There was a gap in the corridors’ inner walls, a split that must have occurred over the years and led to a small cave system beyond the building’s footprint. With the outpost’s systems down, the forcefield that had been covering it was gone. He hit it at a run, wriggling through.
It wasn’t big enough to allow a Latharian to slip through, and he took a couple of layers of skin off his back on the way. As soon as he was concealed in the tiny crevice behind the metal wall, he froze and tried not to breathe. The heavy clump-clump-clump of the suited alien sounded in the corridor on the other side of the thin metal.
“Draanthic human,” he hissed to himself, his voice so close he had to be just the other side. Bending down with a grunt, the lights on his suit stabbed into the darkness beyond where Jay stood hidden. If he worked out that Jay was only the other side of the thin metal, it was over. With that suit, he could tear through it like tissue paper.
“Run then, you coward!” the B’Kaar called out, obviously thinking Jay had escaped through the caves. “Die on this draanthing planet alone.”
Jay kept holding his breath as the B’Kaar walked away, not moving until his heavy steps had faded into silence. Then he slid out of hiding, running like the hounds of hell were after him to reach the main doors of the destroyed outpost. But they weren’t there. The aliens had utterly ripped the place apart, literally digging down through the roof to get to them.
He clambered up the last shattered slope of flooring to see the B’Kaar who’d been left to kill him engage the high-tech jetpacks on his suit and disappear up into the atmosphere, following the shuttle that must be carrying Keris and the rest.
Jay’s eyes narrowed. “Hold on, sweetheart. I’m coming for you.”
Then he ran, heading down the mountain toward where they’d left the shuttle. It had no weapons he could use, and he wasn’t even sure he could fly it, but he would figure it out.
He had to. Because he was going to save Keris. Even if it killed him.
19
The two B’Kaar holding her carried her across the broken ground to a nearby shuttle. It was much newer than the one she and Jay had arrived in and bristled with weaponry. Just looking at it gave her the chills. It was a machine designed for war—bloody and brutal war.
“No! Let me go!” She struggled against them every step of the way, but it was futile. Unenhanced and in a tiny physical body, she couldn’t hope to match them for strength. Their hands were like iron manacles around her arms and her legs beat at the air as they carried her between them, their suit boots crushing small rocks underfoot.
They threw her in through the open door of the shuttle, any possible escape cut off as the huge, kasivar-clad warriors clambered in after her. She retreated to the back of the large cabin, scooting across the floor on her ass.
The way the B’Kaar looked at her was hard and cold—a combination of contempt, loathing, and disgust. Like she was something they’d scraped off the bottom of their collective boot. She would have been scared, but fear of a different type rolled through her as she sorted through the suited warriors, her gaze latching on to a dark-bearded face she knew.
“Berr! Berr, please!” She launched herself at him, landing against his broad chest and clinging on. He refused to look down at her, yanking his head up out of her reach when she touched his cheek.
“Please,” she begged. “You have to help Jay. This isn’t his fault. He’s innocent. He… didn’t know what I was,” she lied, desperate for some way to save the man she loved. “I lied to him. I told him I was a stored mind-file from a Latharian woman who’d died years ago.”
Berr’s head turned like it was on a swivel, and in the tiniest crack in the black-on-black armor of his eyes, she saw indecision. Agony.
“But you were lying. Weren’t you?” he rumbled. “You ain’t ever been a woman. You weren’t born like the rest of us.”
She shook her head. She had been born—on the cold metal floor of the station—but that wasn’t what he meant. “No, I wasn’t. But he was. He doesn’t deserve to die. Please!”
But as she begged, the troop shuttle’s engines had spooled up, the whine assaulting her ears through the open loading ramp, dust kicking up in swirls as they took off. A small squeak escaped her and she would have been thrown down with the force of the acceleration if not for Berr’s arm hard around her waist. The B’Kaar all stood in place, the maglocks on their suit boots securing them to the deck.
“Please, Berr, I’ll do anything,” she pleaded, keeping her eyes locked on his face. But the tiny chink she’d seen closed over and his eyes shuttered.
“Save your breath, machine,” he snarled, detaching her grip on him with hard hands and pushing her away. She staggered against the metal wall, reaching for a support strut to hold on.
The roar of a booster pack and a thump announced a warrior landing on the ramp. She whimpered, recognizing him. He was the one who’d been left behind with Jay.
Risyn turned, one eyebrow raised. “The human?”
The warrior rolled his shoulder. “Dead. Didn’t put up much of a fight. Disappointing really.”
Keris screamed.
At least, she thought she did. Her mouth opened as she collapsed to her knees, but no sound emerged. Just an awful, gasping croak as she tried to breathe through lungs that no longer registered oxygen.
Agony sliced through her chest so intense that she pressed her hand to it and looked down, convinced one of the B’Kaar had shot her… but no blood welled over her fingers. Her clothes remained whole, untorn.
The pain was within as her heart cracked and then broke in two. Tears coursed down her cheeks as torment filled every cell of her body in a protoplasmic storm.
She barely noticed as the ramp closed and they left the planet’s atmosphere, or when they reached the B’Kaar ship. Being lifted by hard hands and carried off the shuttle only elicited another silent sob.
Corridor after corridor passed before her eyes, but she didn’t pay any attention. What was the point? Nothing mattered anymore. Jay was dead. Nothing would ever matter anymore.
She was carried unresisting into a lab. She assumed it was a lab anyway, looking around dully at long counters and operating tables. A body even lay on one of them, the warrior long dead and his skin opened up to reveal his ke’lath within. A preservation field surrounded him so it was impossible to tell how long he’d been there. A kasivar of an older design stood next to the table. She didn’t get a chance to see anything else as her captors shoved her onto the other table.
Risyn watched her with a stony expression as she sobbed silently.
“It feels emotion?” he mused as two other B’Kaar strapped her in. “Fascinating. I doubt it is real emotion. There is no way an AI—”
“Of course it’s real, you fucking asshole!” Keris snapped and raged at him. Her voice rose in fury as she struggled against her bonds. “I am a Miisan-level advanced intelligence construct with hyper-threaded neural capacity. I am capable of running myriads of algorithms and processes concurrently with no loss of cerebral performance and you’d better fucking hope I don’t get anywhere near your fucking computer core. I’ll destroy it and you, and laugh while I do!”