9
EVE
Isat with Thuliak on the bridge as we prepared to activate the Grasp Drives.
“How do these things work again?” I asked.
“The, uh,” he stammered, “well…just a second—” He blinked quickly twice, then began speaking as if he were reading to me from a Womanpedia article. “The Grasp Drive uses higher-dimensional folding to create reactions which are otherwise mathematically impossible in three-dimensional space. The HUMAN WORD ENTRY MISSING of the HUMAN WORD ENTRY MISSING would—” He cleared his throat, “The Hivemind doesn’t seem able to explain it to you. I don’t know how it works either, all I can tell you is that it can pull us across the galaxy, or it can pull parts of the galaxy right up to us.”
“I see,” I said, “so then we’re just pulling a bunch of dangerous pirates right into orbit around Eden?”
Thuliak nodded. “And then we destroy all of them. So that there’s no danger.”
“And you get to look like bigshot heroes? Maybe tell Eden that the pirates had gotten here on their own, and you were the last line of defense to protect us?”
He leaned in close and pressed his forehead against mine. His intense teal eyes met mine, and a chilling fear crept through me. Was he angry at me for—”
He tilted his head and kissed me. Right in front of his entire bridge crew. No one said anything, but the quiet was louder than anyone saying anything. I noticed as his tongue slipped past my lips that all background chatter in the bridge had abruptly cut off. I felt all their eyes on me, and it felt better than I thought it would. It’s not like I was finding some kind of sexual pleasure in them watching me, but I liked the way it felt for Thuliak to do this in front of them. To show them that…that I washis, and he wasn’t ashamed to show what that meant to him.
I kissed him back, but an urgency pulled us apart. I tilted my head at him, as if to ask him why he’d kissed me just then.
“I’m impressed you thought of it,” he said, “because it’s exactly what I’m doing. We have to win your people over sooner rather than later. I’ll use whatever tactic gets the job done.”
“Lying,” I said.
“Yes. Lying. Do you have a problem with that? Now, the Grasp Drive is ready, we shouldn’t waste any time.”
“Do I need to buckle in or something?”
He shook his head and smirked at me. “Grasping doesn’t even feel like moving. You won’t feel a—”
Alarms rang out, and red lights flashed across the bridge. Before I could even open my mouth to ask a question, Thuliak grabbed me by the waist and pulled me up against him.
“What is—”
He held me tight up against his rock-hard body, but his eyes were just flickering like before, except this time it lasted several seconds rather than just one or two blinks. When he finally snapped back, the bridge crew all started speaking at once.
Thuliak stood up, still holding me pressed tight against him. If he hadn’t just kissed me, I’d have felt more self-conscious about the way I clung to him with my arms and pressed my cheek up against his muscular torso as he spoke.
“Hard burn toward Eden,” Thuliak said to his crew, voice booming, “if anyone can get Tschenkar on comms, patch him through to me. I need five minutes with my human, then I’ll be back.”
He grabbed hold of my wrist and all but dragged me across the bridge. I had a feeling that if I slowed down even a little bit, he’d throw me up onto his shoulder and carry me out of there.
We stepped out into the corridor beyond the bridge, and he looked at me, putting a hand on my cheek. “I can’t explain well what just happened, my little Airlock, not without letting the Hivemind try—”
“No, thank you.” I didn’t need him to read off some Hivemind entry where half of the words were missing. I wanted him to use his own words, in a way I could understand. “Are we going to die? Just tell me that.”
“We are perfectly safe,” he said. “According to the Hivemind, this has happened only twice in our hundreds of millions of years of history. You see, Eriok activated his Grasp Drive at the exact moment that we activated ours. The…math…” It looked like his head was about to explode as he tried to come to grips with the math. He shook his head, as if he were just giving up on understanding it. “Our Grasp drive pulled the pirates past us as intended…but Eriok’s drive pulled us away from Eden.”
“What about Tschenkar? Is Tschenkar strong enough to stop them alone?”
What if the pirates just swarmed Eden and Tschenkar couldn’t stop them? We had a lot of ways to fight back, but I had to imagine that High Command was either on the brink of collapsing, or it had already collapsed. I doubted Eden could manage any real military response right now with everything in such chaos. Maybe Thuliak’s “tainting” had put High Command so on the backfoot that they wouldn’t even see the pirates coming?
Thuliak closed his eyes as if he were blinking, but his eyes stayed closed several heartbeats too long. “Tschenkar is also on the wrong side,” Thuliak said. “Currently, nothing stands in defense of Eden.”
“Aren’t your ships faster? Can’t we just Grasp right back to Eden?”
“No,” Thuliak said. “There is a hard limit on how often an area of space can be subjected to Grasp Drives. Using the Drive again would risk creating a black hole. The Hive Mind will not allow us to use the Grasp Drive again.”