Page 33 of Hijack!
Ellix sputtered, though no actual words emerged in any translatable language.
“Like that, was it?” Suvan threw down the scanner with the derisive snort, scattering pieces of his project. “Did you learn nothing from all our lightyears between suns with no one around?”
Despite his embarrassment, Ellix grunted out the sound of amusement. “I learned that Ravkajo cheat at nexum-dice.”
“Not my fault that my people are cunning mechanics while your people are prone to random acts of heroism.”
Ellix winced. “You’ll never forgive me for that, will you?”
“Never. What freighter company will ever take us back when we steeredintoa pirate fight instead of away?”
Lub made a sad sound, and Suvan patted its mottled, bristly hide in condolence. “At least we have this fascinating old engine.”
“That is racing us to an unknown location,” Ellix noted.
Suvan waved his fingers in rejection. “That’s a nav problem.”
“So can you nullify the energy?”
“The stuttering little Monbrakkan sent me the readings she grabbed when the anomaly finally coalesced. The distortion is complex, nothing I’ve seen before, and it seems entwined with the ship’s systems—or maybe it’s passengers.”
“Haunted,” Ellix murmured.
Instead of scoffing as Ellix expected, Suvan hesitated, and Lub whined across a cracked octave. “In the sense that in Earther parlance, a haunting is a lingering energy signature somehow linked to a discreet object…” He waved his hand in another repudiating gesture. “But I have yet to encounter a wavelength I couldn’t control.”
Ellix rubbed one of the scorched patches in his fur. Technically, those scars were from Felicity’s fire, not the distortion itself, but he wasn’t feeling at all happy about how control was beginning to feel like a delusion.
“So how do we capture a wavelength?” he mused.
“It’s true there aren’t many options for a containment unit,” Suvan said. “Not with the limited resources on this ship. And I suspect you won’t like any of them.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” Ellix said wryly. “Let me gather the crew and ping me in the command module.”
The Ravkajo’s pale eyes gleamed in the murk. “Why did you respond to the distress beacon when you knew as well as I did that it was likely false?”
Ellix clenched his jaw, remembering the freightliner board demanding an answer to that same question when he’d still been huffing the stink of his own scorched fur. His reply had been…anatomically unlikely, even compared to the IDA handbooks’ more creative scenarios. But he’d been furious—at the board, at the pirates, at himself.
When he shoved his hand in his pocket, his knuckles compressed Felicity’s hair tie. “Does it matter?” He’d quoted interstellar law and denounced the company’s callousness, but he’d known he wasn’t telling all the truth. He wasn’t sure why he shared it now with the irascible engineer. “Maybe if I cried out in the darkness, I’d just want someone to answer.”
He turned away before he had to witness Suvan’s expression. But for once, even Lub was silent.
Regretting the moment of vulnerability, he shook the tangling hair tie from his fingers and left the struggling deep whine of the engines behind him.
His comm indicated Felicity was in the jump lifepod with the passengers. Which was where he’d told her to stay, so he wasn’t sure why he lurked in one of the corridor alcoves outside, hoping she’d emerge. And then, when she did, his pulse accelerated like it wanted to outrace the ship.
He snagged her elbow as she passed, tugging her into the niche.
She let out only a small gasp, as if she wasn’t very surprised at his presence. In the soft glow of the fairy lightning, her Earther blue eyes took on a mysterious deeper hue like some uncharted region of space.
“Captain.” Despite their intimate proximity, her tone was precisely formal. “We’ll need another plan for our guests soon.” She turned her attention to her datpad. “I’m requesting that you review the order confining them to the lifepod. It’s too late for good reviews, but for humanitarian reasons, we can’t keep them locked up indefinitely.”
Her stiff reserve made his whiskers twitch. When he’d first presented himself to the crew, he’d known she was nervous around him, but somehow, this diffidence was worse. “I suppose we can’t just jettison them into space.”
“Well, that would guarantee bad reviews.”
For all his tension and regret and uncertainty, amusement twinkled through him like starlight. He held out the hair tie. “You forgot this.”
Hectic color suffused her cheeks and fanned across the shallow V of her tunic—which she hadn’t quite sealed all the way to the top, as if… Nay, he would not ascribe meaning to that scant finger length of flushed flesh. He’d been derelict in his duty before; if this was the wrong spacetime for amusement, it was even more wrong for desire.
