by Pearl Foxx
Her tears flowed freely as she stood and wrapped her arms around him, waiting as he slowly returned her embrace.
“It’s too much. It’s all just too much,” she whispered against his chest as he kissed her hair.
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’ll all be over tomorrow.”
Chapter Eighteen
Maxsym
The morning passed slowly as Maxsym stood guard outside a lower-ranked officer’s personal quarters. He’d swapped shifts to have the evening off to meet with Jericho, but he hated thinking that anyone other than him was in charge of Veronica’s safety. The human resistance certainly hadn’t reassured him that Gideon’s family was off limits. Fanatical groups like that were dangerous. Savas had taught all of Kladuu that.
But time was an immovable object. It couldn’t be hurried, and it couldn’t be veered off course. So Maxsym stood at attention, watching familiar faces pass through the hall without speaking to any of them. He hadn’t made friends during his time on Zynthar, but he had developed a fondness for the people here, especially the other guardsmen. They reminded him of his swarm, moving together and working toward a goal.
Thoughts of home never served him well. The weight of the silence in his mind would crush him if he allowed it. The only thing that made his skin hum with the same familiarity as the hive was Veronica. And now he was about to kill her father.
Even if she forgave him, could she ever love him after that? Could she ever climb onto his back and soar through the skies with him? Thoughts of her made his cock stand at attention, and his wings tried to claw out of his skin. His back ached with the need to shift.
As soon as his shift ended, he strolled through the hallways, meandering through the galley and up to the observation deck to make sure he was seen until he arrived at Jericho’s quarters. Standard-issue civilian housing filled this level. All the rooms were small as they only needed to accommodate a single person, but not as small as Maxsym’s quarters.
He pressed his hand against the control panel, and the door slid open.
Inside, Jericho sat with his back to the door. The entire room was overtaken with vidscreens and piles of data drives. A top bunk where Jericho slept was the only surface not covered with electronics. The dim lights allowed the green glow of the screens to surround Maxsym when the door shut behind him, giving the room an eerie glow.
“I’ve been tracking Gideon all day,” Jericho said without preamble. “The access codes to the Elite Corp surveillance has made this exponentially easier. Please thank your friend for me when we’re done here.” He spoke quickly, his eyes darting back and forth to read the words rapidly scrolling by on his screen. His foot bounced on the floor, and every now and then, he’d twitch like a man possessed.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“Yesterday, the day before, who knows? It’s irrelevant in comparison. Come look.” Jericho moved his hands over an embedded control panel on his desk, and two of the monitors changed from glowing green code to a video feed.
“Gideon has been busy. There’s only one room we can’t get any visual of.” Jericho tapped on the screen to the left, which showed the inside of the main lab Veronica had found. The rows of empty cages gave away nothing about the existence of Kladuu, and the hole Maxsym had broken into the wall had already been repaired.
“There’s a room back there. I can’t get a good shot of the door, which I’m sure is around this corner, but Gideon spends a lot of time in these two rooms. For most of the day, he’s been hidden from view back there, doing who knows what. I have an alert system keyed up for whenever there’s movement in that quadrant of the room.” Jericho pointed to the area containing the secret lab.
Maxsym examined the screen, whistling as if impressed by the new information. Of course he knew precisely what Jericho would discover in the lab, but the man didn’t need to know he was being played. The human resistance would not relish the notion of being a pawn in an alien scheme, but Maxsym needed help, and they had a mutual enemy.
“What the fuck do you think he’s doing in there?”
“No idea.” Jericho shook his head. “I’ve seen lab techs come in and out, and there’s a series set up for genetic sequencing on the other side of the room they’ve been working on, but I can’t get a clear enough picture to see what’s going on. When all’s said and done, I’m hoping we can find out. But our first priority is Gideon. If you cut the head off a Frenoid, all that’s left is a useless ass.”
Maxsym laughed as if the joke made any fucking sense. “What’s on this screen?”
Jericho redirected his attention to the screen on the right and moved his controls to zoom in. It was a maintenance shaft that ran along the innards of the station, with all the little tunnels and tubes that kept the place habitable.
Along one area were the air control switches. “Those make it so that if we lose pressure in one area, we can lock down the others, segregating any contaminated section from the rest of the station,” Jericho explained as he drew his finger down the vidscreen to a small green box. “This is a DX-536 neurotoxin. It’ll instantly kill anyone who breathes it when it’s mixed with oxygen. We keep it in stock for the Grelian diplomats. They mix it in their air processors to mimic the atmosphere on their planet.”
“And you connected it to the atmosphere switches—”
“—so we can send a concentrated burst to the lab where Gideon is hiding. We’ve identified the space on the schematics.” The screen flickered and brought up the layout of Level 1162, showing exactly which air feeds circulated to the main lab and the second room behind the locked door.
“The toxin will kill everyone in there,” Maxsym whispered. He had planned to take down Gideon, not the entire staff.
“Yes, but the only people we’ve seen in there are lab technicians and a few high-level officers, all of whom are involved in whatever they’re doing, and honestly, five or six of these bastards is acceptable collateral damage for eliminating Gideon.”
Maxsym’s chest tightened. He didn’t believe in collateral damage. But he ignored the sinking feeling in his gut. This was why he’d come to Zynthar. This was his mission. He took a deep breath and asked, “When do we do this?”
“The timer is set for a few minutes from now. I’m just waiting for the last few lab technicians to clear out, but if they don’t”—Jericho shrugged—“the doors will lock with reinforced plating like if there was a hull breach. Everything is keyed to go—what the hell is that?”
On the left-hand screen, something streaked through the room. Brown hair billowed behind an exquisitely tailored and ridiculously in-fashion magenta tunic over black pants.
“Ronnie!” Maxsym clamped a hand down on Jericho’s shoulder. “How do you shut it down?”
“What are you talking about? You don’t.” The smaller man winced but held Maxsym’s stare. “This is all automated and out of my control. Don’t let some little whore—”
Jericho’s words ended in a howl as Maxsym crushed his shoulder with one hand.
“Show me how to change the controls!” the Draqon roared.
“You don’t!” Jericho screamed, his face turning pale and sweaty as Maxsym ground the bones in his shoulder together. “You think I don’t have fail-safes in place? Killing Gideon’s daughter will send a stronger message about the power elite! She’s just some bitch. Let me go!”
Maxsym shoved Jericho out of his seat, sending him flying across the room so hard that his head slammed into a server cabinet, knocking him out cold.
He flipped the control board over to the air circulators and watched as the valves lowered toward the little green box. Nothing he did, no command or override he knew of, could stop the movement.
Jericho had said the toxin would release in minutes. But the lab was on the other side of the station. He’d never reach Ronnie in time.
In a panic, he fled Jericho’s sad little room and ran down the corridor, shoving confused humans out of his way.
At
the first access panel he came to, he ripped the cover off the wall, not even trying to pretend he needed a screwdriver to access the opening. He pulled himself in, feet first, and half climbed, half jumped down the ladder bolted to the wall.
Voices called out behind him, but he heard nothing over the roaring in his ears.
She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be.
He had to stop this, stop the toxin, stop the assassination. Anything to keep her with him. If she died, he knew, as sure as if she had ridden his Draqon form, that he would die with her. She was his true mate, and he had to get to that fucking green box.
He leaped down, skinning his hands along the sides of the ladder as his body fell faster. Floor after floor whizzed by until he reached the one where the air circulators were located.
From the shaft, he accessed the tunnels that wound through the interior of the ship. He ran, his legs pumping, his scales quivering, his wings ripping out of his flesh and pulling at the confines of his clothes. He would make it in time. That thought was the only thing keeping his barely stable mind in control of his Draqon’s desire to rip and shred anything that separated him from his mate.
He would make it. He had to make it.
He turned a corner and slid to a stop, falling to the ground right before the switch panel. Its massive size took up the entire wall. His hands itched to transform into talons and yank the whole thing off the wall. But then the entire ship would lose oxygen and Veronica would die.
Focus on Veronica, he chanted, the words like a loosely tethered string to his sanity.
His Veronica.
Keep her safe.
Keep her safe.
He found the green box tucked away in a mess of tubes and coils. It was connected in at least six different places. Fuck. Which one led to Gideon?
He took deep breaths to steady his mind, willing himself to remember the movement of Jericho’s finger as he traced the path that led to the box.
What if he just ripped the box out? He reached forward. Would he survive if the toxin was released? Probably if he was shifted, but in his human form? He couldn’t be sure, and he had to stay alive. He had to save Veronica.
He focused on his memory and traced the lines with his hands as he went, just as Jericho had over the vidscreen. This one. No. That was the primary air filter. This one. Yes. Yes. This one.
Maxsym reached forward and ripped out a metal pipe, nicking the back of his hand on the sharp machinery. As he pulled it out, he watched as another pipe lowered and connected to the green box, and without the pipe he’d removed to divert the gas, a red light flashed overhead.
An alarm blared.
“Foreign toxin detected in main air vent. Computer override disabled. Mandatory evacuation,” the station’s AI instructed over the main speaker.
Maxsym’s heart sank.
He hadn’t saved Veronica at all. Instead, he’d killed them all.
Chapter Nineteen
Veronica
“Father!” Veronica rushed through the main room of her father’s secret lab, but no one was there.
The wall Maxsym had broken down was fixed, with a cabinet placed in front as if nothing had ever happened, and the empty cages lining the room stared back at her menacingly.
He was evil. She knew that. The things her father had done were unforgivable, and he had to be punished, but he was still the man who had held her hand as she’d stared out at the infinite universe at age seven and told her about the stars and all the amazing creatures that lived among them. He was still the man who’d smoothed her hair and given her ice water when she’d had the Floridian flu.
He had to be stopped, but he didn’t have to die if she could just get him to listen to reason.
She ran to the back room’s door, the place that had occupied her nightmares and destroyed her few moments of peace. The door mocked her, shut and locked like a vault.
Slamming her fists against the reinforced metal, she screamed for her father. He would hear her. The door may have been made of metal, but Maxsym had proven the walls of the room were no stronger than those in the rest of the station.
“Father!” she yelled until her voice turned hollow and flat.
As she rested against the door, it suddenly opened, and she fell into her father’s arms.
“Veronica, what are you doing banging away on the door like a brain-addled Frenoid? Have you lost your mind?”
“No, Father, listen, there isn’t much time …” She stopped mid-sentence and pulled away from her father’s grudging embrace as she stared at the tall blond man holding the limp arm of a human strapped to the nearest examination table. It was Caj, the Vilkan she’d overheard talking with her father.
Fear turned her gut oily, but when her eyes fell to the man strapped to the table, she had to clap a hand over her mouth to hold back the surge of sickness.
He had the same all-black eyes as Maxsym, a clawed hand like a wolf, and a scaled lower body. The scales were nothing like a Draqon’s. They were larger and layered over each other with a moist sheen. The man’s abdomen had a stitched incision that leaked putrid yellow pus.
She dropped her hand from her mouth, horrified that her eyes were welling with tears. “What have you done?” she whispered.
“Darling, you don’t understand.” Gideon placed a hand on his daughter’s back.
She shrugged him off, her entire body shuddering. “What’s there to understand?”
“Emotional human women,” Caj snickered.
“Veronica,” her father continued, ignoring him. “This is not what it appears. The man on the table is a volunteer, a true human hero. We are working toward a better kind of human, one who can live on our depleted planet without hurting their health, and one that will be better equipped to explore the far reaches of this universe and others. More wonders fill the sky than you know.”
“I know plenty, and I know this is wrong. There’s no good reason to torture someone like this.”
“No one has been tortured,” Gideon insisted. “This man volunteered.”
“And what about the Katu, or the Draqon, or the Vilka you used to change him?” Veronica spat the words, only realizing from the rising growl coming from Caj’s chest that she had betrayed how much she knew about her father’s plan.
“What have you told this child?” Caj’s voice made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
Her nausea turned to fear, which turned to panic. She backed away, unwittingly putting herself farther into the room and farther from the door.
“How do you know this? What have you done?” Gideon demanded.
“I was in here the other night. I saw what you did!”
“You!” Gideon roared. “You released the Katu cub? Where is it? We need that animal to finish our work!” He grabbed Veronica by the arm, his grip as tight as a metal vise.
“I told you you had a problem on this station.” Caj smirked. “Even your daughter can’t be trusted.”
“She is not a terrorist.” Gideon shook her, and for the first time, she felt a spike of fear as she realized her father could and might hurt her. “Veronica, tell me. You aren’t with the resistance, are you? You haven’t betrayed me that much, have you?”
“No! That’s why I’m here! They’re planning to kill you. You have to stop what you’re doing. You have to make this right. Otherwise, they’ll come after you directly, and I’m terrified of what they’ll do.”
“Air filtration contamination detected.” A flashing red light pulsed in the corner of the room. “All personnel, evacuate the station immediately.”
“Did you do this?” Gideon seethed, digging his strong fingers into Veronica’s flesh.
Outside in the main room, a crash echoed through the empty space.
“Ronnie! Ronnie, where the fuck are you?” Maxsym cried out, and she wanted to scream for him to come rescue her, to whisk her away from the horrible slash of hatred across Caj’s face and the fanatical fire in her father’s eyes. But she didn
’t dare. If he came back here, what would he do? Would he shift? Would he kill her father? Did she even care anymore?
“Ronnie, so help me, if you’re back there, I’m going to—” Maxsym stopped short as he came around the corner. His eyes turned black as he took in Caj, the dead human, and her father with his bruising grip on her arm. “Take your fucking human hands off her.” He spoke the name of her species like it was an insult.
“I should have known one of you inbred Draqons would be behind this.”
Caj’s voice drew Maxsym’s attention, and just as he was about to reply, Caj’s form shimmered in the light, distorting and fading in and out of focus until he shredded his clothes and shifted into a giant white wolf.
Veronica screamed as the wolf launched itself at Maxsym. Its long teeth were bared, and saliva dripped from their sharp points as the creature snarled.
Maxsym pivoted out of the way and lashed out with his half-shifted hand, moving too fast for her to see, but the dripping red gashes along Caj’s flank spoke of something sharp and deadly. His full focus remained on Caj, and the back of his shirt ripped at the shoulders as the sharp tips of his wings appeared.
Her father drew the blaster at his hip and pointed it at Maxsym.
“No!” she screamed and shoved him. The blaster beam burned through the wall next to them.
“So, you are working with them!” Gideon roared, wrapping an arm around her neck. The heat of the recently fired blaster burned the hair at her temple as he held it against her head.
Caj rebounded, turning on sharp nails that dug into the plasteel floor, and lunged at Maxsym again.
The furious Draqon caught him by the neck, his grip tight.
“Put him down,” Gideon shouted, pulling Maxsym’s attention back to where Veronica stood, held hostage by her own father. “Let him go or my traitor daughter will be the first to die—and then you.”