Alien Mercenary’s Destiny by Mina Carter
15
Pain. His world was pain. Every cell was pain.
Eric gritted his teeth, a bellow of fury and rage escaping from the drum that was his chest as his spine became a hard arch off the bed. The rings whirled around him as the auto-bed ripped his genetic structure apart and rewrote it the same way it had when he’d been injured. He was glad he’d been out of it. It was like tiny little acid knives stripping his flesh and muscles from his bones. Piranhas of agony swam in his veins and attacked everything they saw. It was… there were no words. Nothing but the pain, the blue rings that swirled above him and the scream that rose from his very soul.
“T-minus five, Eric. We need you up top,” a voice announced from somewhere outside the room.
It was familiar, and he should have recognized it. Should have been able to put a name to it, but he couldn’t even remember his own name at the moment, or what he’d done to deserve the torture being wrought on his body.
“Eric? Eric!” There was a scream, one that echoed his own. But higher. Feminine, the small portion of his brain that still worked told him.
“Oh god, what’s he done?”
“Don’t touch him!” another voice bellowed, the sounds of a struggle drowned out by another scream that ripped itself free of his chest. “Someone get Tal down here! Quickly!”
Everything went black, like a switch had been flipped. Then blue for a second as the rings intersected above his face. Black. Blue. Then… nothing.
He lay for a moment trying to figure out if the quiet sobbing was coming from him. Other sounds came back… the click of the auto-bed rings retracting and the treatment platform lowering. He also heard the soft murmur of male voices.
“Tal, can you tell what he was trying to do?”
Memory came back in fits and starts. That was T’Raal, leader of the Warborne.
Aliens, he remembered. He was on an alien ship, in the middle of alien space and his sister was married to one. An alien.
Sitting up abruptly, he looked at the small group clustered around the console for the auto-bed. T’Raal was shoulder to shoulder with Talent, the crew’s medic, Zero behind them with his arms around Eris, Eric’s sister. Her face was wet with tears.
“I recoded my DNA to give myself Krynassis scale armor,” he told them, his voice rough from screaming.
“Eric, you’re okay!” Eris gasped and tore herself from Zero’s embrace to throw herself at him.
He rocked back at the impact, wrapping his arms around her in a tight bear hug. His heart lurched as he kissed the top of her hair. His twin sister was crying… over him. She’d never shown this much care or concern like, ever.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” he murmured. “I’m okay.”
At least, he hoped he was. He certainly felt like he was, especially now that he wasn’t being ripped apart at the cellular level. In fact, he felt good. Really good.
“Did it work?”
Rather than the tirade of abuse, with an “unnecessary risk” rider, that he expected from T’Raal, all he got was a calm look of enquiry.
He huffed a laugh. “I thought you were going to give me a bollocking.”
The big Lathar shrugged. “Your body. You wanna stuff yourself in that machine and run weird experiments on yourself, that’s entirely your call. Just warn us next time in case we need to scoop you up in a bucket.”
“Noted. I won’t be running any more experiments.”
“Good to know. Now, did it work? I ask because we’re on a bit of a schedule here what with rescuing your girl.”
He opened his mouth to say Zad wasn’t his girl but then closed it with a snap. She was his girl. Very much his girl. And when they got her back, he was proving it. Over and over again, until she forgave him or he died of old age, whichever came first.
Gently disentangling himself from Eris, he gave her a little push over to Zero and then slid off the auto-bed.
For a moment, he just stood there.
“Sometime today would be good, mate,” Sparky said from the door.
He lifted his hand without looking, giving the other guy a one-fingered salute. If this had worked it should be instinctive, his armor flaring to life during battle and if he thought of—
Between one second and the next, the skin over his entire body rose up in something like gooseflesh and then hardened into tiny, diamond-like scales.
“Woah,” Sparky breathed, his eyes wide. “Hey, Tal… you sure you can’t do this for me?”
“No!” shouted every member of the team in the room.
Eric grinned, flexing his arm and watching the light glint off his armor. Then he relaxed and it vanished under his skin, the flesh becoming soft and pliable again.
He locked eyes with T’Raal.
“Let’s go get my girl back.”
Saak hooked a hand in the back of Zad’s tac-rig and dragged her through the corridors following her mother and the witch. Her boots skittered against the scale-shaped tiles underfoot, her strength no match for the Tanel’s. Every time she managed to get a foot underneath her, he yanked her off balance again with a warning snarl.
She twisted and turned, trying to get a look at where they were going. They’d left the throne room by one of the smaller doors behind the throne, entering the queen’s personal level. It was an area she’d only ever been in once when she was born. After that she’d been cast out to survive as best she could in the mass nursery on the lower decks. Krynassis were not attentive parents.
Sometimes a male might take an interest in his offspring, if he could even work out which were his. But since queens were known to wear out entire harems when they went into heat, fertilizing eggs in their reproductive halo by the thousands that were then gestated in pods in the nursery, unless the male had passed down distinctive features or a particular scale pattern, it was hard to tell.
Females were different. They were not gestated but carried to term in their mothers’ bodies. Rare, they were highly prized and looked after, each queen awaiting the birth of her daughter to pass along her knowledge and power. Usually.
Not Zad’s mother. Not wanting to share anything, power or otherwise, Sistilia had viewed the birth of her daughter as a curse. She’d refused to acknowledge her, refused to nurse her. Zad had nearly died, would have died if her father, Zadek, hadn’t stepped in. He’d protected her, kept her as safe as he could. Sistilia had killed him in a fit of rage for it years ago. She’d lost him because of her mother’s hatred.
They entered the queen’s temple and Zad sucked a hard breath in as she took in the glyphs painted in blood on the walls. Thirteen glyphs above thirteen bodies. Her mother’s harem, sacrificed by the scale witch.
“Bring her,” the witch hissed, skittering toward the altar. So old, she could barely straighten up, she was nonetheless still fast. Her gnarled talons grazed Zad’s cheek as the Tanel hefted her up and dumped her on the altar. Whip-vines snaked out to catch her wrists and ankles, yanking her limbs out and pinning her to the hard surface.
Zad fought back, her heart pounding, but the vines’ thorns cut deep, the scent of blood blossoming on the air.
“My payment,” the Tanel demanded, dropping a ratty backpack on the floor by the altar. “Now.”
The witch hissed as he opened it up to reveal a medical transport container and turned away to dance around Zad, her wizened hands skating over her abdomen.
Zad writhed, trying to look at her mother and keep the witch in view at the same time.
“Mother, please—”
“Don’t call me that!” Sistilia hissed, turning around to glare at Zad. “You are not my daughter. You are a mistake! Nothing more! Why couldn’t you just die in the fucking pits like you were supposed to!”
“You sent me there,” Zad said dully, flinching as the witch cut away the fabric over her abdomen and torso. She’d known, in her heart of hearts, but for one moment she’d held out hope that her mother would deny it.
“Of course I did!” The hive queen laughed bitterly, looking down on Zad in scorn. “So beautiful. I could have coped if you were ugly or misshapen. Deformed.”
Sistilia’s eyes filled with hatred.
“You took everything from me. My youth… and my love. Zadek was mine,” she hissed, shoving her face into Zad’s. “And you took him from me!”
“I was a child!” She snarled, forgetting the agony in her abdomen for a moment. “And you threw me away. It’s not my fault a good man saw you for the bitch you are!”
“I. Am. A. Queen! And you are nothing. You were nothing when you were born and now you will die as nothing, as did the male who sired you and his harem-brothers,” her mother snarled, gesturing around the room.
Zad sucked in a hard breath. All those males… dead because one of them had contributed DNA to her creation. Her reality didn’t rock as she realized why she was here. Her mother had always claimed Zad had stolen her life. Her future. Scale witches stole the life force of others to extend their unnatural lives… and the lives of those who paid them.
Her mother was about to correct the mistake of her birth.
She was going to have Zad killed. Sacrificed.
Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes as the scale witch’s claws scraped over her scales. She tried to keep her armor up, but it was impossible against a scale witch, one reason they were rarely suffered to live. They were the only beings alive who could negate a queen’s scale armor.
She’d always known this would happen, that somehow, somewhere Sistilia would end her life. That her own mother had never wanted her born.
Those tears welled and ran down the sides of her face as her armor failed and the witch sank her claws in, digging deeply into her abdomen. Not for her heart as she expected, but lower down. Pain exploded through Zad’s body but the poison on the witch’s claws held her paralyzed. Helpless. Unable to move as she was butchered like the animal Eric had named her.
She held on to that thought, the thought of the male she loved as the witch cut deeper and deeper. She imagined his face, the way his eyes lit warmly as he looked at her. Still the witch cut deeper. Cut through the layers of muscle until she reached the halo, the reproductive tract of a Krynassis queen.
Zad gritted her teeth as it was torn from her body, closing her eyes and trying to keep Eric’s face in her mind as blood welled and flowed from her torn abdomen. She should have accepted his apology. Because of her stupid temper and pride, she had lost him. She would never see his blue eyes again or hear him growl at her.
She would never get to tell him she loved him and not because he had called her armor, but because he was Eric… the stupid human who had almost gotten himself killed saving her.
“You are paid,” she heard Sistilia growl at the Tanel. “Now get out.”
The clump of heavy boots announced his departure. Zad managed to suck a breath in through the acid eating away at her ruined stomach.
She felt her life force slipping away as the voices of her mother and the witch faded away as well. They left her to die on the stone altar, discarded like so much trash, her only companions in her dying moments her mother’s slaughtered harem.
