Royal Recruit - Susan Grant Page 0,37

a walk.

“Your Highness, do you need anything?”

“What can I get you?”

“Serve you?”

“Arrange for you?”

“Cook for you?”

“I’m fine. I don’t need anything,” Jared said. “Thank you.” They were so eager to please.

They feel sorry for you.

Jared clenched his stomach muscles as the reality hit him. Yes, they do, he thought. They pitied him because he was marrying the queen. Oh, joy. It seemed Miss Sunbeam lived up to her reputation.

He paused to peer inside one of the sleeping pods. There were ten. Six were occupied, Karl and Han in two of them. Suspended animation or bio-stasis, it was called, although technically your biological functions weren’t completely suspended, only slowed down—a little for shorter flights like this, and a lot for long space journeys. As peaceful as the men looked, Jared began to wonder why he wasn’t doing the same instead of wandering around the ship with his memories for company.

But in some small way, he needed to keep control of the situation. If he hibernated, he relinquished that control.

Suddenly, the protocol attendant was standing next to him. “Sir, you might want to sit down and fasten your seat harness if you’re not going to enter stasis,” he said. “It can get a little turbulent transiting the wormholes.”

“Sure.” Jared returned to his seat. A little turbulent was an understatement. Passing through the wormhole was like being shot out of a slingshot. The stars stretched into streamers, obscured by a rainbow of colors. The ship shook so hard that he couldn’t focus on anything. Then, just as quickly as they’d entered, they came out the other side.

“That was quite a ride,” he said.

“In a little over six hours, we do it again.”

“Cool.” Jared put away his reading material and lowered his seat into a bed.

Jared slept through the second transit. But for the third and final pass, he was awake and alert.

“Strapped in, sir?” a pilot asked.

Jared gave her a thumbs-up. It baffled her. “Yes,” he said. He was going to have to teach these space jockeys some fighter signals.

The shaking began. He folded his hands over his stomach and tried not to think of what his molecules were doing as they whipped through hyperspace, outside the rules of time and space. Then the ship came out the other side. Immediately, the ride smoothed out. Suddenly, fireworks exploded off the bow of the ship.

“We’re under attack!” The pilot steered away from the ball of fire, but an ear-shattering boom told Jared they hadn’t been so lucky.

Alarms sounded. The pilots were shouting to each other. If he’d thought the wormhole transit was turbulent, it was nothing compared to this. He was flopping around in his seat like a rag doll. He tried to get a grip on something, anything. Nothing worse than flying in combat and being nowhere near the flight controls.

One more explosion left the ship spinning. The alarm wailed. G-forces shoved him sideways. The stars whirled in a kaleidoscope. He smelled burning equipment. Wisps of smoke filled the cabin. They were going to have to evacuate, but no one had briefed that possibility. And they’d have to wake up the sleepers before getting out.

Then something hit, and it felt different than before, like a wave of warmer air, the flash of heat when you ignited the gas in the grill. The pilots had stopped yelling.

Smoke burned his eyes. The alarm warbled, but the shouting had stopped. “Are you okay?” He’d used the English word. There was no equivalent in their language. “Are you well?” he yelled.

Crickets.

Jared tore off his harness and crawled to the cockpit. The ship was spinning. Both pilots were slumped over the control panel. He grabbed the shoulder of the female pilot first and pulled her off the narrow desk. She flopped backward into the seat, her hand slipping off the control stick. The spinning slowed. Jared grabbed the stick and leveled the ship. The shaking continued, rattling his teeth.

He felt for a pulse. Nothing. Hurriedly, he tipped her head back and gave CPR. Dragging her limp body to the floor, he tried to get her heart started. “Damn it.” He pumped, swearing, until he finally gave up. Her counterpart’s lips were already turning blue. What killed them? Some kind of energy pulse?

Whoomph.

Ears popping, Jared spun around at the sound. Whoomph. There it went again, making his ears plug.

Whoomph.

It was coming from the area of the sleeping pods. He jogged to where the rest of the crew and his escorts slept, blissfully unaware of what had happened.

Whoomph.

Jared had one