AllFreeNovel
Share Us
5
EVE
Iwoke up in Tschenkar’s arms. Then I felt myself being manhandled. Then I woke up all the way strapped to a chair in the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” I asked, as the smell of blood hit my nose.
“You have two minutes to do some maths,” Tschenkar said.
“Engineer Eve,” Urgar said, throwing me a tablet.
I looked down at the math and the hastily drawn diagram. Urgar explained out loud as I looked it over.
“We won’t make it,” I whispered.
He’d given me assessments of the damage we’d taken. Without the Hivemind, the ship seemed to be almost shutting down. If we hadn’t been headed toward Eden already, I’d have recommended we get on our way, because I doubted the engines would even work after a few more days.
The unstoppable Khetar warship was now a floating coffin, and the human pirates were like very aggressive vultures, pecking away atHarbingerto speed along its inevitable death.
“Tschenkar,” I said, voice icy cold, “even with no more hits to the ship, I doubtHarbingercould make it through the atmosphere at this rate.”
“So we’re doomed?” Urgar asked.
“No,” Tschenkar said, grinning.
I’d had almost no hope, but his smile brought me back from the darkness. Had he really thought of something? “You have an idea?”
“Urgar had the idea,” he said, “before you woke up.”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t! I didn’t have any idea, we’re—”
“You said we would never make it in one piece,” Tschenkar said.
“Tschenkar,” I started, “we can—”
He grabbed me and threw me over his shoulder. “You go back to the couch now.”
I punched him and protested, I tried to writhe out of his arms, but he was too strong, and soon he had me strapped back into the couch. The cold rush of the drugs hit, and I couldn’t manage to stay awake.
* * *
This timeI woke up with Tschenkar’s hand clutching tight to mine. I was still in the couch.
“I’m up,” I stammered.
I didn’t feel a lot of g-forces, but I didn’t feel weightless either. I had no real idea where we were or what was going on.
“We split the ship into 100 shards,” Tschenkar said. “There was just enough power and processing left alive in it do that, but that was it.Harbingeris gone now.”
“Where are we?”
I tried to look around, but my head was held tight by the couch, and I was permanently looking straight up. I saw only Tschenkar’s chiseled jaw, deep purple eyes, and cocky grin.
A big, forced smile would have made me feel nervous, but the cocky grin let me know that he thought we had a real shot still.
“We made it,” he said, “we’ll be crashing onto your planet in just a few minutes.”
“How many shards made it through?”
