Chapter Nine

Two giant Chekydran, forelegs and tentacles waving, galloped out of the dark.

V’kyrri froze, not even breathing.

Shrieking, the soldiers backpedaled. Laser fire sprayed, singeing the flailing tentacles of the lead Chekydran. It screamed. The creatures fell upon the soldiers and ripped the female limb from limb. They used her bloody, twitching corpse to beat the male into a smear on the cavern floor.

The mystery of what had happened at the corridor junction was solved, at least. He swallowed hard. The stink of blood and hot entrails coated his tongue.

The Chekydran skittered out of the cavern, back the way they’d come.

As if turned to stone, Edie stood, her grip too tight on his wrist. She gasped and hauled him onto the ledge where she sank to the ground.

V’k tried to convince his diaphragm it was safe to breathe again. He glanced at Edie. He couldn’t see her in the dark. It didn’t matter. Since she’d taken hold of his wrist, he had an unexpected, tenuous mental bead on her. He still couldn’t read her, not enough to get at her core. But it was enough for him to have a sense of where she was and what she focused on.

She’d crawled to her spot beside her pack, forehead resting on her knees, arms wrapped around her legs, SEM lenses tucked atop her bright, fiery hair.

What he knew about Firestorm juxtaposed with the woman who’d somehow known and tried to warn him about the Chekydran made his head spin.

She was counting. Strict, focused discipline to suppress emotion already sinking out of reach, but not before he caught a bitter sip. Horror. Sickness. Shame. Intense desire to flee. Deep, habitual sadness. Fear.

He hadn’t needed to rifle her surface thoughts. They swarmed him, wild hiztaps digging needle sharp claws into his skin.

V’kyrri straightened, relief cooling him. He wasn’t braindead. Not entirely.

Game changed in his favor.

With a mote of his telepathic power returning, Edie wasn’t the only one with dozens of weapons anymore.

“Chekydran,” Parqe grumbled in an undertone. “Where the Three Hells did they come from? Permission to scan?”

“Cover that screen,” he said.

Parqe activated her handheld. He winced and squinted. His light deprived eyes took a few seconds to recognize that the device barely lit Parqe’s face and hands.

“Leaving sensor range,” Parqe said. “Which down here is meaningless. I have no idea what that limit is.”

A shallow sip of sound—air drawn in and immediately sighed back out—preceded the rustle of Edie shifting. Her SEM lit.

V’kyrri’s gaze, hungry for visual simulation, locked on the faint trace of light. It lit her face as if it were a Sunsarramian death mask. From upper lip to hairline. The edges remained lost as if her face floated in the dark.

He shook off the superstitious impression.

She rose, dug into her pack, and then approached, the visible portion of her features ironed flat. Placid water with a deadly rip current running beneath.

V’kyrri snorted at the mental image.

She opened another ration packet, took one of the wafers, and thrust the rest at him. “Eat. You’re going to need it. Bugs change everything. You have to get off this hell-hole.”

The crunchy hard exterior was back. Fine.

He accepted the ration pack. Back to the business of rescuing his survivors. With the added complication of dodging Chekydran as well as UMOPG. “I need a tactical on the water.”

“And coordinates.” She worked her handheld. “Link up. I’ll give you my maps. Such as they are.”

“This is defensible,” V’kyrri said, surveying the cavern. “If the Chekydran swarm the ledge, don’t waste shots. No one gets captured.”

Chavolgen’s expression hardened. Fuller wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“You can’t leave us,” Parqe protested. “We stick together.”

“This is a scouting mission,” Edie said. “I’ll be moving fast, staying out of sight, avoiding contact.”

“We’ll be moving fast,” V’kyrri corrected.

Shaking her head, Edie said, “I need you…”

“I know,” he said.

Her nose wrinkled and her lips twisted, but the corners of her eyes crinkled.

“Sir,” Parqe said.

“We need a bead on the viper’s den. Something I can only get if I know you’re here, guarding the injured.”

Parqe, Chavolgen, and Fuller drew breath to argue.

He lifted a hand. “Stay here. Guard your shipmates. That’s an order.”

The faces around him fell.

Edie shifted, her gaze surveying Parqe, Chavolgen, and Fuller before meeting his eye, her mouth pulled down.

She went to Chavolgen’s side and canted her handheld screen. Parqe crowded in on Chavolgen’s other side.

“Consider working out a fast evac plan. You have my maps. They aren’t complete, but the hangar is this way. I tracked ships landing right here.” She traced a route on her handheld. Parqe and Chavolgen bent over the Claugh device, syncing the path. “Once I close the gaps, things are going to happen fast.”

Parqe’s chin came up. A glimmer of light returned to the woman’s eyes.

He kicked himself. He’d sentenced them to a long stretch of boredom with nothing to do but replay the deaths of everyone and everything they’d known. And maybe wait for either the UMOPG or the Chekydran to discover them.

Edie’d given his crew something to do, a challenge to focus on, to occupy their minds. Something they needed. He’d missed that.

“We’ll have to be ready to march at a moment’s notice,” Parqe said.

“It’s why I’m going to argue your captain into staying,” Edie said, swinging to stare at him.

“No.”

“They can’t carry the stretchers between the three of them,” she shot. “You want them to leave someone behind?”

“No.”

Her lip curled. “You’re a real jerk, you know that?”

“That’s what this commendation is for.” He tapped one of the stars adorning his collar. His crew snorted. “Too much rides on this. You need me at your back.”

“You’re injured, exhausted, and hopped up on stim,” she pressed.

“Revenge is perfect fuel,” he countered.

That set her back. Briefly. She drew a breath and leaned in again.

“Stay here. Stay silent,” he ordered, cutting off whatever Edie had in mind to say. He focused on Parqe. “No light. Keep your heads down. Edie. Mission parameters?”

Silence.

He glanced at her.

She stared at him, fists clenched.

He lifted an eyebrow, his own muscles tightening in anticipation.

“Three objectives,” Edie bit out. “A spot where we can stow the wounded during action, rapid access to a ship, and a way to keep the other ships from taking off. This is the fallback position.”

“I suggest adding an objective,” Parqe muttered. “Stay away from Chekydran.”

Edie huffed a laugh at the wry, almost conciliatory note to Parqe’s gallows humor. “Noted.”

Ignoring the annoyance rumbling through her, she transferred explosives from her pack to her tool belt.

“Leave your handheld,” she said to V’kyrri. “We’ll take mine.”

“Good. Dramind sequence on the light bar when we come back,” V’kyrri said to his exec. “But please don’t shoot me if I screw up the second cadence.”

Parqe snorted. “Since you always do, I’d shoot if you got it right.”

“Good luck, sir,” Fuller said from the dark. “Ma’am.”

Edie gave V’kyrri the light bar and led the way off the ledge.

He followed on her heels.

The stink of cooling blood sharpened.

V’kyrri trailed her in silence, moving in the boneless way trained hunters mastered. He put a meter between them, trading the lead and cover with her as if they’d been casing enemy territory together for decades.

Longing stabbed her. He’d make a stellar mercenary. In another time and place.

Edie boosted signal processing to the SEM until her screens and her gray matter lit up with three-dimensional energy signatures bounced back from the rock.

Readings piled up, vibrating at a frequency she wasn’t familiar with. It acted like a kind of sonar, building an echolocation image of the tunnels around them. Maybe that’s what Chekydran sound waves did for them. The pulse seduced hers into sympathetic rhythm until her whole body thrummed in heightened awareness.

It did nothing to erase the impression of V’kyrri pressing the edges of her, as if his unspoken trust in her as a fellow warrior pried up one of her corners to reveal what lay underneath.

She shuddered and scrubbed her shirt against the sweat trickling down her chest. Her hand shook. Spent already, and they hadn’t even made a kilometer. Breathing hard, Edie took shelter at the base of a huge boulder.

He settled next to her, his own breath gusting and surveyed her. “Why are you doing this?”

Freezing mid-swipe of a sleeve across her damp forehead, Edie said, “What? Resting?”

“Helping us.”

She rubbed tendrils of damp hair off her face and stilled. “What do you want? Protestation of what a nice gal I am? I am helping. Isn’t that enough?”

He closed a hand around her bicep. Innocent, pay-attention touch.

Her nerves sparked, nevertheless. Edie sucked a breath between clenched teeth.

“You hate us, Firestorm.”

“Nothing personal. And everyone will live longer and happier if you never say that name again.”

He faced her, the light bar between them. “Why didn’t you leave us to die?”

“Almost did. Saw the Claugh insignia and started walking away.”

He eyed her, suspicion in his frown. “What stopped you?”

She hunched her shoulders. “It’s not important.”

He spread his fingers wide. “Whatever it was changed your mind about leaving us to die, Edie. It’s important.”

“Not to me.” She had no intention of telling him. The weapons he had arrayed against her were potent enough. He didn’t need that one, too.

“Edie.”

“Plaguing a demo gal is bad for your health.”

“You’d blow me up?”

“Straight to Hell.”

“Edie.”

“What?”

“We’re on Hell.”

His dry as dust tone reached through the SEM and wrested a laugh from her.

His eyes darkened. She stared, fascinated. Maybe it reflected what storms did to the waters of his home world. His fingers smoothed the skin of her cheek.

Electricity sparked her veins. She started.

“Tell me what made you save us,” he murmured.

“No,” she said, damning the readings telling her the impact of his touch registered in her vocal quality.

His lips twitched, and his gaze shifted to her mouth.

Heat suffused her.

He shifted closer.

“Crying,” Edie blurted.

He blinked his gaze back to hers.

She let go the breath she’d been holding and swallowed a curse. He’d considered kissing her, and she’d folded like an amateur. That was mortifying enough without the realization that she’d turned into an idiot because, as she crouched in the Chekydran-infested dark, hot, sweaty, and unspeakably grimy, she wondered what V’kyrri’s kiss would feel and taste like.

She straightened her spine and concentrated on her SEM display. Adrenaline kicked her upright. She grabbed V’kyrri by the collar, rocketed to her feet, and dragged him three steps before he got his footing.

Either he, too, registered the pressure of Chekydran soundwaves, or he heard the creatures coming at a loud, disjointed canter.

She dove into a crevice in the rock, V’kyrri on her heels.

The bugs scurried past, tentacles waving an excited pattern, and scuttled into another tunnel.

“They glow in the dark,” V’kyrri noted. “I had no idea.”

“Would you look at that?” Edie breathed.

“What?”

She gestured at the Chekydran. They slid into the tunnel, their tentacles folding back to protect their eye-ridges. “Perfect fit.”

Frowning, he sucked in a breath. “The shape. The height. Width. An exact match. This was built for them.”

“Or by them,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“Why do Chekydran do anything?” she retorted.

They sank farther into the crack in the rock. It opened into another, smaller cavern.

“We’re off route,” he said.

“We’re not.” She slanted her handheld for him. “I mean, we are, but look. Position fix against where I watched ships land.”

“We’re running parallel. One level down?”

“Looks like. We either backtrack to the main tunnel structures—”

“And Chekydran.”

“Or we scout this cave to the hangar.”

“Odds it goes through?”

“Beats all the Hells out of me.”

He grimaced. “Two unknown tunnels.”

“One infested with Chekydran beating UMOPG into the stone and one… Wait.” Edie swung deeper into the crevice. “Data.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “I’m getting a read.”

He crowded against her. His hand on hers tilted her handheld for his gaze. Her screen didn’t automatically reflect the data hitting her SEM, but disarmed by the sparks hissing along her nerves, she synced the screen with trembling fingers.

His diaphragm bounced against her back. “There’s an energy source in this tunnel.”

Edie edged away from the disconcerting impulse to sag into him. “Yes.”

“Go,” he said, releasing her.

Breathing down the heat trembling at her center, she followed the digital trail.

Rocks and boulders obscured their path. The data didn’t wane even as the walls closed in.

“Energy signatures increasing,” she whispered, pausing to mop her face. “It’s either the hangar or the base proper. Either way, we’re on the wrong cavern level. There’s a branch here.” She traced a line on her handheld, well off the limits of the map she’d made scouting before the Claugh had crashed.

“Maintenance access point, maybe,” he said.

“Mm. Main door here, if the number of sensor emplacements is any indication,” she said, tapping the screen.

“We’re still in line with the hangar,” he murmured. “It’s a scouting expedition, right?”

“No need for both of us—”

“No getting into a squeeze you can’t get out of,” he said.

He had a point, and it wasn’t I can’t trust you. Foolish man.

The ceiling sloped down and the walls rapidly closed in. She turned sideways, then went to her knees.

“Hold,” she said. Her breath came in gasps.

As did his.

“Okay. You were prescient about the squeeze.”

“How tight?”

She blew out a sharp breath. “I have to take off the SEM and my tool belt to get through.” If she could get through.

“You’re smaller than I am,” he warned. “If you get stuck, I might not be able to reach you.”

“We’re right under the hangar. If this goes through, we have the perfect back door for an assault.”

“Or the perfect grave if it doesn’t and you get jammed,” he countered.

Her nerves twisted. She shucked her tool belt and shoved it down her body. “Tie that around my ankle.”

“It might not be enough.”

“Better than nothing.”

He didn’t say anything. That meant he was frowning, didn’t it? Should she know that? Feel it weighing on her?

He put the light bar into her hand.

She glanced at him.

Greenish lines pressed the corners of his mouth. It might be easier to go without the encumbrance, but faced with V’kyrri’s queasy look, she shoved the light into the crevice, then crawled in after it. Stone pressed her to her belly. The air grew thick and difficult to pull into aching lungs. She could only progress by pushing with her toes. Resistance on her right ankle communicated V’kyrri’s discomfort.

She shoved the light ahead of her and caught it on a thin, ropey object. The thing rolled under her questing touch. Frowning, she edged forward. Memory hinted she ought to know what it was. Curiosity tugged her.

V’kyrri’s grip held her back.

“Let go,” she said. Not that she’d know if he answered. Or even heard her. The pressure on her leg abated. She propelled herself another few centimeters. The crushing pressure of rock lifted, opening into a tunnel. V’kyrri could probably get through, though he’d sacrifice a few layers of skin.

She fingered the thing that had drawn her. Triumph shoved air into her chest. Wire. Archaic, physical wire.