Talon said, “Now you just pissed me off. I asked you once nicely; now we will have to do it the hard way.”
The officer shouted, “No! No, wait! I don’t know why; we just do. We always have! There’s a …there’s a standing order that we resupply them!”
Jessica’s mind went perfectly smooth and blank; the memories came up. Yori standing before her in their secret meeting room below ground. The dim lights flickering as he spoke in his slow and educated voice.
“The Gorlites are our enemies, but not all in the Federation see them as such.”
She gagged. The flood of memories came harder, threatening to break down the barriers in her mind. She could hear Talon talking to the officer, hear the officer talking in return, but she could not focus on them. Her eyes closed and a tide of things she had locked away came washing over her.
So many secrets. So many lethal and killing secrets.
The resistance on Old Earth. The Federation officer who had taken one look at her when she had been a child and declared she was perfect for the Capo ranks. The death all around her, much of it caused by her. Her need to make things better.
And the words written on a piece of paper she had swallowed after reading.
The Gorlites and the Federation, working together for centuries to disrupt planets and ships and trade routes, all so the Federation could gain power.
Her legs went weak. She felt the heat rolling off the officer’s body as he fled away from her.
Talon’s fingers locked down on her shoulders. His voice came into her ear. His breath washed across her cheek. “Jessica. Jessica!”
More weapons fire. She had to move. Had to go, and fast, but her feet were locked into place, unbending and unmoving. Sickness filled her, making her body sag toward the floor. Talon’s hands met her upper arm, and he moved, dragging her along with him.
Time sped and slowed down all at once. Her head rang with the sound of voices that she had not heard in years as the memories, all of them locked away in that mind-trapping method that Yori had taught her, burst free from their boxes and took her out of the present and into the past, hurtling her into a place where there was no safety and only the sure and dread certainty that this entire universe would soon collapse and die and that there was nothing she or anyone could do about it.
They ran into hell. Harlon shouted, “We got Gorlites, Talon! They’re trying to take our ship! We have to get back over there.”
Time coalesced and hardened. Jessica’s mind snapped back to the present. They ran for the tubes, gathering weapons to replace the spent ones they would not have time to reload. Talon and she were the first ones in the tubes, and she carefully checked her weapons in the small amount of time allotted to them by the journey to their ship, but her brain had gone smooth and blank again.
She was operating on pure instinct now, and as soon as the tube opened, she was out and firing at the Gorlites, a species that resembled a cross between a worm and a cockroach, and whose ability to fight and kill was legendary. If they got within reach, they could spit deadly venom into the faces of their victims. They could handle weapons, and they could stab an enemy to death with their appendages.
The scene was straight out of a nightmare. The only way to kill a Gorlite was to go for its head, and Jessica's aim was true. If they could burrow, they would and leave eggs that would become Gorlites, and those infant Gorlites could take over a ship just as well as their adult counterparts.
Talon’s back met hers. They stood in the middle of the room, their bodies pressed together as their weapons fired at the Gorlites ringing all around them. A burst of venom shot through the air and Jessica grabbed Talon’s hair and shoved his head down as she ducked. The venom sailed over their heads, and Jessica shot a blast from her laser, killing the spitting Gorlite. The acid leaked along the floor, and she screamed in fury as she killed another Gorlite.
Harlon and the others charged in, coming from the tubes in time to see Jessica and Talon trapped within a Gorlite ring.
The Gorlites died, and then they were off and running. The fight was all over the ship. The crew was used to fighting Gorlites, and Talon had long since devised traps for any creature that tried to take his ship. The traps were working, but the Gorlites were large in number. Their bodies littered the hallways, but so did a number of crew bodies. Jessica’s ire only increased as she saw a young Begenlie warrior that had joined them just a few months before lying dead on the floor close to his bride, whom he had obviously been trying to protect.
It was fight or die, so she fought. Talon and the others fought right beside her. The Gorlites were eventually beaten back, and the few who had not died retreated back to their own ship. The crew immediately began the cleanup process and looked for burrow holes and slime trails that would point to a Gorlite infestation.
Jessica kicked a dead body from her path. Her eyes were fastened onto Talon’s face as she walked toward where he stood, one booted foot on the dead carcass of a Gorlite. The anger in her heart was only matched by the rage written large upon his expression. They met in the middle of the battlefield, and for one moment fear brushed a wing across Jessica’s body, sending a slight shiver through her skin.
He looked as if he were caught in bloodlust that might very well mean her death. Her lips parted, and she breathed, “It is me. I am not your enemy.”
His lustrous eyes shone even brighter for one moment, and then his eyelids blinked downward then upward and she saw recognition and a slow receding of the anger.
She said, “Talon…”
Talon’s head drooped downward. One of his hands came up and stroked his hair. “I know, but I don’t want to know. The Federation is in alliance with those parasites. They have likely been unholy partners for centuries.”
It all came back to her at that moment. The secret that her brain had jealously guarded through the mind wiping and the probing of her brain that Jeval had engaged in. The one thing her mind had not shown her earlier and the secret that she had been trying to unlock because her mind had whispered to her that time was running short and she must remember.
A spasm of pain rippled through her. Her breath and heart both literally stopped for a moment, then resumed at a fast pace. Her hands balled into fists, and she had to struggle to speak because the words that she had to say were so terrible it felt like speaking them aloud would somehow bring them into life and being and that was the last thing she wanted to do.
She had to say them.
Now.
