by PJ Schnyder
“Hsst.” DeSarto’s warning had Rygard pivoting in a crouch to face the slit they’d cut in the tent.
Time was up. They’d been found.
He took one more second to throw a tarp over the terminals, hoping the beasts wouldn’t break the equipment before the transmission got out.
Their attackers had taken the time to gather at both entrances and rushed in simultaneously. DeSarto let out a curse as clawed hands reached under the tent edge to grab at his boots as he fought off the things inside the tent. More nets, more bodies, and the two of them went down under the crush of numbers.
Rygard struggled wildly, heavy weight on his chest, clawed hands scrabbling at his harness, disarming him. He cut several more before they got his knife away from him.
No room for fear, only primal instinct and the fight to get free. The things growled and chittered.
His last thought before he blacked out was a haunted worry. Kaitlyn was coming.
Chapter Four
Hard to decide which gave a man the better advantage, fear or ignorance.
When Kaitlyn walked into the holding area, the soldier guarding Bharguest had his back to the prisoner. From his stance, narrowed eyes and tightly pressed lips, the soldier was more wary of her coming too close than of the death standing just behind him. He had no way of knowing what she was capable of, but he apparently assumed the containment field protected him from Bharguest.
Idiot.
Yes, the containment field would stun the hell out of a normal man, or one as big as Bharguest. And yes, they’d put up the bars too as a secondary assurance. But hell, Kaitlyn wouldn’t ever give the prisoner her back under these circumstances. Or any situation she could imagine, actually.
The guard stepped forward and his expression changed as he got a better look at her, his gaze lingering over her chest in a way that scratched her temper. What was with the men and why were they all hornier than even testosterone poisoning could explain?
She dropped the tray carrying his meal on the table along one wall with a clatter, keeping the second balanced in one hand. “Shoulder your weapon, soldier. I’m deactivating the containment field to slide this other tray in.”
“The big bastard isn’t going to reach through the bars and strangle you.” The boy sounded amused at her precautions.
She just stared.
Any hint of laughter died and the color drained out of the soldier’s face.
As he raised his stun rifle, she paused to be sure he aimed it at the prisoner and not at her.
Movement inside the cell. She snapped her attention to Bharguest. He’d been lying on the tiny bunk, mostly hanging off one end. Now he was standing, close but not too close to the containment field.
“Step back.” She didn’t make it a command, but not a request either.
He did as she asked, raising his arms slowly to show his hands were empty. Amusement lit his eyes and one corner of his lip lifted in part smile, part snarl.
It took effort not to snarl back, but she knew when she was being baited. She took a step forward and slid the meal tray through the tiny slot at the bottom of the bars. The prisoner pounced, leaning over it on one knee.
“Shit.”
The soldier cursed but Kaitlyn held up a hand indicating he should hold his fire. Okay, so Bharguest had some impressive speed for a big humanoid. She’d barely managed to track his quicksilver motion. If it came down to him and her, she could move that fast. But she wasn’t human, either, and she wondered again what the hell he was.
“There’s a standing order to catch people like you and bring them in to Terran labs for study.” She kept her tone nonchalant.
Donning a semblance of civility, Bharguest took the tray in his hands and stood. He moved back to sit on the edge of his bunk and balanced the tray on his knees. “That’d be how I got back into the middle of the Terran solar system. I hadn’t been dirt side for a decade or more. When the soldiers offered an escort, I decided it could be interesting.” He started eating, using the blunt spoon they’d given him to scoop peas into his mouth.
“And when they tried to make a lab rat of you?” She had trouble keeping her beast aspect under control on the best of days, but the way her control had been lately, a visit to the labs in person could have been catastrophic to her future.
Bharguest paused his shoveling and looked up at her. “Do I look like a rat, sweetheart?”
“Never seen someone quite like you.” She’d be honest. After all, she could smell a lie and she’d lay odds he could too.
He grinned, lifting a piece of simulated chicken protein in his fingers and used his teeth to tear off a chunk. “No? I’ve seen the likes of you, although I have to admit you are a singular piece of art.”
Now they were getting into too much information and too many people in the room. She had a choice. She could risk being alone with him or she could risk the military boys finding out what she was. Dev might be able to provide her some protection on board his ship, but he had ordered her to keep it quiet to avoid a situation in the first place.
Her captain always gave orders for a reason.
She followed them when she agreed. And in this case, his reasoning made sense. There’d be a better time.
“Put the containment field back up so I can eat.” The soldier had lost his patience.
Timely interruption there.
But she wanted the conversation to continue, just in a different direction.
“Why don’t you take your dinner to the mess and eat with the rest of your team?” Making her voice sound as sweet and full of sunshine as Skuld hurt her throat, still she figured she managed to sound marginally pleasant. “I’ll stand watch here for a bit to spell you.”
No suspicion in the young soldier’s face. Obviously the enticement of better company, at least over his meal, outweighed whatever military rules and regulations had been ingrained in him. Still, to give him credit, he hesitated. “I ought to call for relief from my partner.”
Kaitlyn nodded. “You could do that, but he’s eating in the mess too. I’m here and I’m crew, first mate on this ship plus the ship’s medic. Consider this a shared set of duties between our two teams.”
He grinned. The compromise was good enough for him. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
Without waiting for more than a nod from her, he nabbed his tray and headed for the door, slinging his weapon over his back as he went.
She’d gotten what she wanted, but she was prudent enough to take a position where the soldier had been. She perched on the stool a good distance away from the bars and kept an eye on both the door and the prisoner.
Bharguest had continued to demolish his meal during the exchange, still watching her.
They sat in silence for a few more minutes. She’d long since learned how to stalk her prey, waiting with an easy calm. Another part of her found amusement in the fact that target was doing the exact same thing to her. They were waiting each other out. However, Bharguest had nowhere to go and plenty of time on his hands as they travelled through space. She had duties to attend to.
This round went to him.
“Tell me more about me.” It wasn’t about conceit or vanity. His impressions would be interesting, for one thing, and would also tell her quite a bit about him and how he was capable of gathering the knowledge he had.
He tapped the edge of his tray with his blunt spoon. “You didn’t want to give me this spoon, did you girl?”
Not exactly the answer she’d been fishing for but she understood that sometimes you had to let a person lead you to their answer. “No.”
“Soldier boy over there wouldn’t think twice about it.” Another tap, then another, some pattern. It wasn’t the old Terran Morse Code. Something else, strangely mesmerizing. “But you, you weren’t surprised about
my speed either. You knew how fast I could move already, knew what I could do to a man with this bitty tool.”
Sure. She’d had to do some evil things with one of those in the past. Feeding time was when she’d managed to escape back on Triton Moon Base. And she’d left several dead bodies littering her passage out. They’d deserved it after what they’d done to her.
“Anything is a weapon, when the wielder has either the intelligence or the ability to use it.”
Or the desperation.
“Ah, but you knew I had the ability. Someone taught you to watch and to learn and to understand what you’ve found.” He sounded as if he was entertained, maybe entranced by the concept. Maybe she was too. “You don’t just watch, you listen. You use all your senses, don’t you? Smell, taste, touch... I’d have expected you to be more tactile but someone beat that out of you, didn’t they?”
Yes. Beatings had been the least of the methods used to terrorize her during her imprisonment.
What they had done to her after she’d been caught had been inhumane, and yet the irony had been in the very fact she’d been in human hands, a few generations of evolution notwithstanding. Beatings, rape...torture could take many forms. Humans were capable of cruelty some aliens could never conceive of and she’d been lucky she’d been human enough to survive it.
“Yes.” He drew the word out, his tone taking on a hypnotic quality.
She allowed herself to float on the sound of it, trusting her other senses to keep her anchored to her own center. Let him think he had a power over her.
“You do use all your senses, but you still handicap yourself.” He continued and she wondered how much he was talking to hear his own voice. “They struggled to make something as beautiful as you, as perfectly camouflaged. But you wouldn’t survive the arenas, not as you are. They’d have to do more work on you to achieve the goal.”
Her temper spiked.
“You survived these...arenas.” Speaking the words took effort. She wondered if she should have been able to speak at all.
He chuckled. “Yes. I survived. More battles than they’d anticipated. I won a lot of creds for some of the idiots taking the bigger risks.”
What sort of fighting had he done? Society had survived centuries and the most popular form of entertainment for both the elite and the masses still involved putting a couple of life forms in the same place to see which came out the stronger. The crowds cheered harder if one of them ended up dead.
“Why did you do it?”
He turned his head sideways, a full ninety degrees. “For the entertainment of the crowds? Maybe. They were amusing to watch while I fought. For rich investors? Yes. They’d come to see me, pretend to be brave. Then they’d piss themselves in my presence. Always good for a laugh. For beings fancying themselves masters? Not for long.”
No anger there, only a finality cold enough to chill her to the bone.
“What sort of arenas were these?”
He chuckled and the sound was creepier because he was genuinely amused. “Pit fighting, cage fights. Little girl, there were those and more. Battles held in huge arenas and we were slaves turned gladiators. From day to day, night to night, any form of combat you can imagine under any circumstances could be held for the pleasure of the crowds. The high rollers liked their private fights, their cage fights. If you were dropped in a pit it was because they didn’t care if either of you made it out in one piece. They had good imaginations, the ones running the pits. Always provided new scenarios, new challenges. Took a long time to get bored with it all.”
Kaitlyn didn’t waste time doubting such a place existed. Someone else might question his claims or feign horror while secretly relishing every detail. Or worse, get righteous about the inhumanity of it all. Funny though, it wasn’t such a stretch to believe the bloodthirsty trait was limited to Terra or its natives. Plenty of the species she’d met had a craving for violence and humans weren’t the first to begin exploiting other planets from their own. In fact, she’d bet the individuals in power weren’t human.
Humans didn’t have big enough colonies beyond the Terran sun’s interstellar neighborhood to support such an organization on their own. These...arenas had to be interspecies and anything outside the Milky Way was run by a species other than Terran.
But Bharguest was humanoid, had been human once. So there were humans involved. And that didn’t surprise her either. Hypocrisy, maybe, but humanity was a rarity amongst humankind.
She’d experienced it firsthand from Terran stock so far evolved, they’d claimed they weren’t human anymore. Evolution had been the excuse for superiority, and the justification for enslaving her.
It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t remained a slave. Looking at Bharguest behind the bars, she didn’t see a slave either. “What did they do to equip you to come out of it alive?”
“You already know. Don’t you?” A pause. “Tch. If you don’t then you’re not worth the story time.”
She cocked her head to one side. “The ones who did this to me, I don’t know if they owned the technology.”
Truth. After close to four years of study, it had become clear the human technology her captors had available to them when they’d colonized couldn’t have advanced on its own to achieve the sophistication of the virus they’d infected her with back then. Hell, her equipment was cutting edge and she still had trouble analyzing her findings. They had to have taken the technology from another race and if it was in use where this man had come from, she had to know more about it. They might have a cure.
“They only knew how to administer the virus, combine it with the creatures of their choosing.” She offered him the information to see if it’d tempt him to give her more. “They claimed there was no way to reverse the effects.”
And hadn’t she been searching for one? All this time and she barely understood the virus itself or why it had killed so many of her classmates.
“Why would you want to reverse the effects?”
She stared at him.
He narrowed his eyes, a smile hovering around his lips. “There isn’t ever going back to what you were, girl. Even if they take the virus from every cell of your body, there’s never a way back.”
“I didn’t choose this.” Of course she knew there was no way back to who she used to be, but damned if she wasn’t looking for a way to the future she’d wanted for herself.
“Yes you did.” Those eyes drilled into her, cold, steady.
She opened her mouth to deny him. A snarl came out instead.
Heat rushed to her face. Not anger. Embarrassment.
Bharguest threw his head back and laughed. The sound of his mirth echoed off the walls, making the room seem larger than it really was, emptier.
She waited for him to catch his breath.
“Oh, girl, been a long time since I found funny in a conversation outside my own skull.”
“Someone might think you’re touched in the head, keep talking like that.” She bit off the end of each word, hanging onto temper to burn away her embarrassment.
“I’m going to have fun watching you pretend to be a little harmless girl alongside all these big, bad marines.” He sat back on his bunk with a satisfied sigh, patting his belly as if the laughter had filled him more than the meal.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
“Suit yourself.”
Bharguest leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I answered your question. Now you play one of my games.”
It was her turn to narrow eyes. She tested the air, but there was no deceit in his scent, no telltale sweat or pheromones. The sound of his heart hadn’t increased in tempo aside from his little exercise in hilarity. It made her wary.
He didn’t wait for her to agree. “You tell me about you.”
What was there to
tell? Too much and nothing compared to what this man had likely seen. But it mattered to her. Even the people who knew hadn’t heard it from her lips. Dev had lived it with her. Boggle hacked his way to her. Rygard earned the knowledge from Boggle.
“Not your history, girl. I don’t give a shit about that.” He cut into her thoughts before she realized the words had frozen in her throat. “I want to know what you are. Now. Here. And where do you think you’re going?”
“Well, I can answer the last question.” Dev leaned in the doorway, nonchalant.
She eyed her captain as Bharguest took Dev’s measure. No anger, not in the way Dev held his body or in his scent. It was obvious he’d made an effort to come up on them unnoticed. She’d only heard him in the moment before Bharguest asked his last questions, and those had come out too fast.
Bharguest had heard him coming too.
“Captain. So good to meet you.” Unruffled, Bharguest nodded toward the captain in some semblance of respect.
“The watch is about to change.” Dev directed his words to Bharguest. “We’re going to have to give you back to the stimulating company of the military police again for a bit.”
“Things were just getting somewhere.” Bharguest raised an eyebrow.
Dev shrugged. Kaitlyn buried a tiny nugget of satisfaction at the way her captain remained unruffled by Bharguest. The prisoner seemed to make creeping people out an art form.
The soldier from earlier returned, nodding to her before resuming her post.
She paused a moment, giving the empty tray a long look before heading out of the room and down the corridor.