211. Only One Way
211
Only One Way
M aya
If circumstances were different, using this flamethrower would be the highlight of my year. Maybe instead of those indoor skydiving places they have for entertainment, the next big craze should be flamethrower ranges. Whoop!
My mood instantly sobers when I realize that within hours I’ll be immolating semi-human flesh, not for fun, but to keep myself alive. Yet again, I have to remind myself the only choice I have is to kill or be killed. I doubt anyone else in this forsaken game is having an existential crisis. They’ll all be happy to cut me down in the prime of life.
When I’m done lighting up the room, I turn to see A’Dar has pulled my computer from the backpack I’d stowed on the floor. I join him to see he’s poring over the TGN feed, watching the coverage of the cellblock.
The males are waking up, the clear pod covers are retracting, and the males are climbing out of stasis. I guess it doesn’t matter whether they know it’s been almost two thousand years since they came on board the ship. Whether it’s two thousand years or ten minutes, they’re going to want the same thing—vengeance on the Xenons who imprisoned them.
“Why were the pirates on your ship?” I ask. He never explained the backstory, and I hadn’t bothered to ask.
“We were here to invite Earthers to come to our planet. You were primitives then. We could offer you comforts, the ability to live free of fear from other tribes attacking you, and mates who would cherish you. Xenons mate for life, and once we’re in machta , we are incapable of cheating.”
He casts me a loving glance before continuing.
“The pirates were also here for Earth females. There was a growing commerce in females of your species. The pirates’ strategy was to beam up as many females as they could fit on their vessels and take them to the big slave auctions on Hyperion and Aeon II.
“We stopped them, pulled them inside with our tractor beam, and had already put them into cryo pods to keep them controlled when their ship emitted the gas that would have killed us all if we hadn’t gotten to our cryo pods in time. Then the final blow was the electronic pulse their ship emitted. It caused our systems to fail and sent our ship crashing.”
“So, they’re not just bad guys. They’re bad guys who steal and sell women. Earth women.”
“Aye.”
Good to know. I can’t have any compunctions about killing them.
For the swiftest moment, I allow myself to wonder what will happen when everyone is dead. Let’s say, by the weirdest chain of events, we manage to dispose of all our enemies. Then what?
TGN wants there to be only one person standing for The Game to be over. That’s not going to happen. There’s no way Anna, Emily, and I are going to kill each other. And what will TGN think about our three males? Mates , my mind corrects me.
And the thousands of other Xenons on the ship. What about them?
“The only way out of this is to get the ship working, right?” I ask, realizing A’Dar must have known this from the first minute, but it’s only dawning on me now.
“Mel’Kan will get the ship working. He’s the best in the fleet.” He winces as, I imagine, he realizes there may no longer be a Xenon fleet. May, in fact, no longer be any remaining humanoid life on Xenon. He said they’d been decades away from extinction.
“I sure hope so. And…” I shouldn’t allow my mind to even go here, but I do. “And what about the other Xenons onboard? You say they might go into machta because of Anna, Emily, and me? Our pheromones?”
Shit, there were months on end when I couldn’t even manage to get a date, and now two thousand guys are going to want to get it on with me? Kind of crazy, actually.
“We’re in the military, Maya. Machta or not, when we bring these males out of stasis, they will follow orders or they will wind up in the brig.”
He sounds sure of that now, but if he really felt that way, he would have told the computer to wake them all up, right?