Hitting the Target

by Evangeline Anderson

  “Let her go you fucking bastard or I’ll kill you where you stand!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mia gasped and the Commandant made a strangled sound of surprise at the interruption. His hand loosened its grip on her and she took the opportunity to yank her head away from him. His fist tightened convulsively at the last moment, but all he got were a few of her long, black hairs.

  Mia looked at them hanging from his fist and knew it should have hurt when he ripped them out, just as it had hurt when he first grabbed her…but somehow she hadn’t felt much of anything. Maybe she was just numb with shock.

  “Well, don’t you look like an idiot standing there with your dick out?” Trey rumbled.

  For it was Trey—somehow the big Kindred had come for her! He was wearing an ill-fitting EYE uniform, obviously taken from one of the guards who wasn’t quite his size and there was blood on one shoulder where he had been wounded but he was here—here to take her home!

  Mia felt a surge of joy and disbelief. How had he known where to find her? How had he managed to get past the Great Barrier and get into the headquarters of The EYE?

  But she would have to wait to ask him questions later. For now he was motioning her over and she went quickly, making sure to stay well out of the Commandant’s reach.

  “Come here, little one,” Trey murmured, never taking his eyes from the Commandant, who did present a rather comical sight, standing there with a wilted member in his hand.

  Trey was holding some Kindred weapon in his fist—an alien-looking thing Mia had never seen before. It was silver and sleek and deadly-looking and he aimed it at the Commandant as though he knew how to use it.

  But though the Commandant was definitely at a disadvantage, he never quite lost his composure.

  “So, Kindred—you’re more resourceful than we thought,” he said genially, as though he and Trey were just making polite conversation at a party.

  “And you’re even more of a bastard than I thought,” the big Kindred growled.

  “I don’t know how you managed to get in here, but I assume you came to rescue sweet little Mia there?” The Commandant smirked at him. “You might like to know, though, that she’s a spy. I placed her with you, Kindred. You were nothing to her but a target. Every word she spoke to you…every kiss…every embrace…every time she spread her legs for you, it was all because I told her to.”

  Mia wanted to cry she was so ashamed. It was as though the Commandant had stabbed her directly in the heart with an icicle.

  “No,” she whispered but her voice came out so soft she was sure the big Kindred wouldn’t hear it. “Please, Trey…”

  But to her surprise, the dirty secrets the Commandant was spilling didn’t seem to surprise Trey at all.

  “I know all that,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I don’t care.”

  For the first time, the Commandant almost looked at a loss. But his face smoothed back into its usual smug expression quickly.

  “Is that right, Kindred? And did you know she poisoned you as well?”

  “I know you tried to make her poison me,” Trey shot back. “She didn’t do it though.” He cast a side glance at Mia. “You couldn’t, could you little one?”

  Mia shook her head, feeling the tears rise to her eyes.

  “What?” The Commandant glared from Trey to Mia and back again. “But we received the signal! The biometric sensors are never wrong—the poison was implanted.” He narrowed his eyes at Mia. “Who did you poison if not that big bastard, you stupid little bitch?” he demanded, jerking his head at Trey.

  Trey frowned in apparent confusion but then he shook his head.

  “Never mind about that—it doesn’t matter,” he said coolly. “What matters is that Mia and I are going now and your time of raping and abusing females and controlling everyone around you is over.”

  His finger tightened on the trigger of the weapon he held but the Commandant shouted, “Wait!” and waved his hands.

  “Why should I?” Trey growled.

  “Because if you kill me, you’ll never get out of here alive!” He spoke quickly, his black eyes wide, as though he was finally grasping the danger he was in.

  “I doubt that. I got in without too much trouble,” Trey remarked, a hard smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

  “Every guard in this place is under my control and there’s a life sensor attached to my heart that’s directly connected to an alarm downstairs!” the Commandant said in rush. “If you kill me, a silent alarm will go off and every single guard down there will be on alert, coming to kill you.”

  “Hmm, well that would be a problem,” Trey admitted. A slow smile curved his lips. “If I hadn’t already killed all of them.”

  The Commandant’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Where do you think I got the uniform?” Trey asked, raising an eyebrow. “As a healer, I usually try to save life, not take it. But I’m willing to bet that every guard in this place has had a turn working in the torture rooms you keep in your basement. So my conscience is clear—and it will still be clear after shooting you, you raping bastard.”

  The Commandant nodded, as though accepting his fate but there was something in his eyes that Mia didn’t like.

  “Well, healer Treygar, before you shoot me, let me share one more thing about this little slut you came to rescue,” he spat. “You seem to think she’s so innocent and pure—so sweet and kind she couldn’t poison you and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Let me just disabuse you of that notion right now—look!”

  He spoke a rapid series of commands and the vid which had been playing on the wall that served as a screen—the one of Trey tasting Mia—suddenly changed. Instead of the two of them together, Mia suddenly saw herself wearing Care Center togs and walking down a familiar looking corridor. She was looking over her shoulder nervously, as though to make sure no one saw her as she entered a room at the very end—room 517.

  It was the hallway in her old Care Center, Mia realized, and she recognized the room that her image was slipping into. It was the room of the patient the Commandant had first “recruited” her to deal with.

  Sure enough, the vid showed her shutting the door and going to the bed where a youngish man with dark hair was lying inert, clearly in a drugged sleep. She watched with horror as Mia-in-the-vid drew out a large, empty syringe with a long needle. She drew back on the plunger, filling the syringe with air—100 ccs of it.

  “You’d think, as a healer’s aide, that our sweet little Mia here would have a healthy respect for life,” the Commandant said, in a conversational tone of voice. “I mean, don’t the lot of you take some kind of vow to protect your patients and never harm them?”

  As he spoke, Mia watched herself fit the needle of the air-filled syringe into the IV line flowing into the patient’s vein. Slowly but steadily, she depressed the plunger, injecting the entire 100 cc bolus of air directly into his line.

  “Dear me…” The Commandant shook his head and made a tsking sound. “Won’t that much air cause and embolus and kill a patient? Oh yes, I think it will,” he continued as Mia-in-the-vid turned off the alarm that sounded on the patient’s IV box and then slipped out of his room as quickly and quietly as she had gone in. “And unfortunately, I don’t think this particular patient made it, did he, my dear?” he asked, turning to Mia.

  Mia wanted to die. Had she been upset earlier when the Commandant had revealed she was a spy? Now she wished she could sink completely through the floor and disappear from Trey’s sight forever. What would he think of her now that he had seen her murder one of her patients? He would never want her to assist him in surgery as they had talked about. In fact, he wouldn’t want her near him at all—she would sicken and disgust him, Mia was sure.

  “Mia?” His deep voice forced her to look up at him and the expression on his face was uncertain. “Is this some kind of a trick? He doctored the vid, didn’t he?” he asked and it was clear he wanted her desperately to say yes.
r />   But Mia couldn’t lie—not anymore. And even if she’d had the heart to try, she was certain the falsehood would be written all over her face.

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” she whispered, feeling sick and cold and sad all at once.

  Trey’s eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline.

  “You really did that? You deliberately injected a 100 cc bolus of air into a patient’s line, knowing it would kill him?”

  “Yes.” The word was barely a breath of air. Mia felt so miserable she wished the poison she had inhaled would kill her immediately. Why did it have to be slow-acting? Why couldn’t it finish her off now? The shocked, uncomprehending way Trey was looking at her made her wish she could drop dead on the spot!

  She looked down at her hands, unable to meet his clear green gaze anymore but then she caught a motion from the corner of her eye.

  “Trey—look out!”

  The big Kindred turned from her just in time to see the Commandant whipping out a nasty looking, snub-nosed pulse pistol. As he fired with a coughing roar, Trey pushed Mia out of the way and the pulse pistol blast made a smoking hole in the wall behind them where the vid of Mia killing her patient was playing over again in a loop.

  Immediately, Trey shot his own weapon. A silent but deadly blast of light arched through the air and suddenly the arm and hand the Commandant had been holding the pulse pistol in were vaporized, disappearing in a cloud of fine red mist. The beam from the Kindred weapon must have been incredibly hot, however, because it cauterized the wound so that there wasn’t even any blood spurting from the place where the arm had been—just a blackened, smoking stump.

  The Commandant looked down at himself, uncomprehending. Then he looked up again. Incredibly, he was laughing.

  “Looks like you got me, Kindred,” he said, smirking at Trey. “But not before I got you. You’ll never look at that little bitch the same way again. You came all this way to get her and now you don’t want her anymore, do you?”

  “Shut up!” Trey roared—and it really was a roar, Mia thought. A sound almost like a targen snarling in anger. It made her ears hurt and she clapped her hands over them as Trey shot again.

  This time he vaporized the Commandant’s entire head. Red rain filled the air and the Commandant’s body slumped forward almost as though he was bowing with elaborate courtesy. The smoking stump of his neck was aimed directly at Mia who gasped and stumbled backward, nearly tripping in her haste to get away.

  Trey caught her and set her on her feet again, but she couldn’t help noticing that his hand didn’t linger on her arm. Also, he didn’t look at her when he said, “Come on,” and jerked his head toward the open doorway.

  Mia followed him feeling miserable. He couldn’t even look at her now and she didn’t blame him. She had done everything in her power to forget the awful incident and she had sworn never to tell anyone about it. She’d had no idea that the Commandant had recorded the whole thing, but she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised—he had certainly recorded everything else she’d wanted to keep private.

  They went down the stairs instead of the lift and she couldn’t help noticing that the big Kindred was surprisingly silent for such a big male. Her own feet seemed to stumble noisily on the stairs, though she tried to keep them quiet. It was as though she had suddenly become less coordinated somehow. Several more times Trey had to catch her and keep her from falling but Mia noticed each time he barely looked at her as he did. It was as though he was catching her by reflex—out of a sense of duty.

  She wanted to talk to him about it—wanted to try to explain the circumstances of the awful murder she’d committed. But by the time she got the courage to say anything, they had reached the bottom of the stairs and he leaned down to breathe in her ear,

  “Keep as quiet as you can. I think I killed all the guards on this level but if that bastard was telling the truth about the alarm, there might be more to deal with. Just stay behind me—all right?”

  Mia nodded wordlessly and followed along behind him as he slid open the stairwell door and slipped out into the hallway. But what she saw when she looked around turned her stomach.

  There was blood and bodies everywhere.

  Mia felt numb with shock. These guards—and there was a lot of them—didn’t look like they had been killed by the elegant, deadly weapon Trey had used on the Commandant. There were no smoking, cauterized wounds. Instead, it appeared like huge, bloody bites had been taken out of the hapless men. In many instances, their throats had been torn out and the thick, coppery smell of blood hung heavy in the air.

  The gory wounds reminded the horrified Mia of how the agent of The EYE who had come after her in the park had looked after being mauled by the giant targen. But how could a targen get into the headquarters of The EYE? She didn’t have time to ask because Trey was already leading them quietly and cautiously down the long corridor and it looked like they would get out with no problem, since literally every guard they encountered was dead.

  But then a blue, pulsing light caught her eye. It was coming out from under the door which was always heavily guarded—at least it had been every other time Mia had been in the headquarters of The EYE. But now the guards lay dead on either side of it, slumped in sticky pools of their own blood. Their bodies almost concealed the pulsing blue light…but not quite.

  Trey seemed to catch sight of the light too because he stopped suddenly, an almost listening look coming over his face.

  “Yes,” he murmured, as though he was speaking to himself—or else to someone Mia couldn’t see. “Yes, I think that’s it.”

  “You think what’s what?” Mia asked in a whisper.

  “The controls to the Great Barrier,” he murmured, nodding at the door.

  “The Great Barrier?” Mia could feel her eyes getting wide. No wonder this room had always been so heavily guarded! “But…what are you going to do about it?” she asked, still uncertain of what he wanted.

  “I’m going to bring it down,” he growled. “I was sent by the Goddess—told that I had a higher reason to come here. After all the pain and suffering this damn wall has caused the people of your planet, I’m pretty sure this is it.”

  Mia felt her heart sink even farther. He hadn’t even really come for her—he had come to bring down the Barrier. It was a wonderful, noble cause but it made her feel more than ever like she was an unwanted afterthought, now that Trey knew what she had done.

  “Stand back and keep behind me,” Trey ordered her as he pointed his sleek silver weapon at the door and melted the lock. Then he aimed a well-placed kick and burst in the door of the control room.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Trey was on the lookout for more guards in this area and he wasn’t disappointed. There were three of them, already on alert. Probably they had heard the carnage outside earlier, when his beast was on a rampage, but had strict instructions to stay with the instrument panel which controlled the Great Barrier no matter what.

  Two of them were regular guards in the same black and green uniform he himself was wearing—having taken it off the body of one of the men his beast had killed when he’d first come into the headquarters. But one was a skinny, pale little male wearing thick oculars and a nervous expression. He hid behind the other two, a look of fear in his magnified eyes.

  “Get him—shoot him!” he cried in a high, reedy voice, pointing with a quavering finger at Trey as he entered the room. “That’s no guard—it’s the invader we heard—I’m sure of it! Shoot!”

  The guards weren’t unwilling to carry out orders, but Trey was too fast for them. Raising his blaster, he took both of them out with two quick, silent shots in succession. They fell with surprised looks on their faces, their weapons still in their hands, leaving the thin, pale male to stand there trembling. He was unarmed himself which reinforced Trey’s idea that rather than a guard, he was the officer who was in charge of the Barrier.

  “You,” he said, stepping forward and pointing his blaster. “What’s your ran
k?”

  “Major Hndlr—first Science Officer in charge of Barrier Maintenance,” the little male gasped and fell to his knees. “Please, I don’t know who you are, but I’ll do anything—anything—just please don’t kill me!”

  Trey frowned and consulted his beast.

  “Do you catch any whiff of corruption on him? Do you think he’s been working in the torture chambers like the rest?”

  His other half was remarkably good at scenting things that would go unnoticed by anyone else. The smell of tears and terror—not their own—had been on the other guards he had killed. That was why he hadn’t felt a bit of guilt about killing them.

  He wondered briefly why Mia had killed that patient sleeping in his bed. The sight had shocked him—even more than finding out she was a spy. What explanation could she give for cold-blooded murder? It wasn’t that he didn’t love her anymore exactly, but he almost felt like he didn’t know her now. He felt—

  “No, I don’t smell anything like that,” his beast said, breaking his train of thought. “And I never smelled anything bad on Mia either,” he added loyally. “I’m sure she had a reason for doing what she did.” There was a feeling of a mental frown. “She smells funny now, though—like something is wrong with her. We need to find out what it is, Trey.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Trey told him. He pointed his weapon at Science Officer Hndlr.

  “All right—you’re going to take me to the controls of the Great Barrier and show me how to shut it off—for good.”

  “What? No!” The man recoiled visibly. “Maintenance of the Barrier has been my life’s work! I cannot simply shut it off—the People’s Republic would be left unprotected. Anyone who wanted to could come through and invade us!”

  “Don’t you mean anyone who wanted could go down South where they can live in freedom?” Trey growled. “Now you show me how to shut it off or by the Goddess, I’ll shut you off, you little bastard!”