Chapter Forty-Three
Aphrodite wasn’t sure when she stopped screaming.
She wasn’t sure when her lungs stopped providing air or when her breathers stopped working.
However, she was wheezing for air, clutching her data pad, watching Buddy’s view as he dove for a swallowed Xexis.
The last thing she saw before Buddy’s entire system went dark was Xexis, one hand up toward the drone.
His suit was cracked and everything riddled with bite marks.
Then someone knocked on the bay doors. Rexna slid away from Aphrodite, knelt on the floor and readied the door. “Lights ready?”
“Ready!” Kern barked, preparing the flash wall for the pack to pass through.
Rexna ripped open the bay doors and Aphrodite was washed in wall-to-wall light. She couldn’t see any shapes or any movement till Rexna cried, “Door!”
“Door!”
Aphrodite stayed completely still as something stood before her.
The lights dimmed, she looked up at the shapes looming over her.
Inch by inch, the room reformed and three Vroz hunters stood before her, all three of them carrying a part of Xexis.
At first, she worried she’d find him in pieces.
But, as they set him down before her, she realized they’d all been too exhausted to have one person carry her Mate.
He was whole. He was breathing. He was alive.
“Vels Zhet,” she breathed, peering up into the faces of her pack as they peeled their helmets off one by one.
Kiefgr even tumbled to his backside, clattering to the ground.
Reevar collapsed against the wall nearest him.
Grooug stood, body hunched and there were clear dents—bite marks, like Xexis’ all over his armor.
“Vels Zhet, Mphronatch.” He reached over and put a hand to her shoulder.
“What? Why?” she whimpered.
“Without your enhancements, we’d be dead.” Reevar slid down the wall like a squeegee, squeaking the whole time and leaving a thin line of moisture behind as he did.
“Kern! Move the ship!” Rexna barked, the rest of the crew scrambling to move the ship. It had begun to shake in its stasis.
Aphrodite reached a hand to her mate and slowly undid his helmet. She savored the sound of it hissing as it released its hold. When she set it aside, she found his mouth of pincers and razor-sharp teeth open, air brushing in and out of it.
Then, as all four of his arms slipped to the side, she saw the crushed remains of Buddy.
Her heart stopped. It didn’t skip a beat; it fully stopped for a moment.
The tangled, crunched pieces of the drone lay abandoned across his chest. Aphrodite’s hands trembled as she reached out to the last piece intact, his bulbous head and lifted him slowly.
“Buddy? You…you in there?” She didn’t realize she was crying until her lips cracked, and she licked them nervously.
Salt and misery filled her mouth as she cradled the cracked exoskeleton of her drone.
Aphrodite glanced at her data pad. No signal.
She stared at Buddy, begging, “Please, please, Buddy, you gotta wake up. I can get you a new drone…please.”
The drone’s corpse cracked open more like an eggshell and shattered around her as it tumbled from her hand. The only thing left was dust.
“No…” She couldn’t breathe. Nothing worked, even as the breathers struggled and her suit whirled, she was hollow again.
“Mphronatch.”
Aphrodite glanced up from the barely rising chest of her mate to the hunter kneeling before her. Grooug bowed his head to the chunks of metal that were Buddy.
“Buddy honored the hunt.” Grooug raised his head.
Kiefgr shuddered, tears spilling from his massive obsidian eyes. “He charged valiantly in there. We weren’t sure the cannon was going to work again, the Brexzkit were clogging it up.”
Aphrodite lurched forward, unable to control herself.
In years of training her heart to calm, to rein it in, to keep it contained, Aphrodite Kerso was unable to control the wail that broke out of her mouth.
The other hunters bowed their heads, helmets clutched to their chests, speaking in unison like it was a funeral.
She fell over Xexis, clinging to him as she screamed.
For her crew that she hated, she cried and was haunted by their faces. For the station she left behind for a life in the stars and a mate, she lost sleep and a piece of her soul. But for Buddy? She broke inside. Something stopped working as she dug her fingernails into Xexis’ broken armor.
The hunters left her as the ship began to move.
As it shuddered into gear and ripped through the smog, they joined the crew and gave her the space.
Xexis, still breathing but unconscious, and Buddy’s corpse in her grasp, she lay there on the loading bay floor.
Her wails stopped when her throat cut out.
Tossed over her mate, she stared at the bay doors. Raw and hollow, she felt nothing but the soft brush of air against her moist skin.
Steadily, something else registered, a different touch.
A shift…a tiny…minuscule brush of something.
Like feeling of a cloud. Aphrodite slid back slowly, glancing down at the shredded armor beneath her.
Something hazy and soft, the color of crystal-blue water but if it were made of smoke, trickled out between the platelets of Xexis’ armor where his arms had been so tightly clutched.
Aphrodite took a light breath in, breathers whirling. Placing a hand next to the hazy cloud, she watched it tumble into her palm.
“Buddy…” she whimpered, searching for answers.
It wasn’t like the Brexzkit, but at the same time, the consistency was the same.
Aphrodite scrambled backwards on her one free hand and kicked with her legs across the floor.
She grabbed for anything—anything. Her fingers came upon a wrench first that she tossed into her lap.
Slapping at the chest, her eyes never leaving the floating wisp in her hand and Xexis on the floor.
As she grabbed ahold of something, round and metallic, she wrenched it out from the case it was in.
Bite.
Aphrodite screamed, lurching away as she tossed a metallic orb across the room.
Her right hand bled profusely as she held it up before her.
Like she’d put her hand in a shark’s mouth, her skin was torn and red with blood pumping out of the wound.
The blue blob in her hand trembled. Aphrodite steadied her attention on the oil-slick-colored thing slinking out from around the orb.
“Feeeeeeeeed.” It lurched toward her at first then toward Xexis. The entire blob was sizzling from the lights inside the lab, but it wasn’t enough to kill it.
“No!” She choked on her own scratched throat.
Blinding, white hot pain surged through her as she grabbed the wrench in her lap and launched for the blob.
She swung wildly, ignoring the pain. Stabbing at it, breaking it up into pieces, she smashed it like the wrench was doing anything.
Clang, clang, clang. She scooped it up by the front of the wrench and tossed it across the room. “You. Don’t. Get. Him!”
“Feeeeeeed!” it shrieked in its hurt rabbit voice, slumping forward.
Buddy wobbled in her hand as Aphrodite scrambled backward, putting herself between Xexis and the infected thing.
“Mprhonatch!”
A blaster went off and the tiny creature sizzled away to ash.
Aphrodite sat, back to Xexis’ massive chest, Buddy’s glob held above her head, panting for air.
Rexna leapt down into the area as Jruc, her drone scanned the room. Red lights went off near the wall and the two dove in, stabbing and blasting off more of the infected Brexzkit that seemed to seep in through the walls.
“Are we out of the void yet?” She scrambled to grab her data pad.
With one hand held high, she clawed her data pad open and stuffed the blob inside.
It sank in like cream melts into skin, and disappeared among the wires and chips.
Rexna stepped over to her as she crammed the device back together and begged it back on.
It chirped, text fluttering across the screen.
Hello, Aphrodite Kerso.
Aphrodite gasped, clutching the data pad to her chest and flopping back against Xexis.
“We should be leaving it now.” Rexna dropped to the floor next to her, sighing heavily.
Aphrodite grinned wildly, plucking her data pad up and staring at it.
I am very tired…I think I should sleep.
“Sleep, Buddy,” She laughed hysterically, slumping down further till her head was propped up against Xexis. “You’ve earned it. We won, Buddy…we won. We’re going home.”
She’d never been so happy to go home.