“Unauthorized… illegal machinery,” Khar muttered, then shouted, “Lily, I cannot remove the projectile without bleeding out. I cannot fight like this. Go to the escape pods. Get inside one.”
He severed the tether line, then swayed as the harpoon shifted in his shoulder, pain exploding through him.
He knew Lily was stronger than him. That much was undeniable. But she was also painfully innocent. This had to be her first real fight. She had no chance. And as the defeated one in the hierarchy, it was his duty to protect her.
The luxury promenade maintained its own security detachment. He would send a distress signal. All he had to do was survive until they arrived. Lily’s best chance was to flee. He was not worried about Vegrun or Madame Turtle. Breaching the private suite would take more than a gravitational strike.
Lily bit down on her lip.
Khar braced himself to drag her bodily toward the escape pods, convinced she could not move on her own.
Then she spoke.
“These… ASSHOLES!”
Khar was suddenly certain the harpoon had been poisoned and he was hallucinating.
“Khar, stay here. I’ll deal with these bastards. How dare they attack us? Vitro, reduce gravity to one quarter.”
Reduce gravity?
His thoughts were dimming by the heartbeat.
Raising it would make more sense. Lily could handle the strain.
He did not have time to say any of it.
She was gone.
His head felt heavier by the second as blood loss set in, dulling his reactions. A strange rhythmic thudding filled his ears. That was not a good sign.
With shaking hands, he tore a medipatch from his vest and slapped it over the exit wound. With some effort, he managed to secure another over his shoulder. He forced down a circulation stabilizer, and the world steadied slightly. He was not combat-ready, but he could move. And if a vukri found him, he could still run.
His only fear now was Lily.
He dragged himself upright and peered through the gap between the locker rows.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
Of the remaining six vukri, three lay broken and unmoving on the cargo bay floor. The others clung desperately to the outer wall, trying to evade Lily’s attacks as she pelted them with a heavy, elastic sphere normally used to provide traction for vehicle stabilization. She hurled it at them like a youth playing a ball game.
The lethal kind.
“You’re not so tough now, are you?” Lily shouted. “Ten of you against two of us? You fucking pirates. If I lose my only friend because of you, you’ll wish you never set foot in here.”
Something warm bloomed between Khar’s twin hearts, like the way his mother had held him when he was small.
At the same time, an icy shiver raced down his spine. The same feeling he had known when a ghesz warrior had driven a kick into his gut during his Legion chrono-cycles.
For a moment, he had believed he was dying.
He had not known both sensations could exist at once. Clearly, anything involving Lily required him to rethink everything he thought he knew about the universe.
The pounding sound finally made sense as Lily bounced the ball beside her, occasionally slamming it into the wall near the vukri, keeping them pinned in place.
Khar almost felt sorry for them.
Almost.
