“What do you want to do, Mistress?” he asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.” Lilli bit her lip. “I don’t…don’t know where we can go.”
“There’s nowhere you can go but home,” her mother snapped from the viewscreen. “Come home and surrender yourself at once, Lilliana or face the consequences!”
“I don’t think so.” The deep, familiar voice behind her made Lilli whirl around.
Karn was standing there, still looking weary around the eyes, but standing tall and strong nonetheless.
“You say we have nowhere to go?” he said to Lilli’s Mother.
“Nowhere but back to the Diluthian mines,” she spat at him. “Only this time I’ll make sure they kill you!”
“I’m not going back to the mines and Lilli’s not going back to you, you abusive bitch!” Karn growled. “You’ve hurt her for the last time.”
“Not quite the last.” Mistress Mirabella’s thin lips curved into that cruel smile again. “If you don’t come back, I’ll have you shot out of the sky and that will be the last time I hurt her. It will be terminally final but also extremely satisfying.”
“You will kill no one.”
The deep, resonant voice filled the cabin, making them all jump. On the viewscreen, Mistress Mirabella was looking all around.
“Who said that? Who’s there?” she demanded in a high voice. “Is this some kind of trick?”
There was no answer but suddenly, right in front of them, a swirling blue vortex opened in the blackness of space.
“Fly, my children,” the warm, feminine voice told them. “Go quickly, you are in great peril!”
“Who is that?” H’rare gasped, looking all around. “Who said that?”
“The Goddess,” Karn and Lilli said at the same time and Karn roared, “Fly!” and pointed at the swirling wormhole in front of them.
At the same time, Lilli could hear her mother shouting, “FIRE!”
There was a blast of light behind them and she felt the ship rock dangerously. Sliding to one side, she nearly fell, only to be caught by Karn’s long arm around her waist.
“FLY!” he roared again and then they were diving nose-first into the swirling blue void of the wormhole and leaving Lilli’s mother and everything she had ever known behind forever.
Forty-Nine
“Well, your baby is just fine, thank goodness!” Olivia, the doctor who had met them at the docking bay of the Kindred Mother Ship, ran her scanner wand over Lilli’s belly and smiled.
She and Lilli were in the exam room together while Karn paced anxiously outside, speaking to his commanding officer, whose name was Sylvan. He was also a doctor and had been examining the big Kindred as Liv examined Lilli. Apparently, though he had inhaled a lot of the Diluthian dust, Karn was going to be all right as well.
The fact that her bodyslave wasn’t actually a bodyslave at all and was, in fact, a Kindred spy had been news to Lilli. At first, when Karn had admitted it, she’d simply stared at him with her mouth hanging open. But the vast white bulk of the Mother Ship, orbiting a strange moon she had never seen before, convinced her. It had just appeared like magic, the moment they exited the wormhole and that was when Karn had admitted everything.
Lilli wasn’t upset to learn the man she loved was a spy. Mostly, she was just glad they had someplace to go. She’d had visions of them roaming around the galaxy, looking for a place to hide where her vindictive mother couldn’t find them. Now, it turned out that Karn had a safe home and people of his own—very nice people, if Liv was any indication.
“So you’re sure he’s okay?” she asked anxiously.
“Perfectly okay,” Liv assured her. “Though he appears to be growing like a weed—I do believe he’s a few centimeters longer than he was just a minute ago!” She shook her head in wonder.
“It must be the quick-grow hormones I was injected with,” Lilli told her. “They’re supposed to make a pregnancy three months long instead of nine.”
“Well, when you’re pregnant with a Kindred baby, you usually end up being pregnant for twelve months,” Liv told her. “So I guess that means you’ll only be pregnant for four of those—lucky you! It’s miserable to be pregnant for a whole year—which is one reason I only have one kid.” She grinned at Lilli and then she got serious. “It’s also why the Goddess sent you that wormhole. Karn had called us and Sylvan was about to bend space for you, but pregnant women can’t travel through the rift.”
“They can’t? Why not?” Lilli asked.
Liv shook her head. “It’s bad for the baby. Karn knew that, of course, but what could he do when your ship was about to be blown out of the sky? But then the Goddess intervened and came to your rescue.”
“I’m so grateful she did,” Lilli said sincerely. “You know, Karn had told me about her, but I didn’t know she really existed until she spoke to me from out of nowhere.”