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“Frek.” The lizard alien slumped backward. “You’re right.”
“Yes, I am,” the bird alien said. “You should know that by now.”
As the Sjisji and Tula senators began to bickeragain, I exchanged a sardonic look with my mother and let my mind drift to the issue I’d worked on all morning.
Something about the Abyss and the Grug…
“Frek me!” The idea burst into my mind with the relief of a pressure bubble popping.
Rualii’s beak clacked as she and everyone else in the room turned to stare at me.
“I know why the Grug placed the protective field around the Abyss.” I was enough my mother’s son to give a dramatic pause. “It’s because it’s where the Grug home world is.”
Gasps and beak clacks came from all around, and Senator Bila thumped her meaty tail against the floor.
“Why else go to all this trouble and expense?” I said, making sure to catch each of their eyes for a moment.
“We’ve never known where they came from,” Mother said, her voice thoughtful.
“And all of the rest of the seven sectors are thoroughly charted,” the Tula said.
“We always took it for granted that the Grug were…” The Sjisji lifted her wings and let them drop in a shrug. “… simply everywhere because they had space flight first. But they have to come from somewhere.”
“Do we have any idea where?” Car-Raa asked. “The Abyss is a pretty big place.”
“We might.” Gravin used his comp to send a map of the Abyss to the large wall screen. “Kirel’s analyzed the comms equipment Raxnor and the Marauders brought back from that emitter station. It seems there’s a control signal that comes from here.”
An orange dot appeared right in the middle of the map.
“It’s the Grug home world,” I said. “It has to be.”
“That’s where we have to go.” Vivv’s hands clamped onto my forearm. “We’ll carry the fight to them!”
Her eyes glowed with all the fierce fire of her warrior soul.
I’d never loved her more.
After that meeting, things moved even more quickly than before. The discovery of the special Grug location deep in the Abyss proved highly motivating to everyone involved. Even if it wasn’t their home world, it was some kind of control station for the telepathy-field emitters. Taking it out would make the Abyss safe for all our ships. We’d then be able to destroy the last of the emitters at our leisure.
Senator Bila had every Tula mining facility with the special atomic printers make as much zurilium as possible. The Sjisji brought in more of their trained space workers, and the area around Breyva turned into an impromptu shipyard. At any given point during the day, dozens of spacesuited figures swarmed over the hull of a chosen battleship, coating the surface with long swaths of the metal foil.
A crew of Zaarn, led by Zol and Frankie, took a zurilium-coated shuttle into a region of the Abyss that still had the telepathy field. They peeled off small sections of film to test how much of the coating could be lost without losing the protective effect. If we had to fight the Grug, our ships would take some hull damage. We’d take the extra precaution of wearing protective helmets during any battle, but I wanted to know exactly what I was dealing with before exposing my people. It turned out we could take around fifteen percent hull damage—it wasn’t much, but knowing would help us plan effectively.
The next few days were a whirl. While I worked on outfitting theDaredevilfor a trip into the Abyss, Vivv attended every single meeting with the politicians, campaigning fiercely for the Hyoo-mons every chance she got. Then she spent all her free hours onARK 1, examining the entire ship for damage and working with a team of engineers to assess if any systems were about to age out and malfunction. The Hyoo-mon ship had been made with durability in mind and contained backup systems, but it had also flown for over three hundred years, and several of those backup systems were now on their last legs.
Vivv shared my cabin on theDaredevil, but she fell into bed late each night, dropping with exhaustion. Added to that, crew members kept scratching at my door at all hours of the night, needing answers to burning questions that couldn’t wait.
The day before we were set to depart, I decided enough was enough. I left Gravin and Car-Raa in charge of theDaredeviland flew over to Breyva to meet Vivv as she exited onto the roof of the governmental building.
“Wrin!” She strode toward me, confident in her new Zaarn clothing. The black pants and boots suited her, as did the long-sleeved shirt that clung to her body, its purple the same color as my hands. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Except for the fact that I owe you that dinner I promised.”
“Oh, that? We don’t have ti—”
“We’re making time.”
“But—”
