Chapter 18 Rekt
REKT
“If you need me…” I started to say, but Holly disappeared.
Breathing hard, I tried to pull myself together. Calm my racing heart rate. Organize my thoughts.
Bury my emotions deep from Snyder’s agent.
I’d already compromised his mission. I needed to keep my traitorous thoughts restrained to brain space they wouldn’t consider looking in order to secure my mission.
Protect Holly at all cost.
Pushing to my feet, I strode over to the exit where they’d allowed me to enter the training area. I kept my body loose, my hands relaxed at my sides. I retracted the implement, wishing I’d had permission to sample her blood. Then I could hold another piece of her inside me.
Her saliva would have to do. For now. Her taste melted on my tongue, sinking into eager, hungry cells.
I didn’t need to feed on anything but her.
I didn’t think they would be able to extract her saliva since my cells had already absorbed hers.
Hopefully any mrion contamination was so minimal they couldn’t detect it.
I didn’t want to lose a single cell she may have given me, and a small amount would be nearly impossible to discern unless they had new screening techniques not in my databanks.
The mating had begun, for better or worse. Hopefully the alpha would allow me to remain a secondary mate on our squad.
The illusion of a cliff wall shimmered into a transparent doorway. Snyder waited on the other side. He laughed, shaking his silver head. “Do you honestly believe the BGR++ is going to let you live long enough to mate? Maybe we should drop you into his cell now and see how he reacts.”
“If he cares at all about Holly, he will let me live. If he kills me, then he’s not a fit mate for her anyway.”
Snyder led the way down a tungsten-lined hallway. Heavy doors slid shut behind us every ten meters, their panels turning red. Ten locked doors to reach the lift. “There’s no question he’s not a fit mate for her. He’s impossible to control, and he nearly killed her already.”
We stepped into the lift. Rather than returning to the sleep chambers, he requested the hold.
I blinked, wiping my frontal cortex of any response or log that could be noted. Though I began building a detailed map in my amygdala. Since it was an area typically used for emotions, I hoped the agent wouldn’t think to check those databanks.
Just the simple request to move to the hold told me far more than Snyder probably meant to reveal. This was no planet-side facility but a ship.
Which meant their security was even more precarious.
Life support systems could be easily compromised.
The entire ship could be destroyed with an inconvenient asteroid puncture in a vulnerable spot of the hull.
Though a ship did allow this laboratory to be mobile.
Was it a converted freighter, or a decommissioned military fighter?
“Your curiosity is leaking into the grid despite your best intentions,” Snyder said.
“You chose me as a candidate because of my intelligence. If this ship is easily destroyed, we’ll lose Holly. That must not occur.”
“A simple kiss and you care so very much for our little human damsel in distress?”
Nothing about that kiss had been simple. Another demonstration of an agent’s lack of emotional understanding. His controllers, whoever they may be, certainly tried to convey emotions through the agent, but it was a poor substitute for true empathetic interactions.
Even more importantly, the controllers weren’t dyni and didn’t have even basic comprehension of what it meant for us to be in Dynosauros.
Despite being completely engineered, I still yearned for a squad.
The camaraderie of a like-minded team working together to accomplish our mission.
Let alone the biological urge to procreate and continue my species.
Even spliced and manipulated DNA wanted to live long enough to be passed down to the next generation.
The agent and his controllers had access to DSC’s immense library of information accumulated from across the universe, yet they couldn’t understand why I might care about Holly so quickly.
My mate. The very reason for my continued existence.
Even though we’d only met, the mating bond was actively developing, or I wouldn’t have climaxed so easily.
Dyni accepted into Dynosauros didn’t have sex drives any longer, unless we were deliberately prepared for breeding by allowing our hormones to develop.
We were chemically altered and controlled, basically castrated with drugs so we could better focus on the mission at hand.
Mating overrode those chemicals and released a surge of hormones that would only increase exponentially. Mated dyni gained muscle and mass rapidly. The better to protect and please their mate—and continue the species by breeding.
Which only led me to other pressing questions. If the BGR++ wasn’t controllable, then his hormones were likely already compromised. “For Holly’s safety, I feel I should warn you the BGR++ may come into rut. Is there a way we can regulate his hormones?”
Snyder let out another sarcastic laugh. “Unless you’re willing to examine him and administer the regulation controls yourself, then no.
He won’t allow any agent or control to be placed upon him.
Even if you managed to dose him, I doubt they’d work.
We were barely able to sedate him long enough to extract Holly from his cell in one piece. ”
The lift door opened, and sound waves crashed into my senses, making me stagger. The booming, sonorous rumble of a pissed-off alpha filled the air with buzzing, thick energy. He bellowed and crashed against the tungsten holding cell, making it so difficult to hear that Snyder switched to the grid.
:You will be quarantined down here with him. If he breaks out, you’ll be the first he’ll kill. So it’s in your best interest to try and calm him down.:
I could only stare at the agent. Dumfounded.
That was their response to a dynos going into rut?
Put the medic in a tungsten cell and hope for the best?
:Rut is extremely painful. It’ll drive him mad.
Nothing will ease his suffering except getting inside his mate and staying, ideally until she’s bred.
It’d be kinder to terminate him if you don’t intend to let him near her again. :
Snyder paused at the adjacent cell where the BGR++ bellowed. :He’s already insane. We’ll save him as a last resort if the rest of our candidates fail to accomplish the goal in a safe and timely manner.:
:If he’s driven mad by rut, he’ll kill her.:
:That’s a chance we’ll have to take.: Ignoring me, Snyder pressed a code into the keypad and the cell door opened. :Once you or another candidate is successful, we’ll terminate him.:
I stepped inside the cell. What else could I do? Another agent waited inside, this one a medic with implements like mine. He connected one over my heart and another at my temple and began a full-body scan.
Closing my eyes, I stood quietly, my breathing slow and measured.
I entertained myself by replaying Holly’s scans, watching the way her neural network shifted in such a short amount of time.
Truly miraculous. Sinking into the inner workings of her biological systems so different from mine.
Creating baselines in my own databanks for her statistics.
Still connected to me, the agent responded on the grid. :Scan complete. No mrion contamination detected.:
I didn’t allow myself to respond in any way.
:We’ll give you another scan in twenty-four hours,: Snyder replied. :Dismissed.:
The medic disconnected and exited the cell.
The door slammed down from the top and the lock initiated to red.
I couldn’t hear their footsteps as they retreated but I held myself motionless, making myself focus on the baseline charting as long as possible.
This cell would be heavily monitored. Sound.
Video. I didn’t look around to note where the cameras might be.
I probably wouldn’t even be able to see them, let alone reach them unless I extended my implements.
The tungsten would prevent me from shifting to my beast.
The BGR++’s roars shifted subtly, dropping to an even lower frequency.
My teeth ached, my bones vibrating with intensity.
The longer I listened, the more I could differentiate the sound waves he generated.
His head and claws pounded and screeched on the walls.
Another truly miraculous engineering feat.
There wasn’t any record of other dyni holding their beasts inside a tungsten cell.
His alpha roars were deep and furious, a terrifying sound which would make creatures go still and silent for kilometers around if heard in the wild.
More importantly, also bring any lesser dynos to heel beneath his command.
I had no problem whatsoever accepting him as alpha. Even if he killed me.
But there was something else. A thread so bass, so low frequency, even as a dynos bred to communicate with my own kind, I barely understood it.
“Connect me.”
I blinked rapidly several times, waiting for the skip in my heart rate to steady in case the agents were able to monitor my biological responses through the tungsten.
I didn’t think that was possible, but I refused to take a chance.
Allowing my shoulders to slump, my head drooping forward in defeat, I slowly moved to the far opposite wall from the BGR++ and slid to the floor, as if I needed to be as far away from him as possible.
Sound waves reverberated off the tungsten, making my temples throb in time with my heart. Which hopefully helped disguise my thoughts off the grid. I allowed the pain to fill my frontal cortex logs, while I focused on the problem at hand.
Connect him. To what?
The grid? How? I didn’t have a connection with him to plug him into the ship’s grid.
Though I was surprised Snyder left me tapped into the grid.
Again, a sign that despite his controllers’ wealth and power, they didn’t work with Dynosauros squads often, or they’d never have left me to my own devices with the ship’s network at my fingertips.
I didn’t have to be a Comms specialist to delete crucial controls or turn off access before anyone noticed.
Sure, they’d terminate me, but it’d take time for them to track and untangle the issue to me.
Without something to connect me to the BGR++, I couldn’t plug him into the grid.
Or could I? Because we did have something between us.
Holly.
If she’d been able to give me a small amount of mrions… They’d be able to connect to any of the BGR++’s. They were raw Sirian cells. They could interface with anything. Especially each other.
The agent hadn’t noted any contamination but that didn’t mean they weren’t there inside me.
Closing my eyes, I rested my head against the wall.
I pictured Holly in my mind. The indescribable taste of her skin, soft and delicate on my tongue.
Her scent. Sweet blossoms I couldn’t identify, mixed with the brutal reek of her alpha.
Holding her in my head, I brought up her medical scans and submitted a projection request to estimate how long until her follicle matured. While my internal Sirian network churned through those calculations, I fired off a low priority query.
Are any of Holly’s mrions available?
A mrion pinged back almost immediately. One tiny, precious dot against the formidable Sirian universe. If I hadn’t been deliberately looking for its response, I wouldn’t have noticed it, even in my own internal network.
I fought down the urge to immediately connect to her.
Linking with her mind would be as indescribably pleasurable as tasting her mouth, but I had to assume Snyder’s agents were monitoring her even closer than me.
They might be scanning her this very moment, looking for anything unusual in her developing neural network.
But they wouldn’t be monitoring the BGR++. They couldn’t.
Connecting to him would be easy now. In fact, he could have connected to me first via these mrions. So there had to be a reason he wanted me to make the connection…
The ship’s grid. Connecting to that single mrion would give him access to everything. But if the agents discovered it too quickly, we’d both be terminated before we could get to her.
Think. I growled to myself. You were selected for your intelligence!
I only knew medical solutions. Anatomy. Disease. Biological systems. The science of respiration, digestion, and reproduction. Not network capabilities.
But I had to admit that wasn’t true at all. I’d already been disguising my “curiosity” as Snyder threatened to terminate me with other queries.
Obfuscation. High calculation models would keep my frontal cortex busy—and the grid at the same time. If I could keep the network busy, no one would notice a new connection. As long as we were careful.
I fired off more queries.
For each of the remaining candidates, project probabilities of affinity with the human female based on emotional and mental needs, not just physical compatibility.
Begin calculation by hour of fertilization probabilities with the developing follicle noted in the last medical scan.
I wracked my brain, trying to come up with more queries that would consume high amounts of memory and resources.
Given what we know about the two human females with Mrym fragments, compute the probability there are other yet undetected mrion fragments in the human population on Earth.
Ha. That would certainly take a while to resolve given the size of Earth’s population.
Finally, I sent a low priority command to that single precious mrion.
Connect to the mrions inside the BGR++.
A giant mental fist seized me in a chokehold. :It’s about fucking time.:
Then a flurry of commands flowed between us. So many I couldn’t begin to track them. I just panted softly, my body lax against the wall, letting him work through me. No alarms blared, so whatever he did must not have been detected by the agents.
Yet.