AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So instead, he ground the massive gears of the massive doors slowly, with painful fits and starts that filled the room with the sounds of the heavy metal pieces dragging against each other. Kurt’s face relaxed into relief, and Devin looked up at the doors in delight. A nasty, satisfied feeling lifted Maxwell’s upper lip as he opened the door just an inch. Let them enjoy it while it lasted.
Garrett, Sebastian, and Patrick had reached the main shaft. It wouldn’t be long now. The moment Garrett glanced at the elevator console, Maxwell flicked open the elevator door and began pulling apart the shaft’s air locks.
Garrett grinned and hurried onto the platform, whispering as he passed the console so quietly it couldn’t have been to Sebastian, and Maxwell wasn’t even sure it was really for him, but he heard it. “That a way, baby.”
But as soon as the team got onto the platform and the elevator began to lift with a loud turning of gears, every eye in the warehouse turned to the echoing shaft. The pirates and bugs shifted their weapons into more serious grips, and a few of the nearer pirates even inched closer to peer over the edge. Garrett, Sebastian, and Patrick’s team would be sitting ducks with every pirate and bug aimed at their heads as they rose to the ground level.
Maxwell bit his lip and snapped open the elevator doors. The nearby pirates jumped back with cries of alarm, and the antennae on a few bugs shot to attention. Then Maxwell slammed the doors shut again with a deafening clatter. He squeezed his eyes shut and did it three more times and watched through the cameras in the room as pirates stumbled away, then he let out a cry of frustration.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed and grabbed Kurt’s wrists, clutching them to his face. “I’m sorry, I keep finding the wrong doors.”
“That’s him?” Devin demanded, shoving a finger in Maxwell’s direction.
“It’s me.” Maxwell cringed and turned his face into Kurt’s palm. “I’m sorry, I’m trying.”
“Fucking useless,” Devin muttered as he turned his back on the elevator shaft, and with grumbles of discontent, the rest of the pirates did the same. “How much fucking longer?”
As long as it takes for Garrett and Sebastian to ride the elevator up one more floor, Maxwell thought back with no small amount of malice. He reached about the room and curled his awareness around the two turrets he found on either side of the huge warehouse door.
“He’s doing his best,” Kurt snapped at Devin over his shoulder, then leaned in close and lowered his voice so that only Maxwell’s natural ears could hear it. “And he’s going to start doing better. Get it the fuck together, Maxwell.”
Garrett and the rest of the team readied their weapons as the elevator approached the surface.
Maxwell saw Garrett roll his muscular shoulders and crack his neck, and Maxwell couldn’t help the victorious smirk that curled across his own lips. He opened his eyes to see true uncertainty and a trace of fear settle over Kurt’s face, and through the cameras, he could see his own skin swirling with jade and ruby.
He began flickering every light in the warehouse, and the pirates let out another chorus of yells, and the bugs gnashed their mandibles.
“Boss, what the fuck is happening?” The human woman with the shorn hair stomped over to Devin. “The other guy never did any of this shit.”
“You back off and watch your tone!” Devin jabbed his finger in the woman’s face, but Maxwell could see the shaken confidence in his eyes.
The leader of the bugs stepped forward and raised his rifle. “You’re a conniving thief, pirate!”
“Yeah, that’s why you hired me.” Devin turned his finger on the insectoid alien, spittle flying from his mouth. “Everyone calm down.”
Kurt looked around wildly, then glared at Maxwell and bared his teeth. He slid his controlling hands—the ones Maxwell had always confused for protective—down from Maxwell’s face to his throat and squeezed. “Maxwell—”
“Kurt,” Maxwell cut him off before he had to hear another word out of the lying, conniving, abusive man’s mouth. He started opening up the huge doors behind him, and as every eye turned to them, he felt as though he had grown to ten times his true size. He turned the nearest turret to face them. “Fuck you.”
Then he blew Kurt away in a hail of bullets.
For the second time in under twenty-four hours, the main warehouse of the Thule mine exploded into pure chaos.
Patrick vaulted with a roar up onto the ground floor before the elevator had even reached it, and behind him charged his team of klah’eel with their tusks gleaming and their shrieking war cries filling the air.
Garrett and Sebastian leaped after them, threw themselves down behind crates, and started picking off stunned pirates with—though they’d never admit it—equally skilled marksmanship.
The leader of the bug-like aliens fired one perfectly aimed energy shot right through Devin’s throat, and the human man swayed and then dropped to the floor with a dead, dumbfounded look.
Moving as a swarm, the bugs raced to the exit, firing off energy rounds from their black rifles while the bullets of the pirates and Klah’Eel pinged off their carapaces. Maxwell threw himself to the ground and curled his head into his chest but reached in his mind for the warehouse door. He couldn’t let the strange aliens escape. There was too much about them that the Resistance didn’t know. Who were they? What did they want the uranium for? How had they contacted the pirates?
But for all Maxwell’s control, he couldn’t make the door close any faster than it physically could, and before it was halfway down, the last bug had escaped out from under it. He switched his awareness to the exterior of the building, and in a last-ditch effort, he turned the one huge exterior turret onto their ship.
“Pull it out!”
Pain ripped through the back of Maxwell’s head, and suddenly, the ship was gone. The turrets were gone, the doors, the lights, the cameras all disappeared out of Maxwell’s awareness and left him thrashing and lost and limbless.
He felt his body with a strange detachment as it slammed into a wall and slid down to the floor. Weak and confused, his muscles trembling and twitching as his nerves struggled to fire right, he rolled himself to his side and looked up. Swimming and flickering above him, he saw the same klah’eel pirate with the broken tusk that had plugged Thule’s security system into him.
