Metal Pirate (Warriors of Galatea Book 3)

by Lauren Esker

  "You never answered me about saying goodbye. They're your friends, Skara, and you might not—" She stopped before saying it: Might not come back. But he had to be thinking it.

  "I don't say goodbye," he said brusquely, eyes flicking back and forth as he absorbed information from the ship. "I never say goodbye. Goodbye means looking back. I only look forward. Live for the present, not the past."

  "They care about you. What are they going to think if you just vanish?"

  "They'll think, 'Oh hey, typical Skara. Here today, gone tomorrow.'" His smile was quick and sharp, and unexpectedly bleak. "And that's the way I like it."

  "I don't think you do," Claudia said. "And I don't think they think of you that way, either."

  Skara didn't seem to be listening, sunk deep in concentration instead. The ship shuddered underfoot. There was a sharp jerk and a clanging vibration.

  "Grapples disengaged. We're free of the Discordia." Skara's voice was distant, his attention concentrated elsewhere. "Wanna do a flyby and see the village when we're not crashing on it?"

  Claudia had to stop herself from clutching at her seat as the view of trees began to move and rotate slowly, leaves whipping back in a gust of wind from the ship's departure. She tried to let go of her irritation. It was Skara's family and Skara's life to live. "Sure, that'd be fun."

  "My lady's wish," Skara murmured.

  A ruffled sea of violet and green foliage rushed past the ship, and then fell away suddenly. Skara made a large circle above the village.

  It looked much as she'd guessed from her glimpses before. The core of the village was a tidy ring of wooden houses inside a tall wire fence. There was a rambling outer fence beyond that, looking like it was mostly made of wood, enclosing fields and little fishponds that had been cut off from the main lake.

  The big silver structure next to the village that she'd glimpsed during their hair-raising landing was still cryptic; it was boxy and crumpled, and looked like some kind of enormous cargo container that had been dropped out of the sky onto the edge of the lake.

  "What's that?" she asked, pointing.

  "It's the ship that brought them here, technically a module of a bigger ship."

  It didn't look like a ship. It looked like it flew about as well as a brick. And maybe it didn't fly at all. She realized as Skara made another pass that the long stretch of cleared ground stretching through the forest and ending at the ship was not some sort of runway but actually a track it had torn through the trees when it landed. Some of the trench was full of water, creating a narrow secondary lake.

  In the woods near the village, just inside the outer fence, land was being cleared and people were working in fields. A few tiny figures looked up and waved to them from the ground.

  "How long did you say they've been here?" she asked.

  "Less than a year. Impressive, isn't it? You can see why I think cultivating them as a future contact makes sense."

  "Which is totally why you're helping them."

  "Obviously," he said, tilting the ship's nose up.

  A question inserted itself into Claudia's mind, a gentle intrusion of thoughts not her own, and she recognized Lyr's mind touching hers. *Are you leaving?*

  *Apparently,* she thought back at him, and got wry amusement in return.

  *I have tried to bespeak Skara, but he is blocking me out. Be well, then, and I hope to meet you again under better circumstances, Claudia of Earth.*

  A sudden, wild urge swept through her to blurt out everything. Skara might think he was above his friends' help; he might be too proud and stubborn to ask for it. She could bring them in on this, and maybe save his life.

  And in doing so, commit a betrayal she knew he would never forgive.

  She was already afraid she'd given too much away, the ruffling of her thoughts betraying to Lyr that she had something to hide. *Thank you,* she thought at him quickly, and tried to cover up her traitorous thoughts with something other than Skara, anything other than Skara.

  So, to give herself something else to think about, she summoned a memory of Lyr-the-dragon in the same way that she would have focused on a location to have the symbiont take her there. She tried to make it as real as possible in her head: the glossy scales, the lambent silver of his eyes, the vast strength and power of the serpentine body as it had curled around herself and Skara on top of the Discordia. For an instant, the memory was so vivid and strong that she felt the tingling connection to the symbiont start to engage. No, she thought at it, I don't want to teleport now, and the connection faded, leaving her with the oddest thought: could she talk to the symbiont? Would it understand her?

  That was a possibility so strange, its implications so vast, that she didn't dare deal with it now. She built her mental picture of dragon-Lyr instead, and sensed his amusement. *Flatterer.* His mental voice was faint now, attenuated by distance. *My scales are not so fine as that.*

  *I've never seen a dragon before. You looked perfectly fine to me.*

  There might have been a quiet mental laugh, underlain with worry, but it was so faint she couldn't be sure. And then he was gone.

  "Lyr says—" she began.

  "I know what Lyr says." Skara nodded to the viewscreen. "Look up. Don't miss this."

  They were high in the atmosphere now. Blue sky gave way to deeper midnight, this time with the wide, pale band of the rings sweeping through it. Claudia leaned forward, straining against her seat harness as if craning her neck could help her see better.

  She couldn't help remembering her grandmother trying to point out the Milky Way to her when she was a small child in Louisiana. She had been unable to pick it out; it all just looked like stars to her. In contrast, the planet's rings were clear, a widening band that vanished abruptly where the planet's shadow blotted it out. It looked like they were going to pass to the left, the rings already dropping down to the lower corner of the viewscreen.

  "Like it?" Skara asked.

  "You're trying to distract me."

  "Of course I am. Is it working?"

  "Yes," she admitted, and pointed to the rings. "Could we go closer to those? I'd like to see them up close."

  "Not much to see," Skara said. "They're one of those things that's better from far away." But she didn't have to ask again. He'd already redirected the ship so the rings were squarely in the middle of the screen, a crosswise band that grew and grew.

  He had a point about the rings being more interesting from a distance. As the ship got closer, the rings spread to fill the viewscreen and grew fainter, like a gauzy curtain against the stairs, until they vanished completely.

  "We're in the middle of it now," Skara told her.

  "I can't see anything."

  "It's mostly dust. Dust and small rocks."

  "Crazy," Claudia murmured. Green light glimmered on the screen, and she pointed to it. "What's that?"

  "It's the bigger rocks hitting our shield. Otherwise you'd hear them pattering on the hull. And by bigger ..." He held his finger and thumb about half an inch apart. "There are some larger chunks out there, fist-sized on up to about the size of a float-hauler, but not too many."

  "That's so wild. From the ground, it looks so solid, like you could walk on it."

  "Welcome to space," Skara said. "It's big, it's empty, it's full of dust."

  "It's so awesome, though."

  He flashed a grin at her and then turned back to concentrate on flying. They must be through the rings now, she guessed, for there were no more green flashes, only the clear, bright stars: ahead, around, above, below.

  I really love it out here. The thought came reluctantly, almost guiltily, as if she was admitting something she hated to acknowledge even to herself. To have never seen this, to have gone through her life never having walked on another planet, flown between the stars, touched a dragon, kissed a sexy alien ...

  She looked back on herself a week ago, a person who had done none of those things, and hardly even knew that person anymore.

  "Skara? C
an I take a turn flying the ship?"

  He shook his head. "You won't be able to. Not without the right mods."

  "But ..." She held up her hands, turning her wrists to flash the cuffs. "I don't need them."

  "No. Pilot mods are different." Skara freed a hand to tap his temple. "There's a mechanical module that interfaces between your brain and the ship, through the cuffs. Without it, you can't fly. They're pretty rare, galactically speaking. I mean, sure, it's lucrative work if you can get it, but not many people are willing to get brain surgery in order to fly spaceships."

  "How do you know I can't?" Claudia countered. "The symbiont seems to be able to interface for me with the cuffs. Maybe it can do it with the ship too."

  "I ... huh. Why the hell not. Try it."

  "What do I do?" she asked, looking at the control panel in front of her.

  "Control cradles are right there for the copilot controls."

  Her console had two holes, like Skara's. Cautiously she inserted her hands inside. There was a strangely organic feeling to it, as if it was clinging to her skin, almost like it was moving. It felt like sticking her hand down a snake's gullet. Claudia wrenched her hands out.

  "It's just adapting itself to the size of your hands and arms," Skara said, grinning. "Don't freak out."

  "I'm not freaking out," Claudia gritted out. She braced herself before sliding her arms into the cradle again. It was still an unnerving feeling, but a little less weird now that she expected it. The metal, plastic, or whatever it was writhed around her arms, peculiar and slick, until it settled lightly against her hands and forearms. She was slightly unnerved to realize that the holes had also slid upward on the console, so that they were adjusted at a comfortable angle that wouldn't strain her back.

  At the bottom of each hole, she felt a handle. "Do I grip these?" she asked, and Skara nodded, so she settled her hands carefully around them. "Now what?"

  "Now you reach for the ship. That's the best way I can explain it. You know how you connect to the cuffs? Try to do that with the ship. Its name is the Payout, by the way."

  Hi, Payout, she thought, feeling a bit silly. Are you there, Payout? It's me, Claudia.

  Okay, probably flippancy wasn't the way to go. She concentrated, and it seemed like she could feel an odd tickle around the back of her brain, but not in a way that seemed inclined to go ahead and turn into something coherent.

  "Anything?" Skara asked.

  Claudia shook her head. "Not really."

  "Ah, well. Worth a try."

  She pulled her hands out of the pilot cradles and wiped her sweaty palms on her thighs. I guess we can only push our luck so far, right? she thought at the symbiont, and wondered if it was only her imagination that there seemed to be an answer, almost like a pressure on the inside of her brain, there and gone.

  "Skara, could the symbiont actually be ... I don't know, doing something to my brain, electrically or something like that?"

  "You mean changing the way you think? No," he said immediately. "It's been in me too, remember? Trust me, I hate having my head messed with. I wouldn't have been able to handle it. It's true that I didn't seem to be able to connect with it on quite the same level you can, but it was never invasive, if that's what you mean. No more than the cuff tech is. You're still you in spite of the symbiont."

  "Thanks. That helps."

  "Sometimes you just gotta talk to someone who's been there, right?" He smirked. "And I guess soon you get to talk to a whole lot of someones about it."

  Rhuad, planet of teleporters. "Um ... speaking of which, do we have a plan yet?"

  "Hang on. Let me jump first. Two jumps to a safe place, then we'll talk it over while the drive charges up again. Ready?"

  Claudia nodded and hooked her hands in her harness straps, gripping so tightly her knuckles ached. She wasn't sure if what she felt was fear or anticipation or both. Like the dive down a roller coaster's first loop, like that first drop as you set off on a water slide, a hyperspace jump was one of those things you just couldn't prepare for. The stars smeared sideways, everything in her body felt like it was turned inside out and put back together again, and then the stars were bright and clear in the viewscreen again, but slightly different than before.

  "That was the first jump." Skara sounded out of breath. Claudia glanced at him and saw sweat glistening on his forehead, matting his hair in ragged spirals.

  "Are you—" All right, were the words on the tip of her tongue, but she caught herself in mid-sentence, knowing enough about Skara by now to have realized that he'd take it as a slight against his abilities, not an expression of concern. "—going to do the next jump right away? I'd like to rest a bit first."

  Skara's eyes half-closed, the lids jerking as he communed with the ship. "Engines in good shape, nothing redlining ... I usually double-jump when I leave Haven, to make sure I'm not noticed and backtracked. When someone jumps into a system on a certain vector, there are only so many places they could have come from. But it's damn near impossible to trace somebody two jumps back. You'll be able to recover when we come out the other side."

  It's not me I'm worried about. "Okay," she said, but she watched him closely; she noticed the moment of hesitation as he visibly gathered his strength and steeled himself against weakness and pain. Then his eyes closed and his face went calm. Claudia was still watching him, more fascinated now by the play of emotions across his face when he was too distracted to work so hard on concealing them.

  The queasy, disorienting feeling of jump took hold, and she went through it with her eyes fixed on Skara's face as the one stable thing in a universe gone suddenly askew. She watched the light of a thousand alien suns corruscate across his face in an instant, and when they came out of jump, she was still watching as he wilted and slid out of his chair into a heap on the floor.

  Seventeen

  Claudia fumbled with her seat restraints, caught up in an eerie sense of dejá vu. Just once, Skara, just once can we get through jump without you passing out and keeling over?

  At least he wasn't having a seizure this time, and when she knelt beside him he was making weak, flailing attempts to get up. His trembling arms refused to support him and he slumped back to the floor.

  "Skara, just lie still." She put a hand on his arm and felt shivers wracking him. "Skara—"

  A double row of dinosaurian spines erupted from both sides of his head, rippling down his neck to vanish under his shirt before collapsing back into the skin in a series of pimplelike bumps that vanished as quickly as they'd come. He'd also grown an extra thumb on each hand.

  "Leave," he gasped, curling his fingers against the floor.

  "No. I'm staying with you."

  "Fine ... then ..." He paused for breath, panting harshly. "Go ... to the medbay—my bag—get one of the preloaded injectors, and bring it here."

  "You can't keep taking those. They're killing you."

  "They're also the only thing that'll get me off this floor," he spat out. Tendons stood out in his neck, and a grayish hue underlaid his purple skin. The unpigmented patterns on his face were alarmingly blue-tinted. "Go now!"

  Claudia scrambled to her feet and ran.

  Skara's bag had shifted somewhat, having slid under the cabinets during their takeoff or the jumps. Claudia nearly stumbled over her suitcase at the door, fell to her knees, and struggled with his bag for a few frustrating moments before she figured out how to unseal the visible seam at the top by running her fingertips over it. She pawed out rumpled clothing until she found the case he'd loaded up in the medbay on the Discordia. She had absolutely no idea how to open it, so she ran with it back to the bridge.

  In her absence, Skara had managed to drag himself to the base of his seat and prop himself on it. The slumped half-sitting position only made him look even sicker, as it was clear that he couldn't sit upright without support. He'd extruded one arm into a thick tentacle and wrapped it securely around the seat's swiveling base. Claudia tried not to stare at it as she crouched next
to him with the medical case.

  "Thanks," he murmured, giving her a wan smile. He opened the case by popping up a tab on each end. Claudia watched closely so she could do it herself next time. With shaking hands, Skara fumbled out an injector and pressed it to his arm.

  The results were visible and rapid: pinkish-mauve flushed back into the swirling pale tattoos, washing away their blue-gray pallor, and Skara straightened. He was still shivering, and visibly struggled to retract his support tentacle and collapse it back into an arm. It flopped quivering on the floor, writhed, briefly sprouted feathers, grew two different-sized hands on the end, and finally was an arm again.

  It would have been funny if not for the angry misery twisting his face. Claudia looked down at the case of injectors, wanting to look anywhere but at his expression, and picked one up.

  "Skara ..." she began, as he rested, panting harshly, with his head bowed. "Is 'hatomervi' one of your drugs?"

  "Yeah, it's a painkiller—Wait." He looked up. "The translator doesn't translate written text. You shouldn't be able to read our script."

  "Maybe the symbiont does. I couldn't read these before, but I'm starting to be able to." It was a strange feeling, almost a double-vision effect. Staring too long at the unfamiliar letters gave her a headache, but if she stared hard enough, she was starting to be able to figure out the words.

  Skara barked a harsh laugh. "Why the hell not. You see anything in there called Etebran?"

  A headache had begun to throb at her temples by the time she found it and handed it to him. Skara ejected the empty vials from the same injector he'd used earlier and shot himself with it.

  "What's that one do?"

  "It's to counteract extremely high blood pressure from ... whew ... just a minute. Head rush." He rested his head in his hands. "That might've been too much. From overdosing on stimulants. Okay. That's better." He raised his head and shook back his sweat-damp hair, then gripped the chair and levered himself to his feet with gritted teeth. Claudia's offered hand was ignored.

  "So now you're taking drugs to block the other drugs. Skara ... how much of this can your body handle?"