Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

THREXIN

T hrexin wanted to be angry. He wanted to want to sink his talons into something. Dig his teeth into the female before him and rip her throat out.

But each thought of such kind slammed into a barrier before it even arose, manifesting as a faint shadow of itself. A vague construct that could be real had the limiter in his brain allowed it.

It was for the best. Threxin leaned on his elbow in the commander's seat and took a drag of hak. The mineral smoke wisped from the corner of his mouth until he inhaled it again through his nostrils for another pleasant scratch.

Silarra stood before him beneath the commander's platform, unrepentant. Off to her side, Renza looked mildly amused.

"Did I not make my instructions clear?" Threxin asked. "Were you confused?"

"I was just curious." Silarra pouted in that way he hated. Other males found it appealing for some reason. It made her look like a petulant offspring who had no respect for authority and thought she could get away with it.

"You are compromising my mission. "

"How, Threxin? What do I risk if I give some stupid human a little taste?"

"I do not have to explain this, do I?" Threxin knuckled his temple. That gnawing frustration swelled and deflated so fast, he barely had time to register even the possibility of its existence. Times like these, he wanted to both rip the limiter from his brain and praise its presence. "The human is likely to become addicted to your exorin."

"And?"

"And if the human does not get a continuous supply, it may get… ill. It will do anything to get more. Anything , Silarra."

"…And?"

"Shoq, Silarra, surely you realize their volatility. Not a tick ago, I had to reassign most of this deck's cohort to their residence deck to suppress a riot, and you are about to go down there as well. Do not feign ignorance. Them being alive is bad enough. I do not need another complication."

The humans down on the deck Orion Halen had referred to as "CRD" were going crazy in what he originally thought may be an attempted mutiny. Only soon Renza reported they were lashing out at each other over residential quarters and food rations. They needed to be subdued, nonetheless.

Silarra thought for several ticks, looking away from him. Finally she inclined her chin in curt submission. "I will dispose of it."

"That will fix this specific problem and open another. Our agreement with the part-uhyre demands not killing his humans."

"Oh, come on. There will have to be casualties. He won't even know it's gone, Threxin. The place is teeming with them."

That much was true— Colossal did teem with the pests.

"Find the human. Bring it here. If it is addicted, I will dispose of it myself. But we cannot kill every human at our leisure. Not if we want our planet. Restrain yourself."

"Fine," Silarra looked down, deferential but clearly disappointed. Threxin's spikes flattened at her petulance. Toying with humans couldn't be that entertaining, could it?

"Go now. And don't cause a scene when you fetch it."

Threxin followed Renza's gaze to the exit. Renza enjoyed the pouting. But when he turned, Threxin saw his brother had not been looking after Silarra's departing rear. The command center door was already open before Silarra had even reached it, and a flash of familiar red fur slinked past.

"I forgot I'd summoned Orion Halen. He always has that red bitch in tow." Threxin knuckled at his temple again, hissing through his fangs.

"She does not understand us anyway, brother." Renza shrugged.

"She is too volatile. An example of what we do not want to risk." In some ways Threxin was more concerned about Orion Halen's female than Orion himself. At least his distant human-kin seemed to see the reality of his and his people's situation. His female had a persistent defiance in her eye, and he wouldn't put it past her to do something stupid.

Renza grunted.

"And there's the other one, following her like a damn slave, fetching her food," Threxin continued, thinking of his encounter with Kaia Halen's "assistant" at the canteen that morning.

"That one is perceptive."

"That one is an idiot."

There was something wrong with her, just like her mistress. When she first detected his presence that morning she froze on the outside, but inside she erupted. The sweat on her skin and the uncontrolled increase in her pulse signaled fear—which was normal and desirable. But she had already been in an agitated state when Threxin came across her in the eating place, before he made his presence known. She had been speaking to herself in hushed, aggressive notes as she attempted to extract illicit rations for her mistress. And then, right after her moment of stillness at the sight of him, the stupid female went straight to offering him meal suggestions. Threxin could hardly keep up with the haphazard way she reeled from one extreme to the next.

"She deduced your name from our tongue alone." Renza smirked.

"Barely."

"If I didn't know better, I would have said you looked flattered when you heard it."

Idiot Renza.

"You know it will continue, yes?" Renza changed the topic before Threxin could set him straight. "The mingling."

Threxin bared his teeth in an almost snarl. Purely mechanic. There was no bite to it in his heart. "Stupid. The lot of them. What do they need humans for? They break too easily and they grow obsessed. If we are not careful, we will have a human hive to subdue and I will need to vent them. And this Orion Halen may not break if I do."

Renza let Threxin spew his rant and when he was done offered the obvious explanation: "They are a novelty. Perhaps you isolate a few we can use. Then Silarra and the others can be amused with a smaller batch and leave the rest be."

Threxin hummed, tasting the idea. Renza was not always an idiot. Most of the time he wasn't.

"Have you made progress finding Orion Halen's sire?" Threxin asked for the tenth time in ten days.

Renza hissed through his fangs. "The bastard tucked him away somewhere. For all I know he's hiding him in the residence deck, or some shoqing closet."

Perhaps he killed him .

"Keep looking."

They had nine days until their first jump, to the edge of human space. The sooner Threxin could get the coordinates of his planet, the sooner he could resolve all seven thousand of his problems.

Nine ship hours later, Silarra had still not appeared with her toy human. Threxin needed her down on the CRD to deal with the remnants of the riot—mostly body disposal at this stage. More than that, her refusal to do as he said required swift consequence.

Silarra's cabin would be along the aft side of the ship, about midway down the hull. Threxin was almost frustrated to find that the ship did not contain any physical maps or guideposts—as with the Elssian , the humans had relied on the augmented vision provided by their brain implants to guide them. So he traversed with a map pulled up on a clumsy human tablet, attempting to get his bearings.

Threxin paused in a strange hallway, staring at the screen. He'd noted the entrance to a blood passage, which was what the humans called the secret corridors only commanders and their blood relatives could access. He would need to explore that later.

"Oh."

He turned toward the small voice that accompanied the familiar murmur of a door sliding open.

Orion's pet's pet. Again.

"You," he said. "Why are you out of your cabin?"

She stood in the doorway of a cabin. Over her shoulder Threxin glimpsed the small size of it and was immediately envious. She could keep an eye on all four walls. Her arms would be too short to touch them all, but he certainly could. If Threxin didn't need to keep a close eye on Orion Halen or remain within direct reach of a gene sampler, he'd have claimed one of those .

What were those patches of color in her cabin anyway? Fabric scraps and random items, from a glance.

"I was just… I heard running a few hours ago, and then nothing. I was worried…" She brushed the useless clump of fur from her eyes only to have it fall right back. He felt the sudden urge to shove it from her face. "Is everything okay?"

"Return to your quarters and stay there, female," Threxin warned. There would soon be bodies brought up from the riot on the lower deck. He didn't need this deck's humans to start asking questions.

"Sure, but… are you… lost?"

Did he look lost? Threxin straightened his spine and squared his shoulders. "No."

She glanced at the tablet in his hand. He tilted the map out of view.

"What sector number?" She asked with a knowing look he did not appreciate. She was nervous, as she should be. Her heartbeat jumped in the side of her throat, and the musky scent of salty human adrenaline was cloying. But still she wanted to… what? Help? Why?

"Cabin A-zero-five-four," Threxin offered gruffly, wondering what the human would do with the information. Perhaps this would be a good experiment. Would she send him in the wrong direction to meddle, like a good minion for the former commander? Was she even capable of providing fruitful guidance?

"Oh, that's just a few passages away," the female said, and he tensed as she stepped forward. But her hands were empty and a cursory examination of the volume of her clothing suggested she hid nothing. Nevertheless, Threxin's reaction made her halt and take a small step back once more.

The female pointed down the hall. "Go that way. Take the third right. It'll be a wider corridor. Follow that for about two hundred feet, and take a left when you see a common laundry chute." She eyed him when he tilted his head at the term. "A big hole in the wall. The cabin will be on your right. Anything that ends with an even number is on the right from that direction."

Threxin committed the directions to memory, extrapolating terms like "take right" and "take left" to mean "turn." His apertures flicked open and shut in quick acknowledgment, and she flinched at the motion, eyes widening momentarily.

"Get back in your quarters, female," he commanded, lowering his voice.

She did not disobey him again. He watched her back through the door of her cabin, the door shutting on her with a decisive hiss.