Another first.
I waited for an explanation, every heartbeat hurting, and every muscle taut, ready to react as soon as I knew what this new development was.
Lyssa turned on her heel to look at me. She was pissed. “It’s not the Blue guys,” she said, her voice flat with the heavy control she was exerting on it.
The speaker overhead gave a soft click. “Danny, what the fuck are you doing out here?” The voice, despite the anger and tension in it, was more than familiar.
The Lythion’s engines cut out. We were coasting along on inertia.
“Juliyana?” I straightened from my lean upon the shell. The sudden release of tension gave me the shakes. “Get your fucking ass over here and tell me what is going on. This had better be good, granddaughter.”
—24—
The three ships, The Lythion, the Omia Zaos and Juliyana’s little Penthos, maneuvered carefully together. Then we hooked together with fast-release cables and set up molecular barrier tunnels around the cables. The cables served a secondary purpose. They give us something to pull ourselves along while we were weightless, outside the reach of a ship’s gravity.
I stood at the open exit hatch and looked out at deep space. Just standing there gave me gruesome shivers. “I am not going out there,” I said flatly.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Yoan assured me. He was taller than me by nearly a handspan and looked down at me with an understanding expression. “The technology is very old and reliable,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “But this very old carcass got that way by not taking stupid risks. Floating out in raw space without a suit, depending upon coherent molecules for air to breath, rates as stupid in my lexicon. Everyone can come here.”
I stalked off to the diner to get a drink. I would rather have screamed or kicked in a few walls, but a drink was civilized.
If Juliyana’s explanation for what the hell she was doing all the way out here on the very edge of nowhere wasn’t absolutely solid, then screw civilized. I’d wring necks. I would scream. And I would feel better afterwards.
With the brandy warming my middle, I moved around the Lythion to what we had once called our Boardroom—a space made to resemble a mountaintop camping area, with a long wooden table, and a view that could take your breath away if you paused to study it.
Lyth was already there, sitting on the tabletop with his hands gripped together. He didn’t look any happier than me.
I went up to him. “Did you actually look at the Penthos?”
“Yes,” he said flatly.
“It’s not a freighter.”
“No.”
“It’s bristling with armaments and weapons. One of them looks like the new torrent rail guns I heard chatter about, last year.”
“Yes,” Lyth agreed, even less happy.
“Lyssa actually screamed when she heard it.”
Lyth just nodded this time.
I spared him any more grating of his nerves. I rested my hand on his shoulder. “We could use a ship like that.”
Lyth’s jaw worked. “I didn’t know until just now that it wasn’t a freighter.”
I considered that. “She lied to spare you a heart attack every time she left. There’s hope in that thought, you know.”
His eyes widened a little. No, clearly, he had not thought it all the way through. He was mired in his own…whatever. Guilt, most likely, for Lyth was good at blaming himself for everything.
I patted his shoulder again and let it go. “Can you hear them?”
“They just came through the hatch.” His knuckles whitened for a second, then he loosened his hands and stepped to the ground with one long-legged movement and straightened.
Lyssa rose up from the ground, which was unusual for her. She preferred to move around the ship the way humans did. But she was clearly trying to get ahead of the visitors.
“Dalton, Fiori and Yoan?” I asked her.
“On their way.” She moved over to the table. “Do you need anything? Coffee? Food?”
“Not until I know what is going on,” I replied. I just barely held back the curse that wanted to form in the middle of the sentence. I wasn’t the only one flailing about, trying to understand this new development. I had to take it easy on everyone.
I could hear the tramp of spacer boots on the deck of the ship, now, heading toward the room.
The door opened and Dalton, Fiori and Yoan slipped inside. Dalton moved directly over to Lyth. “You holding up?” he said softly.
“I’m holding up,” Lyth said grimly.
Dalton raised his brow at me. I nodded, telling him with one movement that I was fine, and that I thought Lyth would be okay, too.
Then we all faced the door and waited for our guests to appear.
And that right there, I thought to myself, showed how great the distance was which Juliyana had put between all of us. I didn’t think of her as part of my crew anymore.
Even Jai, who had gone out of his way to make sure Sauli and Kristiana were pulled into to help us get Mace back, hadn’t thought to reach out to Juliyana. Although even if he had, he wouldn’t have known where to reach her.
The first person through the door was not Juliyana. The woman looked trim and fit, with deep brown hair that hung in waves, with a wide streak of gold running down both sides that might have been cosmetic, for the effect was striking. Yet the rest of her didn’t match such painstaking attention to appearance. She wore space coveralls, the type that didn’t fade, stain, rip or wrinkle, which shed water and were very forgiving about the dimensions they could stretch over. As a result of all that utility, the fabric was a dull brown or grey. They were the only options.
The woman had squeezed into coveralls that appeared to be too small for her, but as the things could stretch quite a way, I presumed she had picked a standard size and hadn’t cared about precise fit.
All the stretching had
