Chapter 13 #3
He coughed, dragging in another breath. He rolled onto his side, one hand braced against the deck, his whole chest heaving like the air was fighting him on the way in. His eyes opened, and she watched his face change as he looked up at her in the machine standing over him.
He was a healer, and he was Latharian. He’d read her scans a hundred times, mapped everything her brain had done, so she saw the exact moment all of it fell into place, the shock as he twisted his head and his gaze found hers through the bars.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t have to.
She nodded.
Then more of the wall the machine-her had torn through came down, and the rest of them arrived.
The Voors’tial’s drakeen poured through the breach with their pilots right behind them, blades drawn and already bloody.
Her little robot chirped brightly somewhere in the back of her mind, feeding her information.
It had torn through the shuttle to get back into its combat-body.
The second it powered up, every drakeen in the Voor’stial’s hold had woken with it.
They’d followed it and the pilots had scrambled after them.
Now they hit what was left of Z’Saai’s prototype army like a wave hitting a sandcastle. The prototypes were fast and brutal, but it didn’t help them. What Z’Saai had built were mindless machines on a leash, but what they faced were true chimeras… biology and machinery in perfect harmony.
And she fought with them.
She didn’t think about it. She didn’t need to. There was nothing to think about. The drakeen’s body was her body, its limbs her limbs, and the little robot was part of her mind now. She moved in a way she’d never once moved in her own skin, sure and heavy and… perfect.
She tore a prototype in half and dropped it to crush another under a hind leg.
The double vision should have made her sick, but it didn’t.
Instead, it made everything sharper. Layered, like the world had been flat her whole life and someone had finally handed her the other lens.
In the cage, her human body swayed on its knees, breath sawing in and out, hands still welded to the bars. She let it. That body could wait.
She whirled around as another machine tried to creep up behind her and tore it apart, flinging the bits to hit opposite walls.
Through it all, she made sure to keep covering Kellat as he rolled to his feet. He had blood on his face, and his left arm looked wrong. Once look at his face, though, and she knew he was still the most dangerous thing in that bay. Turning, he found Z’Saai.
The researcher was backing toward a door in the far wall, horror on his face. He moved slowly, as if he were trying not to catch anyone’s attention. Fear twisted his expression as Kellat’s gaze found him and he opened his mouth. Whatever he was going to say, he never got the words out.
Kellat crossed the distance between them faster than she’d ever seen anyone move.
His hand sliced out, hitting Z’Saai in the front of the throat.
The other Latharian choked, scrabbling at his neck as he tried to breathe.
Even from here, she could see the crushed mess where his neck went in far more than it should, blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth.
Kellat grabbed him and spun him around, wrapping thickly muscled arms around his neck and head.
Z’Saai’s eyes widened in fear, and he tried to rip away from Kellat’s hold.
But it was no good. Kellat was far stronger, and his face…
she’d seen him stern, seen him furious. She’d never seen him like this.
Calm. Absolutely calm, and that was so much worse.
With a savage jerk of his arms, he twisted, and the crack of Z’Saai’s neck snapping cut through the sounds of the battle in the room like a gunshot.
Kellat dropped Z’Saai’s body. It crumpled, unmoving, into a heap.
She waited to feel something about that.
Horror, maybe, or guilt. But it didn’t come.
The man had put her in a cage and had planned to turn both her and any daughters she had into broodmares for his sick fantasy.
The only thing she felt, watching him fall, was satisfaction.
He wouldn’t ever be able to do what he’d done to her to another woman.
Kellat stood over the body, his shoulders heaving. One breath. Two. Then he turned and looked at her, and everything else in the bay stopped mattering.
The fight was ending around them.
What was left of the bay barely qualified as a room anymore.
There were machine parts everywhere, fluid pooling black under the emergency lights, and half the far wall was…
gone. The other drakeen moved through the wreckage with their pilots, careful and deliberate, checking their kills.
The noise pulled back. All that was left was the hiss of ruptured lines, and the hum of the link under her skin as she released her hold on it.
Her drakeen went still in the middle of the ruined bay, its eyes on Kellat as he crossed to her cage. He wrenched the lock free with a snarl and the bars slid open. Then he stood in the open doorway of the cage and looked down at her.
His face was a mess, blood and bruises already coming up under the skin.
Then he reached in and offered his hand.