by Celia Kyle
No doubt about it, Varia and her followers are going to bring trouble, more than they already have. Sooner or later whoever canned them up on that floating coffin is going to come looking, and this is hardly a vessel of war. Sure, we’re not defenseless, but the Queen’s main purpose is moving cargo and looking damn good while she does it. In a protracted fire fight against tough opposition, I’m not confident enough in our chances to take the risk.
I press keys on my console and bring up the local star system maps. Some habitable worlds are a relatively short superluminal jump away, but they lack any form of advanced civilization. I’d be marooning the women on the surface, which is not the sort of decision I can make with a clear conscience.
Rubbing the bridge of my nose, I sigh, head dipped and horns drooping toward the console. Things were running so smoothly before one hundred and seven women floated into our lives.
But all hope is not lost. All I have to do is find a decent place to leave Varia and the others, and things will quickly go back to the way they were before. There’s a comfort, a solace in that, which can’t be measured.
Stagnation be damned, I want my ship back to the way it was, with plenty of cargo space, no need to worry about life support, and a crew bereft of feminine distractions.
Part of me wonders if any of the other Kilgari have felt the same thing I have of it it’s in my imagination, namely that one of the one hundred and seven is their fated mate. It’s not like I have such deep conversations with my crew, not about that subject at least. There’s sort of an unspoken agreement among a Kilgari crew that when it comes to women, it’s best not to bring the subject up at all. It will make people anxious at best and downright illogical at worst.
I’m still no closer to figuring out an answer. For the time being, the women are here and must be dealt with. I can decide what to do with them on the morrow.
Overall, we’re not doing badly in terms of supplies, even with the additional passengers, but there’s no harm in playing it safe.
I have nothing left to do now but to head for my cabin and take a much-needed rest. Rubbing my eyes, I unfold from my command seat and head for the bridge exit.
When the alarm klaxon sounds, I actually laugh because I can’t believe it’s for real. There must have been some sort of malfunction. But I head for my console and bring up the alarm display. The sensors have detected a nearby ship with its “spoilsport” active—the slang term for auto destruct.
In a panic, I assume it must be the worst-case scenario, namely the Frontier. If that ship goes up, the shockwave could cause damage to the Ancestral Queen.
My fingers dance over the keys, attempting to open a comm channel to the shuttle’s bridge, but I’m met with repeated failure. Either someone is jamming my transmission—which seems highly unlikely—or the transport vessel’s comms are down.
But I have other methods of seeing what occurs on the other ship. I patch in my command console to the security monitors on the transport, and then gape in astonishment as I see Ilya and Swipt scrambling about on the bridge. Judging from the frantic way they jam their fingers on the various consoles, they’re well aware of the auto destruct being activated and are engaged in trying to stop it.
I’ve not lasted this long as captain by relying upon assumptions, however. Using my console, I dial up the specific frequency used by my first mate, Grantian.
“Solair to Grantian, come in.”
There’s a brief pause, and then I hear his weary voice over the line.
“What’s up, Cap?”
“Trouble. I need you to grab a portable short comm and rush to the aft deck. You should be able to get a signal to the Frontier bridge.”
“Why am I doing this again?”
“Because that ship has just engaged its auto destruct sequence, and I can’t get through to Swipt.”
“Acknowledged. Grantian out.”
At times like these the command chair can feel like a prison. Every instinct makes me want to rush about and try to fix this personally, but that’s not my place. They say that while the captain’s seat is the biggest, you’ll find no rest there. I think I can appreciate that on a new level right now.
The minutes tick by, and I drum my fingers on the console in frustration. I just have to be patient. Grantian is a good man, ostensibly my best. He used to work for a mercenary unit, the famed Kell Hounds, so I know I can rely upon him in an emergency like this one.
I nearly faint with relief when the comm crackles to life and I hear Grantian’s voice.
“We’ve got major problems, Captain. The Frontier’s auto destruct sequence is locked in, and neither Swipt nor the human woman can figure out how to unlock it.”
Damn. My hands tighten into fists at my sides.
“How much time do we have?”
“Less than ten minutes.”
Ten minutes? I do the calculations in my head, but there’s no time to get the remaining cryostasis pods off the Frontier. I don’t even bother thinking about the salvage operation because it doesn’t seem important when compared to the potential lives lost.
Saving the Ancestral Queen is simple, even easy. All I have to do is decouple our linked ships and pilot us to a safe distance. But that decision will condemn not only my pilot and the Ilya woman to death, but all of those poor souls still locked in cryostasis.
My mind locks up, and I fight down a wave of panic.
What should I do? What can I do? Someone is going to die no matter what.
And as captain, it will all be my fault.
Chapter Thirteen
Varia
My eyes snap open the instant the alarm klaxon sounds. As a testament to my military training, I’ve got the covers flung back and am halfway dressed before my roommates have awakened fully.
“Varia?” Lamira rubs sleep out of her eyes, a line of drool decorating her chin. “What’s going on? Why is the alarm sounding?”
“I don’t know, but I mean to find out. Stay here. Stay safe.”
“Maybe I can help.” Thrase slips into an oversized shirt borrowed from one of the Kilgari and rises to her bare feet.
I start to argue with her, but Thrase has at least three PhDs that I know of. Maybe she can help. “All right. Can you gather as many of the Frontier girls together in the cargo bay as possible? I’ve a feeling we might want to all be together in case something happens.”
“I’ll do my best.”
With that, I leave my borrowed quarters and rush out into dimly lit corridor. Given that it’s a sleep cycle, the illumination is low, but the flashing warning lights more than compensate for the lack of light.
The Queen isn’t a capital class ship, but it still seems to take an eternity to race up from my quarters to the bridge. I dance from foot to foot while waiting for the automatic door to hiss open before I race inside.
I spot Solair right away, moving about from console to console and constantly barking orders over comms.
“Montier, make sure that all maintenance cycles are turned off. I want the Queen ready for subluminal transit yesterday.”
“Copy that.”
I move over next to Solair and lean on the console while he angrily pecks at the keys. “What’s going on?”
He doesn’t even look at me. Instead, he completely ignores me and continues to move around the bridge like a jumping beetle on caffeine.
“All emergency crews report to stations. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill.”
“Hey.” I wave my hand at him, but he continues to dance about the bridge without even so much as a glance in my direction. “Goddamn it, Solair, I’m talking to you.”
Now his gaze does flick over to mine, but only for an instant before he gets back on the comm. It lasts long enough for me to catch the clear irritation in his golden eyes.
“Nicari, prepare med bay for potential casualties…”
I step right in front of him, and he tries to sidle past me, but I keep moving every time he moves. At len
gth Solair gives up on his tactic of ignoring me and shouts in exasperation. “Will you please move the fuck out of my way?”
“As soon as you tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Solair grimaces, and his golden-eyed gaze glances over at the nearby console. “The Frontier, for reasons unknown, has activated its spoilsport.”
“Spoilsport?”
“Self-destruct sequence.”
He moves around me as I stand frozen in shock. The Frontier is going to self-destruct?
“But what about all of the women still in cryopods?” I dance after him as he moves from console to console belting out orders. “Solair, you have to save them. You have to.”
Solair turns toward me, his jowls quivering in barely contained anger.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
My mouth closes, and I step out of his way. It’s obvious that my presence is a hindrance to Solair, so I rush out of the bridge and head for the cargo bay at a dead run. Cursing my cryo atrophy, I struggle to keep my legs pumping, drawing in one agonized breath after another into my tortured lungs until I reach the bowels of the ship. When I arrive, more than half of the survivors from the Frontier are waiting for me along with at least that many Kilgari. Everyone seems to be waiting for someone else to take charge.
I rush up next to Marion and lean on her for support until I manage to catch my wind enough for stunted speech.
“We need to… get the cryopods… off the Frontier… eight minutes left.”
Her eyes widen with understanding and she turns around to organize everyone into groups. The Kilgari are not dumb. Once they realize what our purpose is, they leap right into the fray to offer their assistance.
Cryopods weigh over five hundred pounds on a good day, but the two different groups manage to coordinate their efforts with aplomb. Of course, it takes one Kilgari on a cryopod side while it takes four of us to lift the other end, but we make it work.
I join in the effort, rushing over to the dying ship and helping to pick up a pod. Our feet slide about on the metal deck plating as we struggle with our heavy burden until a couple of Solair’s men join us. I’m a little bit miffed by how much difference their strength makes, though I know that’s silly.
When I return to the cargo bay of the Ancestral Queen, I find that Marion and Kintar have appropriated some hover platforms to facilitate the removal of the cryopods. Now we can move them as fast as our feet will shuffle between the ships, which turns out to be pretty quick.
“Come on. Hurry.” We rush over to the Frontier and load another pod onto the working sled. “Come on, come on, come on.”
Lamira grimaces at me from across the sled. “You know, saying that doesn’t make us move any faster.”
“Maybe not, but it makes me feel better.”
She laughs, though the tension doesn’t leave her eyes. I thought I told her to wait in our quarters. How am I supposed to keep her safe if she won’t listen to me?
No time to argue over it now. There’s no time at all.
As we reenter the Ancestral Queen’s hold, we nearly run into another hover sled crew.
“This is the last of them.” I wave them out of our way and I check my chronometer. My heart jumps into my throat when I see that we have under two minutes left before the Frontier blows to kingdom come.
“Seal the hatch, uncouple the IHC ship.” One of the Kilgari moves over to do just that, but Kintar grabs him by the arm.
“Stop, you fool. We still have people over there.”
“But we’re all going to die if I don’t. Tough luck for them, but there’s no point in all of us getting killed.”
Kintar glares at his fellow Kilgari until the crewman wilts. He stares into the darkness of the Frontier through the coupling, his jaw set hard. Despite his bravado, I know he means to do exactly what the crewman had intended if he thinks there’s no other choice.
But then the sound of rapid footfalls reaches our ears, and I peer intently through the aperture. The running forms of Gratian, Ilya, and Swipt come into view, the danger written on their terrified faces.
“Out of the way, move.” Swipt rushes past us and heads out of the cargo bay, presumably heading for the Ancestral Queen’s bridge. I notice Ilya is in hot pursuit, but there’s no time to think about that at the moment.
In surprisingly short order—I envy his long legs—Swipt’s voice comes over the general hail, a note of urgency in his normally laconic delivery.
“Everyone, Kilgari and human, find a place to strap in. It’s about to get bumpy.”
Kintar decouples the Frontier, and the whole ship lurches as the hulk drifts away from us slowly. Then we’re nearly thrown off our feet as the main thruster array burns into life. I throw an arm up over my face to protect my vision from the sudden glare and drag Lamira down between the bulkhead and a cooling junction, the best crash seats I can find in a pinch.
The Frontier slowly lists, dwindling in the distance, until it suddenly evaporates into a globe of fire and an ever-expanding debris field. Lamira and I are thrown against the cooling unit with bruising force, but we manage to avoid serious injury as the shockwave hits the aft deck of the Ancestral Queen.
For a moment it seems like the expanding globe of plasma is going to envelop us, but gradually the Queen pulls away as its velocity increases. Swipt got us moving just in the nick of time.
But as I watch the Frontier disintegrate into so much flotsam and jetsam, I can’t help but feel like there’s a sinister hand at work here, destroying an evidence of why we were captured in the first place.
Chapter Fourteen
Solair
All I wanted was to grab some shuteye before another day of trying to manage this fucked-up situation. That’s it. Just a few quiet, Varia-free moments to myself. Even if she might be my fated mate, her persistence for me to aid her—and her insistence that I’m not doing enough—is taxing me to exhaustion.
And then—then!—the damn Frontier exploded. For no apparent reason. So instead of getting the sleep I so badly need and desire, I’m back up on the bridge of the Queen trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do next, my head pounding so hard it feels like my horns are about to fall out.
Instead of retreating to her bunk to sleep—or whatever else she does when she’s not driving me absolutely crazy—Varia is installed on the bridge, raging over the destruction of the Frontier. Understandably, she’s concerned and confused about what happened. I’m annoyed too since we were still in the process of offloading all the cargo I’d planned to use or sell. Everything that remained on board—including the bodies of the deceased crew—are now no more than space junk. Just another frustration added to the ever-growing pile.
And here I was thinking I’d found myself a jackpot. Fuck, was I wrong.
Varia, though, is pissed because that ship was the only means she and the other women had of figuring out why they’d all been captured. I know she’d planned to scour it from bow to stern once we’d finished clearing it out, believing that somewhere on the massive, floating tomb she’d find an answer to the question of why she’d been detained. Now that hope is no longer and she’s completely losing herself, just as I would be.
What I wouldn’t be, however, is taking it out on everyone around me, and especially not on those who’ve been doing their best to help my cause. With every moment that passes, I get closer to losing my temper. I have no idea how I’ve been able to keep my anger contained this long.
The last straw is when she snaps at Montier. I overhear her questioning his methods of searching the Frontier’s logs, whether he’d done something to set off the self-destruct sequence, and that’s it. I’ve had it. She may be beautiful, and I know she’s trying to do best by “her girls,” but she has no right to question the intentions of my crew. Especially not when they’re bending over backward to do everything they can to help.
Montier stares at me from his seat in front of our own computer system, trying to tune out he
r tirade. I approach Varia on swift feet, stop abruptly before I run her down, and lace my fingers around her arm. At the feel of my skin on hers she whips her head in my direction, long hair splaying out around her in an arc. Her distracting scent assaults my nostrils, but I put a damper on my primal urges.
“A word, please?”
It sounds like a question, but my voice is laced with the authority of command. As she’s had military experience, I know she won’t mistake the tone. She only nods in answer, cheeks flushed with anger, and allows me to lead her away from where Montier and Swipt are trying hard not to look like they desperately want to eavesdrop.
I take her off the bridge altogether. The airlock hisses as the doors close behind us, and before she can even think about opening her mouth I detonate.
“I’d like to know who exactly you think you are, speaking to my crew like that. You’re more insane than I originally thought if you think Montier had anything to do with the loss of that ship. He was given an order, by me, his captain, to recon the ship’s logs to find out something—anything!—about why you and the other women now aboard this vessel were taken by the IHC. We’re a tight crew and I trust my men completely. If I give them an order, they do it. He would never sabotage me and for you to insinuate that—”
She attempts to cut me off but I barrel on, completely steamrolling her efforts.
“I understand you’re frustrated. I can’t imagine what you and the others have gone through and are continuing to go through. If you haven’t noticed, I didn’t ask for this situation to happen either. I didn’t set out to become a babysitter for a bunch of women. All I wanted to do was salvage a dead vessel. I have deliveries to make and you and your friends are completely screwing my timelines. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you’d remove yourself from my sight immediately before I actually say something I regret,” I finish, not caring for a second how my words make her feel.
I’m the commander of this ship, not Varia Dawn. The sooner she realizes that, the easier her time here will be.