Risyn’s expression froze.
“You said Miisan-level.”
It was not the answer she had been expecting. She slumped on the bed. “What?”
“Miisan-level but not Miisan herself.”
Realization hit and she laughed, the sound manic and bitter. Maybe a little unhinged. But who could blame her? She’d lost the man she loved. He’d been murdered and she hadn’t been able to protect him.
“No. I’m not Miisan.” She grinned at him. “You’ll never find her. You’re too late. She’s stardust and databytes across the entire empire by now.”
Risyn’s face tightened in anger. “She’s not the AI we need. Draanth!”
He shoved his hand through his hair, more agitated than she’d seen him before. Pointing at Berr, he snarled, “Get us back to that base. We need that AI’s cortex mapping if we’ve any hope of success.”
Keris blinked. Cortex mapping was only used to integrate an AI’s consciousness into a new cerebral housing.
“Wait? What?” she asked, trying to lift in her bonds as the B’Kaar filed out of the room. “Hey! Wait! No… don’t leave me in here with the dead guy!”
But it was too late. The lights went out and she was alone, shivering on a metal slab with only a dead B’Kaar to help her mourn the only man she’d ever loved.
The shuttle was not just destroyed. The B’Kaar had obliterated it.
Jay stood in the entrance to the cave, speechless as he surveyed the damage. It looked like a wrecking ball had hit it. Or a bomb had gone off inside it. The landing struts and the ventral hull was still there, but everything else was… gone.
At the least, it was no longer in the right place. Instead, the rest of the shuttle was spread around the cave as panels, internal support structure, and bulkheads littered the dirt and rock floor. The airlock door was in two pieces just in front of him and the toilet, a similar design the galaxy over, sat upright near the left wall.
He sank to his knees, a low moan in the back of his throat. He’d been worried about figuring out how to pilot the alien craft. It hadn’t occurred to him that the B’Kaar would ensure he couldn’t follow.
He had no idea how long he sat there, looking at the destroyed shuttle. The first sun sank below the horizon, the darkness brief but complete until the triple moons rose, lighting the cave up as much as daylight had.
“You fucking asshole!” he raged, surging forward suddenly to grab a triangle of torn hull plating. Falling and twisting at the same time, he hurled it out of the cave up at the sky.
It didn’t reach that far, a hand darting out to stop it before it could leave the cave. Still on his back Jay yanked the pistol from his waist and aimed, thinking that the B’Kaar had come back to finish the job.
But the alien warrior standing in the doorway wasn’t B’Kaar. He wasn’t in an exosuit, but the more “normal” leathers of a Latharian warrior. Tall, he was broader than a shuttle across the shoulders and vaguely familiar.
“Wanna tell me who you are, blondie?” he growled. “Before I blow your fucking head off. Because I’m in a shoot first and ask fucking questions later mood.”
The alien tilted his head slightly. “You are aware you just asked a question, right?”
“Rynn, leave the man alone,” a familiar voice rumbled and Xaandril, the emperor’s champion, stepped out from behind the bigger warrior. Seeing the two side by side, he instantly realized why the younger one looked familiar.
He was Xaandrynn M’rln, Keris’s brother and the emperor’s chief assassin.
Surging to his feet, he looked them both up and down. “About time you got here. Those asshole B’Kaar took Keris about an hour after she sent that message. We need to rescue her. Now.”
He walked past the two aliens. “Did you bring a ship? I’m going to need some leathers and guns. Lots of guns. And that big bastard Risyn is mine. Understand?”
Rynn turned to his father. “I thought you said Keris had taken up with a human?”
Jay looked over his shoulder. His quick look outside had reassured him that Keris’s family had arrived in a ship—a sleek, compact warship that looked like it meant business. Exactly what he would have expected from the emperor’s champion and assassin.
“I told the B’Kaar and I’ll tell you as well. You Lathar look down on us at your peril. Yeah, we’re smaller. Yeah, we don’t have all the adaptations you guys do. When you lot come up against a problem, you tweak your genetics. Faster, stronger, see in the dark… you can do it all.”
He turned to face them, his hands bunched at his sides. “Humans didn’t get to cheat that way. But guess what? On a planet where everything wants to kill us, we’re the fucking top of the food chain. Absolute fucking apex predators. We adapt, we overcome, without fucking about with our genetic code and wiping out half our species. Now you tell me who the weaker species is!”
Rynn grunted. “I stand corrected.”
Xaan just grinned and strode forward, clapping Jay on the back. “We’re both mated to humans, Major, so we know exactly how superior your species is. Now, shall we get those guns and go rescue my daughter?”
20
Hours later, Keris had figured out that the dead guy wasn’t much for talking, and the B’Kaar made slightly substandard restraints... or operating tables. One or the other because she’d managed to find a rough edge with the restraint on her left wrist. An eternity of seesawing her arm back and forth later, then she hissed in triumph as the webbing strap gave and she could lift her arm free.
Instantly, she rolled over, reaching as far down under the table as she could to try and hit the release catch underneath. She didn’t have much experience with operating theatres—her brother had been an assassin, not a healer—but for some reason the schematics were buried deep in her brain. Why that, such a random piece of knowledge, rather than something truly useful, like the verbal override access for any Lathar ship, she did not know. But she went with it.
“Uuuunnnggghhh!” she grunted, stretching her arm and fingers as far as she could. The skin of her fingertip just brushed the button, but the cramping pain that shot through her shoulder forced her to roll back and breathe deeply until it had passed. She was just about to launch herself over the edge again and hope that her bodyweight would give her that extra reach when the sound of heavy footsteps in the corridor froze her in place.
“It’s the wrong AI but that doesn’t matter,” a voice she didn’t recognize said. “The procedure should work anyway.”
Risyn, Berr, and another B’Kaar walked into the room. It was not one she’d seen before and unlike the others—all warriors as comfortable out of their suits as they were in them—it was evident from his thin, almost wasted frame and his gaunt face that he rarely, if ever, took it off.
“We need to know the transfer codex that allowed it to integrate with the organic matter, not the entire cortex map,” he said as they approached the tables in the center of the room. His gaze washed over Keris and she shivered. It was empty and devoid of any emotion, no empathy, not even a flicker of recognition that she was a living, breathing thing. He looked at her with the dispassionate assessment of a scientist.