Enemy Games (42 page)

A tendril of exploratory thought filtered into her awareness. She peeled off a glove and extended her hand.

He stroked an antenna across her palm.

Eyesight dimmed. Her head pounded. Rather than shifting patterns inside her brain this time, the drone seemed to page through her plans.

He left, but a tinge of amusement remained behind.

Jayleia’s vision cleared and the pressure in her head subsided.

As she divested herself of the pack and began rummaging around inside, he bugled a complex, layered sound.

It wouldn’t translate.

The creatures had obviously had to reduce themselves to what amounted to Chekydran baby talk to make themselves understood to her.

Evidence that the translator virus frustrated the Chekydran-ki as much as it did her?

Workers answered the drone’s call.

He issued instructions while Jayleia assembled modified kuorl traps and snuck a few soil and web samples.

The workers launched, raising a pall of web and grit.

Jay swiped a hand over her face to clear the yellow web tendrils from her eyelashes and went back to work.

She’d finished assembling her traps moments before the workers returned with gobs of brown, pungent-sweet scented goo.

Jayleia demonstrated what she wanted the workers to do, packing her modified traps with the substance, then closing the doors on the six units.

They caught on instantly, chortling and whistling in apparent pleasure as they worked. One of the workers even provided a sample of the toxin when Jayleia extended a sterile swab. She stuffed the sample into a container and activated the stasis seal.

She gathered that the workers were rarely called upon to protect their queen. Their soldier-sisters, converging on the cocooned queen for guard duty, did that job.

“These are reverse traps,” Jay told the drone. “I put the laser trigger on the outside and a charge on the inside. When someone activates it, the charge is going to hurt, but it will also spray this toxin into the surrounding air. We need to keep your people away from these without giving their location away to our bad guys.”

The queen’s consort offered reassurance. He had it covered.

She nodded. “Let’s get this done.”

They planted her six anti-personnel-reverse-kuorl traps around a perimeter dictated by the drone.

“It isn’t much,” Jay admitted, “but unless we’re hit with another set of biomech soldiers, even one of these going off will give an attack force pause.”

She surveyed the nest plain, her gaze coming to rest on the contingent of soldiers surrounding both the mound where the old queen slept and the enlarged nest where the new queen gestated.

“Never put all your soldiers in one formation,” she murmured, quoting Temple teaching.

The drone chirped a question.

Pressure built at her temples. She held a picture in her head as long as she could.

He trilled agreement, warbled orders she felt more than she heard.

A multivoiced warble of confusion washed over her from the soldiers, but they began digging in as she’d intended.

She planted the plasma grenades. Plasma burns weren’t a kind death by any means. But if the Chekydran-hiin reached the nest plain, they’d lay waste to everything in their path. Unless she made them think twice.

As they returned to the queens’ mounds, she prayed her crew-mates were making bucketfuls of the sleeping formula she’d given them and that they’d arrive in time to prevent that kind of slaughter she’d prepared for.

The queen’s consort uttered a piercing cry. The song of his flight faltered.

They fell.

He banked hard, the noise of his wings sharp and labored. He set down hard.

Jay dropped from his grasp into the wyrl-web and dirt.

“Oof!”
She rolled to her feet and stared at him.

“What?” she cried. “What happened?”

He settled to the ground, raising a cloud of green and yellow dust. His antenna waved.

She stepped closer. He touched her face.

Her world collapsed beneath her. Incomprehensible thought patterns assailed her. Physical sensation vanished as if cut off. Perception of up, down, depth, breadth, and width twisted around her.

She gasped.

And fell out of confusion into terror and soul-killing pain.

She recognized the source.

“Damen!”

An image played through his mind, resounding through the drone’s brain and into hers.

The
Queen’s Rhapsody
had been destroyed.

It arced into a death dive over a seared, rocky world. Pursued by UMOPG scouts.

Rage and panic slashed her gut.

V’kyrri. It had to be V’kyrri in telepathic connection with Damen, even as Damen lay on Raj’s surgical table.

She was seeing what V’kyrri saw. On his way to death.

Please, Twelve Gods
, she shrilled mentally, fighting for breath that didn’t rasp in her burning throat.
Not V’kyrri. Not easygoing, good-natured V’kyrri.

A blinding flash. Searing pain.

She screamed.

Horror ripped her out of the strange, relayed contact. Dumped her into her sorrow-wracked body, huddled and sobbing on the ground between the drone’s front legs. Tears wet her face.

She knew what she’d seen.

The engine core had detonated.

They’d lost the
Queen’s Rhapsody
. And everyone on board.

Helpless rage rocked her, followed swiftly by terror. If V’kyrri died while in contact with Damen . . .

“Damen!” she shrilled, anguish ripping her heart.

The queen’s consort stirred, but didn’t rise.

“Is Damen alive?” she pleaded. “Did he . . .”

The drone lowered one feathery antenna. It trembled.

Jayleia choked on a sob, fear squeezing her heart. She pushed herself to sitting, resting her back against the drone’s carapace. Fingers shaking, she shed her glove and touched the antenna.

The drone swept his senses across the world as if they were still flying. There. Her mate was alive, but not conscious. Like the queen.

Jayleia dropped her hand to the soil and let the tears run down her face.

V’kyrri must have broken contact at the last second, right before . . . she caught in a shallow breath and screwed her eyes shut. He hadn’t taken Damen with him into death, but that didn’t mean V’k hadn’t done irreparable harm on his way out of Damen’s mind.

How easy V’kyrri had made it to forget that telepathy had a dark and deadly aspect. Ari’s telepathic attack on the TFC admiral who’d given her to the Chekydran had left the man a permanent resident of the Armada psychiatric ward.

Jayleia shuddered and closed her eyes.

“You can’t be gone,” she murmured aloud. “V’kyrri wouldn’t want that. Damen, I need you. I know you think I lied to you. It’s fair. I suspect you only seduced me because I was your assignment. I don’t care.”

She paused, sniffed, and scrubbed her face dry with her sleeve before leaning back again. “It doesn’t make any sense. Knowing you want to hurt me for not telling you everything, and knowing you only care about your mission, how is it that I fell in love with you, anyway? It’s not rational.

“I’m not rational.

“You promised to teach me.”

Color.
She heard it.
Cascading, swirling, humming.

She joined in. The sound soothed her aching heart. Adrift in the play of color and hum, Jay lost track of time. At some point, another, deeper voice augmented the sound.

Damen.

Her eyes blinked open. No. Not Damen. She and the drone were alone, disabled on the edge of the nest plain.

But she’d heard Damen’s voice,
felt
his presence so clearly. She frowned. She wasn’t telepathic, not by a long shot. But the Chekydran were. Were they acting as a connecter, putting her in contact with her mate?

Her mate. Heart expanding, she smiled, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the drone.

She dropped into the play of color and hum.

And collided with him instantly, the gold and green glow of his mind recognizable in the sea of alien colors and minds.

Jayleia ignored her trembling heart. She swallowed against the lump in her throat at the desolate tone of Damen’s wan hum.

“I’m sorry,” she choked in a mental whisper.

His hum and the sense of his presence winked out.

She’d surprised him.

It took only a few seconds for him to return.

“Jayleia.” He sounded ragged. “Where are you?”

“On the nest plain,” she said. Grief pierced her, her own and Damen’s. “V’kyrri . . .”

“He was my friend,” Damen murmured. “Before I knew how to have or be a friend, he was mine.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

“I dreamed,” he said, his voice relaxed, wistful as if he hadn’t quite returned to full consciousness. “Dreamed you said you love me.”

Shock rippled through her. How had he heard that? She’d spoken that aloud in the middle of nowhere, before the Chekydran hum had brought them together in a way she couldn’t comprehend.

“It wasn’t a dream. Do you want me to say it again?”

“Yes.”

“I fell in love with you,” she said, her mental voice breaking. “Some things are worth dying for. You’re one.”

A locked-up, frightened place inside Jayleia’s heart tore free. She gasped at the initial twist of pain, but then light and heat suffused her. A sense of liberation welled within her.

Via the drone at her back, she flashed Damen a snapshot of the Chekydran-hiin landing and of the traps she’d laid.

His pride, approval, love, all underpinned by the sorrow of lost friends, encompassed her.

“I love you,” he said. “I prefer you not die for me. Live, instead.”

“That complicates things.”

“It usually does.”

J
AYLEIA opened her eyes and sat up.

“Jay?” Ari’s voice on the com badge channel. “We’ve received data from the Chekydran cruisers you didn’t want us to fire on.”

“Yes?”

“They tweaked our sensors,” her friend said. “I’ve got new targets entering system. Cloaked, but carrying a distinctive energy signature.”

“UMOPG military.”

“That’s my guess,” Ari said. “They’re decloaking! Scan! I want to know what those Carozziel slime-bats ate for breakfast!”

“The lead ship’s singed, Captain,” a young man’s voice called. “Residual energy readings match the
Queen’s Rhapsody
’s main guns.”

“They’re making a run for the planet!” Ari yelled. “Damn it, where’d they get that speed? Weapons! Get me a shot at them!”

“Working, Captain!”

Behind Jayleia, the drone coughed out a curse.

A ship, then another and another, entered atmosphere, angling for the queen.

“Stand down,
Dagger
. I’ve got them.” Jay watched the craft slant across the horizon and smiled in spite and satisfaction. UMOPG. The scavengers come to pick the carcass clean. Save this one wasn’t dead. Not by a long shot. And regardless of Temple teaching that vengeance killed more warriors than it avenged, she intended to exact terrible retribution for V’kyrri’s death.

The drone’s hum strengthened. He rose, hooked his forelimbs under her arms, and lifted off.

The UMOPG scouts had set down in a tight triangle formation within sight of the queen’s cocoon. A group of ten people clustered in the defensible center of the triangle.

Jayleia frowned. So many factions seemed to want the queen dead. The Chekydran-hiin she understood. What did the UMOPG get out of genocide? She studied the group, not buying for an instant that they were the sole attack force. She surveyed the plain.

Half the Chekydran-ki soldiers stood guard over the two queens. The other half were invisible.

The drone chortled approval of their preparations.

A humanoid shout sounded. Laser fire sizzled past. They’d flushed a cluster of soldiers between forty and fifty meters south of the queen’s mound. The men and women sprayed weapons fire into the air.

The drone dodged, sliding one way, changing altitude, canting his body first one way, then another.

He made it look so effortless, Jayleia couldn’t help but laugh. She pulled her knees up, creating a surface for her pack. It took effort and concentration to unseal it without the full use of her arms. If the drone intended to continue flying her around, they’d have to develop a harness system of some kind.

As the queen’s consort circled the squad, Jay managed to extract a handful of poppers. They were little more than toys, noisemakers with a time-delay fuse, useful for flushing specimens toward a trap in the field.

She activated five fuses and dropped the tiny toys behind the entrenched group of miners wasting their power cartridges on a creature who owned this world’s skies.