by Elsa Jade
His ballistic fatigues dissipated a portion of the energy, and Blackworm’s mercenaries thought they might be shooting at a target they wanted to keep alive so the flare was stun-strength only. Still, the ferocious energy numbed his whole arm.
His blaster tumbled from his deadened fingers and spun across the deck plating, out of reach. Well, he needed to focus on running anyway.
Taking one deep breath, he plunged out from behind the baffle and sprinted for a piled pyramid of crates. It wouldn’t offer much protection—
A brilliant orange blast of lethal light obliterated the pyramid.
Apparently Blackworm’s squad had turned up their death-and-destruction setting, realizing he wasn’t a Black Hole Bride.
He jagged sideways, aiming for a small hauler used for transporting deliveries within the station. It would be too slow to serve as an escape vehicle, but it would be sturdier than crates.
From across the hangar, his crew returned fire at full strength, giving him a chance to reach the hauler. He caught a glimpse of another ensign grabbing Otlok with Amanu’s help.
Trixie was the one shooting.
She must’ve taken Otlok’s blaster. Her delicate features were set hard and sharp as cut crystal, and the light flashing from her weapon was straight and true.
For an instant, as sometimes happened in battle, the firing paused, and in that heartbeat, their eyes met across the mayhem. Both of them acknowledging the distance was too great and the enemy too close.
Nor spoke into the dat-pad comm. “Linn, grab Trixie and get out of here. Blackworm will have already figured out where the shuttle is docked, and if he brings the Grandy around, you’ll all be larfed.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Azthronos security will be inbound. Rendezvous with them. And don’t let Blackworm anywhere near the Earthers.”
If there was another respectful reply, he didn’t hear it.
A concussion grenade bounced toward the hauler. He had a second to throw himself backward before the explosion picked him up and tossed him even farther.
The pressure on his fatigues was like a squeezing fist, but it was his head bouncing off the deck plates that left him down and nearly out.
His ears rang hollowly. Somehow, though seemingly far away, he heard Trixie’s cry.
His name.
He turned his head awkwardly—larf it, was his painfully pounding skull even still attached to his body?—to see Amanu grab for Trixie. And miss.
His little mishkeet was speedy, he granted her that. She darted across the hangar.
Toward him.
He wanted to bellow at her, but his lungs felt emptied, as if he’d never draw another breath.
A second concussion grenade detonated where she’d been standing, demolishing the corridor to the docked shuttle. If Amanu and the others had still been there…
Too late. Trixie was almost to him, her chin thrust out as if it gave her just a little more speed. Or as if she knew he was going to yell at her for such folly as coming after him.
He managed to flip himself over—apparently his head was still attached—as she skidded to his side. The wreckage of the hauler had formed a little barricade, and she grabbed him to wrench him deeper into its dubious protection.
He left a smear of slick blood across the deck.
So, his head was attached, but something had been nicked.
Her eyes glazed as she stared at the evidence of his failure. He’d failed plenty in his life, but this was perhaps the worst, to see her despair.
But he underestimated her. After that instant of hopelessness, she fumbled in the pocket of her pants—his pants—and unrolled an emergency med kit. Which was a sweet and kind gesture, just as she was sweet and kind. And also clever to have noticed that his fatigues were well supplied. But no way would the intruders give them another chance to compare scars.
Which was too bad, because he would’ve happily taken another occasion—any chance, all opportunities, every time—to show her what was in his pants.
And maybe…what was in his heart.
She’d come back for him.
He reached for her, but she pushed the kit into his hand. She kept the blue booster ampule. She should be careful with that; the chemical cocktail was calibrated for big Thorkon soldiers who needed a burst of strength. Who knew what it might do to a fragile little Earther female.
Eyes narrowing, he tried to speak, but between the dull thudding in his head and the way his ears seemed full of mud, he wasn’t surprised when she pulled back.
Everyone pulled back from him. Because he failed.
She crouched in a three-point stance, one hand braced beside the expanding pool of his blood. Ignoring his garbled protest, she slapped the booster against her neck. In one heartbeat, her pupils shrank to dots, and she huffed out a collapsing breath that rounded her shoulders.
But then she straightened. She gave him one last searing look, pushed away from the deck, and ran.
If he made an imploring sound, he couldn’t hear it through his stunned ears. Or his own desolation.
Framed through the fractured rubble of the hauler, Blackworm’s squad broke from their position behind the baffle and swept across the bay. Not toward the hauler where he sprawled with the med kit falling from his slackening hand.
Like all evil raiders—as he himself had—they pursued what ran from them.
They went after his little mishkeet.
They were hunting Trixie, and with his blood seeping across the cold plasteel like a cruel reminder, there was nothing he could do to save her.
Chapter 14
Blackworm was hunting her.
Again. The first time, she hadn’t known it. She’d been snagged—clueless closed-worlder—off the streets of Sunset Falls with no idea what had happened to her.
This time, she knew.
If he caught her, he’d shoot her into the black hole as he’d done to the others.
Her whole body wanted to crumple into a tiny ball, crushed by fear and hopelessness before the singularity even got the chance. But the blue drug wouldn’t let her stop running, her heart pounding even faster than her boots.
And she couldn’t stop running because of Nor.
He’d been hurt, bad, but he had the med kit. Surely that high-tech first aid would save him.
In the meantime, she’d just have to save herself.
At least the intruders wouldn’t shoot her dead, she mused, since they wanted to sacrifice her to the black hole. Her mind, which seemed to be floating approximately seven inches, give or take, outside her frantically fleeing body, ticked over her options idly as she pelted down the corridor away from the hangar and the shuttle.
Away from Nor.
No, she couldn’t think about the shattered look in his blue eyes when she’d stood up as he lay injured. She knew how tender he was inside, broken by old abandonment and stitched together with bravado. But if she’d stayed to patch his wounds, Blackworm’s intruders would’ve likely killed him and taken her anyway.
With her brain roaming outside her body, she couldn’t even count the turns that were carrying her away from him. But it didn’t matter. She knew all the careful counting didn’t matter now, hadn’t mattered back then either. None of it had ever been her fault.
Weird to realize that while fleeing for her life and Nor’s.
She cornered hard, her boot soles squeaking like a fear she couldn’t voice, and found herself…
In the glass-domed atrium with that damned black hole pulsing overhead.
Of course.
Stupid scared feet, carrying her here of all places. So that ugly hole eye could watch her hungrily while she was caught.
She ducked behind one of the concrete planters, out of reach from the glow of the supplemental lighting recessed into the columns that supported the domed ceiling. The filtration panels she and Nor had tested were tucked into restricted slots. As much as she’d tried to reduce herself over the years, shrinking and shrinkin
g until she was almost invisible even to herself, she still wasn’t small enough to hide there.
And maybe—despite these desperate circumstances—she didn’t want to hide anymore.
She checked the charge on the blaster she’d taken from the injured lieutenant. She’d expended a lot of energy already, though she’d kept her shots short and efficient as Nor had told her. Would she have enough time for an ambient recharge?
The echoing clatter of chasing boots was not the answer she wanted to hear.
There was no way out of this atrium. She knew that from the map she and Nor had been using. By not sticking to her lifelong habit of knowing her escape route, she’d backed herself into a corner. But she couldn’t regret it, not if she’d saved Nor.
If she could get the intruders to bunch up, come for her, maybe she could sneak around behind them. If they were close enough together, maybe she could catch them all with one blaster shot. Yeah, maybe she’d just fly to the stars.
Although really, she had done that, so maybe there was hope after all.
She dodged toward one side of the circular atrium to draw her followers with her. Maybe she could come around on the other side… As she wriggled between two towering purple-fronded trees, she peered between the trailing lines of the pepper spice, and her heart sank. There were a dozen of Blackworm’s crew streaming through the far doorway. There was no way she could take them all. Already, they were fanning out from the doorway, creating a living net to catch her.
To her surprise, instead of fear freezing her blood, a rush of hot fury pulsed through her. She hadn’t come all this way just to end up back where she started.
Drawing back into the fall of vines, she glanced up at the black hole barely visible through the lavender undersides of the alien trees. Did she have enough juice left in the blaster to strike a hole through the windows holding space at bay? With one shot, she could end this threat. She’d show them what it was like to be sacrificed to the stars.
But even as she raised the blaster, sighting on that malevolent radiating eye, she paused, her fingertip poised on the trigger.
As bad as things had ever gotten, as scared as she’d ever been, in the blackest moments of hating her own weakness, she’d never given up. She might not be an astrophysicist, but she knew until she crossed that event horizon, there was always hope.
Realigning her blaster, she shot out one of the lights.
An uproar of voices speaking in tongues she couldn’t understand—not that she needed to—converged on her. But she was already moving. She demolished another light, plunging the atrium further into the darkness, except for the eerie light of dying photons whirlpooling around the black hole.
She led a deadly earnest game of hide-and-seek around the alien garden. To conserve the blaster’s energy, she dialed down to stun. As much as she wanted to kill the bastards, she’d tease them for as long as she could, giving the shuttle a chance to escape. Giving Nor a chance to save her.
At some point in her life, she stopped hoping anyone would save her. Not that she’d done a great job of saving herself. How strange that it was a rouge rake of an ex-pirate and his irresistible kisses that had made her believe again.
But belief wasn’t always salvation, and hope wasn’t always enough. Kisses, even irresistible ones, couldn’t stop plasma fire.
She’d stunned three and tricked another four into poking through the small access panel slots she’d left open so they’d have to waste their time looking for her there. But that left five of the intruders prowling through the atrium, hunting her. One of them, a four-armed alien who looked like a very toothy praying mantis wearing Christmas mittens, carried a net—an actual net, as if she were an animal—that sparked intermittently, hissing and spitting. The same yellow light as her stun setting was like tiny lightning bolts in the gloomy atrium. She had no doubt if any strand of the net touched her, she’d be immobilized even before those four arms engulfed her.
Ooh, she wanted to shoot that one next.
If she could sneak past them and get to the engine compartment, the radiation shielding would disguise her life signs. Although if they couldn’t scan for her bio signature, probably they’d figure out she’d gone to the engine room… How she wanted to shoot them all!
Righteous indignation replaced the fading effects of the booster drug, but as her brain seemed to settle back into her skull, she couldn’t help but acknowledge how unlikely this all was.
She was an Earth girl playing a deadly alien first-person shooter game of madman and mishkeet when she’d never even liked video games. And she knew there’d be no extra lives for her. She had to level up, now.
She crawled alongside a low concrete planter, keeping her head down. The shallow gutter was filmed with mud; no matter how high tech and tidy a garden was, it was still full of life that refused to be entirely contained. Like her. No matter what Blackworm did, she’d fight to be free.
Peeking around the end of the planter, she realized she’d sneaked behind the advancing line of aliens. The door to the escape. Was. Right. There.
With the insectoid alien in the way.
She gritted her teeth. The blaster on stun had worked beautifully so far, dropping the humanoid invaders silently in their tracks. Would it work the same on an insect?
Before she consciously finished considering, her thumb spun the selector dial. She had one shot to get to the door. Literally. The charge indicator on the weapon had been blinking a warning since she blew out the last light.
She didn’t want to be a killer, but they’d pushed her to the edge and she was staring down into the void.
Not bothering with a last breath—she hadn’t felt this cold since she tumbled out of Blackworm’s stasis pod with Rayna staring down at her in horror—she aimed around the edge of the planter and fired. In the same motion, she shoved away from the muddy gutter and raced for the exit.
But the mantid alien was faster. At the first glimpse of her gun, it leaped up and sideways on inhumanly jointed legs. It fumbled the net, but her blaster charge passed uselessly below it. It screamed out—a clattering shriek like silverware thrown into a garbage disposal—rage or alarm or rallying cry, Trixie didn’t know. Didn’t matter, since it brought the other intruders running.
They converged on her from all sides. She darted one way then the other and made it three steps toward the doorway when a beam of yellow struck her elbow.
Her arm blazed with a sun-bright agony then went numb from shoulder to fingertips. The blaster tipped precariously out of her palm. She grabbed with her left hand and didn’t even feel the brush of her own fingers in the anaesthetized limb. As if she were one-quarter dead already.
Grimly, awkwardly, she spun and raised the blaster toward the dome above. She wasn’t suicidal, but she doubted the remaining charge would pierce the panes. One good crack, though, would give them all pause…
She never got off the shot.
Another alien, big and ugly but anonymous in battle-scarred head-to-toe armor, lifted a snub pistol and fired. The yellow ray caught her square in the chest.
Maybe her heart stopped, maybe the universe did. She tried to scream and it would’ve been for Nor, but the darkness that crashed down on her was irresistible.
Chapter 15
She woke when she hadn’t expected to see anything ever again except maybe the baleful eye of the black hole as she was sucked down.
A low, powerful hum through the bulkhead at her back told her she wasn’t on the shut-down space station. This had to be the Grandiloquence.
Blackworm had her.
There’d been a time when this moment of realizing her own helplessness would’ve left her curled in a shattered, girl-shaped lump of terror. Now…this was another chance to survive.
She tried to push herself upright and almost screamed at the sharp, stinging pain coursing through her body. It felt as if every nerve and bone had fallen asleep, that strange tingling ache amplified by a thousand.
Good. I
t meant she was alive to fight.
She stretched each muscle cautiously, until the waves of agony receded, leaving her weak. Well, she’d been weak before, and so what?
When she and the other abducted Earthers had been rescued by Raz and transported on the Grandy, they’d been given beautiful staterooms. This room was plain by comparison; the berth of a junior-level crewmember like Amanu, probably. Other than the bunk she was lying on, there were no other furnishings or decorations.
Not much better than a stasis pod except she got to think.
She forced herself to her still-tingling feet and tried the door. Not shockingly, it was locked. The en suite sonic facilities built into a small cubby were functional but the even smaller galley alcove wasn’t. She swallowed hard against the rasping dryness of her throat. Weren’t sacrificial victims supposed to be fattened up and feted before getting all sacrificed and whatever?
She went through the room methodically. A low storage chest was locked; maybe she could bash that open with…okay, no, keep looking.
There was nothing in the room except her. But wasn’t that a cosmic truth?
She snorted quietly to herself. Of all the times to become philosophical.
She went through the pockets of Nor’s fatigues, starting with the pouch where she’d found the med kit she gave him. There’d been so much dark blood, darker than a human’s…
For the first time since casting off the paralysis of the stunner, her hands shook. But she stiffened against the desolation. Nor had made it through worse than a stun blast and some concussion damage. He’d even left one of his scars unhealed just to show what he could survive. He was out there right now. And he was coming for her.
She just had to keep herself out of the black hole until then.
Her blaster was gone, of course, as was the dat-pad that had been on her forearm. Her pockets were empty. Since she’d stolen the fatigues right off Nor’s very practical body and he would’ve had at least a source of light and a utility tool on him, she had to assume one of Blackworm’s people had rifled through her clothes while she’d been unconscious. She grimaced. Probably it was the insect one with all the hands. At least they hadn’t left her in one of those creepy white nightgowns or, worse yet, naked.
