“Aera!” I charge through the room. I can make it. I know I can. But the way she screams when she sees me makes me think I’ve miscalculated something.
“No!” Her face is red, and veins rise in her neck.
A cold, impossibly heavy weight slams into my right side, coats my body, and smashes me into the far wall with crushing force. Milky white polymers filled with energy-draining probes suck the power out of me. My body begins to shut down.
Capsule. Capsule. Capsule.
My body slowly morphs inside the shell of hell I hate most.
How did I get captured in this shit again? Damn it!
Something pushes me, rolls me across the floor, over a lip, and into container. The plasma retracts from me, rolls out of the chamber, and forms into a perfect sphere that a Solcrue loads back into a gun as he slams the door on my cell.
“Welcome back to hell, Ssss...”
“Fuck off, Half-wit.”
“It’sHetnick, you piece ofShannassishit.”
I get up and punch the clear pane between us. It doesn’t even fracture. “Half-dick. Yeah. Whatever.”
He taps the control panel on my cell with a smirk and sends a dart punching into my neck. Hetnick tilts his scaly head, rubs a cropped ear, and watches me.
The dart thrusts cold liquid into my body, carrying with it the sickening chill of bad code, of corruption, of the very thing I never wanted to endure again.
I slump down in the cell.
He chuckles, bites off a bit of a gilkyworm cake, leaving crumbs on the floor, then turns for the door. “That’s what I thought. I’ll be back for your first shift in an hour, S...”
I can’t let it consume me, not again.
But the way it invades my body and turns my veins into fire makes me concerned I’m not going to break out of it this time. It feels...upgraded. So I focus my protection around my cores and the precious chips inside my body, and let the poison do its thing.
I just wish I knew how to stop it, what medicine I needed, or anticode.
I pull up the memory of Aniah killing the Solcrue, and every other memory I have of humans fighting for one another, defending themselves from Solcrue, the kind of thing that broke me free last time. The poison code reaches my central processor and slows my thinking. But I bring Aera’s face to the front of my memory.
I hold onto her, fighting to help her colony and the salvage mission, even though she’d barely had an hour of sleep. I drift off under the taxing effort of processing the corrupt nanos while thinking of her digging her heels into my ass and begging me to be one with her.
At least when I serve Solcrue this time, I won’t have to be alone. My companion program is complete.
Chapter 21: Aera
Evo came for me, and the damned Solcrue caught him. Again. I fight Captain Crezlith harder.
“Aera, I swear to the black holes, I will cut you again if you don’t...” He wraps an arm around my waist and hauls me through a doorway.
I launch an elbow into the side of his head.
“Stop!” He slings me into a cell and smashes a button on the side that sends a door closing between us and metal arms unfolding from the ceiling, the kind meant to control unruly anajas. They pin me back against the wall, binding my arms and legs so I can’t move.
He runs a finger over his cheek and wipes blood away. Then, he taps the screen and the door opens again.
Crezlith storms up to me, grabs me by the face, and gets close enough that I can smell the gilkyworms on his breath. I stifle a gag when he bares his pointed teeth at me. “Let me be clear. The only reason you are not already dead is that Titan wants you. And he is also useful. If I kill you, knowing Titans, he will decommission himself. Which, in hostile situations, turns him into a bomb. And we can’t have that. We’d much rather have a servant we can count on.
“As for you...” Crezlith’s green eyes dance over my face with interest. His jaw muscles flex. “Your kind are supposed to be submissive.”
I growl at him, and it makes him throw his head back laughing. “Aferalfemale. Perhaps I should try Evolution’s corruption code on you and see if I can get you to behave.”
