“Yes! Yes, fuck! Biologically!” Aera flinches, and it’s hard to watch. But when I make a move toward them, he powers up his igniter, and her hair starts to smoke from the heat in his barrel.
“Salvation for your souls? No,” she warily adds. “You have toearnthat.”
He squirms and then draws her closer. “We know. We know. We...feel it. It’s why...” He rakes his teeth down her neck in an animalistic way that eats at me. “It must be why we want humans so badly. But Command...”
The way Aera cringes makes me desperate to find a way to stop him. I can’t go full stardust mode now, or I’ll incinerate her too. But I find a nearby decorative piece of trim and covertly break it free. I make eye contact with Aera and motion to the ground as I count down with my fingers. She watches them. As I hitOne, I flip the piece of metal in the air to feel its weight, then catch it, and throw it at Crezlith.
Aera rips herself forward and out of his hands and runs toward me. The metal tags him in the chest and knocks him back a step. Crezlith slumps against the pilot controls, bracing his bleeding chest, then fires his gun at me.
I pull Aera into the shield of my body and pull up the impenetrable sensation of Armor’s wings. My body morphs into a feathery sheet of metal that disburses the heat of Crezlith’s gunshots as he runs for the escape pod.
The Solcrue stumbles inside before I can move Aera aside and chase him down. Crezlith kicks the emergency eject button and is sealed up and in space before I can get to his pod. I brace myself on the sealed glass wall and glare out at him, then throw myself in the pilot’s seat and arm weapons, bringing us around and into firing position.
Aera circles my seat and crawls into my lap, distracting me. When I fire, I miss.
I miss.
I can’t believe it.
Crezlith’s pod engines blaze with light, and it disappears at hyperspeed.
When I look down to protest and ask why she would distract me from taking revenge, I see the blood running down her neck from his bite marks and forget about Crezlith. I will find him one day again. And I will kill him then. Right now, my mate needs attention, and we need to escape the cruisers turning their guns on us.
“This is a new ship,” I admit, tucking her close against my chest, before taking the controls and launching us out of the system. Navigation says we’re nowhere near home. “I’ll get us back among friends as soon as I can.”
“I don’t care where we go,” she sniffles into my shoulder. “Just don’t let me go.”
Chapter 23: Evo
I launch us out of the system and back toward the closest familiar planet I can find that’s more of a large asteroid.
“Are they following?” Aera asks.
I check the scanners. “Doesn’t look like it. We have no tails. That doesn’t mean we won’t encounter more later.”
She pulls herself up to my neck and hugs me. Thinking she needs a moment, I send a deep-space encrypted signal to Chasm and Aegis, hoping to get a pingback. It’s not easy to pass signals to Rebels over Solcrue satellite relays. But they often think it’s interference from junk and asteroids reflecting signals and disregard it.
“Please... Aera. I understand if you don’t want to tell me what happened, but I’m...concerned.”
“I thought I killed him years ago. He knew I was important back then. Had an order from his commander. He killed two of my Omega Force friends. I shot him, but it clearly wasn’t enough. He came back for me.”
The raking teeth marks on her neck bleed. So the moment I’m able, I get us on autopilot to the nebula, rip the Solcrue tracking system from its wires under the dash, and then carry Aera into the back while I look for something to care for her wounds.
A door to my right slides open to a one-bed medical room that the other emissary ships often don’t have. I set her down and sort through the cabinets and drawers for saline and dermal repair products.
She cautiously braces her neck and grimaces. “Seriously, what the fuck? Why the teeth?”
I douse her with the saline and dab the deep scrapes, wanting to tell her what I know. But first, I need to understand the situation. “What did you two talk about? And did he hurt you anywhere else?”
“No.” She sighs. “But I basically pointed out that they’re the weaker species of the three of us. Because when you strip all the gadgets away and put us on a world together, Solcrue would, let’s face it, die first. Then humans. Then Titans. Mostly because of the mating ships, like you said, because they control us so ruthlessly. And the way he talked about insecure types looking for ways out... I just put it all together.
“Solcrue left Earth to find a better world. They didn’t try to keep the old ways alive, striving for more and more advancements until they advanced themselves out of natural self-preservation. I didn’t expect to see surprise on his face. It’s like the thought had never occurred to him. So either their command is lying to them, or he hasn’t been paying attention to the patterns in his own society. But anything can be made to look like something it’s not if it’s dressed up right.”
“That’s an interesting concept. Can’t say I disagree.” I place a repair patch over her wounds, and Aera curls forward in pain.
“Is that really necessary?” she wheezes. “Fuck that burns.”
I pull the patch back. “Burns... like the medicine?”
