Page 216 of Galaxy Games Four-Book Box Set (Galaxy Games)

216

The Landing Bay

M aya

Our first fight. How cute. I’ll have to put it in our wedding scrapbook.

Yes. I’d dreamed of a big wedding and a white dress. Life sure has a way of surprising you.

I’ve got a ten-inch knife in my left hand and a twelve-incher in my right. Although we’re trying to be stealthy, we’re running toward the stairwell. The fewer pirates who are in the landing bay before we arrive, the better our chances.

When we enter the stairwell to go up, a bolt of panic darts up my spine as I remember how we both almost died a few hours ago when we were accosted by those humongous females who came at us, one from above and one from below.

We ascend seven flights and take a breath before we enter the main hallway.

At this point in The Game, nothing should surprise me, but I didn’t expect the lights to be turned off. I know as certainly as if the information had been downloaded into my brain that Zedd did this and the galaxy is watching through infrared cameras.

I see A’Dar’s heat signature. I forgot his DNA enhanced me. Bigger, better, stronger—I hope. And I can see as well as if I’d been equipped with thermal vision goggles.

A’Dar eases through the metal doorway to the landing bay. He’s trying to be stealthy, but the soft snick of metal on metal reverberates through the enormous bay like the crack of a gun. It’s pitch dark in here, too. Perhaps that will give us, with our thermal vision, enough of an edge to live through this nightmare.

Maybe my hearing is enhanced also, because I not only hear footsteps, my brain gives me information about how many attackers there are and where they’re coming from.

Four. Two from each side.

When I glance in their direction, my thermal vision doesn’t let me see much more than the blobs of blue, green, red, and yellow. All I know is they’re big and coming at us fast.

I get to see A’Dar in action. He moves like something out of a movie. Nothing human could do what he’s doing.

Perhaps it was because we were hemmed in on that landing; when we were attacked by those two females in the stairwell, he was nothing like this.

His arms are almost like buzz saws, moving so quickly my eyes can barely follow him. He slices the two males on his right, then pivots and uses the knives in both his hands to carve up the males on our left.

Although they fall to the floor like dead weight, I hurry to them and stab their chests repeatedly, making certain they’re dead. As I do my grisly work, I silently thank whoever is listening that I’m not seeing this in the light. They’re just blobs of color slowly becoming fainter as they grow colder in death.

I stand, knives in hand, ready to join the fray and help A’Dar, when the last male falls to the floor. A’Dar slices both those males’ throats. I know this because of the orange liquid oozing from them and pooling horizontally on the floor.

“The ship,” A’Dar says, his voice cold and hoarse.

Metal is dull silver in my thermal vision. All the ships, I suppose they’re small runabouts for when the crew is planetside, look the same to me. I simply follow A’Dar’s broad back as he stalks forward, his head swiveling from side to side.

“Stay aware,” he whispers as we mount the ramp.

No matter how softly I walk, there’s no silencing the clang of our shoes on the metal. I guess the slaughter near the doorway left no doubt that whoever might be in this ship has company.

Dim lights flick on as we pass through the open doorway. At first, I’m relieved to be out of the dark, but then I realize we just lost any advantage we might have had.

“Computer, close exterior door,” he says with the command of a captain.

It shouldn’t surprise me when the ship complies. I imagine they’re all equipped with translator software.

“Allow no intruders. Override any passwords but one. Maya.”

“One password,” the ship responds. “Maya.”

“Standard procedure when we take an enemy ship is for the captain and first officer to override the passwords and biometrics. Thankfully, we had time to do that as the prisoners were taken to the brig and put into the cryo pods. Now that I think of it, that must have been what triggered the gas that almost killed us as well as the pulse that almost killed my ship. It was a trap.” With a sigh, he says, “We can’t change the past, but we can change our future. Besides, it brought me almost two thousand years to you, my mate.”

His smile and quick hug give me warm fuzzies from my head to my toes.

Now it’s just A’Dar, me, and anyone who might have already boarded the ship. No one else will be able to sneak in and hurt us.

“Computer, how many humanoid life forms are aboard?” he asks as we explore further into the bowels of the ship.

“Two.”

I sag for a moment and huff out a relieved breath.

He methodically enters a room, moves right, opens interior doors, searches in nooks and crannies, then returns to the hallway and probes deeper into the ship.

“Why are we still searching?” I ask.

He stops, turns to look at me for the first time since we left the bloodbath in the brig, and scrubs his chin with his palm.

“I’m not a trusting male. The computer could have been told to lie,” he says. “Besides, we need to look for weapons.”

Now that I’m less terrified, I pay more attention to what’s going on in the vessel. The pirates obviously left in a hurry. The place is a mess. It’s like a frat house that hasn’t had a housemother in a long time.

It may have been almost two thousand years, but everything is still scattered just as they left it. We find our first weapon in the hallway.

A’Dar hurries to it, picks it up, then tosses it back to the floor.

“No charge,” he says, his voice laced with disdain.

We continue through hallways and cabins, finding many weapons, all strewn about with no regard for order, none with any charge at all.

The moment we barge into a cabin at the end of the hallway, A’Dar announces, “Captain’s quarters,” with optimism.

I’m not sure how he knows it’s the captain’s quarters. Maybe it’s a smidge bigger than the others we’ve explored. This one is neater than any we’ve seen, and there, in the closet, are weapons.

The layout is similar to A’Dar’s closet, with weapons hanging on the wall in organized rows. Each has been plugged into its charging station. When we entered the ship and the lights turned on, the ship must have powered up the charging stations as well. The time it took us to find them was enough to fully charge them.

He lovingly pulls one into his grip and checks it over. He turns it on and it emits a gentle humming that must be the universal sound of a piece of machinery coming to life.