Page 127 of Shellshock

“The gun-grids have a pretty glaring bug,” she explained, showing him the virtual schematics as he watched over her shoulder.

“There’s the main system. And there’s the failover. If you knock both offline like this”—she moved her fingers around the screen to show him—“you wipe the configuration. They’ll come online in a factory reset state.”

“Hm?”

“It’ll never auto-fire again. What happened to the Crescent Rim won’t happen again. Unless it goes all the way back to Earth and they spend months on the phone with the manufacturer.” She huffed a victorious laugh. “Which is out of the question! I blew up the portal.”

He poked her tablet, rotating the cubic ship. With a flick of his finger, the 3D model spun joyously. He did it a second time. “What about the gravity?”

“Why are you always so obsessed with gravity?”

“Because it’ll be fun to fly through all these halls without it.”

She sighed. He said that now, but she doubted he would keep that same enthusiasm once he saw it from the inside. But she’d warned him about every hazard and he still wanted to go. It was the ultimate challenge to him.

She put her tablet away. Her head tilted back on his shoulder and his arms banded around her own.

“Where do you want to do it?” he asked.

“It?Is this a sex question?”

The tip of his tail flicked. “Get married.”

“Oh.” Her heart stirred. She should be mad at him, not giddy over every mention of a future that… they might never have. Tears dotted her eyelashes. “Erulea… maybe?”

“What about Sanmantia?”

Silence descended for a moment. Stars drifted by. She wondered to herself if this could have been avoided if only she’d come clean sooner. She’d questioned it a million times but couldn’t erase her mistakes. Lucca needed to be brave enough to get to the point if she wanted to be with him.

“When you said there were fireproof cities, did you suspect—”

“I told myself you had a compromised carapace,” he murmured. She nodded and drifted off in thought until he interrupted it. “But part of me knew the truth. I was… ready for you.”

He stroked her stomach idly.

“It doesn’t matter where we do it,” she said. “But you changed the subject. I don’t like the idea of you getting on that ship and never leaving it again.”

He said nothing.

She twisted to face him, meeting his wary gaze. He’d shown her parts of him that she figured were meant to scare her off. He never banked on her still being there.

“I mean it,” she said. “Do whatever you have to do—I can’t really stop you. But my condition is that you have to come off that ship alive. No matter what it costs.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t make any promises, either.

“You have to, Caligher. If you don’t come back, it will kill me.”

CHAPTER25

CALIGHER

After returning Lucca to her cell, Caligher checked his route to make sure the dark mass was still in his crosshairs. They were closing in.

His senses had been going haywire for days.

He couldn’t seem to get the right words out. To sit down with Lucca and have the talk they needed to have. She kept saying he needed to include her in whatever plans he made for her mothership. She’d go down fighting with him.

He didn’t want to see her promises put to the test, but it warmed him to have her on his side.