Page 270 of Gladiators of the Vagabond Boxset

Arianna

My nipples were hard points, rubbing against my bra. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d teased Da’vi the way I had; I didn’t even know if his alien parts would line up with mine. Too bad something was going down, or I would have tried to convince him to find out with me.

I wished he hadn’t sent me to the bridge of the ship; I would have much rather gone with him to the engine room.

I was pretty sure that letting him withdraw was a bad move, he seemed like the kind of guy who would try to shore up his defenses and keep me out if he could.

There was just something about the grumpy, stoic, silent type that made me want to draw them out of their shell.

As I followed the carefully modulated voice of the ship’s AI to the bridge, I contemplated that urge.

I was pretty sure I was a little messed up in the head; most people probably didn’t have a whole chorus of voices telling them they were shit all the time.

Most people would back off when a guy like Da’vi snapped at them, he was hella intimidating with his antelope horns, sharp teeth, and metal hands.

“Don’t care,” I murmured to myself. “He’s been my rock; now I’m going to be his sunshine.” He needed someone to help him relax, to help him have fun. I was the fun girl, I could definitely do that for him.

“What do you mean by that? I do not comprehend,” the ship AI asked me, curiosity shining brightly in that voice. That surprised me. Could an AI feel emotions? Wasn’t it just a really advanced type of computer program?

I paused in the hallway, leaning my hand against the wall.

Through an open doorway, I could see what was obviously a mess hall, with well-worn tables and chairs, cozily decorated as if it were just a rather oversized living room.

One wall was entirely covered by plants, their leaves pretty hues of purple and silvery green.

“Oh, I was talking about Da’vi. Don’t mind me,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.

I couldn’t tell where a camera might be mounted, if there were any, they didn’t look like anything I might recognize.

“Lead the way, please.” If I couldn’t be with my grumpy guy right now, I’d better do as he’d suggested—he had sounded pretty worried.

The AI had just indicated which way I needed to go when a new voice sounded over the ship-wide intercom.

“Better strap in, everyone, we appear to have a ship incoming. Prepare for evasive maneuvers.” I was pretty sure that voice belonged to the Captain I’d briefly met, a guy who looked like a cross between a bull and a crocodile on two legs.

“Hurry, Arianna,” the AI urged me. I broke out into a run, racing to the doors at the end of the hallway.

When I burst through them, I was on the bridge, and several heads turned my way in surprise.

I recognized the captain and his human girlfriend, a beautiful African American woman with sharply intelligent eyes.

I also saw two people sitting in the pilot and navigator seats; they looked vaguely familiar too, so I was sure they’d been present in the med bay.

What was a little more shocking was the giant gargoyle—with a set of bat-like wings—calmly sitting behind the com station.

So many bizarre aliens. I thought I had a great imagination, but I hadn’t expected them to be this diverse on a single ship.

“Huh, I thought you’d be with Da’vi,” Abigail said, “Aggy can you make sure she’s strapped in?” The woman gestured at the back wall of the bridge, and I turned, surprised to see yet another human woman along with two adorable alien kids sitting in seats along the wall.

“Here, Arianna,” this new woman said, and she smiled in welcome. I instantly liked her; she seemed like the type of woman who loved to nurture, a motherly type. I hurried to the empty seat at her side and happily let her show me how to strap myself in as a precaution.

The others on the bridge were talking rapidly, but as soon as I heard Da’vi’s voice, I lifted my head and paid attention.

“I haven’t finished a complete diagnostic of the engine; we shouldn’t risk using my upgrade.

” I shivered. He sounded so confident, so sure of himself.

It was really sexy to hear him talk about his area of expertise.

“All right,” the guy in the pilot chair said, a human-looking redhead with a tan stripe horizontally across his face.

When he looked over his shoulder at his captain, gold eyes entirely inhuman flashed with excitement.

“Permission to fly her through the debris field? I’ll try to shake them while Chloe works out our FTL jumps. ”

The Captain’s bullish snout pulled into an answering grin, his long, scaly tail lashing the air.

The sharp, knife-like spines covering his skull in a mohawk all the way down his spine and tail rose in a threatening display.

“Permission granted.” He tapped at the com strapped around his thick wrist. “Everyone strapped in?”

A chorus of “aye” sounded, both on the bridge and over the comm system.

As soon as silence followed, the Captain added, “All animals secured?” The question was answered by a male voice I hadn’t heard before; his affirmative was followed by something that sounded like a rumbling purr, confirming that he was indeed in the presence of an animal.

After that, the Captain didn’t need to say another word; the pilot had already set the ship into motion.

On the viewscreen, I could see us speed up, pieces of wreckage from my former prison passing by at rapid speeds.

A male sitting at the station that had to be the weapons console was keeping sharp green eyes fixed on a grid.

“They are still gaining on us, brother.”

“I am aware, Thorin,” the pilot snapped back, his body shivering as fur suddenly broke out all over his skin.

His face morphed from something distinctly human into a sharply pointed snout with white teeth glittering in his maw.

Fox ears flicked at the top of his head, and his hands turned into long-fingered claws.

I only just managed to hold in a gasp once he’d finished his transformation, going from a human man to a fox-like, two-legged creature in only a few seconds.

“I know, it’s a bit of a shock, seeing a Sune transform for the first time,” Aggy said in a gentle tone from my side.

“You get used to it, he does that when he’s feeling strong emotions,” she added, as if that explained everything.

One of the kids next to her, a blue-skinned one with an adorable mop of bright azure hair, chimed in to explain that he could do all kinds of shapes, starting to list them on his chubby fingers as if I’d recognize any of the alien creatures he was naming.

Holding the edge of my seat, I watched as the Vagabond started going faster, darting through the wreckage until we cleared the field.

Then, we were slinging around a giant spinning meteorite, and our com system started blaring with an incoming call.

“Should I answer that, Captain?” the gargoyle asked, in a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together.

In response, Aggy, next to me, sighed, and a sappy smile appeared on her soft, rounded features.

Oh boy, guess that one was taken too. I wondered just how many of the human women aboard the ship had hooked up with an alien.

Was that a requirement to stay here? My skin itched, and my body was struck with the urge to run.

I liked hooking up with guys, liked having no-strings affairs wherever I went, but nobody—certainly no man—was going to tie me down.

I wanted to pull Da’vi from his shell, have fun with him, and show him how to enjoy life better, but I wasn’t looking for anything long-term.

The only other woman on the bridge, the navigator, was plugged into the console quite literally.

A cable ran from the back of her neck down into the console, and on the screen, I could see star charts flash and move at impossible speeds.

Her entire body leaned a little sideways toward the pilot, and then he took his hand off the yoke to softly stroke a finger across her cheek.

Her pixie face broke out in a happy smile. Yup, another couple…

“Don’t bother. Da’vi said it’s his former captain, and they’re here to force him back into the fold,” Ziame responded. “Nobody’s taking our engineer from us, right, brothers?” There was immediate agreement, a bit of a growl even rumbling from the fox fur-covered chest of our pilot.

“I’ve got an FTL jump lined up,” said the navigator in a soft voice, but the bridge immediately hushed.

The pilot counted down from three, and while I clutched my seat tightly, everything on the screen seemed to blur into streaks, my body pressed back by the force of it.

Then, more disconcertingly, my hair crackled with static and started to lift up around my face.

A little like what happened when my brother had rubbed a balloon on my head when we were kids.

Next to me, both kids were whooping with excitement, laughing and giggling when the ship dropped back out of its superspeed leap after a short minute.

Da’vi had explained faster-than-light jumps to me, but I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around them.

Even though I understood that without those kinds of jumps, nobody would ever get anywhere in a timely fashion, the distances were simply too great to cross.

Now that we’d finished the jump, it looked like we were just hanging still. On the screens, only black showed, with only the faintest glimmer of stars in the distance. Deceptively, I simply couldn’t sense any kind of motion, but we probably were still moving forward.

“Shit,” the guy behind the weapons console said. I was pretty sure his name was Thorin. “They followed us.” That was really bad news, it seemed, because the pilot shared another look with the Captain, his worry clear on his face even if it looked almost entirely like the head of a fox.

It was the navigator who spoke, the small human woman tapping a button on her console. “There’s not much out here in a dead zone that can hide our leaps, Da’vi. You’re going to have to turn it on. Speed’s our only option.”

My guy could be heard swearing in that deep, dual-toned voice of his. He still sounded angry when he responded, and I couldn’t help but smile. This should make me feel scared, but after the miracle Da’vi had pulled off before—reaching me in time—I had faith that he could do it again.

“Akri and I calculated the risks. There’s a 68 percent chance our last jump caused catastrophic fractures in the engine casing.

Another jump like that? Engine failure. We could end up dead in the water until I fix things,” Da’vi said, a deep rumble of discontent coloring the words failure and catastrophic, as if those terms personally offended him.

“Odds of escape without that speed, Chloe?” Abigail asked. She leaned forward in her harness to gently pat the other woman on the shoulder. Her amazing, big hair haloed around her head in an enviable way.

The younger woman responded to the gentle touch by squaring her shoulders, her chin firming.

She looked at Abigail, then at her guy, and the fox-like male reached out to squeeze one of her hands gently, nodding at her in encouragement.

Then her eyes flickered briefly in a very freaky way, while the com blared again, as the ship chasing us tried to hail us.

“Odds of escape without an extra burst of speed are six percent.”

“Turn on your upgrade, Da’vi. We’ll have to risk it.

You heard those odds,” the Captain said.

Da’vi didn’t respond beyond a growl that could be construed as an affirmative.

I saw how the navigator, Chloe, focused back on her console, and star charts started flickering across her screen at a crazy speed.

“They are closing in. That’s a Raptor Class vessel. They can outpace us outside of FTL,” Thorin announced darkly. The pilot’s body jerked forward before the man had even finished speaking, his hands moving the yoke.

“Hold on tight, everyone. FTL in three, two, one…” he said, and everything streaked across the screen, my hair catching another static charge.

The kids were much quieter this time, and Aggy reached across to curl a palm over my tightly clenched fist, offering silent support—maybe asking for some too.

I could tell her eyes were as large and worried as my own.

I couldn’t tell how long this particular FTL jump lasted.

The attempt I made to count in my head soon became disjointed and confused.

It felt almost as if the seconds doubled on themselves.

We were going faster than light, were we somehow going faster than time?

It felt like that even more than during our last jump.

One moment, streaks of light filled the viewscreens; the next, the curve of a silvery planet filled it.

In the distance, I saw the shape of a second, bluer planet curve out behind the first one.

Though my body didn’t physically feel any sharp kind of braking, my brain still tried to interpret it as a sudden lack of motion, and I jerked forward in the seat’s harness.

I wasn’t the only one who jerked forward, only Chloe remained perfectly poised in her chair.

“Akri, scan for other ships. Were we followed?” the Captain said, and the voice of the AI responded that it was scanning now.

So that was what it was called, they had given the AI a name.

I wondered just how sentient it was. I mean, my phone could also be addressed by a name and perform searches for me, but it was definitely still a dumb machine.

When others were unbuckling themselves from their seats, despite the AI not yet announcing the all-clear, I followed suit.

I wanted to rush to the engine room to check on Da’vi.

He’d warned against this jump, worried it would damage his precious engine.

I wanted to know if he was okay. Were we dead in the water now?

The thought alone made me shiver. I wasn’t alone this time, but I still didn’t like the thought of being stuck in space again.

Right as I was thinking of him, Da’vi’s voice came over the coms on the bridge: “Reporting extreme engine stress. I can’t confirm if FTL is out permanently, but I do not recommend another jump, the engine will explode.” Oh boy, that sounded bad.

At least Akri followed that up with some good news when the AI announced that it was not detecting any vessels in the solar system.