AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Let the people here go back to their cabins for now,” Kaia said. “It’ll take time to get your list anyway. It’s zero three hundred hours onColossal. I’ll have it for you by zero six hundred.”
Threxin’s spikes bristled and he smoothed them atop his scalp, his apertures thinning. He noted how she pronounced the name of his ship. MoreC-oh-loh-ssalthanC-lossal.
“I say.” He did not like the vigilant look in Kaia’s eye—one mirrored almost precisely by Orion behind her.
Turning back to Renza, Threxin switched to Apthian. “Track them. Especially the red bitch and this one. Her assistant, apparently. Make sure they try nothing.” He looked back at the females, switching back to Universal. “And if they do, kill them.”
Renza tilted his chin in assent as his cohort began the work of ushering the humans once more. Threxin had to think. A decision had to be made, and soon.
Threxin
He had gotten his list, and Renza had already herded the humans who were not on it down to the ship’s common deck. No one complained save for one silly pest asking where they were to live once they got down there.
That was not Threxin’s concern—Orion Halen could decide such trivial matters, considering he was the reason for the dilemma in the first place.
Threxin finally had a few ship hours to himself and spent them in his new cabin across from the commander’s quarters, which Orion Halen and his female still occupied. The commander’s cabins were needlessly large. Threxin did not know how the two humans cohabiting there felt comfortable with all the empty space. Threxin preferred to sleep somewhere he could touch all the walls and have no redundant entries or exits. His new suite was not that, but at least it wasn’tashuge and disquieting.
He took an inhale of the hak some of his arrivals had brought. Microscopic crystals rasped pleasantly against the walls of his windpipe as he drew them into his lungs. The texture of it scratched something in the brain, igniting flickers of satisfaction that rolled through the body.
In part, Threxin chose this cabin because it would beprudent to remain close to the former commander. The humans did not appear idiotic enough to mutiny, but Threxin had no illusions that Orion Halen would give up his seat quietly either, and his red-haired female verged on open hostility.
And yet it meant the morning after his arrival, after rolling up the rest of his hak and exiting his quarters, Threxin would encounter the humans’ insubordination as the first marker of his day, cutting his solitude short.
“I said my wife needs to eat,” he heard Orion Halen snarling at the guard in the hallway, then saw him jerk his shoulder as Pteron cinched the human’s arm more firmly. “Back the fuck away and come along if you want.”
Pteron calmly yanked the disheveled male back when Orion Halen tried once again to sidestep him. His human-kin wore low-slung fabric pants and no top. He had no apertures on his body—not even faint ones. The skin taut over the planes of his hard muscle was almost infantile in its appearance, though even newborn uhyre had thinner patches of skin already visible a few days after birth. Soon enough the membranes would rip, exposing the first glow of their fresh inner essence.
When the human continued to be difficult, Pteron drew back a fist. Orion spotted the movement fast enough to remind Threxin that he wasn’tentirelyhuman. He ducked the blow and swung an uppercut into Pteron’s chin, landing it with a thump that sent the guard stumbling a couple of steps back. Pteron was sometimes a little sloppy. He recovered immediately, of course. Orion grabbed the barrel of Pteron’s weapon arcing toward his chest mid-swing, and that was when Threxin decided it was time to intervene.
“Enough.” Threxin hauled Orion against the wall. He raised his chin at Pteron, who licked a black fang absently, gun pointed at the human’s chest.
To make the mess worse, that was when Orion’s toyfemale appeared in the doorway, looking like she was ready to jump into a fight herself. Threxin turned to her with mild amusement, and Orion did the same with unshielded fury in his eyes. He was not pleased with his plaything, who crouched in a fighting pose with her fists bobbing before her face.
Threxin had never witnessed exorin addiction, of course, only heard stories. He supposed it made sense, though. It clouded a human’s judgment, making her reckless and stupid in her haze of need. He wondered how often Orion Halen was satiating her.
“We got a problem?” Kaia snapped, but her voice was as unstable as her hands.
Threxin turned back to Orion. “Your female is defective, no?”
“Say that again, crackly motherfucker,” she snapped, though the threat was followed by a reflexive flinch when Threxin glanced at her. She must have sensed something in the split-second before his limiter kicked in. Threxin wondered if she was this perceptive because she had to be under Orion Halen’s command. His kin, after all, had no limiter to temper him.
“Fuck, Kaia.” Orion Halen ran a hand down his face, then shoved her behind himself. “She’s just passionate.”
Threxin grunted.
“My decision is made,” he turned to the male. “You will direct me to the planet you claim to have found. If it is suitable, my cohort will settle it.”
“And you leave the people on this ship alive.”
“I say.” Threxin inclined his chin with some reluctance. He peered at the shuffling of feet behind Orion. The female did not look pleased. Threxin leaned forward, pinning the former commander with a glare. “But if you betray me. Take me to a human hive. Attempt harm to me or my cohort. Direct me to an empty husk no better than Apth.Anything, anything otherthan the planet I will be happy to settle my cohort on, I will dispose of your people. Then I will dispose of your toy female. Then I will dispose of every living human in your world. And after you have witnessed all this, I will dispose of you. Do you recognize?”
“Yes,” Orion Halen ground out through a clenched jaw. His eyes slid to his female, and Threxin knew he need not have bothered threatening Orion’s people, nor even Orion himself. All he had to do was threaten her.
“The humans are your responsibility,” Threxin added, straightening. “I do not deal with pests.”
Of course, Threxin did not intend to keep the humans around if he could help it. He suspected Orion Halen knew that. That day, Threxin set one of his cohort to interrogate the pests, both here and down in their mass residential decks, about any knowledge of this planet Orion had promised him. There had been a minor stampede down in the residential deck when five of his cohort arrived to perform this questioning. Seven humans had perished.
After all that was under control and the bodies disposed of, humans claimed ignorance of Orion even having a destination in mind after Apth, much less where it was.
