Page 30 of The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
Dejo touched his pad which highlighted a section on Nor’s. “No, he was definitely interested in the singularity for reasons beyond the disguisingradiation.”
Nor peered at the emphasized section. “He had all the station’s sensors aimed at the black hole. But nothing escapes the event horizon, so what was he looking for?”
“He was watching what wentin,” Dejo said.
The dat-pad showed a sensor recording of a small object launching from the space station toward the black hole. Nor peered at the screen. “He was ejecting the station’s emergencylife pods?” Probably more accurate to call them death pods, considering their lethal trajectory toward the infinitely crushing gravitational forces of the singularity. “What was he…?”
The pad switched to another view, from earlier according to the time stamp, taken from one of the corridor security vids. The station had been in hibernation mode, mostly powered down, so the lighting was poor.But the vid had enough extrapolated detail to show a tall, dark-haired, Thorkon male hefting a smaller figure, limp in his arms, and opening the hatch on an emergency pod. He slid the figure into the pod, tucking the trailing hem of the white shift inside.
Nor gripped the stone balustrade on either side of the dat-pad, watching. If Blackworm’s neck had been between his palms…
Blackworm steppedback, sealed the hatch, and triggered the release.
“That could’ve been my sister,” Vaughn growled. “Shewassomebody’s sister or friend or…” She clamped her jaw shut.
Dejo put an arm around her shoulders and leaned his feathered head toward her as if he was sheltering her, even from her own helpless anger. “We know some of the Earther women Blackworm abducted were signed on with the IntergalacticDating Agency. The Big Sky outpost had records that we’re analyzing to find out who they were, besides Rayna and the other four that the duke recovered. But as Rayna discovered, the mercenary crew Blackworm hired to transport his victims wasn’t always so selective. They took women from Sunset Falls and other Montana towns who never agreed to be part of the alien bride program. We may never knowwho those were.”
Just closed-world innocents, going about their days, never dreaming they’d be abducted to a fate of eternal darkness. Innocents like Trixie.
Nor scrolled quickly through more of the dates on the security recordings. Blackworm had made many such trips to the life pods. Fury tightened Nor’s voice when he asked, “Is there some other way to find out who they were?” The ones who’dbeen sent into the black hole couldn’t be saved, obviously, but they could at least be remembered.
“The neural gel we left in the station’s data core is building a timeline of every moment the station was in Blackworm’s possession,” Dejo said. “It’ll cross-reference security vids, any internal or external controls that were accessed, all communications channels. After it compiles, we’ll havea better idea of what all happened.”
“But there’s only so much we can do remotely,” Vaughn said. “If you send a technical team to the station to take physical samples, we might be able to cross-reference DNA swabs with the people we know were on the station…to the ones we don’t know.” Her brown eyes, so like Rayna’s, glinted, fierce and furious. “We’ll find out who they were, and we’ll make surethe authorities add another lifetime to Blackworm’s sentence for each of those missing women.”
The Quaye sisters were their own force of nature, like reverse black holes, spewing righteous justice into Azthronos. No wonder his oh-so proper ducal brother was enamored with the Earther commoner.
For a moment, Nor’s belly tightened, like a strange sort of starvation. How nice for Raz and the Quayesisters and even the erstwhile data thief Dejo Jinn to rally against a disgraced nobleman’s wicked ways. If the many gods of Thorkon—or, say, trans-galactic legal systems—were weighing good and evil, likely Nor would land on the same side of the scale as Blackworm.
He shoved down the resentful thought. He’d bought his way into semi legitimacy. Certainly that counted for something. Counted bya rather bogglingly large number of galactic credits.
“I’ll send the team,” he said curtly. “I assume the neural gel will create a map of the most likely places to swab for identifying samples?”
Dejo nodded. “I’ll have the gel ping your dat-pad whenever it has a likely location. Although even if we do make identifications, the galactic council likely won’t approve reaching out to the closed-worldfamilies who are wondering what happened to the women.”
Vaughn lifted her chin, the jutting bone as blunt and pugnacious as the honed bore of a plasma rifle. “They won’t be forgotten,” she vowed. “We’ll make sure of that.”
Her reference to “we” probably didn’t include him, but Nor nodded anyway. What if Trixie had been one of those girls, gone forever, with no one knowing? The thought of hertouchable little body atomized by the tidal forces of the singularity wrenched him as hard as thoughhe’dbeen captured by those inescapable forces. If he’d never known her…
“Since theGrandyis docked for maintenance, I’ll lead the team myself,” he said. “We’ll get you the rest of the data you need.”
It wouldn’t be of any practical help to the women who’d died in the black hole’s pitiless pull,and as Dejo had pointed out it probably wouldn’t even benefit their families. And Nor considered himself brutally practical, so he wasn’t sure why he had volunteered his efforts. But since he didn’t have anything else to do at the moment…
Except fall back into bed with Trixie.
He signed off with Dejo and Vaughn but kept his gaze painstakingly on his dat-pad as he left the balcony and passedTrixie’s door.
He couldn’t help the Black Hole Brides who were lost forever, but he could at least save himself from the irresistible attraction of one small Earther girl.
