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Chapter One
“He’s on our left!”
“That’s our right!” Garrett yanked the ship’s control stick, and they banked around a hunk of debris as the pirate fighter spewed bullets after them. He reached blindly to his side to shove the qeshian kid’s head back below the windshield. “Now get down!”
The boy shook Garrett’s hand off. “I’m helping!”
“You’re not helping.” Garrett circled the sheet of metal—so large it could have only been from the siding of the Barzen—a few times before peeling off and zipping toward a shot-out transport ship. If he could just leapfrog between cover, he might be able to make it out of the debris field in Tava’s orbit and back to Carta without—
The ship lurched as bullets slammed into the side.
“Fuck.”
“They got us,” the child wailed, and from the way his sob went muffled at the end, Garrett knew he’d finally put his head down.
“They didn’t get us.” Garrett wrestled the spiraling ship’s control stick with one hand so he could reach over with the other and find the boy’s head to ruffle his thin, soft hair. “It was a glancing blow. We’re fine.”
It wasn’t a glancing blow, but that was what shielding was for. Fucking pirates. Garrett abandoned his leapfrogging strategy and gunned the engine, hoping the pirates would decide they weren’t worth the fuel to chase them. Their minuscule ship—barely large enough to fit the tiny qeshian kid in here with him—clearly couldn’t have much of value on it. The pirates were just shooting at anything that moved in the debris field or could be seen launching off Tava. Vultures.
The boy started sobbing as the g’s built on their bodies and then coughing as the sobs exacerbated the sickness that had found him a spot on Garrett’s ship in the first place. “I want”—he choked on another brutal cough—“I want to go home.”
“I know.” Garrett reached down and looped an arm around the kid’s waist. He pulled him into his lap and hid his face against his chest as they barreled out of the debris field. “I know.”
A few more shots whizzed past them, and a tailing ship blipped onto the scanner for a second before it gave up the pursuit. They probably had bigger fish to fry. Garrett didn’t ease off the accelerator, but he turned the ship toward Carta and put his home planet once again in his rearview sights.
Once the debris field and the pirates lurking in it were safely behind them, Garrett slowed them down and looked at the boy. His cries had subsided into shuddering little sniffs against Garrett’s chest. As a qeshian child, he was smaller and thinner-limbed than a human child would have been at his age, and at the moment, his skin was a depressing mottled gray and steel blue.
Garrett gave him a squeeze. “We’re gonna get home eventually.”
The boy coughed a few times, his lungs rattling in a distinctly concerning way, and then sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Will my mom still be there?”
Garrett pressed a few buttons and flicked a few switches to tell the base back on Carta that they were on their way and thought of the tall, sad woman who had gratefully loaded her child onto the only available space in Garrett’s tiny recon ship. “I hope so.”
“But the storm…” The boy picked at the hem of Garrett’s shirt with his tiny fingers and pulled at a loose thread that really didn’t need any help unraveling, but Garrett didn’t chastise him.
“You’ve all sheltered from storms before,” Garrett reminded him. He increased the oxygen flow into the cockpit and powered up the long-range engines. The g’s required to get back to Carta within the next several hours—before their oxygen ran out—would be tough on the kid’s body, but he’d survive.
“I hate the storms,” the boy muttered, still pulling on the loose thread of Garrett’s shirt.
Garrett grimaced and rearranged the kid to fit more securely against him. “I’m sure you do.”
It had only taken a few days for the fear gas to be loaded up in the Barzen and then dumped onto Tava’s surface to gather in the atmosphere. It formed clouds that roamed the sky over Southern Tava, blasting areas of the continent indiscriminately with high winds and horror. Garrett had never been caught in one, but they’d gotten reports from people who had, and he never wanted to be.
Garrett glanced down at the boy’s puffy eyes, and his heart ached. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Rhast.”
“Well, I know you miss home, but I’m glad you were with me to help me with the pirates, Rhast.”
That made Rhast look up with a tentative smile. “Really?”
Garrett nodded seriously. “Really. There were so many of them this time. A whole battalion, I think.”
“And they still couldn’t get us.” Rhast’s tentative smile grew almost into a grin, and Garrett returned it.
“Couldn’t even lay a finger.” Garrett pressed a few more buttons and pulled the gas mask out of its compartment. “Alright, Rhast, I’m gonna need you to put this on for me, alright?”
“What is it?” Rhast eyed the contraption but let Garrett strap it over his face.
