Chapter 3
Chapter Three
VENNOX
Exhaustion pulled at me as the alien suns crept above the horizon. I had not slept more than a few mims at a time while Tyrk and Ruze worked through the dark hurs. Sleep rarely brought rest anymore. Every time I closed my eyes too long, I found myself back inside Uri's cage.
Instead, I watched their silhouettes hunched over sparking circuits, listening to them mutter tech terms as I fought to stay awake.
"Stay inside," Tyrk had ordered repeatedly when I suggested scouting the perimeter. "Until we know what's out there, this ship is our only protection."
As the twin suns rose, light filtered through the shattered viewport, and a sharp beeping cut through the silence. Tyrk lunged toward the damaged control panel, his massive frame tensing as he studied the flickering display.
"Movement," he growled, adjusting several controls that sparked in protest. "Northeast of our location."
Ruze appeared at his shoulder. “What are they?”
"Can't tell." Tyrk's fingers moved across the console, coaxing the damaged tech to life. "The scanner's compromised. But there's definitely something out there."
I moved closer, studying the erratic pulses on the screen. Four distinct heat signatures flickered in and out among the chaotic readings from the surrounding vegetation. They moved with purpose, following a direct path toward our position.
"Four beings," I said, my instincts finding the pattern beneath the noise. "Moving in formation."
Truxxet's fingers tightened around the shaft of his spear, thumb tracing the distinctive blue-silver sheen where Valosian steel met wood. "Could be predators."
Tyrk's jaw tightened. "Can't get a clear reading. This planet's teeming with life, and the damaged scanner can't filter it properly."
"Whatever they are, they're heading straight for us," Ruze said, his claw-tipped finger tracing their trajectory on the screen.
I straightened, decision already made. "We need to know what we're facing."
"I'll go," Truxxet volunteered, his scales flashing with readiness.
"I'll join you." I met his eyes. Our clan differences had grown less relevant with every hurs we spent on this world. Survival had a way of simplifying things.
"I will accompany—" Brunnex pushed to his feet, words slurring as he listed sharply to the right.
"You'll stay here," Ruze cut in, steadying him with a firm hand. "We need someone monitoring comms."
I caught Ruze's eye over Brunnex's shoulder.
The slight tilt of his head said everything.
A warrior didn't need pity. He needed purpose.
Clan Jurigon's pride ran deep, deeper, maybe, than my own Huren stubbornness, and the dried blood on the bandage around Brunnex's head told the real story of why he needed to stay put.
Tyrk exchanged a glance with Ruze, then reached into the pocket of his leather pants and pulled out a small metal case. He opened it to reveal two strange devices: silver bracelets with intricate circuitry woven through their surfaces.
"Moktian cloaking devices," he said, lifting one from its housing. "Kept from a previous mission."
Ruze took the second bracelet, made an adjustment, and held it up to the light. "They bend light around you. Completely undetectable. I've linked them so you can see each other when you’re both cloaked."
"How do they work?" I asked, extending my arm as Tyrk approached.
He snapped the bracelet around my wrist. It adjusted automatically, tightening to fit my arm. "Press this node to activate," he said, indicating a small protrusion on the outer surface. "Again to deactivate."
Ruze held out the second bracelet, and Truxxet took it, turning it over in his hands. "The same devices Gunnox spoke of? When you landed on Tirius, and he interrogated that Zibeck?"
"The same," Ruze said, a low chuckle in his voice. "Gunnox regaling you with stories of adventures beyond the clouds of Valose?"
"He said it was like moving among the Spirits," Truxxet grinned.
"Except spirits don't leave footprints," Tyrk said. "The cloak doesn't mask sound or scent. Move too quickly, and it creates a distortion, like heat waves rising from sand."
I tested the weight of the bracelet on my wrist. Strange, but not unwelcome. An advantage was an advantage.
"Stay low, stay quiet, stay alive," Ruze added. "If they're hostile, don't engage. Recon only, then get back here with information."
"And if they're friendly?" Truxxet asked.
"Use your judgment," Tyrk said. "But trust nothing on this world until proven otherwise."
I checked my blade, secured it in its sheath at my hip, and slipped a smaller knife into my boot. The familiar weight of weapons settled against my body and pushed back the last of the dizziness from my head wound.
"Ready?" I turned to Truxxet.
He nodded and pressed the node. In an instant, he vanished before my eyes, leaving nothing but empty space where he'd stood. I reached out instinctively, and my fingers connected with his solid form.
"Can you truly not see me?" came his disembodied voice, tinged with wonder.
"No," I breathed. "You're gone."
He laughed softly. "Activate yours."
I pressed the node and felt a strange tingle move across my scales. Truxxet reappeared not solid, but a shimmering impression, his outline wavering like a mirage.
"We stay together," I said, keeping my voice low. "Unknown terrain, unknown threats."
Truxxet's outline rippled as he nodded. "Two warriors, one shadow."
Tyrk held out two short-range comms, eyes scanning the empty space where we stood. Our invisible hands took them.
Behind us, Brunnex sat slumped at the console where Ruze had positioned him. "May the Spirits guide you," he murmured, voice thin but earnest.
We moved toward the ragged tear in the hull where the viewport had been, avoiding the main hatch. The torn opening offered silence, stealth, and surprise. Everything we needed.
Truxxet's shimmering outline followed me through into the alien world.
We paused just outside, shoulders close, taking in our surroundings.
The sweet, ferrous scent of the planet hit me full in the face, almost overwhelming after the ship's filtered air.
My boots sank into the soft soil. I glanced at the impressions we'd already left, then back at Truxxet.
"We circle behind the ship," I murmured, pointing to our footprints stamped in the earth. "Climb the ridge. Come at them from behind."
His outline flickered as he nodded.
The vegetation around us pulsed with unsettling life, leaves shifting as if tracking our passage, not unlike the floratrap fields of Valose, those vast and deceptively still carnivorous plants that could take a warrior's life before he ever saw them move.
My scales flared and cycled uselessly through silvers and blues utterly inadequate against the riot of hues this world threw at us from every direction.
On Valose, our camouflage had been refined over generations to match our world's palette of silver, white, and deep blue.
Here, I could barely process all the colors my eyes were reporting.
"The colors are so bright," I murmured to Truxxet, blinking against the assault, “to look at them burns my eyes.”
His own scales flickered in the same distress. “Like staring too long at the twin suns,” he whispered back.
I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the afterimages that flared each time a particularly vivid flower or crystalline formation caught the light. My arm flickered silver and blue and back again, my scales searching for a pattern that didn't exist here.
We gave the four figures a wide berth as we curved toward the ridge. The ascent was gentle, each step placed carefully among the strange flora. Twice we froze. Vine-like growths reached blindly toward us despite our cloaks, as though they could sense the heat of living bodies moving through them.
Once we crested the ridge, I dropped into a crouch.
Truxxet's shimmering outline settled beside me.
Beyond us, four figures picked their way through the dense vegetation.
Three moved in tight formation behind a fourth who led with confident, unhurried precision.
As we watched, they stopped, huddling together while one consulted some kind of device.
We needed to get closer.
I tapped Truxxet's arm and gestured a wide arc through the treeline, signaling we would loop far around and come up behind them.
We moved in silence through the dense vegetation, picking our way between crystalline formations that jutted from the soil at irregular intervals, some no taller than my knee, others rising to my shoulder, refracting the alien light into fractured, nameless color across our cloaked forms.
As we curved in behind them, whispers drifted through the still suns-rise air, female voices speaking a language that brushed against the edges of my memory.
I reached up instinctively to touch the small device nestled behind my ear. The translator. I'd grown so accustomed to its presence that I almost forgot it was there. A constant, quiet reminder of my abduction, waking with it already attached on the Gorken ship.
The whispers sharpened, coalescing into words.
"Do you think they'll shoot him?" one voice was saying.
"If they're smart, they'll listen to him first," came the reply.
Close enough now, I could see them clearly through the vegetation. Three human females. Their soft, scaleless flesh was unmistakable. The same species as the females who had been pulled from the sorium mines on Gorka alongside Valosian captives.
But where was the fourth?
Truxxet gestured downward. My attention dropped to our crashed vessel. There, approaching the torn hull with both hands raised in a gesture of peace, walked a tall, silver being. Long white hair flowed behind him, catching the twin suns' rays. Not Valosian. Something else entirely.
We moved in synchronization, circling behind the three females still crouched on the ridge, watching their companion approach the ship. My hand drifted to the hilt of my blade even though these were not the enemies I'd expected.
"That's weird," the one with the long dark mane muttered.
"What is?" another asked.
"Something's—"
"Drop your weapons," I commanded, stepping forward the moment I caught sight of the weapons they carried. "And raise your hands where we can see them."
The effect was immediate. All three females startled from their crouches, blasters slipping from their grips as they twisted around.
One fell to her backside. Another scrambled sideways on her knees.
All three raised trembling hands skyward, eyes wide, searching the empty space behind them as they tried to understand where the voice had come from.
I deactivated my cloaking device with one hand, the other already gripping my unsheathed blade, Valosian steel catching the alien light.
Truxxet followed a heartbeat later, his spear held at perfect striking height, the deadly tip trained on the center human.
The shimmer of energy dissolved around us, revealing our combat-ready forms.
My hand flew to my sternum.
An unfamiliar rhythm thundered beneath my palm. A second heartbeat where only one should exist. The sensation hit so hard and so suddenly that I staggered back a step.
"What is it?" Truxxet hissed, his attention split between the humans and me.
I couldn't answer. Energy surged through my body as my ancillary heart hammered against my ribs, each contraction sending scorching adrenalyne flooding through my veins.
The pounding drowned out everything else.
My muscles coiled with sudden, staggering strength, my limbs feeling weightless and powerful all at once.
I pressed my fingertips to my forehead and felt the ragged edges of my head wound knitting together beneath them.
A dangerous sense of invincibility swept through me, and my gaze snapped to Truxxet's spear pointed at the humans.
At my female, though I didn't yet know which of the three she was.
My hand tightened on my blade. The urge to drive it between Truxxet and her rose up my throat in the form of a feral growl before I caught myself.
"Fucking Helios," Truxxet lowered his spear with a curse. "Get a hold of yourself, Vennox. Just because one of them is your spirit mate does not mean you can trust her or her companions."
My gaze moved over the three females, pulled by a force I couldn't fight or name.
The first was sprawled where she'd fallen backward, short blonde hair fanned around her, wide terrified eyes, hands shaking as she held them above her head.
The second was smaller, darker complexioned, a mass of curly hair pulled back from her face, shoulders squared despite the fear written across her features.
Then my gaze found the third, and my ancillary heart stuttered.
She knelt ahead of the others. Unlike her companions, her hands had lowered and now hovered over a strange device in her lap. Her eyes were as pale as Valosian moonlight, steady as a drawn blade, and met mine without wavering. Fierce. Calculating. Taking my measure the same way I was taking hers.
The essence of me twisted and pressed against my sternum in recognition so profound it felt less like discovery and more like remembering. I couldn't look away from her. Couldn't think past the adrenalyne roaring through my blood.
She was mine!