Was he okay?

Ty could barely hold himself in a sitting position with his back propped against the wall. The blasters had done a number on him and these goddamn slavers had taken more than a few potshots while he was unconscious. His ribs were miraculously unbroken, but he’d have bruises until his dying day.

No. He wasn’t going to think about that. If he let himself spiral then he’d never defeat these people. And he knew he couldn’t do it alone. He’d gotten a glimpse of rooms when they started to drag him through the ship, but they weren’t the glorified cattle pens he’d seen on other slave ships. That give him a little privacy, which he appreciated, but it also meant he had to find a way to communicate with any other captives.

And talking was so much easier than knocking.

“I’m alive,” Ty called back in Interstellar Common and flinched as the air in his lungs pushed against his ribs. He clutched an arm to his side and clenched his jaw. His ribs weren’t broken and he kept talking just to prove it. “Though I’d rather be on a beach right now with a frothy drink and the most beautiful woman in the galaxy.”

“Oh.” That one syllable was filled with something that Ty couldn’t define and just a hint of amusement. “I’m Dorsey and I don’t have any drinks. And the other thing…” She laughed.

“My name is Ty.” He would have given his full name, but each word he spoke burned deeply where he was badly bruised.

“Are you human?” Dorsey’s tone made Ty want to sit up a little straighter and smile. There was a light in her voice that he couldn’t ever remember hearing. With just a handful of words, he already knew that he was going to do everything he could to make sure that she got off this ship and to safety before it was too late. Maybe one final good deed would see him on to a happy afterlife.

But he needed to answer her. “Detyen.” Normally a question like that wasn’t asked so baldly, but normally conversation didn’t happen through a ventilation pipe between prisoners on a slave ship. Adjustments to the typical flow were necessary.

“I don't think I've ever met a Detyen before,” she responded. “Do you have any neat tricks to get us out of here?”

Now Ty did smile. “Unfortunately all superpowers were bred out of my species long ago.”

A heavy breath that might have been a laugh traveled down the air vent. “Damn, then I guess we're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

Distantly it occurred to him that his captors could have planted her in that cell to give him false hope or to thwart any of his plans. But there was honesty in her voice and Ty had nothing to lose. She didn't have enough time to betray him.

Ty looked around his cell. The light from the ceiling barely illuminated anything, and what he saw was beyond sparse. There was absolutely nothing in the cell that could be used as a weapon. Other than himself, there was nothing in the cell at all. They hadn't furnished a cot or chair, and the solid door meant that there were no loose bars to pry off. He ran his hands across every centimeter of wall that he could reach, but it was all completely flat.

“Is your cell empty, too?” he asked Dorsey, clenching his jaw against the pain in his ribs.

“Affirmative,” she called back. “And all of the meals are sent in on some sort of degrading plates. They only last a few minutes before they're basically dust.”

That was not helpful. “Have you been here long?” He leaned against the wall to give his legs a rest. The kidnappers hadn't been kind and he wanted to sleep, but he feared wasting even a moment.

“Not too long, I don't think.” But she didn't sound certain. “They mess up the time.”

Of course they would. Disoriented prisoners were more likely to be docile.

Ty massaged his knuckles as he and Dorsey spoke. She explained how the guards came and what they did. From her experience, they didn't stand guard outside the cells when they weren't giving her food or bringing in the hose to bathe her and clean out the cell.

And he didn't think they could hear them in the cells. Letting any rebellion foment among the prisoners was a recipe for disaster. If the guards could hear them, they would have come in and shut them up.

At least Ty hoped that was correct. He knew he was placing a lot on instinct and the knowledge that they couldn't hurt him for long.

But they could hurt Dorsey.

It was a long time later that she spoke. “I think they're going to bring food soon.”

“How do you know?” If they hadn't been consistent there was no way to time it.

“I'm starting to get hungry and they haven't starved me yet.”

She was right. Several minutes later, he heard footsteps outside of his cell, and when they stopped, the slot at the bottom of the door slid open. He couldn't see outside to the hallway; it was blocked by a darkly gloved hand and a bowl containing an unappetizing stew and a separate small container of water.

Since Dorsey hadn't warned him off it, Ty drank the water down quickly and ate the stew before his plate dissolved. It began to crumble in his hands before he finished the last bite.

“Is that how they always come?” he asked her.

“So far it is,” she confirmed.

“I think I can work with that.”

 

***

 

Long after the food settled in her stomach, Ty told her to sleep. Dorsey liked his voice. He didn't sound like the humans she knew or the men back home. There was something gravelly and deep with an unexpected lilt to his words. It wasn't merely gruff, it was self-assured.

She hoped he wasn't about to betray her. She knew the slavers who'd taken them prisoner could be playing games with her, but Dorsey couldn't understand why they would. Well, other than out of plain old sadism. And if that was why they acted, she couldn't do anything about it.

She wanted to trust Ty. She wanted to go home. And if he had a plan for making that possible, she'd follow his lead. The worst that could happen was death, and she'd rather die escaping than live as a slave.

Sleep didn’t come. She couldn’t move enough to burn up the energy burning through her, and excitement sizzled within. Ty gave her hope, an unexpected piece of joy in this antiseptic cell. And she was afraid that if she fell asleep she’d wake to find he had just been a dream.

Dorsey curled herself up into the corner and angled her head toward the vent. “Are you still awake?” she asked.

He didn’t respond for several moments, and Dorsey thought he was either asleep or that she’d spoken too softly. But then Ty answered, “I told you to sleep.” He was wide awake.

“You’re still going to be here when I wake up, right?” She hated the vulnerability, but sleeping with that niggling thought in the back of her head would only lead to nightmares.

“I promise.”

She believed him. And with his promise fresh in her mind, she closed her eyes. This time sleep came quickly and her exhaustion kept the dreams at bay. She could barely think straight when she was awake; she had no focus to dream.

By the time a rattle outside her cell woke her up, she didn’t feel rested, but she was closer to it than she’d been since the day she was kidnapped. One of the guards pounded on the door to her cell long enough that even the dead would wake. Then they slid in her meager rations and let her be.

Nothing had changed.

Not knowing if the guards could still hear her, Dorsey was afraid to say anything to Ty. Instead, she knocked twice against the wall. She breathed a sigh of relief when he knocked back.

He was real. He was still there.

She pulled the tray they’d slid into her room close and scooped up the food with hungry fingers. It was all tasteless, textureless gruel, but it filled her stomach. She gulped down the water, licking a little against her parched, dry lips, still thirsty by the time she was through. They’d given her less food. She didn’t know if that was a good sign or bad, nor could she have said what good or bad news from her captors would have looked like.

Several minutes later Ty spoke. “Wait for it.” She held her breath waiting for more, but had to let it out when she realized that Ty wasn’t going to say anything else. She knocked back in acknowledgement and sat with her back against the wall.

Time passed slowly. Dorsey traced patterns in the dust on the floor of her cell. She’d erased and redrawn her patterns nearly a dozen times, now working on one that took up half a meter of space, when Ty knocked three times against the wall.

Before she could say anything, she heard an outer door open.

Dorsey waited, but they passed her by and walked on around the corner to Ty’s cell. Even pressed up against the wall she couldn’t make out much more than a pained grunt and dull thuds when the captors made it to his door.

She rolled up to her feet, ready to move, when the fighting went silent. Then there were footsteps coming towards her. Dorsey hoped with all her heart that it was Ty and that he hadn’t just gotten himself killed with attempts at thrilling heroics. When she heard only one set of footsteps coming back down the hall toward her, she perked up. Two guards had gone to check on him.

With a hiss and a click, the lock to the door disengaged and a blue hand with wicked looking claws shooting out of its knuckles appeared and wrenched the door the rest of the way open.

She almost got a good look at him before he jerked back towards the hallway and a laser blast caught him in the face, dropping him to the ground. Dorsey hauled herself over to him and pulled him far enough into the cell so that he would not be a target. The door started to close, but she caught it before they were trapped once more.

Footsteps started toward them. Half in the cell and half out, Dorsey had cover from any blaster shots, but she had little leverage. She shirked back into the shadows as best she could, a pang of guilt striking her for basically leaving Ty as bait. But she only had one shot and the wickedly sharp bloodstained claws shooting out of Ty’s hands weren’t going to do her any good until he was conscious.

The steps clicked closer and Dorsey’s heart beat double time. Her veins danced with energy and she sprang like a coil in an almost suicidal move the second the shadow of the alien guard fell over Ty. She slammed the door out and pounced, reaching blindly for the alien’s blaster and trusting it would be there.

With a spin, she jerked around and found the small metal device clenched in her dark fingers. She whipped it out and fired first at the alien and then back behind him, not knowing whether he had any friends still taking cover. When no one returned fire, she knew they were safe for the moment.

All in all, it had taken less than two seconds.

Dorsey slipped the blaster into one of her pant pockets and looked down to see Ty beginning to move, the shock of the shot wearing off. With a groan, he clutched a hand to cover his eyes, his strange claws slowly retracting.

They were safe for now, but there was no way to be certain how long it would last.

With the moment of reprieve, Dorsey stole a second to study her fellow escapee. And maybe it was the adrenaline buzzing through her, but heat curled low in her body and her insides clenched as she got a good look in.

Damn, he was handsome.

Ty had to be at least six feet tall, broad shoulders and muscles currently covered by loose fitting dark clothes. He was shaped like a human, with the proper number of arms and legs in the right proportion, but the blue of his skin and the strange dappled markings she glimpsed through a tear in his shirt told her his ancestors hailed from a faraway planet. And that wasn’t even counting those deadly claws.

He let his hand fall from his eyes and Dorsey had to bite back a gasp. Demon’s eyes, her mother would have called them. They shone red and black, practically glowing with whatever emotion coursed through him. The eyes and his claws should have scared her, but she wanted to reach out and cup his cheek, run her thumb over his thick lower lip, and then steal a taste for herself.

But her own desire had to wait. She tamped it down as hard as she could and sealed it away, tightly locked under layers of discipline and survival instinct.

A nasty bruise blossomed between those ruby eyes of his and it had to hurt. Added to that, Ty stared just over her shoulder, his eyes unfocused. As he struggled up to his feet, he stumbled into the door, and used a hand to brace himself against the wall to keep from falling over.

“Can you see?” she asked as she watched with one arm ready to shoot out and catch him. He’d looked right past her and had almost fallen through the doorway.

Ty blinked several times and shook his head like he was trying to clear water from his ears. “Everything is a bit… dim at the moment.”

He was blind.

Dorsey stepped fully into the hall and looked in both directions. It was brightly lit, but there were no windows. On a spaceship that meant nothing. They might have been flush up against the vacuum of space or in the innermost corridor.

“Can you walk?” It came out harsher than she’d intended, but she needed to know what he could do. He’d given them this chance to escape and she wasn’t about to waste it. But she wouldn’t even think of leaving him behind.

Ty nodded once, his lips, a darker almost cerulean blue, pulled tight. “I’ll be fine once I get my hands on some regen gel.” He spoke of the backbone of all interstellar first aid. The thick gel could fix most of the injuries that any spacefarer would encounter, or keep them alive long enough to get to a doctor.

Taking him at his word, she pulled the blaster out of her pocket and grabbed for his hand with her empty one. “Follow me, I think the door is this way.” She shut the alien guard up in her old cell and led Ty down the corridor, her heart beating wildly in her chest. Every little sound—and ships had the nasty habit of creaking and groaning—made her jump out of her skin. But she needed to stay steady. For Ty. And for herself.

The flesh of his hand was warm against her own, and Dorsey’s skin practically tingled in response. She could feel the shock of the contact reverberating through her and once again was seized by the crazed desire to pull him close until they were skin to skin and he was all hot and full inside of her.

What the hell was wrong with her?

Only when she felt Ty’s muscles flex under her fingers did she realize how tightly she’d squeezed him. She loosened her grip and started to lead him slowly down the hallway, careful of any debris the lasers had knocked loose.

They made it to the end of the hall, and though Dorsey’s back was as tight as a Dortanian Seal, she didn’t hear their guards sound the alarm. She and Ty had been swift in their attacks and it hadn’t been more than three minutes since he broke out of his cell.

At the end of the hallway, she stopped when she found the door. “There’s a keypad and some sort of bio sensor,” she told Ty, acting as his eyes. “You’re not a super awesome hacker by any chance?” Put her in the cockpit of a ship and she could fly, but that was her one skill.

Ty huffed out a little laugh and Dorsey had to grit her teeth against the onslaught of sensation that her body responded with. Did this dude give out pheromones or something? She had never acted around anyone like this, and certainly not the human males who would be much more appropriate targets of lust. Things were so much trickier with aliens, even ones she wanted to strip naked and lick from head to toe.

His hand tightened in her grip and she wondered if he had the same reaction to her. But when he spoke, it was all business, with not even a hint of nasty thoughts. “I’ve neither the tools nor the eyes to hack the lock,” he said with an air of disappointment in himself. “Besides, my so-called hacking skills leave much to be desired.”

Crap. Whether it was nerves or her hyper-attuned senses, she could almost hear footsteps beating down the hallway outside. They didn’t have much time, and if they were discovered in this hallway, they’d either be thrown back in their cells or killed in seconds. She took a deep breath and pressed her hand against the hull of the hallway, trying to get a feel for the size of the ship and a sense of where exactly they stood in it.

“Just shoot the lock with your blaster,” Ty said when she fell silent.

Dorsey ignored him and placed her other hand on the wall. There was a feeling of space beyond the metal. Not the cold, deadly vacuum beyond the ship, but of a hallway or ventilation shaft. She looked back down the hall and then up to see the crisscrossing plasteel beams overhead.

“Dorsey—”

“I know what class of ship we’re on.” A Y14 J Series freighter. They were one of the most ubiquitous large ships out there and had been on the market for decades. The cells had been added in a retrofit, but a retrofit couldn’t change the bones of a ship.

“How can you tell?” he asked, not with doubt, but curiosity.

This was her world. “I’ve been flying freighters for five years. This is just a retrofit, and a cheap one at that.” And now that she knew what type of ship they were on, she knew how to get them out. She traced her hand over the panels built out from the door. They were a little more than a meter tall by a meter wide and went from floor to ceiling.

A hollow knock on the third panel gave her their way out. She reached up until she found the hidden latch to release the panel. On a ship like this, almost every centimeter of space was accessible from the hidden wall panels, but most shippers forgot about them and never secured them. She peered inside the narrow ventilation shaft and eyed Ty. It would be a tight fit, but he’d make it. “Come on,” she said as she pulled him gently in and pushed him back the wrong way. She stayed behind for a moment to secure the panel behind them and then crawled in front of him. “I’ll get us to the med bay.”

“Can you get us to another ship?” he asked, his words surrounding her from the echo in the shaft.

“But your eyes—” She didn’t want to risk permanent damage, not when he’d been hurt helping her.

Ty was adamant. “Any ship that can fit us both will have a first aid kit. I just need some regen gel. If we stop, they’ll catch us. Now. Can you get us to another ship?”

“Yes.” She didn’t like it, but he was right.

She led him towards the ship bay without any more argument. A ship as big as a Y14 had the capacity to carry a limited number of smaller ships, usually at least one space to air short range cruiser and a human-handful of longer range ships that could be used if the ship needed to be abandoned.

The crawl through the ventilation shaft didn’t take long. When Dorsey found what she thought was the right place, she pressed her ear up against the panel and listened. It didn’t sound like anyone was waiting for them. It would take much longer for someone not in the shafts to reach this point, and she hoped her captors checked other more likely escape routes first.

Dorsey opened the panel and looked out for a moment before she helped Ty to the ground. As she’d suspected, there was one short range ship and three longer range vessels all lined up and ready to be stolen. She grabbed Ty’s hand and pulled him through the room, pausing before one of the longer range ships and reading the shipping diagnostic printed out beside a mechanic’s station.

This would do nicely.

She opened the door, led Ty inside, and found the first aid kit with the regen gel. “Use it,” she told him. “I’ll be back in three minutes.”

He grabbed her wrist with the dexterity of a sighted man. “Stay here, we need to go.”

Dorsey pulled free. “If I don’t disable the other ships, we’ll never get away. The freighter can’t go fast, but any of their small ships will be able to catch us. It only takes a minute to disable a ship from the inside if you know what you’re doing.”

For a moment she thought he would argue. Instead, he grabbed her hand once more, gently this time, kissed her palm, and let her go.

Dorsey flexed her hand, the imprint of his lips seared onto her nerve endings. Oh, if they weren’t fleeing for their lives she would have him naked and spread out before her in a second.

She shook her head. It wasn’t the time for that.

As promised, it took her three minutes to disable the starter systems of the ships. It wouldn’t take long to fix them, perhaps an hour at most, but it would give them enough time to get away, and that was all they needed for now.

Dorsey ran back to her chosen ship and found Ty sitting in the small kitchen area, his eyes covered with a thick coat of regen gel. She closed the door behind her. “Strap in. I’m getting us out of here.”

Ty didn’t need to be told twice. As he moved to secure himself, she climbed into the cockpit and powered up the ship. It turned on with an ease that indicated all of the kidnapper’s machinery was well cared for. On a hunch, she flipped down the hatch that covered all the nav wiring. In the heart of the nav system she found a tracker. It took another precious minute to extract it without damaging the system, but she wasn’t about to risk broadcasting their coordinates to the very enemy they were trying to escape.

With that done, she fired the thrusters and aimed for the air lock.

“Exit sequence engaged, please enter sequence code.”

Dorsey bit back a curse as the dulcet tones of the computer filled the cockpit. She entered the standard Consortium exit code, hoping that the ship practiced Galactic Standard procedures. The warning beep told her that her luck had run out.

“Please disengage thrusters and re-enter sequence code.”

Fat chance of that happening.

Dorsey fired up the blaster cannon on the ship and aimed for the airlock. The blaster wasn’t strong enough to fire a hole in the hull, but it just might do enough damage to break the airlock. She said a prayer to her mother’s gods and fired, the green light of the blaster momentarily blinding.

A siren blared, their escape no longer a secret.

But Dorsey didn’t have time to worry about that. The air lock disengaged and the doors started to slide open with jerky movements that spelled out their freedom. She forced herself to sit in place long enough for the doors to open wide enough for them to escape. Damaging their ship in haste wouldn’t do them any favors.

An eternity later, the doors were wide enough and she shot through, immediately diving into evasive maneuvers to evade both recapture and enemy fire. She warmed the hyperdrive on the ship and punched in coordinates for a Consortium allied planet she knew well. The war loving planet had some of the strongest space defenses around, and unless their attackers were allied with one of the War Lords, they would be shot down immediately.

Only when the hyperdrive engaged and the computer lost sight of the freighter did she allow herself to breathe. Her hands shook and her stomach roiled as thoughts of what could have happened to them assailed her. How long had they had her? Why had they taken her? And would they come back?

She looked over at the nav tracker laying innocently on the floor. Disconnected from the nav system, it should have been safe. But she wasn’t taking any chances. She unbuckled herself from the pilot’s seat and scooped it up. Dorsey threw it down to the ground and stomped on it, feeling the fragile plastic break into tiny pieces with every stomp.

She didn’t know how long she worked at destroying the small piece of technology, but when she finally stopped, she was breathing hard and felt a fine sheen of sweat pop up on her arms. She heard more than saw movement in the doorway and looked up to see Ty watching her, the regen gel gone from his eyes. Those rubies stared at her with something akin to hunger, and that lust she’d felt on the ship crashed into her, its effects tripled now that they were momentarily out of harm's way.

“Frustrations?” He quirked up a brow and when he spoke, she caught sight of canines that were sharper than human teeth. Fangs and claws. She should have been scared of the animalistic features. Instead, she wanted to see what else he was hiding and feel his power beneath her, over her, in her.

Dorsey smiled and let that heat sink into her eyes. “I don’t want any uninvited company.”

Ty stared at her without saying a word, but his nostrils flared and she knew that she wasn’t alone in what she was feeling. He wanted her too.