I stared after him, wondering who he wanted me to keep company with. All the males—every single one of them—were flying down to the Rummicaron outpost. They were mounting a full-scale attack, one the size of which I’d never seen before. Therewereno males left on the ship to act as my bodyguard. The only one with any fighting skills was Evie, and I knew she and the others were all gathering on the bridge to monitor the situation on the planet.
It was very tempting to return to the engine room after I’d watched the shuttles depart. Very tempting. The entity messing with my ship hadn’t left much behind, and this mission had only allowed me a small part to play, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any work to do. There was always something to repair or maintain, systems to check, armor to upgrade. I found myself a little too worried about the mission to focus, though, so I headed for the bridge anyway. All this just to kill or capture two men, it wasn’t right.
“Ysa, come to watch? Ruby had Brace make something that’s almost popcorn!” Harper said cheerfully when I entered the bridge. The massive viewscreen was lit up with live footage of the shuttles: a fleet of four black ones—ours—and two sleek silver ones that had to be from theVagabond. They met up over the planet, then angled down to enter its atmosphere. Everything looked like it was going exactly as planned. This was one of the outer worlds of the Rummicaron territory, right on the border with the Kertinal Empire.
I eyed the women, all hanging out in various seats by the different stations. Harper was by comms, the station her mate, Mitnick, usually manned, while Mandy sat with her baby in her arms in the Captain’s chair. Lyra and Evie were by the Navigator and Pilot controls, and Evie actually looked ready to fly theVarakartoomif necessary. That wouldn’t surprise me; Evie was highly trained and very capable, while Aramon was nuts enough to enjoy throwing her into the deep end with a ship this size.
“Sure, what’s popcorn?” I asked. I was anything but interested in food, even if I’d kind of missed breakfast. My stomach was all in knots, full of nerves about what my boys were up to. Normally, I wasn’t nearly this on edge, but it was different now.
“Only the best snack ever for watching movies,” Ruby announced. “You’ve got to taste it.” Then, much softer, Brace’s mate said, “We’re all nervous, but they’ll be fine. They’ve done this a million times. It’s like twenty to one down there, those are good odds.”
Twenty to one, twenty gladiators and mercenaries to one escaped mass murderer. Good odds, but I still worried not all of them were going to come back alive. Thatch healed fast, I told myself, and Ivo and Grunn were strong. It was going to be fine.
Chapter 17
Thatcher
We knew something was wrong before we’d even landed. The outpost was small. There was a military base, a tiny town, and a few farms. The flight tower had communicated about our arrival and given us landing coordinates not that long ago. They had claimed there had been no sightings of the pair of escaped gladiators, but that they were in a state of high alert as a precaution. There was no sign of any other arrival except ours, and according to the Rummicaron in charge, we must be mistaken about their next target; it wasn’t this sleepy outpost.
As we entered the atmosphere and our shuttles leveled off and angled toward the small outpost, that changed. “I can’t reach them, Captain,” Mitnick said. “They’re still not responding to hails.” He tapped the implant on his temple,and light glowed over one eye, a display only he could read. “TheVagabond’s shuttles are having no luck either, sir.” We shared grim looks with each other, and a spark of something that came awfully close to guilt niggled at the back of my mind.
I drummed my fingers against my legs, tension growing in every muscle. I knew what had happened, even before we had confirmation. The shuttles split to circle around the outpost, but smoke rose in thick, dark plumes from far too many homes. The base itself sat on a rock outcropping and was made of thick gray walls with undulating, smooth curves impossible to scale. Every single turret or cannon lay dormant on its corner, one listed over the edge of its tower, and another was still burning with white-blue plasma fire. The town was in ruins, but the military base had been decimated.
We landed in silence, on high alert, as the first shuttle set down inside the base. We weren’t supposed to land there, but there was no one alive to stop us now. The bodies that littered the base were either badly cut or badly burned, sometimes both. The wounds were also more severe than those visible in the images of previous attacks. They were escalating. Seriously escalating. We were all subdued as we fanned out and began a strategic sweep of the base, searching for survivors. I did not believe there would be any.
“They’re escalating,” I said to Asmoded when I reported back fifteen minutes later to the central courtyard. Mitnick had set up a temporary station with scanners and trackers; a very small command hub. He and the gladiator Sunder were poring over the data as it came in. Both captainsstood side by side, overseeing the operation. Mine a black, scaly beast, and the gladiator’s a shimmering green.
“So it would seem. Why do you think that is?” Asmoded asked. “I cannot imagine even a well-trained Pretorian is capable of doing this much damage.” I did not think so either, but it seemed too much for one Shadow Unit soldier on his own, too. We had almost always been assigned to missions alone. Our strength, our speed, and our rapid ability to heal made us perfect infiltrators, ones that did not need backup.
I assessed the damage with new eyes and swore roughly. Most of my past missions had been solitary, but not all. “There are two of them,” I said. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but this is too much damage and death for just one Shadow Unit soldier. This is the work of two.” The bounty was for two males, but one was a Pretorian, not human, which made that impossible. This kind of carnage, I’d only seen it, only created it, when working together with another.
Ziame, theVagabond’scaptain, met my eyes with an emerald stare down his bullish snout. Smoke curled with a click from his nostrils, from which hung a gold ring. “Gladiator blood mixes in the arena, and sometimes in the stables when we’re not offered medical aid as punishment for failure. Could the human’s blood have infected the Pretorian?”
I contemplated that and discovered I wanted to reach for my comm to ask Ysa. She did not have a sample of my nanobots, but Dravion kept one in the med bay. If she studied them, would she come up with an answer? The doctor had used my nanobots once to heal Mandy, but he’d gone out of his way to deactivate them afterward. I turnedmy head to my own captain, my mouth already opening to ask permission to assign Ysa to the task. The sound of an explosion prevented me from speaking.
Everyone ducked for cover, and Asmoded began shouting orders that were quickly picked up by the Sineater, while Ziame addressed his own people. I went where I was pointed, joining a group assigned to exit the base and circle it. No time to ask Ysa for anything now; these guys hadn’t left, and we weren’t going to sit by idly while under attack. I was certain this pair was killing for fun and searching for harder targets to challenge themselves. What better target was there than almost a dozen prime gladiators, including the famed Beast, and mercenaries as notorious as those from theVarakartoom.
It was never easy for me to blindly follow orders. I’d done that for a very long time and paid the price. Still, the thrill of the fight was too tempting to make a fuss over anything—least of all the danger of not one, but two nanobot-enhanced men. This guy, Eric, I was certain I would be on equal footing against. We had to be similarly enhanced, but I had Ysa’s specialized armor, and he did not. It was the Pretorian that was the wild card now.
The group I was assigned to was a perfect blend of gladiators and mercenaries. We had the tracker, Fierce, taking the lead, and a Sune male called Thorin, with a human female named Camilla as his backup. There was also a slinky, shadowy Ferai beast that kept his nose to the ground. He was bonded telepathically to Fierce and was as good at hiding as his master’s strangely adaptive skin.
From theVarakartoom, I had Flack, Grunn, and Ivo with me, which I knew was no mistake. The engineerswere good fighters, and Asmoded had paired them with me because Ivo and Grunn had already proven themselves eagerly loyal to me. Loyal because of Ysa, and I couldn’t help but feel more connected to them too—like they were brothers from my time in the military before the Shadow Unit. A bond I had only vaguely begun to recall while living aboard theVarakartoom.
They’d put Flack in charge of our little group; after all, he was an officer. His fur gleamed white as he stalked silently through the tall grass just ahead of me. He was in his hybrid-form, a fox on two legs, almost seven feet tall and crowned with a sharp snout and pointed ears. Behind him, a thick, plumed tail wove back and forth through the air, the motion calm, slow, and taunting. He grinned at the Ferai beast, but cocked his head and listened closely as theVagabond’s tracker assessed our direction.
It was the one human woman in the mix that had me fall in at the back of the group, unease crawling along my spine. A vague, distant part of me wondered if she was putting herself in terrible danger by being here. A far bigger part of me did not care; that was a worry for her boyfriend, the scowling, angry Elrohirian at her side. He limped; it wasn’t very noticeable, but I noticed it all the same. She looked familiar, and that pulled at memories buried deep.
When she kept glancing over her shoulder at me, I began to realize she recognized me, too. I didn’t like that, not one bit. My past should stay in the past, buried and forgotten. It had shaped me, and not in a good way, and I really didn’t need a reminder of all the terrible things I’d done in the name of the UAR. Of course, this human—she was a soldier herself—and like a dog with a bone, she would not let it rest.It was not an attitude that was good for a soldier, and the way she walked and held her laser rifle screamed soldier in every way.
“What?” I snarled when she glanced back a third time. Flack shot me a look over his shoulder that was all warning, but he did not speak. Her mate, Thorin, did not respond either, but I had a feeling he was on high alert. I would not be as trusting in his position, to let my girl solve this herself, but then, my girl did not fight, and his clearly did. Camilla was wearing an altered, and probably improved, version of a battle suit the UAR liked to use. Sleek, dark gray, with the UAR’s logo painted over. Instead, she had a closed fist over a heart in a faint dark gray. A logo, but cleverly muted and camouflaged.
“You look familiar,” Camilla said. She flicked a long, dark brown braid over her shoulder, though hers was not nearly as impressive as Ysa’s long strands. I shrugged, glaring to discourage her, but she did not scare easily. In that, she was similar to Ysa, and I imagined it made this Thorin guy worry the same way it did me. “No, really, how was it you ended up in the Zeta Quadrant? You’re the guy Eoin and Tori rescued from that mining planet, right? You’re the guy who’s part of a unit that’s not supposed to exist, just like our quarry?”
I bared my teeth, growling, because it had become second nature. It made her smile like she thought I was funny, so I doubled down. “So? That doesn’t mean we know each other.You’re notof the Shadow Unit. They don’t take women.” That was a hard fact. There were no female Shadow Unit soldiers, and since we were a branch of the military that technically didn’t exist, there was no one to tell us to changethat policy. I didn’t care one way or another. The whole unit could burn in hell for all I cared.
She rolled her eyes, then patted her mate on the arm like she was calming him. He hadn’t changed how he walked, had not so much as twitched a muscle, but I had a feeling she’d known, correctly, that he was pissed. My hands twitched and clenched into tight fists, and beneath my skin the metal that had fused with my bones and strengthened them seemed to itch. He wouldn’t know what hit him if he tried to strike; I’d claw straight through his armor and shred his thin skin.
“Well, I came here on the Praetor, and I’m willing to bet you did, too. That’s probably why we look familiar to one another.” Damn it. She was right. How was it possible that, out of all the random humans who’d gotten lost in the Zeta Quadrant, these gladiators had picked up a stray space marine from the very ship that had brought me here, stranded me, and betrayed me?
