Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)(43)

Kal looks ready to dish out some more insults, but before he can speak, a voice crackles over comms.

“Goldenboy, you read me okay?”

Tyler taps his uniglass. “We read, Fin, what’s your status?”

“Well, I’m down in the hold and I gotta tell you, this is about the scariest thing I’ve seen since I walked in on my third grandparents when I was twelve.”

“Explain.”

“Well, I had a med appointment that got canceled and I came home early and found my grandmother and grandfather with a bowl of sagarine and a twelve-inch—”

“Maker’s breath, Finian, I mean explain about the hold!” Tyler snaps.

“Oh,” Finian replies. “Right. Well, I’m not sure how our little stowaway did it, but the inner doors have been peeled open like those things you dirt farmers eat. I can’t remember what they’re called. … They’re round. Orange colored.”

“You mean oranges?”

“Yeah, whatever. Point is, these doors are made from case-hardened carbite and titanium. And she bent them open like they were cardboard.”

“Flush her, Tyler,” Cat says.

Kal pushes off the wall, looming over Cat, his voice cold as ice.

“You will not hurt her.”

I suck my bottom lip, noting the calm in Kal’s voice versus the intensity in his eyes. Syldrathi body language can be tough to read far beyond We are soooo much better than you and yes, we know it, but for a girl he was being a complete jackass to twelve hours ago, Kal looks ready to tear Cat apart if she so much as blinks at Aurora wrong.

Cat’s a foot shorter than Kal—maybe a little more right now, with her fauxhawk flattened by sleep. But never one to back down, our Ace squares up against our Tank. “You heard what she did in the hold, Pixieboy! In case you flunked mechaneering, our hull is built out of exactly the same material as those doors. And she buggered with my flight controls. How could she know how to do that if she’s been drifting in the Fold for two hundred years? This girl is not what she seems.”

“I agree,” Kal says simply. “Which is exactly why you will not touch her.”

Aurora groans and at least three disruptors immediately swing back in her direction. Kal steps in, eyes locked on Tyler.

“Sir,” he says. “If Aurora wished your sister dead, she would be dead. You saw what she did to those GIA operatives.”

“I surely did.” Tyler looks at the stirring girl, and I can practically see the cogs turning behind his eyes. “What course did she lock into the navcom, Cat?”

Our Ace blinks, lowers her weapon. Turning to her pilot’s console, she wipes off Aurora’s nose blood with a muttered curse, stabs in a series of commands.

“Sempiternity,” she finally says.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“You never heard of the World Ship?” Cat blinks.

“Astrography isn’t my forte,” I reply. “I remember sleeping through most of it.”

“I remember you sleeping with—”

“Sempiternity,” a small chirpy voice twitters, and Tyler’s old uniglass lights up inside Aurora’s breast pocket. “Also known as the World Ship. Located deep in the Neutral Zone, Sempiternity is a trading hub, outside any governmental jurisdiction, run by … interstellar entrepreneurs.”

“It means space pirates,” Cat offers.

“I was trying to be polite,” the device says.

“Silent mode,” Tyler growls.

“Aw.”

The uniglass falls silent as Cat calls up a 3-D schematic of Sempiternity over the center console. It’s an enormous collection of hundreds of thousands of ships, all different makes and models and sizes, bolted and welded and crushed together into a vast lopsided sphere. Beautiful. Hideous. Every kind of impossible.

“Sempiternity started as a single starport,” Cat explains. “Run by a freebooter cartel. Pirate crews would unload there, sell their spoils, head out for more. But over the past fifty years it’s accumulated more and more extensions. Ships that decide to stay and just attach themselves to the superstructure. Place goes on forever now. It’s as big as a small moon. Hence the name. The World Ship.”

I look at Aurora, still slumped in her chair. “So why does she want us to go there?”

As if she senses that I’m talking about her, Aurora groans and slowly lifts her head. Wincing with pain, she realizes there’s three disruptors pointed at her face. Her mismatched eyes go wide, then narrow as she realizes she’s in restraints. That she can taste blood on her lips.

“Um,” she says. “If this is another vision, I’d like to wake up, please.”

“You call that an apology?” I ask.

“W-what am I apologizing for?” She winces again, slowly rolling her shoulders and neck. “And … why do I feel like I was in … a c-car accident?”

“What, you don’t remember slamming me against the wall without touching me? Or Zila hitting you with half a dozen disruptor blasts?”

A kaleidoscope of emotions cross her face. Fear. Dismay. Frustration. Genuine confusion. Looking around and realizing she’s not in the room she went to sleep in. Licking her lips and tasting blood.

“N-no,” she says.