Chapter Sixteen

V’kyrri admired Edie’s set up. Rubbing knuckles along his jaw, he levered himself to standing. The job should have taken three times as long. She’d clearly rewired the ship for quick, efficient swaps like they’d performed.

Save you, buzzed inside his head. He scowled and glanced at Edie. She hadn’t been speaking. She stood before her view screen. Tension knotted the muscles of her back and shoulders.

V’kyrri peered around her to catch a glimpse of what had her transfixed.

Edie gasped, darted to the command sling, and blanked the view screen. Something clanked against the hull before the shields sent it rebounding away.

He scowled. “What was that?”

The look she shot him iced his insides. Distress pressed white lines into the corners of her eyes. Sympathy reflected in the pinched downturn of her mouth.

“Why’d you—”

“Bodies,” she breathed. “I didn’t think you needed to see the bodies.”

His crew.

So much of the Rhapsody had decompressed. Most of his dead were out there in orbit. If the corpses didn’t get pulled down by planetary gravity and incinerated by reentry, they’d desiccate and orbit until the end of time.

Save you. He slumped. “I need a stim.”

“No.”

“Edie…”

“Without a reason, you get nothing. You lied to your people to get them clear. You will not lie to me.”

“I’m not lying to you.” He clenched his fists. “I need that stim. We’re chasing Chekydran.”

“Hadn’t noticed.”

“Then you have a plan that doesn’t involve the two of us piloting to stay inside their exhaust stream for who knows how many hours?” he snapped.

Her brows lowered. Her jaw set in a mutinous line.

“You need me to spell you,” he said. “In fact, you should sleep first. You’ll need fewer hours than I will.”

“You’re injured.”

“So are you.”

She barked a derisive laugh. “Not even a nice try, Mr. Went-Down-With-the-Ship.”

Save.

He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Those things from the planet.”

“The overgrown slug wasps?”

He breathed a wry laugh at her description. “They’re trying to get at me. Until we get out of here, I need the stim. I can’t block them without it.”

“Then we just get out of here.”

“Edie.”

“My boat,” she said. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

He closed the distance and took her hand, savoring the sparks tracing his veins. “I’m not interested in taking command. I’m here. I’ve got your back. Give me the stim.”

“Damn it.” She sighed. “Do the Claugh breed true for weaponized charm?”

He couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

Her lips twitched and her ribs expanded as if she breathed his amusement.

Lust fired his system. Could be a stim side effect. Or it could be Edie. She’d gotten under his skin. Something about her shattered decades of hard-won mental discipline. That she hadn’t exploited the fact suggested she had no idea.

And he’d never suspected that having his shields broken would be this much fun. He squeezed her hand.

She pulled free, ducked into the command sling, and swore, “Cravuul dung. Another Chekydran mothership coming around the planet. Going slow.”

“Sweeping?” he asked, his chest tightening.

“Maybe? How—”

“It’s them. They’re looking for us.” Me. No saying that out loud. Not with the buzz strengthening inside his head.

Brows bunched, Edie handed him a dosing unit.

Tension eased. He forced his shoulders lower. Meeting her eye, he said, “Last one, I swear.”

“Famous last words,” she replied, crossing her arms.

“I’m not an addict, Edie.” He set the unit against the skin of his forearm. “Extenuating circumstances.”

Her brown eyes clouded.

Bracing for the chemical fire, he pressed the button.

No fire. No pain.

The drug traced velvet fingers through his veins on the way to his brain. Muscle fibers unknitted. He sagged. Awareness beat the drugs to his head.

She’d tricked him.

Rage fired strength into his body.

“You…” he grunted.

And crashed to the deck plates.

****

Edie picked up the dosing unit. So trusting.

“Why yes. I am a devious, conniving Carozziel slime-bat.” His fault for not checking which drug she’d offered him. “We’re getting the Three Hells out of here.”

Edie ripped a rescue blanket from her first aid kit and tossed it over him. She returned to her command center and shut down her shields. The Chekydran ship in front of her had already fired thrusters. Irrational to want to see the Chekydran ship with her own eyes rather than via data. Still, she turned the view screen back on.

Data lit her panel. Vibration like bugs on skin walked her spine. She frowned. Thumps and vibrations assaulted her. Edie stared at her readout.

The ship rounding the planet raised shields and altered course. The Chekydran in front of Edie also put up shields.

She scowled, her pulse slamming inside her temples. They couldn’t transition to supralight with shields. They’d only pop defenses this way if they’d detected a threat.

She was the only thing between the pair of bulbous boats. Her bio-mesh bruised her ribs with alarms. She flinched. Weapons fired from the Chekydran in front of her. They hadn’t shot at her, or she’d be dead already. The burst of plasma impacted the second Chekydran ship’s shields.

Edie sucked in a startled breath. “What the Three Hells?” The Chekydran didn’t fight amongst themselves. Not ever that she’d seen in the copious reports about the creatures.

The massive ships traded a volley.

Shaking, Edie nudged her engines. Her choices were limited. Make a run for the closest mothership and hitch a ride into supralight. Or she drifted, until the squabble played out, and she lost her shot at figuring out what the bugs were doing with crystal.

Before her, silent bursts of energy lit up each ship’s shields.

Edie dared a short burn. It would look like trash impacting other trash, and it would boost her into the gravity well of the nearer Chekydran. Assuming the two big boats didn’t destroy one another.

Other bits of detritus, grappled by the big ship’s mass, spun out of the debris field with her. Good.

Navigating by the shield flares, she risked another burn. Distance numbers ticked down. The trick with trying to look like trash captured by another ship’s mass was that she couldn’t get up too much speed. She didn’t have to point her nose at her target. Orbiting trash didn’t do that. She had to sync her orbital position to the ship she wanted and work steadily higher and closer without looking like she was steadily working higher and closer. If the Chekydran ship’s mass overcame t’Achreides-myn’s inertia, she’d get sucked in.

Internal sensor data vibrated at her back. Her shield conduits. They were carrying all that plasma V’kyrri had routed through for shields. With the shields up, the system ran at tolerance. With the shields down, she shook her head. She couldn’t raise shields. Space trash didn’t glow as it arced through space. She had to reverse out the shield hack.

Damn.

She studied the data on the two ships. Neither had suffered any meaningful damage other than depleting shield generators. Her sling vibrated, drawing her attention.

The ship she wanted to shadow had started accelerating. No time to contemplate the evidence of intraspecies hostility.

Edie banked her core to reduce her heat signature. Then she, too, would look like a piece of trash captured by the massive Chekydran vessel.

She coded up an alert for a distance window so she didn’t get too close. Or left behind. That done, she sprinted aft, glancing at V’kyrri as she passed.

Weird. She’d expected him to shut off in sleep, but the telepath unconscious didn’t get him out of her head.

He was everywhere. All around her. Part of her. She was breathing him while he touched everything she was. She’d always had the impression of sinking into sleep.

V’kyrri relaxed out in sleep.

She couldn’t escape him even when he was unconscious.

With a sigh, she rerouted power and flushed the fuel feed lines. Harder than it sounded. Especially when V’kyrri started dreaming.

She could ignore it at first.

He grew restless, tossing in his sleep.

Edie worked, flicking glances at him when he thrashed. The sense of him in the ship—Hells—in her head and in her damned bones—sat on her. Slowly, steadily, pressure built inside her ribs.

Her vision hazed. Frowning, she swiped a sleeve across her eyes. There was nothing to wipe away.

Pain lanced from instep, up the right side of her spine, and straight into her skull.

“Ow. What the Hells?” she yelped. The hurt drained away leaving not even a ghost of soreness behind. Edie groaned. This wasn’t her pain. It was…but it hadn’t originated in her blood and bones.

It had to be V’kyrri entering dream state.

Blinking watery eyes, she forced her focus back to rerouting fuel flow.

Another burst of pain and the ghosts of crew members Edie didn’t have floated past her eyes. She glared at V’kyrri’s sleeping form.

Damned telepath.

She returned to confirming field integrity before turning on final, normal fuel flow. She hoped.

Field integrity reads flashed all clear.

In the ghost sight haunting her, an explosion blasted through the phantom crew. In the cockpit, V’kyrri writhed, his motion violent enough to kick the ship into sympathetic motion.

Edie glanced at him and threw the fuel feed switch. Green across the board. Chewing her lip, she fought to keep focused outward rather than at the nightmare she got to experience by virtue of sharing close quarters with a telepath. She sealed the line and closed the access hatch.

No explosion. No temperature change alerts on her bracelet. Good. She returned to her controls and eyed the readouts.

V’kyrri’s nightmare pasted Edie back with a vision of a station manned by a trio of young men and women blown to bits. Body parts splattered outward. The phantom of a bloody, headless and armless torso, ribs exposed and shattered on one side, hit and knocked the breath right out of her.

Gasping, Edie rushed to V’kyrri’s side. She had a telepath killing her with his nightmares from inside her own head.

She resisted the urge to kick him awake and shook him instead. Maybe not as gently as she could have. She’d imagined a telepath in control was the worst thing that could happen to her. His pain prying her skull mocked the notion.

“Wake up,” she said. “C’mon. You’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”

She didn’t want to touch him.

Edie rolled her eyes. She did want to. That was the problem. Crouching beside him felt like she’d routed reactor core plasma into her veins.

Another ghost explosion. Blood spatter this time. She jerked under the lash of memories not her own.

His face twisted. His mouth opened. Yelling. Screaming maybe.

Not waking.

Edie flinched. He’d tried to warn her. She hadn’t listened, and here she was. Staring at a man suffering terrors he couldn’t wake from because she’d tranqed him. Her fault. And she had no clue how to fix it. No idea if she even could.

All she had was a vague and distant memory of her mother at her bedside, soothing her bad dreams. She blew out a trembling breath.

Commit, Edie, or blow your own fool head off to end the torture.

No help for it then. She wrapped her arms around him.

He fought.

Setting her teeth, she held on. “Calm down. C’mon. You’re okay. You’re on my ship. You’re safe. Unless you keep this cravuul dung up. Relax. V’kyrri. Stop it and relax.”

As if her voice was a trigger of some kind, he subsided. Didn’t wake. But his respiration slowed. His muscles let go a piece at a time.

The ghosts of his dreams dwindled.

Edie sagged. The surges of pain drained off. Weariness set in. She sighed.

He stirred.

“Rest easy,” she said.

He stirred again.

Edie touched his cheek.

He sighed and subsided. Great. Skin. He needed touch, the only thing that cured the icy dreams of dead friends.

She relieved him of his boots, tucked the blanket around him, and secured him in a set of gravity straps.

In sleep, the stern lines of stress and injury fell away. V’kyrri looked too young to be the captain of a prototype starship. Too young to have had most of his crew killed. Too young to be addicted to stimulants.

Edie sighed. Me, too, right?

Without the conscious decision to do so, she smoothed his hair from his forehead, clenching her fist when a tingle walked her nerves.

She left him long enough to glance at acceleration data and to cut gravity.

V’kyrri floated.

Under normal circumstances she’d haul him snug against the hull where he could sleep weightless. Hanging over her head both literally and figuratively. Not an option with the nightmares.

He needed touch to keep from killing her. She needed to be in her sling to manage the transition to supralight. Since she’d been awake for two days under some really messed up circumstances, she’d risk a sip of V’kyrri’s poison.

The last stim shot on the boat called to her.

Edie launched for the first aid kit before V’kyrri could tumble back into REM sleep. Fortified by the chemicals burning through her body, Edie reconfigured her bio-mesh cocoon into a chair and maneuvered V’kyrri to where she sat. Supported by the straps, his back rested on her lap as if she meant to use his chest as a work surface.

She couldn’t quite close the front of her cocoon, but she’d cope. She’d have to. The Chekydran and the Claugh telepath were running neck and neck for most clear and present danger.

He stirred and her vision hazed.

Edie tripped the seal on his uniform jacket and tucked one hand beneath the fabric. Her vision cleared.

He sighed and settled.

Smooth skin and crisp hair met her touch. She was rendering aid. Not taking advantage. No exploring. No matter the temptation.

Still. She might as well hold a lit firecracker. The charge went up her arm and settled into a fizzing pulse between her thighs. Embarrassing.

At least he was sound asleep.

Look at her. Defusing an enemy forced to relive the terrors of having his ship destroyed. At least, she wasn’t a part of those nightmares.

Not yet.

Every time the ghost crew appeared before her eyes, she set her palm to V’kyrri’s chest and let the rhythm of his breath fire awareness through her system. Good as a stim shot at keeping her uncomfortable and awake.

The Chekydran ship overwhelmed her view screen. She’d left all but one other bit of space junk behind. Either the bugs weren’t paying attention, or they rightly believed there wasn’t a damned thing she could do to them in such a puny ship.

Except cling like a Deaccolo tree thorn jabbed into the seat of their pants. She frowned at the mental picture of Chekydran in pants.

The bigger vessel led her across the paths of the moons, brushing close to the outer moon. The maneuver sheared off two pieces of debris that had been sucked in by the big ship’s gravity.

The Chekydran fired their star drive.

Any concerns Edie had about being detected vanished. She lifted the lid on reactor output and brought her own drive online. Her energy signature would vanish in the Chekydran exhaust.

The big ship flashed to supralight, sucking t’Achreides-myn straight into the groove with it.

No!

Blinking back tears inspired by the wail of protest in her head, Edie cut power and got a hand on V’kyrri again. She had no idea how he’d managed to yell at her while asleep, but she’d be happy to have it never happen again. Especially not shadowing a bug ship through supralight.

The move was illegal, dangerous, and a dead bore.

Even with the stim burning her awake, she’d need something to occupy her mind. Just so happened, she needed a new SEM. Might as well get started. She walled off a secure location in the shipboard computer, plugged in her crippled handheld, and began the process of offloading the data she and V’kyrri had stolen.

Looming death in the form of the aft section of a Chekydran ship inspired Edie to rapt attention to every bit of sensory detail her sling had to offer regarding their status.

Which left her captive to the pervasive, all-encompassing presence of one Claugh officer who required her touch on his bare skin to keep from killing them both with his nightmares.