Chapter 13
The trail led them in the opposite direction to the one Kellat expected.
Amaelii moved ahead of him with Delilah’s jumper in one hand, her head up and her nostrils flaring. She turned left where the docking spur ran right and cut through a maintenance junction he hadn’t known existed. Three corridors later, she stopped at a sealed hatch with no clan markings.
“This one.”
He frowned as he looked up and down the docking corridor. Sector four. This was the sub-level command had flagged.
“This is a private berth. Z’Saai’s ship is docked on the main spur. I checked the manifest.”
Amaelii shrugged. “The scent goes through this door. He didn’t take her to his own ship.” She pressed her palm to the panel beside the airlock. “It’s dead. Whose berth is this?”
He frowned. When in dock, all ships needed an active power and data connection from the airlock to the station’s system. He pulled the registry up on his comm. “The research delegation from Kaalas-Delta-Three.”
She nodded.
“The neural graft presentation. It was on this morning’s schedule, and they never showed.” Her eyes narrowed. “I marked it and thought nothing more of it.”
Kellat’s jaw tightened. What were the chances that the delegate hadn’t missed his presentation by choice?
Opening the panel, he grabbed the hatch release and hauled. Nothing.
“Odd.” He stepped back. “Power must be cut from the inside.”
“Let me.” Amaelii shouldered him aside, set her grip on the frame, and her fingers punched into the metal. His eyes widened as she peeled the metal of the hatch back. He’d known vorrtan were strong, but there was strong, and there was strong.
Her lips quirking, she dropped the ruined hatch at his feet. “After you, Healer.”
Chuckling, he inclined his head. “I’m not sure if I’m the point warrior here or the bait.”
She grinned. “I’ll leave that to your interpretation.”
The air inside the airlock and the corridors beyond was freezing, the air of a ship run on minimum power for days.
Hold on, kelarris. I’m coming.
The first warrior came out of the dark swinging.
Kellat ducked, letting the blade whistle over his head, and put his shoulder into the male’s gut as he drew his own blades.
The air left his opponent in a grunt as he slammed into the wall.
But before Kellat could finish it, Amaelii went past him in a blur, and the warrior hit the deck with his head facing the wrong way.
The warrior coming up right behind him met her claws and then the wall in quick succession.
He slid down it, babbling as he held his guts in his hands.
The two of them walked past him. The corridor opened into a cargo bay, big and dark, crowded with crates and the shadowed bulk of powered-down machines. Warriors came out of the darkness in numbers he didn’t bother to count.
Amaelii shifted.
Between one stride and the next, her skin split and her bones cracked as her whole body reset itself. The thing that landed in the middle of the enemy warriors stood taller than any male in the bay, with claws as long as his forearm. Throwing her head back, she howled.
Everything in Kellat froze. He’d read about the vorrtan howl; every Latharian had. Myth said it made even the Krin run.
Then she went silent and started killing, and the sounds in the silence were worse than the howl.
He left her to it and followed his instincts.
The marks on his wrists burned, the bond pulling at him like a hand around his spine.
He didn’t fight it. Instead, he followed it down a short corridor with open doors to stripped-out rooms. Warriors kept getting in his way, and then they stopped getting up.
He didn’t remember hitting them. Bone gave under his fists, blood splashed over his skin, but still he kept moving.
Then the corridor ended, and he stepped through a bulkhead door into a larger chamber. There was a cage in the middle, with a small figure huddled within it.
His breath caught.
“Delilah!”
She was on her knees, hands fisted in the skirt of his gown, and when she lifted her head, the look on her face nearly put him on the floor.
Her expression was flat, without hope. His heart ached savagely.
Somewhere in the dark between the conference hall and this cage, she’d stopped believing anyone was coming for her.
He crossed the space without thinking, wrapping his hands around the bars. Three fingers of cold alloy between him and his mate.
“Kellat.” Her voice cracked in the middle of his name.
“I’m here, kelarris,” he growled. “I’m here. I’m getting you out.”
“No, you’re not.”
He spun around at the sound of the voice. Rivaan Z’Saai stood in the doorway, warriors filing into the chamber at his back.
“Your papers on her were remarkable,” Z’Saai said. “I read them three times. I told you that much, but I didn’t tell you what I found.”
“Delilah,” Kellat said, keeping his eyes on Z’Saai. “Ignore him, I’m getting you out.”
“Touching but incorrect.” Z’Saai took a step closer. “The adaptive regeneration you spoke about, V’Raav. You called the neural reconstruction a healing response. But it wasn’t. It was an inheritance.”
“What do you mean by ‘inheritance’?” he sneered at Z’Saai. Anything to keep him talking. Every word… every step brought him closer to the reach of Kellat’s blades.
Z’Saai smiled. “My clan descends from the same line as your female. The old clan that built the drakeen link-band technology. We used a quirk of our genetics to bond with the machines instead of merely piloting them” He took another step forward.
“Stupidly, my forbears passed that information to the empire when we should have kept it for ourselves, consolidated our power within the empire as the B’Kaar did.
But we still have our genetics, so I took another look.
The DNA tweak for the drakeen-link was not the only thing there.
There were others. Just dormant. Waiting for the right key. ”
“What does that have to do with Delilah? She’s human.” His voice was flat as he measured the distance. Four strides… Three, if he pushed off the bars… and he could have his hands around Z’Saai’s throat. One snap and this would all be over.
“I read about her in your paper.” Z’Saai paced like a player on a stage, clearly enjoying his moment. “Her pathways rebuilt themselves instead of scarring. That’s not healing, Healer. That’s one of the dormant elements surging to life.”
Kellat bit back his groan. All those nights he’d spent hunched over her scans trying to work out what was going on and all those hours in the lineage archives seeing if he could find an answer, if something similar had happened before.
It had, but he hadn’t been able to find it because it was locked into a clan database.
So he’d documented it all, and this draanthic had read it in his paper like it was a gods-damned menu.
“So?” He shrugged. “That’s just genetics. Characteristics can lie dormant then re-express generations later.” Hundreds of generations in Delilah’s case, but that didn’t make it any less true.
“So I’m building a new variant of the link-band.
Not the pale imitation that the empire uses.
My link doesn’t share; it overrides.” Pride crept into Z’Saai’s voice.
“My warriors are linked permanently to their machines. Pilot and frame, fused into one perfect organism. They can’t desert.
They can’t be captured or turned. The link holds until death. ”
Even through the rage, the healer in Kellat flinched.
That wasn’t how drakeen worked. The link was severable by design, and had been severable for thousands of years…
because pilots died and machines were destroyed, so no sane person welded a living being to a machine in that way.
What Z’Saai had built was a perversion of the entire technology, and he described it with the pride other males used to describe their offspring.
“Still not seeing what the draanth this has to do with my female.”
Where the hells was Amaelii? Kellat knew better than to try and look past Z’Saai and tip him off that he wasn’t alone.
“Her DNA carries the markers I need to push the variant further than the old clan ever dreamed.” Z’Saai glanced at Delilah in the cage the way a farmer glanced at livestock. “She and her daughters will breed generation after generation with the new link DNA, and create the army I need.”
Close enough. Kellat moved.
His fist took Z’Saai in the throat. It was a bad angle, the blow half-formed, but that didn’t matter. Z’Saai staggered back, hands over his throat as he choked. Kellat’s knee snapped up into his gut and folded him in half.
Z’Saai’s warriors surged forward, surrounding him. He put his elbow through the first one’s jaw and his heel through the second one’s knee, shoving them out of the way to grab Z’Saai again.
Yanking the male up by the robes, he hit him. And hit him again over and over, until blood slicked his knuckles… the mask of the calm, professional healer dissolved under rage.
This male had threatened his female, had taken his female, and the primal male part of Kellat wouldn’t be appeased until the deck under his feet ran with his blood.
Somewhere behind him Delilah screamed, but he couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop.
He didn’t realize she was screaming a warning.
The drakeen came out of the dark, hitting him from three sides at once.
Metal cracked his ribs and something deep gave way.
He groaned, knocked away from Z’Saai, and an arm hooked around his throat.
He was hauled backward, his spine bending wrong as agony flooded every cell in his body.
A third one swept his legs from under him, and Kellat went down under the weight of the machine, crushing the air out of him.
The deck was cold against his cheek as he roared, trying to buck the machine off. But it was no good, he is vision narrowed to a grey tunnel with Delilah at the end of it. Her mouth opened in a scream as darkness crowded the edges of his vision.