“I have the file in the printer memory,” the waitress said. “It has never been accessed,” she added.
“I bet,” Dalton said, with a grimace.
Now I was dying to know what the hell it was. I looked at Fiori and was a touch disappointed when she shook her head.
“Could I have…can you print tea?”
“Beverage, plant, or dried leaves?” the waitress asked.
“Oh, beverage. Hot. And honey.”
The waitress moved away, her long black curls bouncing against her ass as she walked.
Fiori bent her head to examine the waitress. “How extraordinary!”
I gave a small laugh. “That about sums up the entire ship,” I told her.
She nodded. “I am starting to understand what Dalton has tried to tell me for years.” She paused. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”
“It’s an old conversation, anyway,” I said dismissively.
“You’re still refusing to let Gabriel pay you back?” Fiori asked, her voice inflecting upwards.
I grimaced. “My decision. My debt.”
“It keeps her scrappy,” Dalton added.
I glared at him. “You like your life interesting and varied, too.”
“Not after eighty years of it,” Dalton growled. “Peace is nice. Boring is productive.”
I raised my brow and stared at him, not fooled for a second.
“For now,” he added, with a grin.
“Peace has its upside,” Fiori added.
“I’d hardly call scraping a living on alien balls stress free.”
“Stress free isn’t the same as peaceful. People don’t shoot at us, at least,” Fiori replied, showing a rare spirit. “Planetside living is soothing. It has rhythms you can count on.”
“Soothing?” I repeated. “Weren’t you Imperial Shield before you met Dalton?”
Fiori pressed her lips together for a moment. “Soothing, for now,” she amended. “But that’s all ending, isn’t it?”
I grew still. I couldn’t bring myself to glance at Dalton.
Fiori nodded as if we’d both shouted an affirmative at her. “I was happy to spend twenty-five years off to one side raising Mace, but he’s a man now and…” She trailed off, all the animation running from her like water from a glass.
Dalton sighed.
They’d both remembered why they were onboard. The ship had distracted them for a few minutes, but now they were back to facing an unguessable future.
“We’ll find him,” I said softly.
Fiori looked at me. Her gaze was steady. “You don’t know that. Not for sure.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Dalton told her. “She’s Danny Andela. You’ve never met anyone like her and never will again.”
Fiori gave a soft laugh, as if Dalton was making a joke.
I just squirmed.
Dalton wasn’t done though. He shook his head. “No, you don’t get it,” he told Fiori. “Maybe it’s because I’ve spent too many years talking about her. You can’t see it objectively.”
“See what?” Fiori demanded, the tinge of backbone showing once more.
“We could have reached out to a dozen different authorities about this—”
“There is no authority, anymore,” Fiori pointed out, her tone cold. She looked at me. “That was your doing, too, wasn’t it?”
I sat back, even more surprised. “I had nothing to do with the collapse of the Empire,” I assured her. “I tried to fix it.”
“There are planetary governors,” Dalton said with the implacable patience I recognized was him intending to drive a point home no matter how pissed the other person was…or how angry Dalton might be, come to that. “Mayors of cities. National troops. Policing contingents. Even the Spacing Guild would want to know about a ship on their register going missing.”
Fiori’s jaw rippled, but she said nothing.
“There are a dozen other organizations we could have reached out to,” Dalton continued, his voice flat. “But we came to Danny. It was your idea, Fiori. You might not know the details, but you knew in your gut that Danny would sort this out. And you are right.”
The silence in the diner was broken by a ground car making a distant, but distinct, honking sound. We all jumped and turned to look through the window, as the car’s pilot hung his arm out a side window and waved to someone on the path by the side of the road.
The walker waved back.
Fiori gave a soft laugh that sounded more like a release of taut nerves. “I just hope this ship is as wonderful as Danny is supposed to be. I can’t help thinking we’ll need it.”
—7—
At the fifty-nine-minute mark, the Supreme Lythion pulled away from the Melenia landing bay, maneuvered slowly to face away from the star city, then moved into its assigned jump vector.
“Ready, Colonel,” Lyssa said.
“So are we,” I said, glancing around the bridge to make sure everyone had their backs against an inertia cushion. “Let’s go.”
Lyssa nodded. She had no need to stand against an inertial shell. She instead stared forward, through the quaint windows which Wedekind had thought was an interesting spin on the usual view screens.
The Supreme Lythion rumbled deep in her guts, then accelerated at a pace that induced multiple gees of pressure. Lyssa was giving it her all. Just as I thought that surely the shells would slam closed over us and smother us in the disgusting oxygen-enriched gel that protected us from extremes of inertia which crush juice couldn’t cope with, Lyssa said softly, “Crescents arcing. Ready…and…now.”
The actual jump, from inside a ship, was a confusing flash of purples and shimmering greens, as the crescents pulled the wormhole they were forming over the top of us and scooped it under us. There was a slight shudder of transition, then the screen was filled with the purple flashing lights which would quickly make any human nauseous.
Lyssa dropped the shutters over the windows, hiding the view, and turned to us. “Don’t relax too much,” she warned, with evident satisfaction. “I maximized the speed of our entry. This will be a real short trip.” In the overhead lights, the fine spray of freckles on her face was clear. So was the twinkle in her green eyes.
Lyssa was true to her word. Five hours later, we popped out of the worm hole, and emerged into normal space over an unremarkable rocky brown planet with no atmosphere to
