Authors: Rachel Bach
I chewed sullenly, forcing myself to swallow the ration that suddenly tasted more like coal dust than chocolate. I was going to die. That wasn’t just pessimism, either. Any way you cut it, my life was a done deal. If the lelgis didn’t get me, the virus would. Even if Rupert’s mystery doctor knew exactly what to do, even if we popped out of hyperspace to find Caldswell waiting to keep all his promises and proclaim me the hero who saved the daughters and ended the war with the phantoms, the likelihood of me getting out of this alive was practically null. And even if I did, it wasn’t like the Eyes would let me escape, not with what I knew.
I stopped pacing, sinking to the floor with my head in my hands. It was that or cry, which I was
definitely
not going to do. I couldn’t even explain why I was suddenly so upset. To die gloriously for a greater cause was a blessing, an honor. Even if I failed to find a use for the virus and couldn’t save the daughters from their slavery, at least I’d kept it out of Reaper’s hands. That alone was enough to earn me a spot in the Warrior’s Heaven five times over, so why wasn’t I happy? Why did I feel this stupid sense of loss?
This was exactly why I should have stuck by my resolve, I thought with a growl.
This
was the real reason I should have just told my lust to shove it and kept the hell away from Rupert. Because at the time in my life when I needed to be strongest, he made me weak. He made me want to live, to reach for a future that I couldn’t have, shouldn’t want, and wouldn’t get, and the more I thought about how stupid and unfair that was, the angrier I got.
That wouldn’t do at all. We were only twenty minutes into the jump. If I spent the rest of it stewing like this, my virus would kill us both before we got to Kessel. What I needed was a distraction, something to keep me too busy to rage about the hopeless tragedy my life seemed to be turning into. A pirate attack would have been perfect, but there was no hope of that in hyperspace. So, with nothing else on offer, I decided it was time to do what I usually did when I was feeling trapped, upset, and anxious. I decided it was time for a drink.
Alcohol was forbidden on royal fleet ships, but Anthony had never paid much mind to rules he didn’t like. Sure enough, a little hunting turned up a bottle of whiskey tucked away in the tiny freezer behind the medical ice packs. It was a good Paradoxian label, too, not as smooth as the Terran blends, but it tasted like home.
Four swallows later, I decided this was the best decision I’d made all day. True, I was still going to die and lose the only man I’d ever loved before I’d even gotten him, but at least I didn’t have to be sober for it. Part of me knew that didn’t make any sense at all, but the rest of me was buzzed and ready to tell all the problems I couldn’t do shit about to go to hell with my compliments.
I put the whiskey back in the freezer and sauntered up to the bridge to check out those training videos. The Home Guard always got the newest, coolest stuff, and between my time on the
Fool
and the eight months I’d lost, I was criminally out of date on my armor knowledge, which meant I might actually learn something. I was just about to flop into the captain’s chair and pull up the video list to see if there was anything promising when I discovered I had an audience.
The little phantoms I’d seen floating around when I’d first gotten on the ship were now sitting in a line on the edge of the flight console like birds on a wire, if birds were semi-transparent and came in shapes ranging from small spider with too many legs to fist-sized blob. There were seven of them, all sitting perfectly still, and though no two were alike and all seemed to be lacking eyeballs, I got the distinct impression they were staring at me. This would have been creepy sober. Drunk, it just pissed me off.
“Scram,” I said, waving my arm at them.
I didn’t expect it to work. I wasn’t close enough to send them running, which was the only time the phantoms seemed to notice I existed. If anything, I expected the little critters to break their line and float away. Instead, they moved closer together, waving their little appendages like they were trying to get my attention.
I arched an eyebrow and hauled myself up out of the chair, walking forward until I was standing directly behind the pilot’s seat. This put the glowing bugs right on the edge of what I’d begun to think of as my phantom panic zone. But though I was dangerously close, they didn’t run. They just waved harder.
I looked around the bridge, but there was nothing to see. I was alone in hyperspace with no witnesses to judge my weirdness, and so I decided to take a risk. I cleared my throat and leaned down, fixing my eyes on the largest phantom, a strange, foot-long glowing critter that looked like what might happen if a lobster and a centipede got stuck together. Then, feeling like a right idiot, I whispered, “I see you.”
I held my breath, waiting for a response, but the phantoms just kept waving like I hadn’t said anything.
“I see you,” I said again, louder. “What do you want?”
Nothing.
I rolled my eyes and stepped back, more angry with myself for expecting an answer than with the phantoms for not giving me one. I gave them the finger before sweeping my hand over the console, sending them flying. As usual, they scattered like frightened mice, but they didn’t leave the bridge. Instead, they regrouped on the headrest of the captain’s chair and resumed waving, leaning into each other like gossiping monkeys.
“Oh no you don’t,” I snarled, marching back to the chair. “That’s where I sit. Take your crazy somewhere else, glowworms. We’re full up here.”
The phantoms scattered again when I sat down, but like before, they didn’t leave. Instead, they went back to the flight console and started gesturing even more frantically, like they were desperately trying to tell me something.
“Go tell it to Maat,” I drawled as I brought up the training menu.
Sadly, there were no new armor titles, but there was a whole series about the new Maraday line of sniper rifles. I’d never been interested in sniping, but seeing Rashid in action had changed my tune. I hit the first training session and put my feet up on the console, which was both comfortable and blocked my view of the phantoms. Out of sight, out of mind, and as the video started, I put the crazy glowing bugs firmly out of mine.
Unfortunately, they didn’t stay there. I watched ten videos over the next four hours, and by the time I was sober, I had a shopping list as long as my arm just in case I lived long enough to upgrade my equipment. This should have put me in a much better mood, but I was on permanent buzzkill because the goddamn phantoms still hadn’t moved, and they hadn’t stopped waving at me.
“God and king, would you just
go away
?” I groaned, dropping my feet to glare at them. “What do you want from me?”
They didn’t answer, of course, but I’d had enough. I switched off the monitor and stood up, stretching the last few hours out of my joints. I was about to evacuate to the kitchen again to see if there was anything more appetizing on offer than ration bars when a piercing scream ripped through the ship.
I dropped into a protective crouch before I realized I’d moved, hands going for the gun that wasn’t there. My first instinct said it was a phantom scream, and I glanced at the little bugs. Was this what they’d been trying to warn me about? But when the scream came again, I knew it was a real sound, not that awful stabbing pain in my skull. Not a phantom, then, but it still didn’t sound human.
It had to be Rupert, I reasoned at last, standing up. He was the only other thing on the ship besides myself and the phantoms. Now that I knew what I was hearing, I could actually recognize his voice, barely. By this point, the screams were nearly constant, and each one was horrifying, a barely human sound of rage and pain that made me want to run to Rupert’s room and wake him up, anything to make it stop.
But I didn’t. Rupert had told me to stay away, and that was exactly what I planned to do. I wasn’t about to be the idiot who got herself killed ignoring basic safety instructions because she couldn’t take the noise. So even though the screams seemed to be getting worse by the second, I climbed back into the captain’s chair and stayed put, covering my ears with my hands as I waited for it to end.
Three minutes later, the screams showed no sign of stopping, and I was wondering how the hell Rupert had slept on the
Fool
. There was no way I could have missed such a horrible racket even a deck up. Of course, he’d said he was normally quiet, so maybe this was a fluke? I prayed that it was. Whatever could pull that sort of sound out of a person wasn’t the sort of thing I’d wish on my worst enemy.
At last, after nearly ten minutes of howling, Rupert’s screams faded to whimpers. I slumped into the captain’s chair, flexing my shoulders as I tried in vain to relax my muscles. My body was tight as a clenched fist, leaving me feeling like I’d just gotten the bad end of a drunken brawl, and I’d only been listening. I couldn’t imagine how Rupert must feel.
Fortunately, we had only forty minutes left to go in the jump. His whimpering died out a few minutes after the screaming, which I took as a good sign. I was debating whether to go knock on his door when I heard the lock click open.
I jumped out of the chair. “Hey!” I called, running across the bridge to the hall. “Are you okay? That sounded horri—”
I stopped short, words dying. Rupert was standing in the door of the officer’s bunk, and the second I saw him, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that he was covered in scales or anything like that. He actually looked perfectly normal, dressed and steady on his feet, but though he was staring straight ahead at the opposite wall, his eyes were empty, like there was nothing behind them at all.
Not making a sound, not even daring to breathe, I took a step back. My suit was still in her case hooked into the charging rack at the back of the bridge, but my guns were lashed on top. I could almost see them from where I was standing. All I’d have to do was step back out of the hall and dive to the left. One step, that was all I needed, but the moment my foot left the floor, Rupert’s head snapped toward it. That was all the warning I got before he slammed into me.
With my suit, prepared, I could keep up with Rupert’s speed. Unarmored, I didn’t have a prayer. I barely had time to gasp before Rupert’s hand wrapped around my throat like a metal vise. This close, I could see his eyes weren’t actually empty. They were vicious and mad, like Maat’s could be, with absolutely nothing of Rupert in them at all, and I knew right then that if I was going to survive the next few seconds, I had to fight for real.
After that, my battle instincts kicked in with a vengeance, clearing my mind and banishing my panic. All at once, there was no more fear, no more Rupert either. Just me, my survival, and the obstacle that stood in my way.
I lurched forward, pushing off the wall behind me and lifting my leg to slam my heel directly into his knee. Symbionts are tough, but their physiology is still basically human, and a kick to the joint still hurts. I couldn’t get enough power to break it, but my kick made him stumble, which loosened his hand on my neck enough for me to tear away.
I dove the second I was free. Rupert’s charge had knocked us back onto the bridge, which meant the charging racks were directly to my left. I landed hard on my stomach right under my armor case, and my arm shot up instinctively, grabbing Mia off the top.
My plasma shotgun weighs sixty-three pounds, far too heavy to use unarmored. Stuck in fight or flight as I was, though, I didn’t even feel it. I snatched my gun to my chest and flipped over, hitting the charge as I brought her barrel up. I didn’t have time to aim, barely had time to get the damn muzzle pointed the right direction before Mia’s whistle hit the ready note. The instant I heard it, I pulled the trigger.
Fortunately for me, plasma shotguns don’t require much aiming. Just pointing Mia in the right direction was enough to send a blast of burning plasma directly into Rupert’s chest, and not a second too soon. By the time I’d flipped over, he’d been almost on top of me. The blast knocked him right off again, making him yelp in pain as he flew backward to land flat on his back a few feet away, his chest smoking.
I was on my feet again by the time he hit with Mia cocked and singing against my shoulder, ready for another shot, but I didn’t take it. Rupert’s cry just now had sounded like himself, and so I waited, gun ready, to see what he’d do.
It took a while. The blast must have knocked his breath out, because Rupert lay still for several seconds. Finally, he sat up with a groan, looking down in confusion at the smoldering hole in his shirt. The burned skin beneath was already healing, which made me feel better about shooting him. But as I was lowering my gun to ask him what the hell had just happened, Rupert looked up, and the horrified expression on his face almost made my heart break.
“Devi,” he whispered. “What…” The word faded out as his eyes went even wider. “Did I do that to your neck?”
I’d been so caught up in the fight, I hadn’t even realized I was hurt until he said something. Now, like it had just been waiting for its cue, my whole throat exploded in pain. I could actually feel the imprint of his hand around my neck still, as well as the massive throbbing that was always a sign you’re going to bruise all to hell. Worse, the unexpected pain sent me into a coughing fit, which in turn sent me to the floor, clutching my throat as I tried to breathe through the pain.
Rupert was at my side in an instant. He left again a second later only to come right back, this time with a first-aid kit. He was talking the whole time, and though his tone told me the words were meant to be calming, I couldn’t make them out. At first I thought this was because I just couldn’t get enough attention away from my throat to make sense of what he was saying, but a few words later I realized I couldn’t understand Rupert because he wasn’t speaking Universal. But it wasn’t until he pulled me into his lap, pressing me painfully tight against his shaking body, that I realized Rupert, the eternally calm operative, the cold killer, was in a full-blown panic.