Page 28 of Claimed By the Alien Mercenary

Chapter 21

Danitalin

The glider was not a comfortable ride, mostly because we had several guns and suspicious eyes aimed our way. Jaxin held me in his lap, hugging me close, and that helped. The hostile feelings, the impatience to get rid of us, it tingled heavily in the air and pressed against my skin. Kind of like a thorn in your foot, irritating you with every move. Like an uncomfortable screech just beyond your range of hearing.

Very little was said, just a few barked orders from a Kertinal with stripes on his uniform. “This way, the shuttle is waiting.” He seemed even more anxious to get rid of us than his underlings were. I hoped that meant he simply wanted nothing to do with my cure and me. We were a disturbance in their plans that they needed to remove, that was it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be more to it: the war they were waging against Taktak’s people, which I very much wanted to prevent—but knew I couldn’t.

It wasn’t right that the Kertinal Empire could invade an inhabited world and claim it as their own. This was Taktak’s world, not theirs, but in the eyes of most civilized societies in the Zeta Quadrant, that hardly mattered. Power was power, and even the Aderian government wasn’t getting involved in this. I wasn’t even sure what they were after, because the Kertinal usually only invaded if there was something to gain: precious ores or a tactical advantage.

The shuttle we were delivered to was silver, sleek, and not very big. It did not look to me to be of Kertinal design either, but even the Kertinillian Army used ships from the Strewn Shipyard, since they were the best. Perhaps it was something new from there; I hardly cared enough to keep up to date with the latest shuttle models. I opened my mouth to ask Jaxin, but just then our Kertinal escort’s impatient boss began talking again.

“This is all we can spare right now.” His dual-layered voice gave me the chills because it reminded me just a little too much of D’aron. In fact, my chin itched as I remembered the spot where the head of security had cut me with the blade that tipped his tail. Jaxin’s crew had killed that murderous bastard, but that was not giving me the comfort it should have. Not when I was faced with another male who looked and sounded much like him. Except this officer, who hadn’t even introduced himself, didn’t have pale pink and purple lines; his were a reddish hue instead.

The small shuttle had only a single Kertinal pilot at the helm; the officer hadn’t been kidding when he said this was all they could spare. My stomach twisted with worry for Taktak, because that probably meant they were about to move on his people very soon. I wanted to turn on the Kertinal officer and implore him to delay the attack, to reconsider. Jaxin hauled me aboard the shuttle with a warning glare. He was probably attuned enough to me by now to know what I was thinking, and he didn’t want me to say anything. Fine—it would be pointless anyway, but it still felt wrong not to try.

The hatch hissed shut right behind us, with zero warning or ceremony. The two of us were instructed by the Kertinal pilot, in a cool tone, to take our seats and strap in. He seemed… off to me somehow, annoyed, anxious, and that probably had to do with missing out on possible action. He must hate having to ferry us off the planet when his buddies were all about to prepare for war. That was exactly the kind of thinking I knew to expect from a Kertinal soldier.

Jaxin grunted a very grumpy warning as he urged me into the nearest jumpseat. “Patience. We’re here now, aren’t we? You’ll be rid of us soon enough.” His hands were gentle as he strapped my harness around me but quick and capable as he secured my bag of samples. I watched him and realized he was needling the pilot on purpose by taking his time securing our things—and himself. The male was not allowed to take off, per Kertinal protocol, until Jaxin had secured himself in his own jumpseat.

When the last strap was secured and Jaxin’s laser cannon cradled in his lap, the shuttle lifted off without warning. Just a quick confirmation with the flight tower, and we were off. It wasn’t until we were angled skyward and my eyes locked with the approaching darkness of space that I felt it. “Jaxin! Stop him!” I called out, just as a hatch came slamming down between us and the pilot. No! Too late… How had I not realized that the pilot’s anxiety had nothing to do with the mounting activity on Radin? This was all about us.

Jaxin roared as the hatch slammed down, yanked free from his harness, and raised his cannon as if he planned to fire it. A shot inside this tiny shuttle would kill us as much as the pilot, perhaps cause such structural damage that the shuttle would crash. He reined himself in at the last moment, raising his comm to call for aid instead.

I wanted to undo my own flight harness to help somehow, but the hiss of gas above my head made me freeze and yank my eyes up in alarm. What was that? I smelled it—faint, but present—before I could identify where it was coming from. A drug, like the faintest hint of sulfur in the air. Jaxin and I looked at one another, recognizing it at the same time, and then my eyes rolled back and I passed out. Jaxin’s angry roar accompanied me into the dark, and then I was all alone.

It felt like I’d blinked once, not been out cold for hours, but when I woke, everything had changed. Gone were the shuttle, the dirty and partially improvised clothes, and Jaxin. I was lying on a soft couch, and someone had cleaned and redressed me in typical Aderian clothing: soft pants, a flowing blouse, and a jacket fit for work in a lab or hospital at any time. My hair was braided too, but just at the temples, so it left my ears exposed.

I expanded my empathic senses before I did anything else, searching for only one thing: Jaxin. I touched the minds and emotions of dozens upon dozens of people—some signatures more familiar than others—but it wasn’t until I’d reached almost as far as I could that I found him: a massive wall of cold rage and terrible fear. His mind was as familiar to me as my own, and his feelings as obvious as those of anyone else. He was unhurt, though his chest muscles ached, overtaxed and not entirely in shape yet, after recovering from that terrible injury.

Knowing he was alive made me feel strong enough to face what I otherwise couldn’t. The familiar signature of emotions in the other room. Koratalin was here. I didn’t know what to think of that, or how to feel. She’d been a friend, a sister, something good that I’d lost when I’d cut ties with a father who, I’d learned, was nothing but evil. Now I knew Koratalin wasn’t any better, and she’d somehow disguised that from me. She was here to steal my cure, force me to make it, and then use it for her own nefarious purpose.

Rising slowly, I tested the limits of my body by dancing through several of my favorite Yadasca poses. It did not relax me, and it did not help guard me against the press of feelings closing in around me, either. Too many people were crammed aboard this spaceship, in close quarters, and feeling dark, unpleasant things—anger, greed, lust, and a pervasive amount of fear. It was not nearly as bad as being held hostage with my terrified colleagues for days, but it came close.

Perhaps Yadasca was not enough to calm and steady me, and I grasped for another tool I’d recently learned: Jaxin’s mind-numbing exercises. They did not work on me the same way they did on a Rummicaron mind; they could never mask my feelings or push them away entirely. But as I breathed through them with closed eyes, it did seem like they put a little distance between me and the feelings of others around me. It helped, even if it was only a little.

The door hissed open then, and Koratalin glided inside, her footsteps hurried, almost rushed, but not quite. She wasn’t the same woman as before, even if she did feel familiar. Her face was the same; her hair was even done the same, with a comb glittering with emeralds by her left ear. She smiled at me with the same almost motherly concern, and her embrace swept me away in a cloud of expensive perfume and warmth, just like I remembered. Still, she was different, because I was different.

“Danitalin!” she gushed, with the perfect hints of warm concern and happiness at seeing me. It felt so real that I struggled to figure out what was really going on, because I knew it couldn’t be real. Not if she was really the person who had sent those mercenaries to take my team and me hostage, or hunt me through the jungle. Everything Hadralin—our father—ever said and did had hidden his true nature from my empathic gift. Now, I had to believe that Koratalin could do the same somehow. Some Aderians were like that, gifted with something opposite of empathy.

I lingered in the embrace for just a few seconds, memorizing it—perhaps comparing it to my recollections of the past. I was not the same; I kept telling myself that. I’d seen things since my sister and I last met. The darkness of that Rummicaron world, with all its Roka-addicted people; the effects of the pollution on their bodies. I’d met Jaxin, and in the short time I’d known him, he’d changed me on a fundamental level.

I had an understanding of my gift, and better control than I’d ever had. That was thanks to him, thanks to the subtle nuances in his feelings beneath the cool armor. His Rummicaron mind exercises were helping me here, too, letting me feel a calm through the hurt that I would otherwise not have known. I let that feeling guide me, anchored in the solid knowledge that I’d made a male love me who wasn’t supposed to know what love was. Jaxin was all I needed, and he gave me the strength to stand firm now, too.

My gift unfurled like a flower in my mind, not spreading across the ship just to find Jaxin’s mind, but curling through the room and around Koratalin to sniff out the truth. What was beneath that false concern? What was the truth? She was talking about how much she’d missed me, and how relieved she was that she’d managed to rescue me from that awful mercenary. At the same time, her questions probed at what I was doing now, how my cure was going.

I deflected her question with a “You’re not interested in my nerdy science stuff! Tell me about your life, Koratalin.” It made her frown; a flicker of something shifted beneath her warm welcome. I focused on it, pulled on it like it was a thread to unravel. Pull it, and things started to collapse like a house of cards. It was like all my experience sliding beneath Jaxin’s emotionless shields was coming in handy now. There the truth was, staring me in the face from one moment to the next.

I blinked, shocked to discover the darkness in my half-sister’s mind. Hidden there, even against the power of my gift, all this time. She felt exactly like what the stories of our father had always implied he should feel like: greed, anger, cunning—those were first and foremost. Her impatience to get answers from me was heavy and hard to miss. She wasn’t happy to see me or concerned about my well-being; she was here to interrogate me.

I did not count on her realizing I’d burst her facade like a bubble. She jerked back from hovering, supposedly protectively close, and her smile dropped. “What did you do, Danitalin?” she said in such a cold tone that fear slid like ice water down my spine. She was furious with me, and I could sense her desire to strike at me; it pulsed against my skin. My eyes dropped to her hands in reflex and widened when I discovered the metal, gem-studded claws she wore over her nails. Her hand would do serious harm if she struck me with that, she’d draw blood.

Her satisfaction curled between us then, thick and heavy. She knew I’d seen the threat, sensed it, and she rather enjoyed having that kind of power over me. How sick. How could this woman be related to me? I already knew how my empathy-gifted mom had been tricked by Hadralin for the duration of their passionate affair. Yet it sickened me to discover how deeply I’d been tricked by him, and by my half-sister. Mom had warned me, and I had believed myself too strong an empath to be deceived.

“So, you’ve grown stronger. Fine. It doesn’t matter.” Koratalin strode away from me in a swish of lush golden silk and red embroidery. Her black hair shimmered along her back in undulating waves, the tips dipped in gold dust for an extraordinary look. She’d always enjoyed the finer things in life, and I should have realized that getting piles of gifts from expensive stores was not love—just the only way an emotionally stunted person could think to persuade me to like them.

“I never did like playing games,” she added, and that was a blatant lie. Koratalin had taken great pleasure in deceiving me, I saw that now. Her smirk told me she knew I knew it, and she did not bother to correct herself. “Now, since we’re done with this”—she flapped her hand between us, and her gold- and gem-crusted claws glinted—“sisterly bonding thing… You’re going to tell me what I want to know, and then you’re going to finish your work. Got that, sis?”

I nodded slowly, but my mind was racing as I considered the options. There was no way I was going to make the cure for her that she was after, but I needed to convince her that Jaxin was key to it all. I had to make sure he was safe, and I had to make sure we found a way off Koratalin’s ship. Once we were together, I was certain Jaxin would know things I didn’t. So that was the plan: get him in the same room with me, preferably with minimal guards.

“So, this is the real you, is it?” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. It was a poor shield against the darkness I now sensed coming from her, and my skin prickled, reminding me that she’d embraced me. “Why do you even want a cure for Roka pollution? What do you care?” Jaxin had outlined some reasons to me at one point, but it still didn’t make much sense. How would having this cure give Koratalin control of a bigger slice of the drug trade?

She smiled evilly, there was no other word for the way her mouth curled and her black eyes glinted. She was going to indulge me because she liked being the one in control, and she rather liked horrifying me to boot. “Because, sis,” she drawled, tapping a claw against her red mouth, “with a cure like that, I can charge the sods working for me to have it. It’ll have them flock to my production sites and leave the others at a disadvantage. I can even charge my rivals a premium if they want it for their workers. Get it?”

I did not get it, it was too horrible. This was not at all what I had set out to create, and I refused to hand over such power to her or anyone, for that matter. Shaking my head, I told her no, and her expression grew dangerous, a threat sharpening in the air like a knife. She was too far away to harm me with her claws, but that did not mean she couldn’t harm me in other ways. There was a very small laser pistol hanging from her belt, for instance, and her personal guard was only a shout away.

“You don’t get to say no to me, Danitalin. You’re my blood. I’d hate to see you harmed, but I will, if you leave me no choice.” Hate to see me harmed? That was a lie, too. She didn’t give a Nia’s whiskers about me. Dead or alive, it didn’t matter, as long as she got her cure. That was where I had the leverage, and I pounced on the chance.

“Where’s my guard? Where did you put Jaxin? I’ll help you if you let us—both of us—go afterward. Unharmed. And I’ll need his help; he’s the only one who knows how to assist me.” My demand was met with an amused bark of laughter, Koratalin’s disbelief that I needed Jaxin’s help crashing against my mind. I struggled to maintain the cool shielding I’d learned to create with Jaxin’s exercises, pain like shards in my chest from her intensity. Things were wearing thin; I was getting tired of keeping this up.

“You need a dumb Rummicaron warrior to help you?” my half-sister said, shaking her head. “I doubt that. Are you banging him? Is that it?” I gasped, and perhaps my expression said enough, because she laughed again. “Oh, that’s priceless! You are! I suppose him being a cold fish is the only way you can get close and not burn out. Something is better than nothing, is it?”

Mortified, I tried to figure out how to answer that, but every answer would give away how much Jaxin meant to me. That was not a risk I could take; it would put all the power back in her hands. I settled on: “His emotionless state protects my mind from overloading. He helps me think straight.” She raised an eyebrow as if she did not believe me, and I feared she was about to suggest she’d put another Rummicaron as a guard in the room with me. Then she shrugged, as if she didn’t really care.

She thought she was in control, that she had all the power. Perhaps she didn’t think Jaxin and I could get up to no good when put in a room together. She was going to find out she was wrong, because I was convinced that, together with him, I could do what Jeltom and I had tried to do the first time around: a bomb, a distraction, and escape.