My voice has grown hoarse from trying to explain the danger Tess might be in, from trying to discern whether they have anything in the hideout that will stop the onset of the heat-sickness humans suffer from without proper equipment. “Do something! Give her something. You have to have the proper suits, somewhere. It’s regulation,” until the words lose all their meaning. Her body is limp, held carelessly by the Velorian guard that caught her as she fell. The sight of her so still and quiet was unerringly wrong. Even in sleep, she moves, arms and legs rearranging themselves, lips muttering things. My dragon is close to the surface and it is only the thought of how long the pain lingered the last time I tried to shift that allows me to hold it back. I cannot help Tess at all if I am in too much pain to help myself.
The room they toss us into this time is smaller. The air inside feels even hotter than the rest of the place and as they close the door, deaf to my bargaining, I know that it will not improve her condition. I pull her to me, consciously fighting to lower my body temperature as much as it will go. Even my normal few degrees above Tess will be an improvement upon the current temperature. Her skin feels boiling under my hands, but when I touch her, pull her close, she opens her eyes a slit, looking around the room blearily, before opening them all the way. When she sees me and no one else, she lets her familiar grin slip free.
“You’re alright?” I ask.
She keeps grinning. Her skin is flushed red and her lips are losing their color, but her voice still sounds strong when she speaks. “Yeah,” she says, pushing herself up and giving my arm a reassuring pat. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m in serious trouble here, but the whole fainting thing was a ruse.”
Her smile turns sheepish. “Sorry. I couldn’t exactly warn you with that psycho in the room.”
I am wavering between relief and anger. Surely there was no reason to startle me so badly. Perhaps she was hoping to accomplish something else. “What were you planning?”
“Nothing anymore,” she says, grabbing my hand and pressing something long and cold inside it. “It’s all on you now, Commander.”
The key is a bit trickier to use than Tess anticipated. The specially made cuffs are tight and my fingers feel quite useless after spending so long with a limited supply of blood and little movement. When they are free again, the first thing that I feel is a rush of pain, fingers tingling as the feeling returns. Velorian healing is a thing of wonder, but after such damage, it still takes nearly an hour before I am able to grip the knife that Tess offers, and in that hour, her condition only deteriorates.
“When we’re out,” I say. “We’ll head for that bit of jungle we saw. It may be cooler in the trees. If we can find water to submerge you in, that would help as well.”
Tess gives a tired chuckle, eyes wincing as though at a pounding headache, and wipes sweat from her brow. “You mean there’s water here that isn’t boiling?”
“If one knows where to look,” I answer. My arm is around her, trying to offer her what little cold I can manage with my biology. I find myself wishing, for perhaps the first time, that I were an ice Velorian instead. If we live, I’ll have to tell Takkan that I could have used his help greatly. I never admit such things, so I imagine it will cause him to laugh.
“We’ll have to fight,” I tell her, sometime later, when it has grown mostly dark in the room and the plan has taken shape in fits and starts, growing into something concrete and oddly hopeful.
“I know,” she answers.
“I’ll need to be close to the surface, when my dragon breaks free. We’re too far underground. And this room is too small for my wings to expand.”
“Okay,” Tess answers, managing to sound confident despite her growing exhaustion.
“Okay,” I repeat. “Tell me the plan.”
Tess rolls her eyes. They are bloodshot, and I wonder if either of us has slept a full night since this ordeal began. “I’m a little warm, Jari—not mentally impaired. I’m clear on the plan.”
I lift an eyebrow.
She gives in with a sigh that makes me think of earlier days. However effective she was as a soldier, she has always had a slight disdain for authority. She followed orders well enough and rarely broke rules, but had ways of letting her irritation shine through.
“I pick the lock on the door. If I can’t pick it, you’ll break it. We do our best to sneak to the exit; if we don’t make it, you’ll do the punching and I’ll do the stabbing. When we get out the door, you do your dragon thing. And then you fly.”
Of all the things we have said, it is a loose approximation at best, but it is more than I expected Tess in her current state to be able to give me. She is near heat exhaustion at the very least, and that is on top of all the other plights she has suffered since the smuggling ship crashed into the bridge of her ship.
A thought occurs to me.
“Do you have a second lockpick?”
She smirks. “The leg comes with a few perks,” she says, and begins to fiddle with the side of it. The room is growing dark and I imagine her sight is failing, but she manages to pull free a small pin.
“Not sure what part this is,” she says, “which means that I could go down at any given moment. Stick close to me when we get out there, yeah?”
“Of course,” I answer.
Something in the tone of my voice makes her eyes soften. There is a difference now, between Tess my friend and fellow soldier, and Tess my lover and mate. It is the latter that stands and kisses me, tongue licking at the roof of my mouth, before kneeling in front of the locked door.
“When did you pick this up?” I ask her.
As far as I’m aware, it is not a habit that she used to have.
“Trick of the trade,” she answers. “All bounty hunters know how.”
“So the knowledge just drops into your head when you fill your first contract?”
“Exactly,” she says. “Now shut up for a second. I need to hear it move.”
I decide to take her at her word and close my mouth while she works. She does so quickly and professionally, as if she is a thief and not a soldier. I find myself watching her hands again, their clever, measured movements, but they are not the only part of her that I fixate on. I also watch the way she catches her lip between her teeth as she concentrates and the way she pauses to shake loose hair out of her face. If we live, if I get to keep this, I will be allowed to pay each part of her such special attention. Even the way she curses each time she drops the pick is endearing, and I wonder if all people have such sickeningly sweet thoughts about their mate invading their skull.
“Got it!” she says, turning toward me. Her voice has slipped down into a whisper. No one has paid any attention to the noise we have made so far, and it stands to reason that they won’t now either. But I suppose picking the lock has helped her slip into the mindset of subterfuge more easily. I imagine any torture they have planned will wait until the morning, but we should still be quiet now, careful of every noise that might draw more attention to us. Just having someone turn toward our cell in curiosity at a certain sound now has the potential to ruin us entirely.
“Good,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”
Tess stands, gingerly, testing her leg before nodding in satisfaction. “Yes sir,” she says, with a nod, and a wink that does things to my cock I bet she’d love to hear about—later.
It isn’t as though as she hasn’t said the exact words on a mission before. I have always outranked her, and even given the fact that we were part of different militaries, the show of respect and deference was so drilled into Federation soldiers that it was second nature. Now though, the words send a jolt of desire through me that is entirely useless and definitely inappropriate given the situation.
Her eyes widen at my expression, the way I shift my stance, and she gives a quick laugh. “Later,” she promises, echoing my own thoughts. She steps close and gives my hand a squeeze. “Don’t you dare die.”
She bends to retrieve the knife from her boot at l
ong last, and I take the opportunity to drop a kiss on her head when she rises. “I’ll do my best,” I tell her, when what I truly mean is I love you.
“Me too,” she answers, and I know she means the same.
Tess steps in front of me, and eases open the door.
Stealth works for a few moments longer than I expected it to. Tess cannot walk silently; the clang of her leg against the floor is audible with each step. Every time we can hear it above the other small noises of the hideout at night, above the sound of distant voices talking, perhaps over a meal, and above the sound of the wind howling across the empty landscape outside, both of us wince. She has not mentioned it specifically, but I would guess that this is one of the drawbacks to the leg that upsets her. Velorians don’t place much stock in stealth or moving quietly—we are more about brute force and shows of superior intelligence. We have the grace to move quietly, but rarely put forth the effort required to. Most humans lack such grace, but years ago Tess was one of the few that possessed it. She could be behind enemy lines, her blaster finding a new target with each breath, without the enemy having a single inkling of her whereabouts.
She could never pull off something like that now.
We are lucky, and there seem to be no guards in the long, winding corridor that separates us from the door we entered through. I walk in front, with Tess behind. She does not argue this, recognizing that I am in better physical shape despite three days in handcuffs. The lack of food doesn’t bother a Velorian the way it does a human; it does not weaken us so quickly or so severely. This is without even considering how much the heat is weighing on Tess, however hard she tries to hide it.
We encounter our first guard at the end of the hallway. Tess grips my arm, and steps around me with the knife. I can see that it is not one of the Velorian cultists, but rather one of the alien mercenaries. She presses her blade like a kiss to the back of his neck, at the vulnerable juncture just above his armor, and lets him feel the cold bite of metal against his skin.
“Your blaster,” she whispers. “Pass it back.”
The Draxl proves himself not to be a zealot when he does so immediately. As I reach forward and take it from his grip, I wonder how many of them are here for belief and how many are here for money.
As soon as the gun is in my hand, I switch the setting to stun and drop the guard to the floor. Tess and I lean forward to catch him at the same time, lowering his unconscious body to the ground with as little sound as we can manage. I start to step forward, leading the way once more, but Tess pauses, leans down to the prone form of the guard, and removes his comm device from his belt. It’s quick thinking. If we can get a good signal, we may be able to call off planet.
Together, we move toward the door. Each time I look back at Tess, she appears a bit paler, and I know I need to get her to a cooler place. Even if there is no cool spring in the jungle, it will not be so dangerous as the rock we are under, the heat of the sun beating down.
We creep up the steps that lead toward light and greater heat. Tess squares her shoulders to brace herself for it. There is a crash behind us, as the unconscious guard fights his way back to consciousness, overturning a stack of crates in his efforts to grip something he can use for leverage. As the sound of the crash echoes through the hideout, footsteps approach.
“Shit,” Tess says.
We abandon the subterfuge of Plan A and engage Plan B, sprinting up the last few stairs and stumbling outside through the thankfully unlocked door. The air is a few degrees warmer. Tess falters, but I grasp her arm and pull her with me, both of us stumbling out into the open air. The smuggling ship has been moved or else has left already, carrying death to the Xzerg. We turn toward the forest, and I pass Tess the blaster as I run.
“Get ready,” I warn her.
“Always ready,” she says. The words are soundless, without breath, as she is running as fast as her legs can take her. There are shouts behind us. Tess holds the blaster over one shoulder and pulls the trigger blindly. It is not accurate, but if the cultists are dodging blaster fire then it becomes difficult for them to fire accurate shots in turn. Tess shoots, we both run, and I call my dragon forth.
The feeling is always a cross between disconcerting and exhilarating. Disconcerting because of the loss of control that sometimes happens. Even to the most seasoned Velorians, keeping the dragon under control is like trying to capture lightning with a leash—just as dangerous as it was difficult. I have been lucky in this regard for the most part, but there are always risks to be weighed. The only person I’ve met who doesn’t hesitate a bit to use theirs is Prince Takkan himself. My body shifts, bones lengthening, joints changing into something better suited for raw power and flight. My feet touch the earth and they are no longer humanoid, but flat and strong with talons at their end.
Tess climbs onto me without breaking stride, as though she has not been starved and beaten, as though she has no limp to contend with. The way she settles across my back, holding on without fear, one might be forgiven for thinking that we have done this before. Tess has only seen my dragon once, during the mission of our first meeting, when I shifted forms in a desperate bid to reach more survivors of the eruption. She had watched with the amazement on her face, but we had certainly never done this.
Tess stops firing, unable to control the blaster and still hold on as the ground plummets away below us. Shots are fired past us, but I feel none of them hit home. As we rocket toward the jungle, Tess’s laugh echoes toward the sky.
I cannot keep the dragon form for long. It is too easy to track and I am still too weak to hold it for hour upon hour as I could have in another instance. I stop when, at our backs, I see other Velorians beginning to shift. I drop to the ground and shift back, grip Tess’s hand, and pull her with me into the jungle, where we can find cover and shade. If the other Velorians track us this far, they will not be capable of seeing us from the air. They will have to abandon their dragon forms as well and chase us through the underbrush on foot.
Most of my clothing was destroyed during the shift, though there are a few pieces of armor, specially designed to withstand it, that manage somehow to hang on. The branches do me little harm as they whip against us while we traverse the trees, but they scratch at Tess’s skin even through her suit. We crouch at last, after what feels like many hours of walking in an overhang of rock against the side of a great hill. The slightly cooler temperatures of the jungle have eased the progress of Tess’s illness, but she still looks a bit worse for wear as she sits down heavily next to me, all but falling to the damp ground. She would not normally show such weakness, and it is a testament to how sick she feels that she immediately tucks herself into my side, head falling onto my shoulder.
“Where’s the swimming pool?” she asks.
I shrug in apology. “I’ve heard no water.”
She nods, licks at dry lips. “This seems like as good a place as any to wait. Clearing up a head, on top of the hill. Big enough to land something, or you know, almost land something.”
I follow her gaze upward, and nod in agreement at the site of the clearing. It is not until she pulls out the comm device that my exhausted brain remembers she took it from the unconscious guard. She fiddles with it for a few moments, squinting at the dials and buttons in displeasure, before handing it over to me.
“It’s set to send signals but not to receive,” I announce. “No specific calls. We can send out a distress beacon, but our enemies could very well pick up the signal. “
“What other options do we have?” Tess asks.
“None,” I answer. Our other choices consist solely of waiting here until they find us anyway, or hiding here until the heat saps every last bit of life from Tess’s eyes. At least this way, we will have a chance, however small, that someone sympathetic will hear the signal.
I press my thumb down on the proper button and speak into the device.
“Tess Owens and Commander Jari of Veloria, requesting aid at these coordinates. Assailants
are heavily armed and landing zone is adequate.” I lift my thumb, and sit the comm on the damp ground between us.
“And now,” Tess pronounces, her voice beginning to blur with tiredness. “We wait.”
For an indiscernible amount of time, Tess dozes against me. I end up sleeping a bit as well, albeit unintentionally, body lurching awake at each small noise. I open my eyes several times with adrenaline shooting through my body only to find that what I’d heard in sleep had been no more than a small animal scurrying through the leaves. When I wake up decisively, it is to a far different, much more alarming sound—a craft of some sort doing its best to touch down in the small clearing.
I sit up straight, bringing Tess with me. She is still mostly asleep, head dipping down in exhaustion.
“There’s a shuttle,” I tell her. “We need to get closer.”
My voice rouses her most of the way, and though she still looks terribly ill, she rises to her feet. Her hand grips at my arm as she walks, both of us trudging up the steep hill, toes digging into the dirt. We are panting at its crest. I can see the grey hull of the shuttle through the trees, as well as a flash of red, Fire Velorian skin. It could be salvation, or it could be our death.
“We’ve got to try, Jari,” Tess says vehemently.
I agree. There are no choices left to us, and if this proves to be our last one, we will make it together. Tess shifts her grip from my arm to my hand, joining her fingers with mine as we step through the last of the covering trees and into the open.
We see a young Velorian standing on the ramp, another a few feet behind him. He is speaking into the comm device on his wrist, repeating our names. When he catches sight of us walking toward him, Jeyal’s entire face lights up, his eyes and his mouth both grinning.
“Commander!” he says, and the relief in his tone is evident. “Where the hell have you been?”
11
Tessie
Primal Planet Captive: SciFi Alien Fated Romance Page 9
