if something was wrong, and even Raul had started talking to her again, but she couldn’t confide in them. Alexa hated to admit it, but she was beginning to care for some of them despite her best effort not to. She couldn’t stop hearing about their lives, their jobs, their woes, and their happiness when they conversed around her.
She imagined what it would be like to be one of Pigeon’s daughters, living without this burden of loss and hate. She even considered accepting Raul’s invitation to become something more with him.
Lovers. It’d be easy. They already slept in the same room. And maybe having Raul beside her would distract her from whatever was happening with her regarding Hysterian.
I’m going to kill him. That’s what’s happening.
Raul could be easy and fun…
Alexa cleared her throat.
Today was a new day, a new evening. She’d come to find Hysterian to apologize for breaking protocol and to reset boundaries between them, to figure out where the bugs for Titan’s ambassador were, to finally get into the bridge, and most of all, remember why she was here in the first place.
Alexa inhaled and looked around her some more. She didn’t know how much time she had.
She moved away from the door after waiting another few seconds, just in case Hysterian watched the security feed later. He could be heading back at any moment if his business with Daniels was done.
She closed in on Daniels’s station first, slowly making her way to her target: the captain’s logs. If she knew she wouldn’t be caught, she’d have followed Hysterian to overhear his and Daniels’s conversation. Maybe she’d find out what Daniels was looking for in Hysterian’s quarters…
She shook her head. I’m not here for Daniels.
The screens ran continuous feeds at Daniels’s station. Numbers and alerts popped up in the air directly above the hardware. There were calibrations and readings of the Questor’s systems, their usages, and maintenance specs. It was strange information for someone on the bridge to be viewing but not wholly unusual.
The ship’s water supply and recycling were at their max. The Questor’s AI suggested water replacement immediately due to an unusual number of unknown substances in it. Strange.
Alexa pretended to stretch and swiped her finger across the specs, pushing them away. New information came up. Navigational specs, random coordinates, and more popped up. A correspondence from Elyria? Her eyes widened at the planet’s name coming out of nowhere, and when she stretched again, she was dismayed but not surprised the correspondence was locked.
She moved away from Daniels’s station, cutting her gaze to the ship’s windows in the front.
Titan was a beautiful planet, but the tarmac was not. Condensation evaporated off the cement, making the view foggy.
She made her way to Horace’s station next.
His station was a complete disaster, and she wondered where the cleaning bots were, but she had also interrupted the officers in the middle of something, so maybe they hadn’t had time to clean up and organize their stations before the next shift cycle.
Horace eluded her. She’d barely spoken to him in the weeks they’d been traveling. He was a quiet man with a testy demeanor. Neither she nor Horace made the effort to get to know one another.
But his screens were filled with correspondences, and her curiosity piqued. It made sense. Horace was the communications officer, their expert on the various sects of humans across the universe. Snooping on his mail would be satisfying, but she wasn’t here to get distracted. She backtracked to stand beside Hysterian’s chair.
The captain’s seat was front and center, and above the others—even the empty stations across the bridge. Power, it screamed. Authority. Leadership. She didn’t belong anywhere near it.
Alexa would never be a captain of anything. She was lucky enough to have the position she trained for. She’d been poor growing up and only had her dad. He taught her how to survive up until his own death. He never taught her how to survive without him though.
He would’ve made a great captain.
Dad never left Elyria. He never so much as stepped onto a spaceship. He’d been a Trentian half-breed. Part-human, part-alien. Alexa reached out and ran her fingers over the back of Hysterian’s chair, soothed by the soft, rich leather she felt.
Dad never had a chance to be anything more than what he was. He could work for neither government nor any organization affiliated with both. Humans didn’t trust him; Trentians tolerated him. And since Elyria had more humans than either Trentians or half-breeds combined,