We were silent as we made our way back up to the cockpit, all of us reeling from what we’d just seen. The coldbloods’ only hope was expert medical attention, which wasn’t something any of us could offer. And so, all we could do was wait until we reached the quarantine facility, which was still six hours away.
Pausing just short of the cockpit, we made a quick detour to the airlock. Knowing it was the best place for them, we put the box of antivirus insects into the center chamber and opened the lid, before stepping back out into the safety of the inner corridor. As soon as the interior hatch closed shut, Navan typed in the code which opened the outer door. From the small window, we watched as the box and the insects within were sucked out into the endless oblivion of space, never to be seen again. With that done, we made our way back to the cockpit.
As we stepped into the control room, I shuddered. A sound drifted up through the metal grates that covered the floor. I had to listen closely to pick it out over the thrum of the engines, but it was definitely there. It was the sound of those tortured souls, their screams impossible to silence.
Chapter Twenty-Six
After passing the time with countless games of I Spy, wolfing down several freeze-dried packets of astronaut food and a few vials of blood for the boys, we heard the control panel beep unexpectedly. The sharp sound prompted Bashrik to get up from his intense game of hangman. We were using the papyrus and the singeing pen I’d pilfered from the Draconian lodge, finally putting it to some good use.
“Perfect timing. You were about to get your ass kicked!” Angie called up to him.
“Not at all. The word is ‘galactic,’” he replied, making Angie grumble under her breath.
“Lucky guess,” she muttered.
Bashrik smiled. “No, you just made it too easy,” he countered, his hands moving over the controls. “We’re approaching the quarantine station,” he said distractedly.
Through the glass, I could see a hulking metal structure appearing on the horizon, getting closer with every passing second. It looked similar to images I’d seen of the International Space Station orbiting around Earth, only this construction was way bigger, with several orb-shaped attachments branching off a central atrium. It was turning slowly, and my engineer’s mind guessed that the rotation of the metal arms was likely responsible for the station’s energy production, creating electricity in much the same way as a wind turbine or a tidal turbine might. From this distance, I could already see the glow of artificial lights shining out at us through the windows that peppered the station’s chrome exterior as we drew nearer.
“We’ve got an incoming transmission,” Bashrik said with a grimace.
A moment later, the speakers crackled. “This is Quarantine Station Panacea speaking. State your business.”
I looked to Navan. “What are we going to do?”
“Dock, and hope they don’t kill us first,” he replied, turning to Bashrik. “Turn on the ship’s white lights to show we surrender!” he urged, reminding me of the action he’d taken in the Snapper, when we’d been forced to cross the border from Southern Vysanthe to Northern Vysanthe. It had saved us then—and I hoped it would save us now.
The speakers reverberated again. “Are you in distress? Flash your lights twice if your comms are damaged,” the voice said. Bashrik obeyed. “Very well, you may approach the station and dock. Guards will meet you on arrival.”
“Let’s just hope they’re gentle with us,” Bashrik mused, navigating us toward a metal umbilical port that extended from the side of the quarantine station. Skillfully, he connected the airlock of our ship with the docking port, a jolt sending us flying forward as the two parts joined.
No more than two minutes later, there was a worrying knock at the exterior airlock door, the sound echoing through to the cockpit. A second, more impatient knock followed quickly afterward. We all scrambled to our feet and hurried into the main space, pausing before we made our way down the hallway to the right, where the airlock lay.
“Well, is someone going to answer it?” Angie hissed.
Navan looked at me. “You three should hide. They’re coldblood doctors—they might want to investigate you further, if they see you,” he whispered anxiously, gesturing for us to hurry down the hallway to the left, as far from the airlock as possible.
There wasn’t time to argue, as a third knock pierced the air, startling us. Exchanging a glance of agreement with my best friends, we took off down the opposite corridor, slipping into a supply room and pressing our backs up against the door, panting hard as we sank to the floor.
It was a tortuous wait, especially when we couldn’t hear a single word that was being said. The boys were too far away. It was only when I heard heavy boots on the metal walkway outside that we caught our first snippet of their conversation. The boys had brought them this way to take them to the med-bay, and by the sound of it, there were quite a few coldbloods with them.
“You liberated them from Zai?” a voice asked sternly. It was a masculine voice, deep and raspy.
“No, not the planet itself. It appears that some of the infected tried to escape, but only got as far as a planetoid nearby. We picked up on their distress beacon as we were passing, quite by chance,” Navan replied, his tone confident.
“We were wondering where the rest of the mining missions had ended up. They were presumed to still be on Zai, but Queen Gianne put an end to our immunization funding, so we’ve never been able to retrieve those who were left,” the voice replied bitterly.
“Do you have medicine for the victims of the virus?” Bashrik asked.
The doctor snorted. “We have antiviral drugs in our stores, but without further experimentation, we can’t refine the formula. Indeed, none of our patients have ever returned to their former selves. All we can do is make them comfortable until they come screaming to the end of their miserable lives.”
“You won’t need to use your antivirals on these particular patients,” Navan explained. “It seems that, over time, the virus wore off. These people were running around half-crazed when we found them.”
The doctor made a curious sound. “Wore off, you say? I had an inkling that might be the case, but we had no further subjects to test the theory on, and Queen Gianne forbade every request I made to search for the other miners.”
“I’m not sure these people are in a better state than your other patients,” Navan said reluctantly.
The doctor sighed. “No matter. We’re just a spinning graveyard in space, anyway. All they can do here is wait until death claims them.”
Their voices faded away to nothing as they made their way down to the med-bay, leaving the three of us to look at one another with a mixture of sorrow and relief. As bad as the coldbloods could be, nobody deserved that kind of fate.
A short while later, we heard the return of Navan, Bashrik, and their coldblood escort.
“We’ll gather some porters and some stretchers, and have them off your hands in no time,” a different voice spoke, this one definitely more female.
“And thank you for offering to deliver the paperwork to Queen Gianne for us, Navan. If I’d known we were speaking to the sons of Jareth Idrax, I’d never have brought armed guards,” the first male voice said.
Navan gave a soft laugh. “Our comms are down—I don’t blame you for being cautious. You can’t be too careful out here, especially with a station full of crazed patients.”
“You have no idea how right you are, Navan!” the male replied, evidently indulging in some ass-kissing. I figured the news that Navan had jumped ship to Brisha’s side had not yet traveled this far from Vysanthe.
The voices disappeared again, though they were replaced by the sound of juddering vibrations ten minutes later. Flattening to the ground, I peered out of the narrow slit at the bottom of the door in time to see a fleet of hovering stretchers humming down the hallway, flanked by stern-faced coldbloods, some bearing weapons.
Only when they were gone did I turn to my friends. ??
?They’re collecting the miners on these cool floating stretchers,” I whispered.
“What, like levitating gurneys?” Angie asked, arching an eyebrow. The light overhead was dim, but I could see my friends if I squinted hard enough.
I nodded. “I mean, I think they’ve got little engines in them, but yeah, they’re floating along!”
“At least they’re not carrying fifty-nine coldbloods all the way through the ship. We’d be here all day!” Lauren chuckled.
I grinned, lifting a finger to my lips as the thrumming of the stretchers came back. Lowering my head to the floor again, I watched the convoy of sick Vysantheans pass by, their bodies limp, their heads lolling. Clearly, they’d been given a sedative of some kind, to keep them calm. However, when my eyes locked with the open, blank stare of a floppy coldblood, my heart almost jumped straight out of my mouth. The female looked awake, but I knew she wasn’t—if she were, she’d have been screaming the place down. Even knocked out, she still wore a look of unbearable pain.
After listening to several return trips, the judder of the floating gurneys ceased, and a loud clank seemed to signal the departure of the quarantine doctors, complete with their armed guards. Shortly afterward, we heard boots on the walkway outside.
“You can come out now,” Navan whispered.
“Then why are you whispering?” I retorted through the gap.
He grinned at me as he opened the supply room door. “For dramatic effect, obviously.”
“Are you sure they’re all gone?” Angie asked, peering down each side of the hallway.
Bashrik nodded. “They’re all gone, and so are the plague victims.”
“Did they buy your story?” Lauren pressed.
“They seemed to,” Bashrik replied, his confident tone giving me reassurance.
As selfish as it sounded, it did feel nice to know we were now the only five on board the Vanquish. With the sick coldbloods gone, we wouldn’t have to worry about being murdered in our sleep, nor would I have to hear the blood-chilling sound of their agony. There was nothing we could do for them—they were in the best possible care now.
“Seems you got yourself a fan,” I teased as we headed for the cockpit.
Navan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That coldblood you were talking to—he seemed impressed by your name. You Idraxes are like Vysanthean celebrities,” I said, nestling against him as he put his arm around my shoulders.
“It comes in handy from time to time,” Navan replied, though there was a bitterness in his voice. He hated that his father’s name brought him advantages; I could see it on his face.
“It’s about time we paid the Fed a visit,” Bashrik chimed in cheerfully, giving his brother a playful shove in the arm. It appeared to distract Navan from his thoughts, a smile tugging at his lips.
“Lead the way, Bash,” he encouraged. It seemed that, the farther away from Zai we got, the more Bashrik was returning to his usual, coldblood self. It made me hopeful that the revived coldbloods might find a bit more peace, now that they were away from the planet that had confined them.
Bashrik smirked. “I would if I knew the way, Navan. You’re the one with the coordinates.”
Chuckling to himself, Navan released his hold on my shoulders and approached the control panel, typing in a location and setting a course for our new destination, his hands moving rapidly across the screen. The Fed outpost was waiting for us, and I was forcing myself to be hopeful.
After being told it would be another four hours until we reached the outpost, the girls and I decided to put our time to better use than endless travel games. Leaving Bashrik and Navan in the cockpit, I took them down to the weapons pods and began to teach them how to use the warship’s guns.
“You’re naturals!” I beamed as Lauren shot a pulsar into the oblivion of space.
“Take that, meteor!” she whooped. The beam smashed a floating chunk of rock to smithereens.
Angie, meanwhile, used the force beams to push away small pieces of space debris that were hurtling toward the ship, exploding out from the site of Lauren’s obliterated target. She hummed to herself, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth in concentration.
“This is pretty cool, but I’m glad Earth doesn’t have warships like this,” she said, pushing away a cluster of rocks.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Lauren agreed, firing at another small meteor that crossed our path.
“Can you imagine each of our most powerful nations equipped with one of these bad boys?” Angie went on, pulling a face.
I gave a grim laugh. “There’d be nothing left of Earth by the time they were done.”
As they returned to their explode-and-push operation, I turned back to the screen in front of me. I was in the command module of the weapons deck, where the officers would have sat, if we had any officers on board. While they’d been getting a handle on the different guns, I’d been becoming better acquainted with the ship’s built-in systems. Navan had filtered the mainframe network down to my module so I could study the operations of the whole vessel, not just the weapons. It was good to know how to get the main blast cannons to work and stop, though it served as a reminder of the crumbled wing of the Draconian temple.
There were other weapons, too, that weren’t available from the pods on either side of me. Here, we had laser guns, machine guns, missile launchers, flamethrowers, chemical sprayers—everything required to start a war on an unsuspecting nation. It horrified me, and I vowed never to touch a single one. Cannons and force guns were bad enough, but chemical sprayers? I shuddered at the thought.
We were still only halfway into our four-hour trek to the Fed outpost, when Navan appeared at the threshold of my pod. His face was smeared with what looked like oil, the sleeves of his t-shirt rolled up to reveal his muscular arms. After the traumatic events of the last few days, I’d forgotten just how good it could feel to have some physical contact. There hadn’t been much time for that sort of thing with the mission taking precedence.
Now, however, we had two hours to kill. Angie and Lauren had given up on their weapons training, their gazes turned out toward the vastness of space. I could see that Angie was getting sleepy, her eyelids sliding shut. They wouldn’t notice if I went missing for a while.
“What happened to you?” I asked, getting out of my seat and moving over to Navan. I tried to wipe away the oil that smeared his cheek, but I only made it worse.
“I needed to fix a few things in the engine room,” he explained.
I smiled and batted my eyelashes at him. “Will you show me? I’d love to see the inner workings of this ship.” Sexy talk wasn’t exactly my specialty, but I’d expected more of a reaction out of Navan, who just gave a casual shrug.
“Yeah, sure. It’s pretty noisy in there, though,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder and leading me out of the pod.
“Angie, Lauren, we’re just going to the engine room to look at some… big machines,” I announced, turning over my shoulder.
Lauren grinned, sticking up two thumbs, while Angie was fast asleep in the chair of her pod, her soft snoring echoing down the corridor. I stroked the side of Navan’s arm, looking up at him, but he remained oblivious to my frankly embarrassing attempt at being sexy.
“Is it… hot in the engine room?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound sultry.
Navan shrugged. “Pretty hot. There are a lot of working parts in there. They give off a lot of heat in order to stay cool.”
I rolled my eyes. “Does it make you all sweaty?” I tried again.
“It can. Why, do I look sweaty?” he replied, lifting the collar of his t-shirt to smell the fabric.
“You definitely look hot,” I murmured.
“I’ve been at it for two hours. Guess I must look like a mess.” He laughed, squeezing my shoulder in a side hug. I didn’t know whether to be amused or devastated that I was throwing my best moves at him, and he wasn’t noticing a single one. Then again, my m
oves were admittedly weak—they always had been.
“Would you like to see me all hot and sweaty?” I made one last attempt, but he wasn’t even looking at me. His eyes were fixed ahead, his thumb absently stroking the side of my neck.
“Did you want to help me out in the engine room? I should have asked—I totally forgot that’s your area of expertise. I suppose it would be good for you to have a grasp of Vysanthean engineering, in case you need to use it in the future,” he replied apologetically, his casual tone making me want to grab him by the face and kiss him hard, until he noticed me.
Realizing that might be the only way of getting him to understand what I was up to, I kicked open the door to one of the supply rooms and dragged him inside, gripping the fabric of his t-shirt as I pulled him toward me. All I wanted was to be kissed, and to forget the misery of the previous days. I didn’t want to think about the terrible things my hands could do. I wanted to use them for something good, something exciting.
Navan looked surprised as I kissed him deeply, pulling his head down to mine, running my hands through his hair. He really must have been oblivious to my half-baked advances, but it was good to feel that delicious moment when surprise turned to excitement—when a kiss turned into something more.
His hands slid down my waist and over the rise of my hips, pulling me closer to him. Our kiss deepened, the passion blossoming, his tongue exploring my mouth as he pushed me against the wall of the supply room, knocking over a stack of crates in a haze of frantic anticipation.
“I didn’t think you’d want to,” he whispered breathlessly, placing a trail of kisses down the curve of my neck.
“With you, I always want to,” I breathed, as his hands slid under my shirt, seeking out the hook of my bra.
“Just, with everything that happened, I wanted to give you some space,” he explained, his voice catching in his throat as I let my hands trail across the front of his pants, feeling his eagerness.
“You are my space—you are where it’s easy to breathe,” I murmured, as he lifted my shirt over my head and threw it to the ground. Picking me up as though I weighed nothing, he lowered me to the floor, his mouth exploring every part of my bare skin, his fingertips making quick work of the buttons on my pants, before shimmying them off.