When the votes were cast, even the more hostile-looking red Naga that Zathar had glared at was in favor of helping those below. It was he, in fact, who suggested we use the distraction of the fight below to send a party to board the ship. It was an option eagerly embraced, and Jasmine and Iwere quickly picked to be part of that group. We had a job to do waking people from stasis and assuring them they were being rescued.
Khawla came to my side then, his tail looping about my hips to hold me protectively, but he did not voice an objection. “No point,” he whispered in my ear. “This is why you are here, is it not? Bold female with the big heart—you would protect everyone if you could. You are a warrior, like all of us.” He pointed at the males as they stripped off their warm tunics, quickly limbered up their muscles, and sharpened their spears one last time. I didn’t think I was quite like that, but he was right, I was a warrior in my own way, an advocate for the needs and rights of others.
“I will have your back,” he added, and his purple eye pierced me, filled with the weight of his vow. My eyes wanted to fill with tears; that meant the world to me. I was not alone in this fight. I had only to look at Zathar as he barked out orders and at the males fearlessly rushing from the woods to join the fight.
I opened my mouth, ready to tell Khawla right then that I loved him—a pre-battle declaration. But he swept me over his shoulder, ducking through the woods to circle the fight as planned. The lack of warning left me breathless, and I struggled to lift my head and scan our surroundings. I was too busy to find words of love as adrenaline pumped through my veins.
Behind us, two more Naga followed, and one of them had picked up a protesting Jasmine, hauling her with him the way Khawla was carrying me. We were much faster this way; it made sense, our boarding party was tiny, all they were able to spare if they wanted to turn the tide of battle against the Krektar. Then Kalani fired her first shot from where she’d climbed a tree, laser fire whistling through the air. I could not see if she struck true.
Then the dragon rose from the trees and flung itself like a speeding missile toward the ship, its roar and a cone of fire blasting through the air.
Chapter 21
Jolene
After the noise of the fighting outside, the ship was eerily silent. The Naga made absolutely no noise as they slipped through the hatch and into the dark hallways. I had trouble seeing in the utter dark, but they had no such issue and knew exactly where to go. We ran into nobody, either, as if everyone awake on the ship had gone out to fight. I was certain I had not seen any sign of Thor outside, though, so unless he was already dead, he had to be somewhere. I had a feeling that guy was wily enough not to get himself killed in a fight like that.
When we reached the hold, the door wasn’t locked, but Khawla had to put me down to shoulder the heavy metal panel open manually. Without power, it did not go gracefully, and something had warped and bent it a little since the last time we were here. When we were through the door, I could see two dents at Khawla’s height. As if something with horns—Thor, perhaps—hadrammed into it.
“Ah, fuck,” Jasmine muttered. “I forgot just how many there are. I know we didn’t plan to wake all of them. But seriously, can we even justify waking all of them—ever? Most are pretty bad guys, if you recall.” I shrugged, uncertain how to respond to that. It was perhaps unfair to everyone sleeping to make choices for them, but I was just here to wake my girls. That was it. For now.
“We will protect the ship while Corin tries to fix it, then fly it to a safe location. Focus on waking the ones you need,” Khawla responded, full of pragmatism. Jasmine could understand him just fine because they’d updated her translator implants to include the Naga language. Very neat trick, too bad they did not have enough implants to give out to all of Haven’s unmated males. It was often a one-way street, or so Jasmine had told me.
Khawla held Jasmine and me back until the other two males had done a sweep of the hold. They wanted to be absolutely certain that there were no surprises waiting for us in the dark. I couldn’t say I entirely disagreed with that, but I was anxious to get my girls out. Who did I start with? In my head, I was running down options, wanting to pick solid, calm girls first so they could help the others. It would also be about finding the pods I needed quickly, but I hadn’t seen where they’d stacked everyone. It could be hard to find everyone in the thousands still here.
“I’m sure they’re clustered together,” Jasmine said, trying to reassure me. “You said yourself they saved you for last because you were the least trouble. I doubt those lazy bastards moved pods around if they didn’t need to.” That was my hope too, but I couldn’t be sure.
When Khawla gave the greenlight, he and the other two lit ‘lightsource’ relics from the past that were much like flashlights or lanterns. It was enough light for me to see by, and Jasmine and I rushed for the stack of pods I thought was the right one. It took precious minutes to find the correct pods, but then my hands fell into familiar patterns as I ranthrough waking sequences. Jasmine had never done it before, but she hovered over my shoulder, watching what I did until she got the hang of it.
I woke Jessie first, because she was a crack shot and steady in a crisis, followed by Amara, Sophia, and Megan. It took Jasmine and me a few minutes to get Jessie up to speed—she was the first—but she took over that task for the others, pulling them into her huddle and quietly explaining the facts so I could focus on waking the rest. We were making good progress that way, and Khawla was keeping the pair of eager Haven aspirants at a distance.
They were eager to touch each of these women, even with just a quick brush of a tail, to see if one of them could be their mate. That’s what all those Naga hunters at Thunder Rock had been up to when Reshar had escorted me to Khawla’s home that night. I hadn’t told Khawla about that, certain he wouldn’t like it, and it was harmless anyway. They didn’t need to try that on my still-fearful girls, though, not right now. But I wouldn’t begrudge them finding out once everyone had settled in. Later.
By the time a crowd of ten girls had huddled at the front of the hold, I was starting to think we really had lucked out. Nobody beyond us was awake aboard the ship. Things were going smoothly, and nobody was panicking yet. The eager pair of hunters—one purple and one green—were behaving, too, guarding the door with serious faces, though I saw how their eyes flicked to the women every now and then.
“One third down,” Jasmine said as she hunched over the next pod. I nodded, unease shivering through me anyway. It was too simple, surely we’d been noticed? And how was the fight going outside? What if the Queen and her escort tried to interfere? What if the Krektar were winning?
I was opening Eva’s pod, and I braced myself for tears. Not only was the girl easily scared, but she’d been injured during the stampede, right before they’d put us in stasis. It was going to be rough for her waking up, and while I hadbeen given a bag of medical supplies, my priority was waking everyone else first. As I’d expected, she struggled to hold in a sob when I helped her out of the pod, her eyes instantly latching onto the two Naga by the door before she winced back and huddled into me. “What are they?”
“Our help,” I said firmly, but not unkindly. “They’re here to rescue us. Go to Jessie; she’ll explain,” I added, and with a gentle push, I sent her toward the tall redhead who was doing her best to keep the others calm. I was glad to see that Eva was pulled into the huddle and hugged by Megan, while Sophia bent close to inspect Eva’s bruises. She had a pronounced limp—her ankle badly sprained, possibly worse—and had lost her shoe. That was important; she couldn’t go into the snow like that, so I turned to Khawla to tell him one of the hunters would have to carry her.
That’s when chaos erupted. The door to the hold was shoved inward, and something was tossed inside that quickly started spewing vision-obscuring smoke. There was a lot of fearful screaming, and I quickly lost sight of Jessie’s huddle and Jasmine deeper in the hold. I never saw where Khawla was at all, but that was not worrisome; losing sight of the other two hunters was a bit more scary. Had they been hurt by that blast? And what was it—an EM pulse? The one from the Shaman Artek was supposed to have disabled everything except the shielded stasis pods.
I took out my sling, loaded it with a rock, but I had no target to aim for. Hunkering down, I listened closely to figure out what was going on, but there was too much noise—running steps, still-screaming voices, Jasmine shouting over it all for people to hunker down. I heard the hiss of stone against metal and a deep growling sound, as if a wolf were charging through smoke.
Where was Khawla? I had no clue, but when someone came crawling out of the stinging smoke toward me, I reached out and pulled them close. It was Eva, hurt, her eyes stinging far more than mine, as she’d been closer to thesource of whatever this was. “Ah, Jo,” she moaned, “what’s happening?” A new injury decorated her face: blood on her brow from a shallow cut.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Stay here.” I pushed her against the side of the stasis pod I’d been about to open. She curled into a tight ball while I rose to my feet, hoping to be able to see over the smoke. I wasn’t quite tall enough, but itwasthinner up high. Climbing onto the stasis pod afforded me a better view, and that’s when I saw it: a flash of red and black. That could only be one person—Thor. But was he here to help or not? I hoped so, but I still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced he was entirely good.
Jasmine was standing on a stasis pod herself, a small distance away, and she wasn’t using a sling to fire into the smoke. At Haven, apparently, she hadn’t sat still during winter but had made herself a bow and a full quiver of arrows. I didn’t know how she did it, but she seemed to know her targets as she took aim. Around her stasis pod, several of the women we’d woken huddled, so they’d found their way to relative safety.
That didn’t mean we were in the clear, not one bit. From my higher vantage, I could see much more. The smoke was fading, slipping away in the huge hold, diluting enough for me to make out the players: a dozen Krektar, armed with spears and crude knives. Some of these were tipped in steel, not stone, much sharper and deadlier than the stone blades of the Naga. It was the alien that was clearlynota warthog-like, smelly Krektar that had my lungs seize in fear.
He was huge, clad in black, and his head was shaped, most improbably, exactly like that of a rhinoceros. Whatever he was, he was twice the size of a Krektar—if not in height, at least in mass. He was swinging a massive hammer about like it weighed nothing and giving the Naga a hard time. The purple guy was bleeding and backing away with a furious hiss. The green one tried to circle around to help his friend, but he was getting harried by the Krektar.
Khawla was slipping in and out of the smoke, in his element with his muted scales, hard to spot and lightning fast. But outnumbered easily four to one, that was not enough. They needed help, and though Jasmine was doing her best with her arrows, their armor seemed to be blocking most of her strikes. That meant my sling-thrown rocks were probably not going to matter at all—what could they do against that massive rhino guy anyway? His skin appeared so thick, nothing could harm him.
Then my eyes landed on the stasis pod over by the far wall, the one I’d lingered over last time. The Dragnell. My heart skipped a beat as I contemplated that possibility. Would he help? He hadn’t harmed any of the girls he’d taken under his wing before. He’d been forceful about making themaccepthis protection, but he had not hurt them, and he definitely hadn’t demanded things from them in exchange for that protection. As far as I’d been able to tell, that had come free of charge. That’s why I’d considered waking him for help before, so why not now?
