Page 19

Jaz

The chime warned that we were on the ten-minute countdown to the slipstream spitting us out in Nirzk territory.

I’d taken a close look at what the navcube had provided, and I’d handed piloting privileges over without a whimper. I was a damned good pilot.

I didn’t think I was good enough.

Of course, I had no idea if Zyair was, either. He stood over the pilot’s seat and arched a brow at its placement—he currently wouldn’t be able to fold his long legs to fit into the space. He leaned over to hit a button, and the seat obediently moved backward.

When he lowered himself into place, he winced and growled. Then he peeled off the upper half of the coveralls and fully unzipped them before yanking them lower on his hips.

I ripped my gaze away from the naked skin thus revealed. It was marred with half-healed talon marks, but wowsers ! He was one gorgeous hunk of Drake. And it seemed he preferred to be piloting more or less in the nude.

With the essentials now unbound, he sighed in relief as he settled.

For the first time, I witnessed how the design of the seat facilitated Drake wings—each side of it was indented to leave room for them to pass beyond the seat itself.

It had always left my shoulders feeling unsupported, but Zyair’s wings spread comfortably a little behind and above him.

And the weird notch at the back of the seat was to leave room for their tails.

Zyair’s twitched as he pulled the harness into position across the most splendid pectoral development I’d ever witnessed—well, except for maybe Xandros’s—and strapped in.

When he glanced my way and raised a brow, I took a long breath and plunked my butt into the navigator’s seat, which was seldom occupied.

While in realspace, I usually handled both navigator and pilot duties for the Stardrifter.

There was seldom so much incoming information that a second person was necessary.

It felt weird being there, instead of in the pilot’s seat.

The control panel sloped away from me, and I placed the navcube in the hexagon-shaped holder that protruded from it.

It currently showed the slipstream dockyard, but it was a static display.

Until we left the slipstream itself, it couldn’t pick up on the realtime data.

By the time it did, things were likely to be pretty well in motion.

Zyair occupied himself with adjusting the controls. Piloting the Stardrifter involved the use of both hand levers and foot pedals. I loved the sensation of becoming part of the ship, and I could tell by the way Zyair fiddled with them that he wanted everything positioned just right.

As I watched him fuss, a small amount of my internal worry abated. He was certainly acting like an experienced pilot.

Another chime sounded—the three-minute warning. Zyair hit the internal comm on the dash. “Check in.,”

“Strapped in and ready,” Xandros rumbled from the starboard gun port.

“Ready,” Rhodes stated from the port side.

“As ready as I’m going to be,” Yani said from the engineering bay. “Sookie’s strapped in too.” She’d have Sookie in her little travel crate, where she wouldn’t get tossed around .

I was hoping there wouldn’t be too much tossing. But I had my doubts.

“Do I get a vote?” Kurt complained.

“No,” I said, and shut down the comm.

“When this is over, you can explain how you ended up flying with that annoying male,” Zyair growled.

I’d rather forget about Kurt than explain him. Zyair started flicking switches, and a deep thrum ran through the floorboards beneath my feet as the realspace engines came online.

We weren’t supposed to do that until the slipstream released us. “The authorities will be pissed,” I murmured.

He grunted. “I’m afraid we are about to do all kinds of things that are discouraged.”

“What’s life without adventure?” I asked.

He shot me a look. “Indeed,” he stated, and then, he smiled.

Fucking hell. It transported him from gorgeous to some other status that I lacked sufficient words for. I sat transfixed, my mind filled with static.

Fortunately, Zyair looked away again, and I was able to recover.

My dash screen on the panel was live and ready for data from the navcube once it was clear of the slipstream’s interference.

He’d put me in charge of handling the slipstream authorities—it would be best if their equivalent of police stayed out of things.

According to Zyair, the Nirzks would have their talons deep into the local establishment—getting stopped by the port authority would only ensure our delivery to their nemesis.

I had no idea just how I was going to keep the authorities at bay. I’d rather be doing the flying. So long as we were just ordinary flying…

I was reasonably certain that we wouldn’t be.

“We will be—good,” Zyair rumbled.

“Are you going to tell me that you do this kind of thing all the time?”

His lips twitched. “Often enough. ”

I thought he was joking, but something in his voice indicated he wasn’t.

To distract myself, I stared at the static hologram from the navcube. It showed the portal through which we would be arriving, and the structure surrounding it that supported the slipstream itself.

I tapped the controls, and it zoomed past that zone, to that just beyond.

A planet wreathed in cloud dominated the screen, ringed by a large asteroid belt.

The extensive port authority infrastructure, complete with docking facilities, was sheltered from stray pounding rocks by powerful shields, as well as a small orbiting moon.

The slipstream ports were magnets for vendors of all kinds, and their infrastructure was designed to house markets.

The gravity docks extended out from it like three-dimensional spokes on a wheel, and the berths were often at a premium.

Beyond the dock itself was the departure zone, where ships waited in queue for their slipstream allotment.

It was a busy place, and by the way Zyair was revving the realspace engines, we were about to visit it at an unsuitably rapid speed.

The slipstream began its thirty-second countdown. I glanced to Zyair, who stared out the viewscreen. His eyes were alight with green fire, his wings partly spread, and every muscle was poised.

Ready.

Just looking at him lit something inside me that I didn’t wish to examine too closely.

The chime increased in frequency until it was a steady tone—and space suddenly reappeared around us.

Zyair didn’t wait for any kind of reasonable visual. He slammed the throttle forward, and Stardrifter leaped from the portal like a startled deer.

I was pushed deep into my seat as we hurtled into the departure zone. My dash lit up with a million lights as the port authority demanded in a no-nonsense tone that we shut down immediately.

Instead, Zyair accelerated and took us right amid the ships waiting in queue. I held my breath as he dove between two mammoth slipstream shuttles, somehow emerging unscathed out the other side.

“Look for them,” he coached calmly. “They are there.”

The navcube was now coughing up ship ID’s along with descriptions and placement. I tapped a finger into the air on top of one—and there it was.

A Nirzk vessel.

It could be simply waiting for the slipstream, but it was smaller than the Stardrifter and not in the queue. Instead, it was in motion, arcing around the stationary line of ships.

Moving to cut us off.

Zyair shot the navcube a look. “Nirzk Ranger. Heavily armed, and shaftzing fast.”

I found two more doing the same thing. “We have three Nirzks moving to intercept.” I scanned another phalanx of four, slightly larger, ships heading our way. “And the port authority is coming in from coordinates 30-0-07.”

An increasingly shrill voice was demanding that we halt. I hit the comm button. “My apologies. Our ship has experienced an engine malfunction. We are attempting to get it under control.”

That my tone remained calm throughout was a matter of pride, because the reality was that we were barrelrolling as we passed first over, and then through, two largish merchant vessels. We were doing pretty damned good when it came to controlling a supposedly bolting spaceship.

“Navigate out of the queue and standby to be contained.” The suspicion in the official’s voice verified that I wasn’t the only one to notice that.

If three or more of those port authority ships managed to surround us and activate their EMF containment field, we were toast. It would completely shut down our vessel. Which, if we were really experiencing a malfunction, would be a great thing.

As it was, we needed to avoid that. Fortunately, the port vessels were hampered by their desire to carefully negotiate their way through the jam-packed queue. Whereas the Nirzk vessels dipped and dove with us, and were right on our tail as we approached a slipstream shuttle.

We were going to hit it, no way we’d miss. Then Zyair stomped on the foot pedals, yanked back on the column—and flipped the Stardrifter right over, in a space-shipian version of ass over tea kettle .

The Nirzk vessels were caught completely flatfooted. One managed—sort of—to mimic our maneuver. A second pulled up, coming close enough to the larger ship that it clipped off sensors. The third wasn’t so lucky—it hit the slipstream shuttle’s shields and exploded.

The explosion, Zyair’s nutzoid maneuver, and the nausea it induced all assisted me in adding a good dose of emotion to my reply to the official.

“Give us a minute to try on our own. We can’t afford the downtime.” An EMF containment could knock systems down for days. Anyone familiar with space travel would commiserate.

The official was spluttering into the comm, and no doubt was now handling an outraged slipstream shuttle crew, but the port authority vessels had hesitated in their advance.