Skinny addressed his handpicked army. “I don’t know if they are monitoring us or if it’s even possible with all of this noise, so I’m not going to explain the details, but basically we need you seven to help him”—he indicated the Dran whose shoulder he still held in a death grip—“create a wall around us,” he said, waving a hand toward Taymar.
One of the foremen raked Taymar with a skeptical gaze, but didn’t comment. He didn’t need to. His cynicism was obvious.
Taymar stepped up to him. “Did you have something you wanted to say, or are you just another well-trained mute?”
The spots along his neck darkened to almost black. She balanced her weight, eager for the fight, but the massive man only raised his one eyebrow as he stared down at her, head tilted ever so slightly. In less than a second, his spots were back to their normal brown. Probably in a less stressful situation, they wouldn’t have changed at all. His self-control only served to taunt her.
“So there’s still some Arlele left in you? They didn’t squeeze it all out? Or are you just afraid that what’s left is too pathetic to survive me?”
A warning tingle in her head brought her spinning around to the pilot, but it was number six who caught her attention with a simple headshake. With the inner fire once again fully raging, Taymar stepped back, trying to decide how she could dispatch them both. The Arlele would be harder, but Six had to go first.
“Don’t fall into it,” the pilot said, reaching for her arm. “You are called Taymar, right?”
“What do you mean? I’m not called Taymar. I am Taymar. That’s my name. Taymar. And don’t touch me.”
He pulled back his hand. “Taymar. You and I working together here is the only thing that might save us all. You simply have to push it down.”
That gave her pause. She looked over at the foreman, who was still watching her with considerably more interest, and then down at the nearly black spots that ran up her inner arms. They wouldn’t be changing back anytime soon. Genetic altering. It had to be genetic altering that gave those foremen more self-control.
She shook her hands and let out a long, slow breath. “Okay. What do you think I can do?”
The pilot let out his breath, too. “You and I need to connect.” He turned to the others. “That means the rest of you need to keep everyone away from us.”
“We can do that,” the foreman said, giving Taymar a small smile. “And trust me. I’m all Arlele. No one is getting through.”
Even though she didn’t want to, Taymar had to smile back. The pilot’s plan ended that soon enough, though.
“Okay, Taymar. Let’s sit down.”
“Sit down? Is that another joke?”
The man rubbed his face with his hands until she thought his skin would peel. When he finally looked up, a tiny trickle of blood leaked from where he had pulled his wound open. “We are out of time! Either they can keep us safe, or they can’t. Dicci, Taymar! Please help me.”
Her fire went out. “I’m sorry. I’ll help. You just have no idea how hard this is.”
“I know it’s hard, but we have to sit, because I’m about to fall.”
She used her mind to support him as he eased himself down to the floor. No sense making themselves a bigger target than they already were by giving him her arm. But when she joined him, she still kept her back to the wall.
“Can you sift through this mindfill enough to connect with me?”
“Yes, but it’s going to take work, so voice it for now.”
He leaned in. “That’s the truth. Just follow me through some mind-hops, then use your teke and do exactly what I tell you to do once we get there.”
“Assuming we get there and assuming you can sift through the skinhair’s thoughts.”
“I can. Read their thoughts, I mean. I’ve been practicing already. They are saltari.”
Taymar shrugged. “Saltari?”
“Like us. Upright, walking, talking, thinking, sentient beings. Guess what they say is true. We really must all come from the same source. Anyhow, I can read them. Getting where I need to go will be another issue. Understanding their technology, something else completely, but one crisis at a time. Ready?”
“No.”
The pilot frowned.
“But, I won’t be getting any more ready than I am now,” Taymar said. “Let’s just hurry.”
Chapter 4 – Takeover
The pilot still didn’t look well, but his confidence in his own abilities inspired hope. Taymar dropped the shielding she had put up against the mindfill. Instantly, the cacophony of mental turmoil in the room crashed into her. All around, minds screamed in panic and pain. Some cried for help. Others faded away in death. Still others, not all Arlele minds, raged in anger. The torrent threatened to take her, except that the pilot’s strong thoughts cut through the clutter and called her name. Taymar latched onto his patterns.
He laughed.
After bumping through a couple of Arlele minds, they finally managed to isolate their first Shreet. Even though his specific thoughts were in his language, the gist of what he was thinking was easy enough to figure out. He was trying to decide if there would be anyone from Drani left alive by the time they got where they were going. That told Taymar and Rysh, the pilot whose name she pulled from his mind, that this Shreet must be in charge of the prisoners. Not the Shreet they needed.
Rysh reached out from there and connected with the next Shreet mind he found. This one, like the first, was wondering about the insanity in the three, not two, holding rooms, but she was also concerned about the nearby Alliance ship.
Taymar sent him an impatient jolt.
As they continued jumping from mind to mind, the holding room eventually ceased to exist. The yelling was replaced with the clicks and whistles of the alien language, and the crashing of bodies became the quiet thumping of alien feet as they ran down the corridors.
Taymar looked around through the eyes of the Shreet whose mind they were borrowing. They were in the power center of the ship; that much she knew from the neat rows of crystallized brakeal cylinders attached to a coil in the center of the room. Two irregular blocks of the dense black crystal sat cradled in a harness against the wall. How that helped them, she couldn’t guess. One of the Shreet across the room tapped furiously at a panel, his pale white skinbraids, made from more hair than skin, swung around his face as he rushed from one bank of panels to another. He finished tapping just as the room grew dim. When he looked up, he clicked something to the other Shreet and then crossed over to her.
Something about him told Taymar that he was young. What it was, she couldn’t say. As he moved, she couldn’t help but admire the silence his foot design offered. Like hers, the alien’s toes splayed out in a circle at the end of his foot; however, the ball of his foot was twice as round as hers, and the toes much longer. But her favorite part was the finger-length claw that hooked out just above his heel.
She didn’t have to answer. He knew already.
His enthusiasm filled Taymar’s mind with his plan. She filled in where he left off.
Rysh didn’t have to answer, but his hold on the Shreet’s mind started slipping.
Taymar used their Shreet’s eyes to focus on the coil. As long as the skinhair didn’t turn around, they would be fine. Brakeal, the coveted power source of the sector and Drani’s main export, provided massive power through a rapid decrystallization process that left behind only the brakeal shell as a waste product. Arlele telekinesis purified the raw brakeal, giving it longer life and greater stability. Running on unrefined brakeal was risky, to say the least. Some Arleles could even recrystallize brakeal if it wasn’t too far gone. Taymar didn’t have that level of skill, but she could start the deadly chain reaction that every Dran feared.
Starting the two smaller blocks didn’t take much effort, so she did those first. They were both raw, probably stolen during the raid, and easy to push. The rows of smaller crystals powering the ship were a different matter. They were partially hidden shards of brakeal, Arlele-enhanced and as stable as they came.
The first several pushes started a reaction, but not so much that the coil mechanism couldn’t compensate for the unexpected output. The crystal form of brakeal was usually used for the jumps into string space. The powder is what ran the ship on a normal basis, so the crystals reacting set everyone in motion.
The young Shreet clicked something and rushed over to a panel that had started beeping. Taymar felt herself cough, a strange sensation since she didn’t hear it. Only then did she realize she was in the Shreet mind alone. Rysh was gone.
A flash of panic flared up, but she squashed it down and focused everything she had left on the coiled bank of brakeal. Accelerating the decrystallization reaction wasn’t unlike fanning a flame. Too much, and she would break the chain. Not enough, and the crystals would break without setting off the explosive reaction she was looking for, and the coils would continue to absorb the extra power. Another push. An alarm sounded from somewhere in the room. Her Shreet looked away, and Taymar’s body went into a coughing fit. The young one ran over to another panel. They had discovered the two now unstable blocks and were trying to transfer them off the ship. All she needed was one more look at the coiled brakeal panel. Just one more push to make sure it was going to rip, but another violent fit of coughing yanked her back to the holding room.
Bodies covered the floor. Not a single person, Arlele or Dran, remained standing. A thin haze drifted through the air like a blanket of mist, only instead of welcoming moisture, a harsh chemical burned her eyes and throat. She coughed again and gulped a mouthful of the sweet-smelling gas. It tasted bitter and she moved to wipe out her mouth, but something partially covered her face. Taymar reached up to yank it off, but realized before she did that it was some sort of mask. They had constructed it out of one of the foreman’s shirts, but when he had fallen, his hand must have pulled it part of the way off. She tried to work the strategically torn shirt back into place over her mouth and eyes, and then lay back, suddenly exhausted. The lull of sleep called to her.
Taymar snapped her eyes open. She knew that feeling. They had been drugged. The mist. It was a drug. Just to be sure, she reached out to the minds around her. Almost all of them were asleep. Some were dead. She didn’t touch them all, but from what she could tell, she was the only one still awake.
Either she was getting used to seeing it or the haze was clearing, but to be safe she pulled the shirt-mask all the way over her head and peered out a tiny crack. Fighting off the drug wasn’t so hard now that she knew what it was. Like hopping through minds, she had plenty of practice with that particular skill.
Rysh lay to her left. He also wore a mask, but the small Dran woman who lay flopped across his chest had pulled it almost completely off. Whatever drug the Shreet had pumped into the room must have been powerful. But in his weakened state, the pilot probably wouldn’t have lasted long even with the mask.
Taymar was just twisting to better see the room and the shirtless foreman, when the ship lurched, throwing her back against the wall. A quick search through the Shreet minds told her what she hoped she would find. The brakeal had exploded and taken their reactor coil with it. The Alliance was on its way. Hoping for the best, Taymar lay back against the wall and waited.
The actual takeover of the Shreet ship turned out to be a much simpler process than Taymar imagined it would be. She followed most of it while feigning sleep. With their reactor coil missing, the Shreet had no way to move their ship. All they could do was wait for the Alliance to get them. She had one brief moment of panic when the Shreet attempted to activate a self-destruct protocol designed to take the enemy ship with it, but apparently the self-destruct device required the reactor coil in order to function.
With their ship dead in space and their defenses nonexistent, it seemed all the Shreet could do was surrender. The problem didn’t come until the Alliance captain realized how many Drani citizens, still mostly sleeping, were onboard the Shreet vessel. His shock radiated through his mind, and since it was in a language Taymar could actually understand, she enjoyed the full flavor of his distress at wondering how to get the survivors home and why so many were dead. Taymar smiled to herself and stayed right where she was. He thought he had problems now. Wait until they started waking up.
Not surprisingly, the arguing started almost the instant the first Arleles crawled back to consciousness. But it wasn’t the mindless brawl it had been. Everyone was more subdued, even the Arleles. As the Dran woke, they worked quickly to get better control of the room. Maybe the sight of the dead and dying littering the holding room floor helped keep the situation in perspective, but everyone seemed far more willing to comply.
As her little group began to stir, Taymar sat up against the wall and pretended grogginess. It wasn’t much of a stretch. The drug may not have taken her, but not for lack of its effectiveness.
The fully-clothed foreman woke first. Arlele metabolism. He had probably been one of the last to go down, too. The man blinked twice, stared at Taymar for less than a second, and then leaped to his feet, ready to fight. She had to give him some credit. Keeping her and the pilot safe must have been a challenge.
“They drugged us,” she said, pulling off the mask.
“I know. It didn’t work, then? You didn’t turn the ship?”
“It worked. We blew up their brakeal.”
He turned as the shirtless Arlele started struggling to his feet and gave some sort of foreman code for relaxing. “So where is the Alliance? Are we heading home?”
You are, Taymar thought. She smiled and held the mask up to her half-naked, almost-sparring partner. “The Alliance has boarded, and they are trying to figure out what to do with us. Want your shirt?”
The man smiled back. “No.”
“Good choice.” She glanced around again. “The Dran are trying to break everyone into small groups. That must be what t
he Alliance needs. Since we blew up the reactor coil, this ship can’t move, so I’m getting from the Alliance that they want to shuttle us over to their ship. It seems like maybe they are worried about the Shreet coming. It’s almost harder following them than the Shreet because everyone is thinking similar things at once, all in the Alliance language. We must be in the middle of their war zone or something. And I don’t think they have enough room for all of us.”
“How many of us are there?”
Taymar shrugged. “Alive? I don’t know. There are three rooms like this one, though.”
“Dicci.” He let out a slow breath and shook his head. “I wonder what Newete looks like.”
“Or if they hit Razere, too,” added the second man. “How’s our pilot?” Taymar had already shifted the still-sleeping Dran off him, but neither had shown signs of waking.
“Your masks saved us, but when she fell she pulled his off, so he inhaled more of the drug than I did.”
“And he was injured,” said Shirtless. “But he’s alive at least.”
“Not an easy feat?”
He shifted his shoulders slightly and rose to his full, not insubstantial height. “Be glad your first assumptions about me were wrong.”
“My words may have been wrong, but my assumptions were apparently exactly right. What’s the point in baiting someone who won’t at least be fun to take down?”
Shirtless stared down at her, blank-faced. The diamond of thumbnail-size spots that ran up the sides of his neck melted to near black, and his chest rose and fell in slow, deliberate breaths. Finally, she had pushed him.
His fellow monument to Arlele control placed a hand on his chest and turned to face him. “We need to help organize these groups. Let’s go.”
For a long moment, Shirtless didn’t move. Taymar wondered if she should at least climb to her feet. But at last the man’s lips twitched into something close to a smirk. “Another time.”
“Can’t wait.”
Shield of Drani (World of Drani Book 1) Page 6