8. Two Blades
Two Blades
Natalie
The proximity alert is still in my ear when Tael takes my wrist.
Not my hand. My wrist. The grip of a working hand is now the one making decisions, and we are out of the chamber in one breath and down the C spur at a run, past the six clean doors he scented on the way in.
At the breach hatch, he stops me with a flat palm across my chest and puts his ear to the seal.
“Three through the airlock. Fourth still docking.”
“How long.”
“Ninety seconds. Less.”
“The service corridor is the only way back.”
“Maintenance crawl to the A spur. Clocked it coming in. Behind you. Low panel.”
The crawl is a half-meter square, unlit, twelve meters parallel to the spur before it dog-legs. I go first because his shoulders will not. They catch twice on the bracket supports behind me, and he does not make a sound.
A spur. Amber. Sealed berths in sequence. The junction with the concourse eight meters down.
Tael freezes at the junction.
He does not lift a hand. He does not tell me what he is seeing.
He goes still, the deep predator stillness that is itself the message, and my body reads it without being told.
His shoulders drop. His tail, rigid working posture all evening, lifts off the deck and goes into the raised flick my species briefing filed under engaged: high lethality intent.
The strip of neck between the collar and hairline has gone darker.
I have not seen his face. I do not need it. The body in front of me is reading kill, and the body in front of me has, for every meeting and corridor and SNAG office since he walked into mine, been reading coordinate.
He turns his head a fraction toward me. Silver eyes gone to slits in the amber.
“Vosk.”
“Shh.”
“You know him?”
A beat.
“Yes.”
“Is he the worst one?”
“Yes.”
I ease my head around his shoulder.
He is standing in the arch of the concourse doorway with his hands loose at his sides, and he is not doing anything at all.
Draelith. Taller than Tael, heavier through the shoulders, dark coat over dark everything, the rosettes at his throat too faint to read at eight meters in amber light.
He is not looking down the A spur at us.
He is looking at the deck plating a few feet in front of his own boots, the way a man looks at a floor when what he is actually doing is listening to something two rooms away.
His tail does not move. His hands do not move.
Nothing on him moves; it is the stillness of an object somebody set down there and has not come back for.
Three seconds. I count them the way I have counted seconds through a scope, one, two, three, and on the third the amber over the arch stutters, once, in a way the lighting on this station has not stuttered all evening.
I blink.
The doorway is empty.
The arch of the concourse, the deck beyond, the bar in its alcove, the keeper’s counter unmanned. No Draelith. Tael’s body does not relax.
“He was there,” I say.
“He was there.”
“Where did he go?”
“He didn’t go. He moved.”
JINX, on the shared channel: “Tael. Three biological signatures inbound from the concourse. Fourth signature has gone dark.”
“Dark.”
He is holding stealth somewhere on the upper structure. Tael moves me back from the edge with his shoulder and puts my spine to the bulkhead. Claws out. Breathing slow.
“Three inbound. We take the three. Then we get to the ship.”
“Through him.”
“He won’t come down at us yet. Not with the team in motion.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“Later, Torres.”
Boots on the A spur plating. Three sets. Fast.
The first one comes from the ceiling.
He drops out of the overhead duct in silence and lands between us before I register the drop.
Threshari. Tall, gaunt, translucent skin with the blood vessels mapped in blue and black beneath it, an elongated skull, more teeth than anatomy should permit, a blade in each hand.
He splits us. One blade to Tael. One for me.
Mine comes high, along the line the carotid would take, and fifteen years of Military Police training gets my left arm up in time, and not cleanly.
The blade scores the outside of my forearm from elbow to wrist, cardigan and skin, a hot fast line, shallow and real, and the blood is on my knuckles before my body has filed the strike.
He pivots, broken-rhythm, and I get his wrist for the second pass, and we are trading at a speed my body has not worked at in five years, and Tael is two meters to my right taking the other blade on his forearm and claws with the low, contained attention of the working version of him.
Then he sees the blood on my arm.
I do not have a word for what changes. The professional is gone. The sound that comes out of his chest is not a purr; it is lower and longer, a frequency my sternum reads as a warning, and the Threshari’s head whips toward it half a beat before Tael moves.
Half a beat is not enough.
I do not see the cross. I see the results.
The Threshari’s wrist coming apart, the second blade dropping, Tael’s claws to the knuckle in places not built to hold against claws, and the chest opening sternum to hip in one strike that is not surgical and not professional.
It is predatory, in a category I do not currently want to name.
The Threshari is dead. Tael’s claws are wet to the knuckle and he is breathing like he has been holding something at the back of his throat all evening and has just let it out.
The other two are fifteen meters down the spur and closing.
Tael steps in front of me.
The Crex first. Chitin over an olive-brown exoskeleton, two primary arms on a rifle, two secondary arms folded to the thorax that snap open when he registers Tael.
Tael does not engage cleanly. Claws through both primary wrists, the rifle clatters, and then the secondary arms come up, and he takes them too.
Not breaking. Taking. Off at the joints.
Claws to the throat seam and the Crex is down and Tael is already moving, because the Grolic is behind him with a blade the length of my forearm.
Slate-gray, no neck, tusks curving up from the lower jaw, two hundred pounds heavier than Tael and carrying it low. Tael takes the blade across the ribs.
I see it open. The dark line spreading through the dark fabric. He does not break stride. He goes inside the reach, claws through the wrist, the blade drops, and the Grolic’s other hand comes up with a short knife I did not see and lays it across the top of Tael’s shoulder.
Two wounds. Both taken in the four seconds he is between me and the Grolic.
His tail goes around the Grolic’s knee. The coil is tight and a Grolic leg does not bend at the angle it has just been asked to, and the Grolic drops, and Tael takes the throat, and the tusks come up, and he takes them off at the root with the dry crack of ivory giving.
The corridor is quiet. Three on the deck. The worst one somewhere I cannot see. Tael bleeding from two places.
He turns to me. His eyes run my face the way my scanner runs a baseline, eyes, jaw, scar, throat, and then down to my forearm and the blood at my knuckles, and his pupils, only just coming back from the kill, blow wide again.
Two strides. His hand comes up slowly, and one fingertip traces the length of the cut, once, making sure it is what he thinks it is and not something deeper I am downplaying because I am the kind of woman who downplays.
It is what he thinks it is. He breathes.
“Walk. We move.”
“Your ribs.”
“Ship.”
“Your shoulder.”
“Ship, Torres.”
He tries to take my weight on his good shoulder, which is backward, the male bleeding from two places carrying the graze-cut female, and I push him off hard enough to get his attention.
“I take the weight, Vosk. Shut up and walk.”
He walks. I support him. Six-foot-five of lean predator on five-foot-nine of spite and procedure, and we are getting to his ship if I have to drag him.
The concourse is empty.
No keeper. No freighter crew, no Xenari, no hauler with pinpoint pupils. One fewer ship on the docking board: the berth the Draelith independent was in when we arrived.
“His ship is out.”
“That doesn’t mean he is.”
I stop. Of course it doesn’t. Of course, a male whose presence in a doorway rearranged Tael’s whole body does not finish a job by getting on the ship he is supposed to be on.
He sends the team and stays. The empty bar is not abandonment; it is dispersal.
Every civilian moved out of his line for whatever he decides next.
“Walk, Torres.” His arm tightens across my shoulders. “Don’t look around. Don’t slow down. He’s watching, and the second we look is the second we tell him we know.”
“He’s letting us go.”
“For now. He wants to see where we go next.”
Two hundred meters of open deck. I do not look up at the four mezzanine balconies that would give a tracker of his caliber a clean line on our exit. It is the longest walk of my career.
The airlock cycles. Helia’s Reach smells like dried botanicals and old leather and Tael, and my body does something with the scent that I will address when I am not bleeding.
I get him to the cockpit couch. He does not pretend that he does not need it.
He reaches for the yoke. “Get us out of here, JINX.”
“Tael, do not ignite. Unauthorized device on the port thruster housing. SRS Mk-IV sabotage charge. Calibrated to trigger on ignition.”
His hand stops.
“How bad?”
“We lose the port thrusters in the first three seconds. We do not survive the burn.”
“Clear it.”
I have the trigger circuit. I do not have the depolarization protocol.
SENTRY, crisp: “I have the protocol in my reference library. I will lead. JINX provides hardware interface.”
Sentry.
“JINX.”
I want it on the record that I am supporting under protest.
“Logged. Seven minutes.”
Five if I run point.
“Five is the margin on which your last three field neutralizations failed. I have your after-action reports.”
I pushed those for comparative study, SENTRY. Not for leverage.
“Duly logged. Beginning protocol.”