by Mina Carter
“In,” he ordered, cramming her into the small space so quickly her head caught on the top of the opening and her knee scraped against the side. She bit back her yelp, hearing the door to the room slide open a second after he’d shut the door on her.
She was trapped, in the dark, with only a thin piece of wood and a warrior she’d turned down between her and certain death.
She just had to hope it was enough.
11
“We’re looking for the human breeder bitch,” a rough voice announced, muffled slightly by the wood of the cabinet door. Jess held her breath, convinced they’d hear her frightened rasp even through it.
Saal gave a hard laugh, bitter and without mirth. “You’re not the only one, brother. You with Dvarr too?”
There was a rumble, which she could only assume meant assent, because then Saal chuckled. “Yeah, I don’t know who’s with us or not either. He’s playing his cards close to his chest. Can’t blame him, though, not with what’s at stake. The emperor, Terran-loving bastard he is, gets wind of this and we’re all done for. I cleared this room… which ones have you done?”
Saal’s voice faded along with the heavy footsteps and Jess sagged, leaning her forehead against the inside of the door in relief. He’d straight up saved her life. She dreaded to think what the purist warriors would have done if they’d found her in the room.
“Don’t worry, little one,” she whispered, her hand over her stomach. “You and me are getting out of this in one piece. I promise.”
Holding her breath, she listened for any movement in the room outside the cupboard. Straining her ears for the slightest sound… the scuff of a boot across the floor, the whisper of leather clothing as it moved, even the whisper of air leaving lungs as someone breathed… but there was nothing. Relief had her breath slithering from her lungs in a rush as she pushed opened the door and unfolded herself from the cramped space.
Her stomach and heart fighting for space in her throat, she padded on silent feet to the door and listened out again. Silence met her ears so she risked sliding the door open and peeking out. If she had this wrong…
The corridor was empty. She didn’t have time for relief though. At any moment, a warrior could come around the corner and she was trapped with nowhere to go and no weapon to fight back with.
Scooting around the door, she ran lightly down the corridor. First things first, she needed to find a weapons stash and arm up because until she did, she was a sitting duck. Sure, she might not have been a trained marine like Kenna and Jane, but she knew one end of a rifle from the other and her range scores had always been some of the highest on the base.
Three corridors later and the tension was beginning to mount, her shoulders riding higher as she expected at any moment to be shot between them. But each corridor was empty of both purist warriors and the recessed weapons lockers the octagonal ident tags around her neck would open.
“Shit, please tell me they have weapons in here…” she breathed to herself, reaching an intersection and going left. Left for Laarn, no other reason… which was probably as dumb as fuck but she couldn’t stay still. With purist warriors searching for her, staying put was as good as a death sentence. She needed to keep on the move and just hope she was behind their sweeps. And that someone had thought to put weapons caches in the healer’s hall.
They would, surely? For all this was a place of healing and… well, not violence and killing people, the Lathar were a warrior race. They even took their weapons into the damn toilet. She’d seen the stands.
Turning another corner, she spotted a locker on the wall, half hidden behind a support strut.
“Thank fuck,” she muttered under her breath and hurried toward it, yanking the ident tags from under her gown. The skin between her shoulder blades itched as the lock cycled and gave a loud ping as the lights on the front went green.
Shit, someone had to have heard that. Holding her breath, she tried to listen for the pounding of booted feet even as she yanked a weapons belt free. It was too large to go around her hips so she slid it over one shoulder, across her body and jammed a pulse-pistol into the holster.
Some of the rifles were too big, needing someone Laarn or Karryl’s size to lift, so she grabbed one of the smaller ones, checking the charge as she’d been taught. It was fully loaded.
A grin on her lips, she turned and clicked the safety off. Let those purist bastards try to hurt her or her baby now.
Her footsteps were as loud as the breath in her lungs as she set off down the corridor. She’d not been in the “ward” area of the healer’s hall before except for a brief tour from Laarn when they’d arrived. So she operated on the vague memory of a central area containing the labs, with corridors leading off it like spokes of a wheel. A big main corridor had circled the entire hall with smaller corridors running parallel to it.
Guessing that the purists would likely be holding the main corridor, she ducked into one of the smaller ones, working her way through, maze like, until she figured she was somewhere near the main labs and medbay… and, more importantly, the main door out of the place.
“Got to be the only planet in the fucking universe to stick the damn hospital in the fucking basement,” she groused under her breath. Running on light feet to the end of the corridor, she risked a quick look around the corner and quickly ducked back into cover.
There were two warriors covering the main lab. She hissed lightly between her teeth as she considered her options. She was alone behind enemy lines and she’d just become purist public enemy number one. She’d managed to avoid running into any of them so far but she wasn’t delusional enough to think her luck would hold out much longer.
Casting a glance back the way she’d come, she nibbled her lip. Should she double back and try and find another way out? There had to be service ducts or something, maybe even maintenance shafts, she could use. Hell, she’d even settle for the old movie staple of ventilation shafts right about now.
Decision made, she took three steps away from the corner when she heard it. Boots. Heavy ones. Not from the two men in the lab in front of her, but in the corridors back the way she’d come. Freezing in place, she listened. Her finger slid off the trigger guard and curled around the trigger as she lifted the rifle into her shoulder. That was more than one man, and they were getting louder. The question was, would they come this way or turn off to search one of the subsidiary corridors?
A couple more seconds and her question was answered as the boots got louder. They were past the secondary corridor junction and were headed right for her. Which meant she had only two options left—face however many of them turned the corner in a moment…
Or take on the two men in the lab.
She cursed under her breath and turned on her heel. Fast steps took her to the corner and she barreled around it before she could think how fucking dumb this was.
As soon as she cleared the corner, she started firing, cutting down the first guard in a hail of laser bolts. Rapid fire, close grouping, just as she’d been trained and the man lurched, his body dancing and jerking before dropping like a puppet with its strings cut.
Jess didn’t blink, firing at the other warrior as he dived for cover. She might not have been the dyed in the wool, born for war marine Jane and Kenna were, but when her life… her baby’s life… was on the line she could and would kill with the best of them.
Shouts sounded behind her, but she ignored them in favor of darting across the lab, keeping her enemy’s head down with covering fire as she approached his position, crouched behind one of the big diagnostic beds.
He tried to dart out of cover to fire at her, but each time his head broke cover, the movement was met with a burst of rapid fire. Before she’d made it halfway across the room, she heard the rifle, designed for the Lathar method of accurate with one round at a time shooting, begin to overload. Grinning like a fool, she rattled off a couple more bursts and then threw the thing over-arm.
It tumbled through the air,
the whine from the overloading power pack getting louder and louder. Diving to the side, she took cover behind another bed as the rifle clattered into the wall then hit the floor. The warrior crouching there managed a small curse, the slide of leather and the thump of boots sounding as he tried to get clear.
BOOM!
The blast shook the walls as the rifle went critical and exploded. Her ears ringing, Jess was on her feet in an instant, staggering toward the frosted glass double doors at the front of the medbay. Red lights to one side warned her that the assholes had locked it. With her eyes streaming and warriors about to pour into the room behind her, she didn’t have time to stop and unlock it. Instead, she grabbed for the pistol in the holster at her side and, holding it in both hands, aimed at the doors.
As she pulled the trigger, she sent a prayer up to anyone who might be listening.
Please don’t let the bloody doors be bulletproof…
THE INSTANT the shuttle touched down, Laarn was at the airlock door, waiting for it to cycle so he could get off the damn thing. He’d showered and changed since he’d come out of surgery, but sleep had eluded him. How could he sleep with mating marks around his wrists? Marks he’d dreamed of being called forward in his skin all his life, but that shouldn’t… couldn’t be there, not yet.
Even he didn’t understand the mechanism but marks were only called to a male’s skin after he’d claimed his woman… or something else happened. Since he hadn’t claimed Jess’ delectable, curvy little body for his own yet, that left something else.
The thought of what else it could possibly be had his heart thudding against his chest in fear as the door finally opened and he bolted through it. He cleared the ramp in one leap, his booted feet hitting the flagstones of the landing pad hard, but he was already running.
One of the reasons that could call marks to a male’s skin was the death, or near death of the female he longed to claim. Fear gripped him as he pounded through the corridors of the palace, heading for the healer’s hall. If anything had happened to Jess, that’s where she’d be… He growled in frustration… in the care of second-rate healers while he, the best of them, had been on the front line, far away from the woman he…
He couldn’t complete the thought, a frown on his face as he realized he wasn’t the only person running toward the healer’s hall. Two full squads of warriors ran down the opposite side of one of the many galleries on the way. Sure enough, as soon as he noticed them, the palace alarms started blaring.
“Hey!” he called out, altering direction to intercept the squad. “What’s happening?”
“Lord Healer.” Somehow the warrior at the front of the group managed to incline his head and give the impression of a bow while running at full tilt. “Purists in the palace. They’ve sealed themselves in the sickbay with one of the human females.”
“Draanth!” Laarn burst out, exhaustion and fear robbing him of his normal poise. “Which one?”
“The little one… Lady Kallson?”
Nononono… Not his Jess.
Laarn managed to keep his horrified moan to himself and upped his pace, his long stride leaving even the fastest of the warriors in his wake as he sped toward the healer’s hall. Making it in record time, he all but slid around the last corner and found the corridor in front of the entrance to the healer’s hall packed.
Warriors thronged around the double doors, voices raised in frustration as different people tried to make themselves heard. In the middle of it all stood Daaynal, a dark expression on his face as he obviously lost his patience and bellowed.
“SILENCE!”
All the voices fell silent, and every pair of eyes turned toward the warrior emperor. He gestured to the doors. “Get those damn doors open. I don’t care how. Blow them out of the wall if you have to, but get them open.”
“That won’t work,” Laarn cut in, jostling through the crowds to reach his uncle’s side. “The hall is designed as a last redoubt if the palace is breached. It’s built to withstand even a drakeen assault.”
“Draanth!” Daaynal hissed. “Why the fuck wasn’t I informed of that?”
Laarn blinked at his adoption of the human word. If the situation weren’t so critical, he might even have smiled and teased his uncle at his forward thinking. As it was, he just shrugged.
“The hall has secrets only the lord healer and his men need to know. The ability to guard the Arc is one of them,” he said, naming the central computer and storage core buried deep in the earth below both the palace and the healer’s hall.
An ancient installation, it housed the entirety of the Lathar knowledge of genetic manipulation and samples going back thousands of years. It was said that somewhere in the archives was their original genetic code, but the modern systems only went so far back and the older archives were perilous and unsafe to venture into.
“The front doors, you see,” he continued, “are backed up by force fields and a vibrational-energy molecular shield. Fire on it, even with an energy pistol and it will return the yield tenfold. Which, given the close confines of this corridor, will kill anyone in here. The only way to shoot out the doors is from inside.”
“NO ONE FIRE ON THOSE DOORS!” Daaynal bellowed, stopping at least three warriors from doing just that. He returned his attention to Laarn, his expression steely. “When this is over, you are going to tell me everything I don’t know about the hall.”
“Maybe. If you tell me what the draanth is going on. Purists in the palace? Again?” he demanded, not caring that he’d just snapped at the emperor himself.
“We were watching a cell, preparing to move in to try and get the leaders, but they moved unexpectedly.” Daaynal reached out, using a big hand on Laarn’s arm to hustle him to one side.
“Is there any other way in?” he asked in a low, urgent voice. “We need to get Miss Kallson out. She’s…” Pausing, he looked at Laarn curiously. “You’re taking this very well for a male in your position. If that were my female in there in that condition…”
“A male in my position? What do you mean?” Sudden wariness rolled through Laarn and his hand stilled where he’d been about to pull his sleeve back and show his uncle the dark marks around his wrists.
“She’s pregnant,” Daaynal said bluntly.
Shock and then pain lanced through Laarn, and he couldn’t stop the quick inward breath. “We haven’t…” he started, his words trailing off under the assault of the thoughts tumbling through his head.
Had he missed his chance with her? Had she taken another male as mate while he’d been gone… His expression hardened. He’d told her she was his, that as soon as he got back he’d claim her fully… She’d given him her pleasure, writhing on his fingers as he’d made her come.
“Faithless female,” he hissed, drawing his lips back from his teeth, but Daaynal held his hand up, shaking his head.
“No, we had the baby’s genetics tested. It’s either yours or Tarrick’s, and I’m fairly sure your litaan has his hands too full with his mate to claim another female.”
The baby. His baby. His child.
For a moment Laarn couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think as the thoughts tumbled through his mind. He was going to be a father… an honor that he’d never thought he’d achieve.
And she was locked in the hall with purists…
“We need to get in there. Now.”
“Way to go, Captain Obvious,” Daaynal threw back, making Laarn’s lips quirk. Seemed someone else had been as fascinated with the Terrans as he and his brother-warriors had. “How do you sugg—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the sound of shots rang out. Both Laarn and Daaynal whipped their heads around, the admonishment already on Laarn’s lips not to shoot at the damn doors when both realized the shots had come from within the hall itself.
“What the…”
Like the rest of the men in the hall, they turned toward the glass doors. The shots were muffled, but they could all see the muzzle flashes as a rifle fired repe
atedly on the other side. Laarn shot a look at Daaynal, who looked puzzled.
“Human soldiers shoot like that,” he explained. “Rapid fire in bursts. We saw it when the T’Laat tried to take them. They bottlenecked a corridor and blew the draanth out of them. The T’Laat didn’t know what hit them, especially when the rifles started to overload.”
“And?” Daaynal demanded.
“They used them as explosives.” As soon as he said the words, Laarn knew what Jess was going to do. They couldn’t open the doors from this side, but if she had weaponry…
“CLEAR THE DOORS,” he shouted. “GET READY TO MOVE AS SOON AS THEY’RE DOWN!”
The whine from the other side of the glass was followed by a clatter, then…
BOOM!
The explosion lit the glass up in a flare of green and gold, so bright the warriors in the corridor had to look away. Before the sound had cleared, there were more shots… two dull thuds on the other side of the glass doors as something hit them. Then they cracked, shattering into a million pieces to spill out over the floor of the corridor, leaving a gaping hole filled with smoke.
Bloodied and pale, his little Jess stepped through the gap, a pistol held in a no-nonsense grip. She looked at them and blinked, shaking her head.
“YOU MIGHT WANNA GET IN THERE…” she shouted and then shook her head, stepping aside as warriors poured through the gap behind her. “Crap, sorry… hearing’s shit at the moment. Purists, in the corridors right behind me. Led by a guy called Dvarr apparently.”
Daaynal snarled, anger evident on his face, but Laarn was done talking. Moving in, he pulled her into his arms. She nestled against him with a soft sigh, her hands on his chest as he plucked the pistol from her, handing it off to a warrior behind her and holding her tightly as sheer relief rolled through him.
“Gods, little one. I thought I’d lost you,” he murmured against her hair.
Fear the like of which he’d never known had run through him at the thought of her dead or dying, the light in her lovely eyes snuffed out forever. He’d never felt such fear or emotion before, and it humbled him. Somehow, she’d gotten under his skin and become his reason for breathing, for being… for everything.