Hyperspeed Dreams by Anna Carven
Chapter Eleven
Lodan sprinteddown the corridors of Silence, the Sylth seething with every step.
The ship heaved and groaned. He pumped his legs, moving so fast that everything around him became a blur. But he couldn’t run fast enough. After what felt like an eternity, he burst through to the ship’s bridge, where one of the navigators, Kiran, and a tech called Mavrel sat in stony-faced silence, their eyes glued to the holos, fingers flying over the controls as they tried to figure out what in the Nine Hells was going on.
The only reassuring thing about the whole situation was the fact that Tarak was in the pilot’s seat.
Garbed in full battle-kit, he wrestled with the controls in his usual no-nonsense manner, attempting to contain the Sylth, but even he couldn’t deal with a disturbance of this magnitude. The General was a skilled operator—one of the best in the Empire—but he just didn’t have Lodan’s natural hyper-neural connection with the machines.
Lodan was a freak of nature.
Only he and his closest brothers knew the extent of it.
Grim-faced, the navigators braced as the ship shook again. Only Tarak looked remotely comfortable, and that was because he was used to chaos. In fact, Lodan knew very well that the bastard relished situations like this—where he had to impose control.
If Tarak hadn’t been in the seat right now, the ship would probably be doing 180-degree flips in space.
Cursed thing.
This was unheard of.
This was Silence, the legendary alpha-class battle cruiser.
Silencedid not have problems like this, ever.
But Lodan had brought trouble onboard, and now the ship was going nuts.
Nythian was right. Human females always came with trouble.
And somehow, Tasha had become his responsibility.
Now how the fuck had that happened?
Lodan locked eyes with Tarak, who gave him an all-too-familiar look. “Take over,” The General said. As always, he was icily calm in the center of the storm. “This is your fight now, Lodan. If you can’t get the Sylth under control, we’ll have no choice but to terminate her.”
“Terminate?” Lodan moved beside the command chair, preparing to swap places with Tarak. The exchange would have to be lightspeed-fast and perfectly seamless in order to avoid any further disturbance. “Are you sure, boss?”
“We will lose automation, but there is nothing on this ship we can’t control manually. But you leave that to me to worry about. I just need you to make the malfunctions stop. Get in here now, soldier.”
“Sir!” Lodan snapped to attention, involuntarily responding to the command-note in Tarak’s voice.
“Go, Lodan,” The General whispered as the Sylth’s controls disengaged from his fingers. “You have my permission to do whatever it takes.”
Lodan nodded.
Whatever it takes.
With the exception of the Five Commanders, The First Division were the only ones Tarak allowed to operate with full autonomy.
Tarak trusted Lodan unequivocally, and Lodan would never betray that trust.
He slid into the chair as fast as Tarak leapt out of it. Immediately, the Qualum-Callidum tendrils wrapped around his hands like liquid silk. The visor extended across his vision, and all of a sudden, he could see everything.
A faint prickle of electricity danced down his spine and over his scalp as the extra-neural connections formed. The nodes attached to his fingers were for integrating the precise finger and hand movements that allowed him to fly the ship. The morphic visor covering his eyes allowed him to see any part of the ship. It also provided a neural interface for his mental commands.
The Sylth’s embrace was familiar; calming, intoxicating.
Suddenly, Lodan was home.
In the past, he would have welcomed this feeling, but now all he wanted to do was destroy her.
Because she’d dared to rail against a human that was under his protection.
Not just any human.
This was Tasha; delicate, swift, violent, and utterly confounding. She was a walking contradiction; brutally strong, yet brittle and fragile.
An enigma.
He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
He hadn’t figured her out yet, but he would.
Heat blossomed in Lodan’s chest.
Tasha.This infernal perplexing human female. She’d appeared out of nowhere; a killer, a long-lost sister, a human with secrets.
With enemies.
With desperation in her eyes and no real plan.
He hadn’t expected to find her in the excruciatingly hot and humid jungles on Reunion Island, but he had, and somehow, she’d become his responsibility.
No Kaiin-cursed AI was going to steal her away from him, no matter how well he meshed with it.
She was his.
It was time to remind the Sylth who was boss.