Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,91

realized she was shaking.

He eyed her. “This is the first time you’ve heard a battle.”

Swallowing hard, she mumbled through her knuckles, “That was Ridley. She’s in the fighting.” And too near the charged ray that had silenced an entire squad.

“She was a warrior on Earth too.”

True, but… “I swear, this still won’t make me run away.” And when the moment came to see battle? “Can we contact Marisol and Coriolis and the rest? Tell them we’re coming.” She grimaced. “I’m nothing, but the return of the Phantom could turn the tide.”

“Any choice by any being may turn the tide,” he reminded her. “That’s why we’re here.” He gestured at the crisscrossing streams of messaging. “We have no weapons, and the runabout’s mimic shield is obsolete even if we risked pushing more power priority there. Our best chance of landing intact is to hide our path down. Since we’re small and our signal is obscure, with the Cretarni focused elsewhere, we might be able to sneak past. But not if we call attention to ourselves prematurely.”

He’d never been small and obscure. He’d never hidden. Once again, this was her fault. She nodded and dropped her fist into her lap. “Where do they need us most?”

Not since she’d set her prom date’s truck on fire had she felt as hopeless and complicit as she watched the simplified scan outlining the battle below—almost as bad as a screenshot from the old Space Invaders video game, except real lives were being lost. Would it even make a difference if they could tell the Tritonesse what kind of weapon they were facing? They’d already hated and feared the nul’ah-wys—with good reason. Maybe it was already too late.

But with Tritona right there below, she wasn’t running again.

Sting pointed at the screen. “The Cretarni are focused here. They have their armada in an offensive array, and from the lack of Tritonyri signals where fighters should’ve been arrayed here and here—and here—it seems our forces have withdrawn to a defensive position above the Abyssa’s chasm.” His voice roughened even more than usual. “We’ve never retreated so far, and that it’s happened so fast…”

It meant the Cretarni attack—wielding the weapon they’d taken from her blood—was the worst that Tritona had ever endured.

She squelched the impulse to blame herself again. Drowning in guilt had never gotten her what she wanted. She could only join the fight with what she had.

On their return trip, Sting had shown her some fighting moves effective against specific Cretarni liabilities and he’d drilled her with a plasma pistol although obviously she wasn’t able to live fire on the runabout. She still wasn’t a warrior, but she was willing.

So how far would that take her?

“We’re going to crash the runabout,” he announced.

She sighed. Yeah, that sounded about right. “Third time’s the charm,” she muttered.

“Kill the power, go dark, drop fast and deep. We’ll be underwater before the Cretarni can destroy us.”

Biiiiig sigh.

And worse than definitely crashing and maybe drowning or blowing up, if they descended to the trenches, what help would she be? The Phantom would go back to fighting the Cretarni, except now more endangered than ever.

When he hadn’t been showing her how to kill and how to survive, he’d been constantly rebalancing power to get them to Tritona sooner. When the air in the runabout had gotten thin and she’d tried to sleep, to conserve her own power, she’d lie there, watching his stillness broken only by the occasional flick of his fingers over the controls, as if he sought to propel them through the vacuum with his own webbed hands.

Only once, without words, had he come to lie down beside her, those hands holding her instead of empty space.

“I thought I was going to die when the Cretarni ejected me,” she’d confessed in a whisper. “Even though you were right there, I thought I was going to die alone. I couldn’t believe you’d find a way.”

Finally he spoke. “Believe.” And he held her while she cried until she’d finally fallen asleep.

Now, she had to fight.

But how? Except for the ability to read fast, snack constantly, and maybe lob a couple grenades, she’d lost the only power she’d ever had.

“We have to go to the Abyssa,” she said.

Sting nodded. “If Coriolis has pulled the Tritonyri back, then he’ll need us at the chasm—”

“No, I mean we have to go deeper. All the way to Abyssa.” When he didn’t answer, she swiveled her seat to face him. “You said yourself, one being can change the