Page 38 of Hunted By the Wraiths
The densest part of the asteroid cluster was ahead, where three massive rocks had collided recently and created a sphere ofdebris. It was suicide to fly through. The chunks were too thick, moving too fast, no pattern to track.
I flew straight at it.
“You’re insane!” The bounty hunter’s voice held the first note of uncertainty.
Maybe. But I’d built an empire on taking risks others wouldn’t.
We hit the debris cloud at full thrust. The impacts came so fast they blurred together. Metal screaming. Glass cracking. Every alarm the ship had going off at once. I flew by instinct, by feel, jerking the stick based on shadows and the way the ship shuddered.
A chunk of rock the size of my fist punched through the ancillary shielding and slammed into the bulkhead near Thoryn’s seat. The impact was violent, throwing us against our straps with a sound of tearing metal.
We punched through the other side trailing smoke and sparks. Half my systems were red-lined. The viewport was a spider web of cracks. But we were alive.
The bounty hunter wasn’t. His ship emerged from the cloud in three separate pieces.
One pursuer left. I could see him on the scope, hanging back at the edge of the field. Smart enough not to follow, but he was calling in our trajectory. More ships would be coming. The Consortium had deep pockets.
The Haven was twelve minutes out at maximum burn. I pushed theGhostas hard as she’d go, her damaged frame groaning with every course correction. Thoryn’s breathing had steadied, but he still hadn’t woken up.
“Almost there,” I told him. Or myself. Hard to tell anymore.
The Haven appeared on the scope, that beautiful clustered mess of abandoned ships and illegal modifications. No law here. No security force. Just credits and anonymity.
The last pursuer peeled off as we approached. The Haven’s defense grid wasn’t much, but it was enough to discourage a single ship from starting trouble.
I brought us in hard and sloppy, theGhosthandled sluggishly, her damaged frame fighting my commands. The docking computer tried to take over, and I slapped it off. I’d park my own damn ship.
We settled into a berth with a grinding crash. I didn’t care. We were down. We were alive.
Except…that last, violent impact had torn the new bio-sealer open. Thoryn was bleeding again, freely. Unconscious, breathing only just.
“Don’t you dare die now,” I said, killing the engines. The sudden silence was deafening. “Not after The Fortress. Not after the fall, or this field. Not after all this.”
His bio-monitor gave a weak, shrill chirp. Heart rate irregular. Blood pressure critical. Time to organ failure: imminent.
I’d gotten us to the Haven. But I didn’t know if I’d gotten us here in time.
THORYN
Iwoke up not dying, which was a pleasant surprise.
The room smelled wrong. Too clean. Antiseptic instead of blood, recycled air instead of rock dust. A bed instead of a metal cot bolted to stone. My body felt strange too. The vibro-blade wound in my side had been properly sealed, not just slapped with field foam. The plasma burn on my shoulder had actual bandages, the kind that promoted tissue regeneration instead of just stopping the bleeding.
Someone had plugged me into an autodoc. The back-alley kind, judging by the mismatched tubes and the way the diagnostic screen flickered between Tamzari and what looked like Jazurai biological readings. Still, it worked. The infection markers were dropping. My scales had shifted from dying-gray to merely exhausted-green.
But the real difference, the one that made me lie still and just breathe for a moment, was the bond.
No pain.
For eight years, my nervous system had been rewired to scream whenever I got close to my mate. The Consortium’s scientists had been very proud of that. They’d turned love into agony, proximity into torture. Even after Maris’s healthy bondhad broken their conditioning three days ago, there’d been that constant background ache, like healing bones.
Now? Nothing. Just warmth. A steady, comfortable hum where the pain used to live.
Maris was asleep in a chair next to the bed.
She’d pulled the chair close enough that her knee touched the mattress. One hand rested on the bed near mine, fingers curled loosely. The other held her blaster, safety off, pointed at the door. Her head had tipped forward, hair falling across her face.
She looked exhausted. Dark circles under her eyes, deeper than yesterday. A fresh cut on her jaw I didn’t remember. Blood on her knuckles, probably from gripping the ship’s controls too hard. Her clothes were the same ones from the escape, stained with my blood and hers.
