Page 20 of Hijack! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #1)

Maybe she’d been a bit overconfident. She hadn’t even paused for a pro/con comparison. Was there such a thing as alien-kissing-induced delusion?

Or maybe it was just that a man who heard a cry for help and answered—even knowing it might be trouble—had asked her for help. Like he believed in her.

Well, hallucination or heroism, too late now.

Reflexively, Felicity fumbled for her datpad. She could just do that pro/con real quick while she returned to the lifepod to check on the passengers one last time before they attempted to regain control of the ship…

Her groping hands came up empty because she’d left the device on Ellix’s chair in the command module. Like she’d given up her scrunchie. In frustration, she raked her hands through her hair, but instead of her own fine strands, her fingers tingled with the memory of lush fur.

I wanted to leave the devotion mark on you.

What would that have meant, exactly?

Did she want to know?

She would have to ask him. Maybe she could look it up first, do her own research, make a list of questions. But the truth was, the only answer that would matter was his.

She would just have to take that risk too.

After saving the ship, of course. She paused for a few calming breaths, and surprisingly, they seemed to work.

Speaking of questions, she let herself into the lifepod and was instantly besieged by a few dozen of them, plus a few demands.

“Do you have any idea how many followers are going to hear about this?”

(Yes, she did in fact know how many followers; she’d curated the passenger list with purpose. Felicity did not say this.)

“I must speak with the captain, immediately.”

(Yes, she wanted to do the same. She also did not say this.)

“Are we going to die?”

(Uhrm, hopefully no?)

That last question from Mariah deserved more than internal snarky monologue. So Felicity raised her datpad-free hands, patting the air as if she could smooth the agitation coming at her in waves.

“Everyone,” she said loudly, “if I could please have your attention.” She’d told Ellix she intended to be honest with their passengers; they deserved the truth. He’d agreed, albeit reluctantly. He’d also wanted to accompany her, in case there was “unruliness”, but she’d declined.

“This is my job,” she told him. “Let me do it while you go do yours.”

And he did. Still, she imagined some of that protective furry bulk around her as she faced the disturbed crowd.

“The power fluctuation we experienced earlier has worsened and is affecting some of the ship’s systems”—when Remy started to speak up, Felicity gave her a hard look—“including navigation and communications. We are off course with no way to call for assistance.”

Probably it was horrified shock, not her commanding presence, that kept them silent for a moment.

But grateful for the reprieve, she forged on.

“Though the captain and crew are working to reroute power, there may be further disruptions.” She directed a gentler look to Mariah.

“We do not plan to die. And believe me, I make plans for everything.” She cast a quick glance at Ikaryo, who she knew had been silently monitoring the situation.

“I’m on my way to get an update now, and I’ll be back to share that with you as soon as possible. In the meantime…”

Even though she didn’t have the datpad with her, she could picture the various appeasing phrases she’d collected for the “damage control dialogues” tab. She might’ve practiced them aloud more than once.

Not this time though. “I know this hasn’t been the fun night any of us expected,” she said, going off script. “And I am very disappointed about that because I wrote the brochure! But…maybe the most perfectly plotted course going sideways is what takes us where we never realized we needed to go.”

Not so long ago—like, maybe earlier this evening—the possibility of all her careful plans getting blown to subatomic particles would’ve made her hyperventilate. Now… Maybe she was saving all her breathlessness for a certain lion-man.

On her way down to engineering, she found herself stopping at the Starlit Salon. It was empty and dark, like the bounded oval of space through the viewport. The stars, going by too fast and far away, streaked the blackness like scars.

Or silvery tears.

“Are you here?”

The question was just a hollow echo. Sometimes, fear was a gift, her therapist had told her. And sometimes it was a weapon she wielded against herself. The trick was knowing which was which.

So she pulled the feelings button out of her pocket. It flickered uneasily in her hand—or maybe that was her shaky fingers?—until she set it on the corner of the bar. If only she could chug a strong shot of something real…

“Do you see me? Can your energy reach us this way?”

Was she just talking to the air? She’d done that a lot as an anxious kid; at the time, it had seemed like progress to stuff it all deeper, to keep it to herself.

The button stayed stubbornly blank.

“Felicity?” Ellix’s voice rumbled through her comm.

Oh, that rumble kept rolling through the tiny bones of her ears, filtering along each vertebrae, all the way down… “Coming.”

Her original tour of the ship hadn’t included the engine cellar. Mr. Evens had said only that the space belonged to the chief engineer. She hadn’t realized the Ravkajo would guard it like a dragon. And from her research, his species somewhat resembled lizards.

Although there were IDA match preferences for scales and fang, no check box existed for rude and remote.

The portal beeped permission to enter and opened to a square of unrelieved darkness.

The discordant drone of the engines was like creepy theremin music played backward for max creeptastic effect.

Resisting the urge to tiptoe—which was hard in the heavy magnetized crampons anyway—she walked far enough into the cave-like engine module that the door closed behind her.

In the sudden black, a dizzying claustrophobia snatched at her breath. She was trapped…

The white-hot glare of an arc welder ripped sparks through the darkness, briefly illuminating Ellix and the other crew members, and she hurried toward them.

Promptly tripping over something in the shadows.

A big, familiar paw grasped her elbow, keeping her upright. “You’re here.”

The hint of gladness in his deep voice made her heartbeat skip almost as quickly as he’d come to her side. But for some reason, the resonance with what she’d asked in the Starlit Salon— Are you here? —tightened her throat. “I’m here.”

“How are the passengers?”

“Worried, but not too unruly. Should we discuss releasing the lifepod?”

“Not at this speed. I’ve checked and rechecked the calculations. With how the ship keeps accelerating, the pod would be ripped apart on separation.”

She grimaced. “Then we really are in this together.”

“Suvan says the containment unit will be done sooner than he anticipated. It’s wired directly into the engines, so we’ll have to spark the distortion here.”

She wanted to beg for reassurance, as Mariah had done. But she wasn’t just a Love Boat I guest; she was crew. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

He hadn’t let go of her arm, and now he steered her away from the others, into an even darker corner. “Once the unit is complete, I’ll send the rest of the crew away, and we’ll be alone here. I would not ask you to take this risk either, but every time the distortion appears, you’ve been there.”

She blinked. “I… I guess that’s right.” Abruptly, she reared back against his hold. “You don’t think that it’s me doing this.”

“Nay!” He didn’t let her go. “If I did, I’d let you do this alone.”

Peering up at him, she caught the gleam in his golden eye. “I would say you’re getting better at teasing, but…”

“But it was a terrible joke. Because I would never let you take this chance alone.”

She’d been alone—clutching Mr. Evens’ job offer, head still aching from the translator implanting—while she’d watched Earth shrink to the proverbial blue marble behind the ship taking her to the stars.

The sight had left her breathless. And the only thing more terrifying had been the thought of staying stuck, not so much on the closed world but in her going-nowhere life.

Now she was going somewhere, very fast, although where that was exactly…

But one thing she knew was close enough. Disregarding the lingering sting of the “passing weakness” comment, she reached out to center her palm on the thick mane arrowing down his chest where the dark gold fur turned silkier and as pale as her own hair.

She took another breath and would’ve sworn she caught a hint of the flowers in the atmo-hall. “Would’ve been odd kissing all by myself.”

His cats-eye pupil slitted as he pinned his paw over her hand. “Not without me,” he growled.

“Captain,” Griiek called. “The containment unit is…ready?”

Felicity lifted one eyebrow at Ellix. “That sounds about as confident as I do.”

“I have never doubted you.”

She tucked her chin. “That’s because you can’t see the panicked mess I am inside.”

“Kufzasin do not have flesh-penetrating vision, it’s true,” he said with great seriousness. “But I have seen what you do , and I say that matters more.”

His sincerity and his trust warmed her as much as his kisses had, just in a different way. Was that the devotion of his people? Partnership and passion, faith and feeling.

“Let’s go save the ship,” she whispered.

He didn’t release her hand as they returned to the crew working on the unit.

Suvan’s pale eyes locked on them, blinking once, and Felicity would’ve laughed at Griiek’s audible gulp but that seemed rude.

Instead, she concentrated on the chief engineer’s explanation of the containment unit and how it would negate the harmonic distortion plaguing their systems and yada yada.

Okay, so most of her focus was actually on Ellix’s big paw engulfing her fingers.

Anyway, it wasn’t like she could offer sensible critique of a “capacitorus”, as Suvan called it.

At first she thought the name referenced the large size of the unit and the long conduits of tubing, one at each end, that created a vaguely brontosaurus-looking device suspended in the middle of the room.

But as the engineer went on—and on—her translator deciphered that the unit functioned as a sort of capacitor for storing an energy charge in the donut-shaped torus of the core component.

Suvan finally wrapped up, saying, “Assuming the distortion can be nullified by the wavelengths we calculated, the draw on the engines will be significant. We have one opportunity to do this.”

In the tense silence as they considered the situation, an urgent beep sounded.

“Captain,” Delphine said. “Not that we can do anything to stop it yet, but you should know, that alarm meant we’ve likely crossed into the Zarnox Zone. There aren’t hard borders to the zone, but at our speed, we’re probably already out of reach of any jurisdictional authority.”

Felicity swallowed hard. “So we’re really on our own.”

“That would be preferable,” Suvan grumbled. “Instead, the worst of the worst are out here in the zone with us.”

Ellix squeezed her hand. “I’ve been told this cruise launched on a chance and a hope. Let’s see if that’s enough—along with some engineering—to get our ship back.”

In retrospect, she should’ve paid more attention in those math and science classes, but since astrophysics hadn’t been offered at community college she wouldn’t be too hard on herself.

Hey, probably her therapist would consider that progress.

So while Suvan and Griiek led their captain aside to show him how to control the capacitorus, she took a few deep breaths of the metallic air.

The brochure she’d written for the Cosmic Connections Cruise had proclaimed lightspeed dating was all about taking a chance on hope.

When she’d mentioned it to Ellix before, he’d seemed to dismiss the sentiment as purely silly.

To find out now that Captain Never-Smiles had listened…

Maybe she had a knack for this gig after all.

And maybe she was getting the knack of a certain captain too.

She felt almost not too freaked out by the time Ellix returned to her.

“Once we activate the capacitorus, the interference will cut off our comms until we separate the distortion from our systems,” he told her quietly. “Is there anything you need before we begin?”

“No. Everything I have is right here.” Hearing herself, her face heated. “I mean here on the ship. Not…” She cut her gaze away from him, only then realizing the rest of the crew had gone. “Anyway. I should tell you…”

He straightened, his whiskers flaring. “Yes?”

“I didn’t really understand Suvan’s calculations. Do we actually stand a chance, or is this more of a hope?”

His whiskers slicked back. “Maybe a wish?”

Despite her nerves, she smiled. “This time I won’t ask if you are teasing.” She turned to face the capacitorus. “Let’s do this.”

“Felicity.” He caught her elbow, swiveling her back around, and his expression was severe. “Whatever happens, I need you to obey me. And nay, I am not teasing.”

She studied the fierce glint in his golden eye. “You are the captain.”

He extended one arm and she took two steps into his embrace.