Chaos (Xian Warriors Book 5)

by Regine Abel

  Acid burned through my veins, invisible claws shredded my hearts to pieces, and my lungs seemed to collapse in on themselves as images of my Sabra flashed before my eyes. I hacked away blindly at my foes, silently begging my mate to forgive me. We’d had so little time… too little time. I shouldn’t have brought her. I should have kept her safe. I should have…

  A sudden roar behind me nearly made me jump out of my skin.

  “HYBRIDS, MOVE!” Lekla shouted.

  My brain almost froze when I looked over my shoulder. For a second, I thought I had died or was hallucinating as a Gomenzi Dragon, tall and majestic in its golden splendor, came towering over my brothers and me holding the line. Reaper and Bane flew out of the way, and the Dragon stretched its long neck over us to rain fire over the mutants. The deafening sounds of the screams of agony nearly tore my eardrums, but I didn’t stop my attacks on the flailing mutants before me.

  Through the smoke, flaming bodies, and the acrid scent of burnt flesh, I watched Stran free himself from the tangle of limbs and resumed rolling through the masses. The attack of the Gomenzi Dragon—or rather of Shuria morphed into one—had lasted no more than a minute, but it had completely turned the tide. I could only imagine how much it had taken from the Mimic as her Dragon shadow receded from over us. Stran unfurled, getting back on all fours to battle the stragglers. Bane and Reaper resumed their places hovering above us. This time, however, they no longer had anyone to knock back from jumping over us and focused on firing at the creatures writhing on the floor until the last one had gone still.

  Despite many scratches, blossoming bruises, and mostly light bleeding wounds, our men were fine. But Shuria lay on the floor, looking utterly drained, Lekla by her side. I understood then that it had not so much been to keep from blowing her cover that Shuria hadn’t taken part in cleansing the base but knowing that she was burning out too fast using her abilities while shapeshifted. My hearts constricted realizing what a deliberate sacrifice she had done to save us all. To think I had been so determined to kill her at the onset of this mission.

  “Go get your females and stop him if you can,” Lekla said. “We will take care of her.”

  “Like I would trust you,” Bane snarled.

  “Things have changed, Hybrid,” Lekla said with a hard tone. “We all have a common cause now. She can help us achieve it. We can help mend her.”

  “She speaks truth,” Varnog snarled, having read her mind. “We must go. Our women need us.”

  “How will you get back home?” I asked, wanting nothing but to rush back to my ship.

  “We are the builders and thinkers of Kryptor,” Lekla said as if I had said something offensively dumb. “We made all the ships in the hangar. We can manage them.”

  I did feel dumb for a second, but I had no time to waste on such petty thoughts.

  “Safe journey then,” I said before breaking into a run towards the exit… towards my ship… towards my mate.

  Chapter 18

  Sabra

  I regained consciousness, feeling like I’d just gotten steamrolled. Keeping still, I took stock of myself, realizing I was lying naked on a cold, metallic surface. Three straps kept me bound to what I assumed to be some sort of examination or operating table. The sanitized scent and that of other underlying chemicals reinforced that belief. The padded sounds of soft steps a few meters away alerted me as to the presence of at least one person in the room. Opening my senses, I sought for their emotions but came up empty.

  It’s either the freaky Workers or that cyborg Mimic.

  I psychically reached for the other girls, finding them all nearby, but still unconscious. I needed to come up with a game plan before they started doing irreversible things to us. But what? Naked, weaponless, and immobilized, I had no real options. What I wouldn’t give to have Varnog’s mind-control ability.

  I froze for half a beat then immediately reached out to him… and failed. We were out of range. Which could only mean that Khutu had taken us away, and that we were likely en route to Kryptor. My gorge rose, and my innards twisted with fear. I had seen what had become of Pahiven. I had heard the rumors of what had happened to Bane’s mother and the other Soulcatchers that the General had captured in the past. There was no fucking way this would happen to me or the other girls.

  Refusing to be defeated, I continued to cycle through the men from both Chaos’s and Doom’s crew, hoping they had managed to get out of the facility and were on an intercept course, then through our women here, trying to nudge them awake. As much as I forced myself to be strong, the first seeds of despair were beginning to take root. What if the other women weren’t responding to me because the freaky Workers had already performed some sort of procedure on them? What if they were, right this minute, giving them cybernetic implants that would make them puppets for the General to control? What if…?

  “Sabra!”

  I barely managed to swallow the startled yelp that rose from my throat. Holding my breath, my heart pumping in my ears made it difficult to listen to see if whoever was lurking in the room had noticed my small jerk of surprise.

  “Varnog! Where are you?” I asked, hope blossoming in my heart, although I could feel the flimsiness of our link because of the great distance.

  “We’re coming to get all of you. Are you safe?”

  I was giving him a quick rundown of the situation, when I felt Chaos at the edge of my consciousness. As much as I was dying to feel the loving comfort of his presence wrapped around my soul, I couldn’t handle both of them from this distance. And right now, Varnog held the key to our freedom. With a heavy heart, I pushed Chaos away and asked Varnog to inform him that I couldn’t talk to him just yet.

  While he was passing on the message, I took the risk of cracking one eye open to get a glimpse of whoever was in the room. As I had suspected, it was one of the cyborg Workers. She was laying a number of procedure implements on a medical tray next to Linette. My heart constricted, realizing that we were running out of time. I quickly closed my eyes again, having heard a slight movement behind me.

  “I’m going to try to Ghost the Worker. Shadow me,” I ordered Varnog. “If you can, make them detach us.”

  “It’s going to be tricky. We normally make people see what we want in a Dream Walk,” Varnog argued. “Making them do things in the real world is far more challenging, especially from this distance. If she’s a strong psychic—”

  “Varnog!” I interrupted brutally. “We don’t have time for this! She’s a Worker, they’re low rank psychics, and she’s about to mess up Linette. We have to stop her now.”

  The powerful wave of fear, near panic, and the mix of strong emotions that slammed into me from our psychic link nearly took my breath away. And then understanding dawned on me.

  “Maker… You’re in love with her!” I exclaimed, disbelievingly.

  “Ghost the fucking Worker, NOW!” Varnog snarled, anger and fear permeating our mental connection.

  That snapped me out of my shock. As I sought the tug to the Worker’s mind, I felt the Scelk’s consciousness latch onto mine as we had so often rehearsed on our way here. I hung on to him, pulling Varnog with me to avoid losing him over our weak connection. It had slightly strengthened, though, indicating their ship was gaining on ours. That further fueled my hope.

  It took less than a blink for me to connect to the Worker. Our great proximity and the weakness of her psychic mind no doubt played a big part in it. Instead of the usual falling sensation, I felt sucked right out of my body as if by a vacuum. We were not in the Infirmary, but rather some sort of custom laboratory. Despite the frightening display of glass containers filled with all kinds of weird organs floating in liquids of various colors, a cooling unit with vials of strange substances, and medical paraphernalia that seemed to belong more in a horror movie than in a laboratory, the place was extremely clean and organized. You’d think my OCD mate had placed everything.

  The lab only had a single, large medical bed upon which Tabit
ha had been laid down. The rest of us were lying on the type of metal plates that were used to repair a ship’s hull. The General clearly hadn’t planned on bringing anyone back. I also believed a lot of the enhancements performed on himself had been done here by the cyborg Workers programmed to do him no harm.

  The two Workers—one by Linette, the other by Tyonna—were taking blood, skin, hair, and saliva samples from the girls. Judging by the two trays with similar sample containers on the counter, I assumed them to be the ones taken from Tabitha, Yumi, Jessica, or me.

  Varnog’s ethereal form moved next to the Worker clipping a few strands of hair from Linette. The savage expression on his face made me shudder. Had he been physically here, that Kryptid would have long been dead in a most horrific way. I felt the psychic energy swirling around him as he began to take control of the female. For a split second, I felt him slip from my grasp and latched onto his consciousness. Halfway through reaching for the tray to place the hair sample she’d just taken, the Worker froze. After a beat, her fingers opened, dropping the locks onto the floor. She turned around and slowly walked towards my body still lying on the metal plate and began detaching the straps holding me.

  My virtual heart pounded viciously, my gaze flicking between the second Worker focused on Tyonna and the straps becoming loose around me. I could have cried with relief when the second Worker kept on going about her business. Thankfully, Varnog had not made the first Worker remove the straps, merely detach them so they continued to give the appearance I was bound. He moved her to free Tabitha, then Linette. As she was moving towards Jessica, I saw Tabitha move ever so slightly. I rejoiced at the thought she might be waking, but couldn’t risk losing my connection with Varnog by attempting to mind-speak to her.

  But that was short lived.

  The second Worker had finished whatever she was doing with Tyonna and had started moving towards Yumi. She froze and gave her colleague a strange look, her gaze flicking through our bodies on the tables before returning to the first Worker who was continuing to walk towards Yumi.

  “What are you doing?” the second Worker asked, her voice and facial expressions emotionless as she stared at her companion.

  Varnog couldn’t control her in the real world like a puppeteer. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of illusion he was playing before her to make her do what she was doing. But the game was up. I had to act before it was too late.

  When the mind-warped female failed to respond, the second Worker began slowly approaching her. My eyes scanned the room for something I could use as a weapon, and locked onto a pair of medical forceps. I would only have one shot at this and couldn’t risk mucking it up.

  “Our link is about to drop,” I mentally warned Varnog.

  I didn’t wait for his response and ended the Ghosting. To my shock, I felt his consciousness hang onto mine even as I fell back inside my body. My eyes snapped open just as the second Worker was walking past my ‘table.’ The one we had released was blinking in confusion, looking at her hands having half freed Jessica.

  “TABITHA! WAKE UP!” I mentally shouted.

  “I am. My restraints are loose,” she answered.

  “We have to attack, NOW! There’s one Worker next to you. Take her out, I’ll take care of the other.”

  I jumped off the platform I’d been lying on, just as Tabitha sat upright in her examination table. Both Workers turned to look at her with a blank stare, which must have been the closest thing to shock they could have felt. As I reached for the forceps, Tabitha moved lightning fast, her heel solidly connecting with the second Worker’s throat. The female immediately fell to her knees, holding her throat while emitting gurgling sounds. The first Worker made to move on Tabitha, but I threw the ten-inch forceps like a dagger, and they found their mark deep in her right eye—the one devoid of cybernetics.

  By the time I ran to my target, Tabitha was already standing next to her own target and snapping her neck. Although it creeped the fuck out of me, I was relieved that neither female screamed in pain. Judging by the neutral expression that remained on their faces even as the first one choked and the second stumbled from her grievous wound, the General had deprived them of feeling pain as well. It alleviated some of the guilt I felt as I also snapped her neck.

  “I don’t know if they managed to mind-speak an alert to anyone else on board the ship,” I whispered to Tabitha while rushing to Jessica’s side to finish detaching her.

  “Do you feel anyone approaching?” Tabitha asked while working on Yumi’s bindings.

  “No,” I said while shaking Jessica to wake her.

  Linette began stirring on her own.

  “Good,” Tabitha said, her voice tense. “Let’s get all the girls up and see if we can find our armor and weapons.”

  We didn’t find our weapons, but our armor had been dumped in a clothes bin inside a closet in the lab. We quickly got dressed and grabbed whatever that could even remotely pass for a weapon. Being able to Shield only four psychic minds simultaneously, Yumi first assigned one to herself, to make sure she wouldn’t be affected by any psychic disruptor the General might activate. She then gave me one which, to my pleasant surprise, seemed to strengthen my connection with Varnog, the third to Tabitha as our leader and the last to Tyonna as our second in command.

  “I’m going to see if I can find the way to the escape pods or to a shuttle off this bucket,” I said to Tabitha.

  Jessica had confirmed that Doom’s ship was already in pursuit, piloted by their team’s Portal, Fatima, with their Shield, Thanh, as second. They would reach us before Chaos. Hopefully, they could catch our escape pods before the General shot us down.

  “Please tell Chaos I’m sorry, but I want to keep Varnog as long as possible.”

  He hadn’t poked me again, but he had to be freaking out—I certainly would be in his shoes. I felt like shit for not personally reassuring him. However, that needed to wait.

  “Don’t worry,” Tabitha reassured me. “He knows the drill. But don’t Ghost the General.”

  “Oh Maker! I’m crazy, but not that crazy,” I replied. “I’m certain he would detect me. We need to be gone before he tries to mind-speak with those two,” I added, pointing at the dead Workers with my chin.

  “Indeed. Go!” Tabitha said.

  But that went nowhere fast. As soon as I tried to connect to the Mimic, I hit a wall.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered. “That’s a no go. I guess she’s either asleep or unconscious. We’re going in blind. I can’t feel anyone nearby, but I couldn’t feel the emotions of these two either. The Maker knows if Khutu only has a skeleton crew or if there are more cyborgs on board.”

  Although feeling as disappointed as I was, Tabitha squeezed my shoulder encouragingly then formed a psychic group chat so that we could communicate telepathically while traipsing through the ship. To my relief, it didn’t sever my connection with Varnog.

  Armed with our makeshift weapons—I’d grabbed the long metal rod used to clamp the ring supports for flasks and vials—we carefully exited the lab and filed quietly down what looked like an endless hallway with a few doors along the way. Unlike the lab that had been entirely made of a whitish metal, the corridor ahead and the floor were made of organic tissue. It would make sense for this to be a liveship, but for them to have the lab be a more sterile environment.

  “Oh God, I know this ship,” Linette telepathically said with growing excitement. “It’s a Kryptid Dragonfly! If that sick fuck didn’t change the layout like he customized the medical bay into a lab, then I know the fastest and safest way to the escape pods.”

  “Good girl! Lead the way,” Tabitha replied, hope and relief oozing out of her.

  A wave of pride and longing filtered through my mental connection with Varnog. A part of me was embarrassed to unwittingly eavesdrop on feelings the Scelk was visibly trying to keep hidden from everyone. It was all the more heartbreaking that Linette had clearly expressed her interest in Bane’s brothers.

  I co
uld barely breathe my heart was beating so hard in my throat. If Soldiers showed up and whipped out their blasters, we’d be toast. The way the ship was built with one long corridor forming the ‘tail’ of the dragonfly, there would be no hiding if someone showed up in front of us. Thank the Maker, we encountered no one. I was increasingly suspecting that the General’s ‘cyborg’ assistants were specifically designed to allow him to perform things he wanted kept secret from the rest of the Kryptids.

  Halfway through the hallway, Linette paused and seemed to hesitate.

  “This door on the left should take us to the maintenance shaft, which provides a shortcut to the escape room,” Linette said in our group mind-chat. “But we could press our luck and move a few more doors ahead where the armory is normally located. Thing is, it could be locked or rigged with an alarm.”

  “What’s the way once we’re in the shaft?” Tabitha asked.

  “Take a right and straight ahead until you find the hover platform to take you downstairs,” Linette said.

  “You all go ahead, and we’ll catch up then,” Tabitha said. “Tyonna, you’re with me.”

  “Okay,” our Portal said.

  “No,” Linette argued. “If we’re going after those weapons, I’m the one going with you. If it needs a sequence to open it, I know all the standard ones.”

  “Maybe we should all go?” I suggested.

  “No,” Tabitha countered in a tone that brooked no argument. “There’s too many of us in this hallway right now. Linette, open the passage. You’ve all heard her directions. Tyonna, you’re in charge until Linette and I return. Let’s do this.”

  Pressing a seemingly inconspicuous section of the membrane that constituted the wall caused the whitish, opaque membrane that served as a door to part open. The liveships weren’t sentient creatures but merely a network of tissue and nerves that responded to various stimuli. You just needed to know which nerve to activate. How Linette had known that was the right spot was beyond me. But not wasting time dwelling on such thoughts, I followed Tyonna and the others in the surprisingly large tunnel that gave access to the bowels of the ship—both figuratively and literally—and the various systems that allowed it to operate.