Fathom: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Mermaids of Montana Book 3) Read online

  But none were Lana. When the house was finally cold, so was he. And he never felt the cold.

  He returned to the kitchen. Kailani was sitting up in the half-round of cushioned seats surrounded by windows. At least these hadn’t been broken. She was wrapped in a blanket and leaning against Thomas while he held a pack of something cold pressed to the back of her head. They both looked up when he arrived.

  “Lana?” she asked hoarsely.

  Sting shook his head. “Tell me what happened.”

  Kailani huddled closer to Thomas, who tightened his arm around her. “Lana and I were just talking in the music room. She was saying…” Her dark gaze, so like Lana’s, flicked over him. “Well, that part doesn’t matter. Thomas brought us some drinks”—she pressed her cheek to the guardsman’s shoulder—“and he had just gone back downstairs when the wall…” Her breath caught. “It just…blew apart. Everything was smoke and screaming.” She grimaced. “I think that last part was me. Lana shoved me under the piano—that’s how I bumped my head—and I saw her run out of the room, leading them away. They followed her, firing these blazing lights that blinded me. But I saw…” Her breath hitched again in a swallowed curse. “Aliens. It was aliens chasing her.” She put one hand over her mouth, but her distress radiated clearly. “They got her, didn’t they? They took Lana.”

  Since it was obvious, Sting didn’t answer.

  “The Cretarni,” Thomas clarified. “I rebooted the house system and downloaded the security cam footage.” He pulled a small screened device from his pocket and laid it on the table, shoving it across to Sting.

  The grainy image, clearly shot from the treeline beyond the fountain pool, showed a ship hovering deftly above the house. Lines descended from the ship, dark forms clinging to the lines. Flashes of light and then fire followed. After decades of air-to-water warring, the Cretarni had perfected the techniques of attacking from above.

  “I’ve sent a message to Maelstrom,” Thomas said. “But our array was damaged by the EMP. And since we can’t reveal our unauthorized extraterrestrial interactions to closed-world security, we can’t push the message through on a faster packet.” His expression turned grimmer. “Until the message can bounce on unsuspecting carriers, we’re on our own.”

  Sting clenched his jaw. Many times during the war, that had been the case for him. But ever since Coriolis had taken over his command, he’d gotten used to having others on his side, maybe behind him more than beside him, but still there. Now, worse than being alone, he was charged with keeping these innocents safe.

  And finding Lana.

  But he was still a tracker, hunter, killer. For once, he’d be the monster for good.

  Chapter 14

  She was drowning. Not in water, but in darkness. She struggled through suffocating shadows, like the time she’d been doing her laps at the community pool, where some kids had been playing with a rope toy. Somehow the toy had wrapped around her ankles, its sodden weight dragging her down, and for the longest moment, she’d feared she would drown in the over-chlorinated concrete tub. The surface of the pool had been a broken mirror above her head, too far away for her flailing hands to reach, nothing to hold onto.

  She’d almost taken a breath, and then she would’ve drowned for sure. Or would she have? Maybe her vestigial gills would’ve opened up, blooming in the water like an anemone, freaking out those kids worse than her splashing had when she finally struggled free of the surprise bonds and surfaced with an annoyed shout.

  Maybe she would’ve known years ago what she was if she’d taken that deep breath.

  But honestly, once again panic seemed like the more reasonable response.

  Still, she kept her breathing steady and her eyes closed as waited for her disorientation to pass. Though she’d never been kidnapped before, she’d heard enough stories at the hippie shops where she worked and had snarked with Sting often enough to know alien abduction when she’d been abducted by aliens.

  Not opening her eyes, she sent out the most tentative ping like Sting had taught her. At first, nothing, but then a hazy image formed on the back of her closed lids, like the lowest resolution old-time photo ever. But it was clear enough that she recognized the interior of a spaceship, the unfamiliar yet somehow universal industrial lines of a working vessel. And most importantly, she was alone. She was still wearing the pajamas she’d donned before meeting her mother in the music room for happy hour, courtesy of Thomas. She still tasted the sex on the beach that she’d ordered—with a wistful sigh—but now the orange juice was a sour tang on the back of her tongue. Though she was cold and aching all over, she wasn’t sure if the ache was from the cold or if the cold was holding back a worse pain.

  Her mother… The last glimpse they’d shared, she’d been stuffed under the piano and Lana had been running away.

  Once again, running away.

  But what other choice did she have? At least the home invaders had followed her, leaving her mother behind and ignored. Cretarni, she knew, although she’d never seen Tritona’s second sentient race in person before. They were sized more like Earthers than Tritonans, maybe not surprising considering they were the terrestrial species while the Tritonans were adapted for their watery existence. But the way they bristled with weaponry and armor, mostly they were like all the worst images she’d ever seen of invaders across the world.

  But why had they taken her?

  The Tritonesse wanted nothing to do with her, so she was useless as a negotiating point or even a straight-up hostage. She didn’t know any secrets, didn’t have any connections, no power…

  Well, she did have that one power.

  But the one thing she had was the one thing that had ruined her life on Earth, gotten her kicked off Tritona, and would likely kill her soon. Nobody wanted that.

  Now that she was conscious, the chill was too much to ignore, and shivers wracked her. When nothing changed and no one responded, she let herself curl into a ball and then finally sit up to minimize contact with the cold plasteel deck.

  She might as well not have opened her eyes since the room was completely lightless. Bastards, keeping her in the dark.

  She hazarded another tiny ping. This time the view was clearer. And apparently even spaceships had broom closets? The room was too small to be anything else but storage.

  Or maybe a prison cell?

  She swallowed hard, grimacing at the nasty linger of alcohol and the dryness of her throat. How long had she been out?

  Pushing stiffly to her feet, she shuffled forward, one hand outstretched since she wasn’t quite sure whether she trusted her echolocation. Her fingertips met the wall, and she trailed to one side, seeking the outlined panel she’d seen/heard. Had to be a door, right? Or maybe it was an airlock and she was about to be ejected into space. That would suck.

  Literally.

  She felt around the seam, probing the minimal crack.

  Ugh, considering this was an alien abduction, she wished she hadn’t thought of probing cracks.

  Even if she’d had some tool besides her silky pjs—somewhere along the way between the Wavercrest estate and this Cretarni spaceship, her nighttime hair scrunchies had gotten lost—she didn’t think the door was opening from this side. She braced her hands on either side of the panel and lowered her forehead to the smooth plasteel, closing her eyes again. The only tool she had…

  No, she couldn’t risk it. Not yet.

  Straightening, she slammed her palm against the panel until her fingers stung before stepping back. “Open this damn door! Hey! Let me out of here, you dry-humping soil-suckers!”

  A hiss behind her brought her whirling around. Oops, no wonder the panel had resisted her prodding.

  The entire wall slid aside to reveal a half dozen Cretarni soldiers, and she squinted against the sudden burst of light. Judging from their silhouettes, they’d slimmed down from their attack armor, but the obvious thickened pads over vulnerable portions of their anatomy made it clear that they weren’t at ease. T
his hadn’t been a pleasure jaunt where they accidentally snatched an unsuspecting innocent Earther.

  Not that she’d really believed bombing Wavercrest was a mistake. But a girl could hope.

  “Light switch,” rumbled the Cretarni standing in the middle-front of the group. The boss, she assumed by the squared stance and overlarge pistol in one seven-fingered hand pointed straight at her.

  But the word? “Light switch?” Her universal translator recognized the Cretarni language but she wasn’t getting the context. “No lights here. You left me in the dark.”

  “Make light and I will shoot you.”

  Well, the last half of that was clear, at least.

  She lifted her chin. “This is a violation of closed-world protocols. Release me at once.”

  “You are a violation of closed-world protocols. If they knew you were here, local authorities would thank us for removing you.”

  She swallowed again. She’d always said she wasn’t a fighter like Ridley or a leader like Marisol. She was just…herself.

  Her vision adjusting, she swept her gaze once around the group. Though indignant and scared, she was curious too; they were only her second alien encounter, after all. Their faces were masks of furry feathers, with large, tufted ears and bare, damp-looking triangle noses. Their small, round eyes were a dull yellow-orange except for the black pupil. They reminded her of lemurs mashed up with parrots, stout-bodied and long-limbed, though she saw no tails of any sort.

  Under her scrutiny, several of the Cretarni…stepped back? Their large, wide boots splayed oddly on the plasteel decking, splitting into seven separate, reticulated toe sheaths on each foot. That was a lot of footwear engineering; maybe a deliberate contrast to the typically unshod Tritonans? She frowned thoughtfully, and a couple more retreated.

  Odd. No one had ever been afraid of her before. Except the Tritonesse, who were the exact opposite of the Cretarni. How nice to be hated equally by two groups that considered each other mortal enemies.

  The boss didn’t move except to raise the pistol higher. “No light.” Despite the hooting undertone to the voice, the command was clear even if the reason wasn’t.

  But the Cretarni hadn’t shot her yet, so… “The intergalactic community has rules about abduction.”

  “Those rules do not apply to intra-system civil disagreements.”

  “Disagreement? For how many centuries?” She scoffed. “Why not call it what it is?”

  The Cretarni flicked the muzzle of the pistol. “War, then. But those rules you cite still do not matter.”

  True enough, considering she was caught and no one knew where she was.

  But Sting would find her.

  She knew that, in her deepest heart. He’d been gone all day, but she knew he hadn’t left Earth yet. She knew. How she knew, she didn’t know. But he was out there, somewhere, and when he realized she’d been taken, he would come for her.

  She gave the Cretarni a thin smile with her best channeling of Titanyri teeth, and all of the Cretarni stepped back this time.

  “You lost the war,” she reminded them softly. “Do you really want to lose again?”

  The boss stiffened, all his fur-feathers bristling. “You only lose the war if you stop fighting. But I’m not here to fight you.” Another gesture with the pistol. “Come. This way.”

  She glanced at the rest of the party who’d arrayed in a defensive shape, all of them with their seven-fingered hands covering their weapons. “Where are you taking me?”

  “That will be up to you,” the boss said. “Depending on what you do next.”

  Her breath hitched. She’d never mastered the kind of power all these aliens seemed to fear, and even now, she knew, whatever the Cretarni seemed to believe, that power still wasn’t hers.

  They did have all the guns, after all. She just needed to hold on long enough for Sting to find her.

  Except…she’d told him to go away, that she had no intention of returning to Tritona. What if he’d finally believed her? What if he finally took her at her word and left? What if she was wrong about him coming for her?

  Numb from more than the cold, she followed the Cretarni through the ship. Most of the soldiers stayed fanned out behind her, although she suspected their positioning—where crossfire with her in the middle might take out half their number—would’ve gotten them a stern talking-to from Coriolis, and Maelstrom would’ve had them drilling until they got it right.

  Sting would just slaughter them. And for the first time, she probably wouldn’t argue with him about senseless violence. Unless she could somehow avoid it.

  She glanced at the boss Cretarni at her side. “What is your name?”

  The boss did not return her look. “Does it matter?”

  Annoyance sparked in her. She was trying to save their lives, but if they weren’t going to at least try… “I want to be able to identify your body for the intergalactic council when they charge you posthumously with war crimes.”

  “Tell them Cinek took you away. Tell them he still believed, just as they told him to.” This time he did glance at her with a backward twist of his feather-tufted ears, black pupils pinning to small dots, that she’d guessed was Cretarni anger. “Or tell them nothing. Enough of my people rot in the cursed waters of Cretarn, lost forever and unknown, that I think one more will not raise the sea level worth noticing.”

  Her frustration drained away. “Then why? Why keep fighting when you acknowledge that it’s already over?” Like Sting, who had been bred and trained for war, and could not let it go.

  The Cretarni grimaced again. “If those waters must be the unmarked grave of my people, then the Tritonans can die there too.” He bared his teeth, and she gulped back a little eep of alarm at the long canines dominating his mouth, three on either side and one in the middle like a vicious egg tooth. “All the poisons we sent into their waters and still they survive, like the siphoning parasites they are.”

  She blanched. “You did that on purpose? You poisoned the waters just to kill them?”

  “How else when they were otherwise impossible to find. Still they clung like the stink of their low tide, relentless as the waves that never stopped.”

  She shook her head. “Until even those on land could no longer live there.” Anger and sorrow were as toxic as the worst the Cretarni had done. “Just as well you left,” she told him. “If you wouldn’t take care of what you had, you didn’t deserve it anyway. The intergalactic council will rule on behalf of the Tritonans because at least they are trying to fix it.”

  “And what about you? What are you doing with what you’ve been given?”

  Her bare feet stumbled on the decking as if the ship had fallen out beneath her. “I wasn’t given anything.” She wasn’t going to explain how she’d fled her home with nothing—more than once. “If I did have anything, you made sure I’m standing here without it now.” With a disgusted sweep of her hand across her pajamas, she wanted to stomp her foot but she knew she’d only hurt herself.

  Unlike the Cretarni, it seemed, who’d hurt everyone.

  “Just let me go, and then leave. Find a place where you are meant to be.” Unlike herself. Tears choked her.

  “I will do as you command,” he said. “After you give me the power to end the Tritonans. Fire-witch.”

  She froze. The Cretarni word he used was the same as before but her universal translator served up an alternative version since it had registered her confusion on the first round.

  Light switch. Fire-witch. The power he wanted was her zaps. “What do you mean?” she stuttered. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

  He peered at her. “We know you are fire-witch. We tracked the exodus ship to this planet and then we duped the Tritonans into pinning down the location. And we know you came from there.”

  They had fake-revived the IDA, calling it the Intergenetic Data Agency to trick Marisol into funding the search for other descendants of the Atlantyri, crashed so long ago outside Yellowstone. Ridley
and Maelstrom had managed to unlock the ship and collected samples of the heritage species the Tritonesse were using to repair Tritona’s damaged ecosystems. And Marisol and Coriolis had discussed how the long-lost ship could be used to prove Tritona’s sustainability to the intergalactic council. They’d known how much the Cretarni had manipulated them, but now to know that she personally was the target of their mission?

  That didn’t bode well, not for any of them.

  “What is a fire-witch?” When she said the Cretarni word, it flickered between the two meanings in her brain. Light switch?

  Cinek gave her another look, as if he suspected she was toying with him. “The switch was our technology. Those dead-eyed spumers stole it generations ago.”

  “Technology?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The waters were too vast to corrupt enough to drive out the Tritonans. So my forefathers created the switch to shock the waters, to kill the spumers where they hid.”

  She kept shaking her head, trying to dispel the unease and confusion. She wasn’t any sort of switch or witch. Just a short-circuiting fuse, trying not to… She stiffened. “Wait, you mean, the switch…like, electrifies the water or something?” Not only was she not a switch or a witch, the extent of her electrical knowledge was changing a lightbulb, but it sounded as if he was saying the tech was some sort of malfunctioning toaster his people were going to toss into the Tritona tub to…fry all the fishes?

  He made a hooting noise, although she couldn’t be sure if it was assent or amusement. “Salt water electrolysis had the added benefit of creating pure freshwater. Which we needed since the results of the chemical warfare had leached back onto land and the cleanup effort was destroying our economies.”

  She grimaced. “You probably could’ve predicted that, considering—ya know—what it was doing to the rest of your planet.”

  He made another noise, ruder this time. “We should’ve eaten them all when we had the chance.”