Hyperspeed Dreams by Anna Carven

Chapter Nine

For the entiretyof the short return flight to Silence, Lodan made a point of ignoring the human.

Her.

Tasha.

Who was full of anger and fear and stubbornness and almost childlike naïveté.

Who had punched him, a First Division warrior, right in the face, shattering the cartilage in his nose.

She’d broken his fucking nose.

This was starting to become a habit of hers.

The first strike hadn’t been a fluke. She really could hit quite hard.

He’d healed instantly, of course, the infernal black nanites swarming beneath the surface of his skin to knit together cartilage and flesh and bone.

But Lodan wasn’t impervious to pain, and Tasha’s blow had fucking hurt.

As he stared back at her—at her wild eyes and trembling body; at the raw, savage emotion in her expression, at the blood on her hands—he’d been hit with a surge of arousal.

His erection had returned, infinitely stronger than before; so hard it became painful.

And he found himself wondering what it would be like to hold her; to draw that terrible tension out of her body, to coax her to stillness.

To claim her.

Hisway.

Stop.

She was damaged. She was running from something. She had secrets; she was afraid.

Unstable.

She was pure chaos.

To claim one such as her?

Him?

Was he seriously considering it?

Lodan shifted in his seat, unable to rid himself of the terrible tension. Tasha sat behind him, alongside the old woman called Virginie.

They were deep in conversation, speaking some Earth language he didn’t have a Varhund’s lick of hoping to understand.

Hersoft, murmuring voice invaded his consciousness as he tried to maintain his unbreakable grip on the Sylth. The cursed AI was playing up again; every time Tasha stepped onboard, the Sylth’s resentment grew, crackling through the neural links, whispering death-chants in the back of his mind.

Lodan had already thought about Tasha’s safety in great detail. For reasons he didn’t understand, the Sylth had it in for her. He’d considered taking her to their secure compound on Earth. He’d thought about putting her on a human-made ship, or another one of the Fleet’s vessels. But he’d quickly ruled out each of those options. She was a target of some yet-unknown enemy. There was no way he would endanger their people on Earth by bringing her to Kenna’s lands, and he would never consider placing her on a human ship, because human spacefaring tech was just too unreliable.

No, the only way he could ensure her safety—for now—was to keep her close by. Lodan was certain that as long as he was on the ship, he could keep the Sylth under control, and he would always ensure that either he or Nythian was within striking distance of her at all times.

Cursed thing. He would have to bring it to Tarak’s attention as soon as possible. The Sylth had her own little idiosyncrasies that probably dated back to Zorian times.

Kordolian tech was derived from the ancient Zor. There were many things from the Zor that they still didn’t understand.

He suspected that the Sylth’s sudden change in behavior was one of them.

What in the Nine Hells is wrong with her?In all his rotations of flying, Lodan had never ever lost control of the Sylth. When he meshed with the ship’s interface; when he took the flight controls and slid into the command chair, he experienced the usual expansion of his consciousness. His hearing became enhanced. He could “see” through the ship’s countless viewports and sensors. He could feel the ship.

That was why flying came so naturally to him.

Tarak had once told him that his kind of talent was very rare. They didn’t know why Lodan meshed with the ship better than anyone else, they simply accepted it. In the old imperial times, he’d been the assigned pilot on all of the most dangerous flight missions. He’d navigated asteroid belts and singlehandedly destroyed enemy fleets.

The Szark, they’d called him, after the mythical winged creatures that once dominated the skies of Kythia.

He’d flown into pockets of the Universe that weren’t even mapped.

Once or twice, he’d pulled them out of the death-suck of a black hole.

But he hadn’t been able to evade the wormhole that had brought them to Fortuna Tau, the human mining station where they’d first encountered humans.

Who could have predicted that their arrival on that primitive, dilapidated little station would lead to the eventual collapse of the mighty Kordolian Empire?

A familiar buzz reverberated through his ears as the comm opened.

“Lodan.” It was General Tarak. “Report.”

“I have retrieved the elder. She is in good health… and good spirits, it seems. She’s a tough one.” It was true; Virginie hadn’t even batted an eyelid as she was transferred to the cruiser.

And whatever she was saying to Tasha seemed to be more effective at calming her down than anything Lodan ever could have done.

Although letting her use him as a punching bag seemed to work for some reason, and to his surprise, he did not mind it at all when she was the one doing the hitting.

If it was anyone else, he would have eviscerated them, but when she struck him, it was a wild, desperate thing.

She needed it.

“And the human? What is your reading of her?”

“She is…” Lodan thought about Tasha as he eased his ship into the gaping maw of Silence’s airlock. “Difficult. Naturally, she’s afraid of us, but something else is bothering her. Some sort of condition. She won’t tell me about it. She has major trust issues. Seems she was badly mistreated by whoever she’s running from.” As the words left his mouth, the lingering embers of Lodan’s arousal crystallized into cold fury.

This fierce-yet-fragile creature was running scared.

Someone had made her this way.

From what he’d seen, she was just trying to protect her family.

Someoneneeded to die for what they’d done to her.

The intensity of Lodan’s anger surprised him a little. He rarely got this emotional about anything.

The Sylth nipped at the edges of his consciousness, feeding his anger. Lodan ignored its insistent pull as he guided the ship through the airlock and into the cavernous docking bay.

For a heartbeat, his control wavered. The ship tilted ever so slightly, the error so minuscule it could only be detected by him.

From the outside, the descent would look flawless, but Lodan knew.

He knew.

It wasn’t a perfect landing, and that bothered him.

Tasha and her Mama had gone quiet.

The Sylth seethed, pushing against his consciousness with invisible fury. She tried to wrench control away from him, but Lodan wouldn’t let her.

“Enough,” he growled, drawing on the discipline he’d won from many revolutions of brutal training. He slammed his will against the AI, refusing to yield even the tiniest amount.

No defective fucking Sylth was going to harm a human under his protection.

“Lodan,”Tarak snapped, his voice ringing with the authority a man who had once been the equal-highest commander in the Imperial Kordolian Military. “What in the Nine Hells are you doing, soldier?”

“Sylth’s playing up,” he growled. He flew the ship into her dock, extending the landing gear with a flick of his hand. There wasn’t even the faintest thud as the ship came to rest against the floor. A growl of irritation escaped him. It was almost a perfect landing, but she was off center by the tiniest fraction.

How annoying.

He resisted the urge to lift her up and nudge her straight.

“I’ll run it by the AI techs when I’m done here,” Lodan said softly. “Obviously, you’ll be wanting a full report. Could be a glitch, could be something deeper than that. We’ve had glitches before.”

But it’s never as bad as this.

“Indeed,” Tarak replied, being his usual cryptic self. “You will report to my office as soon as the passengers have been securely handed over. Nythian and his mate are waiting for them in the dock.”

“Sure thing, boss.” Relief surged through Lodan as he disconnected from the troublesome Sylth. He could leave Tasha under Nythian’s watchful eye. He trusted his battle-brother without reservation.

He stood and turned toward the humans, who were watching him with cautious eyes.

The elder was surprisingly calm. She was holding Tasha’s hand in a firm-but-gentle grasp.

Tasha was trembling again. Her once-perfect golden hair was disheveled. Her left eye twitched. Her left finger twitched. Her jaw quivered.

But the eyes that stared back at him were clear, brilliant blue. He saw a hint of fear and a lot of defiance.

And perhaps… a sliver of hope.

Her scent wrapped around him, reactivating his cursed erection, which he’d endured for the entire return flight.

She was flawed; damaged, human.

And therein lay the problem, because with the Sylth nipping at the edges of his consciousness and this mysterious little human stirring his most primal urges, Lodan was suddenly faced with the prospect of losing control.

And that almost—almost—scared him.

No.

He would not lose control.

Not now, not ever.

“So what happens now?” Tasha asked slowly, cautiously, appearing a little subdued.

But he saw the way she continued to tremble despite her best efforts to control it. He caught the subtle shift in her scent as it became deep and rich and heady; as his eye was drawn to the delicate fluttering pulse in her neck.

Lodan’s ear twitched. He hid his hands behind his back as his claws flicked out. Cursed things. He’d never lost control of them before. This was not good.

“Mosha,” he commanded, carefully concealing his inner thoughts. The Qualum doors unravelled, and Lodan caught a glimpse of his Third Division brothers. A couple of them risked curious glances in his direction. They would be curious about why Lodan allowed the humans to ride with him instead of in the outer chamber with them as was customary, but none of them would dare question him, because he outranked them. “You are under our protection now,” he said quietly as he walked past, beckoning for them to follow.

“But you haven’t even explained what that mea—”

Tasha went quiet as Virginie placed a steadying hand on her forearm.

“Whatever trouble you have brought… it will be dealt with by us.” As he filed out of the ship, bringing up the rear behind his men, Lodan glanced over his shoulder, meeting her brilliant blue eyes. “I will leave you to spend some time with Alexis and your family. But when I return, you will tell me everything I need to know.” Sensing resistance, he stopped and turned to face her. “Tasha, I am not going to sell you out to anyone,” he growled. “You will give me names, you will give me locations, and you will explain to me exactly what the problem is.” And then I will go down there and deal with it personally if I have to. “The only time you would ever have any reason to fear me is if you posed a threat to someone that was important to me. You wouldn’t happen to have any such intentions, would you?”

“N-no.” For the first time, her voice wavered.

“Good.” I didn’t think so. “Now come.” He stepped aside and waited to for them to pass.

As the old woman reached him, she gave him a steady look, piercing him with her grey-green eyes.

Then she smiled at him; a slow, wily, all-knowing smile, as if she knew something that he didn’t.

She actually smiled.

Look at this old woman; she was so frail and weak, and yet she didn’t seem afraid at all.

Crazy humans.

Did they all have to be so unpredictable?