by Mina Carter
As if he read her mind, he grunted. “Stay close.”
He moved easily, an assault weapon in his hands and his attention split between the route ahead and looking up to check for active internal sensors. She didn’t bother. For one, his night vision was far better than hers, and for another, she needed to cover their rear. She’d seen how fast the B’Kaar were. One could round the corner they’d just turned and be on them in the blink of an eye, so she had to keep her wits about her.
Even so, she couldn’t help casting glances at Seren’s broad, leather-clad shoulders. Things had changed between them since the kiss. She wasn’t entirely sure she was happy about it. Not because of the kiss. That had been as hot as Hades and, had he been human… someone she’d met on assignment or even in a bar during leave, she’d have dragged him back to her quarters and climbed him like a tree.
But… he wasn’t human. He was Lathar, an alien she was spying on in the hope of getting actionable intelligence for her superiors, even if they had no idea where she was or what she was doing. Nomads worked that way. Her original mission had been to root out the leaders of an organized gang of scavengers. She’d been working her way up that tree when the Lathar had gotten involved, so she’d been forced to adapt.
She tightened her grip on her weapon as she walked behind Seren, keeping her footfalls light and turning periodically to cover the rear. Just being near him gave her a sense of safety she didn’t like. Mostly because it was nice. Seductive.
She didn’t need a man to survive, never had… so that little waver toward him all the time, that little traitorous instinct to trust him and look to him for comfort and support, scared her way more than the scary-ass armored assholes pursuing them.
She pressed her lips together in irritation with herself. Up until now she’d had all those impulses under control. The epitome of tall, dark and handsome, Seren had an irresistible, cheeky edge at times, but he’d also been safe. The boy next door kind of safe she could mentally box up and understand.
Then he’d busted out the attitude and the fangs.
And now she was fucked.
Seren paused abruptly ahead of her, lifting his head, and for a bizarre moment it looked like he was sniffing the air. A sound behind them brought her head around at the same time Seren grabbed her arm and shoved her ahead of him.
“Run!” he roared as the corridor around them filled with laser blasts.
6
She didn’t. Instead, she threw herself into cover behind a support strut, already turning to pick out her targets as he did the same the other side of the corridor. Holy crap, had he smelled them?
“What the draanth do you think you’re doing?” he bellowed, the rifle in his hands spitting fire and destruction toward the four B’Kaar barreling toward them. She watched where he aimed at the joints of the suits and did the same. Between them they brought the first suit to a dead stop, sparks flying around the lower legs as the B’Kaar inside bailed out. The other three took cover, sniping at them from the darkness.
“What does it look like?” she threw back through gritted teeth, trying to get a line on the hidden B’Kaar. It was easier than she expected as most of their fire seemed to be concentrated on Seren’s side of the corridor.
“What the…” she breathed, frowning as she risked leaning out further. All her combat instincts screamed at her, but she overrode them. Sure enough, even when she slid completely out of cover and into plain sight, none of the B’Kaar shot at her. It was as if they didn’t even see her.
Oh no, they could see her alright, but she was female, which meant they wouldn’t risk hurting her.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she murmured and then grinned and ordered. “Seren, get behind me.”
He slid her a sideways glance, ducking back into cover as three energy bolts almost gave him a close shave and haircut. “No.”
She just looked at him. “What?”
“A Vorr does not,” he broke off to return fire, “hide behind his female. Ever.”
“Seriously?” Anger and disbelief brought heat crawling over her chest and neck as she glared down at him. “You’re actually going there? You’re going to pull the ‘me man, protect little woman’ card when we have a clear tactical advantage?”
He just slid her an irritated little look and continued firing until she put herself in front of him.
“Move, warrior,” she barked, doing her best imitation of General Xaandril.
He didn’t, instead trying to scoot to the side to fire around her. “Female, you’re putting yourself at risk,” he growled, a deep note of anger and something else in his voice. It both made her want to obey him and pissed her off all at the same time. She was not a delicate little woman who needed protecting.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” she snapped back. “And haul ass. We need to get out of here.”
“Fine.”
He surged forward, standing and scooping her up in the same movement. The broad solidity of his shoulder hit her mid-gut and punched the breath from her lungs. She gaped, trying to drag air in as incredulity hit her. The asshole hadn’t dared… but he had.
Her teeth gritted, she braced herself against his arm over the backs of her legs and twisted up to give covering fire as he stalked off down the corridor into the darkness.
“What the fuck?” she demanded, wriggling to get free as soon as they were clear of the corridor. The B’Kaar hadn’t followed them. Yet. Seren dropped her to her feet, shrugging as he looked down at her.
“You said to get behind you.”
“Behind! Behind!” She glared up at him. “Not under!”
“Same thing.” His eyes darkened, the hint of a fang at the corner of his lips as he hustled her down yet another identical side corridor.
“It is not. Not at all,” she grumbled, following him at a trot. He’d sped up, moving with more confidence now as they passed through corridors that looked a little less monster-inhabited.
“Call it practice then.” He paused at an intersection, a frown on his face as he took a deep breath and glanced around the corner. His expression serious, he looked back at her. “Okay, the door to the upper gantry of the shuttle bay is just up ahead, second door on the right. Doesn’t look like the B’Kaar have posted a guard up here but we need to move. Once through that door, do not stop for anything. Understand me?”
She flipped him a one-fingered salute. “Sure you don’t want to throw me over your shoulder again, just to make sure?”
His hand snapped out, sliding through the hair at the nape of her neck, to yank her up against his larger, harder body. “Don’t tempt me, little female.”
She gasped as her hands spread out over his chest. “What happened to you?”
He frowned, giving a little shake of his head. “Nothing, just protecting my female. Why?”
She ignored the common sense that said poking the big, scary alien warrior was a bad idea and shook her head. “You’re different from when I met you. You were… softer somehow.”
Something flared in the backs of his eyes but he quickly shielded it and triumph washed through her. She was right. Something had changed, and not just between them. Something about him had changed. Made him harder, darker… and infinitely more dangerous.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” His voice was rough with warning. He let her go with a little push and a glance toward the door. “Ready to move?”
She nodded and they slid out of the darkness to head for the door he’d indicated. In the absence of others, and the presence of real and present danger, she’d dropped her cutesy “colony agent” mannerism. Assholes shooting at a girl tended to do that. Well, technically they weren’t shooting at her, but at Seren. However, she wasn’t splitting hairs. She’d just shoot the assholes back on sight.
“Come on. Come on,” she murmured, keeping an eye on the corridor as he worked on the lock. Unlike some of the others she’d seen on the base, this had a mechanical lever hidden be
neath a metal plate on the wall next to the door. In the absence of a key code for the number pad, Seren just pulled his arm back and drove his metal hand through the plate, triggering the door.
“Neat trick,” she commented, sliding through the door backward and onto the gantry.
“Indeed,” he murmured, catching her by the arm and pulling her up hard against him in the shadows by the door. When she glared up at him, her mouth already open to complain, he shook his head and nodded at the level below them.
She froze and turned her head.
The shuttle bay was one of the smaller ones on the base, about the size of three football pitches, with rows of old Cabal shuttles hunkered down in malevolent silence. Three smaller ships, the Latharian version of space-fighters, sat in the middle of them all. Their pale silver hulls with General M’rln’s crest made them stand out. One was lit up, the canopy open and ready to go.
The problem was the two B’Kaar patrolling the shuttle bay floor.
“Shit,” she hissed, pressing herself closer to Seren. If they looked up, the B’Kaar’s enhanced sensors would pierce the darkness to discover them hiding.
“What do we do?” she whispered.
“I have an idea,” he murmured, his hand spreading out over her back. “Do you trust me?”
She nodded without hesitation. His eyes flared with triumph and pleasure, and his lips quirked into a devastating half smile. “What? No argument?”
“Shut up before I think of one. What’s your idea?”
Instead of answering, he scooped her up and ran. Not daring to make a sound in case the B’Kaar spotted them, she clung to his broad shoulders and wrapped her legs around his waist. The shuttle bay whizzed past in a blur of speed and then he leaped. They fell, his strong arm around her waist, and she squeezed her eyes shut as the air rushed past her. They tumbled, twisting in the air. The smallest squeak escaped her as something yanked them to a stop abruptly, like a falling climber caught by a rope. She opened her eyes as Seren let go of the canopy and dropped them both into the pilot’s seat. A roar of challenge said the B’Kaar had spotted them.
“Stay still,” Seren barked in her ear as she started to move to get out of the way.
She froze at his order. The fighters were built for a solo pilot, so there was only one seat. With nowhere to go, she tucked herself as small as possible. He reached around her, his hands swift on the controls as the canopy snapped shut.
The B’Kaar shot at them, heavy laser blasts hitting the side of the small shuttle as it lifted off.
“Shitshitshit,” she hissed, turning her head enough to see the controls and bay outside the view screen. The ventral doors to the shuttle bay had already started to close.
Seren grunted. “Gonna have to punch it. Hold on.”
She nodded, her lips grazing the side of his neck. “Do it.”
The engines kicked in and it was like being hit with an elephant at light speed. She moaned softly as the g-force slammed into her, pressing her harder up against the big alien warrior as he gunned the shuttle toward their rapidly closing window of escape.
“Woohooo!”
They made it through, Seren’s whoop of triumph in her ear as stars zipped by. The pressure eased off as the shielding kicked in and she managed to raise her head to look out the back of the canopy.
“We made it?” she asked, clearing her throat as the engines punched to full and the base disappeared into the star field behind them
“Oh, yes, we made it. Left ’em behind in our exhaust plume. They’ve no chance of catching us now.” He grinned, his hands on her hips as he watched her. The smile faded a little, became more intense as he lounged beneath her. With a start she realized she was pressed up close and very personal with him.
“In all that,” he murmured. “I didn’t hear you refute the claim that you were my female.”
“Draanth it all to draanthing hell!”
Risyn hissed, slamming his hands against the console in front of him as he watched the fighter disappear into nothingness. In the corner of the room, his kasivar twitched, activated by the sudden surge on his ke’lath.
“Who was in that fighter? The Vorr and the human female?” he demanded, glaring around the command suite. Twelve warriors were on duty, jacked into the base’s system as they both ran the day-to-day operations and tried to recompile the Cabal’s database.
None of them looked up or toward him, but they didn’t need to. When jacked in, their bodies were just another element of a larger system, disregarded in favor of the more sensitive internal sensors of the base.
“Rerunning security feed,” the warrior closest to him said. “Confirmed as two beings aboard the fighter when it left the base perimeter.”
“And no other activity?” he asked, activating his ke’lath and sliding into the datastreams himself.
Unlike a lot of the younger warriors, who needed their kasivar’s support to remain autonomous while streamed, he could maintain three areas of consciousness with ease. Probably more. He hadn’t tested his abilities in a while since he’d been too busy trying to track down that troublesome AI.
Now he used that ability to pace the command suite in his physical body while his digital consciousness surfed the stream and a subroutine ran maintenance on his kasivar.
The emperor might be famous for his ability to pilot multiple drakeen simultaneously, but Risyn had seen part of the coding from his updated link band. It was virtually an AI by itself, custom coded to the emperor’s DNA. Risyn’s lip curled back at the corner of his mouth at the thought. He was B’Kaar. He didn’t need an AI to do what he did.
No other activity, the other warrior confirmed, hovering in the datastream at Risyn’s side.
No energy or data spikes? he asked, his voice in the stream smoother than in the real world as he studied the patterns in the data spread out in front of him in neat lines. He could see everything from environmental control and surveillance of those aboard to the reassuring hum of the main data core and right down to the flickering light that needed maintenance on deck twenty-three B. It was a beautiful sight no one other than a cyber-warrior would see.
The patterns of life itself were parsed down to their base form—pure and uncorrupted.
No, nothing.
Risyn growled and pulled himself from the streams to pace some more, coming to a standstill in front of the main window of the command deck. It looked out onto nothing, the blast shielding still in place from when the Cabal had abandoned it. He frowned. He hadn’t noticed it before and pinged the maintenance stream. It was on schedule, but near the end of the list, beneath maintenance on the waste scrubbers. He left it and turned away from the blank shutter.
Finding the rogue AI was more important than any view. He clenched his fists at his sides. He’d been tracking it for years, ever since coming across a reference in one of Miisan K’Saan’s papers on cognitive awakening in AIs. An odd phrase had stood out, playing on his mind and not giving him any rest until he’d analyzed the body of her work. Then the awful reality of what she’d done had hit him. She’d created an AI version of her own brain scan. The emperor’s sister, the most accomplished mathematician and artificial intelligence expert in the empire had become the thing she studied. And in doing so she’d cheated death… and possibly become death itself.
Because AIs weren’t to be trusted. They were inherently unstable, prone to cascade failure, and that was just with created artificial intelligence. A mind that had once been tethered to an organic brain, let loose with all the power of something like the base?
A cold chill crept up his spine.
A consciousness like that would go insane. Untethered. Could… would become death, destroyer of reality itself.
Boss? Berr’s deep, rich voice sounded in his head. Long-range comms for you.
“Who is it?”
His majesty, Daaynal K’Saan, his second in command replied, keeping his mental voice carefully neutral.
Risyn gritted his teeth. A
conversation with the emperor was not one he wanted to have today. Not when he was in the middle of tracking down the male’s sister, or a digital version of her anyway. But one did not say no to the emperor.
Finally, he nodded. “Put him through to my personal stream. I’ll pick him up.”
7
“Are they following us?” Gracie tried to twist to look at what was going on, but the tense set of Seren’s body as he reached past her to control the craft warned her not to move too much.
“Unlikely,” he replied, his voice crisp and professional. “This is a mark seven otarai. The B’Kaar might have the latest tech for cyber-warfare, but they prefer those draanthing flying cities of theirs. They don’t have anything this small, nor anything that can match it for speed.”
She breathed a sigh of relief, relaxing against him. They’d escaped, gotten free and clear.
“But that’s not our main problem,” he admitted, the pause making her tense up all over again.
“Oh? What is?” She tilted her head to look at him.
His lips compressed as his hands moved on the controls. “We’re in a short-range fighter in the ass-end of beyond. We can’t return to the base, and after that burn, I don’t think we can make the nearest outpost.”
She blinked. “Well… shit. What are we going to do?”
He shook his head, his expression tight. “Head for the nearest habitable world and hunker down. I’m fairly sure the general would have—what the draanth?”
Blue light from outside the fighter washed over his skin, turning him from tanned to zombie in a heartbeat. She twisted around, knowing what she would see. The blue flower of the Cabal portal opened up in front of them and then swallowed them whole.