I snorted. “I should be. Been doing this long enough. Anyway, I like working on my armor. It’s soothing. Gives me a sense of control when the universe feels a bit too big.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t worry about that,” Nic said cheerfully. “Any sense of control is merely illusion. We are all just tiny specks in a cosmic system larger than we can possibly comprehend. You are no more out of control now than you have ever been.”
He clearly meant the words to be comforting, but the thought of being a speck didn’t exactly do it for me. Still, the ridiculous reply was enough to send me into a giggle fit. Nic tilted his head at my laughter, and I shook my head. “Sorry, sorry,” I said, returning to my boot. “I swear I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that you just remind me of my old roommate.”
“I could only hope so,” Nic said humbly. “Novascape always had a more innate understanding of the truths than I. To hear that I remind you of her is praise indeed.”
My head snapped back up. “How do you know Nova?”
Nic raised his pale eyebrows. “Can’t you see the resemblance? Novascape is my sister.”
“You’re Copernicus?” I said, louder than I’d meant to.
He smiled. “Only my family calls me that. Everyone else calls me Nic.”
“What the hell are you doing with Brenton?” I said, speaking right over him.
“Helping him,” Nic replied.
Suddenly, several things made a lot more sense. “God and king,” I muttered, rubbing my temple. “That’s how Rashid ended up the only good candidate on Wuxia. Nova told you everything over dinner.”
“Actually, Basil told me about the hiring,” Nic said with a smile. “He had a great deal to say about you.”
I bet he did.
“We suspected Caldswell would go to Wuxia,” Nic admitted. “He tries to keep his movements unpredictable, but the years have left him with certain habitual ruts, and Wuxia has long been his favorite repair port. I merely arranged to be in town when he arrived. After that, the setup was fairly simple.” He paused. “You’re not angry, I hope?”
I had to think about that one. “No,” I said at last. “I mean, I don’t like feeling like a chump, but Caldswell was the one who got played, not me. Still, how the hell did you end up on Brenton’s side? Nova said your dad put her on the Fool because he believed in Caldswell’s work. That puts you on the wrong end of things, doesn’t it?”
Nic’s face went suddenly serious. “My father’s beliefs do not always align with my own,” he said. “But he does not allow his will to impede the flow of his children’s. I believe in what Mr. Brenton is trying to do, and father believes in following one’s own path.”
Wish someone would have told my dad about that. He’d only believed in yelling. “So who is your father?” I asked. “How does he know about all this?” Because Mr. Starchild was now involved with two of the primary players in this supposedly secret game, and I was curious.
“Our father has a … complicated past,” Nic said quietly. “But such things mean nothing in a universe where time only flows forward. Wherever we were before, we are all now exactly where we are meant to be.”
“Right,” I muttered, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “So does Nova know what you do?”
“No,” Nic admitted. “I thought it best for her safety if I kept my involvement with Mr. Brenton to myself. Novascape does not possess a duplicitous soul.”
That was true. Nova kept secrets pretty well, but the girl couldn’t lie to save her life. But man, what a pair. Between Nova’s permanent position on the Glorious Fool and Nic acting as Brenton’s private plasmex factory, it was a miracle there were any Starchilds left. “Your family sure likes dangerous work.”
“Living is dangerous work,” Nic said serenely. “And invariably deadly.”
I chuckled at that, and Nic flashed me a warm smile. “I am pleased to share space in harmony with you at last, Deviana. My sister spoke so highly of you, it pained me to be seen as your enemy. I hope our future orbits will continue to be equilibrious.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at that one. “You really are her brother.”
“I would not be false with you,” Nic said, affronted.
“No, I mean you talk just like her.”
“We are children of the stars,” he said, like that explained everything—which it kind of did.
Nic glanced up at the cockpit, where Brenton was sitting in the pilot’s chair. “You really should try to get some rest,” he said softly, his face growing serious again. “We’ll be coming out of hyperspace in another few hours. Once we arrive, I do not know when you’ll get another chance.”
I still had the rest of my suit to clean, but I promised Nic I’d try. He smiled and returned to his seat, pulling up a star map on the projection around him that was almost as complicated as one of Basil’s. Meanwhile, I put my helmet back on and got back to scraping.
An hour later, I called it quits. My Lady was still dirtier than I liked, but without real tools, there was nothing else I could do. My guns weren’t much better. Sasha still had a clip and a half left, but Mia was down to one shot. I could have charged her off my suit, but it would have cost me a day of power and I wasn’t willing to risk it. One shot would have to be enough.
Once all my equipment was sorted out to my satisfaction, I put my armor back on and stretched out on the bench. I still didn’t trust Nic or Brenton enough to actually sleep, but I did doze. I must have been more tired than I thought, because I didn’t notice Brenton until his hand touched my shoulder.
“Showtime,” he said when I jerked away, flashing me a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. He walked back to the cockpit as I sat up, and since I was already suited, I stood and strolled after him to see what I’d gotten myself into.
A lot of nothing seemed to be the answer. Though we’d dropped out of hyperspace, which should have meant we were reasonably close to our destination, I didn’t see so much as a blip marking the asteroid we were supposedly headed for. I didn’t see any asteroids, actually, which was weird. In my experience, space rocks traveled in packs.
“Did we come out in the wrong place?”
“This is it,” Brenton said, easing the throttle forward, though with nothing outside, it didn’t feel like we were moving at all. “Patience, Miss Morris.”
I’m not patient on a good day, and I hadn’t had any of those for a while. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. About ten minutes after our departure from hyperspace, I felt a cold chill run up my spine, like someone was walking on my grave. When it passed, the space in front of us, which a second ago had been nothing but empty blackness, was now taken up by a large asteroid with no less than three xith’cal battle cruisers sitting in space around it.
I’m not ashamed to say I gasped. I’ve never actually seen a nonjunked xith’cal battleship up close. You usually didn’t want to, not unless you were also in a battleship. I’d heard they dwarfed even the Royal Cruisers, but even that didn’t prepare me for the sheer mass of the huge dark-green ships hulking above us like ugly giants looking for something to step on.
I expected Brenton to whip our little ship around and hit the thrusters, but he just kept flying forward, matching the asteroid’s slow spin as he piloted us toward the huge floodlit cave in the space rock’s side. This trajectory took us directly under the battle fleet, and as the xith’cal’s lights hit us, I felt the need to say something.
“Brenton,” I said with a calm I was not feeling. “Why is your asteroid surrounded by lizards?”
“Because it’s not my asteroid,” Brenton replied. “It’s theirs. They’re the experts I was talking about.”
And this was where even the appearance of calm went out the window. “What?” I shrieked. “This is who you’re taking me to see? The goddamn xith’cal?”
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” he said. “Haven’t you heard that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“I don’t care how many enemies away they are!” I cried. “Have you forgotten the part where the lizards want to enslave and eat our species?”
“No more than I’ve forgotten who made the virus that’s the only reason you’re still alive right now,” Brenton said, glaring up at me. “Where did you think I learned all that stuff about Stoneclaw from anyway?” He looked back at the rapidly approaching asteroid. “Relax, Deviana. This is a long-running arrangement. I have everything well in hand.”
I didn’t believe that for a second, and I was feeling decidedly less happy about the new alliance that Brenton and I had struck, but I kept my mouth shut as he navigated our little ship into the asteroid’s entrance as delicately as a tailor threading a needle.
The floodlit cave was too straight to be a natural formation. It ran a good three hundred feet into the black space rock before ending abruptly at a huge steel door that had started rolling open as soon as our ship passed the cave’s mouth. Inside, I could see a huge, brightly lit cavern, though the details were obscured by the blurry lens of the shield that kept the atmosphere from escaping.
Brenton cut the engines at the fifty-foot mark, and we floated the rest of the way, sliding through the thick shield like a slow-motion dive into a clear pond. The artificial gravity snagged us the second we were in, and Brenton hit the thrusters, jumping us up several feet before the ship’s fancy autopilot took over and set us down light as a falling leaf.
The cavern was just as artificial as the tunnel leading into it, an enormous carved-out hangar packed to the brim with ships, mostly smaller xith’cal fighters and what looked like civilian vessels, if the lizards could be said to have anything so civilized as civilian craft. But though the lizard ships took up most of the room, a small area toward the front corner seemed to have been designated for human ships. There were two at the moment, a small trade freighter not too dissimilar from Caldswell’s Fool and what looked like a six-man version of our little stealth ship. The human vessels were separated from the xith’cal ships by a wide stretch of empty pavement, and it was in this empty space that Brenton set us down.
As we landed, I took note of the lizards’ positions. Fortunately, most were well away from us, clustered on the hangar’s far side. None of them had suits on, which meant the air was breathable, though undoubtedly full of arsenic like the xith’cal preferred. It wouldn’t hurt me unless I sat around breathing it for days, but I sealed my Lady anyway. A virus was bad enough. No way was I adding poison on top of that so long as I had a viable clean air supply.
Nic lowered the walkway as soon as we were stable, but I waited to let Brenton go out first. After my experiences with Hyrek, I’d revised my shoot-all-xith’cal policy. Slightly. But I was not about to be the first one into the lion’s den when I wasn’t even getting paid for it. And despite Brenton’s claims that everything was under control, I put my suit in battle mode and kept it there as I followed him down the ramp to where a trio of the strangest-looking xith’cal I’d ever seen were waiting to greet us.
My best guess was that I was seeing living, healthy female xith’cal for the first time. Like the sick females I’d seen on the ghost ship, they were shockingly short, not much taller than I was in my suit. They were also bright green, greener even than Hyrek, and they wore what looked like long chains of delicate silver metal that jingled when they moved looped around their necks, arms, and over their stubby horns.
They watched us descend through slitted yellow eyes. When we reached the end of the ramp, the female at the front of the pack pulled on the largest of the chains wrapped around her wrist. A second later, a small shape shuffled out from behind her. It was so stooped and dirty I thought it must be some kind of alien dog at first, but then the female xith’cal jerked the chain again, and the thing straightened up, turning a small, frightened face in our direction.