Caretakers (Stag Privateers Book 2) by Nathan Jones

Author:Nathan Jones [Jones, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Scale

It took nine days to reach the secret HAE base, a sharply helpless time for Aiden.

Ali condescended to let him pilot, but it was mostly pointless because she couldn't allow him to view any sensor data about their location or what was out there in space around them, aside from marking obstacles for him to avoid. Thanks to that, he might as well have been flying in an empty void.

He couldn't tell if they were headed deeper into Iglis galaxy, or were going back out into the vast gulf between galaxies to some remote and untraveled location. For all he knew, they could've been flying right into a sun and he wouldn't have been able to tell until he felt the bulkheads begin heating up around him.

It was a lonely time, as well. He was avoiding Ali, for obvious reasons, which meant he spent far less time on the bridge than usual. Without her, he didn't really have anyone else on the ship to spend time with: even loneliness couldn't force him to seek out one of the twins for company, and Lana and the gunner were off in their own world, as usual. Especially with the gunner spending more time resting to recover from his burns, and most of his reduced on-duty hours keeping a suspicious eye on the Caretaker in case of any treachery.

The young man had protested them putting so much trust in a strange AI, to the point that they couldn't even use their own ship's sensors, but Aiden had shot him down there. This wasn't the first time they'd bent over backwards to appease a client, and HAE was paying an obscene fortune for its scientists.

Speaking of whom, most of them kept to themselves, and seemed too intimidated to really talk to him when he encountered them and loneliness compelled him to try to socialize. They usually excused themselves as soon as they politely could, which he supposed he couldn't complain about; most of what the roboticists usually had to say went right over the head of a career soldier. His passengers seemed to have few interests beyond their work, and the few they admitted to were ones Aiden didn't share.

The only exception there was Terra Sarr.

To his surprise, in spite of his angry confrontation with the willowy woman about her conspiring with Ali to sync, she didn't go out of her way to avoid him. In fact, she seemed somewhat ashamed about how what she'd done had impacted him, even though she firmly insisted it had been the correct choice, and seemed to want to make up for it if she could.

She even turned out to be pleasant company, at least when she wasn't giving into the temptation to ramble on about her passion, the adult companions she'd helped create. Not that it wouldn't have also been enjoyable to talk to her about that subject, since she was good at expressing concepts in ways he could understand without seeming like she was talking down to him.

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