Oz (The Telorex Pact Book 1)

by Phoebe Fawkes

  The next freng was even bigger.

  “Yeah, Oz, I don’t think so.” She took a step back. “I think they want to eat me.”

  Oz chuckled. “They don’t eat people.” He paused. “Just maybe tear you up a bit… Heh, don’t think about that. Now, you’re doing fine and almost done. I’m right here.”

  Molly took a deep breath and reached out to the other one. Her hand started shaking as she reached toward the beast. “These are monsters where you come from, right, or is this your version of a pet?”

  “Both. They are highly prized and not often given to ones without a verlok.” He rubbed the side of the largest one’s head. The beast craned its neck in appreciation. “We grow up with them; the frenglets are passed down within families. These are from the captain’s family and were his from the time they were six months old. I do not have a freng myself, but these consider me part of their pack. It is enough.”

  Molly reached forward again to touch its neck, near Oz’s hand, finding courage that he would not let anything happen to her. The large one responded by closing its eyes and letting its mouth drop open.

  “There you go; Io’s in love now.”

  “Io, Mars- that’s so strange. How did they get their names?”

  “The Captain named them shortly after we came to Earth’s defense, shortly after they were passed down to him. He lost an older brother in the battle for Earth, and these should have been that brother’s.”

  Right, she thought, feeling embarrassed. She hadn’t really thought about all the Mahdfel who had also lost people in the war for her planet. The poor captain, it wasn’t even his planet.

  How could she even care how they wasted her life? No, not happening. She couldn’t help it; she still cared.

  Oz gave Io another pat on the neck. Io let out a soft whine. “Enough Io. Io, Mars. Return.”

  Molly drew back as Io and Mars took a wide turn and went back under the passage.

  “They return to their den,” Oz explained. “They have a small entrance for themselves. The Captain’s sleeping quarters are through there; his office is over on the other side, through that door. Now, what have I left to show you?” He leaned toward Molly slightly, a soft smile on his face. She felt something brush against her leg. She gasped and lurched a step away, still nervous from the war beast encounter. She stared down, ready to jump for a high ledge or probably climb up Oz like he was a tree.

  It’d been Oz’s tail touching the back of her leg.

  She tried to recover herself.

  “I’m sorry, I…” Oz drew back. “I didn’t mean to… We can head back now.”

  He turned around to head back toward the crew’s quarters.

  Molly watched his back for a moment, feeling lost. “Can you show me engineering?” Molly asked in order to slow him down. She didn’t want him to leave exactly.

  Oz turned back to say something to her, but glanced up at the viewscreen. “Wait, that’s not right.” He clicked a few buttons as a look of horror crossed his face.

  16

  Molly

  “Molly, get back. Strap in somewhere. Quick.”

  Oz made a few more adjustments, and the view of the asteroid was replaced with a view of space outside. There was something big out there, past their ship. The viewscreen cleared even more, and Molly gasped to see a ship. It was enormous. The edges of two more ships, just like it, were visible on either side of the center one.

  No. Panic flooded her body, and Molly froze in place, helpless. She wanted to throw her arms up to block the view as though it could somehow protect her.

  Oz flicked absently at his communicator. “Captain, priority on the bridge.” His voice sounded calm somehow.

  The ship lurched to the side, and Molly grasped at the seat. She pulled herself in, staring at the screen as she fumbled around and tried to hook the belt over her waist, but the connectors weren’t normal. She couldn’t make it work without looking at it, and there was no way she was taking her eyes off the menace outside. Blindly, she tied the ends together. What could it even matter?

  The office door slid open, and the captain rushed out. He gaped for a moment, then drew himself up. “They’re everywhere. We’ll need to—”

  He paused, seeming lost in thought. “We’ll need to try the…”

  Oz and the captain glanced at each other. “The Barskledia-Gace Maneuver,” they said at once.

  “Oz, you’ll have to talk me through it.”

  “The photons will need to be at 38 degrees off-alignment. I’ll ready the helm.”

  Molly watched as their hands flew over the two front consoles. A loud alarm sounded in the cabin. The lights went dim, and a red light started flashing.

  The captain made a few quick clicks. The lights came back on, and the alarm was silenced. The sudden quiet filled Molly with even more unease as she could hear her own panic, the quick gasps as she sucked air desperately into her lungs.

  There were three large ships, all sharp angles, like giant warbirds of doom with large teeth, and they were baring down on the Xeo Tarlith.

  Molly’s heart had never beat so fast. She was going to die. She clung to the armrest and tried to remember how to breathe.

  “Captain, we need point two alignment on the core if we’re going to do this.” Oz’s voice was patient as though they had all the time in the world.

  “On it,” the captain said. A moment later: “Ready.”

  Oz’s hands had never stopped moving. “Good. It’s now or never,” he said. “Hold on, Molly,” he called. He pressed a button and braced himself.

  Suddenly the world spun out and became still, then lurched forward again. It was as though the whole ship was spinning. Something was wrong. The alarms had come on again.

  Oz raised his voice over the alarm and began a countdown. “5… 4…”

  His voice was calm, as though they were walking across the beach on a summer evening, merely counting shooting stars.

  When he reached one, he pushed another button, and they lurched the other way.

  Oz studied the viewscreen for a moment more. “Now,” Oz commanded.

  The captain, who’d had his hand hovering over the panel, immediately swung a lever.

  The viewscreen was filled with explosions.

  The captain clicked his communicator. “Team, emergency. Evacuate to the ship immediately. We’ll brief you once you’re back.”

  Fyn’s voice came over the ship’s com. “On it, Captain. Light show noted.”

  “Is it over?” Molly’s voice was shaky to her own ear. “Did you get them?”

  “We’ve delayed them,” Oz said. “Captain?”

  “Yes. Start the calculations.”

  “Sir.”

  17

  Oz

  As soon as the men hailed that they were docked, the Captain ordered Oz to set the course.

  The crew came rushing up to the bridge. Oz found himself shook and clapped on the back by his crew mates, a slightly uncomfortable feeling.

  “Oz, my man, you save the day again, brother?” Xain asked.

  Oz glanced around, grateful to be alive and that they’d all made it. Molly was still sitting in one of the bridge chairs. His gaze caught on something unexpected: she hadn’t done up the straps correctly. At all. Was she actually tied in, as in tied in? What the…?

  He saw her working to untie the straps with trembling fingers. He rushed over in a couple steps, placing his hand over hers to stop her movements. She paused and looked up at him, terror still plain on her face.

  He felt his heart go soft. “Let me do that for you.” He crouched down and reached over to work the straps loose.

  Once he was done, he stood up placing his hand lightly on her shoulder, trying to lend some comfort.

  “Captain,” Xain remarked, “I don’t mark anyone in our wake, but apparently that doesn’t mean much right now. We should get out of sight for a bit, until we can take stock. We don’t want them tracking us back to Vargys space.”


  “Yes. Take whatever precautions you can to obscure our trail. We’re probably leaking a mountain of ions from that little maneuver. We’ve slowed them down, but they’ll be back with reinforcements.”

  “On it,” Xain said.

  Oz felt a pang. They would need to stay out of this sector for some time now, but all he could think of was his mother’s worn face. He could only hope the team had stowed enough of the Varstath on their shuttle before this had happened.

  “That was a tremendous light show you all put on.” Fyn said. “What was that?”

  “The Barskledia-Gace maneuver,” Oz said, softly, still amazed it had worked.

  Fyn whistled.

  “What?” Haze asked, glancing over. “What are you all on about?”

  Xain looked over from the console, where he’d been making adjustments to their flight path. “You know, Haze, that little bit of theoretical physics they named after its inventors: our buddy Ozien Gace here and his good friend, the great professor Kava Barskledia.”

  “Oh.” Haze gave Oz a loud, painful smack on the back. “Good going, Oz. Glad you didn’t blow us all up.”

  “So…” Xain glanced at Oz with a half-smile, his eyes big. “How did you not blow her up exactly?”

  Haze guffawed at that.

  “Our theoretical math was sound,” Oz said somewhat stiffly.

  “Yes… but practically speaking…?” Xain needled him.

  Oz shook his head, feeling light-headed. “I think I need to sit down.”

  “Go for it. We’ll man the ship for a bit.”

  “Oz.” The captain clapped him on the shoulder, much more gently than Haze. “Nice work. I’ll put you in for a commendation. Thank stars, you were on hand to crunch the numbers for us, real time.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “Oz?” Molly asked, looking up. “I’ll come with you?”

  Oz glanced down. “That’d be nice.” He reached down to help her up.

  “Thanks. I think I need to sit down too. …Er, somewhere not here.” She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm to clasp him lightly.

  As they walked back toward the crew quarters, his tail flicked against the wall nervously. Perhaps the tiny human was not completely repulsed by him.

  Oz sat in the dining room feeling truly exhausted. Molly sat beside him.

  “What was that you did anyway? Were we spinning or something? The viewscreen was all strange; I couldn’t tell.”

  “Yes. I had to hack all of our safety controls so that we could do a tight spin at speed. I sprayed the ships around us with torpedo locators, and we set them to blow up at close distance. There was at least a 70% chance we would get blown up in the process, from either the torpedoes targeting us, or the core blowing up, or the pressure sheering the ship in two. The professor and I were pretty sure we could compensate with alignment adjustments, based on a few in-scenario measurements.”

  “Wow. Glad I didn’t know that. I had a feeling but… yikes.” Her voice dropped. “You both stayed so calm. With the alarms going off and everything.”

  “It’s one of the things we learn during all that training. There’s no benefit to allowing your emotion into the situation.”

  “Easy enough… Just skip that pesky emotion part.” She smiled at him.

  “It takes practice,” he admitted.

  Just then the captain and his first mate joined them. “Xain has us in a particularly dense ion cloud. We should be able to patch things up and run some system checks without anyone finding us.”

  “Their stealth technology has come a long way, Captain,” Oz said. “We didn’t even have any warning. It was only that I was looking at one of the side monitors and noticed a rather large disturbance. They’ve masked themselves almost perfectly. I will adjust our sensors to help detect this new anomaly, but it was a close thing. I don’t know how they did it, especially to hide something as large as three ships. We’re lucky they didn’t attack us right away. I think they may have been studying us first, trying to figure out if we were a known race, whether or not they’d have use for us alive.”

  “The problem is,” Fyn added, “if we alert the Council, they’ll want to know where it happened and all of the details. How will we explain what we were doing so close to Suhlik space?”

  “I can say I found an interesting reading,” Oz offered, “and we were checking for a Suhlik incursion. Certainly we found one. They still won’t be happy, but it at least might allay a court martial.”

  “Can you back-check the data?” the Captain asked.

  “It’s not like it will be the first time, Captain. Although this time it will face a bit more scrutiny. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve had some practice.”

  “I’ll alert my father in some vague way,” Fyn said. “He’ll take steps to get it to the right channels for us.”

  “Good, good.” The captain turned to Molly. “That was a bit of an adventure. I say you’re holding up very well.”

  “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore,” she said, smiling as though she’d made a joke.

  “Kansas?” he asked.

  “It’s her home state,” Oz supplied.

  “Eh? Yes, right. No, you are definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

  Molly smiled again. “Nope.”

  “I should probably get back to engineering to get the report ready. It may take some time to finagle the records, but I’ll let you know once I have everything up to standards.”

  Molly stood up. “Can I go with you?”

  “Sure. I think I also have a tour to finish.”

  “The tour, right. You owe me.” She slipped her hand through his arm, clutching it a little tighter this time.

  Molly seemed to need some reassurance. She was a civilian. This couldn’t be very easy for her or even slightly within the realm of her normal experience. He kept forgetting she was not one of them.

  She was every bit as alien as she looked.

  Molly looked up at him as they wandered down the hall in the crew quarters. “You all fight so well, not just with that crazy ship stunt today, but also in The Pit yesterday. Have you always been training to do this, since you were a child even? Or did it just come naturally?”

  Oz’s mind flooded with warm memories of his primary mother. She had been patient with him, laughing easily and making the small, required things fun. Some of his brothers from his verlok, although they were not Mahdfel, had even joined in for a time.

  “I learned a few forms from the time I could walk. But my training began more in earnest when I turned six and joined some of the Vargys-Mahdfel training camps.”

  This had been the time when he’d finally realized how different he was from the others of his verlok. He would not grow up with his verlok brothers, the ones who shared the Vargys mothers and fathers of his verlok. Instead he would join this other Vargys-Mahdfel group: the almost outcasts; the boys fathered by Mahdfel; the few on the Vargys planet who had only one mother and one father.

  It served no purpose to live in that time. “It’s such a long time ago.” He gestured and felt the pain of loss pass beyond and again into memory.

  He smiled softly to Molly. He gestured to the ladder down to engineering. “After you?”

  As she climbed down, he held himself back. He wished to touch her hand upon the railing, anything to feel some small connection with her, but he did not wish anything that might ruin this small moment between them.

  Once they reached the bottom, she glanced about the room. “Everything is so high-tech here. It’s amazing.” She moved to the high wall at one side, filled with most of the main monitors and base controls for the heart of his ship.

  He stood beside her, keeping a space between them so as not to crowd her, and felt a small vibration pass through him at her nearness.

  “Did you like the training?” she asked, glancing over at him and back at the controls, seeming to study them closely.

  Apparently Oz would not get away from such memories so easi
ly. Oz thought about it for a moment. “I did actually. There is something fulfilling about it, as though you were born to it, and the movements are part of you. They just need permission to be released. I made many new brothers there, a new family with the same purpose. Xain is one.”

  Xain had been his first friend among the Mahdfel. As soon as they had learned of it, they had pledged to be Bond Brothers, although it was a Vargys’ custom. Usually it was between unrelated males who formed a verlok together, but were they not Vargys as much as they were Mahdfel?

  Xain and Oz lived in a time of war with the Suhlik that would probably last their lifetime and beyond. If one died, the living one would raise the other’s son. If it were possible, they would have formed a verlok with their females. It was not possible.

  “We all took to the training so easily. It helped to be with others like ourselves, since we couldn’t stay with our families. All of us Vargys-Mahdfel are similarly gifted in the ways of war.”

  She was staring up at him with a certain sadness. “I suppose that would happen with my son as well, assuming—” She broke off. “You know, assuming the pregnancy went without a hitch.”

  He did reach toward her then, grasping her hand lightly, wishing to reassure her, but no words could make their way past his closed throat. There were no sure things when it came to being with a Mahdfel. He could not lie to himself or her about that.

  She pulled away. “I’m stupid to bring it up. It won’t change anything.” She gestured toward the front of engineering, past the ladders. “What’s through there?”

  Oz felt relieved at the change of subject. “A few storage areas. Just past it is our shuttle bay. Would you like me to show you our shuttles?”

  “Actually, that’s all right. I think I’ll head back to my room now. I’m still trying to adjust to everything. Probably there’s at least a few time zone changes happening here.”

  “Perhaps I can escort you again to dinner?” He reached over to push back a lock of her hair that had fallen endearingly in front of her eyes. He paused for a moment, still clasping the bit of her soft hair in his hand, wishing to move closer, to quiet the restless energy coursing through him at the thought of her moving away from him.