But he was not too young to know when something had gone terribly wrong.
The first warning came when the Aphrodite shook as if a great fist had slammed into its hull. Agent Teklys jumped out of her seat, hand flying to the gun at her belt, and stared up as if she could see through the overhead to the source of the explosion.
The boy followed her gaze. “What is it?” he asked. All of a sudden he was very excited and very scared. “Is someone attacking the ship?”
Before she could answer, the first alarm shrieked over the intercom. Agent Teklys muttered something fierce under her breath. The boy felt her fear; he couldn’t read thoughts, not yet, but he sometimes caught images, feelings. What he glimpsed in Teklys’s mind made his stomach flip-flop like a spike-eel in a fishing net.
Agent Teklys ran to the bulkhead and punched the intercom. All that answered her call was static and the wail of the klaxon. She dashed back to the boy and knelt before him, grasping both his arms.
“Listen to me, young ser. I’m going out to see what’s happening. I’ll be right back, and I want you to stay here until I come for you. Is that understood?”
He nodded, swallowing the thickness in his throat. He wanted very badly to go with her, but he’d only get in the way. That was what his older brother Ambros told him constantly.
But Ambros was home on Persephone with Uncle Miklos, and he, the middle son, had been allowed to go with Mama and Papa on this most important of missions. He would not wish he’d been left at home as well.
“Very good,” Agent Teklys said. “Don’t be afraid. I will protect you.” With a final tap on his shoulder, she ran through the mess door and sealed it behind her.
He waited. He was good at waiting, watching, and listening; Mama said he was very much like his father in that way. But he knew he was not nearly as brave as Papa, or as smart. The noises continued, explosions and bumps and thumps he could feel in the soles of his boots. He thought he smelled smoke. Stray emotions from the crew drifted around him like ghosts, adding to his fear.
Mama? he cast out wildly. Papa? There was no answer. He was not strong enough to make them hear. He ran to the door and placed his hand flat on the control grid. It vibrated against his palm. He stepped back just in time as Agent Teklys charged through, hair loose in her face and her gun raised to fire. The door closed behind her.
“We have very little time,” she said in a clipped, tense voice. “The Aphrodite has been boarded. You must get to the escape pods immediately.”
Boarded? He knew what that meant; someone else had come onto the ship, someone who hadn’t been invited.
“If ever the ship is boarded,” Papa had told him, very seriously, on the day they left Concordat space, “I want you to go straight to the escape pods and do exactly what I’ve shown you. An automatic signal will go out to all of our nearby ships, and someone will come for you. Do you understand?”
He didn’t understand nearly enough. But he took Agent Teklys’s sweaty hand and let her pull him toward the door.
It slid open in a burst of bright light. Agent Teklys shoved him behind her, and then the tall figure in the doorway lifted his weapon and fired. She staggered and fell. The boy stood frozen where he was and looked up.
He knew what he was seeing. Mama and Papa had carefully shown him the holovids, answered all his questions, and tried to prepare him to meet his father’s friends among the shaauri. But his mind compared the holovids to the huge shape before him and refused to make the connection.
Red fur. Red, black-striped fur covered the whole body, from long-nailed bare feet to the tips of pointed ears. He stood a head taller than even Papa, who was a big man. He wore short, loose trousers, many belts hung with tools and weapons across his chest, and metal decorations around his arms and throat. His face, wrinkled in anger or confusion, made the boy think of Uncle Miklos’s cat on Persephone, but only a little. The shaauri were not cats.