Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,28
attack the Earth as they did your planet?”
“The war on Tritona was an internal matter, which is why intergalactic security forces didn’t interfere. Attacking a closed world would be much different.”
“The Cretarni don’t seem to care much about what’s right.” After all, they’d poisoned their own planet when it became clear that they were losing the war.
“As a practical matter, they lack the resources to wage a planet-wide battle, even against an unprepared populace such as your Earth.” His silvery gaze returning to her was steady, unflinching, as if he wanted her to know he was telling the truth. “We may have kept control of Tritona only because the Cretarni expended their reserves, but that also means they aren’t able to come after your Earth, even if for some reason they thought it worth pursuing.”
That wasn’t really consolation—that her whole world wasn’t worth the fight—but she’d take what assurances she could get.
She swallowed hard. “If it is the Cretarni, how are you and I supposed to fight them alone? I crashed the Diatom, and you have no way to contact more Tritonyri—”
He closed the distance between them and clamped his hands on her shoulder. As if he didn’t even care if she zapped him in her burgeoning panic. “We don’t have to fight them. Yet.”
The weight of his big hands somehow made it easier to draw a steadying breath. “Okay, first steps first then. How do we find them, whoever it is, and make sure they aren’t bad?”
“Bad,” he rumbled, sidling away from her again and letting his hands slip free. She resisted the urge to wind up and smack him if he asked what that meant. Much as she believed in nuance, she wasn’t going to quibble when possibly both her planets were at stake. “The Atlantyri is old,” he continued, “but it has some of the technology I can use to repair the Diatom and upgrade the systems at the estate. If the other ship turns out to be just a random visitor, we do nothing.”
“And if it is the Cretarni?” She peered at him. “Don’t hide things from me. I want to know what you know.”
His flat gaze never changed. “The Tritonesse weren’t interested in hearing my thoughts.”
“They made it very clear to me that I am not them.” When he gazed back silently across the small distance of the alien ship, she sighed. “And I shouldn’t have tried to evoke their name to order you around. That was wrong. So I’m simply asking because…it’s just the two of us, and we’re in this together.”
After a heartbeat, he inclined his head. “What I know I will share.”
As if she could actually be of any use. “So where do we start?”
He rolled his hand, flashing the small computer on his wrist. “The Diatom’s AI sent the list of damaged components, what can’t be reproduced from the production printer Maelstrom left behind. First, we need a sample of the nav data gel.”
Astrology she knew. Deep space navigation? Not so much. But she’d skimmed enough of the IDA handbooks—intended for new-and-clueless intergalactic citizens—to get a sense of how the scoby-like gel was cultured with artificial neurons to support sentient life with the trickier aspects of galactic existence, such as hopping across the interstellar void.
He moved quickly through the ship, and she had to hustle to keep up with his longer strides which kept her from being as nosey as she wanted.
This had been the path of her ancestresses. Their feet—probably bare as the Tritonans usually were and as she was now—had trod these halls. But eventually they’d left the Atlantyri and found Earther mates—a path that led to her.
A dead end.
Well, not quite dead yet.
Though Lana knew the Atlantyri was buried under centuries of sediment below one of the small lakes that fed tributaries to Yellowstone, the hallways that Sting led her down felt surprisingly open. And still when they emerged from the peripheral corridor to the core, she gasped with surprise and delight.
Though Ridley had described the core cavern as a massive, multi-chambered heart circulating the waters that kept the Tritonan ship alive, seeing it in front of her was something else. They’d emerged from one of the main conduits high in the cavern wall, which left them overlooking the segmented wheel, like a circular slice of a futuristic city, where waves sluiced from one segment to the other in an artificial tide divorced from the pull of the moon.
At least not the small, solitary moon of this world,