Jane was missing. Zenik flew into the bar, chest heaving, and scouted around. He took a deep breath and forced his Mahdfel senses to calm down and allow him to actually start thinking with his brain. Jane was gone. Someone had taken her. How could he locate her without any tech? How did he always know when she entered a room? Zenik inhaled deeply. Her scent was not here. He did catch a scent of something a bit familiar, something that somehow reminded him of home, but he couldn’t quite place it.
“You looking for a good time, sweeties?” a woman danced around him. She was yellow with bright pink hair.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“I know a good place to find people. For a few credits, I can take you there. It’s a stop in paradise, baby.”
He was wasting his time but he threw a few credits her way and then charged back out the door. That familiar scent still lingered but he shook it off and narrowed down his field of sensory to his life scent, to Jane.
There she had gone, down the street away from the shipyard and the bar. He took a few more paces in that direction and it was quite clear that he was right. Jane had gone that way and she was not alone.
Zenik clocked at least three other scents commingled with Jane’s. There was no tang of blood, for which he was grateful. She, perhaps, had gone with them willingly. Oh, his sweet deluded mate was never going to hear the end of this.
Further down the street, the trail ended. There was nothing but a pool of her scent and then it disappeared. Zenik paced. She must have gone into one of the buildings near here but there were five possibilities. Trying one might set off alarms in the others and place Jane in an even more dangerous situation. But she still might be getting herself murdered right now.
A bloom of the other scents pulsed at the edge of his range. The three with her were out and about again. Surely, he could get one of them to tell him where Jane was. An auto flat coasted by with a dumpster loaded on the top. Three unsavory characters walked behind it. The moment Zenik came running at them, they scattered and he was only able to catch one of them.
It didn’t take a large inhale to realize that this slug was not one of the three he was stalking, but their scents were still strong and getting stronger. He held the slug around the neck with one hand and lifted the lid to the dumpster with the other.
Inside, he found three dead bodies. Judging from their scents, these were the three who had escorted Jane to the Wine Merchant and soon after had met their doom.
“Where is Jane?” he growled.
The creature trembled and pointed.
“Where? Show me,” Zenik demanded.
The slug didn’t get the chance to answer before the building behind them exploded in a furious blast, blowing the main door halfway across the street A chunk of the building clocked the guy in the head and his eyes rolled back into his skull.
Zenik didn’t need him anymore. It was fairly obvious where his mate was now. Zenik did not know how long he dug through the rubble, ignoring the blood and strain of his muscles as he looked for his mate. Curious onlookers were still peering out of nearby doors and windows as the crazy green guy dug futilely through the rubble.
Zenik hit a black coat and under it was something warm and soft - a body. He peeled back the coat and his breath caught in his throat as he caught a glimpse of Jane’s black hair. Her heart was still beating but there was a rasp in her breath that alarmed him. He scooped her up, coat and all, and sprinted back out to the main street.
The yellow woman with the pink hair was there, with a small motor cab. “Get on. They’ll come looking for you soon.”
Zenik didn’t recognize her, knew he shouldn’t trust her, but there was that faint reminder of home again. He stepped on the back and they were off, back to the ship in less than a minute. He climbed the hatch ramp and headed straight for the med station. The female followed.
“Orth,” she said, as if suddenly making a realization.
“What?” He didn’t turn to look at her. All his attention was devoted to his mate.
“Orth. He has been here. He has mated. Oh, that’s so nice!”
He peeled off the coat, and set the auto medic to work. It began to repair Jane’s injuries immediately. He looked up at the woman, whose pink hair had faded. Her skin had also changed to a natural green.
“You’re a pure Etlonian,” Zenik said, finally putting two and two together.
“Where’s Orth? How do you know my son? Are you in the same clan?” she asked hurriedly.
“I am not familiar with a warrior by the name of Orth,” he replied.
“Then why are you flying around in a ship dripping with his scent? What have you done to him?” Her skin mottled and turned a nearly black green. If Zenik wasn’t mistaken, it was a near homicidal color. Who was this female, anyway? He knew nothing about her.
“Scrubs, she’s talking about Scrubs,” Jane said weakly from the med bed.
“I am speaking of Orth. He is a medic and proud slayer of many Suhlik. He is not a scrubber of floors.”
Zenik was too busy scanning his mate to follow the conversation. If the female proved to be a problem, he would eliminate her, Etlonian or not.
“He’s the doc. He goes by Scrubs so as not to frighten the other females. Scrubs refers to a surgeon’s uniform, not scrubber of floors.”
“So, you have seen him? He is well?”
Jane tried to sit up. Zenik pushed her down.
“Expecting a baby anytime now,” Jane told her.
The female got a bit wistful and her color changed back to a more natural light green. She looked around and nodded.
“We should get going,” she told Zenik. She didn’t wait for him to ask more questions but simply disappeared toward the cockpit. Zenik did not follow.
“Maybe you should go check on her,” Jane prodded.
“I am checking on you,” Zenik replied.
“I am fine. I only got a little exploded.”
“I wonder what the Suhlik devils would say if they found out what their allies are lining their coats with.” Zenik pulled open the coat and he showed her the glint of Suhlik scales underneath. It was a reliable armor for those willing to chance the Suhlik wrath if and when they found out. They tended to demolish entire clans, entire species, if they found one warrior wearing their scales. Zenik was happy that those bastards had been wearing them though. It had protected his mate from even more serious damage.
“I’m fine. Go check to make sure she’s not delivering us up to the Wine Merchant,” Jane instructed.
“So, he is not dead,” Zenik, the knot in his stomach returning.
“Unless he’s an android with a self destruct mode, probably not.”
Zenik nodded, assured that Jane was in no immediate danger. He headed to the cockpit where the Etlonian female was halfway through the lift off checklist.
“Scrubs, Orth, is a new member of my clan. From what I know of him, he is honorable and courageous,” Zenik told her.
“Being away from my son. That’s been the hardest thing, living out here on the edge of the law. But that bastard, I’m going to catch him.”
Zenik had never seen an Etlonian female in person before. He knew that Athen’s mother was one but they were so rare and unusual, he had never had contact with one. When the Suhlik had attacked Etlon, the Etlonians had had very few defenses and most of the major cities had been brought to ruins in a couple of hours. The females were the only ones left who actually remembered Etlon as it was. The Suhlik had taken the strongest of the males and used them to make Mahdfel. They also took about a hundred Etlonian females and put them in cryostasis tubes. When Etlon and the other warriors liberated themselves from the Suhlik, they found the females and claimed them as mates. There was hope that Etlonian females could produce female children but the defect had been bred into the male side. No Mahdfel could produce a female child.
She swiveled around and shook a finger at Zenik. Her hair rippled in color, changing from a white to a pink again. “For future reference, when I say run, I don’t mean run right into the arms of the dangerous asshole. I mean run away him.”
“My mate is not afraid. She should be more, but she is not.“
“Your mate is lucky. And so we’re lucky because I have a plan.” With that statement, the engines roared to life and Zenik felt his ears pop as the ship pressurized.
“I do not even know your name, or where you came from. You could be another spy sent by the Wine Merchant to kill me,” he said to her.
She bared her neck to him, showing off the small dots on her skin where her mate had first claimed her. “I am Bright. Mate and Mother of Mahdfel, sworn to slay as many of those shiny devils as I can before I die. I remember the blue trees of Etlon and the shining purple city. My heart cries for the billions lost. I would slit my own throat before working for such a thing as the traitorous Wine Merchant.”
Zenik nodded. No female could make such a declaration and be deceitful.
“And you?” Bright asked.
“Me?”
“I can only assume that you are the Mahdfel that lived.”
“I failed to kill him the first time. I will not fail again,” Zenik spat in disgust.
“Show me your chest. Show me your credentials.”
Baring his chest, naked, without a tattoo to be seen, was usually his last resort. It was not shame, exactly, but it was a reminder that he had failed. Athen had offered to restore his tattoos. He had earned them, after all, but Zenik had refused. He did not deserve to be restored until he had completed his mission. But he would show her the truth.
Zenik stripped off his top and stood there for her inspection. It only took her a moment and then she nodded and went back to supervising the trip out of orbit.
“You have a plan,” Zenik said as he buttoned his uniform up again.
“Yes. As your mate found out, the Wine Merchant is a wily fellow. He lives somewhere on an estate, on some faraway planet. Nobody knows where. The thing you saw, the one your mate must have tried to kill, was an android. The best and most expensive in the known systems. He can afford it but they are only made in one location, by one select company. The Bistra only allow for one copy to be run at a time. And any attempt to modify, harm, or open an android for study generally results in self-termination with extreme prejudice.”
“They explode.”
“Boom. That is why your mate is extremely lucky that she’s still alive. Something must have malfunctioned with the android, giving her time to get far enough away from the blast to survive. That is why I told you to run. It was far too dangerous to try and explode the android on your own.”
“You could have just blown it up yourself from a distance.”
“Well, yes, but I had an itty bitty problem with that. I didn’t have a ship. I had hitched a ride with an amenable, yet disreputable citizen who, when I didn’t want to leave just yet, dumped here.”
“What is your plan now that the android has been destroyed?”
“The Wine Merchant must go in person to pick up his new toy.”
“To Bistra.”
“Yes. So we can watch him, wait for him and follow him back to whatever hole he crawled out of.”
“Won’t he be looking for this ship?”
“I made a few friends on Uprorion. I think they managed to bury the paperwork if someone decides to go looking. It will appear as if this ship never landed. Unless he had specific eyes on the ground, he’ll never connect your mate with this ship, and he’ll probably think that she died in the explosion anyway.”
Zenik pondered the possibilities. It seemed like a sound plan, though it would take much more research to determine the best place to strike. If they could find his hideout, they could dismantle his whole network, not just take down the head.
“Go. Reassure your mate. It will be at least six cycles before we are near enough to Bistra to get a good read of their defense perimeter. I will take the first shift in the cockpit,” Bright said, waving him off.
Bright was right. One of them should be in the cockpit to monitor things. He turned and saw Jane leaning against the doorway with her hands crossed over her chest. Right now, his mate needed him.