Chapter 58

CHAPTER 58

ALINA

S he had woken up with her face in his chest and her leg twined with his own. The first sensation was of the still sticky but mostly dried fluids between her thighs. Alina rolled over and opened her eyes, staring at the dark ceiling of the cabin as she remembered the treatment he'd given her the night before.

The first time she had protested Threxin taking her while she slept was genuine. She found it weirdly hot, reminding her of the time he jerked off next to her in her bed. But logically it seemed like a transgression.

The second time she protested, it was a weak attempt at self-assertion that failed miserably.

She couldn't hide from him the way she could before—not with themselves so intricately linked. Before, with other people, Alina had been able to lock away her transmissions and block emote comms, keeping her privacy.

That wasn't an option with Threxin. He had become adept at drilling through whatever flimsy barrier she'd tried to put up, prying her mind open until he knew exactly what she wanted, even if she tried to pretend she didn't.

Every protest after that was more of a way to get a rise out of him. Alina realized she liked egging him on with her feeble attempts at a fight. Eventually he'd get agitated just enough to shove her face in her pillow or clamp a giant hand over her mouth—or better yet, occupy her mouth in other ways. She hadn't found the guts yet to admit to him that she liked that, but she was pretty sure he knew by now.

After all, he knew everything else.

They had three days until the jump, and Alina was the only human on the ship besides Orion and Kaia who knew about it.

She lay with that weight for a while, somehow complementary to that of Threxin's arm draped over her hip. The arm was a comforting possession. The knowledge of what was coming was dread and hope and fear squeezed into a little pit in her stomach all at once.

The whine in her ears didn't take long to register, but by the time it did Threxin was already bolting upright, already on his feet, already shoving himself into his trousers and clasping up. He did not bother with a shirt, his apertures thin as needles as he grabbed his laser rifle from the floor, already halfway out the door as he slung it over his bare shoulder.

"Stay here," he said without looking at her. And then he left.

Shit, did he lock me in again?

Alina was already scrambling into her clothes.

Threxin hadn't locked her in, though he gave her a look that said he wished he had when she showed up at the command center amid the commotion.

The radar was projected on the thermaview, and it took Alina several confused seconds to interpret what she was seeing.

Ships. Hundreds of ships surrounding the blinking blob of Colossal .

Renza was in the pit of the command bay next to Threxin. He had one hand encircling Kaia Halena and the other pressing a barrel to her temple.

Orion Halen was in the commander's seat.

Alina slinked toward the pit, ignoring Threxin's subcomm demands for her to get to safety.

What safety? She dismissed, increasing her pace.

"Hydra Company Goliath X, this is Orion Halen, Commander of Colony Ship Colossal . Explain yourself," Orion demanded.

For several long seconds, there was nothing but the faint hum of an open link. Then a rugged face appeared on the thermaview display. The woman had sharp eyes, hair slicked back along her scalp. Her neck was covered by a rigid collar that wrapped all the way to her throat, a golden pin glistening at the corner.

"Colony Ship Colossal . We have received credible information that you require assistance."

"You were mistaken," Orion said flatly. "We require no assistance. We are preparing for a jump and demand you withdraw all craft from our radius immediately."

"Our information has been verified. Are you under duress?"

Orion clenched the armrests, knuckles white, and Alina knew what he must be thinking.

What answer would help his people… his wife … make it out of this alive?

"Renza…" Alina choked out when she came to stand next to him, but the look in his eye when he turned his attention to her was hard, his finger tensing on the trigger.

There was no getting out of this. He was making a rational decision. The only rational decision for his kind, because it was his kind that he cared about. Alina shuddered, looking to Threxin, who watched Orion Halen intently as he spoke. Her legs took her to his side without her mind having even decided, her lungs having trouble getting air. As he grabbed her hand and squeezed, Alina noted a sampler in his port—he had plugged into a peripheral gene reader so as to stay out of sight of the human transmission.

"Warning shot fired by Colossal ," the weapons officer announced, eyes wide. "I… wasn't aware of this."

Threxin shot him a dark look and Alina realized he'd issued the shots bypassing standard controls.

"Who… who's out there?" Alina whispered the question out loud.

Threxin's apertures narrowed. "Everyone."

She glanced at the thermaview again, where the radar view had now displayed labels over some of the larger dots. Zenith … Icatha … Olympus…

Colonies. By the look of it, maybe all the colonies, plus thousands of peripheral craft.

Shit.

A transmission came through again.

"We have visual confirmation that you have uhyre on board the ship," the woman on the thermaview declared. "As you presently appear to be collaborating with the creatures, you leave us no choice. The threat to humanity must be eradicated."

The comms link closed without bothering to give Orion time to protest, and before the weapons officer even got a chance to announce anything, the ship did it for him: Multiple missiles incoming. One thousand seventy-five.

The ship shuddered with the first impact.

Shields compromised.

Orion sprang up from the commander's seat and was already halfway to Kaia, whom Renza had allowed to wrench out of his grip upon seeing Orion had not betrayed them. Threxin was no longer at her side but striding to take his place.

"Reroute power to weapons. Cover fire targeting colony ships, enable nuclear cannon," he commanded as soon as the sampler socketed itself in his wrist.

All those people.

All our people, Alina Argoud, he chided in her head, and he was right.

"It's no use!" Orion yelled from the pit, crushing Kaia Halena close.

"Quiet, human," Threxin snarled.

"You have to jump. Now. That's every colony ship in the known universe out there," he gestured to the radar display. "We cannot beat that. Threxin, you have to fucking jump if you want to live." He jerked his head toward Alina. "If you want her to live."

Threxin

Orion Halen was right. Alina Argoud had to live.

"You won't be able to reroute power to the nuclear cannon without siphoning it completely from the jump drive," Jump Drive Engineer Stharn was saying into his earpiece.

Threxin nodded, glancing to Orion Halen, then to Alina. He didn't need to beat them—he just needed to hold them off.

"All power to shields," he redirected. "You have to jump now." He muttered the coordinates Orion Halen had yelled from the pit into his comms device.

"We're… Our route is calculated for three ship days from now, from another location. We may hit?—"

"If you have any better ideas that result in us not being blown to bits by the nuclear cannon that I see powering up in that shoqing warship, I'm all fucking ears."

He'd said that too loudly. He realized that when all eyes rolled to him, color draining from Alina's face down in the pit .

Threxin tried to calculate whether he had time to have her Upload.

No. She subvocalized, and when she opened herself what he felt roiling off her wasn't fear, or regret, or hatred for what he'd gotten her into.

It was a yearning. A desire to crawl inside his mind and stay there until the end.

A desire for him to know .

He looked down at her in the pit, searching her faraway gaze. "I know."

She went to him, stumbling as another volley of hits shook the ship. He pulled her into his lap, strapping his harness around them both with her straddled at his hips.

"Jump drive hot," Stharn's voice announced in the earpiece.

He put his hand on the back of Alina Argoud's head, tucking her face into his neck so that she wouldn't see. Behind her shoulder, on the thermaview, Colossal was live predicting the blast radius of the incoming bomb. The craft surrounding them, still pelleting them with missiles that sent Colossal into a perpetual tremble, began to move backward out of the way.

The thermaview began to flicker, and for the first time the ship's hull exposed the space outside. Glinting specks of light, flickers of the assaulting ships, were clearly visible in its depths. And right ahead was an enormous white-blue fire—a perfect circle growing in the distance.

Still locking, Stharn communicated.

Jump.

We risk colliding with…

Do it now.

The circle of death before them grew blinding, and in some ways looking into that white-blue fire was like looking in the mirror. For just a fraction of a tick, Threxin saw the jump control panel reveal itself in the arm of his seat before everything went white .

Threxin slammed his fist down blindly and forgot about the jump, the ship, and the screaming. They were entirely unimportant, because the rest of his time would be dedicated to the human female pressed against him. He would dedicate it to delicate fingers clutching at him so hard that they pierced themselves on the spikes at his neck. The shuddering breaths washing over his neck and jaw, the weight of her pressed to him. His nerves were alight and open as they melded, and what a pity it was that no other human or uhyre on this ship would experience this particular Heaven right before their death.

His Colossal shrieked with a sound he'd never heard before as the white death engulfed them all.

Alina

Her ears buzzed incessantly, everything around her vibrating in a silent scream. Her fingers were needles. No… there were needles in her fingers.

Fire shot through her shoulder as she was jerked sideways, clenching even harder to whatever it was she was holding and gasping with the shock of pain that followed up her wrists.

Light registered behind her eyelids, vaguely. She opened her eyes to something black in front of her, dim flashes of red creeping into the edges.

Threxin.

She was still strapped in atop him, only now they were sideways, his hip crushing her thigh beneath it.

Something tightened at the back of her waist.

"Alina," he grunted beneath her, cinching his arm tighter .

She could see vague silhouettes moving all around them, but heard nothing over the buzzing in her ear. Slowly the buzzing turned to screeching… to burning… to fire.

If we jumped, this is normal, she subcommed through the NS.

Wasn't it?

The ship was always destabilized after a jump, but this… this felt different.

Another jolt sent silhouettes sliding along the floor, down and down into blackness.

Gravity failure.

Or gravity success?

"We are crashing," Threxin spoke her mind. He had fumbled futilely at the arm of the seat where the sampler should be. The sampler slot was open, but the needle was nowhere to be found. Alina tried to push herself up off his chest and reached over to help.

"Here," she said, wet fingers following the thin tube to its final point. "Here."

She clenched the needle in both fingers as she found his wrist, fumbling it in. It… it didn't stick like it should, but there was no time to guess if it worked.

What could he even do anyway?

She kept her fingers tight against Threxin's wrist, keeping the sampler in his port lest it should fall without the contact.

"I'm trying…"

Alina's stomach dropped with that falling and rising feeling, indicating a change of elevation. The trembling smoothed slightly, but only for a few moments before the ship jerked to its other side and then rolled over. Alina and Threxin hung upside down, strapped together as she fought to keep her hands stable, keep the needle in the port.

The next time the ship flipped she heard the union of screams, both in and out of the command center. She didn't know if it was people, or if she was imagining it, or if it was the ship itself in its death throes.

Alina screamed as the next jerk ripped the harness through her shoulder. God, she was sure it must've broken. But they were upright now, bouncing in a series of screeching jolts. The sirens suddenly went silent, giving way to an escalating roar of sound that came from outside the ship as opposed to in. A crushing growl not unlike the guttural roar of an uhyre.