4. XYROX
XYROX
A s I came to, a moan escaped me before I could clamp my lips shut. Heat of the seven suns, my head hurts! Willing myself to stay completely still, I listened to my surroundings and figure out where I was. It sounded like a ship. But who’s ship? How long had I been out?
“About half a rotation.” The answer to my unspoken question came from a now familiar voice. “Glad to hear you’re finally awake.”
My eyes blinked open. Sure enough, I was strapped into the seat next to the gorgeous, female bounty hunter … who’d apparently zapped me. She piloted the ship. I bared my teeth and growled as I pulled against the straps that held me fast. “How did you get me in here?” I snarled, my voice rough.
Those fascinating violet eyes gave me a universal games-worthy roll. “I carried you and dumped you there, of course.”
I studied her carefully. I had to weigh twice as much as her. Fekk! What kind of mutant was she? I’d thought she was Pleiadian, but I’d never seen any Pleiadian female do that—of course, they weren’t much for manual labor.
“Agent Veylora.” She shot me a withering glare. If looks could kill, I would have gone up in flames at that moment. “I’m really tired of you calling me names, criminal.”
“I didn’t call you anything,” I protested. But then realized I had. I’d called her a mutant … in my mind! How can you hear me talking to you in my head? I asked silently to test whether it was real.
“I don’t know,” she answered aloud. “I was going to ask you the same question. Is the Intergalactic Space Recovery Forces testing new tech?”
“It’s not me, sweetheart. Besides, you think they’d leave experimental tech on a traitor?” I cut my eyes to her, waiting for a response, both verbal and non-verbal.
Her shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly, and she chewed her bottom lip. A lip that was already pink and pouty. One that I’d like to play with, with my—
“Hey! Cut that out!” she snapped, glaring again.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“Fekking hells!” I turned my gaze to the viewscreen—and away from the frustrating female—trying to figure out where we were going. It looked like we were coming up on an asteroid belt. “You should slow down,” I suggested.
“No one asked you.” And damn if she didn’t speed up instead.
“You’re going to pull one of those rocks into your intake and then we’ll be dead in the slipstream.”
“I’ve been making this trip for years, criminal. I know what I’m doing. I don’t need assistance from the likes of you,” she said through gritted teeth as she expertly dodged rocks in our flight path.
My blood boiled. “My name is Agent Quorath, or simply Xyrox if you must. Not criminal. I was framed.”
She heaved a breathe that blew several of her white-blonde braids from her high cheekbones.
I stared. Her straight, pert nose fascinated me for no reason I could fathom.
It was just a nose. A cute nose to be sure, but …
Fekk! One side of her mouth quirked up in a smirk.
I had to figure out a way to cut off this telepathic communication—the sooner the better.
“Listen, Agent Veylora , or whoever you are, I know what it says on the warrant, but I’m no traitor. Those men hunting you earlier—they work for the same guy who framed me—Jokull. He’s got his nasty prints on all kinds of trafficking, and I was about to bring him down when he framed me.”
Her eyes glowed a bright purple, but they continued to stare out the viewscreen.
I moved to run my hands through my braids in frustration, but quickly remembered I was tied to my seat.
My nostrils flared, and I huffed in agitation.
“What do I have to do to convince you? If you take me back, I’ll be dead within six sols.
Regent Jokull won’t take the chance of me escaping again. ”
This time when she looked at me, a bit of regret flashed across her expression before she returned her focus to avoiding space junk. “Determining guilt or innocence isn’t my job,” she said flatly. “Making sure you show up for your tribunal date and my bond agent gets their money back is.”
Chewing on the inside of my lip, I searched for a persuasive counterargument when the ship rocked hard to the left. “What the fekk was that?”
Sirens blared and fire-retardant steam billowed, making it impossible to see out the viewscreen, even though it was directly in front of us. Had we hit some debris?
Then the ship juddered again. “Catastrophic damage to the starboard side. Hull breach imminent. Evacuation recommended. There’s a habitable planet within pod number two’s range,” a calm, disembodied voice informed us.
“Someone’s shooting at us,” my captor shouted as she fought the controls.
“Let me loose!” I tugged desperately at the straps, but they seemed to be made of some type of composite material I couldn’t tear, despite my strength.
Sweat rolled down my back from beneath the scales on my shoulders where some was usually stored for me to use in emergency heat. “We have to get off this ship.”
Her braids floated around her head weightlessly as the artificial gravity started to go offline. She smashed a button and glided out of her seat, looming over me with a knife. “Be still,” she commanded a second before slashing down and cutting my bonds.
Without any other instruction, I followed her the few steps to the back of her small vessel and dove into an even smaller vessel— an escape pod before she jerked a lever, and we were thrown from the ship.
We were tossed around the tiny vessel several times before I managed to right myself and pull myself into a seat, strapping myself in.
A moment later, my erstwhile captor was settled into the seat next to me.
We were both gasping for air when an overwhelming pressure surged through my chest, propelling us even faster. The ship had exploded, and we were caught in the blast radius. Debris ricocheted off our hull, making the escape pod shake.
My fingers dug into the armrests as my head moved on a swivel, trying to make out anything besides the vastness of space in the small windows. “There! I think that’s a planet! What are we close to?”
“I don’t know. The autopilot is bringing us to the nearest habitable planet. I hope.”
We didn’t seem to have any way to steer anyway.
We were at the mercy of any gravitational pull that might pick us up.
I closed my eyes and threw out a little prayer to any powers that might be listening that we be captured by the nearest planet’s gravity and not the ship that had tried to blow us out of space.