“What are—” I started.
Loch dropped the forward shield, rammed Polaris out of the bay before the fighters could take advantage, then engaged the FTL drive practically on top of them.
After the jump, the windows and vid screens showed vast quantities of empty space. I breathed a sigh of relief. No doubt we’d have to do some repairs after Loch’s little stunt, but we’d made it.
Loch tapped on the manual control screen then stood up. “Medbay, now,” he snapped at me. Fury darkened his face.
I scowled at him. I’d been about to congratulate him on his piloting, but I changed my mind. People who yelled at me didn’t get compliments.
I unclipped from my seat and stood. I wobbled slightly but steadied myself with the back of the chair. Indignation and foxy kept me going for half of the trip downstairs. The second half was powered by sheer will. When I hit the medbay, I admitted defeat.
“I think I need to lie down,” I said. My voice sounded funny. I collapsed onto the diagnostic table. My arm lit up in agony at every tiny movement.
If I never moved again it would be too soon.
Loch cut off my shirtsleeve and the trauma bandage. I hissed in pain as black spots danced behind my eyes. He pressed something cool against my shoulder, and I heard the distinctive hiss of an injector.
The pain did not lessen.
Loch prodded at the wound in my arm. I yelped and tried to pull away. “You can still feel that?” he asked.
“Yes, obviously,” I said.
“Okay, then this is going to hurt,” he warned.
“It hurts now,” I said.
“The anesthetic should kick in soon, but I don’t want to wait because you’re bleeding again. And you’re already white as a sheet, so you don’t need any more blood loss.”
I clenched my good hand. “Do your worst,” I said.
He did.
Chapter 23
My arm was cleaned, coated in regeneration gel, and bandaged, then my scraped-up feet were given the same treatment. Only then was I allowed to leave the medbay. I had also been given a large glass of orange juice by Veronica and stern instructions to drink it all.
She also insisted on escorting me up to the flight deck when I listed drunkenly to the right on bandaged feet while trying to walk out of the medbay door. Loch followed silently.
Veronica helped me slump into an empty chair while Loch dropped into the captain’s station. “Thank you,” I told her, “for everything. I mean it, even when I yell at you later for ignoring my request and risking your life.”
“You are welcome. I’m glad your arm is bandaged properly,” she said. “You should’ve let me do it before.” She sat beside me. I’d scared her and now she was hovering. I could deal with hovering.
“You’ll also have to yell at me,” Rhys said cheerfully from the navigator’s chair. “And Loch.”
“Don’t worry; I will,” I said. “I’m just saving up my strength. Where are we?”
“Ten light-minutes from the gate,” Loch said. “It’ll take longer to get a jump point, but Rockhurst will not expect us this far out. We’re stealthed. With the exception of the gate frequency, everything else is shut down. And I’ve matched our trajectory with a large planetoid; you can’t see it, but it’s below us.”
At ten minutes out, our gate communications would take twenty minutes—ten minutes to the gate and ten minutes for a response. But it made the area Richard would need to search in order to find us so vast that he’d have to get extremely lucky to even have a sliver of a chance.
“Thank you,” I said. “And nice work getting us out of the Santa Celestia in one piece, even if you did yell at me afterwards.”
Loch inclined his head. “It was a little risky, but it worked,” he said. He might be playing modest, but he’d proven once again that he was a first-rate pilot.
I turned to Rhys and Veronica. “How long does the gate take to give you an endpoint?”
“You figured out that we’d jumped before, huh?” Rhys asked.
“Richard tipped me off when he mentioned how much alcubium you had left. I suppose now would be a good time to yell at you for being crazy, stupid, and reckless, both with yourselves and with my ship?”
“Yell at Loch,” Veronica said. “He’s the one who decided to jump out of the ship after you. Without his calming influence, Rhys and I were left to our own devices.” She said it with a straight face, but her eyes danced with humor.
I rounded on Loch. “You did what?”
“I told you I was there when you blew up Rhys’s shield in Rockhurst’s face. I wasn’t on the ground when Polaris took off, so how did you think I arrived? You might not like jumping out of ships, but I don’t mind it.”
“Wait, wait, wait . . . back up,” Rhys said. “You blew up my shield? Do you know how much trouble I had to go through to get that?”
“Hopefully, it was a lot,” I said without remorse. “But we’re getting sidetracked. We were discussing how Loch jumped out of the perfectly good ship he promised to take to Father.”
Loch shrugged. “I never promised anything. You just assumed I did because I made a vaguely agreeing statement.”
I glared at him. “You made an agreeing statement right after I asked you to promise. Next time I’ll get it in writing, in triplicate,” I grumbled. “So you jumped out of the ship. Then what?”
“All of the soldiers were wearing Rockhurst space suits. So was I. In the chaos you created, one of them disappeared and I took his place. Once I was on board the Santa Celestia, things got dicey a few times, but no one expected a foreign operative on the ship.”
I certainly hadn’t expected it, so I doubt Richard had even given it a moment’s thought.
Loch continued, “I knew approximately when Rhys and Veronica were due, so I just had to find your cell. It took longer than I expected; Rockhurst kept your presence quiet. Otherwise, I would’ve given you warning. Nice escape, by the way.”
“I’d spent the day going over my marriage contract. I was getting out of that cell no matter what.”
Veronica turned to me. “Rockhurst still wanted to marry you?”
“If you can call it that. He was blackmailing me into a sham of a marriage with a number of threats, including one on your life and Rhys’s.”
“You wouldn’t have gone through with it, right?” Veronica asked.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “The way the contract was originally written—no. Richard wanted me to feed false information to my House, which would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives. I was modifying it when Loch rescued me. If I could’ve gotten it into a halfway decent state, I would’ve signed it, only to breach it as soon as an opportunity presented itself. Signing it would’ve given you and Rhys at least a slim chance of escape.”
“But that would me—” she started.
“Trust me, I knew what it meant,” I said.
Veronica bowed her head to me. “I am glad we rescued you from that,” she said.
I smiled at her. “You and me, both.”
“You want to clue in the rest of the room?” Loch asked.
“When two Houses join in marriage, there is a marriage contract that lays out all of the details, like the dowry. The lower houses try to marry into a High House for power and prestige. High Houses marry into lower houses for strategic purposes or because the lower house offered money, territory, or technology as part of the contract.”
“Sounds mercenary,” Loch said.