Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
I am so stunned by him and by the way he looks, that for the briefest, most split of seconds, I am almost pleased to have been caught by him. Hell of a way to meet a guy. As the rest of my brain catches up, I realize that if I am going to make any kind of a move to get away, I’m going to have to do it quickly, before they get me somewhere I’m going to have trouble escaping from, like a cell or a cage or some other containment device.
That’ll be next on their agenda. We’ve been keeping an eye on what happened to our captain and the other captain. It’s all been terrifyingly undignified. There’ve been cages. There’s been worse than cages. We’ve seen more of Sullivan and Raine than we ever did, even as shipmates. There was one occasion when one of the saurians flew almost into the hull of the ship with a damn near naked Raine in his arms. We were hovering above their big bone temple at the time, and it was nearly a complete fucking disaster.
Not that long ago…
A big purple saurian with magnificent, flowing dark hair flies past the ship with our captain in his arms. He swoops and soars, and damn near collides with us. He can’t see us, on account of we are invisible. But we can see him, and if he does that again, we’re about to see him smeared across the ship.
“Decloak!” I shout at the navigator.
“I’m not going to decloak! He’ll see us!”
“That’s the fucking point. He almost slammed into the hull. If Sullivan dies on our watch because we hit her with an invisible spaceship, we’ll never forgive ourselves!”
“They’ll all see us if I decloak. I’m moving the ship.” Maria’s hands move over the controls unsteadily. She’s drunk again, and not the everyday kind of drunk that some of the crew have going on, where you can’t really tell and frankly, they’re improved by it because at least it means they stop shaking for a bit. She’s the kind of drunk that makes her waver over the controls, her body swaying as she tries to desperately remember what each of them do.
“We should never have been this low.”
“Shut up. I’m moving the damn ship.”
“Not too high, we need to stay in visual range!”
“How can we stay in visual range when these things have wings and fly into us! We’ll use the cameras.”
“That’s what I meant, not eye visual range. Camera visual range!”
The deck is absolutely bursting with bickering. The Mare was never like this when the captains were around. Sullivan would have made a decision without asking anybody and executed it herself if necessary, and Raine would have beat the hell out of us if we’d tried to be this chaotic in her presence, either before or after the mutiny. We need at least one of the captains back, preferably both, because we are not going to survive if we don’t get some leadership going here.
Casey is sitting in the captain’s chair, one leg slung over the armrest, a bowl of brightly colored cereal loops cradled loosely in her hands. Every so often, a little milk slops over the side unnoticed and drains down into the fabric of the chair.
We are absolutely trashing this ship. The bridge was never what you might call a spic-and-span sort of place when our first captain was in charge, but Raine had it very orderly. She made a rule that there was to be no loitering. You were either flying the ship, manning the instruments, delivering information, or you were off the bridge completely. Then Raine got abducted trying to save Sullivan, and now…
KA-DUNK KA-THUNK
The ship jolts down suddenly, losing all the altitude we just gained, but that’s not actually Maria’s fault. She’s now splayed across the controls, having lost her balance in the attempt to avoid a human missile.
“Sorry!” Cadence’s latest powered roller-shoe prototype has propelled her at high speed into the control panel. One of these days, we’re going to find a Cadence-sized hole in the hull and that will be the end of it. You cannot stop her tinkering, no matter what you do. Once, Raine confiscated her tools and materials, only to discover that Cadence had manufactured new tools out of bits of an old chair, and then used parts of the Mare itself for new materials. She’s incorrigible.
“CADE! GO SIT DOWN!”
Rage, not her real name, but the only name that accurately accounts for her temperament, grabs Cade by the back of the neck and drags her off the bridge, one wheel on her roller-shoes squeaking all the way. Rage has a red mohawk and only wears clothes that have tears in them. We’ve tried giving her new clothes, and somehow they end up torn within hours. She’s one of our few offensive gunners, and keeping her off the weapons system has been a constant battle.