Page 4 of Seven Oars (Rix Universe #3)

The next morning began much as all the previous ones, with orderly use of the lavatory followed by canned breakfast.

After breakfast, Anske discovered her Holy Guide was missing.

“Have you seen it?”

she asked everyone in turn.

“It’s like a notepad with different-colored squares on the cover: orange, purple, blue… One for each commandment.”

No one knew what happened to the Holy Guide. No one truly cared.

“I’m sure it’ll turn up soon,”

Rosamma tried to reassure her.

But Anske couldn’t be talked out of her search. She looked for her Guide all morning, rooting around and upturning their carefully stowed-away things. Alyesha got snappish, and they quarreled.

In the heavy silence that had descended, Fawn produced a small, innocuous device.

“Yo, bitches! How about some music?”

The women clustered around Fawn.

“Where did you get it?”

“Does it work?”

Fawn grinned cheekily.

“Yes, it works. It’s mine, actually.”

Gro gave her a questioning look.

“I thought the aliens took away all the gadgets.”

“They did.”

“How did you get it back?”

“I asked nicely,”

Fawn demurred, then chortled at Alyesha’s expression.

“No backstairs deals with the aliens, I swear.”

“You didn’t steal the player, did you?”

Anske asked, frowning.

Fawn threw her hands up in the air.

“For someone so pious, you sure have a suspicious mind. Riel gave it to me.”

“How kind of him,”

Alyesha murmured.

Fawn powered the player on.

“I have an entire catalogue from this one record label. Ten years’ worth of music. All the original, first edition recordings.”

Gro whistled.

“Collector’s music. Must’ve cost a fortune.”

“That,”

Fawn admitted, “was totally pirated. I dated a guy once whose sister worked for that records company. It was his birthday present to me.”

“Stolen goods! Some present.”

Anske crossed her arms.

“We’re not listening to any of this.”

“Then cover your ears, ‘cause we’re jamming.”

Fawn turned it on.

The sound was weak and tinny. Everyone quieted, listening.

The first track was by a popular female singer, still trending on Meeus.

“Oh my god, I love her!”

Sassa squealed and clapped her hands.

The lyrics were a bit racy, but the vocals were more than passable, and the beat was lively.

The first genuine smile tugged at Rosamma’s mouth, rusty after so many days, weeks of worrying. Smiles bloomed all around her.

“Outrageous,”

Anske grumbled, but even she was defrosting.

The song was so familiar, so nostalgic. It suddenly felt like they’d only left Meeus for a short trip and would soon come home.

Home.

How Rosamma longed to go back! Oh, if she ever returned, she’d… The first thing she’d do…

What would she do? What was waiting for her at home?

She thought back to her cozy room in the apartment, the many quiet nights she had spent under mellow lamplight, reading and waiting for her brother to come home.

It hadn’t been a bad life, not for someone as afflicted as she was.

Against her will, her gaze strayed to the deck and Phex, for the briefest of moments.

Fawn started singing along, and soon the others joined in. Rosamma did too, mixing up lyrics and making them up as she went.

They laughed and swayed, and laughed harder because microgravity made dancing a ridiculous affair.

Through the open hatch, they could see the Rix, and the Rix could see them. Riel was at the controls. Phex, indifferent, turned away.

And she knew: it may have been Riel who returned Fawn’s music player, but it had to be Phex who authorized it. Nothing on this cruiser happened without his approval.

He wasn’t the unemotional, pre-programmed robot everyone believed him to be.

A warm feeling spread through Rosamma as she took in his form in his shimmering dark-blue suit, tightly woven from tiny links of unknown material, like beautiful alien chainmail. They all wore the uniform, but it looked especially dashing on Phex. He was so exotically beautiful.

Fawn and Sassa linked hands and spun in a wild circle. Over the singing, Gro and Eze swapped witty insults about each other’s taste in music. Cold, aloof Alyesha was grinning. And young, weird Daphne looked on at the frolicking with her owlish, unblinking eyes.

Amid the exuberance and uncoordinated swaying of bodies, the singing and the laughter, a slight jolt of the cruiser went almost unnoticed. Barely a jolt, even. More like a sensation—something that shouldn’t be there.

Before Rosamma could fully register it, Riel shouted, and then the sirens blared, drowning out everything else. The screens on deck lit up in a kaleidoscope of warnings. Strobe lights around the interior flashed spasmodically.

The Rix sprang into action, tearing into their supplies, extracting hand weapons.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

the women kept asking one another.

Fawn’s music player was still on, bleating out another popular melody beneath the abrasive wail of the sirens.

“You’re the spokeswoman. Ask them!”

Alyesha shouted at Rosamma.

Rosamma could only stare, stunned into stupidity by the sudden shift, the noise, and the sick feeling of doom.

“Stay in the back room!”

Riel yelled at them.

Since they were already there, they only huddled closer together.

Daphne burst out crying, and Sassa started sobbing too.

Another distant jolt unsettled the ship. This time, it was felt more clearly, a metallic clang, like two railroad cars coupling.

Anske recited a prayer.

The sounds and flashes disoriented Rosamma. She gripped Gro’s hand and held on, her eyes locked on Phex, tracking his every movement. He worked furiously at the controls, exchanging terse words with his crew amid the cacophony of the ship’s overstimulated warning system.

“We’ll be okay. It’s nothing. The alarm makes it so much worse.”

But Gro’s words failed to reassure Rosamma.

The Rix didn’t think it was nothing.

As suddenly as it had begun, it all stopped—the noise, the lights.

The cruiser plunged into complete darkness. Only the battery-powered music player kept going, spilling out yet another well-known hit.

Two heartbeats, three…

Phex fired up an emergency flashlight.

All four Rix defenders had floated into the “back”

room, crowding in with the women. They closed the hatch and locked it.

“Prepare oxygen masks.”

Phex thrust the torch into Rosamma’s hands and palmed a second weapon. Two more were clipped to his waist.

“What about the protective suits?”

Eze asked.

“Don’t have any.”

Eze didn’t ask again.

“Did we hit an asteroid or something?”

Fawn asked, her voice thin.

“We’ve been ambushed.”

“By who?”

“By pirates.”

Phex hit the music player, silencing the familiar music forever.

Fawn gasped.

“P-pirates? Are you sure?”

Phex didn’t deign to reply.

The silence that followed was broken only by uneven breathing and the rustle of packages as Riel extracted oxygen masks and handed them out.

Meanwhile, their cruiser sailed on, seemingly undisturbed. No more clanging or jolts. No movement at all. Aside from the power loss, now replaced by the red glow of the emergency flashlight, everything seemed normal.

It was wild to imagine that somewhere outside, something was happening. That there could be another presence.

“What are we going to do?”

Rosamma whispered into the dark silence.

“We wait.”

Phex turned to her, all huge black eyes and austere features.

“If we’re lucky, they will board us.”

“And if we’re not?”

“They’ll shoot.”

She put the oxygen mask over her face. It pinched her skin.

All of it seemed surreal, like one of those bad action movies. Or maybe the good action movies. The realistic ones.

Eze stirred at the edge of the circle of light.

“Did you contact our flagship? The one with Rosamma’s brother on it?”

Phex shifted ever so slightly.

“No. They’re too far. They changed course and went to Enzomora,”

he said stiffly.

“That ex-pirate friend of yours, Lyle, needs medics Priss doesn’t have.”

Rosamma’s breath thinned, and the oxygen mask did nothing to help.

Ren!

“You never told us that!”

Alyesha’s voice bristled with fear, hurt, and anger.

“You didn’t need to know.”

Rosamma wanted to laugh and laugh. Why did nothing go according to plan? Why had she agreed to leave Meeus in the first place? Why, why…

Alyesha exploded.

“We do need to know! We’re in this together, you uppity fucks. You’ve failed us! Some Rix defenders you are. You missed the pirates, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Phex adjusted his grip on the gun.

“Yes, we have missed them,”

he admitted, the first crack in his composure.

“This cruiser lacks equipment. Flying it was a stupid idea. But we didn’t have a choice, did we? We were ordered to fly you, and now we’ll die protecting you.”

Alyesha fell silent.

They waited, ears straining.

Nothing changed.

“Why are we sitting here and not shooting at them?”

Eze asked again.

“There’s no ammo.”

“Is there any good news?”

Gro quipped.

Riel, another optimist, chuckled.

“We haven’t been blown up yet.”

A sound came then, a distant groan of resisting metal being pried open. Clangs followed. Then a sizzling shot. And then… voices.

Louder, closer.

Near.

The Rix defenders formed a line in front of the frightened huddle of the women.

Abruptly, the hatch protecting them from the intruders was torn away, ripped off along with the doorframe. The beam of an industrial-strength flashlight from the opening blinded them.

Phex fired.

His laser hit the flashlight, melting it and filling the air with acrid smoke. The pirate holding it howled and spit out a savage curse in a language that struck Rosamma as strange—and familiar.

But there was no time to think about languages.

An object flew through the open hatch—the molten flashlight—striking Riel in the head with a dull thunk.

A massive body loomed in the opening. Then another.

More bodies.

There was no warning before the violence erupted.

Rosamma's senses got flooded by the foreign stench of dirty men, the sounds of fists hitting flesh, the shouts and cursing.

In zero gravity, everything devolved into an indistinguishable tangle of flailing bodies. The red light from their emergency flashlight flashed off the blades of the pirates’ knives.

Neither party discharged any more firearms, likely to avoid making a hole in the hull.

Yes. Very likely that.

The thoughts tumbled through Rosamma’s head like clothes in the dryer, as she was tossed about the cramped room, jostled and shoved by the fighting bodies.

“Get them, girls!”

Gro shouted.

She unclipped one of the small supply crates and hurled it at a big body that wasn’t one of their Rix.

It connected, knocking the pirate off balance, right into Aris’s reach. He snagged the man and pistol-whipped him hard.

The pirate should have dropped, but in this environment, he just kept floating.

Rosamma strained to see. Was he dead?

Blood welled from his head wound in a grotesque blob that grew without breaking contact with skin, a macabre balloon inflating.

Gro unclipped another container and shoved it into Rosamma’s hands.

She threw it, hitting someone. Friend or foe? Impossible to tell.

More objects floated in the air now. The women started grabbing whatever they could and flinging it at the pirates.

“Die, you worthless bastards!”

Anske screamed, throwing herself at a big body.

She caught a fist in the stomach and convulsed mid-air, gasping and wheezing.

“Let me go!”

Fawn shrieked, her hair caught in a huge fist.

Rosamma flung the emergency flashlight at the pirate holding Fawn, but he caught it, crushing the device in his hand.

Their world plunged into darkness once again.

It amplified the strained grunts of the men and the helpless cries of the women.

Fear of death blossomed, a poisonous flower of doom, feeding off the dark.

Something cold and hard touched Rosamma’s skin.

The oxygen mask flew off her face as she thrashed wildly, pushing against the thing—anything to get away.

She wanted to smell vanilla, to see the sky, to live. She wanted Phex’s attention. Ren. To feel better and to reach Priss in one goddamn piece. Was that too much to ask?

The cold, hard thing scraped her skin. Bodies pressed in close.

It was a net.

They were sardines, dumb, senseless fish caught for dinner.

It tightened painfully, mashing their bodies into a ball, arms and legs twisted at odd angles.

They were dragged through the dark, away from the perceived but oh-so-precious safety of their “back” room.

The squeeze compressed them hard.

More pressure. Almost unbearable tightness.

Pain.

A clang echoed from somewhere deep, followed by a prolonged hiss of an airlock hatch.

A door to what hell?

Lights flashed, stabbing into Rosamma’s eyes.

She landed hard on her side.

Gravity.

They were someplace else now, another ship. It smelled of machine oil and a stuffy locker room.

A great machine rumbled in the bowels of this new ship. It pulsed as if alive with grating whirrs and deep, throaty knocks. The vibrations transferred through the floor, into her skin, her bones, until her body thrummed with it.

The net loosened, leaving Rosamma writhing on the floor.

Her wavering vision registered dark figures moving around.

Tremors racked her body. She was cold. Beside her, Anske whimpered in pain. Mara lay motionless.

Phex! Where was he?

Frantically scanning the tangle of bodies with her blurry eyes, Rosamma spotted his arm, bent and still, fingers lax.

“What have we here?”

said a gravelly voice, speaking smooth but strangely accented Universal.

“Would you look at that.”

A new sound entered the space, a soft whirring underscored by a slight squeak of fat wheels. A bizarre contraption rolled up from the darkness. Its sight sparked a tiny hope inside Rosamma that maybe, after all, it was all just a bad dream.

“No immediate danger, Striker,”

the contraption enunciated in a melodious female voice. It spoke a textbook-perfect Universal.

“Higher reasoning present. Non-venomous. Weapons not detected.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rosamma glimpsed the frightened, pinched faces of her companions. Their attention was fixed on the thing, with Daphne staring intently at the small purple light blinking in the middle of the robot’s “belly.”

“Hello, alien life forms,”

said the same gravelly voice, so deep it resonated in Rosamma’s chest like the ship’s engines.

The pirate stepped forward from the hazy beyond and halted when the toes of his scuffed boots touched the net. Slowly, he lowered himself onto his haunches.

Others behind him sniggered in a coarse and obnoxious manner.

He flung the net off sharply, scaring the women into gasps and cries for mercy.

Pulse hammering in her temples, Rosamma looked the pirate in the face.

Scars and grime. Sharp planes. Ugly.

His oversized black eyes glinted malevolently under the ship’s dim, flickering lights.

Her mental wheels snagged at his image.

His eyes were large, almond-shaped, and fully black above an aquiline nose with three slatted nostrils on each side.

Phex’s eyes.

Like Phex, he had fine but abundant hair and a six-fingered hand still gripping the net he had lifted.

The pirate was a Rix alien.

Rosamma forced her hazy vision to focus on the shapes in the background.

They were all Rix aliens.

But not of the defender kind.