"Saving your damn ship!" I snapped, working fast. "You have an emergency bypass for this, right? A hardline switch that lets you manually cut bridge power from everything except primary control?"
His jaw tightened, but I could tell he was impressed I even knew to ask that.
"Right side, second module." He pressed out.
I reached for it—and jerked my hand back as a sharp arc of energy snapped toward my fingers.
"Shit!" My heart slammed against my ribs.
The overload was getting worse. If I cut power too soon, I could short the whole bridge—but if I waited too long, the Ohrurs would take full control.
No time for finesse.
I gritted my teeth, yanked my jacket sleeve over my hand, and grabbed the module. A sharp jolt of alien energy surged through my arm, making my fingers tingle—but I held on and ripped the relay free. The result was instantaneous.
The bridge shuddered, and lights flickered as the ship’s power grid rerouted itself, forcing manual control back to Xyrek’s command chair.
The screens flashed—and suddenly, all the Ohrur overrides vanished. I sagged against the panel, chest heaving, fingers numb from the residual shock. Xyrek exhaled hard, running a quick systems check. Then he turned toward me, his eyes gleamed with something that might have resembled reluctant appreciation.
"You could have killed yourself."
I smirked, still catching my breath. "Yeah? Well, you could’ve lost your damn ship."
Silence stretched between us for a few moments. Then, to my shock, Xyrek huffed a low, dry laugh. "Maybe you’re not completely useless after all, engineer."
I shot him a mock glare as I pulled myself back to my feet. "High praise, Captain Asshole. Truly."
His smirk lingered for half a second longer than usual before he turned back to the controls. I rolled my aching shoulder and glanced at the still-smoking power junction. Yeah. I wasn’t useless. And something told me Xyrek wouldn’t forget that anytime soon.
XYREK
Damn,that female managed to impress me. Nobody had ever done that, not like her. The evidence of the tinkering I had seen so far had been mediocre at best, but what she pulled earlier today? I was still shaking my head when I thought about it.
Never in a hundred years would I have thought it would be that hard to override the Ohrur's programming. It seemed like they already had experience doing it, as if others had… a thought occurred to me. Of course, others had. Every ship belonging to the Ohrurs was equipped with recall orders. I should have thought about it when they sent me on the hunt to find thetraitors. If that's what they really were. The deeper I got into this mystery and the more I discovered, the more convinced I became that they weren't traitors. It was more than likely that we shared a common goal.
"Here," I shoved the kit of tools into Alice's hands. "You've earned it. Just don't dismantle my ship."
She opened the box, and her entire face lit up in pleasure. "Thank you!"
I grunted a response and threw myself on the chair, calling up several cubes I had open from previous searches, only peripherally aware of Alice chasing down one of the cleaning drones and beginning to dismantle it with her new tools.
Earlier, I had watched Nock's stream about mating marks, but it hadn't given me any information I didn’t already know, except that I couldn't find anything onunexpectedorinterspeciesmating marks as he had claimed. My mind worked furiously; the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that Zaarek must have experienced something similar to what Alice and I shared. Nock was with Zaarek—for whatever unfathomable reason—and he had more or less put out an open invitation for every Space Guardian to go to UX938.
I ran a quick analysis to see if I could make it there in time, but every scenario the computer played out told me I would get there days after them. Zaarek was a Space Guardian; he would never risk hanging around the space station long enough for others to catch up with him. When Nock broadcast his stream, he must have been in relatively close range.
He had been looking for someone!
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. He must have been looking for the other three Space Guardians assigned to the Pandraxian mission. He was trying to get all of us together.
It made sense, but unfortunately, that didn't help me. I would never make it to UX938 in time, and wherever they went from there, it would be like trying to find a particular star in a cluster.
Tomorrow, we would reach Astrionis, and I would be rid of my cargo. Lord Protector Garth might know something that would help me if I were lucky. The others must have crossed paths with him. We had all followed the same orders, and if they had fallen into the mating trap, it was only logical to assume they had more than one human aboard. And if they did, further logic dictated they had wanted to get rid of them as badly as I did.
A small curse from Alice ripped me from my thoughts. I followed her line of sight to the cleaning drone she had taken apart, which was now banging its case repeatedly against the wall. My lips curled up in amusement. I should have been annoyed that she destroyed another drone, but I wasn't. Not a bit. Instead, I watched her face crease in concentration as she looked over the bits and pieces that had been left over after she put the drone back together.
I wasn't sure what possessed me, but I got up and walked over to her, kneeling in front of her. I picked up a small part and held it up to her. "That's the stabilizer."
"Oops," she laughed.
