Page 3 of Nansar
Karvat's jaw worked as he processed the information. Possible death here, or possible death in an escape pod, orpossible death on a prison planet... the choices were endless and equally terrible.
"Get her to pod three," Karvat ordered finally, his voice sharp, brooking no argument. "Set the coordinates for Palaydium and launch as soon as she's secure." His blue-gold eyes, tempestuous and burning with something I couldn't quite name, turned back to the communications officer. "Open an encrypted channel to Alliance Prime."
The horned crew member—Torven, I remembered his name now—was already in motion, his clawed hand gesturing urgently for me to follow. My feet felt rooted to the deck for a heartbeat, my mind spinning through the implications. A prison planet. They were sending me to a prison planet.
Another impact shattered my hesitation. The ship groaned like a dying beast, metal screaming against metal somewhere deep in the hull. Sparks rained from an overhead conduit, hissing as they hit the deck in brilliant cascades of white-hot light.
"Go," Karvat said, and his eyes locked with mine one final time—a look that held both apology and determination. "Now."
I ran.
Torven led me through corridors that twisted and turned like the intestines of some great mechanical creature, emergency lighting casting everything in that hellish red glow. The deck shuddered beneath our feet with each new assault, the attackers relentless, their weapons tearing into the ship's hull with methodical precision. We reached a small bay where three escape pods sat in their launch tubes like bullets chambered and ready to fire.
"Pod three," Torven said, his clawed fingers punching commands into the console. The hatch hissed open, revealing the cramped interior. "It's preprogrammed. Just strap in andhold on. The pod will handle the rest—navigation, landing, everything. And it's cloaked, so they won't be able to follow."
He held out his hand to help me, but I shrugged it off with perhaps more force than necessary. I didn't like to be touched. I climbed inside, the space impossibly small, claustrophobic. The seat was hard and unforgiving against my back as I fumbled with the harness, my hands shaking now that the adrenaline was catching up with me, making my fingers clumsy.
"Good luck, human," Torven said, and there was something almost gentle in his gravelly voice. Then the hatch sealed with a solidthunkthat reverberated through my bones, and I was alone in the cramped darkness with only the sound of my own ragged breathing for company.
The universe tilted sideways as Torven's hand slammed down on the release mechanism. One moment I was stationary, cocooned in the metal shell of the ship. The next, I was hurtling through space with bone-jarring acceleration that made my vision blur and my stomach climb into my throat. The force pressed me back into the seat so hard I couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, could only grip the armrests until my knuckles went white and my nails bit into my palms.
It was ten times worse than the worst roller coaster I'd ever ridden—an ancient wooden monstrosity at Six Flags my college roommate had dragged me onto—except here there were no tracks beneath me, no safety net, no ground at all. Just the endless black void and me shooting through it like a bullet fired into the dark.
The pod's viewport gave me a panoramic view I immediately wished I didn't have. Behind me, Karvat's vessel hung in space, its hull scarred and smoking from the sustained assault, looking like a wounded animal trying desperately to stay alive. As I watched, the attacking ship finally materialized fully, dropping whatever cloaking technology had kept it partiallyhidden. It was massive—easily three times the size of the Alliance transport, its dark hull bristling with weapon arrays that glowed with barely contained energy.
The Alliance ship pivoted with surprising grace for something so damaged, positioning itself directly between the massive attacker and my fleeing pod. The maneuver was deliberate, sacrificial. Karvat was giving me time to escape, putting his ship and his crew between me and Hewes's guns.
"No," I whispered, my breath fogging the viewport, my hand pressed flat against the cold surface as if I could somehow reach back through space and pull them to safety. "No, don't—"
Lasers erupted from both vessels simultaneously, brilliant lances of energy that turned the void into a light show of destruction. The Alliance ship's shields flared with each impact, rippling like water disturbed by stones, each wave of energy creating patterns of light that would have been beautiful if they hadn't signaled imminent death. I could see them weakening, the protective barrier growing more translucent with each passing second. Return fire from Karvat's weapons scored direct hits on the larger vessel, but they were mosquito bites against a giant.
Another volley. The Alliance ship's shields collapsed in a cascade of blue-white light that scattered like dying stars.
Then the killing blow. A massive energy beam, thicker than the pod I was riding in, lanced out from the attacking ship and struck Karvat's vessel dead center. For a heartbeat—one terrible, frozen moment—nothing happened. The Alliance ship just hung there in space, silent and still.
Then it came apart.
The explosion was soundless in the vacuum of space, but somehow that made it worse. I watched as the ship tore into fragments, metal and fire and bodies blown outward in an expanding sphere of debris that glittered like deadly confetti.The blast was so bright it should have blinded me, white light edged with orange and red, the colors of hell unleashed in the cold dark.
I pressed both hands against the viewport, my palms flat against the cold surface, as if I could somehow reach back through space and undo what I'd just witnessed. My throat closed. My eyes burned. Karvat. Torven. The lavender-skinned navigator whose name I'd never learned. The engineer who looked like a ferret-hedgehog hybrid. All of them, gone in an instant. Dead because they'd chosen to protect me instead of surrendering me to Hewes.
The pod's autopilot fired maneuvering thrusters, spinning me away from the carnage, orienting toward whatever destination had been programmed into its navigation system. The last thing I saw before the debris field disappeared from view was the massive attacking ship, hanging among the wreckage like a shark in bloody water, weapons still glowing with residual heat.
They didn't follow me. Hopefully, they thought I'd died in the explosion. The ship turned and vanished back into whatever hole it had crawled out of, leaving nothing behind but expanding clouds of frozen metal and the ghosts of beings who'd tried to save me.
I sat alone in the darkness, hurtling through space toward a prison planet I knew nothing about, and I let myself break. Just for a moment. Just long enough to acknowledge what had been lost, what I'd cost them simply by existing, by being the bait in a trap.
How many now? How many people had Hewes killed?
The grief in my chest hardened into something else. Something cold and sharp and unbreakable.
I didn't know how. I didn't know when. But somehow, some way, I would make Hewes pay for every single life he'dtaken. For every person who'd died or been enslaved because of him. I would survive whatever waited for me on Palaydium, and I would find a way to become something more than prey.
I was no longer his pet, the female he'd drugged and used. I was ChloefuckingBlackwood, Naval Intelligence, FBI agent. I would become the thing Declan Hewes should fear.
I pulled myself together, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and stared out at the stars. Somewhere ahead of me was Palaydium. Whatever waited there, whoever was imprisoned on its surface, I would survive it.
I had to.
