She must have lost it in the chaos of the attack, because she couldn’t understand a word these men were saying. “Hello?” she called, interrupting them.
The commander cleared his throat. “I wished to check the accuracy of my language translator. You are not in a pod? You are only protected by a suit?”
“Yes.”
“And neither the ship nor any pods are within your view?”
“Right. There’s nothing.” Although her helmet did limit her view. “Hold on. Let me see if I can twist around and get a better—” As soon as she swiveled her hips in an attempt to turn around, agony shot through her right side, all the way up into her chest. “Ah! Shit!”
Resting a hand on her side, she held her breath and clenched her teeth.
“Earthling?” he said sharply. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Maybe the pain would ease if she remained still.
“You are injured?”
“I’m fine,” she gritted. But she could feel warm moisture creeping down her right arm, down her side, down her hip, and recognized the signs of bleeding.
“Earthling—”
“Eliana,” she corrected. “My name is Eliana.” Even in her current, terrifying circumstances, being called Earthling was just too weird.
“Are you injured, Eliana?”
“Yes.”
“How badly?”
She glanced down. “I don’t know. I can’t exactly open my suit and take a look, but—judging by the feel of it—I’ve had worse.” Hunting and slaying psychotic vampires on a nightly basis could sometimes result in injuries that would prove fatal to ordinary humans. As an Immortal Guardian, however, she could usually recover from such in anywhere from minutes to a few hours… if she had a goodly supply of blood on hand.
He spoke softly to someone in that foreign language.
“What’s happening? I can’t understand you,” she said.
“Because you have no beacon, we will have to determine your location by tracing your comm signal. Once we do that, we can come to you, but it will take time.”
“Okay.”
“How much oxygen do you have left?”
“I don’t know. How do I find out?”
“On the left forearm of your suit, there is a flap you can pull back. Can you open it?”
Though the rest of the suit was baggy, the gloves that covered her hands were made of a stretchy material that reminded her of spandex and weren’t too huge on her. She found a little flap on her left sleeve and pulled. It drew back as though stuck with Velcro, revealing an electronic screen about the size of a cell phone, bracketed by multicolored buttons. “Okay. Now what?”
“Press the blue button.”
As soon as she did, a female voice spoke in that other language.
More muted conversation erupted.
“What did she say?” Eliana asked.
Conversation ceased.
“Hello?”
“You have the equivalent of twenty-six Earth hours of oxygen left.”
That didn’t sound so bad. She had worried she only had minutes left. “How far away are you?”
“We have not yet determined that,” he said. “We are still tracing the signal.”
“Oh. Okay.” She had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t take this long for them to trace the signal if she were only a day away from them.
Crap.
The men returned to their soft conversation. She was glad the commander left the line of communication open. She was trying very hard not to freak out, and hearing their calm voices helped.
She tried once more to remember the events that had landed her out here in the middle of nowhere. “We were attacked,” she murmured.
“What?” the commander asked.
“We were attacked, like you said. I was with Ganix. I was trying to get him to help me talk one of the Yona soldiers into sparring with me.”
“Sparring with you?” he asked, his voice hesitant, as though he wasn’t sure he understood the word.
“Yes. Sparring means… fighting or engaging in battle.”
“This Yona offended you?”
She laughed, then grunted when pain shot through her chest. “No. I meant fight with me as if we were training, not as if we were enemies. I had never met a Yona soldier until I boarded the Kandovar, and they really intrigue me. They’re always so stoic, you know? I mean, they never exhibit any emotion. I’ve never met anyone like that before and was curious to see if that changed when they fought. Do they get angry? Do they get frustrated? Do they get excited, thrilled by the rush of battle? I was trying to get Ganix to help me talk one into sparring with me so I could find out when alarms started blaring. A voice came over the speaker, saying we were under attack. The ship began to take fire, and the situation degenerated quickly. Ganix told me I should get my people into escape pods in case the worst should happen. Apparently fighting while racing through a qhov’rum isn’t easy. So I hauled ass to get my charges onto escape pods—”
“What are charges?”
“There were other women from Earth on the ship. I was one of their guards, tasked with keeping them safe. So once Ganix told me to get them to the escape pods, I hauled ass to get all my charges into the pods.”
“Were you able to do so?”
“Yes.” She’d had preternatural speed on her side and had deposited most of them in pods in the same time it would take a single Lasaran to settle into one. “Then I helped the Lasarans.”
“You did not enter a pod with your friends?”
“No. I guess I should have. They were my top priority. But the ship’s shields began to fail, and Lasarans were being injured. So I helped as many as I could reach the pods—”
“Even though the Lasarans were not your people?”
She paused. “Of course. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t my people. They were kind to me. And my friends. So I helped as many as I could.” She frowned. “I would’ve helped more, but Ganix caught up with me and kept ordering me to get to a pod myself. Then there was an explosion and… some guy talking gibberish in my ear woke me up.” She glanced down. “I wasn’t wearing this suit when the attack happened. Ganix must have stuffed me into it while I was unconscious.” He probably had tried like hell to get her to an escape pod, too. “I hope he’s all right.”
A moment of silence followed.
“I hope they all are, Eliana.”
She liked the way he said her name.
“You’re very brave.”
A wry smile twisted her lips as she stared through the helmet’s visor. “I don’t feel very brave at the moment.” She was actually scared shitless.
One of the other men spoke softly.
Though she couldn’t understand what Dagon bit out next, the way he delivered it sounded suspiciously like a curse word.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “We are having difficulty calculating how far away you are.”
He sounded grim as hell. And she was going to go out on a limb and guess he didn’t lie very often, because she had no difficulty determining he was doing so now.
“Bullshit. You’ve already calculated it. I can hear it in your voice. How long will it take you to reach me?”