Page 36 of Crush
Obviously unconvinced, Adeline grabbed him. “We have to find Oliver.”
“Yes.” Lifting her off her feet, he anchored her to his side and followed Kinsley’s fading heat signature out of the rooms. “I would rather leave you here or take you to the med bay,” he informed her.
“But—”
“But I know you would not stay.”
She wrapped her arm tight around his neck. “What are the orc laws regarding abducting a child?”
“Since our hatchling rate is so low, even stricter than mutiny.” With his free hand, he tapped at his datpad. “I’m finding no evidence of increased system usage that would indicate hidden comm chatter. Dorn may be working alone.” Not that it took more than four arms to steal a rock and a child. “I’m putting a stop code on the shuttles and the shuttle bay doors. But Dorn has enough seniority and skill to challenge my codes. Once Sil knows what’s happening, he’ll be able to lock the ship tight.”
Adeline’s grip nearly strangled him. “Teq, he can’t… He just can’t…”
He didn’t need her to share all the words; hefeltthem tearing through him. “He won’t.”
“This is everything I was afraid of back on Earth.”
Losing Oliver, with no power to stop it. But it was his deepest fear too: to feel this much. He was a crusher, but he didn’t want tobecrushed.
He had to fight for them both.
“I need a weapon,” Adeline said.
He almost laughed. She’d been terrified, attacked, knocked unconscious—and she was ready to fight too.
“You have me,” he told her.
To his surprise, she pressed her lips to his cheek, just above his tusk. His pounding strides never faltered, but his heart skipped a beat.
When they got to the processing bay, it was cold and dark, just as the rock had said—and empty.
“Where are they?” Adeline’s broken whisper stabbed him.
“I was hoping to pick up a trace from Oliver,” he said. “But I don’t think they left from here to the shuttle bay.” Vug. Orcs ran cooler than Earthers, and theDeepWanderwas saturated with their presence, making a followable track from Dorn essentially invisible. And the rock wasn’t talking to him.
The only other way off the ship…
He reversed course. “Dorn tried to get Kinsley to help him. If he is working with someone else besides her, they may be coming to retrieve him and the rock.”
And the weakest spot in the ship was the main ore processing bay.
Bigger than the gather-hall, with more hazardous machinery than the secondary bay, capable of swallowing huge chunks of interstellar debris and spitting out gravel, the main bay was dark and cold—and not empty.
“I believe Ollie is here,” Teq murmured to Adeline as he carried her within. Though too full of machinery to echo, the room felt like a section of space itself, briefly captured. “I sense—”
“Maaaaaaah-meeee!”
She twisted against his hold until he set her on her feet. She didn’t falter, just fell into stride with him, all but running. “You stop Dorn. I’ll get Ollie.”
Near the hatch, the grappler twisted on its upper gimbal toward them, glaring its array of lights. “Stop!” Dorn’s command blared through the grappler’s loudspeaker. “I will tear this ship apart—and the rock and hatchling too!”
The grappler was a colossal exoskeleton, built to enhance the bay crew’s ability to grab and haul rock—and it could crush the locked hatch, no problem. It stood twice as tall as an orc, and each phalange bristling at the end of its four pincers was almost as long as Teq’s arm. It was a tough, powerful machine, although it was stiff and slow.
It was Teq’s favorite—maybe he related to it a little too much?—and now he would destroy it without hesitation to retrieve one squishy alien hatchling and a pet rock.
He swung to one side of the grappler, gently nudging Adeline the other way, though every instinct in him demanded he keep her close. “Dorn,” he called, wanting the other orc’s focus on him. “What the vug are you thinking?”
“I’m saving theDeepWander. Mag is wasting this chance at a fortune. But if he can’t hold onto it, I want it.”
