And it sounded like a fuck of a lot more than twenty-five to him.
The howls were answered by shouts from the camp. Within a moment, the high whining of auto-blaster fire was echoing off the cliffside. Blue-white light cast the nearby forest in a faint, ghostly glow. The booming of skeks guns retorted, swelling to overpower all other sound and make the blaster fire seem pathetic in comparison.
“That’s a fucking warband,” Thargen said with a snort.
“Smugglers are rousing inside the cave,” Kier said. “They’re taking up weapons and going to reinforce the barricade.”
At least the comms were clear despite the din of battle.
“I see nine outside now,” Kayl said.
Kier touched the wrist controls. “One remained behind with the captives.”
“My earlier estimate was low,” Kayl said. “This looks closer to one hundred. They are using the trees and rocks to cover their advance.”
The thundering of those skeks rifles was followed by the sharp cracks of projectiles striking stone, which only became more piercing as they increased in frequency.
With each inhalation, Thargen’s Rage burned a little hotter, and fresh strength pumped into his muscles. Those battle sounds called to him, beckoned him to come, to join. He’d have all the bloodshed he could desire if he just charged around the corner.
“The smugglers are focused entirely on the attacking skeks,” Kayl continued. “Their position is defensible. They may yet hold.”
“They will be overrun,” Thargen said. “Smugglers must’ve pissed them off. When skeks organize into a warband like this, they won’t stop until they destroy their enemies. They aren’t here to hunt, just to kill.”
“And they won’t stop with the smugglers,” said Yuri, her sense of helplessness evident in her every word.
“We must reassess this situation, and you are too close to the chaos,” Kayl said with a new layer of hardness in his voice. “The two of you must withdraw.”
Thargen clenched his jaw and tensed his muscles, fighting the draw of the ensuing combat, trying to ignore that his heartbeat had become a thunderous, insistent drumming that urged him onward to war. There were only two possibilities for those captives if Thargen and Kier retreated now—remain slaves should the smugglers win—which was highly unlikely—or become food.
Too many of Thargen’s comrades had fallen prey to these forces—the ravenous infestation that was the skeks and the slow, cancerous death promised by slavery. Even his Yuri, more precious to him than anyone or anything, had not managed to get through her life unscathed.
“Fuck that,” Thargen growled—or perhaps it was his Rage speaking with his mouth.
Kier snapped his head toward Thargen, who could almost imagine those mismatched eyes being wide behind that black helmet. “Thargen, there are—”
“Run your fucking drone thing.” Thargen pushed away from the cliff face again, bracing the end of his auto-blaster on his forearm to retain his hold on the knife. “Find us another way out of that cave.”
“And if there isn’t another way?”
“We’ll make one.”
If Kier responded, Thargen didn’t hear.
Thargen darted around the corner and charged the undefended section of barricade ahead—the bokkan had moved to join his companions on the other side of the defenses. The forest was flashing with plasma pulses and the orange muzzle flashes, creating a strobe-like light that made the movements of the figures amongst the trees stuttering and erratic.
Without slowing, Thargen leapt over the barricade. Firelight from just outside the cave mouth cast a soft orange glow on the backs of the smugglers along the defensive line, an almost surreal contrast to the more intense bursts of illumination from the gunfire.
Rage whispered for him to join that chaos, to embrace his place as its agent, its embodiment. He could kill all those smugglers before they even turned around. Kill them like the fucking animals they were.
You’re with me this time, he told his Rage.
Those smugglers were the only buffer between the skeks and the captives at the moment. Killing them now would only complicate things.
Thargen forced himself onward into the cave. A sharp turn after the narrow entrance opened into a large chamber lit by intense white light; he had the impression of electric lanterns set up around the chamber, but it was an unimportant detail. His attention fixed on the group of captives deeper within the chamber and the smuggler standing guard over them. Thargen’s arm moved without thought, lashing out and releasing the knife as he broke into a run.
The lone smuggler spun away from the huddled captives just in time to catch the knife in the side of his neck. He grunted and staggered aside a step. Then Thargen was there, slamming his palm against the knife’s pommel to hammer the blade in to the hilt. Blood bubbled from the smuggler’s mouth, and with a choked gasp, he sank to the cave floor.
A whisper of movement had Thargen spinning, auto-blaster raised.
“It’s Kier,” Yuri said, her voice punching through Thargen’s Rage. “He’s there with you.”
Thargen forced his finger away from the trigger and lowered the blaster. He spat a curse. “Fucking tell me you’re following next time.”
Kier’s helmet peeled back in segments, revealing his face. His brows were low. “I did.”
“Then say it louder next time. Fucking skeks are making a ruckus out there.”
“Noted,” Kier replied with a smirk. He dropped his blasters into their holsters and hurried to the captives, several of whom recoiled from the approaching daevah.
The female sedhi and ilthurii were still together, just as they had been since Thargen had awoken in that cage. The female kaital who’d been locked up beside Thargen and Yuri was here also, along with the male azhera who’d escaped the crashed ship, and a young male borian who’d been caged toward the front of the cell room.
All five were dirty, naked, and noticeably thinner than they’d been the last time Thargen had seen them. Their hair was tangled, the azhera’s fur was matted, and many sported healing cuts and bruises on their bodies.
Kier crouched, placing himself closer to the captives’ eye levels, and said, “My name is Kier, and he is called Thargen. Do you remember him from the ship?”
A few of the captives glanced at Thargen and nodded.
“He was caged with the terran,” said the sedhi, her third eye’s pupil dilating and contracting. “How are you alive, vorgal?”
“Do I look that fucking easy to kill?” Thargen turned his weapon toward the cave’s entrance. The battle sounds from outside seemed to be intensifying with each moment.
“What of the terran?”
“She’s fine, too. Damn fine.”
“We are going to escort all of you out of here.” Kier accessed the controls on his wrist armor again. “My drone has scouted through a tunnel at the rear of this cave that will lead outside. We must move swiftly.”
“What about these collars?” asked the azhera. “They used them to shock us, to track us.”
Kier pulled up a small holo screen at his wrist. “Just a moment.”
“There is another large group of skeks advancing from the other direction,” Kayl said, a hint of static in his voice. “The smugglers are being spread thin now, forced to defend along the entire barricade.”
Thargen growled, flexing his hands on the auto-blaster’s grips.
Should be out there fighting. Out there killing.
But that was his Rage talking, irritated that it had been pushed back again, that it was being held on a leash. His muscles were rigid in his struggle to hold it back. He was here to defend these people, to get them out of here, to do what he hadn’t done before. And it was Yuri’s voice in the back of his mind that helped him win that struggle—her voice, so sad and dismayed, asking, Is that really all that’s left?
He fucking loved her, and he was going to make sure she knew it when they were reunited.
“There,”
Kier declared, tapping his wrist.
A rapid series of soft clicks ran through the group of captives—their collars disengaging. The captives tugged the metal collars off and tossed them onto the cave floor, the azhera and sedhi spitting curses in their native tongues.
“Everyone on your feet,” Thargen called over his shoulder. “We need to move.”
“The skeks are gaining ground,” Kayl announced. “They are advancing cautiously, providing covering fire for each other.”
Fuck.
If this warband had been worked up into a frenzy, it might have bought Thargen and the daevahs a little more time—the skeks made easy targets when they were rushing headlong into blaster fire, even for assholes like these smugglers. But if they were making an organized attack…
The smuggler ship must’ve crashed in a skeks tribe’s home territory.
Kier helped the sedhi onto her feet, who in turn helped the ilthurii beside her. Within a few seconds, all five were standing—and as difficult as that had proved for them, Thargen didn’t expect much speed during their escape.
“Come. I will show you to the tunnel. It is narrow, but we can all fit through.” Kier led the captives toward the rear of the cave.
Thargen followed, keeping his blaster directed at the entrance. The battle sounds spilling into the cave were made ghostly and distant as they echoed off the stone walls and ceiling. Thargen’s Rage wanted the skeks to break through, wanted a chance to build a mound out of their corpses high enough to block the mouth of the cave.
“Riniya,” someone said behind him in a thin, wavering voice.
Thargen glanced back to see the kaital looking at him. It was hard to believe she was the same female that had been their neighbor only a week ago. She looked diminished, dehydrated, broken.
“Riniya,” she repeated, voice cracking. She pointed toward the far side of the cave with a trembling hand.
Thargen’s Rage intensified to an inferno, fueled by the sight of this kaital in such a state; none of the smugglers he’d seen were nearly as dirty, malnourished, or battered as these captives. This could’ve been his Yuri, had things gone differently.
But his Rage was also fueled by a pang of guilt; could he have prevented this? Could he have spared this kaital and the others the hardships they’d endured? Could he have kept more of them alive?
No. I wasn’t in any state to help them and keep Yuri safe.
Regardless, there sure as hell wasn’t any time to contemplate that now, but he let it pour into his Rage all the same.
“Don’t understand what you’re saying, but we gotta go,” he said.
“Riniya,” she said more firmly, jabbing her finger in the same direction again—toward a clutter of pallets on the cave floor. “She’s alive.”
One of those pallets, piled higher with ratty cloth than the others, moved slightly.
“Go with the daevah.” Thargen didn’t linger to see if the kaital obeyed. He jogged to the pallets and knelt beside the one that had moved, tugging off the tattered clothing and blankets piled atop it. “Ah, fuck.”
“Thargen, what is it?” asked Yuri.
The female volturian—Riniya—who’d been beneath the cloth turned her head to look up at him with one eye gleaming feverishly. The other was swollen shut. Beads of sweat stood out on her skin, which had an ashen pallor. She met his gaze and held it.
Fuck.
“Kill me,” she rasped. “Don’t let them…” Her eye fluttered shut.
“Thargen?” Somehow, Yuri managed to squeeze a hell of a lot of worry into his name.
“The volturian who hurt her leg. She’s alive,” he said.
Should’ve helped her at the crash. Should’ve helped her get away.
Fuck, haven’t I been through this? They all had collars on, the smugglers had guns, and me and Yuri were both battered and half-starved ourselves. What the fuck should I have done?
“Thargen!” Kier called. “We need to help everyone up into the tunnel.”
Thargen’s heart quickened further, and he gritted his teeth as a fresh wave of Rage blasted through him. He swung his blaster onto its shoulder strap and, gently as he could, scooped Riniya into his arms. She groaned, curling in on herself, features contorted in pain. She was even lighter than Yuri, even more delicate.
His mind flashed back to the volturian he’d slept with back in Arthos years ago, back to her cries, her—
Fuck! I didn’t do this, it was those fucking smugglers!
The rest of the group was gathered at the rear of the cave, standing below a nearly two-meter-high ledge.
“Up there,” Kier said as Thargen approached, frowning when his gaze fell on Riniya, “and a little farther back.”
“Didn’t see any openings when we came in,” Thargen said through his teeth, struggling to keep his breaths measured, to hold back a wave of raw fury.
The commlink in Thargen’s ear crackled.
“Uh, Kier,” Yuri said, “the feed from your drone just went out. Like…its black now.”
Kier lifted his arm and fiddled with the controls on his wrist again. “Likely just interference from the surrounding stone. Signals seem unreliable on this planet.”
Thargen set Riniya down and hurried to the ledge, trying to ignore the itch crawling up his spine—he knew it was just an instinctual reaction to having his back turned to a battle. He hauled himself up smoothly and followed the ledge back, moving around a bulge in the rock to find an open passage just as Kier had said—a narrow, pitch-black gap in the stone. A faint, cool breeze flowed out from the opening.
He almost hated that part of himself was disappointed to have found an escape route after only a single kill. The smugglers and skeks deserved a lot worse before Thargen was through with them. All he needed was a few minutes to release his pent-up Rage and he could be satisfied.
Of course, he should’ve kept in mind what he’d expressed earlier—things rarely went according to plan.
“Three smugglers down at the barricade,” Kayl said. “I am thinning the skeks as best I can, but a precision railgun is not exactly the most efficient weapon against a ravening horde.”
There was a chance the smugglers could hold out all night—more improbable shit happened all the time—but it was just as likely they’d be overrun in the next few seconds. Either way, Thargen and Kier needed to have these captives moving now.
Thargen rushed back to the others, knelt at the edge of the ledge, and offered a hand. “Let’s get going.”
The female sedhi urged the kaital forward. The kaital’s trembling hand caught Thargen’s, and he pulled her up; she was nearly as light as Riniya. Once she was balanced on the ledge beside him, he reached for the next captive—the ilthurii. Just as his fingers closed around her scaled wrist, a sound pierced the battle din—a small, insignificant sound he shouldn’t have been able to hear, given the situation, but one that made him freeze for an instant.
It was the sound of a pebble clattering in the passage behind him.
Releasing the ilthurii’s arm, Thargen pushed onto his feet and ran to the opening, swinging his auto-blaster into his hands. He raised the weapon to look through the optic. The stone walls, floor, and ceiling were lit up through the optic as though bathed in pure daylight.
So was the grinning skeks working his way through the narrow passage.
Fuck. When will I learn my damned lesson and stop asking for shit to go wrong?
The skeks opened his jaws to release a howl as he struggled to raise his rifle in the cramped space. Thargen cut that howl short with a burst of plasma; the last he saw of the skeks was its half-melted face just before it hit the floor.
At least half a dozen more skeks picked up their fallen comrade’s war cry, their howls so amplified by the walls of the tunnel that there might as well have been a hundred of the fuckers crammed in there—and there very well could’ve been for all Thargen knew.
“Tunnel might be a bit tighter than you thought, Kier,” Thargen shouted, firin
g another stream of plasma bolts into the passage.
Skeks snarled, growled, and howled, their large, sunken eyes gleaming with reflections of the blaster fire. One of their weapons went off, producing a fiery muzzle flash and a deafening crash of thunder. Projectiles cracked off the stone around Thargen, and heat flared on his bicep.
Rage pulsed through his veins, curling his lips into a grin. He kept the trigger depressed, filling the tunnel with the blue white of plasma bolts and the orange glow of melting stone where those bolts struck the walls, floor, and ceiling. “Gonna have to do a lot fucking better than that if you want to eat tonight!”
When that stream of plasma sputtered out only seconds later, Thargen snarled and threw himself aside, pressing his back against the rock wall as another volley of return fire erupted from the darkness. He opened the auto-blaster’s power cell chamber. A puff of smoke coiled out of the compartment, revealing a melted, sizzling power cell.
High-end weaponry and those stupid smugglers loaded them with cheap-ass ammunition?
He ejected the deformed power cell and dropped his hand, intending to reach for another, but the sound of heavy, shuffling footsteps in the passage had him tossing the blaster aside to pull his axes free of their loops on his belt. He already had the weapons activated and swinging by the time the first skeks emerged from the tunnel. One of the hardlight blades cleaved off the top half of the skeks’ head.
“Kier, get over here!” Thargen’s second axe lashed out to hack off the next skeks’ arm at the elbow.
There were even more of those bastards howling in the tunnel now.
Thargen kicked the disarmed skeks into the wall once it had stumbled out of the passage and set into the next foe, his axes moving in blurred orange arcs that were complimented by sprays of blue blood.
“How many are there?” Kier asked as he appeared in Thargen’s peripheral vision. He fired two quick bolts from his blaster, finishing off the one-armed skeks.
“Too many.”
Or maybe not enough…
Thargen growled at hit another skeks with both axes, barely registering the immense damage wrought by the blades. The entrance of the tunnel was already slick with blood—and was fast running out of room for bodies.
Savage Desire (The Infinite City Book 4) Page 36
