Accordingly, I got up and headed down to find Kivi.
Coincidentally, she was just hitting the showers herself—with Sargon in tow. I got the feeling they’d been intimate, then decided to wash up. That was extreme, even for me, but I wasn’t in a judging mood.
“Specialist?” I said, climbing out of my filthy suit and getting into some hot water. Carlos had been right about that part—after a long day, a shower always felt even better than you thought it was going to.
Sargon raised an eyebrow at me. “Is this official business, Centurion, or…?”
He didn’t want anyone horning in on his girl, and I didn’t blame him. “Yes, it really is.”
“All right then. I’ll see you later, Kivi.” He slapped her on her ample butt and left.
She didn’t meet my eye. Instead, she started washing herself in slow-motion. Apparently, her breasts were going to be sparkling when she stepped out of here.
Now, I’m every kind of a fool when it comes to womanly wiles, but even I have my limits. I knew she was distracting me. She was doing a good job of it, too.
“Stop that,” I told her.
“Why? Don’t you like it?”
“What I don’t like is tech specialists who tap into feeds and listen into command chat.”
She blew a raspberry at me. “As if. Your little doormat Natasha does that trick for you whenever you snap your fingers.”
“She’s my specialist, she works for me. That’s different, I need intel from above.”
“So do I.”
Kivi looked unrepentant. I was annoyed, but it was kind of hard to blame her. The brass treated us like sardines in a can, and they told us very little about what was really going on.
Thinking hard for a second, I thought of a new angle. Kivi had never been as good at hacking as Natasha was. Nowhere near. Hacking her way up to Gold Deck—that was new ground for her.
But then again… Kivi and Natasha were in the same unit together—my unit.
“So,” I said as I rubbed soap into an armpit. “When did you start hacking Natasha’s computer? Does she even know?”
Kivi dropped her soap. It just plain up and sprang out of her hands. She bent over to pick it up, and I got quite a view. Still, I refused to be distracted.
“Come on,” I said. “Talk to me, or I’ll tell her. She’ll shut you out hard. You know she can.”
She glared at me suddenly. “Damn it, McGill, don’t say a word to her.”
“All right then—talk.”
She heaved a sigh. “It was just natural curiosity. Natasha is always doing things that are… let’s call them special missions. For you, and for others. I was curious, and I didn’t want to work as hard as she does…”
“I see. I get it. You hacked Natasha so you could get into all her business on the cheap. That’s clever. What did you learn?”
“All sorts of things. About you being on the Sea Empress before it blew up, for instance. And about how you screwed Raash and gave him those blue scales he hates.”
“Yeah, he does hate that,” I admitted.
“Did you know that he’s aboard ship?”
I snapped up my head. “He is?”
“Yes. Floramel brought him. They came in with the last wave, but you were too busy chasing Jenny Mills around to notice.”
“Huh… I guess they figure he might be a source of intel on the enemy.”
“I doubt it. That lizard was nuts before, and now he’s completely insane.”
“Kinda, yeah. What else can you tell me?”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because you’ve been hacking and stealing Natasha’s data stream, and I’m going to tell her if you don’t give it all up.”
She shrugged. “Okay, okay. There isn’t much else to tell. I caught a recording of today’s fiasco up on Gold Deck with Armel and Winslade. That’s when I became worried.”
“Why?”
“Because James, there’s no way we’re getting out of this province alive. Once we start bombing planets, every Skay and saurian for lightyears will come running. That’s what Carlos asked about, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But it’s not preordained, girl. Stop worrying so much. We’ll get in, perform a surgical strike, and flash out of here again.”
“Dominus is fast, but they’ll be behind us—between us and Earth.”
“So what? Maybe we’ll run the other way.”
Her eyes widened improbably large, and she turned off the water. Her skin was nice and shiny when it was dripping wet. “Am I hearing this right? Are we planning to rush blindly into some other province? Into territory completely uncharted?”
I threw my hands wide. “Someone has charted it. Have a little faith, girl. Those pricks back on Earth might not give two shits about Legion Varus, but they don’t want to lose this nice, shiny ship, now do they?”
“Huh…” she said, toweling off. “I hope you’re right, James. I really do.”
She left, and we parted ways. I fell onto my bunk a few minutes later, but it took almost a half-hour to fall asleep. I kept thinking about what Armel had said—and what Carlos and Kivi had figured out.
What were we going to do after the strike was over and the smoke had cleared?
-32-
Klaxons went off all over the ship early the next morning. My men were shoved out of their bunks again. We scrambled into our kits and stumbled into the passages.
Red arrows directed us downward. We followed, trotting and stopping only to grab some basic weapons at the armory. I tried every ten steps to contact Graves, but he wasn’t answering.
“Is someone hitting us?” Carlos demanded. “Are they interrupting our warp bubble? We’re all going to fry when the radiation hits if they don’t shut that down right.”
Carlos spoke from experience. I’d once watched him die in the warp bubble on the outer hull of
