Is Nostrus not here?
“She’s pretty scrawny,” the nearest male continued. “They probably just say she’s so dangerous to save face. I bet she got the drop on them a couple times and they’re embarrassed about it, so they play her up.”
“Maybe,” said the driver, “but best not to take any chances, right?”
The males fell silent. The vehicle’s easy swaying continued; it neither knew nor cared about Shay’s current plight. Moving as little as possible, she tested her limbs; she had feeling throughout her body, which was a good sign even if most of what she felt was discomfort and pain.
“She isn’t bad looking,” near-voice said.
Shay couldn’t make out the driver’s reply.
“It’s not impossible, right?” As near-voice continued speaking, the volume of his voice diminished, like he’d turned his face away from Shay. “Master Foltham said himself that he wants to breed her. Means there’s a chance.”
Shay took a chance of her own; she opened her eyes to slits and bent her neck, angling her head toward the talking guard.
He was sitting at the front of the transport’s bed on a low bench, legs spread and one elbow on his knee. His torso was twisted, head turned toward the driver as he conversed. Shay took a bit more of a risk and farther lifted her head to get a better look at him.
The guard was a borian, big and broad-shouldered, and his suit was tailored to show off the impressive physique beneath. The hand dangling between his legs—almost directly above her feet—loosely held the control for Shay’s bindings and collar.
Finest security, huh, Murgen?
Shay drew in a deep breath. Though they rarely displayed their weapons openly, she knew Murgen’s guards carried blasters. If she could get her hands on one of those weapons, there’d only be what? Twenty or thirty armed guards to fight through? She’d faced odds like that in training simulations, and though she’d yet to overcome any of those sims successfully on her own, she had to try. She had to get her daughter back. Leah was not going to grow up in a place like this.
Only have one shot at this. Better make it count. They get me into that cell, and its game over.
Slowly, she bent her left leg, planting her foot firmly on the floor to better brace herself, before swinging her right leg up. Her foot struck the borian’s hand. The small control flew out of his grip and clattered against the corridor wall.
The guard spun to face Shay, his eyes wide, and glanced down dumbly at his empty hand. Brief as that look was, it afforded Shay enough time to reverse the direction of her kick. She used her left leg to thrust her backside off the floor and toward him—probably looking like a flopping fish in the process—and straightened her right leg, slamming her heel into his groin.
The borian doubled over with a pained grunt and grabbed a hold of Shay’s ankle in an unforgiving grip. She gritted her teeth, locked her hands together, and clenched her abdominal muscles, throwing herself forward into a sitting position; the motion was sped by the vehicle suddenly braking to a halt.
She swung her arms down with all her strength, hammering her wrist cuffs into the top of the borian’s head with a dull thwack. As he sagged forward farther, she jerked her left leg up. Her knee struck his nose with a wet crunch. Warm liquid flowed over her bare skin. The borian’s head snapped backward, and his torso tipped back along with it. Blood streamed from his nostrils.
Shay could see the other guard now—a goat-faced groalthuun. He’d stood up in the driver’s seat and turned toward her with legs bent as though he meant to jump. She reached into the borian’s jacket and grasped the handle of the blaster holstered under his armpit as the groalthuun leapt over his companion.
The groalthuun’s hands struck her shoulders, and his momentum knocked her back. She desperately clutched the blaster, which was tugged out of the holster by her backward motion. Shay tumbled onto her back. She swung the blaster’s barrel up, pressing its tip against the groalthuun’s stomach while he came down atop her, and fired.
The blaster made its high whining sound three times, and the guard jolted, features contorting in shock. He released a short, harsh breath that sprayed spittle onto Shay’s face, and sagged forward. She quickly raised her thighs, squeezed the guard’s midsection between her knees, and heaved him aside before he could fully collapse atop her. She slid herself aside as she did so, opening some space for his larger body to land.
Once she had the room, she angled the blaster toward his chest and fired two more plasma bolts into him.
The borian groaned. Shay sat up and turned the blaster toward him. He had a hand clasped over his nose as he lifted his head, blood trickling through his fingers.
His eyes fell on Shay’s blaster and rounded. “Fucki—”
Shay silenced him with three plasma bolts through the chest.
He slumped to the side, twitched once, and went still, lifeless eyes still wide. Smoke curled up from the holes in his chest.
“Fucking hell,” Shay muttered, wiping the spit from her face. She allowed herself a moment to breathe only after she’d ensured the corridor was clear in both directions. Her arms trembled, as did her exhalation, and a wave of nausea clenched her stomach, which threatened to force its contents back up her esophagus.
The simulations she’d run so often back at the compound had been visually realistic, but her dad had been right all those years ago—nothing, not even extensive, intense training, could prepare you for the first time you took a life. Nothing could help you anticipate your reaction to the smell of plasma-scorched flesh and blood, or the absurd amount of adrenaline pumping through your veins.
“Fuck,” she said breathlessly as she shifted first to her knees and then stood up. The transport wobbled beneath her.
Adjusting her hold on the blaster, she stepped down from the transport’s bed and surveyed the corridor, seeking the little controller. Not three seconds had passed before her stomach cramped, and she spun back toward the transport. She slapped a hand against the vehicle for support and bent forward as her body again threatened to purge itself.
“Puke if you’re gonna puke,” she said between ragged breaths. “Don’t have time to stand here undecided, damn it.”
She needed to hurry, needed to get to Leah before Murgen and his people did something harmful to her in the name of science or curiosity. She needed to get her baby before they moved Leah somewhere beyond Shay’s reach.
Bile rose in her throat.
No, you had your fucking chance.
She swallowed it back down, spit out a mouthful of bitter, acidic saliva, and shoved away from the transport. Her first few steps were stumbling and unsteady, but she refused to accept that. She regained confidence and stability quickly, and within ten or fifteen seconds had spotted the small controller lying on the side of the hallway about five meters from the stationary vehicle.
Checking behind again—the corridor was eerily quiet now, and that unsettled her—Shay walked to the control and crouched over it. She set down the blaster and picked up the little device. Fortunately, it appeared undamaged. The buttons were labeled with tiny pictures; she pressed the one marked with a broken circle.
As one, the cuffs around her wrists and the collar around her neck clicked and unlatched. She shook them off immediately. The sound of those heavy metal restraints hitting the floor was more satisfying than she could ever have imagined.
She snatched up the blaster and checked its charge level. Ninety-two percent. It would likely hold out long enough for her purposes, but she couldn’t afford to take the chance. She turned and rushed back to the dead guards. Without allowing herself to acknowledge the fact that she was stealing from men she’d just killed, she wrestled off the borian’s blood-stained suit jacket, pulled it on, and loaded spare energy cells—along with the groalthuun’s blaster—into the pockets. She buttoned the jacket and hurried down the corridor in the opposite direction from that which the cart had been traveling.
The corridors were big and q
uiet. Now that she was moving, she guessed that this place was under the effects of sound dampeners that prevented noise from carrying very far—otherwise, there would’ve been echoes of every little sound bouncing up and down these halls. The place was terribly lonely despite the numerous display windows through which various alien animals could be observed, not that she had any interest in any of those displays. Murgen meant for her and Leah to be held in similar cells, waiting to be gawked at by him or his guests.
She adjusted her two-handed grip on the blaster and growled.
Not again. Never again.
Shay increased her pace, bare feet padding over the cold floor. Her imagination flashed an image in her mind’s eye of Leah, so small and helpless, alone and lost in these corridors, still too young to crawl away. Shay shook the imagining away. Nothing like that was going to happen. She would fight her way to her baby, and once she had Leah, she’d fight her way out of this place. After that…she’d hunt down Vanya and kill the shit out of her to win back her mate.
God, I hope Drakkal is okay.
If Murgen and Nostrus had considered Shay dangerous before, they were in for a surprise now. She’d never pulled her punches here, but the odds had always been stacked against her, preventing her from inflicting real damage.
Now the odds didn’t matter. These motherfuckers had Shay’s baby, and they’d sold off her mate to a psycho azheran bounty hunting bitch. Even if she had to kill a hundred more guards, a thousand, Shay would not stop until Leah and Drakkal were both safe and secure.
Shay slowed as she approached an intersection. She’d only been moved around this facility a few times during her prior captivity, and that had usually been while restrained in the back of a cart, under the watch—and sometimes the pinning bodies—of Murgen’s security guards.
She paused before crossing into the intersecting corridor, uncertain of which direction to go. Wasn’t she supposed to have some kind of…mom super sense or something to lead her toward her baby? She didn’t want to spend any more time in these corridors than was absolutely necessary—they were too long and lacked any practical cover apart from support frames every twenty or thirty meters, and those only jutted from the walls about thirty centimeters. Perfect if she wanted to get a tit shot off.
There was no choice but to move on.
“So what?” she muttered. “Eenie, meenie, mi—”
Nostrus walked around the corner from Shay’s right, bumping into her shoulder before either of them could act to avoid the collision.
Shay reeled back and simultaneously swung her blaster up. Nostrus’s eyes—rounded in surprise an instant ago—narrowed. He raised his arms and caught her wrists in his hands, stopping her before she could aim the blaster at him.
“You’re going to regret this, terran,” he grated through bared teeth.
Shay bared her own teeth in a wild grin that would’ve made Drakkal proud as rage dulled all her aches and pains. “You turned down the wrong hallway, motherfucker.”
Twenty-Six
“They know their surveillance system is compromised,” Arcanthus said over the commlink.
Drakkal made a final adjustment to his earpiece and grunted his acknowledgment before returning his hand to the foregrip of his auto-blaster. Urgand had tended to the worst of Drakkal’s wounds, but it had been impatience and rage that chased away his pain, leaving room for little inside him beyond that persistent heat and his thundering heartbeat.
He was in a large, dimly lit access tunnel deep below the Gilded Sector with one shoulder against the wall, standing just to the right of a wide blast door. Urgand and Thargen were positioned to the left of the door, and Sekk’thi was at Drakkal’s back with her eyes and weapon trained on the large bay door a few meters away. Both entries were closed.
“Cren, you three in position?” Drakkal asked.
“Yeah,” Kiloq replied through the commlink. “Initiating attack in three…two…one…”
Blaster fire crackled across the comms.
“All right. Security team’s taking the bait, already shifting guards to the main entrance,” Arcanthus said.
“Good. Get this door open,” Drakkal grumbled. Shay and Leah were somewhere beyond this entrance, within a few hundred meters of him, but he couldn’t smell them out here. It was maddening to know they were so close and yet so completely separated from him.
“Two on the other side,” said Arc. “When you breach, they’ll be ahead and to your right.”
Drakkal’s holocom flashed on, projecting a small screen that showed a high-angle view of the garage’s interior, presumably from above the bay door. A pair of guards flanked the wide interior doorway at the far side of the garage. One of them had his head bowed slightly and a finger up to his ear—he was likely listening to something over his commlink.
Thargen’s grin widened. “Haven’t had this kind of fun in a while.”
“Focus,” said Urgand, who was standing behind Thargen.
Drakkal rolled his shoulder and settled the butt of his auto-blaster against it. “We’re all focused.”
“Those fuckers took my friend and my niece,” Thargen said, fire sparking in his eyes. “They get to meet the real me today.”
Perhaps at most other times in most other situations, Drakkal would’ve been hesitant to release real Thargen on anyone. But he had no qualms about it here and now. Fuck this place, fuck Murgen Foltham, and fuck the people who willingly worked for him.
“Kraasz ka’val, Arcanthus, if you don’t open this door now…”
The keypad on the doorframe flashed, and the blast door slid upward with a faint whirring of unseen machinery. Drakkal lifted his auto-blaster and hurried through, turning the weapon immediately toward the far doorway. Thargen and Urgand’s boots sounded on the floor behind him.
One of the security guards had time enough to look toward the open blast door, eyes wide, before Drakkal fired. The auto-blaster sprayed hot plasma bolts at the guards, joined an instant later by bursts from the two vorgals accompanying him.
Both guards went down within a second, each with at least half a dozen smoking holes in his body.
“Getting a map onto your holocoms,” Arcanthus said. “I’ll do my best to keep enemy positions updated on it, but I’m working with an uncooperative system here.”
Though Arcanthus was the most skilled fighter in their bunch—and very likely the strongest, thanks to his cybernetic limbs and reinforced body—this was one of those situations during which he was best used outside of combat. Drakkal trusted Arc with his life, but Arcanthus’s skills as a hacker were far more valuable now. Only Arc could compromise the manor’s entire security system, turn it against the occupants, and ensure that no communications left the premises. Arcanthus had complained, but he’d ultimately agreed to stay in the armored vehicle they’d parked in the tunnels outside—especially because it meant keeping Samantha, who’d refused to be left behind at home, close. She could watch Arc’s back while he worked, and he’d watch out for everyone going inside.
Drakkal’s holocom screen, which had automatically rotated around his wrist to remain visible when he’d raised his weapon, changed again to display a two-dimensional map of Murgen Foltham’s zoo.
“Just get me to Shay and Leah,” Drakkal said.
Two flashing dots appeared along the edges of the map.
“Leah’s in some sort of examination room. Shay’s being moved on a transport cart. I think they’re both unconscious,” Arc said.
Drakkal’s heart sped as he advanced across the garage—the same garage Vanya had taken him from less than two hours ago. The soft clicking of claws on the floor behind him meant Sekk’thi had moved up to join them.
“Who’s closest?” Drakkal asked when he reached the entry at which the now-dead guards had been posted.
“Shay. She’s being moved toward you,” Arcanthus replied.
It wasn’t a choice Drakkal had wanted to make, and the weight of the decision was almost crushing. What if
he picked wrong? He knew Murgen wouldn’t kill the terrans, but what if Drakkal made a mistake, and his choice placed one of his terrans in more danger? If he took too long going for Leah and Shay was harmed because of it…
Shay would want me to go for Leah first…but if Shay is closest…
No. Can’t do that now, Drakkal. No time to go back and forth on this decision.
“Only one way forward for now, anyway,” Arcanthus said, “and it’s going to take you right past a whole mess of guards.”
“Hope they’re better than these two,” Thargen muttered, kicking one of the bodies.
Drakkal pressed onward through the entryway, flanked by his companions.
“Odd tastes on the air,” Sekk’thi whispered. “Alien tastes.”
“Foltham has all manner of creatures down here,” Drakkal said, moving with his auto-blaster raised and ready. He smelled all of it, and those clashing scents almost overpowered the only fragrances that mattered to him, the two scents that were so similar and yet so unique—Shay’s and Leah’s.
Fury roiled in his gut. The scents of his mate and cub didn’t belong in this place—never had and never would. But thanks to Murgen and Vanya, here they were.
“Turn right where the corridor splits in two. There’ll be two doors on the left”—the projected map zoomed out as Arcanthus spoke to display what he was talking about— “that lead into a damned barracks, Drak.”
Drakkal clenched his jaw and asked through his teeth, “How many?”
“Ten,” Arcanthus replied.
“Twelve,” Samantha corrected, her voice soft over the commlinks. “There’s two back there, Arc.”
Drakkal could almost imagine Sam leaning over Arc’s shoulder to point at the screen they were looking at. It only made him long even more to have his Shay back. His heart ached for those simple, peaceful moments, for those tastes of a life like he might not have deserved but would damned well reclaim. He’d never believed he could love anyone as wholly and fiercely as he loved Shay and Leah.
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