He could see the warriors’ lights shining on the damp stone walls, heard the scuff of their boots, the crunch of gravel, and the occasional ping of a kicked rock, so he knew they followed, but there was no more debate or grousing, with their mission begun.
About twenty-five yards in, the cramped tunnel opened enough for him to stand upright, though just barely. The warriors, who were every bit of seven feet tall, Remus probably an inch or two more, weren’t so fortunate and still had to walk slightly bent over.
It took longer than he’d expected to move such a short distance, but dodging boulders and the low ceiling slowed them down. When the device beeped ten yards from their target, the cold knot of fear, pervasive in his gut since they’d learned she’d been taken, twisted tighter.
What if they were too late and she’d been drained like the others? The gruesome image of Betsy’s withered gray features haunted him. For the same thing to happen to Adria was unthinkable.
He tried to remain positive as he pushed forward. Adria was a survivor, and more determined than anyone he knew.
Beck stopped when he came to a hard, right turn in the tunnel and held up his hand signaling the others to stop as well. “They’re just around this corner.”
Though he didn’t turn, the hum of blasters charging told him the warriors were ready to face whoever or whatever might be with Adria.
God, please, let it be Adria, and let her be alive.
With his hands full, and armed with only a laser pistol, he let Remus and Tarus provide cover. The hand with the flashlight came up to signal them forward, but it flickered, went dark for a second, then came back on.
“Fucking unreliable equipment,” he muttered under his breath as the next instant it flickered again. Beck shook it, but it made matters worse. The damn thing went completely out, plunging them into darkness.
After he blinked several times, and his eyes adjusted, he saw a soft-blue glow ahead.
“What is that?” Remus asked softly.
“I don’t know,” Beck whispered back. “But we’re about to find out.” He stretched his arm out behind him, palm up. “Flashlight.” As soon as one of the warriors slapped theirs into his hand, he ordered, “Let’s move on my count.”
“I’ll go high,” Remus told his twin, receiving only a grunt of acknowledgment.
“One...two...” Beck didn’t need to utter three. On that final beat, they surged around the corner, the warriors with weapons drawn, ready to take out any threat, and Beck with one thought—finding Adria.
Their defensive incursion was unnecessary. Except for some equipment and a large blue sphere on a pedestal, the chamber was empty. He aimed the beam of his light into the shadows where the weak blue light didn’t reach.
Finding nothing, he looked down at the tracker again. “I don’t understand,” he muttered in frustration. “She should be right here.”
“Perhaps the blue ball is causing interference,” Remus suggested.
Moving farther into the chamber, they began to search.
“Here,” Tarus called.
Behind an equipment console were three metal cages. One held an unconscious male—a miner by the look of his long-sleeved plaid shirt and jeans. Inside the other two were old women, none of them moving.
“The medics should have arrived by now. I’ll alert them to get in here now,” Remus said as he pulled out his communicator.
Tarus squatted beside the cage nearest them and reached between the bars. He laid two fingers on the miner’s throat. “He’s alive,” he called.
“I didn’t know we had women over the age of fifty on Terra Nova,” Beck commented while he tried the cage holding one of the women. “Locked,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose there’s a set of keys lying about.”
“That would be too easy,” Remus replied as he crouched next to him and studied the locking mechanism. “I don’t recognize the technology, but it’s beyond a lock and key. We’ll have to blast them open.”
Beck reached through the bars. “I’m going to move you, ma’am,” he told her in case she could hear. “Don’t be frightened. We’re going to get you out of here.”
She didn’t react. Lying with her upper body slumped at an odd angle, only her legs were in reach. He grasped her ankles and eased her toward him. Although he was careful, she was unconscious, and, in her limp state, she rolled, or, more aptly, flopped, onto her back. Her pale hair fell away from her colorless face.
“Holy fuck!” he exclaimed.
“What is it?” Remus and Tarus demanded as one.
“Not what, who.” His hand cupped her face. It was like ice. The knot in his gut tightened as he moved his fingers to her throat. As he searched for a pulse, he watched for the rise and fall of her chest. “This isn’t an old woman. It’s Adria, and she’s barely breathing. Blast this fucking thing open, now.”
Remus was ready to do so before he finished speaking. “Shield her eyes. I’m unsure of this alloy. There may be sparks.”
He didn’t have time to be gentle like before and hauled her lifeless body to the bars, rolling her onto her side facing him and away from the door of the cage.
“Do it now,” he ordered.
Green blaster fire lit the dim chamber, but Beck only saw it in his peripheral vision, his gaze locked on her wan face. Like her hair, it was devoid of color. Her brows and lips were equally pale.
The metal glowed red as it heated then melted. When the cage door fell inward, Tarus dragged it out of the way, and Remus rushed in. She didn’t so much as twitch when he lifted her and carried her out, and was deathly still when he laid her on the hard cave floor and checked for life signs. Several moments passed before he pronounced in a voice choked with emotion, “Her heart has stopped. We’re too late.”
“No! She was breathing a moment ago. I saw her.” Beck shoved the man as he shouted, “Move. You’re in my way.”
“If the Maker has called her,” Remus said sadly, “what can you do?”
“Save her,” he growled as he ripped her from the bigger man’s grasp.
The pulse in her throat was slow and weak, and hard to find, but she had one.
“Now is not the day you meet your maker, Adria of Valkerr,” he whispered as he bent over her. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He positioned her head to open her airway, pinched off her nose, and breathed for her. After giving her four rescue breaths, he raised his head and demanded, “Where is the damn medic? She needs oxygen.”
“So does this one,” Tarus muttered, after firing his weapon and opening the third cage to get to the other woman. “It’s like they’ve aged fifty years. What went on here?”
He got no response because none of them had an answer, and Beck was too busy breathing for Adria, anyway.
“I’ll go see what’s keeping the medics.” Remus rushed across the cavern to the tunnel they’d entered through. He’d been gone only a few minutes when he returned with two men wearing blue emergency vests, a woman Beck recognized following them.
“Chandra, hurry,” he called to the paramedic. “She’s barely got a pulse.”
Within a few seconds, the experienced medic had a tube down Adria’s throat and oxygen flowing through it. Next, she attached a small box with dials to the opposite end. “This will breathe for her, Beck. But we need to get her out of this cave.”
The medics had loaded the other two victims onto Hover-tech stretchers. They floated above the rocky cave floor as their rescuers guided them into the tunnel leading outside. Adria was next once Chandra started intravenous fluids and attached a heart monitor to her arm. At her nod, Beck lifted her onto the floating mat. As he followed her out, he kept an eye on the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed on her own now. If it became too shallow, the assistive device beeped and gave her a burst of forced air. The only small comfort he took seeing her so helpless and still was the sound of her heartbeat echoing through the cave.
“It’s a good thing you found her when y
ou did, Beck, and that you know CPR,” the medic commented. “A few more minutes and we may not have been able to revive her.”
“Do you think she’ll recover?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“I’m sorry, Beck. She’s critical. I wish I could say more,” Chandra replied. While they waited to go single file through the low, narrow cave entrance, she looked up from monitoring Adria. “It would help if we knew what happened to her. She’s ashen–everywhere–her skin, her eyes, the inside of her mouth, and her hair. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We don’t know. She was like this when we got here. But...”
“But what?” Tarus inquired from behind him.
Beck turned back. “The blue orb. We found one like it with the other victims.”
“Do you think there’s a correlation?”
“I don’t know. This one looked drained, like her. If nothing else, it might tell us who did this.” He glanced down the dark tunnel but couldn’t see the faint light any longer. “I need to go get it.”
“I alerted the Intrepid,” Remus advised. “They have contacted Commander Rothke who is on his way. He will inform General Trask of his sister’s condition. In the meantime, Captain Allon is sending down a response team to investigate. Until they arrive, my brother and I will stay and guard the cave and ensure nothing is touched.”
Beck nodded but didn’t say more because it was his turn to follow Adria and Chandra. Once outside, he stood by, feeling helpless and heartsick as her unconscious body was loaded into a shuttle.
“Go with her,” Tarus urged.
He glanced at him, surprised.
“I’m not blind, man. Or, stupid. You care for her, more than you or she realized until today is my guess.”
“And you saved her life,” Remus stated, adding in a choked voice, “When I would have given up.”
“Are you a medic?” Tarus demanded of his twin but didn’t give him so much as a second to reply and answered for him. “No. You are a warrior, and trained as such. Do not fault yourself for skills you do not have.” To Beck, he repeated, “Go with her, Kincaid. If she returns your feelings, she’ll want you by her side when she wakes.”
Needing no further encouragement, Beck hurried to the shuttle before the doors closed. On the short flight to town, he kept out of the way, letting the medical professionals work, but his gaze never left her face. In his mind, he saw her stunning blue-green eyes open and the dimple in her cheek flash as she smiled at him. She didn’t wake, however,
Worry clawed at his insides.
Tarus was right. He cared for her—deeply. No matter his contention he’d never fall for another woman, he had. The little alien had gotten under his skin and embedded herself in his heart.
Now, he had to hope, and pray—something, until today, he hadn’t done in over a decade—that she’d live so he could tell her how he felt.
“UNIDENTIFIED SPACECRAFT, this is Captain Allon of the Primarian battleship Intrepid. You have entered restricted air space and are ordered to dock. Slow for our fighters who will escort you in.”
When there was still no response, Allon looked at his navigator. “You say it came from the planet’s surface?”
“Yes, sir. I picked up its signal north of the capital.”
“Which is where we sent the response team to investigate the caves,” he muttered. More loudly, he tried to hail the ship they were tracking once again. “Unknown spacecraft, I repeat. Slow for our fighters and dock. Refuse, and we will blast you into oblivion.”
“Sir. I’m picking up a transmission on an obsolete channel. It’s garbled and a bit broken, but—”
“Put it on speaker, Aveth. Bridge only,” he ordered.
“Orleon to Dohkar Command. Emergency, please respond.”
“Dohkar,” Allon repeated as he turned to his second-in-command. “Do you know of them, Vemar?”
“No, sir.”
When several moments passed without more over the frequency, Allon issued his final warning. “Unidentified ship, you have ten seconds to comply.”
“Orleon to Dohkar, do you read?”
This message was more frantic. At least they knew they’d gotten through to the alien ship.
“Dammit, Tergen, I know you can hear my transmission. Do not leave me out here.”
At the new name, he and his officers exchanged mystified looks.
“You knew it was a risk you took, brother. We cannot risk capture ourselves.”
“Isolate the response location,” Allon directed.
“On it, sir!”
“Ten seconds until the alien ship is out of range, sir,” his weapons warrior warned.
“Dammit. We can’t leave Terra Nova unguarded to pursue, but if we blast them out of the sky, we won’t get the answers we seek.”
“Five seconds, sir.”
Allon spun and demanded, “Do you have it, Aveth?”
“Yes, sir. Sector nine of the Azluseon system.”
Which was several galaxies away, farther from them than Earth.
“Your time is up, alien ship.”
It was a bluff. Allon would give the craft more time while his communications specialist tracked the interchange.
“They are going to shoot unless I surrender!” came Orleon’s frantic response.
“Did you leave your legacy, brother? If so, you will live on.”
“Tergen, don’t do this!” the first alien cried.
“Three...two...”
“Sorin is proud of you, brother, as am I.”
These were the last words Orleon would ever hear because Allon let the countdown expire. He couldn’t allow the murderer of three humans to escape, and the three others he’d captured and left clinging to life by a thread, one of them a member of the princep’s family. Justice deserved to be done.
“Fire,” he called.
An instant later, the ship on screen was engulfed in fire. A split second after that, it blew into tiny fragments that shot across space.
WATCHING FROM THE BRIDGE of the Reliant as they raced toward the colony, Maggie barely flinched when a huge fire ball appeared in the distance.
“Magnify,” she called.
Used to the commander’s mate taking some liberties, the technician obeyed without questions.
At one thousand times magnification, pieces of fiery debris that had once been a ship flickered in the blackness of space. Like sparks from a roaring fire bursting into the air, they quickly blinked out, vanished as if they’d never been there to begin with.
“Faex,” her mate uttered beside her.
“Allon had to act, Roth. You heard the transmission.”
“I’m not cursing my captain’s actions, Maggie, but our devil bedamned luck. If we’d caught the worm, our work would have been so much easier. Now, we have to search the Universe for a bigger worm who goes by the name of Tergen.”
She turned and laid her hand on his cheek. “So ruthless, my commander,” she whispered. “Why do I find that incredibly arousing?”
His eyes burning bright with lavender fire, Roth laid his much larger hand over hers. “Perhaps because you were as ruthless as I in your Captain Maggie days.”
She shrugged. “More likely because there was a reckoning for Orleon of Dohkar, who terrorized my people, killing several of them.”
“Our people, purrada. Or did you forget he captured Adria, too?”
“How could I? I’ve been so worried. At least the threat of this creature is over for her and for Terra Nova.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“How long before we can shuttle down, Roth? Since we were closest and were expected to arrive first, I promised to report her condition to Eva, Lana, and Eryn. They’re as frantic with worry as I am.”
“Trask sounded beside himself when we last spoke, too. We should be in orbit around Terra Nova in a quarter of a time cycle. Once the Reliant takes over security for the colony, leaving Allon and his crew to pursue this Dohkarian threat, we’ll be able
to descend to the planet.” He caught her chin between his forefinger and thumb and angled her face up to his.
The decidedly heavy-handed gesture from any other man would have resulted in a scathing set down at a minimum. In her single days, more likely with a knee to the groin for good measure. But from her mate, the father of her unborn child, and the love of her life, this dominance turned her all melty inside and never failed to make her wet.
“You’ll stay by my side; not so much as an inch out of reach. I have heard nothing but horror stories coming out of the colony of late. I’ll have your promise, Maggie.” His free hand moved to her rounded stomach, and he lowered his voice to a husky growl that never failed to make her knees weak. “I’d be inconsolable if anything were to happen to either of you.”
“I’ll be like your shadow, Roth. I swear.”
“Mm, why does it feel like I’ve heard that before and didn’t like the outcome?”
“Ah, but that was back in my Captain Maggie days. Now, I’m Ambassador Maggie, the epitome of decorum.”
He grunted in disbelief. “More like the epitome of mischief, especially when others from your crew are around.”
“That was twice,” she complained, “and we escaped before the treaty was signed and well before I knew how much I loved you.”
His arms slipped around her, and he pulled her close, dipping his head so his lips could claim hers in a kiss filled with equal parts tenderness and passion.
When it ended, he looked down at her with love in his eyes. “I’m still holding you to your vow, purrada.”
“You have nothing to worry about, Commander. Your obedient, very pregnant mate will stick to you like glue. Besides, no one on Terra Nova was part of my crew. So, you’re doubly safe.” She twisted in his arms ostensibly to watch their approach, but it was really to hide her impish smile. He thought he knew her so well, and he did, but she had to keep him on his toes.
She bit her lips to keep from laughing when he dropped his head on her shoulder and let out a long-suffering groan. “You two will be the death of me before I reach my fortieth birthday.”
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