Wings of Retribution (39 page)

Shrapnel from a grenade I didn’t toss far enough.  My sleeve caught on the ATV’s windshield as I was throwing it.

Oh, great.  It was self-induced.  That was
so
much better.  “What happened to Darley?”

A mob tore off his body armor before they took his gun and shot him.  He drove himself halfway here, but he died on the way.  With only Rabbit and Howlen driving the other two ATVs, we had to leave him there.

“What about Athenais?  She couldn’t drive?”

I’m not sure.  That’s when my memory starts to get fuzzy.

“
I thought you had a memory equal to a thousand of us human brains.”

I do, but as soon as my host’s vision grew dim, I couldn’t really see what was going on around me too well.

“Oh.”

Something pounded on the other side of the door.

“Come on out, worm,” Tommy shouted.  He pounded again, hard, sneering, “What’s taking you so long?  Feeling guilty that you just put your only friend in this world into a coma?”

“Shut up, you old prude!” Dallas snapped.  “I’m not in a coma.  I’m sorting things out and I’ll come out whenever I’m damn good and ready.”  Then she paused as another thought occurred to her.  “Oh, and forget what I said about giving you the pilot’s seat!”

There was a pause on the other side of the door.

“Dallas?”

“Speaking of that, could one of you go
check
the autopilot?  I didn’t plot a course when I left, so I have no idea where we’re going.”

She heard someone curse on the other side of the door and hurried footsteps down the hall.

“Was he already dead, then?”  Rabbit this time, his voice almost gentle.

“He’s fine.  Stop shouting.  My head is starting to hurt.”

You’ll probably need to sleep for a few hours.  Transfer is a draining experience, and it doesn’t help that you were exhausted to start.  That was impressive flying up there.  Was all over the radio.  No one told me you were a stick fairy.

“
What,” Dallas muttered, pressing her hand to the side of her head, “You just thought Rabbit was signing all our death-slips?”

Pretty much. 

Dallas snorted, and had to wipe more blood from her lips when it came out her nose.  “So everybody just called me Fairy because…?”

That actually caught him a moment. 
…they were cruel?

Dallas hadn’t actually thought about that before.  But it was true…they all
knew
she hated being called Fairy.  She just thought they’d all done it because Athenais made them.

Then again, she’d called Goat Goat and Dune Dune, even when she knew they had real names.  Hell, she couldn’t even
remember
their real names.  She hadn’t known Squirrel had been born Veronica until she found an old love-letter from some dude on Thorn stuffed in the bottom of her dresser.  And in her own defense, she’d only pulled it out because it was
paper
, not a chip, and had the most delicate calligraphy she’d ever seen, and if Squirrel had wanted to keep it secret, she should have copied it to a chip or locked it away somewhere, not left it out, all pretty and beautiful, where anybody could find it.

Dallas started crawling across the linoleum to reach the wall, which she intended to use to stabilize herself long enough to stand up. 

You should lie down.  At least give yourself a few minutes to adjust.

“I don’t need to adjust, I need to get back to the controls,” Dallas protested, wobbling to her feet.  “They’ll smash us into something.”

Rabbit got around pretty well with
Aurora.
Howlen had
Renee Beckett.  And Athenais, well…
   Don’t worry.  They can just cut speed and let us drift if nothing else.

“Not gonna happ—”  Reaching for the door, Dallas lost her footing and slipped, falling to her knees in the blood.  She winced, biting out a groan.

Told you.

“Oh shut up,” she muttered, sitting down with her back to the wall.  “Why’s my balance off?  You break something in there?”

No,
Stuart said quickly. 
My passage threw off the fluids in your inner ear.  It’ll take a little while to adjust.  Unless you want me to take over and calculate it out manually, you’ll just have to survive on your own until it heals.

“Uh, not really?” Dallas said, knowing she really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Okay,
was all Stuart said.

“Dallas?” Rabbit demanded through the door.  “You still alive in there?”

“I said
bugger off
!” Dallas cried. 

Oh, he’ll like that,
Stuart commented. 
Considering he honestly believes I’m some sort of insect.

True to form, Howlen said, “That’s funny, coming from you.  Just how lenient is the little bug being?  Is he letting you do the talking?  Or just pretending he is?”

Told you,
Stuart said with a sigh. 
Predictable as a pulsar.

The fact that Dallas had another seeing, speaking, thinking
organism
in her brain was starting to hit home, and it was all she could do not to hyperventilate.  To Stuart, she said, “Okay, so, could you, uh…  Take my mind offa…?”  She hesitated, unable to finish.

But Stuart smoothly took her cue. 
Well, we already went over sexual reproduction of me, sexual reproduction of shifters, sexual reproduction of humans, sexual reproduction of
dogs
—

“I didn’t know they had knobs,” Dallas said, in her own defense.  Then she flinched.  God, what if he made her have
sex
with somebody?  What if she got pregnant?  What if—

Never,
Stuart interrupted, the vehemence like iron in his voice. 
You have my word.  With what you just did, without any request of my own, you are more…special…to me than anything I could ever express.

“Okay,” Dallas said stupidly.  She sat there against the wall for a few minutes, trying to get the world to stop twirling as she stared at the far wall.  That she’d given herself a migraine flying circles around the Erriatian fleet couldn’t be helping.  “God, I think I might puke again.”

Outside, they were pounding on the door again.

You should probably open the door,
Stuart urged gently.

“I dun wanna,” she muttered, the mere thought of crossing the room and the world-spinning that would entail leaving her close to vomiting again.

You want me to do it?

“No,” Dallas muttered.  “I want to sit here, nice and quiet, and wait for my head to stop spinning.”

Okay.

And they did.  Almost an hour, without him saying another word.  Eventually, her head stopped throbbing, and even the static fuzz left over from seven hours on manual started to diminish slightly.

Once Dallas was pretty sure she could cross the distance without puking all over herself, she levered herself off of the wall and crawled over to the door.  She walked her hands up the frame and unlatched the lock, then weakly pulled it open far enough to stick her head through.  Rabbit was standing outside.  Athenais and Tommy were gone.

“So who am I talking to?” Rabbit demanded upon seeing her.

“Get me a gurney,” Dallas said.  “I’m tired as hell and Stuart tells me I can leave
Retribution
in your hands for awhile without you guys turning it into a shiny new comet.”

“Dallas?  Is Stuart in there?”  Rabbit squatted down in front of her, then reached out and touched her ear.  When he pulled it back, his finger was bloody.

“Yep,” Dallas said, staring at the floor as she patted Rabbit on the shoulder.  “Don’t worry.  He doesn’t hold it against you that you almost shot him.”

Actually, I do…

“Well, it sounded good.”

“What?”  Rabbit gave her a perplexed look.  “Are you feeling all right?”

Wobbily, Dallas lifted her head and peered at him.  “Are you hard of hearing?”

“What?” Rabbit blinked.

“I just spent seven hours on manual, doin’ stuff that ain’t supposed to be possible by a human brain, coming inches from being pasted at least a dozen times, generally giving myself a migraine saving your fool asses, and now I’m gonna take a nap.”  She pointed down the hall.  “Gurney.  Now.”

Rabbit must have seen his little red dot about to get crossed off on her mental map, because he got up and darted off.

Deciding to get an early start on her beauty rest, Dallas fell face-forward into the hallway and passed out.

The Fate of the Shifters

“Well, that’s six hours of my life I’ll never see again,” Rabbit said, heaving a huge sigh.  He engaged the autopilot—it took him a moment to figure out where it was, Athenais noted—then reached up and rubbed his eyes.  “Gods…  I don’t know why anyone would willingly spend their lives staring at a debris field.”

Disengaging the chair swivel-lock and turning from the console, Rabbit took the two minutes it took to completely unstrap himself from the complex safety harness.  Every line, right down to his impact-prevention ankle straps—which would supposedly keep a man’s knees from snapping off, if the ship’s grav system went down before an impact—had been cinched into place before he ever picked up the controls. 

He always has been a stickler for the rules,
Athenais thought, watching.  Part of what made him a crappy pilot.  Personally, she’d rather risk being thrown around a bit in order to have faster access to an escape pod.  She’d been in plenty of crashes where seconds meant lives.

Well, not her life.  Angus had made that pretty clear.  Athenais immediately squeezed her eyes shut against the images that followed, gut clenching.

Getting up from the console beside her, Rabbit stretched, yawning.  After a moment, he motioned to the pilot’s seat.  “Your turn, Attie.  You can try the intercom again, but I’m pretty sure Dallas is still out of it, and Tommy already had his go.”

Realizing he wanted her in the pilot’s seat, Athenais froze.  “No.”

“It’s your turn,” Rabbit said, irritation flashing across his lean face.