“Is that a common prayer of your people?”
“It would be if enough of them spent time around you.” I glanced at him to gauge his reaction, but Catman wasn’t paying attention to me. Instead, he was frowning at his control panel and muttering.
“Something wrong?” I asked brightly, almost hoping there was.
“These coordinates are incorrect. We are not where we are supposed to be.”
“I bet that happens sometimes when you’re everywhere at once in hyperspace.” Apparently, I couldn’t keep my sarcasm in.
He shot an irritated glance at me. “Computer, analysis. How did we end up at these coordinates?”
There was a long silence before the computer finally answered. “Conducting self-diagnostic.”
“That doesn’t sound very good.” A hysterical giggle escaped me. Some part of me knew I should probably be worried, but I was in a spaceship with an alien who could turn into a giant green tiger. There really wasn’t much else I could do other than laugh.
Of course something had gone wrong during my alien abduction. That was the kind of week I was having, after all.
Finally, Catman spoke again. “Computer, report.”
“Attempting to complete self-diagnostic. Please hold.”
Catman tapped his fingers impatiently against the armrest of his chair.
I desperately needed to do something, anything. I began fiddling with the straps on my chair.
“You should stay strapped in, my mate,” Catman instructed me.
Which reminded me…
“What’s your name?” I couldn’t simply keep calling him Catman forever.
“Commander Lutro Dax,” he replied absently, still tapping away and staring intently at the console, as if he could will the computer to respond more quickly.
“I’m Nora, in case you want to call me something other than human girl. Or mate. Mate is such a creepy word. Plus, it makes you sound like some British dude out with his friends.”
“What is a who-man?”
“Human,” I corrected his pronunciation. “It’s my species, I guess.”
“And you think ‘mate’ is a strange word…”
I couldn’t really argue with him.
After another long silence from the computer, Dax began unstrapping himself.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“There is something seriously wrong here. I am going to go to check the computer feeds and see if I can determine why this is taking so long.”
“Have you tried turning it off and rebooting?” I asked in a faux-cheerful voice.
He frowned but didn’t answer me. I waited until he was gone, then scrambled out of my own straps, dropping down to the floor. Only then did it occur to me that the seats were so large my feet dangled in the air like a child sitting in an adult’s chair.
Quickly, I moved to the control panel—the one against the wall, not the one by Dax’s seat that he had just been looking at. I stared down at it, trying to remember how he had put us into hyperspace.
Apparently, my translation matrix didn’t extend to reading. It looked like a series of symbols, but none that I recognized.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered. “Hope I don’t blow myself up.” I held my breath and reached out, then jerked my hand back in a fist and held it next to my body. “This is stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“It certainly is.” Dax’s voice came from the doorway into the corridor, and I jumped.
“Gah. I didn’t hear you return.”
Dax moved into the control room. “What did you plan to do?”
“Go back home?” I meant for the statement to come out more forcefully, but instead, it had sounded like a question.
Dax shook his head. “It wouldn’t have worked. The control panel is keyed to my DNA, the computer to my voice. No one can fly the ship but me.”
Yep. That kind of week.
With a huff, I flung myself back into my chair. “Did you at least find out something about the computer?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “The computer has been sabotaged.”
“I thought it was keyed to you?”
“It is. And yet somehow, it’s been hacked.”
As if triggered by his words, a klaxon warning began bleating throughout the ship.
“Computer, display,” Dax ordered.
The screen in front of us changed to show another spaceship popping into view. It was big and gray and lumpy, not at all the kind of sleek battleships I was used to seeing in sci-fi movies.
“What is that thing?” I found myself cringing back in my chair, trying to get away from it.
“That is a Karlaxon warship. I believe we are about to be boarded,” Dax said, moving to open some sort of storage unit on the back wall, revealing what I suspected were weapons.
“Is that ship as much bigger than us as it looks?” I asked.
“Absolutely. That ship is probably ten times larger than mine.” He sounded awfully calm for a man whose spaceship was about to be boarded.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just, I don’t know—tractor-beam us in or something?”
Dax chuffed lightly. “Is that a technology your people have? Because I do not know of anything like that.”
“No—just something I saw in a movie once.”
“Wait here,” Dax instructed. “The computer is working on getting us out of here. I’ll try to hold them off in the meantime.”
And then he was gone, leaving me alone on a ship in space with a bunch of hostile aliens coming to get us.
This just keeps getting better and better.
Chapter Eight
Dax
I maintained my composure long enough to get off the bridge and close the door behind me. Once outside in the core door, however, I leaned back against the green wall. For once, its color did little to soothe me.
I stood there gasping, trying to catch my breath. I had fought in hundreds of battles, many of them much more dire than the one I was about to face against the Karlaxons. Something was different this time.
This time, I had a mate to protect. I had something real to lose.
That simply means that I have more to protect.
I inhaled deeply and blew the breath out slowly, centering myself.
I can do this.
I could destroy these invaders who wanted to eliminate our way of life, who had been working to take our mating options away from us.
The Karlaxons thought they
