Mak

Despite Captain Marz’s irritation, Vance sat on the ground, one leg propped up, one flat out in front of him. Completely at ease. “Once the Hive on the planet are taken care of, I don’t much care what you two do or where you go, especially since you have this… blue thing going for you. Marz is right, they’ll never let you go. But we all agree the threat to the Colony gets taken care of first. And I think we should take a full force of warriors into the caves.”

Gwen was shaking her head before Vance finished. “This is not a normal battle. This is a Nexus unit. He’ll feel every mind approaching. Know we’re coming. If there are too many, he’ll run and hide again. I have to go in alone, take out his protection, subdue him so we can finish him once and for all. Once I have him down, Rezzer can come in and do whatever he wants. I’ll give him that because I know his experience with the Nexus unit still eats him up on the inside. But I don’t want the governor to know. Ever.”

“That’s treason,” Captain Marz cleared his throat. “Punishable by death.”

She glanced down at her blue body, then back up at us. “If the Intelligence Core finds out what I am to the Hive, that I have more integrations than they ever imagined, that the Nexus units will come out of hiding to pursue me, to claim me for their own—”

Gwen paused at the growl that rumbled in my throat but glanced away as quickly as she had turned to me, trusting me to pull myself together. No, demanding I do so.

“They’ll put me in a cage, Marz. This is why I’m naked, to show you what I’m really like, what they really did to me. I’m not normal. I’m not even normal for the Colony. I’ll be an experiment at best and a weapon at the worst. I won’t survive it. You saw me going crazy, grounded on the planet. I’m not just contaminated. I’m something else. I am one of them. Not a drone or a soldier. They made me Nexus. I’m permanently broken. Wrong. At first, I thought I could just do missions and kill Hive and be happy. But that had been unrealistic. I won’t be able to hide who I am now. What I am now. I can never go home. Hell, I don’t even have a home. Once I finish off Nexus 4 and the governor and the others learn the truth, I will have to flee. Escape. And you two must make an oath never to reveal what you saw here today. You can’t tell anyone the truth about me.” She waved her hand in front of her body. “Do you understand?”

Marz stopped his pacing and turned to face her. “You want to kill the Hive here, then leave us all to go hunt them on your own.” He shook his head. “You may be the strongest female I have ever encountered, but you are still a female. Every cell in my body demands you be protected, not sent into battle. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it. I’m not asking, Marz. I’m telling you.” The threat was there, the fact that she would use force, if necessary, to get through his thick Prillon skull.

“She won’t be alone. She is mine.” A fact.

Marz looked from Gwen to me, then lifted his head as if to inspect the stars. “May the gods have mercy on us all. They’ll throw me in the brig for this.”

“Not if they don’t know what happened,” Vance offered. “Rezzer will keep his mouth shut. We’ll get him and Braun to back up our story. We returned to the surface, had an itch to go looking for some trouble in the caves, and got lucky.” Vance glanced at my mate, the woman I would die to protect. “We’ll tell them you died up here with the Hive.” He glanced over to me. “Both of you. Shot off into space. Lost.”

Marz looked as if he were about to protest, but he locked his gaze with Vance and slowly nodded. “As long as we destroy the Nexus unit and stop the transport mineral from leaving the surface. We fail”—he turned back to Gwen—“and no more deals. No secrets. We stop them, or every warrior on the planet helps us take them out.”

“Done. Agreed.” Gwen spoke for herself, which meant she also spoke for me. “But I’m the only one who can get close enough to kill him.” Gwen pointed to the Hive ship we could all see outlined not far from where we talked. The dead bodies had been left behind, and the Hive ship was only a few steps away, the odd configuration drifting in and out of view as the fog shifted and moved around us. “Once Nexus 4 is dead, I’m taking their ship, with their flight codes, and I’m going to hunt them and kill them for as long as I can.”

I knew Braun. Rezzer. Tane. I knew the few Atlans on this world, and not one would sit out this fight, even if they had to keep their mouths shut and defy orders to be involved. That left Marz and Vance. As Prillons, they were the unknown. The governor was a Prillon as well, and a good leader. But for Gwen, and for Rezzer, this was personal. I understood that now, and I would assist my mate in any way I could, because killing the Nexus was the only way to keep her safe.

“Rezzer will not want to miss this fight,” I agreed. “Nor will he come alone. It is his right to accept or decline the presence of the other warlords. It is the beast in him that must decide. But it will be on you, Marz, to make sure he understands what’s at stake and keeps his mouth shut.”

“Or stays out of it,” Gwen added. “I am more than happy to kill Nexus 4 on my own. I am willing to do this for him, and for CJ, and the twins. That is all.”

I held my breath as Marz made his decision. Vance was his second, and I knew the other Prillon warrior would support Marz in any decision he made.

He nodded once. “Very well. I will agree to keeping this a secret. For now. But if they catch sight of you blue… well, I think the secret will be out. Are you stuck blue now?”

“No. I have full control of my integrations.” As she spoke, the blue began to fade until she stood before me as I remembered her, caramel skin, black hair, dark brown eyes I would be happy drowning in.

Marz and Vance wisely looked away. “Fine. Whatever. But there is too much at stake,” Marz said. “This information about the Nexus units could turn the tide of the war.”

What Marz said was true, but I glanced at Gwen to see if she agreed.

“I already told the Intelligence Core the truth about the Nexus and the nature of their alliance with one another. I am the only secret, Marz. I don’t want to be a science experiment, or bait. I can turn the tide of the war all by myself if you all will just let me.” She offered a negligent shrug of her shoulders and I couldn’t help but enjoy the way her breasts rose and fell with the action. I glanced at the others, ready to poke their eyes out if they noticed the motion. If they had, they made no reaction, their heads still turned like honorable males. Thank fuck.

“So, are we good?” she continued.

“No, I am not good. Maxim deserves vengeance as well. Where this Nexus unit is, the traitor Krael will be, too. He murdered my second, Perro. He nearly killed the governor and murdered the human, Captain Miller. I do not like this, but I will agree… if you give me and the governor the location of the traitor.” Marz held out a hand to Vance, pulling his second up off the ground.

“I second this request,” Vance added. “I was not thinking clearly until now. Rezzer is not the only warrior on this planet who deserves vengeance.”

Gwen smiled and bowed slightly. “You drive a tough bargain, Marz, but it just so happens that the transport ship and the Nexus unit are not in the same set of caves.” She walked to Marz and held out her right hand in the oddly human way they had of making bargains. “I’ll offer the governor coordinates to the stolen minerals on that cargo ship, for a price.”

“What price?” Marz scowled at her.

“That is between him and me. Do we have a deal?”

“You are a formidable female. And yes, we do.” Marz placed his gloved hand in hers and she squeezed his hand, shaking his arm up and down in the human ritual. Marz ignored me, which was fine. He released Gwen’s hand and spoke to Vance. “You get back to Mak and Gwen’s shuttle. Report that there was a battle and we lost track of both Mak and the lieutenant.” He turned to me now. “Since your mate’s helmet and tracking device is already on the ground, you’ll need to dump yours as well, before you leave the moon’s surface. The governor has to believe you’ve been taken by the Hive. That should buy us the time you both need to get into position.”

“Done.” Smart. I couldn’t think right now. Nearly losing Gwen and now watching her stand fearless and proud among us made my cock hard and my chest ache.

“Good. I’ll make sure I take plenty of footage of the dead Hive and the scene of the battle. Vance will help me load up the bodies. I’m sure those warriors have family that would like to know their final fates. We’ll take them back to the Colony for processing and you two disappear.” He looked at Gwen. “You have my private comm code?”

“Of course.”

“Use it when you’re ready to offer the governor your bargain. How long do I have to recruit Rezzer and the other Atlan Warlords?”

Gwen tilted her head, taking her turn to stare up into the stars. “I’ll give you two hours to have them at the cave entrance. Not one minute more. Take a shuttle and head north of Base 3 about eighty miles to the entrance of the ice caves.”

“That close?” Vance seemed to pale behind his helmet.

Gwen ignored him. “And tell Rezzer that if I didn’t like CJ so much, I’d just kill the motherfucker and deliver his head to Rezzer on a platter.”

“Warlord Rezzer will be most grateful that you do not,” Vance said, a small smile turning up the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah? Well, he can owe CJ about a thousand backrubs and two thousand orgasms as payment.”

Marz choked at her bold words. Vance laughed. I looked at my warrior mate and smiled. Two thousand orgasms? It might take years, but I was more than up to the task. After all, I could not live knowing an Atlan pleased his mate more than I pleasured mine. I just hadn’t had enough time with her. Forever would do.

As if she could read my mind, my female turned to me. “If you really want to do this, then let’s go, Mak.” She waved a hand absently at Marz and Vance as she walked away. “I’ll activate the beacon at the exact coordinates when I’m ready for Rezz and his beast friends to storm the joint.”

Marz protested, but Gwen ignored him and I couldn’t take my eyes off the sway of her ass, the seductive slide of her long, glossy black hair as it fell down her back as I followed her to the empty Hive ship.

This ship was ours now. And I now understood that Gwen had no intention of ever giving it up. Not until the war was over, or all of the Nexus units were dead. I’d been wrong to think she’d be content on the Colony, going on mission after mission. That having such a small part to play would be enough for her. I’d been so wrong. Looking at her now, she was right. She wanted to go after the Hive, to destroy them, but she wouldn’t be able to do it by the governor’s rules. She might not strip bare for him to see what she’d been turned into, but the intel she collected and the way she did it alone would make her a weapon to the Coalition.

A thing, not a person.

She, too, had to escape. As long as she let me fight next to her, I didn’t care what kind of ship we called home. Or what color she was when we went to sleep at night.

“Are you two planning on fighting the Hive naked?” Vance called after us.

“Of course not,” Gwen replied easily. “They have S-Gen units on every ship. We’ll make our own gear.” The spontaneous matter generators were common on every Coalition vessel in the Fleet. Every household had one on the developed worlds. It created everything from weapons and clothing to food and personal items with recycled quantum energy formed into new molecules. If the hive had S-Gen units, we’d want for nothing.

She disappeared up the ship’s ramp and I followed, sighing in relief when she closed the door and filled the small room with breathable air.

The moment I was able, I pulled off my helmet and hauled her to me for a kiss.

By the gods, she was magnificent, no matter what color she was.

“Get that damn uniform off and toss it, Mak. They need to think you’ve been captured. At least for a while.”

“Are you telling me to get naked, female?”

“Yes, Mak. I am.”

“Good. Then it will be easier to fuck you after I spank you.”