Page 127 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Da’vi lifted his head from what he was doing and actually looked at me, eyes sympathetic.

“I understand. All Kertinal males tend to be employed by the military in some fashion. When I decided to leave…” Then his eyes caught on Thorin, and I saw his expression shutter a little.

He immediately turned back to his work on my suit panel and didn’t say more. I shrugged at Thorin. I tried, alright.

“There, that should do the trick. I’ll pull the data off. Bring the rest of your suit here, and I’ll make sure it’s fully functional again.” Da’vi’s sub-harmonics were back, rumbling through the engine room in sync with the engine itself. “Akri, you got the data?” he asked the ship’s AI.

The ship confirmed immediately, “Sifting through it now. Shall I send the pertinent data to your datapad, Thorin?”

“Yes, please. Thanks, Akri,” Thorin replied, already fishing the pad out of his pocket so he could take a look. From the focused look on his face, all his concentration had sunk into this task. I was itching to see it for myself too; I needed to know what had caused my superiors to turn on me.

I was raised a polite girl, so I thank Da’vi for his help and for the offer of caring for my suit. “I’ll be sure to bring things by, but uh… please make sure the ship won’t blow first.” The sudden mischievous grin he sent me told me all I needed to know: this ship wasn’t about to blow at all.

*

Thorin

I stared at the last footage of Camila’s EV suit with a hard rock in my stomach, watching that ship depart while she drifted in space, thinking she was about to die.

That really drove home what she’d been through.

Without thinking, I had already reached out to tug softly on her long braid, taking comfort in that bit of connection.

Akri had found her just in time; she had survived, and she was kicking some manners into me. I was suddenly so grateful for that. I needed this girl, challenging me, bringing out the better parts of myself that I didn’t know I still had.

At my touch to her braid, she didn’t respond, not until we’d left engineering and were walking side by side in the direction of the mess hall. “See anything interesting yet?” she asked, pointing at the datapad in my hand.

“Too much footage. We need to narrow it down. When did they turn on you? We can skip back to before that moment. Sounds like they acted quickly.”

Akri would help narrow things down quickly; this AI was really good at that sort of thing.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this as it kept niggling at the back of my mind.

If this stuff was worth killing Camila over, what if it was something we could use to strike back at Drameil?

If we could hit him where it hurts… I was certain I wasn’t the only one itching to take the bastard down.

He still had more gladiators in his stables, we should try to free them.

Camila was quick to outline the timeframe in which she thought it must have happened.

The mess hall was empty, so we sat down at a table, for which I was grateful—even if I didn’t want to admit it.

My leg was feeling better since the Doc had treated it, but it was still great to get off it.

“Akri, help us out, will you?” I drawled at the AI, watching as Camila ducked into the galley to fetch snacks.

She insisted they were a prerequisite for studying.

“What would you like me to do, Thorin?” the ship responded, so I outlined my search parameters for it. Camila listened on while she stared at the datapad, fiddling nervously with her braid and the cookies on the plate she’d put down.

I grinned at her and snatched one of those cookies up, staring her down while I stuffed the entire thing in my mouth. That made her laugh. “Oh, you’re on!” she said, and followed up that statement by downing two whole cookies in a matter of seconds.

“This is the footage from a spacewalk maneuver that makes the most sense in the time frame outlined, Thorin,” the ship said, interrupting us.

I immediately straightened up and ignored the fact that Jakar had just walked into the mess hall and was staring at us with his mouth open. “Play it, Akri. Thanks.”

A moment later, footage from a spacewalk started playing on the datapad, and Camila and I both bent close to properly watch it.

“Speed it up a little, please,” Camila said.

“That maneuver took an hour.” At high speed, we watched the footage.

Most of it was aimed at the stars around them or picked up the black hull of the ship and her colleagues.

While it was interesting to see the drill unfold—somewhat, at least—and to watch how Camila was ordering everyone about (which was hot), nothing in the footage was promising.

Not until the last moment, when they were headed back into the airlock, did Camila begin to relax.

She was the last one heading into the ship.

Her squad was in front of her, magnetic boots allowing them to walk along the hull of the ship.

The seven men she was with were all bigger than her, but they’d responded with alacrity to all her commands; she had to have their respect for them to do that.

Something distracted Camila just as the last of her squad members climbed back into the ship. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but her EV suit camera didn’t capture everything she was seeing herself, like her HUD. Maybe she’d received a message.

Regardless, it caused her to turn her body, so the camera panned over a cargo bay door.

It was open, with a force shield in place to keep it from depressurizing.

A small ship was just leaving, darting off into space behind her.

The camera captured a perfect view of stacks upon stacks of stasis pods inside the cargo bay.

I paused the video right on that view and turned to raise an eyebrow in Camila’s direction.

“See that? Why are your people transporting so many in stasis?” She shook her head.

“I don’t think I saw that myself, maybe just from the corner of my eye.

I think… if that entire cargo bay is filled with them, they’re going to offer people in trade to Drameil.

” Her voice had dropped into a shocked whisper, and the skin around her eyes had pinched, going pale.

Slinging an arm around her shoulder, I offered her some comfort. “You didn’t know that, and they didn’t want you to know. We need to decide how to proceed from here.”