“Er, Captain?” Griiek gulped. “Just to clarify. According to the med scan, Director Rowe’s vitals were elevated above Earther norms, to be expected from this stressful situation. But so were yours?”
Still not looking at her, even though she tried to catch his eye with a sly grin, Ellix growled, “A passing weakness. I’m over it now.”
She stiffened, barely hearing Suvan’s grumble. “We’ll have to modulate frequencies on the spot to manifest the distortion. Whether we can isolate and contain it—” The rest of the speculation was lost in the goblhob’s screeching.
“Keep me updated,” Ellix said. “Other than the hijacking”—everyone on the comm made derisive noises appropriate for their species—“how are we faring?”
“Engines are holding even at the higher output.”
“Ship systems are all in standard range.”
Delpine answered distractedly. “I’m still plotting possible destinations along this trajectory. I’ll have something for you soon.”
“Good,” Ellix said. “Stay on high alert. Griiek, keep monitoring for any reappearance of the anomaly. We need to calculate which frequencies and modulations will counteract the distortion.”
When he closed the comm, they sat for a moment in an uneasy silence.
“A passing weakness,” Felicity murmured.
Finally, he slanted his gaze to her. “Indeed.”
It took everything she had to dredge up her smile, one she’d perfected over years of managing other people’s emotions, a faked expression to hide her own uncertainties that she’d thought left behind for good on Earth.
“Back to captaining then,” she said brightly.
His gold eye narrowed, and she was pitifully thankful the feelings button was in her pocket. “Back to making everyone else happy,” he rumbled.
Tossing back her hair—which had completely escaped her last scrunchie—she winked at him. “Oh, I got mine too.”
Before he could answer that, she shoved to her feet, fumbling at the neckline of her uniform to seal it higher. With her datpad clutched to her chest for extra protection, she fled from the salon.
Away from the lion-man pirate captain who—if he looked too deep with that one eye—might see everything else she wanted to say.
Chapter 10
Ellix watched her go, knowing he had more urgent commitments, even though every muscle in him twitched to give chase. He wanted to catch those flyaway strands of shiny yellow hair and bring her back to his side. Instead, he sank his claws into the cushions on either side to hold himself in place.
The way her smile had trembled, had she been angry or sad or…? Curse the infinite stars, where was a feelings button when he needed one? But then her smile had caught and widened, though her blue eyes still held a lurking shadow as cryptic as the disappearing distortion.
It had been the stress of the moment, he reassured himself, and maybe a touch of alien energy fluctuation. What had happened was just another anomaly in space-time, unknowably strange, potentially dangerous.
At least he hadn’t succumbed to the binding urge of the devotion bite. The imprint of his teeth would fade from her skin, but somehow he knew that the marks she’d left on him, with her yielding flesh and tender cries, had sunk deeper than any of the plasma cannon scars.
He shoved to his feet to resume his duties.
And next to the message cube in his pocket, he shoved her hair tie, which had come loose when he’d tangled his claws in her hair.
Stewing with dismay at his dereliction, he headed down to engineering. The module was sealed—Suvan didn’t allow anyone into his domain—but the portal yielded to his override code. Ellix stalked into the gloomy interior, raising his voice over the rumbling hum of the engines, louder than they should be. “How much longer?”
Suvan peered out from the guts of some half-deconstructed device strewn in pieces across the compartment. “I told you I’d tell you.” His large, pale eyes narrowed as he focused on Ellix. The goblhob leaped on his shoulder, chittering. “Lub says your halo is a mess.”
Ellix grumbled in the back of his throat. The Ravkajo engineer had the visual acuity to see energy fields; that was why his kind made such good engineers. At the moment, it was inconvenient. “My energy doesn’t matter. How do we counteract the anomaly?”
When the goblhob crowed out some garbled noise, Suvan held up a scanner—and aimed it directly at Ellix. “I see it, I see it,” he muttered. “Very messy.”
Ellix stiffened. “Is it the alien energy?” Had the med scans been wrong about not being infected—or impregnated?
“Yes, it’s all over you.” He held the scanner up higher, like an accusing eye. “Oh, not the anomaly. The Earther.”
