by Mina Carter
They barreled through the doors, Xaan last, and the couple slammed it shut behind them, dropping a metal bar across to seal it. The guy stayed by the window, his gaze sharp as he kept watch.
“Thanks for the assist,” she said as she turned to the other woman. “Kenna Reynolds.” Introducing herself, she held out her hand. “Xaan and Stephens.”
“Gracie Shardlow. Pleasure to meet you properly now we’re all using our real names,” the woman smiled tightly as she shook Kenna’s hand. Her gaze zeroed in on Xaan.
“You know what this thing is? How do we fight it?” she demanded.
“We don’t.” Xaan scanned the room. “We hole up, barricade ourselves in and wait for sunrise. It’s young but feeding fully now. It shouldn’t be able to tolerate the light once the sun comes up.”
Gracie nodded. “Soon as we got in here, my boys started to secure the entry and exit points. It’s about as secure as we’re going to be able to make it.”
“Weak points?” Xaan was sharp and to the point, his question more a barked demand. Gracie didn’t take offense, just replied in the same manner.
“The domestic pods. Barricaded what we could and guarded. Medical bay I’m iffy about, but the windows are high and small. I think it would be difficult for that thing to get in.”
Xaan’s lips compressed. “Don’t underestimate it. They’re fast, intelligent and resourceful. Get someone watching those windows.”
“On it.” Gracie whistled to get the attention of one of her group across the other side of the room. “Jay… get someone on medical.”
“Okay. Where do you want us?” Kenna asked, relieved that someone here had some sense. “And who the hell are you guys? You’re not Dex’s lot, are you?”
Gracie shook her head. “Fuck no,” she spat vehemently. “Deep cover working for the Colony Commission. Command got wind of scavengers working in this area so sent us out. We dropped in like you, under the guise of traders, but Jay had a contact here after being undercover a few years ago. They never even questioned us. We were about ready to blow it wide open when you guys arrived.”
“Huh. Sorry about that.” Kenna winced. She knew how much it took to put together an undercover op. She and Xaan had probably ruined years of work.
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” Gracie clapped her on the shoulder, squeezing quickly before letting go. “If your guy knows how to fight that thing out there, I’d rather have you here than not. We’ll get through this.”
A bang against the door made them all whirl around, weapons raised. Dex’s face appeared in the window. One eye was gone, his cheek a bloody mess.
“Let me in!” he wailed, banging on the door. “Oh god, it’s out here. Let me in!”
The guy on the door reached for the bar to lift it, but Xaan was across the gap in a heartbeat.
“No!” He slammed his hands down on the bar, keeping it in place. “That’s not Dex.”
“LET ME IN!” Dex shouted, looking over his shoulder. His expression was one of terror and pain as he peered in again. “It’s coming. Please, you gotta let me in!”
“Xaan?” Kenna asked, unsure. “He’s right there. He’s injured.”
“That’s the point,” the Lathar replied, eyeballing the human on the other side of the toughened plexiglass. “Those are Krin sucker wounds. If it got hold of him, he’s dead. That’s not Dex.”
Dex’s face went slack. Utterly devoid of emotion. If he hadn’t been begging and pleading with them a moment ago, Kenna would have thought she was looking at a corpse with its eye open. He opened his mouth and the voice that emerged wasn’t Dex’s but a hideous cackling sound.
“Ohhh cleeeeeever little Lathar. I’m going to enjjjjjoy cracking your skull open and feasting on your braiiiiiins. Perhaps I shall make you siiiiiiiing as I do!”
“What the fuck is that?” Stephens gasped.
”That’s the Krin,” Xaan confirmed as Dex rose slowly on the other side of the window. Only where his neck ended there was no body. Instead, there was a long, iridescent tentacle.
“Ohmigod, it’s using his head,” a voice behind them gasped in horror. Someone puked in the corner, the sound interspersed with low moans of terror. The higher pitch told her it was one of the women. Probably.
“Yeah? You just try it, you piece of dranthing trallshit!” Xaan called out. “And I’ll rip your draanthing tentacles off and shove them so far up your defecation channel you’ll be able to tickle your own kernagstrito!”
Stephens looked sideways at Kenna, one eyebrow cocked.
“He’s going to rip its arms off and shove them up its ass,” she translated.
Stephens nodded, looking satisfied. “The classics are always the best.”
“Preeeeeeeeetty little snackzies, caught in a cage! Weeeee! I’m haviiiiiiiiing so much fuuuuuun!”
Then the Krin was gone, throwing Dex’s head at the window as a parting gesture. It hit with a meaty thud, leaving a bloody imprint behind. Kenna tried not to think about it rolling away like a football.
“God, aliens. No fucking manners,” Stephens announced. “At the very least it could have taken its rubbish with it.”
“Looks like it took out the compound office,” Gracie said as she dropped into the seat next to Kenna to report. “Dave can just see it from one of the windows in his dom-pod. Says it went in there about half an hour ago and threw all the furniture out. Took a couple of bodies in.” She shuddered. “Best not ask questions about what it’s doing with them.”
Kenna shook her head. Having seen what the thing had done with Dex, she really didn’t want to know.
They’d been holed up in the main building for four hours, since darkness fell, and they still had five to go before sunrise. So far though, so good. The Krin had wandered around the main building, hurling body parts and abuse at the few windows that weren’t sealed up. For the first time in her life, she was grateful for the enclosed, claustrophobic design of colony buildings.
They were a one design fits all scenarios sort of thing, which meant thick walls to keep both heat and cold out and tiny slit windows to let light in, but not big enough to get smashed in bad weather. The plexiglass was toughened, able to withstand a level nine hailstorm or a sustained burst from a machine gun. Which meant there was no way the Krin was going to smash through any of them with someone’s right foot or a jawbone.
“All other stations good?” Xaan asked, waiting for Gracie’s nod.
Every way in or out of the building and attached pods was sealed up six ways to Sunday and back, with guards at every choke-point. On Xaan’s orders, each guard had line of sight with the next, so no one was left without a set of eyes on their every movement. An allatronian mouse, the tiniest rodent in existence, couldn’t have farted anywhere in the place without them knowing about it.
They’d turned the central tables in the main room into a command post. The rest were cleared away, colonists sleeping around them on camp beds if they could. Some just stared open-eyed at the ceiling. Kenna had no sympathy for most of them. With Dex they’d been responsible for countless deaths, so the Krin descending on them seemed like karma had really upped her game. She just wished karma had given them a bit of warning, rather than getting bitten in the ass with the rest.
Looking around, though, she realized the level of their losses. Sami and Eva, the young girl she’d been determined to rescue, weren’t among their number. Sadness filled her. If they weren’t in here, they were dead. There was no way the Krin hadn’t hunted them down wherever they were hiding. As far as she could tell, though, none of Dex’s main men were in here either. Good. Murdering assholes deserved everything they got. Instantly she felt bad. No matter what they’d done, no one deserved the Krin.
“Dave says it took out the main office?” Stephens joined them. “There goes the radio then. And any hope of rescue.”
Kenna shot him a look, warning him to keep his voice down as she cast a glance at those in the camp beds. There was a fine line between being r
ealistic and being a Debbie Downer, and Stephens was stomping his size elevens all over it.
“Not necessarily,” Gracie shook her head. “Not sure how much recon you guys got to do before this lot were onto you, but there’s a—”
“—junkyard.” Kenna finished at the same time, smiling at Gracie.
“Exactly,” the other woman nodded. “With the remnants of the ships there, we should be able to find something that we can cobble together to get a message out. At the least there might be a couple of escape pod transponders we can set off.”
Kenna and Stephens nodded. She explained for Xaan’s benefit. “All Terran ships and comms relays are preprogrammed to latch onto and repeat escape pod transponder beacons. If we set off a cluster, it’ll ping up on someone’s screen somewhere.”
“And,” Gracie added, “from what I saw of what they got in there, some of those ships are near complete enough we might be able to borrow from one to get another working and get off the surface. Dave’s not bad as an engineer…” she trailed off, looking at them in question.
“Not me,” Stephens shook his head quickly. “Give me a rifle I’m good, but useless with anything that requires a toolkit.”
“I’m out as well,” Kenna replied. “But this handsome fella right here… you were a science officer, weren’t you, Xaan?”
He grunted, massive arms folded over his chest. The way he looked now, the sleeves torn off his t-shirt to make dressings for the wounded and all his tattoo-like marks on display, he looked as far from a scientist as he could get.
“I was. Jury-rigged a lot of trall in my time. I’ll figure something out—”
His words were cut off by a scream from the direction of one of the pods. It wasn’t a normal scream but the type Kenna had never heard in her life before tonight. A type she could go a lifetime without hearing again.
“BREECH!” someone yelled and the air filled with the sound of gunfire. The five of them were on their feet in a heartbeat, racing toward the dom-pod.
“Oh god, it’s got her!” the guard yelled, crying and firing wildly through the doorway into the pod as they reached him. Kenna shot a look into the room and wished she hadn’t.
The Krin was in there, in all its eight tentacle-armed glory. It had one of the women who had been on guard, tentacles wrapped around her in a sick parody of a lover’s embrace. It held her off the ground, her arms flung out to the side. Her clothes and the skin of her abdomen had been ripped open, four of the tentacles disappearing inside her body. As they watched, two re-emerged with gobbets of flesh in the suckers on the end. The woman screamed as she watched her own heart pass by her face to disappear into the shark-toothed maw of the Krin.
“Soooooo deliciiiiiiious…” it crooned, stroking her hair with a free tentacle. “Tasty little human. I liiiiiiike humans. Want to eat moooooooooore of them. Snackziiiiiiies!”
Xaan stepped forward. Without missing a beat, he lifted his rifle and put two bullets through the woman’s skull. The Krin screamed in anger as her brains decorated the wall behind.
“Noooooo… doesn’t taste as gooooooood if theeeeeey’re deaaaaaad!”
Its wails were abruptly cut off as Xaan hit the switch for the door. It slammed shut, cutting off their view of it feeding. “Seal this closed,” he ordered two colonists who had joined them. “And pull back to the main section. Barricade and guard that door.”
The rest of them trooped back to the command tables and sat down.
“How was she even still alive?” Kenna asked, unable to figure out what she’d seen. Xaan reached out and took her hands in his, stroking his thumb across the back of her knuckles in a soothing gesture.
“It’s how it feeds,” he explained, his expression tight as though he didn’t like the words coming out of his mouth. “It uses the tentacles to hook into its prey’s circulatory and cardiovascular systems and replaces them, keeping its victim alive as it consumes the internal organs.” He paused, a look of disgust washing over his features. “They say it makes the meat taste better. This one? It was playing back there. Learning how long it can stretch out a meal.”
Kenna swallowed. “That’s just… sick.”
The big Lathar nodded. “It is. It’s the reason we hunt them if they dare step out of their space without multiple visas and valid reason. If we find them hunting, every species in the galaxy comes together to eliminate the pod in question.”
“Pod?” Stephens asked suddenly. “What… like there are more of these things?”
Xaan nodded slowly. “That’s why we have to get off this planet. This one is young. It might be alone now… but where there’s one Krin, more follow. Always. Especially if they think they’ve found a new, unguarded food source.”
“Shit,” Kenna, Gracie and Stephens all breathed at once.
“Exactly. We need to survive tonight and get off this gods forsaken planet. Then come back with ships and blow it the draanth to hell.”
15
The morning was warm, a gentle breeze on the air as the sun shone down. Xaan stood on the grass and closed his eyes for a moment. With the gentle rustle of the grasses and the chirping of the native avian lifeforms, he could almost believe he was back home, readying himself to perform his morning Diraanesh. Like every warrior, he did them after each sleep cycle without fail. The movements and exercises stretched his muscles and conditioned his body, but doing them with grass between his toes was good for the soul.
The wind shifted slightly and an acrid smell filled his nostrils. He wrinkled his nose and opened his eyes. He wasn’t home. He was on some gods forsaken human colony planet, looking at a mass funeral pyre for the victims of a draanthing Krin that had somehow found human space.
At least they’d survived the night, he mused, as Kenna’s small hand crept onto his arm, her expression filled with sorrow and understanding as she looked up at him. He smiled and brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She thought he felt pity for the humans whose remains were burning on the pyre.
He didn’t. Not for most of them. They had been murdering liars who had preyed on their own species and didn’t deserve to live. The goddess Tsaalina, Lady of Justice, had cast her judgement on them by allowing the Krin to find them. The only ones he felt pity for were the ones who had shown courage in helping to protect their fellows last night—the woman the Krin had gotten to in the domestic pod and a male it had tagged when it had managed to get a tentacle through a drain.
He’d cleaned that one up himself, refusing to allow the humans to see the little that was left of the body after it had been pulled through the drain grate. He’d only needed a mop and bucket. The male had sealed himself in to stop it getting any further—a sacrifice of honor and courage.
“Their names will be remembered by Tsaalina,” he murmured to her in a low voice, resting his forehead against hers. Utter relief rolled through him that she had survived the night. If the Krin had gotten ahold of her… He shuddered, and then ice-cold fury at the very idea slid down his spine.
If it had killed Kenna, he would have gone out there, empty handed if necessary, and torn the thing limb from limb. Xaantar, a legendary warrior of his line, had done just that centuries ago when his mate had been slaughtered by a pod of Krin while he’d been off planet. He’d ordered his men to drop him on the surface with nothing but his bare hands.
He’d slaughtered the Krin without mercy, every last one of them, leaving their dismembered bodies on spikes around his former home. It became both a shrine to his mate and a warning for any Krin that dared to venture onto the planet. Statues of the scene were erected on all border planets with Krin territory as a warning of what Lathar retribution looked like.
He’d have done that for his Kenna. If the thing had hurt so much as a hair on her head, he’d have turned this whole fucking planet into a warning of what happened when anyone dared touch a warrior’s mate.
She was more than that. She was his beloved. A general’s kelarris. He was the emperor’s champion and his
rage and retribution would eclipse even Xaantar’s.
Kenna leaned against him, so he wrapped his arm around her. They had nothing to do for now. With the engineers left alive, he’d made a survey of the ships and technology available in the junkyard. They were in a better position than any of them had dared hope. One ship was almost complete, only needing minor repairs with parts that could be scavenged from others in the yard. Simple jobs that didn’t need him to be there. The other engineers were far more familiar with Terran ships and systems than he was.
He pulled Kenna closer.
“You look tired, kelarris,” he murmured, brushing his lips against her temple.
She blinked and straightened up. “No, no. I’m good,” she reassured him.
He hid his smile. She wasn’t getting it.
“No… I think you need to rest.” His voice was low as he pulled her to face him. Leaning down, he whispered against her lips. “I think I need to get you to bed.”
“Oh!” Her little gasp was lost under his lips and he groaned as she opened up for him immediately. Heat and need filled his veins as he pushed his tongue into her mouth to claim the soft recesses within. She inflamed him like no other ever had, and it took everything he had to stop his body responding fully. Only because he couldn’t walk through the camp with a raging hard-on.
Pulling back, he looked down at her to search her expression for any hint she didn’t want this. There was none. Instead, she tilted her head slightly.
“Well, what are you waiting for, warrior? Get on with the claiming already.”
He grinned, the expression nothing at all to do with amusement, and scooped her up into his arms. She squeaked and then smiled at him as she settled against his chest happily. He strode back toward the compound. She fit there perfectly, like she’d always been meant to be there. He knew in his heart she had. She was his perfect mate, the one female who’d been made for him and just for him.