Captured and Captivated

Chapter 10

SARHEN

Escape or die.

This wasn't a macho thing. Not a you'll never take me alive thing. This was pure numerical calculations of probability. Cold. Calculating. Messy. Either one of these outcomes was going to happen, or it was going to be the other.

"Do you humans have blink warp drives?"

I tried to ask the question casually. If her kind had them she'd have a clear idea of how desperate the situation was, or-

or she blinked.

"No."

Her voice was low. Husky, even. A few units of memory were committed to saving the sound to be immortalized later. Provided we have a later.

There was one minute left exactly until we hit the gate. The Alconis had been closing in but not fast enough. We'd make it first, but seven seconds ago they'd stopped hailing us. Now their ship was arming its weapons. Negotiations had failed (or hadn't begun) and I didn't have to check my databanks to know what they were carrying RMs. It was the only thing that could reach us on time. Anything else don't bother, 56 seconds to go.

And it would hit, too. Only one thing faster, and that was hyperspace itself.

"Relativistic missiles?" My next question. Ever heard of them?

You'd think an Augment would be able to modulate the "oh kark" out of his voice better. Don't scare the human. I was scaring the human. My onboard was a static blur of numbers and calculations. It was debating blink warping into the gate. That... you don't do that.

Forty-nine seconds left. My human had taken a full seven before she answered.

"Relativistic as in the speed of light."

Spoken in the same flat-syllable way like when I'd fetched the word "macho" from my colloquialism banks.

"Yes." Good girl.

The gate was so close it loomed, completely filling the front viewscreen of my lithe ship, when an earsplitting loud warning chime buzzed.

RM detected. The Alconis was really doing it. They really were about to destroy us rather than let us go.

How utterly wasteful.

I allowed myself one breath of sheer, blind panic before I let my onboard take over fully.

ETA to gating: 34.012 standard seconds. ETA to impact? 11.2-

My computer triggered the blink warp. The whole world swerved sideways, not forward, before hitting a hard stop.

You're not supposed to blink warp this close to a gate. You're really not supposed to blink warp when you're an Augment with an onboard currently hooked up to the nav array.

Maybe that should just be shortened to you're not supposed to blink warp.

But we did. And it hurt. A lot.

I wasn't sure if I blacked out screaming, or just blacked out.

*

I returned to bitter, painful consciousness a solid- oh, my onboard was stalled again. Fan-karking-tastic.

No. Don't like. Don't accept. Refused.

Ahem.

I returned to bitter, painful consciousness sometime probably not too much later from before, but now with a body full of what felt like acid, and mentally connected to a ship that was all system's red.