hungrily the little boy swallowed each spoonful shamed him. The child wasn’t starving, but he wasn’t regularly getting enough to eat either. The mother looked just as hungry as she carefully scraped the inside of the bag holding her ration, gathering ever last morsel of sustenance. He didn’t know much about breastfeeding, but he figured that it required a great deal of calories and water to make nutritious milk for an infant.
Maisie glanced at him as he settled in next to her. Their gazes held for a moment, and he gave her a brief smile. The furrow in her brow relaxed, and she returned to feeding the little boy. Terror reached into the backpack he had taken from the safe house, now filled with supplies, and handed the mother and Maisie cartons of flavored water. The little boy’s eyes lit up at his first taste of the fruity drink, and Terror had to look away, his once cold heart now feeling things intensely and leaving him off-kilter and uncomfortable.
By the time they arrived at their destination, a giant skyport orbiting an uninhabitable planet, Maisie had the little boy in her arms as he napped with his thumb stuck between his teeth. She caught his eye and gestured to their two backpacks with a nod of her head. He understood what she wanted and transferred all of the food and water rations to one backpack and their things to the other. He placed the backpack at the foot of the mother who thanked him with a big smile.
Maisie reluctantly shifted the little boy onto the bench next to his mother. She slipped off her hat and tugged the hood of her jacket over her head. Terror watched as she placed the hat on the boy’s head, leaving him a souvenir for his trip. She smiled and squeezed the woman’s shoulder before backing away and falling into step beside him.
They blended into the crowd leaving the ship and funneled into the arrival corridor for the skyport. The gigantic floating airport had once been a shining example of the best of Alliance technology and architecture. Thirty years ago or more, he figured. Once it had outlived its usefulness, the skyport had been sold off to Wings Intergalactic, the largest private commercial transport business in the galaxy.
Glancing around, he could see how little money the company had put into upkeep. The poor lighting made it easy to overlook the grimy floors and stained ceilings. A deep breath confirmed his suspicions that the air quality was total shit. He could just imagine how gunked up and nasty the air filters and ducts were.
Maisie touched his arm and gestured toward the blinking information screens. Warnings about an outbreak of a highly virulent respiratory disease filled the screens. Certain he had been vaccinated against whatever the hell it was, he wasn’t too worried about himself. Maisie tapped her upper arm to signal that she had been vaccinated against it and then held up four fingers.
“Four times?” he asked, surprised. “Boosters?”
She nodded, and he relaxed at the notion that she was protected. Still, the outbreak posed other problems for them. If they chose the wrong destination, they could end up in a quarantine, neither of which would end well for them. Wanting to learn more about the outbreak, he moved closer to the nearest information screen and read the scrolling bullet points. Maisie stayed close, her back to his and kept an eye on the throng surrounding them.
The outbreak had started in Sector 21, far away on the other end of the galaxy, but it had been brought here, to Sector 2, by passengers aboard various ships. Three of the planets he had been considering as possible places for them to lay low were already on lockdown. He mentally crossed them off his list and decided to cross off the two planets nearest to those locations, just in case.
Eyeing Sector 8 where the Valiant and the rest of their ships were currently deployed, he ditched anything in Sectors 4, 7, 11 and 12. Deciding their best bet was to jump to the farthest sector available, he tapped at the screen to find a departing flight. He flicked by the ones that were leaving too far in the future before arriving at a handful of flights that might work.
There was availability in steerage on a cruiser leaving for Sector 14. The cabin was small with a single fold-up bunk and one chair. Definitely not. All of the other ships