Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(69)
“We’re in the red zone,” I said softly. “That means trying all angles to survive. If playing by the rules means waiting to die, I just can’t.”
Still, her sensible fear was rubbing off on me. Maybe I’d screwed up in a colossal way, announcing our weakness to somebody inclined to exploit it. I didn’t have a monumental amount of trust in strangers, come to that. I didn’t even trust most friends.
She seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “The Leviathan aren’t all gentle. Remember Typhon? What if this one’s . . . gone rogue? What if the crew are pirates or scavengers? I have a bad feeling about this, Zara.”
The continued comm silence felt ominous; that was for damn sure. Because I couldn’t just stand still, I got to work on the console. Maybe I could at least get a decent tracking on the approaching ship. With some searching, I located their signal. We watched the trajectory for a while.
“They’re coming in,” Bea said, and looked up from the console at me. Our eyes met and held, and I nodded.
“Let’s try the comm again.” I sent two more messages. No response at all this time. Panic wouldn’t help, so I considered why they might not answer. “Maybe they’re having technical problems?”
“You think?” Bea sounded dubious.
On the third try, we got the same sounds I couldn’t process before. “Damn, what is up with this translator?”
“Low-power mode,” Bea said. “It’s pretty worthless right now. The sounds have a pattern, but I don’t have the experience to translate this. Do we have anything in our database . . . ?” She started searching frantically, but we only found logs and Honors material, nothing related to exo-translation. Probably deliberately, since the Leviathan didn’t want us ugly, violent humans messing up foreign relations.
“They’re coming in fast,” I said.
We couldn’t manually vanish walls or ceilings with Nadim out of it, but I watched their Leviathan close on the console screen. I let out a nervous breath.
Then a little blip split off from the main bulk.
“Their Hopper’s been deployed. Zara—”
“I know, I see it.”
“What should we do?” A light came on, messages scrolled, and a warning tone sounded. “They’ve overriding our docking bay doors!”
More alien chatter came across the comm, but we had no idea if it was an offer of help or a demand for surrender. “I’ll go.”
“You’ll need a skinsuit. Life support’s already down in the docking area.”
Yeah, that was a hot, fresh reminder of how screwed we were and why I’d beamed an SOS in the first place.
My suit was still being repaired, so Bea offered to get hers, but before she could, the console warning tone got louder. An automated voice said, “Interior breach, docking bay. Unauthorized personnel detected.” The computer went on about how we should respond to the intrusion, but we’d already activated our distress beacon, and Nadim was still out.
None of the standard protocol helped.
This is what you get for breaking the rules in deep space. Guilt and remorse had no place in what was about to go down, though, so I sealed those emotions away. Bea grabbed my arm, thirty seconds from a meltdown. I shook her off and defaulted to what I did best, sprinting to the weapons locker to grab a few options at random. Whatever was coming, I needed to face it full-on.
Squaring my shoulders, I took a deep breath. I was about to meet an alien, and all my bravado aside, I wasn’t ready. This wasn’t a Leviathan, after all. I’d grown up knowing about them from countless holos. This was coming face-to-face with the unknown . . . and I’d invited it in. I knew how bad that could be. I’d seen the old horror vids.
When I got back to the hub, Bea was peering at the console, her hands shaking. “It’s heading this way!”
“How many?” I asked.
“Just one? I think? The reading is—yes, it’s one.”
I confirmed that with a glance at the biothermal signature and relaxed a touch. If it had bad intentions, at least the odds were even, though I was assuming it didn’t have tech that could melt my brain or disperse me into atomic dust. Turning to Bea, I said, “Find some place to hide.”
She gave me a doubtful look, but I shook my head. Bea was great, but if this went sideways, she needed to survive to protect Nadim. She paused to give my arm a squeeze, a last, wordless message of good-bye and courage, and then she took off.
It didn’t take much studying of the console to figure out that our intruder was heading straight for us. I realized that the lights were getting dimmer. Normally Nadim’s natural bioluminescent glow provided sufficient light for me to navigate; when I checked the console, I saw we were operating on auxiliary power now, conserving resources to keep our life support on longer. Nadim was starting to ration his resources.
Great. Darkness and an unknown trespasser.
I intercepted the alien just outside the hub, and it was big. Topped me by at least a meter, and it was far wider. More importantly, it wasn’t remotely human.
My brain went on strike and refused to make sense of what it was seeing; to reconcile the number of limbs, the configuration, with something in our human database. I forced myself to calm down and slow my rapid breathing.
The creature, whatever it was, wore a skinsuit and a mask, though in its case the mask was more like a misshapen helmet. Its head was elongated, and not even the skinsuit disguised that it had a multiplicity of eyes behind that visor.