She had only been close to the fighting, and she still had streaks of unfortunate things about her person. She was a little afraid to do a full inventory, but she knew she did not look like them.
Tyber, she noted clearing her throat, looked nearly as thrilled with her as Nori's barbarian mate. Only while Menelaus looked like he was about to spit fire, Tyber looked...well, if ice could burn that was what it would look like.
Probably a good thing that Lore reached her first.
He picked her up in his arms and held her, her feet dangling off the ground as he held her as if he would absorb her beneath his own skin if he could. She could feel just how worried he had been. Trig wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him back just as tight.
"How did he get you?" Lore asked, his voice low and tortured against her neck.
She sucked in a breath and met Tyber's eyes over his head. That cold bite was taking her in, much the same way Menelaus had studied Nori, as if he was making sure she had not one scratch on her, and someone would die if she did.
Trig swallowed hard, knowing by the narrowing of his eyes and the way Lore stilled that she had waited too long to answer. She cleared her throat, again. It didn’t help.
"I had an idea." It sounded even worse than when Nori had said it and she could not stop the wince that followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A light flashed and suddenly the place was crowded with people. Most of them large scary men. Lucan Warrung, Barnos, Tolan Lark glowered down at the mess that was Cor Warrung. Jax and right behind her was Lara; both took a long step back. They had transported nearly on top of the slaughter.
Lara practically fell with an eep, and would have if Barnos had not lifted her into his arms as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her arms around his broad neck and held on.
Jax looked around and then crinkled her nose. "I am suddenly wishing I had not insisted I come.”
Lara nodded and tucked her head into Barnos' neck.
Nori and Menelaus were apparently still in a heated discussion because everyone turned to look at her when with voice raised she glared down her husband. "I let you fight the cyborg army,"
"While you took on the insane megalomaniac and his cyborg guards?" Menelaus argued back, clearly gnashing his already iron jaw. "You could have been hurt."
Nori turned to look at Warrung in all his pieces. Everyone in the room followed that look and saw what she saw. A pile of body parts and goo. Then she raised a brow at her warrior mate.
"Fine," he growled. "But you still should have waited for me."
"We were both busy. Did you wait for me before you started fighting?"
"I did not go into this with a dangerous plan I did not share with my mate." He held up a hand when she would have argued. "If I had hatched a plan to court the Truthbreaker’s death and sneak on board Warrung’s ship to dismember him, and I had not informed you of it, you would have been angry too."
Nori narrowed her eyes. Then blew out a breath. "Fine. You have a point with that."
"Can we get on with it?" Barnos bellowed, not liking that his own mate was there and not safe where he had left her. "This slippery bastard needs to die, before he manages to run like a coward one more time."
Everyone looked from him to the dismembered megalomaniac and then back at Barnos.
The big man snorted. "Maybe run was the wrong word, but who knows what fail-safes he has that are going to kick in while we stand around flirting."
"That," Trig said, moving away from the two pristine swordsman who pressed in on her. Neither of them looked happy at the move, but they kept silent and just followed as close as they could at her back. "Is where I come in."
This time everyone turned to look at her, and for the first time all damn day, Trig smiled. "I know how to kill him. For good."
***
"Are you sure about this?" This time it was Tolan Lark who spoke, his eyes never leaving the transport pod that they had placed every molecule they could vacuum up into it. Then they had gone a step further and blown up the ship that Warrung had come in on. Starting with a particle blast at the spot where Nori had decimated Cor Warrung. Just in case they missed something.
Now they were on Tolan Lark's ship, The Fire watching the fireball that was all that was left of Cor Warrung's command ship and about to launch a pod into space with a bomb attached to it, so powerful it was banned in all Alliance worlds.
"Where did you even get a thermal reactor bomb?" Tolan Lark looked at Barnos.
Barnos shrugged. Everyone looked at him. He shrugged again. "What?" he asked. "I won it in a game of Parvet a few years back."
Lara looked at him with wide eyes. "And you have just been traveling with it all this time?"
Another shrug. His big shoulders were such that Trig wondered that the ship did not move when he did that. "I couldn't sell it. It's too bloody dangerous. And I was not about to leave it with the bastard who lost it to me. Same with leaving it somewhere else. I sealed it in a stasis pod for safe keeping and here we are. Clearly my thought that you never know when you will need a thermo reactor bomb was the right call. Because we bloody well need it now."
Since this was inarguably true everyone finally dropped it and turned back to the com screen as Tolan Lark finally released the pod. It floated away from them.
Trig half expected Cor Warrung to pop out like an immortal nightmare while they waited for it to get far enough away, but finally when the thing was a speck of light on their distant viewing screens and deep in the empty space past the outer reaches Barnos pushed the button.
The light speck flashed and then a roll of power spread away from what had once been the pod, until it dissipated. By the time the wave hit them, it rolled harmlessly passed their shields. They all waited, all of them that had come in silence, until Lucan gave the word.
"I want that area searched." It seemed ridiculous, they all knew nothing could have survived that explosion, but until they scouted the area and found nothing, they would all continue to wonder. They had seen what Warrung was capable of in the past.
"Already on it," Tyber said, pulling up a second com and sending his own message. "Mac is on the Jezebel. They can check it out and get back with a report."
"Meanwhile, I need to get to Danika and the kids," Lucan said. "I don't like leaving them behind for so long when we could have hidden factions of cyborgs still in play and not know it."
"I started a program I have been tinkering with," Jax said as she walked over to Tolan Lark and took over his com. Pressing buttons fast enough that no one could follow what she was doing. "Should be about done. I think it will be able to differentiate the Cyborgs still on Port Sea, then we can just swoop in and collect them."
"You tinkered," Lucan said with a raised brow.
Jax shrugged her shoulders and smiled at the intimidating man.
Tolan Lark smirked. "You hired us," he reminded their boss. A man most of the known universe feared nearly as much as they had Cor Warrung. "You can't get mad when we do the job too well."
Barnos guffawed and slapped Lucan across the back. That he did not move but gave the man a disgusted look said more about his strength than anything else she had seen. Trig was convinced that she would have hit the wall across the bridge if Barnos had slapped her back like that.
Lucan turned to look at her, standing as she was with Lore heating up her back with his solid strength. She had washed and changed into ship standard of trousers and tunic that was a few sizes too long for her and she wondered if she looked like a child playing dress up or if it just felt like that. "You ready to explain how you ended up in the one place we were all trying to keep you away from?"
She shivered as all eyes turned her way, and she welcomed the arms that Lore wrapped around her to pull her closer against his chest. She blew out a breath.
Tyber she could feel stewing over this very thing, even as he kept the distance he had taken to the com. It was the first time since they had found her that he h
ad allowed any distance, and she felt it painfully.
"I started to wonder why it was so important to kill me, that he would basically go to war over it. The only thing I could think of was that I was a danger to him, and he knew it. I looked for the truth. There were few reasons I could think of that I would be so dangerous to a man I had never even met. One reason, that I could think of that he would go to such extremes. I knew he employed truthsayers and seers because you knew that," she said tipping her chin at Lucan. "And it was not the only thing I knew about him.” Or you, remained unsaid.
She had delved into this man’s secrets; she did not need to remind him of that. "I knew that he did not see woman as a threat because Danika knew it. So it stood to reason that if I was a danger to him then I needed to get close to him to discover the truth he did not want revealed, and I needed to do it with a woman who could take him down, because a man would not get close enough to do the job. Not with the abilities Cor Warrung had at his disposal. Nori was the logical choice to do it. She is small, he had no prior personal knowledge of her or what she could do, and even if he had done his research she is well known for denying her Shakien nature if that were a concern for him." She sucked in a deep breath and stopped her long monologue enough to moisten her throat. "It was a chance, but we were already at war. Taking the battle to the enemy only made sense."
"And the secret you discovered was how to kill him?"
Trig nodded. "It's like he has coded his own DNA so that if there is even the smallest molecule left to form it will reproduce and regenerate him to what he is now. His mind and memories and cruelty all seem to be written in that same information, as if he reforms and gets a reboot, rather than being flesh and blood like the rest of us."
She looked toward the view screen and toward the final death of the man who had managed to cheat death, something even the longest lived raced could not do. "His biggest secret no one else knows. But his seer’s visions told him I would find his truth and be the death of him. Unfortunately for him, he also saw what I can do and wanted it. Instead of just killing me as he should have done. He decided he would take my DNA to assimilate first." She tutted. "Big mistake."
"Not his first,” Tolan Lark said grimly.
"But definitely his last," Barnos said with some obvious satisfaction. Then he huffed. "If not a little bit anti-climactic. Would have liked to cut him into small pieces myself."
There were several agreements to that, but Trig caught Nori's eyes and almost laughed when she rolled them. Trig looked away hastily hiding her humor and clashed with chocolate brown.
Tyber, unlike the rest of them, did not seem a bit satisfied with her explanation. Even if he was waiting to get into it when they were alone. Something he and Lore were determined to do at the first opportunity. She knew they needed to have a talk. So she had every intention of going with them. But she was not looking forward to it. He might not be showing anything but a cold implacable face, but he was very, very angry, and Lore was right there with him.
She would just have to do her best, she thought, to distract them both.
EPILOGUE
Trig was nervous. Ridiculous as it was, but this was the first time she would be introduced to the crew of The Jezebel as not only their newest crewmember, but also their Captain and First officers shared mate.
In the two weeks since the battle she, Tyber, and Lore had been holed up alone together in the house Tyber and Lore shared on their tiny island on Portsea. No one had bothered them. Not even by com. And once she had managed to distract her mates from her foolhardy decisions during the battle they had spent that time learning each other. In bed and out, until the bond between the three of them was so tight she wondered at times where she ended, and they began. So she knew Tyber was silently laughing at her nerves.
“You ran off to face Cor Warrung with less worry,” he reminded her with that wicked smile of his. He was enjoying this a little too much.
She glared at him. She did not say what she was thinking. That this was his family. That it was important.
Turns out she didn’t need to because his eyes warmed to hot chocolate and his smile turned tender. “They already love you,” he reminded her. “If I hadn’t been a bastard when you were on the ship the last time, you would already know that.”
“One friendly dinner and a cup of tea does not equal to loving me,” she reminded him. “Have you forgotten I’m the reason that Warrung came and attacked PortSea?”
“Have you forgotten that you were the one who killed Warrung?”
“That was Nori,” she said, even as she allowed him to take her arm and lead her from the room she shared with Lore, though she pretty much shared it with Tyber too, since she liked Lore’s bed better than the one in the Captains quarters, and Tyber did not like to sleep alone.
“That was you and Nori,” Tyber reminded her.
“I’m mated to two men,” she reminded him back, as if he wasn’t one of them.
“I am happily aware of that fact yes,” he said a smug happy look taking over his face briefly, and she just knew he was remembering the three of them in Lore’s bed this morning.
She fanned her face. Yes, that was enough to bring a smug smile to her face too. She cleared her throat and tried to corral her mind out of hot sheets and hotter men. “They might not approve,” she said low, since she could hear the voices of the crew waiting of them in the dining room/kitchen/ communal area.
She did not need to hear his snort to know he found her fears ridiculous.
Lore’s touch flittered through her mind warming all her cold places as it went. They approve, he assured her. And if they were the kind who would judge who and how a person loves they would not be the kind we would welcome as family and crew.
Trig did not get a chance to answer him, because they were through the hatch and inside. Mac and Sera turned to look at her from the table, Doc stood with Lore in the kitchen. Lore was already heading her way. Doc smiled. “Dinner is ready. Perfect timing.”
Mac watched as Lore came directly to Trig and kissed her, while she stood within Tyber’s loose embrace. She smiled despite the attention, but then Lore had that effect on her.
Mac snorted. “Didn’t you all get enough with the last two weeks of constant shagging?”
Sera elbowed him with an appalled “Mac!”
“What?”
Trig felt her power flow out of her and swirl around the room. She felt her worry drift away with the knowledge that no one there was lying with either look or words. She smirked at Mac. “I’m not sure you have any room to talk Mac. We are not the only ones that have been busy.”
Sera blushed to the root of her hair confirming Trig’s words, while Mac just flashed a rare real smile at her devoid of snark. Even the Doctor chuckled, though unlike the rest of them he had been busy working in the lab at PortSea with Dara. She had started growing at a normal pace, but he had wanted to finish all his tests to be sure she was fine before he left on the Jezebel.
Trig smiled at the young Doctor. Sharing a happy look with him over the good news. Then she sat down at the table, Tyber joining her, with Lore going to help Doc bring the food in.
“So where to?” she asked. Knowing if no one was on the bridge then the coordinates were taking them through safe lanes of travel now. Though if that changed, the tinkering Jax did would insure they knew about it before it became a problem.
“We are rendezvousing with your old crew,” Tyber told her and did not miss the grimace she could not hide. It made him laugh. At her expense, no doubt. “The Ambassador wants to see you and make your change of employment official before word of what you can do reached the Alliance. You are crew, but we are listing you as employed by Warrung,” he told her with a shrug. “Less likely that anyone will give us trouble once word is out.”
Trig blew out a breath. She knew it had to happen, too many people had seen the vids of Warrung, and some of his people had survived. Enough that her roll in it would be known. Not the full
extent of it, but enough that it would get out that she was more than a truthsayer. “I understand.”
Tyber smiled down at her and this one had turned a touch malicious. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You are thinking about torturing Malik aren’t you?”
Mac snorted; Sera laughed.
She looked at Lore for help. Lore just raised a brow and gave her a look. Clearly he had no problem with Tyber’s plan to torture Malik. She sighed, knowing when she was beaten. “Try not to start another war at least,” she muttered and grabbed a bowl. Ready to enjoy her first real family dinner with her mates.
Trig Kelia ate it with a smile.
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