Intergalactic Witness Protection Excerpt

The lights filter in and out around me as my focus returns completely to the ship. I must have deactivated my hologram some time before my last physical body perished. I almost forgot what it was like to lose awareness, even for a moment.

This must be like when humans sleep. Or die. Only mine is shorter. And less permanent.

I do a scan of the ship and locate Orion in the med bay. He seems to sense my awareness, because he smiles up, away from where Nicholas is stretched out on the med-bay. “I owe you one, Alisia Ivy. Well, more than one, but who’s keeping count?”

Imitating that smile on the hologram, I materialize before him.

“Hey, Double A,” Nicholas rasps, looking up at me groggily. “That was a real shin-dig, wasn’t it?”

“Nicky,” Killa scolds from where she’s sitting on another hospital bed, bending and unbending her fingers. “It was a serious incident. Be considerate...” She glances at Orion before turning back to Nicholas with a frown.

Nicholas sighs, tries to lift his arms, and fails. “Right. Sorry, Orion. I shouldn’t be so insensitive. I mean, your past literally tried to blow you up-”

“Nicholas.”

I analyze Orion. He still has a smile on his face, but that expression no longer lights up his eyes the way it is supposed to.

I move through Nicholas toward Orion.

“Hey!” Nicholas cries.

“You need to lie down,” I tell Orion, ignoring Nicholas.

“I’m fine-”

My hologram adopts Killa’s favorite pose and I place my hands on my hips to display that I am not going to be side-stepped like that. “You were knocked unconscious, hit by a Venetian bomb, and hit by debris. And that is just the physical aspect. Emotionally, you were kidnapped by gangsters you grew up with and almost kidnapped by your former lover.”

Nicholas looks up at that. “Wait, what?”

Killa winces.

Orion does too. “Did you have to use the ‘l’ word? You know how I feel about the ‘l’ word…”

“Dude,” Nicholas rasps. “A Venetian? Of all the monsters in the galaxy-”

“Half-Venetian,” Orion mutters. “And not my former lover anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

I let my captain’s lie stand. After all, I wasn’t there when everything went down; he found me after escaping Gaynemade. But I was also the one he sobbed to in the dark vacancy of space where confession was his only escape from nightmares.

“None of what happened even matters now,” Orion adds, sliding up on the table and burying his face in his hands wearily. “Except to know that Gaynemade is even more hostile than I originally presumed, and that a very dangerous, very powerful Venetian from my past is also hot on our trails with an unknown agenda.”

My hologram moves forward before halting to let him have his privacy in letting the rest of the team not know how personal this Venetian’s agenda really is. “I think she has a bounty on us. She wanted you.”

Orion looks up, and while I’m not sure how accurately my hologram eyes display my true meanings like human eyes do, he seems to understand what I’m saying.

Her desire was for him.

He clears his throat before straightening his back. “But with this knowledge in mind, we still need to rescue the man who S.O.Sed us.”

I hope my considerations of this matter do not display neurotically on my hologram visage. I want the poor soul who queried us for assistance to be helped… but by someone else. My team is in too much danger here. My captain is in the most dangerous position of all.

The last I almost lost the last time we came anywhere near the path of the Venetian.

Space is too big to run into her again and it be a coincidence.

“Obviously,” Orion begins, not following my wave-lengths. “We can’t go with Plan Alpha. So, Beta Plan: we land outside and make our way in.”

A slow smile spreads across Nicholas’s face. “I’ll go get my space suit.”

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