I throw myself sideways. Not fast enough. The claws catch my temple — white flash, heat — and the tail comes around on the follow-through and catches my hip and I hit the deck plate shoulder-first and the air punches out of me and the hold goes sideways and bright and wrong.
I am on the floor.
The Vrennak is turning. Coming around. The four eyes — bright, grieving, looking for something I am not — find me on the deck plate, and the plated skull lowers, and the jaw opens, and I cannot get up. My arms won’t hold. My vision is swimming. There is blood in my left eye from the temple, and the Vrennak is three feet away and closing, and it is so much bigger from down here. So much bigger than anything should be, and it smells like ozone and old metal and grief, and its breath is hot on my face, and my mother’s voice is gone, and I have nothing left.
I have nothing left, and it is right there, and I am going to die on this floor in a jacket from the Finder’s Market on my first day at a job I am not going to have anymore because I am going to bedead—
The Vrennak opens its jaws.
From somewhere behind it, very far away, a sound.
Not human. Not a command. Something low and raw and ancient that fills the hold like a pressure wave, and the last thing I see before the world whites out is the Vrennak’s head snapping away from me toward the source of that sound.
5
The Trigger
Jazil
Sheisonthefloor and the Vrennak is over her and my body moves before my brain has a vote.
Not toward the rod. Not toward the cradle. Toward her. Shoulder-first into the Vrennak’s flank at full speed, and the sound that comes out of my mouth is from somewhere I have never accessed — below the voice, below the chest, from the place where forty-one years ofdormantanddefunctandyou will love differentlyhave been sitting quiet and patient and wrong.
The sound saysmine.
The Vrennak staggers. Two feet sideways. Its head snaps toward me, and the four eyes blink, and I am between it andher, and I will not move. It can have my arm. It can have both arms. It can have whatever it wants that is not the female on the deck plate behind me.
The instinct is a detonation. It lit the moment the tail connected with her hip and she hit the floor and made that sound — small, punched-out, not a scream, worse than a scream — and forty-one years ofcompletely fucking finecaught fire and the fire is not going out.
“HORATIO.” My voice. Raw. Stripped. “Field status.”
“Seventy-eight percent, Captain. I need approximately forty-five seconds.”
Forty-five seconds. She is on the floor behind me, and I have a containment rod and one good arm and forty-five seconds to keep this thing off her.
The Vrennak charges.
Not the grief-stricken lunge it threw at Lorri. This is direct. A predator that has identified a threat and removed it. The plated skull comes low, forelimbs driving, and I bring the rod up two-handed and catch the jaw on the upswing and the impact jars through my shoulders and the Vrennak’s head snaps sideways and it screams and my forearm — the slashed one — tears open another quarter inch and the pain is a white line from elbow to wrist that I do not have time for.
It comes again. Faster. I pivot left, crack the rod across the base of the plated skull where the chitin is thinnest, and the Vrennak stumbles and swings the tail and I drop flat and the tail passes over me close enough to take hair and I roll and I am up and it is already turning.
Something is wrong with it. The bioluminescence is cycling in patterns I haven’t seen — hot, erratic, pulsing wrong. The plating along its spine has a texture that doesn’t look right. Too smooth in places. Too rough in others. Six years in a modified stasis pod, in experimental containment nobody can identify, and whatever was done to thisanimal has done something to it. It’s not just angry or grieving. It’s corrupted.
This thing should not be alive. Whatever was done to it — the experiments, the modifications, the six years on a dead ship — it should not have survived. It did, and it’s suffering, and it’s dangerous, but it is between me and my —
My.
Mid-fight. Mid-bleeding. The thought arrives with the force of something that has been waiting forty-one years: I am going to keep her.
The Vrennak charges again, and I go to meet it.
The rod comes down on the shoulder joint — the gap in the plating — and the crack is wet and wrong and the Vrennak screams and the forelimb buckles and I hit it again because the field needs thirty more seconds and she is behind me and nothing is getting past me.
Nothing.
The Vrennak rallies. My good forelimb braces. Skull drops. Jaw opens. I can see every tooth. The hot stink of corrupted stasis pours out of its throat, and I bring the rod across my body and brace.
It hits me chest-high. The rod holds. My boots slide on the deck plate, and the Vrennak’s jaw closes on the rod and bites down, and the metal bends. The bite force vibrates through my palms. The rod is failing.
