Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

THREXIN

I t had been many long ticks, or hours , if he were to go by the precisely differentiated human measurements. Threxin had not yet deduced time spans of the ship and was unsure if they were into the subsequent day or not, but it almost did not matter. The point was, by the time Threxin entered the eating area, he was exhausted.

Renza pushed himself off the wall and raised a casual chin as he entered.

"Disposal?" Renza picked a talon between his teeth, eyeballing the humans, who had begun mustering themselves from the floors and walls a few paces away.

"Not yet," Threxin sighed. How he'd love to have several thousand fewer humans to deal with. If they were all as difficult as Orion Halen and his female had been, he may yet kill them anyway. But for now, he was still thinking. "Trouble?"

"No," Renza tilted his head to the negative. "That female who barged in before caused commotion again, but Silarra took care of it."

It took some time for Threxin to pick out said female in the throng, considering they all looked, for the most part, the same. But he remembered getting a closer look at her in the command center and had some vague aesthetic properties in mind.

"You," Threxin called to her. "To me."

He realized a few ticks too late that he did not issue his command in Universal, yet the human nudged herself upright and shuffled forward, anyway. Humans seemed perceptive to vocal tone.

To his surprise, she spoke first. "These people have children that are waiting."

Behind her, someone groaned.

"Children?" Threxin glanced at Renza.

"Offspring," his brother grunted in Apthian.

"Yes." The female brushed a tuft of shorter hair from her eyes, only for it to fall right back in her vision. Did it not grow properly there, to conceal her line of sight like that? "They're hungry and alone. Hell, all…" she quieted a little when she appeared to realize her own volume, "all of these people are hungry and alone."

This self-sacrificial tone grated on Threxin's nerves, but not enough to kick in his limiter. She spoke for the others as if she herself were not as hungry or tired as the rest of them.

Threxin failed to see the urgency. Soon enough the offsprings' lonely hunger may not matter, if he decided to dispose of the humans.

"How many habitats on this deck?" Threxin changed the subject to more important matters.

"Habitats… You mean cabins? Five hundred on the command deck." The female looked immediately to the uhyre behind him, eyes counting, deducing his meaning. She was shrewder than Threxin liked. "Of which about ninety are free, I think," she hastened to add.

So there were more than four hundred humans on his command deck.

"I require two hundred cabins for my cohort. "

"Two hundred?" The human's face fell, but she recovered quickly. "You'll… There's a little room down at the Common Residence Deck. Some of us can move there."

"All of you will move. Except those required to operate this deck."

He would not permit so many humans to remain in the same space as his cohort. Humans were weak, but he did not like their numbers. Besides, if he chose to reject Orion Halen's proposal, it would be easier to vent them if they were congregated in one location.

"They're all required ," the female frowned. "That's why they got cabin assignments up at the command deck in the first place. Handling all the shifts for each position, it's?—"

"Lengthen the shifts," Threxin interrupted. "Only fifty of those most critical to operations remain. You will tell me who they are."

" Fifty? Wait, me ?" The female balked, her head jerking back toward her people, who were looking various degrees of displeased. "I… I don't know that. I'm just Kaia's assistant. You should ask Orion, or…"

She glanced again at the group, but clamped her mouth shut, turning back to stare straight ahead, which landed her gaze just under Threxin's chest.

Threxin's limiter kicked in then to bring him down before he could finish clenching his fist. Nearly two hundred uhyre had arrived to follow him from the remnants of Apth. They were waiting, uprooted, in this foreign ship's docks to be assigned their living quarters. It would be far easier to simply count off the cabins they needed and kill their occupants, or herd them down to the lower deck. He was giving this pest, who was so concerned with the lives of her human cohort, more choice than any of them deserved. And here she was—complaining about it.

The frustration lasted not even a tick, but the female had noticed it with that unnerving shrewdness, staring at his hand where it had twitched. Threxin wondered if all her clueless floundering was an act.

He grasped her by the throat and lifted her into the air, glancing over her shoulder at the others. Her gasp was cut off as his fist tightened around the fragile windpipe, her pulse pounding frantic protests into his palm. "You will tell me who of your kind behind you can provide a list of essential humans. There is someone."

Her bony fingers found purchase in his wrist. She did not even try to fight—she simply dug useless blunt fingertips into his skin, attempting to relieve the pressure on her throat with impressive futility.

"I'll do it," a familiar voice made Threxin look behind him. The red-headed female approached, trailed by Orion Halen and Pteron behind them. "I'll get you a list."

"Kaia," the useless one managed to squeak. Threxin released his hold and let her stumble back, wheezing and rubbing her red-marked throat.

He had sent for them ticks ago.

"What took you so long?" Threxin asked Pteron in Apthian.

"Got lost," he grumbled.

Threxin sighed, raking his talons down the side of his neck.

"Let the people here go back to their cabins for now," Kaia said. "It'll take time to get your list anyway. It's zero three hundred hours on Colossal . I'll have it for you by zero six hundred."

Threxin's spikes bristled and he smoothed them atop his scalp, his apertures thinning. He noted how she pronounced the name of his ship. More C-oh-loh-ssal than C-lossal .

"I say." He did not like the vigilant look in Kaia's eye—one mirrored almost precisely by Orion behind her.

Turning back to Renza, Threxin switched to Apthian. " Track them. Especially the red bitch and this one. Her assistant, apparently. Make sure they try nothing." He looked back at the females, switching back to Universal. "And if they do, kill them."

Renza tilted his chin in assent as his cohort began the work of ushering the humans once more. Threxin had to think. A decision had to be made, and soon.

Threxin

He had gotten his list, and Renza had already herded the humans who were not on it down to the ship's common deck. No one complained save for one silly pest asking where they were to live once they got down there.

That was not Threxin's concern—Orion Halen could decide such trivial matters, considering he was the reason for the dilemma in the first place.

Threxin finally had a few ship hours to himself and spent them in his new cabin across from the commander's quarters, which Orion Halen and his female still occupied. The commander's cabins were needlessly large. Threxin did not know how the two humans cohabiting there felt comfortable with all the empty space. Threxin preferred to sleep somewhere he could touch all the walls and have no redundant entries or exits. His new suite was not that, but at least it wasn't as huge and disquieting.

He took an inhale of the hak some of his arrivals had brought. Microscopic crystals rasped pleasantly against the walls of his windpipe as he drew them into his lungs. The texture of it scratched something in the brain, igniting flickers of satisfaction that rolled through the body.

In part, Threxin chose this cabin because it would be prudent to remain close to the former commander. The humans did not appear idiotic enough to mutiny, but Threxin had no illusions that Orion Halen would give up his seat quietly either, and his red-haired female verged on open hostility.

And yet it meant the morning after his arrival, after rolling up the rest of his hak and exiting his quarters, Threxin would encounter the humans' insubordination as the first marker of his day, cutting his solitude short.

"I said my wife needs to eat," he heard Orion Halen snarling at the guard in the hallway, then saw him jerk his shoulder as Pteron cinched the human's arm more firmly. "Back the fuck away and come along if you want."

Pteron calmly yanked the disheveled male back when Orion Halen tried once again to sidestep him. His human-kin wore low-slung fabric pants and no top. He had no apertures on his body—not even faint ones. The skin taut over the planes of his hard muscle was almost infantile in its appearance, though even newborn uhyre had thinner patches of skin already visible a few days after birth. Soon enough the membranes would rip, exposing the first glow of their fresh inner essence.

When the human continued to be difficult, Pteron drew back a fist. Orion spotted the movement fast enough to remind Threxin that he wasn't entirely human. He ducked the blow and swung an uppercut into Pteron's chin, landing it with a thump that sent the guard stumbling a couple of steps back. Pteron was sometimes a little sloppy. He recovered immediately, of course. Orion grabbed the barrel of Pteron's weapon arcing toward his chest mid-swing, and that was when Threxin decided it was time to intervene.

"Enough." Threxin hauled Orion against the wall. He raised his chin at Pteron, who licked a black fang absently, gun pointed at the human's chest.

To make the mess worse, that was when Orion's toy female appeared in the doorway, looking like she was ready to jump into a fight herself. Threxin turned to her with mild amusement, and Orion did the same with unshielded fury in his eyes. He was not pleased with his plaything, who crouched in a fighting pose with her fists bobbing before her face.

Threxin had never witnessed exorin addiction, of course, only heard stories. He supposed it made sense, though. It clouded a human's judgment, making her reckless and stupid in her haze of need. He wondered how often Orion Halen was satiating her.

"We got a problem?" Kaia snapped, but her voice was as unstable as her hands.

Threxin turned back to Orion. "Your female is defective, no?"

"Say that again, crackly motherfucker," she snapped, though the threat was followed by a reflexive flinch when Threxin glanced at her. She must have sensed something in the split-second before his limiter kicked in. Threxin wondered if she was this perceptive because she had to be under Orion Halen's command. His kin, after all, had no limiter to temper him.

"Fuck, Kaia." Orion Halen ran a hand down his face, then shoved her behind himself. "She's just passionate."

Threxin grunted.

"My decision is made," he turned to the male. "You will direct me to the planet you claim to have found. If it is suitable, my cohort will settle it."

"And you leave the people on this ship alive."

"I say." Threxin inclined his chin with some reluctance. He peered at the shuffling of feet behind Orion. The female did not look pleased. Threxin leaned forward, pinning the former commander with a glare. "But if you betray me. Take me to a human hive. Attempt harm to me or my cohort. Direct me to an empty husk no better than Apth. Anything , anything other than the planet I will be happy to settle my cohort on, I will dispose of your people. Then I will dispose of your toy female. Then I will dispose of every living human in your world. And after you have witnessed all this, I will dispose of you. Do you recognize?"

"Yes," Orion Halen ground out through a clenched jaw. His eyes slid to his female, and Threxin knew he need not have bothered threatening Orion's people, nor even Orion himself. All he had to do was threaten her.

"The humans are your responsibility," Threxin added, straightening. "I do not deal with pests."

Of course, Threxin did not intend to keep the humans around if he could help it. He suspected Orion Halen knew that. That day, Threxin set one of his cohort to interrogate the pests, both here and down in their mass residential decks, about any knowledge of this planet Orion had promised him. There had been a minor stampede down in the residential deck when five of his cohort arrived to perform this questioning. Seven humans had perished.

After all that was under control and the bodies disposed of, humans claimed ignorance of Orion even having a destination in mind after Apth, much less where it was.

"Tell them to be a little more careful," Threxin told Renza when he had reported the ordeal.

Renza lifted his chin, but gave him a look of resigned helplessness. "They are so fragile."

" Try ," Threxin sighed, slumping back into his seat in the command center.

His eyes roamed the shellshocked workers on shift that morning. They were indeed extremely breakable.

"Renza," Threxin called after him as his brother turned to leave. He paused, head lolling to the side. "The ship's records say Orion Halen has a sire whose death has not been recorded. I suspect if anyone has more information, it will be him."

Renza's apertures twitched in acknowledgment. "I will find him."