Honour's Knight (16 page)

Caldswell’s face had gone suspiciously blank when his daughter entered the room. That didn’t change as she talked, but I could see his fingers tightening on the worn arms of his chair. Whatever she had to say didn’t take long, and the moment she was done, Caldswell burst into action.

“Basil,” he ordered, swinging his chair around to the console in front of him. “Get me the gate commander, emergency channel. Then call over to the dock office and tell them I want immediate takeoff clearance.”

Basil stared at the captain for a second, which was a second too long for Caldswell. “Now!” the captain snapped.

The aeon jumped and grabbed his headset, whistling into it frantically. But the captain wasn’t done. “Nova,” he said, hitting the com. “Have these coordinates ready for the gate when it patches in for the jump: 34H-3848-A998-22K7-8801.”

Nova wasn’t even on the bridge. Last I’d checked, she’d been meditating in our room. But when the captain finished reciting the string of coordinates, all Nova said over the com was, “Yes, captain.”

By this point, I’d already started for the door, signaling Rashid to meet me in the cargo bay. You never went anywhere good when your captain changed course this quickly, and I wanted us ready to roll out. The cook and Ren were already gone, thank the king, so we didn’t have to worry about noncombatants. I was messaging Mabel to seal up engineering when Caldswell called my name.

“I want you and Rashid to scramble,” he said, looking at me over his shoulder. “This won’t be a long jump.”

“Way ahead of you, sir,” I replied.

Caldswell actually grinned at me. “That’s my Morris.”

I wasn’t above giving him a superior smile as I jogged out into the hall, passing a running Nova on the way.

I have no idea what massive handful of strings the captain pulled, but despite the posted four-hour line for the gate, we jumped ten minutes later.

I spent them in the lounge, prowling back and forth in front of the windows like a caged animal. Rashid waited with me, fully loaded out just as I’d ordered, but as soon as he’d secured the jump, Caldswell had inexplicably left the bridge and gone downstairs. I had no idea why the captain would terrify his crew and then go down to his room, but I could hear the building freakout in Basil’s voice over the com, so I sent Rashid up to the bridge to keep order. It was a cruel thing to do to my fellow security officer, but other than the times he’d snapped at the captain about Ren, Rashid was calm as a placid lake, and if anyone needed placid right now, it was Basil.

Tactically, I should have waited in the cargo bay, but I wanted to see myself what we were in for, so I stayed in the lounge by the windows. It wasn’t like I was going to go crashing out the door the moment we left hyperspace anyway, and besides, I still had no idea what all this was about. I couldn’t begin to think what Ren could tell her father that would precipitate this kind of scramble, but as the minutes ticked by, my feeling of impending doom got worse and worse. It was like that moment when you step on a rotten board. You haven’t started falling yet, but you know it’s coming, just as you know there’s nothing you can do to stop it. All you can do is brace.

I was braced so hard my muscles ached. I stalked back and forth in front of the lounge windows, glaring at the blank gray-purple wall of hyperspace outside as I waited to see just how hard this fall would hit me. I was working on wearing a rut in the floor when the cook walked into the lounge.

As always, he entered silently, his footsteps like shadows. I kept my eyes off him out of habit, though I would have loved to glare at him when I said, “Why are you here? Get back downstairs.”

“The captain is watching his daughter,” he replied. “He ordered me to come and work instead.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. The cook hadn’t even glanced at the kitchen. Instead, he walked to the cargo bay stairs and leaned on the door like he wanted to be first in line to get out when we landed.

I couldn’t argue with a direct order from the captain, though, so I decided to ignore him. I put my back to the cook and stared out the window, double- and triple-checking my equipment. But hard as I tried to focus on not looking, I kept catching glimpses of him through my rear camera. I was this close to ordering him out anyway when the jump flash rolled over the ship, signaling our exit from hyperspace.

I was glued to the window the second the jump finished, my suit checking in with the
Fool
’s computer to look up where we were.
Unity
was the answer that came back, another overpopulated aeon colony world much like the one we’d just left. There was even a picture of a built-up planet so covered in city I couldn’t see the oceans.

But something wasn’t right. Even though my suit was insisting there should be a colony stuffed with birds right in front of us, I didn’t see anything out the window, not a planet or a moon or a gate station, not even any other ships. All I saw through the lounge windows was a bunch of floating rocks and dust glittering in the light of the system’s sun.

“Did the jump team mess up the coordinates?” I asked over the com. “This isn’t a planet.” It looked more like an asteroid belt.

My only answer was dead silence. And then, very quietly, Basil replied. “There’s no mistake. This is Unity.”

“This is nothing,” I protested.

“You’re both right,” Nova said. “These are Unity’s coordinates, but there’s nothing here. The jump gate, the traffic control, the moon, the planet—they’re all
gone
. I can’t even get a signal.”

Her voice became higher pitched with every word, and cold began to sink into my bones. It was a dark day when Nova panicked.

“It can’t be gone,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “Planets don’t just—”

The ship lurched under my feet, cutting me off. My stabilizer took the bump nicely, but I braced on the window anyway, craning my neck in an attempt to see what had hit us. With so many rocks around, that should have been an easy call, but I hadn’t heard anything hit the hull. I hadn’t felt a crash either. It was more like we’d bumped into something. I was about to ask Basil what that could be when the aeon’s voice whistled over the com.

“Oh, what
now
?”

The words were barely out before the channel collapsed into static. At the same time, my cameras began to short out, the picture obscured behind a rain of thin white lines that crackled as they fell. I shook my head hard, smacking my helmet on the side that held my receiver, but that didn’t clear the interference, which was so bad now I couldn’t even see my diagnostic screen to figure out what was wrong.

I ripped my helmet off with a curse and turned it over, running my finger over the neuronet feeds just to make double sure the problem wasn’t on my end. It was only by chance that I glanced back up at the window. When I did, what I saw hit me so hard I dropped my helmet on the floor.

There was something outside the ship. Something
huge
.

In my shock, all I could think was that it looked like a squid. A gigantic squid glowing like the moon with its own blue-white light. It was so big I couldn’t even see all of it from the
Fool
’s window, so big that the asteroids that dwarfed our ship looked like grains of sand floating around it. It had no eyes I could make out, no mouth or nostrils or any other opening. Just two huge clusters of tentacles, one at either end of its tubelike body, waving slowly through space like the thing was treading water.

There were so many tentacles I couldn’t begin to count them. They started out enormous where they attached to the creature, but then they tapered off, finally ending in a delicate point that was still twice as big around as the
Fool
. I knew that last bit for a fact, because there was one right next to the ship. The thing we’d bumped into earlier.

“Devi!”

I jumped. I’d been so wrapped up in the monster outside, I’d actually forgotten about the cook until he yanked me away from the window.

“The coms are down,” he said, his voice calm and serious as he turned me toward the hall door. “I realize this is frightening, but I need you to go to the bridge and tell them to prepare for another jump. The system should be coming back up in just—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. I was too freaked out to care that the cook was trying to give me orders. I tore away from him and ran back to the window, stabbing my finger at the glass. “Don’t you see that thing?”

Without my rear cameras, I couldn’t see him behind me, but I knew the cook had turned to look. Instead of the horrified gasp I expected, though, he just sounded bewildered. “What thing?”

And that was when I got the sinking feeling in my stomach again, the one I was becoming way too familiar with, because that was when I realized the cook didn’t see anything outside the window. I was hallucinating again.

But fast as it had come, the sinking feeling vanished. I
couldn’t
be hallucinating. He’d felt that bump earlier just as I had. Whatever that thing was, we’d
hit
it, and you sure as hell didn’t hit hallucinations.

I reached back and grabbed the cook, yanking him up to the window. “Shut up and look,” I said, pointing at the tentacle floating beside the rear of the ship. The one that had bumped us. The one it was impossible to miss. “Do you see that?”

To his credit, the cook looked hard. In the end, though, he shook his head. “I don’t see anything,” he said softly. “Just rocks.”

I swore and let him go, staring hard at the monster while I tried to think of something that could explain why I saw it and he didn’t. This turned out to be a good move, because my staring was the only reason I saw the blow coming.

With astonishing speed for something so huge, the monster flicked its tentacle like a whip. As the undulation ran down the huge appendage, I saw for the first time that the monster’s flesh wasn’t just glowing, it was semitranslucent. This thing had the same frosted-glass look as the tiny bugs, though my little bugs were to this monster what specks of dust were to a mountain. I felt a bit like a speck myself as I watched the huge tentacle swing through the expanse of space, growing brighter and more solid as it raced toward the ship.

“Oh shit,” I whispered, bracing against the glass, the only thing I had time to grab. “Here it comes.”

The cook looked at me in alarm. “Here what com—”

The tentacle landed before he could finish, sending the ship tumbling. All the alarms began going off at once as the
Fool
spun like a whirligig. The centrifugal force crashed me into the window, banging my unprotected head against the glass hard enough to make me see spots. The artificial gravity had cut out on the second spin, so at least I didn’t have to deal with that, but I still felt like I was going to throw up by the time the emergency thrusters finally kicked in to stop the spinning.

I was back up before the gravity reestablished, using my suit’s magnets to keep my feet on the ground as I wobbled toward the door. It was much harder than it should have been. Without my helmet, I couldn’t see any of my readings, but I didn’t need them to know something was seriously wrong with my Lady. She was moving like she’d been dunked in cement, fighting me for every step.

My Lady wasn’t the only one struggling. The
Fool
was going nuts. I don’t know if it was the impact or something else, but the whole ship seemed to be going haywire. The emergency lights were flicking on and off, the alarm changing pitch like something was messing with the speakers, and the gravity was swinging wildly. We also had a pressure leak somewhere—I could hear it hissing—but the breach alarm seemed to be the only one not going off.

But while my suit was on the fritz, there was nothing wrong with my battle instincts. Despite the confusion around me, I knew exactly what I had to do. Whatever that thing outside was, it wasn’t a hallucination, and if I was the only one who could see it, that meant it was up to me to shoot it.

With that goal to guide me, I took a huge breath and popped the lock on my malfunctioning suit. The Lady released me with a relieved hiss, falling off my body like a shed shell. The second I was free, I sprinted for the cargo bay stairs. I was plotting the fastest way through the toppled piles of nut crates to the gunner controls in engineering when the ship bucked again, sending me flat on my face.

I landed on my chin, knocking my teeth together so hard I tasted blood, but I couldn’t even feel the pain. I was in the battle now, and I heaved myself up instantly, charging the door. Considering how the last hit had sent us spinning, I probably should have stayed down, but luck was with me this time. This new blow only rocked the ship instead of sending it hurling like before, and I took my chance to run. But before I could reach the first stair, an iron arm wrapped around my waist, stopping me cold.

“No!” I shrieked, digging my fingers into the cook’s arm. “
Let me go!
I have to shoot it!”

“Devi, calm down,” he hissed in my ear, yanking me off my feet. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Bullshit. There was always something you could do, but I didn’t waste my breath telling him that. Instead I craned my neck back, looking over my shoulder to try to catch a glimpse of when the next hit would land, but the tentacle wasn’t there anymore. All I saw through the window now was flat blue-white fog, almost like we were in some kind of weird hyperspace. It was so unexpected, it took me a moment to realize that the reason I couldn’t see was because the creature’s tentacle was wrapped around the ship. That was why the last bump hadn’t sent us flying; the thing had
caught us
.

And like it had been waiting for me to notice, the monster chose that moment to start squeezing.

The
Fool
’s hull began to groan, and then the lights died completely, leaving only the soft blue-white glow of the monster itself. The alarms died next, sputtering out with choked squeals. The engines cut out a second later, and I suddenly felt like a fool for taking off my suit. If I got thrown into space with nothing but my skin, I’d have only myself to blame.