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Threxin clasped a hand to the back of his neck. That couldn’t be. They had observed full immunity.Realimmunity. The vaccine was based on Kaia Halena’s blood, and they had detected nothing of the sort in her.
“What did we miss?”
“Nothing.”
Threxin slammed a fist to the steel table, black claws constricting behind his ribs. “Obviously we missedsomething, considering the woman I have been mating for the last month under the security of immunity may not be shoqing immune after all.”
“Your female still has time, I believe,” Tetha said, as if that was any comfort. “She was one of the last to receive the current iteration, and we had only just noticed these effects in the first test subjects. She is approximately one ship week, or one and a half Kannth weeks, behind.”
Threxin’s fist was in Tetha’s face before he could—orwanted to—think. The biogineer snarled and lunged forward across the table. Threxin grabbed his fist and twisted hard until he hissed, black spittle flying into Threxin’s face.
Threxin?The small voice wormed into his brain.
Shut up.
Threxin.Placating and calm, his Alina ruined this thing he was so enjoying, forcing the knot in his chest to loosen until he remembered his surroundings.
Gritting his teeth, he released Tetha, who stood hunched over the table with exorin melting between his lips. He did not have the benefit of a calming human presence, but Alina’s placation seeped to him by proximity through Threxin’s NS.
Threxin slowed his breathing with effort.
“Will reinoculation help?” he ground out through his fangs.
“No. Their system is accustomed to it now. It will not react. We need to start over. I will begin work on a variation, but… we have no simulator capacity anymore. We will need to test it live.”
Threxin nodded. “Do so.”
As Threxin walked back to his and Alina’s cabin at the center of the outpost, he watched humans scurrying about the place, giving him a wide berth. He had not yet come to the idea of the wall. He hadn’t needed to, with most of the humans naturally herding together at one side of the outpost while the uhyre kept to another.
Their cabin, a rectangular cargo box extracted from remnants of the ship, was the meeting point from which the human and uhyre sides sprawled in either direction. Orion Halen took the humans, and Threxin oversaw the uhyre. They had been forced to work together as they explored and settledthe land, but outside of necessity the species kept to themselves for the time being.
Threxin was watching how cross-species interactions developed as his cohort received their Neurosyncs, trying to decide just how together or separate they needed to be. It was fortunate that the Neurosyncs appeared to help temper his cohort, though of course nothing as aggressively as the limiters. Some of his cohort did grow surprisingly complacent when their limiters were first replaced, however, and Threxin suspected intermingling was already taking place.
He had not yet officially sanctioned such actions, but considering his relationship with his own human female, it was presumed—not inaccurately—that no more throats would be slit or fangs removed. Except with the failure of the vaccine, it was suddenly looking like the entire strategy was collapsing around him.
“What is it?” Alina asked, looking up from the wet heap of clay on the table before her. She was creating eating vessels.
He stood and watched her. She had a blot of wet clay on her cheek, her hair tied high on her scalp to get it out of the way. Except for those shoqing bangs in her eyes, of course. A permanent nonsensical fixture that she insisted on keeping even now.
She frowned and rose from her seat, dipping her hands into a bowl of water and wiping them dry on the towel tucked into the waistband of her skirt. When she stood on her toes before him and craned her neck to kiss him, he jerked his head up and out of the way, knowing full well traces of exorin from his scuffle with Tetha were still on his mouth.
“Threxin?” a frown dented her brow. “Tell me.”
He enveloped her tiny hand in his and guided her back to the table. He sat across from her, the shapeless clay drying between them. The innocent curiosity in her eyes, unsuspecting of the terrible news she was about to receive, made his chest constrict with a pang of regret.
“The vaccine has failed,” he finally said.
Alina’s frown deepened. “Does that mean we need a booster?”
Threxin flicked his apertures to the negative and rubbed at the drying patches of clay on the back of her palm his thumb. “You need a new vaccine. Yours will soon be ineffective, if it is not already.”
She looked at their joined hands, her fingers tracing his knuckles. She kept her mind carefully guarded behind her NS, not offering a link and him not prodding for one. This was, of course, her worst nightmare coming true.
When she looked up at him again her eyes were wet. Shoq, those always had this way of cracking his heart open and making him want to go to the ends of the damn planet to make them stop.
“I will not let it happen, Alina Argoud,” he rushed out. “We will develop another vaccine. A thousand if we must.”
But Alina ripped her hands from his and bit her trembling lip. His spikes flicked flat as she sat rod straight in her chair, chin wobbling with suppressed upset.
