaal ship came up at him from below.
He never saw it coming. It rose out of the field beneath them, where the plating was thinnest, firing before he could roll clear.
The hit slammed into the Vett'an like a fist and the whole ship lurched, slewing sideways.
Shit, they were using their weapons to cut through the field. There was nowhere left to hide.
Swearing, he yanked them back on their previous course before they could get crushed between two tumbling rocks. A panel above his head sparked, making Amelia squeal and duck, then went dark.
The systems console lit red on the port ventral quarter, flashing warning messages: Hull integrity dropping.
Trall. One more hit like that, and they’d breach. He hit the emergency beacon that would alert any Imperial ship in the area that they needed assistance. He hadn’t before to avoid giving their position away to the pirates, but that moment was long gone.