She used metal cable to bind him to the main locker post, then squeezed her throbbing hand and turned her attention to the vukri.
Vitro’s sensors showed five heat signatures scattered among the stacked crates, one inside the wall.
Lily ran to the medical kit on the side wall, slapped insulating gel onto her burned hand. It disinfected and sealed the wound, but the cold was brutal, almost freezing.
Teeth clenched, she searched for the vukri in the wall, trying to figure out how she would reach it, when she spotted the massive hole torn into the wall that housed Panel C, likely from Saxum’s plasma weapon.
The vukri lay inside the breach.
In its final moments it had tried to chew into the cable bundle, but the golem’s fist had crushed its spine. The heat map suggested it had happened recently. It was not breathing, but the body was still warm.
Lily set her console to alert her the moment any vukri left hiding, then got to work restoring Vitro’s shields.
She ignored every official safety step the service manual would have demanded. In minutes she cleaned and reconnected the damaged cables. She slapped a repair film over the hole and sealed it with the same paste she had used on her collar. Then, through the service panel, she forced Vitro with manual overrides to restore vacuum integrity in the channel and stabilize conditions for shield restart.
Was it perfect? No.
Would it hold long term? Also no.
But it worked. For now, that was all that mattered.
When she finished the shield generator patchwork, she ran out of the cargo bay and, at the external control, dropped oxygenlevels inside to the minimum required for survival. The reduced pressure would ease the strain on the repair film and leave anyone inside barely able to stand. They would pass out soon.
Lily was starting to tire, but she moved at a near run down the corridor toward the service tunnel.
She needed to bring the shields back online.
She needed to hunt Horos.
When she turned the corner, she hit something hard. Black. Solid.
She lost her balance and dropped onto her backside, then looked up at what had stopped her.
The fall had taken only an instant.
It was long enough for disappointment to flood her, bitter and sharp.
Damn it.
I was so close.
Chapter 24
Queen of Mine
Lily
“Does your name mean something?”
“Yes. A flower on Earth.”
“What does it look like?”
Lily hesitated, searching for the right way to describe it, then remembered she could simply show him.
Helios had transferred everything from her Earth phone to her VoidBrace, images included. It took only a command. With a few quick motions she selected a portrait of herself holding a bouquet of tiger lilies and shared it with Khar, the same way they had exchanged reports back when they were still pretending their work was the only thing binding them together.
Khar stared at the image, spellbound. As always, Lily tried to smother her embarrassment with words.
