Page 31 of Ava Greasemonkey

Ava and Ebel looked at each other with twin worried expressions. Ebel checked other channels and then his com screen.

“All internal communications are down. Everything is down. Even the backups we had from the hacking attempt a few years ago are down.” He was frenzied, typing furiously on his keyboard.

Ava ran to her computer to double-check, touching the liquid screen rapidly. Nothing was loading. Even the card game she had up before was now a static screen. Her com watch was unable to get a signal from the Phor mainframe.

The engine was still moving though. The grind of the gears was apparent to her even now. In fact, they sounded louder than before with the computers no longer buzzing in the background.

“Shit, shit shit.” Ebel looked panicked, poking at his useless com on his wrist. His antennas were flying.

Ava halfheartedly pushed a button on the food processor. That still worked—it pushed out more pasta to her a second later.

They were completely blind down in the engine hall, cut off from everything happening in the rest of the ship. Ava bit her lip in thought and made a decision. It was the Vorbax, after all. They were just after the Tuxa. She was not afraid of them. And they were now . . . free?

“I’ll go up in the vents and look. Ebel, you lock yourself in here. I’ll be back fast.”

Ebel didn’t answer. He just stared his static screens blankly. Part of him seemed to have short-circuited.

Ava patted his back and threw on the thermal suit faster than she ever had before. Within a minute she was up in the vents, not even feeling the climb out of the engine hall with her adrenaline pumping. She moved fast, not caring about being silent.

At the top of the shaft, Ava didn’t know which way to go. The last she saw they were leaving the prisoner hold, so she startedin that direction. Halfway though, she heard voices yelling overhead, in the section that contained the crew quarters and navigation. She turned at the next upward vent and climbed that, her magnetic bracers holding tight to the sides to get to that area.

She stopped at the first grate on the level to look out. Everything appeared normal. No activity. But not silence. She could hear screams, far off toward the starboard side, and moved that way.

Ava kept checking grates along the way and gasped when she finally saw something different. She quickly flattened her body against the grate to get a better look. Outside, there was a bloodstain running the length of the plain metal wall, ending in one of the fuzzy Haroo contractors lying in an unnatural pose. A pool of blood was around his body.

Ava stared at him in horror, at the stillness of his body.

He was dead.

Now she was afraid. Her palms slid on the vents from sweat. The Vorbax. They must have killed him. On the feeds, the Tuxa were killed much the same way. Vox . . . he seemed like a friend almost, how could he be capable of . . . this?

Her dreams of escaping with them, of living in peace and joining them, felt like chalk on her tongue. She had been delusional about their true nature if this is what they were capable of.

With the Haroo dead, it was clear they weren’t just getting revenge on the Tuxa. They were killing things not involved in their conflict at all. That Haroo was innocent.

She turned away from the broken Haroo and continued following the vent path. She was much quieter now, not wanting to alert them to her presence. She came across more dead bodies, gasping when she noticed that several were Phor, all swiftly executed, and a few other Haroo contractors on the ship.The concentration of dead bodies was becoming greater the closer she got toward navigation.

Navigation. They were heading for navigation.

Nuor.

Nuor was stationed there, and had been practically living there the last few cycles due to the asteroid belt.

Ava picked up her pace. She had to either warn her or see for herself what was happening. Her mind was scrambled. If she had to she could pull Nuor into the vents somehow, or help her hide. Ava was moving faster, clambering into a partition, when she felt a touch on her mind that made her freeze in place from the contact.

“Interesting . . .”a voice murmured. It spoke perfect Common in her mind, not in the robotic voice of the translator.

“What . . . ?”she thought almost automatically, followed by questioning her sanity.

“Hmmm . . . no, not insane. No space rat either.”

Ava, startled, resumed moving toward navigation. The voice chuckled hauntingly in her head. She moved to the nearest grate, and she saw a Vorbax looking up, standing right under where she lay. His large, callous, amber eyes appeared trained right on where she was hidden in the vent above. It was the largest of the four, Rhutg, the one that was always sleeping.

Neither she nor Rhutg moved. He continued glowing and waiting. Ava felt her mind being scanned. It reminded her of when she was weighed and measured in the Human nursery. The same feeling of impersonal judgment and nowhere to hide from it. She got angry.

Get out!She gritted her teeth and tried to move away, but it felt like her limbs were resisting. Her hands trembled as she tried to move her arm forward.

“Hmm . . . no, this is far too interesting. It is like another world being able to connect to you. What are your intentions? Other than to flee. Which . . .”

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