Page 109 of Shellshock

“It’s the newest version I found,” he said. She considered it for a long moment, then tucked it into her pouch. His eyes followed the motion, his brow mildly lowering.“You don’t want it?”

“I do, but just between us, maybe I could do another day or two like this.” Maybe she would leave it out for a while—until the language divide became seamless.

He cuddled her at bedtime, holding her until she fell asleep, snoozing on his arm.

She woke the next morning to find him in the cockpit, surprisingly quiet, eyes fixated on the pure darkness ahead.

CHAPTER21

LUCCA

Months slipped away faster than expected.

They flew hard against the void. The scale was different out here. More exponentially massive. She even caught Caligher being thrown out of sorts by how utterly, utterly vast everything was.

A bright red star that she hadn’t noticed before gleamed on the horizon. Of course, it wasn’t a star at all. Stars maintained their distance. They closed in on this object fast.

Perhaps a planet, then. Or a moon.

“Pretty…” she said.

“Mm,” agreed Caligher. He was wiring a tiny robot together to her right. She smiled to herself, feeling oddly content as space zipped by. The object grew steadily brighter, larger. Less like a planet and more like a moon.

And then it wasn’t like a moon at all.

“Cal… Cal, that’s your ship.”

He chuckled. The robot in his hands began beeping and he dropped it to the floor to let it skitter off.

“No, I’m serious! That’s your ship!”

“Oh. I can’t believe it…! He thought he could beat us there. Let’s see if we can overtake him.”

“Yes, let’s!”

They raced up close enough to reach the pirate over the comms. “Hail!” she said. Static crackled on the other end of the line but the pirate remained silent. “Is he seriously avoiding me now?”

A blast of light came off the back end of the ship, and Caligher steered them out of its trajectory.

“That asshole!” she said. “He’s trying to shoot us? I’m bringing up the shields.”

“Let me fly. Can you lock onto my old gravity drive?”

“Um… I think so.”

“Do it. Bring it down!”

“On it.”

Caligher veered them in and out between the attacks streaking by. He’d entrusted remote control over the entire thing to her long ago, and it seemed the pirate never changed the locks—probably because he didn’t knowhow. Not with whatever Caligher had done to the spacecraft.

Either way, she held the keys to Wingless.

“It flew better with the wing dangling off,” Caligher whined. “No one else knows what that thing can do.”

“Still, it is going pretty fast.” She struggled to keep a lock on their target. The signal kept disengaging.

“Fear not. Your ship will go faster.”

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