She gestured to the security screens behind him. “What the fuck is that?!” she cried, eyes widening.
When he whirled automatically to look, she cracked him hard over the crown of his head with the blaster. He crumpled like a house of cards. She felt a pang of pity.
“Can’t believe that worked,” she muttered, moving to stand beside the sealed door.
The door whirred open moments later, and she pressed her blaster to the back of the new male’s skull. Broad-shouldered with short, indigo hair—this had to be Urien.
“Hands up,” she said, commanding.
He didn’t comply immediately, turning toward her with a slow menace.
“I said hands up!” she shouted, firing a warning shot that singed the edge of his ear. “Face forward!”
Slowly, he put his hands up. His lungs heaved like bellows, and he chuckled darkly. “So, they really did bring you females on board. They’re even stupider than we believed.”
She ignored the jab. “Deactivate the lockdown.”
At that, he glanced over his shoulder at her, smirking. His nostrils flared as he took another deep breath and shuddered. “I don’t think I will.”
He turned toward her in a rush of motion, slamming her up against the wall before she had time to pull the trigger. One of his big hands caught at her wrist, pinning it against the wall as she kicked fruitlessly at his legs. The hand around her throat was too strong; her vision was already tunneling from the force of its clamp, pricking with black spots like burnt film.
She was sure he was going to snap her neck. All her grand plans would be undone by a matter of mere brute strength. He buried his nose in her hair, breathed deep, and moaned. Her blood ran cold.
“I haven’t seen a female in nearly twenty years,” he murmured into her ear, making her shiver in disgust. “Trapped all these years on this ship, hovering over this miserable, backwater rock, and they couldn’t even send us a few oraya to tide us over. Too much risk of infighting, they said. And now, here you are, fallen right into our lap. I suppose they were right. Everything has gone to hell in a hurry since you creatures arrived.”
She tuned him out, trying to ignore the bone-chilling sensation of him nuzzling his nose against the skin of her neck, and forced herself to think. Her attention slid to the blaster in her hand, still pinned to the wall, pointing uselessly up at the ceiling. Her free hand was wedged between them, joining her knee in keeping his body from pressing against her own.
His tongue stroked up the tendon of her neck, compounding her disgust, and her vision went red with the determination to kill him. She stopped pushing at him with her hand, letting it thread between their bodies as his chest came crushing against her own.
“That’s better,” he crooned, loosening his grip on her neck to grab a handful of her hair instead. “You feel it too, don’t you?”
Her hand fumbled in her pocket for the puck. She pressed down the button at its center. He flinched, ears twitching at some subsonic noise she couldn’t detect, but it wasn’t enough to make him abandon his pursuit.
Disgust skittered up and down her spine, making her focus waver. Pulling her hand out of her pocket, she lined it up as best she could beneath the one he had pinned. She took a steeling breath through her teeth and let go of her blaster. Her heart stopped beating in the space between when her pinned hand lost hold of the grip and when her free hand caught it. The auretian was distracted by his perusal of the column of her throat, bared to him as he craned her head back.
“By the Goddess, it’s everything they say it is. I never knew… I would not have left the homeworld if I’d understood what I was leaving behind.”
He didn’t notice as she slid her arm back between them, nor when she pressed the muzzle of the blaster to the gap between the armor plates of his jacket.
He didn’t flinch when she fired the first time, the nanotech still working just enough to insulate him from the shot.
By the second shot, he felt enough to draw back, blinking down at her with blown pupils in confusion.
By the third, he howled in pain, shoving away from her with such force that the back of her head slammed against the wall.
The world wavered, her ears rang, but she stayed on her feet. He yanked desperately at the jacket, trying to strip it off to free himself from the pooling plasma that was burning him from within. She shook her head hard, trying to clear her vision as she brought the blaster up to aim.
He noticed, sneering in a flash of fangs as he lunged for her again. She fired, but her aim was off—she caught him square inthe thickened armor at his chest, effectively useless. Just when he would have been on her again, he stumbled, gaping down in confusion.
Kliath was snarling at him, both hands wrapped around his boss’s ankle, refusing to let him take another step.
“Let go of me, you insubordinate little shit! I’ll space you for this! I’ll?—”
His head rocked back as Cordelia’s next shot pierced clean through his temple, and then he crumpled in a heap atop Kliath. With a groan, Kliath shoved him off. She trained her blaster on him, ice in her veins, all too ready to blow his head off, too.
Kliath looked up at her blearily, his pupils two different sizes. “It’s forbidden,” he rasped, sagging against the floor. “Forbidden to force a female. By the Goddess, herself.”
The anger in her thawed incrementally. She lowered the blaster, crouching beside him, but out of his reach. Words were only words, after all.
