Page 5 of Shattered Silence

Why the stupid alien had chosen to latch onto him of all creatures, he would never know.

“Uh, Captain?” Once again she broke through his thoughts, and Enki found himself wondering what she looked like. In truth, when she wasn’t warbling, her voice wasn’t entirely… unpleasant.

“I am not the captain.”

A pause. “You have a name, don’t you?”

“I do.” Enki didn’t feel like telling this Layla his name just yet. It occurred to him that outside the First Division, nobody knew him. Even the ordinary soldiers saw him as just another one to steer clear of, and they certainly didn’t know him by name.

“Well…” She muttered something under her breath in human-speak, something that sounded suspiciously like a curse-word. “Then what should I call you?”

“For someone who is in need of assistance, you ask a lot of questions. Wait there and keep your signal open. It is the only way we can track you. We will find you.”

And pray the pirates don’t reach you before we do.

Was that the Tharian speaking, or just his own thoughts? Sometimes, he couldn’t tell.

“Huh.” The human on the other side made an indignant sound, probably unaware that Enki’s hearing was sensitive enough to catch her soft breathing and detect the rustle of fabric against skin. He heard the scuff of her feet against the floor and the soft, despondent sigh that escaped her lips.

Somehow, he got the feeling she was…

“You are alone, aren’t you?” he asked, not really meaning to go there. But for some reason—probably because of her hopeless predicament—this female made him react, made him question, made him speak more than he had in a very long time.

“Unfortunately, yeah. Th-they’re all gone.”

And suddenly, part of Enki could almost empathize with her situation, because he had been there once before.

Stuck on a planet full of ghosts.

Left for dead.

None of that would have happened if your kind had just kept away from Tharos, but you just can’t help it. Destruction’s in your blood, isn’t it, Kordolian?

Shut up.

Inside his head, the Tharian just laughed.

Chapter Two

Layla hugged her knees and curled up into a ball. Sitting on the floor of the escape pod, she bit her hand, trying not to sob. A tangle of emotions swirled inside her chest—sadness, despair, relief.

For the past few days, she’d been preparing herself for the inevitability of death, for the bone-chilling reality that nobody was coming.

But then, against all odds, someone had found her.

She’d been singing an old Earth song about love, despair, and madness when the man’s sharp command—in some strange alien language—filtered through the speakers.

Oh, crap. That was her first thought, because her singing voice was fucking terrible.

Her second thought was that she must be hallucinating.

It had been so long since she’d heard another voice, and time flowed like thick, sticky syrup in this confined space.

Slow as fuck.

Layla had nothing to look at but the four walls surrounding her and the cold, glittering canopy of space, visible through a single port-hole. The pod’s exterior cameras weren’t working for some reason—the blank holoview told her that much. All she could see was a narrow sliver of the Universe, slightly distorted through the thick synth-glass of the window.

At the very edge of her view, she could just make out the damaged shell of her passenger transport, the Starship Malachi.

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