Guardians of the Pattern Bundle, Volume 1 (Books 1-3) by Jaye McKenna

Author:Jaye McKenna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, gay, fantasy, sword and sorcery, space opera, slave, abduction, psychic, pararnormal, abuse survivor
Publisher: Jaye McKenna

Chapter Ten

Rhys ran a hand through tousled hair as he studied the lists on the screen in front of him. Didn’t matter how long he stared at them, they didn’t look any better now than they had when he’d first received Santros Station’s data dump.

He’d sold the medical supplies and they’d been offloaded a few hours ago. Now he was trying to scare up a cargo for the next leg of the journey. Unfortunately, the only thing he could find that would take him closer to Aurora was radiotoxic. The money was good, but he wasn’t licensed to handle or haul the stuff, and Gremlin’s hold wasn’t shielded for it.

Gems, which had always been a good fallback, were in short supply after a series of strong earthquakes had destroyed all but a few of the mines. The prices were high enough to make a profit all but impossible.

Selling the ship and using the proceeds to book passage on a transport was a possibility, but still left him with the problem of the drug supply. He’d used up all of the Anarin on Alek, in the hope that it would help. It hadn’t, and he’d ended up putting Alek in cold-sleep before they’d even made the first jump away from Astilian Station.

Now he was down to his last few cartridges of Synyx, and Firelli’s contact on Santros Station hadn’t even heard of the stuff. Rhys had enough to get through a couple more days on-station, and after that…

After that, his only choice was riptide, which would only delay the inevitable. Having watched Vaughn walk the tightrope between sanity and addiction, Rhys already knew he didn’t have the stomach for it.

Without Synyx to ease his pain, the only way Rhys would survive a trip on a commercial transport would be in cold-sleep, and that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take. Not with Draven and company looking for them. Rhys didn’t know what it would take to have a couple of cryo-tubes spirited off of a transport and sent elsewhere, but if Draven had access to a fast courier, he might well be capable of doing just that.

The thought of coming out of cryo and finding himself back in Draven’s hands was too horrifying to contemplate. No. Alek trusted him to see that he got home, and damn it, Rhys would see him safely home.

He’d spent the past few hours thinking his way around the problem, and the only solution he could see was to upgrade the ship’s drive crystals and pray like hell the rest of her aging systems could handle the increased power.

He ran a few calculations using the specs for the most powerful configuration he figured Gremlin’s systems could take. The numbers he came up with said that his idea was feasible, but there was little room for error, and success would be dependent on the integrity of a drive system that was out of date and needing maintenance that he couldn’t afford right now. It was a

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