Page 18 of Hijack! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #1)

Ellix watched her go, knowing he had more urgent commitments, even though every muscle in him twitched to give chase. He wanted to catch those flyaway strands of shiny yellow hair and bring her back to his side. Instead, he sank his claws into the cushions on either side to hold himself in place.

The way her smile had trembled, had she been angry or sad or…? Curse the infinite stars, where was a feelings button when he needed one? But then her smile had caught and widened, though her blue eyes still held a lurking shadow as cryptic as the disappearing distortion.

It had been the stress of the moment, he reassured himself, and maybe a touch of alien energy fluctuation. What had happened was just another anomaly in space-time, unknowably strange, potentially dangerous.

At least he hadn’t succumbed to the binding urge of the devotion bite. The imprint of his teeth would fade from her skin, but somehow he knew that the marks she’d left on him, with her yielding flesh and tender cries, had sunk deeper than any of the plasma cannon scars.

He shoved to his feet to resume his duties.

And next to the message cube in his pocket, he shoved her hair tie, which had come loose when he’d tangled his claws in her hair.

Stewing with dismay at his dereliction, he headed down to engineering.

The module was sealed—Suvan didn’t allow anyone into his domain—but the portal yielded to his override code.

Ellix stalked into the gloomy interior, raising his voice over the rumbling hum of the engines, louder than they should be. “How much longer?”

Suvan peered out from the guts of some half-deconstructed device strewn in pieces across the compartment. “I told you I’d tell you.” His large, pale eyes narrowed as he focused on Ellix. The goblhob leaped on his shoulder, chittering. “Lub says your halo is a mess.”

Ellix grumbled in the back of his throat. The Ravkajo engineer had the visual acuity to see energy fields; that was why his kind made such good engineers. At the moment, it was inconvenient. “My energy doesn’t matter. How do we counteract the anomaly?”

When the goblhob crowed out some garbled noise, Suvan held up a scanner—and aimed it directly at Ellix. “I see it, I see it,” he muttered. “Very messy.”

Ellix stiffened. “Is it the alien energy?” Had the med scans been wrong about not being infected—or impregnated?

“Yes, it’s all over you.” He held the scanner up higher, like an accusing eye. “Oh, not the anomaly. The Earther.”

Ellix sputtered, though no actual words emerged in any translatable language.

“Like that, was it?” Suvan threw down the scanner with the derisive snort, scattering pieces of his project. “Did you learn nothing from all our lightyears between suns with no one around?”

Despite his embarrassment, Ellix grunted out the sound of amusement. “I learned that Ravkajo cheat at nexum-dice.”

“Not my fault that my people are cunning mechanics while your people are prone to random acts of heroism.”

Ellix winced. “You’ll never forgive me for that, will you?”

“Never. What freighter company will ever take us back when we steered into a pirate fight instead of away?”

Lub made a sad sound, and Suvan patted its mottled, bristly hide in condolence. “At least we have this fascinating old engine.”

“That is racing us to an unknown location,” Ellix noted.

Suvan waved his fingers in rejection. “That’s a nav problem.”

“So can you nullify the energy?”

“The stuttering little Monbrakkan sent me the readings she grabbed when the anomaly finally coalesced. The distortion is complex, nothing I’ve seen before, and it seems entwined with the ship’s systems—or maybe it’s passengers.”

“Haunted,” Ellix murmured.

Instead of scoffing as Ellix expected, Suvan hesitated, and Lub whined across a cracked octave.

“In the sense that in Earther parlance, a haunting is a lingering energy signature somehow linked to a discreet object…” He waved his hand in another repudiating gesture.

“But I have yet to encounter a wavelength I couldn’t control. ”

Ellix rubbed one of the scorched patches in his fur. Technically, those scars were from Felicity’s fire, not the distortion itself, but he wasn’t feeling at all happy about how control was beginning to feel like a delusion.

“So how do we capture a wavelength?” he mused.

“It’s true there aren’t many options for a containment unit,” Suvan said. “Not with the limited resources on this ship. And I suspect you won’t like any of them.”

“I’m sure I won’t,” Ellix said wryly. “Let me gather the crew and ping me in the command module.”

The Ravkajo’s pale eyes gleamed in the murk. “Why did you respond to the distress beacon when you knew as well as I did that it was likely false?”

Ellix clenched his jaw, remembering the freightliner board demanding an answer to that same question when he’d still been huffing the stink of his own scorched fur.

His reply had been…anatomically unlikely, even compared to the IDA handbooks’ more creative scenarios.

But he’d been furious—at the board, at the pirates, at himself.

When he shoved his hand in his pocket, his knuckles compressed Felicity’s hair tie.

“Does it matter?” He’d quoted interstellar law and denounced the company’s callousness, but he’d known he wasn’t telling all the truth.

He wasn’t sure why he shared it now with the irascible engineer.

“Maybe if I cried out in the darkness, I’d just want someone to answer. ”

He turned away before he had to witness Suvan’s expression. But for once, even Lub was silent.

Regretting the moment of vulnerability, he shook the tangling hair tie from his fingers and left the struggling deep whine of the engines behind him.

His comm indicated Felicity was in the jump lifepod with the passengers. Which was where he’d told her to stay, so he wasn’t sure why he lurked in one of the corridor alcoves outside, hoping she’d emerge. And then, when she did, his pulse accelerated like it wanted to outrace the ship.

He snagged her elbow as she passed, tugging her into the niche.

She let out only a small gasp, as if she wasn’t very surprised at his presence. In the soft glow of the fairy lightning, her Earther blue eyes took on a mysterious deeper hue like some uncharted region of space.

“Captain.” Despite their intimate proximity, her tone was precisely formal.

“We’ll need another plan for our guests soon.

” She turned her attention to her datpad.

“I’m requesting that you review the order confining them to the lifepod.

It’s too late for good reviews, but for humanitarian reasons, we can’t keep them locked up indefinitely. ”

Her stiff reserve made his whiskers twitch. When he’d first presented himself to the crew, he’d known she was nervous around him, but somehow, this diffidence was worse. “I suppose we can’t just jettison them into space.”

“Well, that would guarantee bad reviews.”

For all his tension and regret and uncertainty, amusement twinkled through him like starlight. He held out the hair tie. “You forgot this.”

Hectic color suffused her cheeks and fanned across the shallow V of her tunic—which she hadn’t quite sealed all the way to the top, as if…

Nay, he would not ascribe meaning to that scant finger length of flushed flesh.

He’d been derelict in his duty before; if this was the wrong spacetime for amusement, it was even more wrong for desire.

She plucked the ring of stretchy ribbon from his palm, so quick he didn’t even feel the brush of her fingertips. “Left it? Or you took it?”

“My people are enticed by shiny little things,” he admitted.

With a deft twist, she bound her hair. “You’re not going to tell me the kiss was a mistake?”

“Even if it was?”

Slowly, she let her hands drift down to her sides again. “I think some things are just…like a ghost that exists separate from explanations—and then disappears.”

He wanted to ask if ghosts could leave a mark like his teeth, but he knew she was being wiser than he.

With more effort than it should have taken, he stepped back. And as she paced him to the command module, the silence between them seemed to rival the danger of the vast space outside the precarious bubble of the Love Boat I.

+ + +

It was perhaps a dismal measure of their dire situation that the chief engineer bothered to appear in the command module console hologram.

But, Ellix reflected, maybe it would’ve been better for Lub to present their options since it would’ve made about as much sense coming from the goblhob’s undershot jaw.

“The specifics don’t matter,” Suvan finally declared after they all stared at him in silence for a bit, “because none of you could understand it, and it might not work anyway.” When the engineer’s pale gaze angled to Ellix, his tone shifted from surly exasperation to something more tentative. “This is the best I’ve got.”

Ellix inclined his head, understanding the unvoiced apology and desperation. He recognized the sentiment because it had been in the engineer’s voice when they’d launched a makeshift welder against pirates.

The hologram conjured by the Ravkajo engineer now depicted an odd angular torus, with manufacturing and operating specs flickering across the console too fast to interpret.

As a depiction of the anomaly’s shadowy fingers appeared within the torus’s empty core, simulated beams of light froze it in place.

“If it works,” Suvan continued, “the contra-field in the containment unit will focus and neutralize the target wavelengths. That should give us back control of the ship. This all presupposes we have enough correct information on the anomaly. Which we don’t.”

“Run the specs again,” Ellix said. “Slower this time.” He scanned the notations, applying what he knew of physics and fabrication. “It looks like this unit would require two thirds of our engine power.”