Chapter 24 Syko
SYKO
The animals had escaped the zoo. Hopefully they were keeping Snyder busy.
My entire being throbbed with urgency, desperate to connect back with Holly. My mate. Wallow in her pleasure. Cover her with my scent. Fill every inch of her with cum until it dripped from every orifice she possessed. Her belly round with my seed—and then my youngling.
Stupid biology. Now is not the fucking time for fucking.
The two dyni entered the hold without triggering any alarms. Like most Ankylosaurus bases, Nihil moved slower than I’d like, though the shield seemed to be doing its job.
The pair finally made it outside my prison door.
I couldn’t see them with my physical eyes, but I could smell them through the tungsten.
Kaos smelled… off. If I didn’t know he was walking, talking, and breathing on the other side of the thick prison cell, I’d swear he was dead.
On the temporary channel with him, all I felt was pain.
Bone deep, agonizing, maddening pain at the cellular level.
I needed his particular skills the most to escape, but I regretted waking him up if this was his reality.
:Stand back as far as you can,: he said. :If a drop gets on you, it’ll continue to eat through your flesh until the acid is excised, or all organic material is consumed.:
:Even through a meter of tungsten?:
:Absolutely. I’m not even sure I can control the stream enough to avoid leaking through the entire hull.:
:Noted.: I touched Rekt’s private grid. :Develop a contingency plan to get Holly to a survival pod in case of hull breach.:
:Me? I’m a fucking medic not—:
:Figure it out,: I retorted. Then I shut him out.
I’d rather block him like an asshole so he didn’t hear my emotional instabilities if this failed to work.
Though he probably would need a little help, so I plugged Terroar into the medic’s channel.
Between the two of them, they’d come up with a solid plan, and if I couldn’t trust Terroar, then we were already dead anyway.
:I don’t need the door destroyed,: I told Kaos. :Just the locking mechanism. It’s keyed only for Snyder’s access with a passcode nothing else on the ship uses.:
:Understood.: He laughed awkwardly, a sheepish tone creeping into his channel. :I’m going to try something unorthodox then to make sure the acid is as finely targeted as possible.:
Cramming my bulk back into the rear corner as far as possible, I scanned all the ship’s alerts while watching Kaos through our temporary channel.
NSTG-A has entered the training chamber.
HITMS has entered the training chamber.
CDC has entered the training chamber.
XAS has entered the training chamber.
HITMS engaging NSTG-A in combat.
SPTD engaging UGRR in combat.
Good. I hoped there would be so many updates that Snyder might miss any alarms we triggered. Detection was inevitable. What mattered was how long we had to get to Holly before the ship blew.
Kaos moved closer to the door, ducked beneath the refraction shield.
Acid burned up his throat, but he only allowed a small amount to fill his mouth.
It burned, destroying his own flesh, even as his body began healing the trauma.
His blackened tongue flicked out in a quick lick over the door’s control panel, and then he swallowed the corrosive fluid back into his stomach.
His first stomach, one of four, to be exact.
Though the fourth stomach was barely just a bud, not quite formed.
:Looks like that worked.: He stared at the panel, letting me see through his eyes. Metal bubbled and dripped down the door. The panel shorted out in a series of sparks. :Trying manual override.:
Warning: BGR++ lock failure. Cell escape eminent.
Sirens screamed. Red lights flashed. I didn’t have to tell him to fucking hurry. He heaved the door upward, grunting with effort. Nihil tried to help with his armored head, but he didn’t dare shift back and risk someone seeing them on a camera.
I delayed shifting as long as possible too. If Snyder saw the alert and checked the cameras, I wanted him to see me still safely trapped. But as soon as the dyni managed to get the door a few inches off the ground, I shifted to my humanoid shape and threw myself toward the small slit of light.
Kaos roared with effort, both of us fighting pain. I partially shifted my arms, trying to dig claws into the tungsten to pull myself through. If he slipped—
I refused to think about it. At least it’d be a quick death.
Nihil seized my arm in his teeth and helped drag me through. Lost a little skin but not bad. Keeping low beneath his shield, I ordered, :Let’s go.:
Panting, Kaos braced his hands on his knees, his head down. :Need a moment or I’ll puke, and that will be very, very bad.:
Every delay made me want to snarl and snap and rend but I kept my jaws locked tight.
The dynos had saved my life. The least I could do was not bellow at him to hurry the fuck up when he was sick.
He’d swallowed down corrosive fluid that ate through tungsten like it was no big deal.
Yes, it came out of his own stomach, but his mouth and esophagus were raw.
:Damn,: he said on our channel. :The melted metal had enough acid mixed in it to start eating through the floor. Is there anything beneath this level?:
:Nothing but space.: I switched to the XAS’s channel, passing along images of the acid eating through the tungsten floor and Kaos’ file. :Compute how long we have until hull breach.:
Kaos moved closer to Nihil’s opposite shoulder, and we made our way slowly back toward the lift.
:Without exact measurements—:
:An estimate,: I retorted. :Five minutes or thirty?:
:Approximately seventeen minutes at the current rate of disintegration.:
It’d taken Nihil and Kaos nearly twenty minutes to reach the hold at their current pace.
:We’re not going to make it at this pace,: I told them both. :When we exit the lift, shift so we can run like hell.:
Nihil lurched forward in a faster shuffle, rumbling the floor with his massive weight. We made it to the lift, and I hit the call button.
A laugh echoed through the panel. “Ah, what a brilliant effort, BGR++. If I were still a professor, I’d give you an A for creativity. However, your overall grade on this exam is definitely an F.”
Snyder.
Fucking bastard.
HOLLY
“Okay, Snyder. I met your choice. It didn’t work out.”
Lies. But hopefully he couldn’t measure the unfortunate wetness between my thighs. Fucking hell. I’d never gotten so wet before. Especially from a brief interaction with a guy I didn’t even fucking know.
No answer. Guess he was being pissy.
Grumbling beneath my breath, I started walking, even though I had no idea where the exit might be or how large the chamber was.
The raptor guy ran for quite a while, though maybe we’d just been going around in circles the whole time.
I hadn’t been able to see very well around the giant hulking shoulders.
Which only made me remember his weight pressing me against the rocks.
Yum. I mean, Ugh. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong man?
Maybe not. Or maybe my body was just confused and needy after missing Syko. How many days had passed? I had no way of knowing. Snyder could have kept me knocked out for days at a time, and I wouldn’t have known.
I hated feeling so out of control of everything. Even my own stupid body.
As I walked, I jerked on the bracelet again, trying to work it down over my thumb or pry open the clasp. No luck.
Something rustled in the bushes ahead, scattering coffee berries across the pathway. “Which of you is there? Chonk?”
Larger trees swayed and cracked as something big pushed through. Heavy footsteps thudded the ground like an elephant. It wasn’t running or light, so not Chonk. So it had to be Rekt.
“I’m okay.” Relief quickened my step. “Just a little banged up.”
A heavy, rattling breath made me jerk to a halt.
More steps. Heavy, plodding, methodical.
Not scrabbly like I imagined Rekt’s crab legs would move, especially through such thick undergrowth.
A head poked out of the branches. Very lizard like, so not the triceratops of Rekt’s base.
Green. Too high up off the ground to be the raptor, I thought.
But not tall enough for one of the long-necked sauropods.
“What’s going on? Snyder? Hello? Which one is this?”
“Well, well, well,” Snyder finally answered. “It seems as though you’re going to have the opportunity to put that squad together quicker than we originally thought, Miss Price.”
“What does that mean?”
The dynos pushed more of his body through the trees, revealing triangular plates down his neck and spine. Stegosaurus base.
Gulp. The only stegosaurus base in the group was the one blended with spider DNA.
His head swung back my direction. Eyes. He has too many eyes.
A whole row of faceted glittering black eyes dotted across his lizard head.
Frozen in place, I could only stare as he neared, stepping out of the tangled jungle into the open pathway. First, two spindly spider legs, touching the ground far ahead of his body. Then the four ponderous legs of his base. Two shorter spider legs near his tail stump.
Stump. Not the longer, familiar stegosaurus tail. Arched upward slightly. Ready to fire.
Because he had spinnerets poised at the shortened tip.
I bolted sideways into the thickest brush, pushing my way through scratchy branches. Thorns. I didn’t even care. The last thing I wanted was to end up trussed in webbing like Frodo in Shelob’s lair. That scene had given me nightmares for a week.
Dodging larger trees and stumps, I ran flat out for a few minutes until my brain had a chance to calm my body down. I didn’t hear his footsteps behind me. He wasn’t chasing. He wouldn’t be able to shoot webs at me through all the trees I’d run through. I should be okay.
Panting, I paused beneath a palm tree. What the hell was going on?
I didn’t ask Snyder again. For one thing, I didn’t want to give my location away if the NSTG-A was still in pursuit, but for another, I couldn’t trust Snyder to give me a straightforward answer anyway.
All he cared about was his breeding program.
But why start throwing other dyni into the mix?
Unless it wasn’t his doing.
Run. Syko had said. Act afraid.
Again, my first instinct was to reach out to him and demand answers. But if Snyder was able to monitor my brain activity—and I had to assume he could, especially after I’d told him I’d heard Syko’s words in my head—then that might throw a wrench in our escape plans.
Though it pained me to say “our” when I had no idea what the hell was going on.
Now that I wasn’t as panicked, I could hear something in the distance over my own frantic breathing. Thunder. No, crashing. Low roars. A fight, maybe? Were the dyni fighting each other for the right to mate with me?
Ugh. This is getting scarier.
Or hotter, my body insisted.
Damn it.
Common sense told me to book it as fast as possible in the opposite direction.
But this jungle was all a simulation anyway.
The chamber couldn’t go on forever. I certainly wouldn’t be able to outrun any of them if they were determined to catch me, even with my improved physical abilities.
They were engineered to be fast and deadly with crazy weapons I had no hope of matching.
I’d done the run and act afraid gig. I didn’t like it.
Maybe it was the hormones talking. Or maybe I was just done with Snyder’s bullshit. I started running again but this time, toward danger. Mimicking the raptor, I tried to be light and quiet, using the plants as much as possible to conceal myself. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there.
But I was tired of not knowing what the hell was going on.