A grin stretched my lips. I looked over at the grate a few feet to my left, my swollen eye popping open at long last. “Can you see in the dark, Red?”
There was a beat of silence before his raspy voice answered me. “What?”
A final tear and the lights cut out, washing us in darkness.
Shouts rang out in the distance echoing with Red’s curses below me.
My eyes adjusted just as the emergency lighting flickered on, though it was such a low orange it might as well have been black.
I rapid crawled back to the grate, jerked it up and out, and dropped down beside Red.
He cursed again, jerking away from me, his wide eyes even wider in the dark as he strained to see me in the gloom. I swept my foot out, bringing my heel down on Red’s Iliotibial band, assuming it would hurt just as badly as it did on a human. He dropped with a shout of pain, his leg all but useless, and I jumped to pin him to the floor, rolling him to his stomach and bringing his slender arm behind his back. I had never been more thankful for all the grueling training Aga, Rema, and Jack had put me through on the Solus. Hand to hand combat with aliens was nothing like humans. His joints were more liquid, so I had to pin his arm much higher than I normally would, but it must have hurt like a bitch because he cried out and then cursed a blue streak when my knee in his back kept him from struggling too much.
“Get off! Get off of me!”
I leaned over his shoulder to hiss into his flat ear, “Why am I here? Who are you? Who sent you?”
When he only grunted in response, I picked his upper body off the floor and slammed him back down against it, his red skull bouncing off the metal floor with a thump.
“Ah! I don’t know why he wanted you. Who knows why he does anything,” he huffed at me.
I pressed his arm higher making him hiss in pain. “Who is ‘he’?”
“Ow! Stars! Rathal, the Lord of Erral. He has been watching the war between the Unity and General A’tens and told us to go and fetch him something interesting. A human. That’s all I know.”
Man, why couldn’t aliens be fucking normal? Just one damn normal interaction is all I asked for, and instead I get creepy wannabe feudal lords kidnapping humans because they were “interesting”. What was so interesting about us anyways? As far as anatomy went, humans were boring as hell compared to most of the aliens I’d run into. I figured we were like the goldfish of the galaxy. Common and abundant.
But the Vrax had a whole business of taking human women off Earth to sell into sexual slavery in some space version of a black market. Their last known shipment had ended with the Vrax dead and eaten courtesy of a pissed off Jack, a crashed ship, eighteen dead human women, and five escaped prisoners. One of which was a general in the Unity, who’d taken it personally, and the other was a Rijiteran killing machine that held a nasty grudge. We would eventually get around to hunting down every single flesh trader in the galaxy and exterminating them with extreme prejudice. Now these morons had just added themselves to the list of things to kill.
I dug my knee harder into his back. “Where am I?”
He wriggled under me. “Hoirt galaxy, quadrant four seven three.” Twisting his head back unnaturally to look at me, he sneered. “You’re already here, female. Good luck.”
“Thanks, Red. I appreciate your cooperation.”
He must have heard the finality in my voice because his red face paled.
My teeth flashing was the last thing he saw before his head snapped backwards.
Death comes quick in the dark.
two
Callie
Istuckmyheadout the door to look up and down the corridor for other guards, but only the flickering orange globe of a failing emergency light greeted me. The outside of the cell room wasn’t any different than inside, all the same shabby patchwork of metal and filth. It was narrower than I was coming to expect, almost like an Earth hallway instead of an interstellar spacecraft corridor.
I shrugged before starting down the hall, deciding to go right because it felt like downhill and I was tired. My face hurt and my fingers were sore from ripping at the metal and then the wires even with the gauntlets covering them. I healed fast now, already the swelling had gone from my eye and in a few hours it would be like the crash had never happened, but that didn’t stop it from hurting like a bitch until the nanos could do their work. My stomach rumbled, adding to my list of complaints. Whatever creature Anu had used to splice my DNA with when she’d been saving me from the Red Plague had a high metabolism andrequired raw meat to sustain it. Which meant my diet now mostly consisted of raw meat and what few vegetables that didn’t taste like dirt. Fruit was absolutely out of the question. Much too sweet. I had to eat more often and in larger quantities now too. It had been days since I last ate. Maybe more, since I wasn’t quite sure how long I’d been unconscious.
The human parts of my brain were disgusted by my new cravings, but the hunger gnawing at me reminded me that things change and there was nothing I could do about it. Except complain. I tried to keep that mostly internal so I didn’t sound like a whiny baby. I had a list though. An ever growing list of bullshit that I scowled at mentally. Lots of changes in under a year. Abduction, aliens, fuckingalien werewolves, a whole ass war, plague, potentially evil AI...
I snickered to myself as I rounded a corner. It was becoming something of a pastime to fuck with Anu. It kept the ancient creepy computer program that wasn’t really a computer program on her toes.
I came to a stop, a scowl pulling at my mouth. See? That wasn’t normal. I shouldn’t be strolling along in enemy territory, laughing. That insane nonchalant attitude in the face of danger was on my shit list twice. Overconfidence in situations like this just wasn’t normal. Not to mention now that I was creeping along the ship and the moment was over, I felt a little conflicted about just straight up murdering someone. On one hand, yes, it was him or me so I was justified, but damn it wasn’tnormal. My life used to be so fucking mundane. I’d had a great career in the Air Force, flying my dream plane. I'd just bought my car, a sweet little ice gray Porsche 911 Carrera, and I’d even been sort of talking to a man in one of the other squadrons. Life had been good. My parents were retiring and doing well, my friends were awesome, and I’d been happy.
I’d never killed anyone, hadn’t flown into combat, hadn’t known aliens or werewolves existed. Oh, excuse me,Rijitera. Freaky alien werewolves. Now look at me. Snapping necks and hunting pirates on a spaceship. If Jack hadn’t already killed and eaten the Vrax who’d abducted me, I’d kill them myself for thrusting me into this shit.
I looked into the door on my left. Six sparse empty bunk beds were inside so I continued towards the low hum of voices ahead of me.
