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“What’s going on?” Nani’s quiet question was met with a slashing movement of Damon’s hand. An order to keep quiet.

Ready, Captain. I have her coordinates as Darian believes them to be. If he’s wrong, we’ll have to get a boarding party together. Viktor’s voice was calm and assured. Firm. He had supreme confidence in himself. Nani immediately reached out to Darian, trying to see the plan. He blocked her, but she fought her way through, needing to know what thing Darian would try to hide from her. When she found it, she staggered backward into the bulkhead.

“You’re going to dowhat?” She looked to Damon, demanding an answer to her question. “You don’t even know if she’ll survive such a thing! It’s not been tested!”

Damon rounded on her. “I hate to sound cliché, but every second she stays on that ship is one second too long. They’ll kill her once they know there’s no chance of keeping her. So, if you’ve got a better idea…”

Nani clenched her teeth together. She knew he was right. A rescue party would arrive in time to collect Nadira’s remains. As Diamond and Phoebe had stated on several occasions, no one escaped the Hand of God. At least, not without a horrible fight, and this would be a horrible fight.

Viktor and Darian had apparently come up with a way to use that ship’s food generator to turn Nadira into trillions of biological particles, funnel her signature through the filtration system to the waste outlet and intoBlack Star’s tractor beam. They then planned to put her back together in solid form once her particles were safely aboard. If it worked. If not…

She didn’t want to think about that possibility.

“Whenever you’re ready, Viktor. Do what you have to do.” Damon reached for Nani’s hand. “Come on, my lady. Hopefully by the time we get there, Viktor will already have her.”

Chapter Three

Darian caressed her mind the whole way to Viktor. Damon took her to the cargo bay where Mikiel was already waiting. Viktor stood at a control panel at the very front of the bay. The tractor unit glowed an iridescent, shimmering blue as it pulled its target into the cargo bay.

“If the food processors on that ship are even remotely similar to ours -- which from everything I’ve found about that class and design of ship, they are -- we should have little difficulty with her,” Viktor was saying to Mikiel. “I have her signature, and she’s dissolved. Reconstruction in thirty seconds.”

Nani walked in and up to Mikiel. “You tested this idea on yourself.” It was a statement, not a question.

“It was too risky to try it untested. If anyone was going to die because of this desperate idea, it wasn’t going to be Nadira.”

She looked at Viktor. “It was your idea.”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at her.

Nani counted the seconds in her head. She felt Darian’s touch trying to comfort her, but she refused to concentrate on anything other than the countdown going on in her head. If this didn’t work, Nadira would come back to them as so much space dust.

Fifteen seconds.

Ten.

She held her breath. She said a prayer to every deity she’d ever heard of in every language she could remember. Ten seconds seemed like an eternity.

Finally, the tractor reined in as far as it could, Nani saw sparkling particles roughly resembling human form begin to take shape on the landing platform.

“Initializing optimization. Creating a pattern.” Viktor’s verbal checklist was for her benefit, she knew. As glad as she was to have her own body back, it was damned frustrating not to be able to tap into the ship’s sensors. Even more so not to be in control. It was amazing what one could get used to given enough time.

She blinked back tears. Time. She’d missed so much of it. All of Nadira’s childhood. Her wedding. Time with Darian. True, she had a chance to catch the rest of it, at least, but she was still very bitter about the rest.

Breathe, my love. Breathe.

Can you sense her? Is she OK?

She’s pure energy right now and has no thoughts or feelings. It’s a limbo state.

So if she doesn’t make it…

She won’t feel anything, Nani.

Darian’s gentle assessment didn’t ease her mind.

“Materialization in three, two, one.”

Before her eyes, Nadira formed from particles of light. It took about ten seconds for the process to complete, but when it did, Nadira stood with her eyes tightly closed and her fists clenched. Her face was bruised -- presumably from a beating those people had given her aboard the other ship -- but seemed otherwise unharmed. Dr. Zabin…