Seven Days - A Space Romance by Jill Myles Read Free Book Online Page B

of the crucial working parts. Some had been flagged in red by the computer. “What is this? Did Dr. Nevis do more damage than we thought?”
    “Nope,” Kaden said, rushing past her to another terminal. She watched him, growing amused as the smile grew wider on his face. With rapid fingers, he typed on the new terminal and another schematic came up. At the sight of it, he punched his hand on the panel in excitement. “Yes!”
    “Yes what?” She moved forward, trying to see what he saw.
    Kaden turned to her and before she could protest, put his hands on the sides of her face and brought her in for a quick, fierce kiss. “It’s there.”
    “What’s there?” She shook her head, bewildered at his excitement. “Kaden, what are you talking about?”
    “The dark matter compressor.” And he grinned wildly, wickedly, pulling her into his arms and giving her another hard kiss. Then he laughed, spinning her around. “It’s fucking there!”
    His excitement was infectious, and she found herself smiling in response, though she had nothing on his boyish delight. “What do you mean? What dark matter compressor? For the sprint drive? Ours is powering down. We can’t use it.”
    “Ours is toast,” he agreed with a grin. “But the Yokohama ’s is not.” He turned to stab at a few keys on the panel. Another three-dimensional schematic appeared on the display, and it began to turn, slowly.
    She was familiar with the Yokohama . After all, it was one of the wrecks she was here to study. A class-3 pleasure cruiser, it had been lost on the edges of fringe-space over a thousand years before. One of the greatest galactic disasters, the Yokohama had collided with a rogue asteroid and had gone down, all hands on ship. Just another victim of this particular system, and the first ship to go down near Titan 34. But as she stared at the report up on screen, she frowned at the section highlighted in green and at the multitude of sections highlighted in red. “Kaden, what is all this?”
    “I sent out a probe,” he said in an excited voice. “As soon as Garcia, you know...” He cleared his throat. “I thought there had to be something we could do. Seemed stupid to go belly-up and die near a ship graveyard. I was wondering if their technology might be salvageable. And this right here,” he said, leaning in to tap the green-lit section on the display, “is the great-granddaddy of our sprint drive.”
    Her stomach gave a funny little flip of hope, but she quashed it. She didn’t want to get her hopes up only to have them die all over again. “But what about all these red sections?”
    “Well,” he said, rubbing at his too-long hair. “Those are the pieces determined to be missing or malfunctioning by the probe’s initial scan.”
    Just like that, her stomach sank all over again. “Oh.”
    “That’s why I sent out a second probe to the Cephalon ,” he said, turning and pecking away at the next display, bringing up the view of another ship on screen, this one completely whole. It lay perfectly still amongst the asteroid belt surrounding Titan 34, dark and menacing. “And I think we can salvage what we need to get it moving from the Yokohama .” He pointed at a few green-lit sections on one of the broken halves of the first ship.
    “You mean...”
    “We pull up next to the Yokohama , space-walk out and salvage what we can, race our asses over to the Cephalon, attach the dark matter compressor to one of their lifepods and get our asses out of this system. It won’t be a pretty fit, but I think with some elbow grease, we can get it working and sprint far enough to get out of the way of the storm—”
    She stared.
    His eyes were lit up with enthusiasm as he looked at her. “What do you think?”
    Zoey stared at the screens full of schematics. At the probe reports filling the screens, the ship’s computer crunching the lines of data from the reports, information scrolling over the monitor. She looked at Kaden. “I feel...