Page 14 of Adrift! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #2)

Lucky bar rag? Remy grumbled to herself as she raced for the salon. Really?

But the purple square she’d knitted—so reluctantly and roughly—was right there, where he was always standing, centered between some clean glassware and a bottle of something she would’ve swigged if she thought it would calm her nerves.

No time. She just had to get back. To save the ship. To be with…Ikaryo.

No time to think about that either.

Rifling urgently through the under-bar cooler, she found the jar of cinder fruit seeds, grabbed it and the rag, and swung around to run back.

And choked on a shriek at the presence looming…

“Mariah,” she gasped. For a panicked heartbeat, the other woman had looked like a ghost, her flowing homemade dress a shroud of gray in the lowered lights of the salon.

Well, hopefully that wasn’t a sign of things to come.

“What’s wrong?” Mariah cocked her head. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Gulping back a hysterical laugh this time, Remy hugged the jar of seeds to her chest. “No ghosts.” Unless they all asphyxiated. “I just…needed to get these.”

“Okaaay.” Mariah glanced between the jar and the rag. “Seems a little random but… If you add a few more squares to your project, I think you’ll be a knitter yet.”

“Oh. Great. Yeah, I’m going to do that next.” Remy sidled toward the exit.

Mariah followed. “I was just sitting here contemplating the universe.”

“As one does,” Remy muttered.

“And I think you’re still hiding something.”

Remy forced herself to halt. Don’t panic the passengers, she reminded herself.

Wait, when had she started thinking of herself as part of the crew?

And to think she’d been trying so hard to distance herself from all of them.

“Hiding something?” She glanced down at her burden. “Nope. All right here. Ha ha.”

Oof. That sounded fake as hell.

“Hiding from yourself,” Mariah said.

Remy took a breath…then let it out very slowly. She’d seen Felicity practice those calming breaths all the time, and now Mariah did the same. Oh no, they were basically meditating while the ship choked to death.

“I am hiding something,” she admitted. “But I can’t talk about it now. I just…can’t even think about it yet. I just need a little more time, I think.”

Or, maybe, there wouldn’t be time.

Mariah gazed at her, the soft tiger eye brown sharpening. “We might be adrift,” she warned. “But the universe doesn’t wait.”

After another breath, Remy lifted her chin. “So I’ve heard.” She tried not to look frantic. “I really have to get going, but… Maybe later you could show me how to knit those flowers you mentioned?”

Mariah chuckled. “I don’t have to consult my cards to know you’re just trying to get away.”

“Yeah. But also…my boots could use a little more whimsy.”

Waving her away, Mariah turned back to the viewport. “Find me later if you’re serious. I’m not going anywhere.”

At the salon doors, Remy glanced back. The blackness of empty space loomed around the little knitting astrologist, as if the universe was contemplating her back.

Remy wrinkled her nose. Suddenly, all the bored and vaguely hostile audiences she’d played for didn’t seem so bad.

As if rotten tomatoes were flying her way, she pelted back to the atmo-hall.

Heart beating too fast, she clambered over a huge hose blocking the portal. Her gaze arrowed to Ikaryo who was affixing a funnel to the upper curve of the hose near the tank of goo.

“When we divert power from the containment unit to pressurize filtration, the anomaly may escape,” Suvan was warning.

“The cinder seeds will provide most of the push,” Ikaryo said. “We just need enough flow in the lines to trigger the reaction.”

“Here you go,” Remy whispered as she passed him the jar.

“And my lucky bar rag?”

With a scoff, she flicked the purple fringe across his chest. “Like it matters.”

“It does, to me.” He dumped all the seeds into the funnel, his hand hovering over the release. “Captain?”

Nehivar had been prowling around an arch of pretty blue flowers but pivoted at the call. “Carbonated cleanser cocktail,” he rumbled. “I think I liked champagne better. Do it.”

“Lines are pressurized,” Delphine reported. “Just need some juice, literally.”

Ikaryo triggered the funnel release.

For half a second, nothing happened. Before Remy wondered what they could try next, a terrifying gurgling noise swelled in the hose. Orange bubbles leaked from the funnel attachment.

Half a second later, the distinctive fizzing sound of CO2 shot through the system.

Felicity clapped. “It’s working! Um, right?”

“Make sure all the outlets are open,” Ikaryo called. “And watch out. It’s gonna be a mess.” He glanced sidelong at Remy, his silvery eyes spinning in triumph. “Might need more bar rags.”

She couldn’t help answering him with a relieved smile of her own.

Their celebration was cut short by the chief engineer’s gruff voice emerging from Nehivar’s datpad.

“Captain, I’ve been reviewing the ship’s status system by system, using a simulation of Ikaryo’s implant energy signature as a diagnostic reference key.

Given the quantum tunneling we identified, I checked for any previously undetected connections.

” Acerbic fake glee sliced through the technical terms. “And guess what?”

The captain sighed. “Please don’t make me play this game, Suvan.”

“No prize for you then. Or for any of us. There are signs of widespread interference. Just like the superbloom in the atmo-hall.”

Ikaryo glanced around at the acid-green slop streaked with orange, the silage curdling to a nasty brown. “This was the resonark?”

“Apparently romantic entanglement makes bactoalgae very happy,” Suvan said sourly. “Just don’t serenade waste reclamation next. We do not want the decoupled recycle/remove outflow tracks mystically merging.”

Remy grimaced, noting Ikaryo doing the same. A wordless commentary on the chief’s disgusting allusion—or reluctance to sing with her again?

“How bad?” Nehivar asked.

“I would have said nothing lethal yet.”

“Would have?” Remy repeated, just as Ikaryo said, “Yet?”

“The linkages seem imperfect—minor fluctuations, insignificant disruptions, some slightly elevated levels of static and signal artifacts. Mostly, the resonark isn’t syncing.

Except…” The engineer hesitated, and in his silence, the low chittering of his repulsive pet was ominous.

“As the harmonic resonance falters and fades, the effects of decoherence and then the collapse of all those weak connections could cascade without warning.”

Ignoring the overflowed bog brew, Remy sank to the edge of the algae tank. She’d already known the situation was bad—hijacked and adrift, remember?—so why did this seem suddenly worse?

“What are you saying, Chief?” With the back of one mucky hand, Felicity shoved back the loosened strands of her blond up-do. “That if the resonark dies, it will take the ship with it?”

When Griiek gulped, the little movement was shockingly loud in her thick throat, and she looked more green than usual. Delphine pulled the little Monbrakkan under her arm, murmuring reassurances that no one believed.

Suvan’s dour tone dropped like a bulkhead sealing off even that false hope. “And maybe worse.”

“And what exactly is worse than our deaths?” Nehivar asked bitingly.

“Quantum effects don’t follow our mundane rules of distance, intensity, or predictability,” the engineer explained. “While we’re stuck out here, I have no way to verify, but if there are anomalous linkages elsewhere—everywhere…”

Remy let out an incredulous laugh. “So it’s not enough to save the ship. Now we’re saving the universe?”

“Any solace that you’ll be saving yourself too?”

Despite herself, Remy sought Ikaryo’s gaze again. Maybe she was half hoping he’d contradict the buzzkill alien.

Instead, he took her hand.

The captain’s expression was grim, even under the layer of plush fur, and when he spoke, his deep voice carried the weight of command.

“So we’re running out of time, tools, and options.

If we release the anomaly, it may hijack us again.

If we keep it blocked, it will unravel the ship and maybe—what?

—the universe.” He spun on his heavy boot to face Remy and Ikaryo.

“You think the resonark reached out to you because you were singing.”

“And kissing,” Felicity piped up.

Remy’s cheeks burned. “I have no idea.”

That one gold eye was implacable. “But you’re willing to test it?”

She lifted her chin. “Singing or kissing?”

The captain’s long whiskers twitched. Was that Kufzasin amusement? “Whatever it takes.”

Beside her, Ikaryo stiffened, prelude to an objection. “Captain—”

Nehivar held up one claw. “I may be captain, but this ship has belonged to the anomaly longer than it’s been ours.

According to Evens, the resonark was seeking…

something when it hijacked the ship in the past. Suvan, you’ve deciphered its harmonic resonance, so can we find”—he looked at Remy—“its perfect melody somewhere other than here?”

She crossed her arms, striving for nonchalance even as her thumbs dug into her inner biceps hard enough to feel her own hasty heartbeat. “You want me to play musical matchmaker to the energy monster?”

Remy guessed that the single word that snapped through the captain’s datpad from deep in the ship was the same one in everyone’s head, a fundamental knot of frustration: “How?”

Not Felicity, though, who bounced on her toes.

“Before we trapped it, it responded to emotion. Which explains why music apparently bridged the capacitorus restraints. It first showed up when all the passengers were gathered together in the salon. So what if we bring all those pieces together? I propose a recital.”

The irrepressible cruise director spun toward Remy. “Tomorrow night. Not in waste reclamation, whatever Suvan says, but in the Starlit Salon. How would you feel about getting your first interstellar gig?”

+ + +

Remy felt like she was going to throw up.

Maybe it was just thinking about all the leftover algae sludge she’d helped vacuum out of the atmo-hall vents.

The low-tide stink had clung to her as she’d trudged wearily back to her stateroom.

After a long, hot shower using all the sensual alien scents in the bathroom and recycling her hopelessly grimed outfit, she felt human again.

But as she wrapped herself in the simplest robe from the fabricator’s offerings, she had to admit she was just scared.

Not scared of dying in another system blowout—well, scared of that too—but mostly about performing.

What if she bombed? Again?

How humbling to realize that all her musical failures on Earth were nothing compared to what would happen if she flopped out here.

What if—?

A chime at her door made her realize she was just standing frozen in the middle of the room, her panic a blockage in her throat as hard and cold as a dead asteroid in the silent void.

Meanwhile her heart pounded like a solo-maddened drummer trying to gravity blast its way out of her ribcage. An excruciating reminder that the only thing she’d once hated more than failing was staying stuck.

Which was why she was out here, after all.

Spinning resolutely on her bare heel, she went to the door. She opened it without querying because she already knew.

Ikaryo stood on the other side.

“You didn’t say I can’t sing,” she said, as if continuing a conversation they’d already started. “I knew that when I accused you. I was just…” Without the words in any language, she slashed an angry gesture through the air.

“Saying it to yourself,” he interpreted.

She jerked her head in a stiff nod. “I’m still going to do it.”

“You will.”

She’d just meant that she would do the performance, but in the unwavering certainty of his steady baritone, she knew he meant more than that.

His belief—unwarranted and wonderful—made her eyes prickle.

He reached out. “Remy?”

“Oh dammit.” With the heel of her hand, she smeared the tears away. “I never cry about my music. Not before a show, definitely not after. Never.”

With one fingertip, he brushed back a lock of her damp hair. “Would it be so bad if you did?”

Minus her heels, she was just a little shorter than him, so she had to look up with a crooked grin. “You mean, like, get it touch with my feelings or something? If only I hadn’t lost my button.”

“I believe you told me you’d buried it.”

“That’s true.” With a semi-exaggerated sigh, she stepped back. “If you want to come look for it…” She swept her tear-streaked hand dramatically, wafting the hem of her robe.

Which was about an inch away from a scandal, thanks to the romance-minded fabricator.

For a moment, he didn’t move, and internally she cringed at her Schrodinger’s solicitation: a desire simultaneously too desperate and yet not clear enough.

Then the door was whispering closed…behind him.

She’d previously noticed how the thoughtfully recessed lighting of the stateroom allowed no unflattering shadows, the hues programmed to complement each occupant’s skin tones, and how the architectural angles softened sounds.

Setting the stage for seduction, she’d thought with a taint of scorn.

But now she hoped it was all working for her, along with the perfumed body washes.

Because apparently the only thing more wracking to her nerves than performing was making the moves on an alien bartender.

“Um.” She bit her lip. “Shall I get you a drink?”

His half-moon eyes circled once, fast. “No one ever does that for me.”

“This might be your last chance.” She winced. “Sorry. You just saved the day—or night or whatever time it is out there—with your brilliant trick and I’m already whining about the next catastrophe.”

His dimple—ooh, did he know that was a thing on Earth?—flashed as he sauntered toward her. “This might be our only chance for a lot of things.”

The reminder should have been sobering, but instead it felt…dangerously thrilling. Like a dream where she’d recklessly used up her drink tickets before she took the stage.

If they were going to die—which would happen eventually anyway, whether adrift in space or bombing on stage or asleep in her bed at some contented old age—then maybe she could just stop dreading and regretting.

And until the end came, she didn’t need to be alone in that bed.