ALYVOS

It takes endless moments for the Bringer of Many Joys to ping back that her shields are disabled and the override to board her chimes onto Sentorr’s panel. “Got it,” he says in the flat, emotionless voice he always uses when we’re on a mission. Sometimes I think he must explode privately in his quarters to let all the tension out…or maybe he’s just bottling it all inside.

Kivian joins us shortly, puts away his blasters, and then claps a hand on agitated Tarekh’s back. He understands what the male’s going through.

Everyone holds their breath as the Fool glides alongside the Bringer and the docking clamps extend. There’s a hiss as the transfer portal extends, locking to the other ship. Then we’re attached, and Tarekh charges through the airlock the moment it opens.

I’m right behind him, but with a different kind of enthusiasm. He can get his mate. I get to knock heads.

There’s a sweetish stink the moment we get inside the szzt ship that even the filters can’t quite take care of. The air’s warm and musty, a sign that the ship’s seen better days and the recyclers are going to give. If I was a passenger, I’d be terrified of being stranded somewhere in deep space on this hunk of shit, but szzt like to run an old girl into the ground. This is probably normal for them. The passageways are cramped, and the moment we get on the ship, Tarekh heads to the right, looking for the cargo bay and Cat’s bio-signal.

I go left, heading for the bridge. I’m eager for a fight. Not just for the fact that they tried to “win” Cat from Kivian, or that they’ve scared her to death, but for the sheer joy of pounding my fists into something until it’s pulped.

“Traitors! Thieves!” a voice growls down the hallway, and then the door to the bridge slides shut, locking me out.

Found ’em.

With a wild grin, I move to the locking panel for the bridge and smash my gloved fist into the delicate network of transmitters, connectors, wires and chips. Like on most older ships, it’s not protected, and so I’m able to rip out a handful of cords and the panel goes completely black, the power winking out.

I put my fingers against the edge of the door and slowly force it open, just a hair. Just enough to see the two szzt unfurl shock-sticks. Those are used on slaves, but I understand the thought process there—they can’t use blasters, and they need a weapon.

Lucky for me, mesakkah aren’t all that affected by shock-sticks.

I shove the door back with a mighty heave and plow into the bridge. I don’t know if Kivian’s behind me. I don’t know if they hit me with the shock-sticks. All I know is that the blood is pounding in my ears and roaring through my body, and my fists fly as I attack my opponents. I want them to pay. I want them to hurt. I want them to regret the choices they’ve made.

I unload on them, my fists connecting with tough, pebbled orange skin. I slam into them with all the force of my body, blows coming fast and hard. My knuckles hurt as my fists connect, but I ignore it, just like I ignore all the various aches and pains that race through my system as I attack. Old war wounds that twinge, the bad knee that never healed quite like it should have after Thresh II—none of that matters. All that matters is the feeling of defeating the enemy.

Making them hurt.

Making them pay.

At some point, I realize that I’m the only one standing on the bridge. The fury recedes from my mind and I’m panting, staring at the blood-spattered panels around me. They blink with star charts and flight paths, noting the original choice of locations and the hastily changed directions recently programmed in. At my feet, the pair of szzt are collapsed, their bodies bloody and broken.

Still breathing, though. Tough bastards.

I nudge one aside with my boot, wondering if I should get Kivian. If I should finish them off. They’re battered and unconscious and they present no harm to us. There’s no sign of Kiv or Tarekh, though, and I catch my breath, waiting for the bloodlust inside me to subside. For that yawning, empty ache in my gut to be filled, even temporarily, by the satisfaction of hurting my enemies.

I just feel emptier than ever, though.

Frustrated, I put my gloves together and crack my knuckles. Pain shoots up my hands—a good feeling—and I storm out of the bridge.

Maybe there’ll be something—or someone—else to fight in the cargo bay, because I’m not tired. I haven’t had enough.

There’ll never be enough, my mind whispers, but I ignore it. Have for years and years.

I stalk off the bridge and down the dark, shadowed hallways. No one else comes out to confront me, and I force open door after door to make sure that we’re not missing anyone. The ship seems to be empty, so I’m guessing the szzt I just pounded into the floor are the only occupants.

Disappointing. I’m still itching for a fight.

I flick a button on my wrist-comm, looking for the bio-signals of the others. They’re still clustered in what must be the cargo bay. I head in that direction, kicking aside debris and slamming a fist into the wall as I go.

The smell of the cargo bay hits me before I get there.

Immediately, I recognize the sickly-sweet stench. I didn’t pick it up before, but I do now. Anyone that survived the Threshian war knows what the stink of the dead smells like. It’s this cloying, horrific scent that worms into your senses and won’t leave. It’s greasy and disturbing and brings up a ton of bad memories for me. The very air feels like it’s filled with rot and sludge.

The cargo bay stink is like a wall when I turn down the corridor toward it. At the far end of the hall, I see Kivian, a grim look on his face. He shakes his head and slowly steps away. “You don’t want to see that, Alyvos.”

He knows that I struggle with old war memories. But now that I’ve smelled it, I can’t not see it. I have to know, if nothing else to put my mind at ease. Sometimes my imagination’s worse than anything I can ever see.

I step inside, though, and I realize that no, it’s as bad as I thought it was. Off to one side, Cat’s collapsed in Tarekh’s arms, shuddering as he strokes her hair. He barely glances at me as I enter, his attention fixed on his mate. I’m surprised he hasn’t taken her back to the ship yet, but maybe they were waiting for me. Maybe Cat can’t walk yet because she’s too affected. Or maybe it’s only been moments since we boarded. Time blurs when I’m in one of my rages.

This place looks like a slaughterhouse in one of the old vids. The smell of dead things is everywhere, the air hot and stagnant. Old, dark splatters cover the walls, and the floor is filthy with a crust that I’m sure has nothing to do with dirt. Cages are stacked into one shadowy corner of the room, but nothing’s moving inside them. I doubt anything’s alive.

I doubt anything’s been alive in here for a long, long time.

My nostrils flare as I walk in, assessing the place. It makes old memories flare. Bad ones. I shove them back, because everyone was affected by the war. Everyone suffered. I’m not special in that aspect. Special because I can’t move on from it, maybe. I stare at the room. At first glance, it just looks messy. No, trashy, as if there’s piles of rotten garbage that the szzt never threw away or recycled. They just shoved it into this room and let it rot. But those cages make my hackles stand up, and when I step forward and see a pair of curved bones that can only be ribs jutting out from one of the “trash” piles, I realize that it’s not garbage.

It’s people.

Or it was people.

I rub my jaw, saying nothing. We knew these weren’t good guys. We knew that, and that was why we felt no compunction about stealing from them. But this…this is bad. This is beyond what anyone could have imagined.

“Collars,” Cat sobs against Tarekh’s chest. “They’re everywhere. I tripped over one when they shoved me in here and fell into all that mess.” She gags, swiping her hands against her clothing. “I’ll never feel clean again.”

She’s not wrong. It’s going to take her a long time to get past this. I know that feeling.

I feel curiously detached as I pluck a stray cord off of one old cage. It’s not cord, but a lead rope for a slave collar, one I’ve seen humans wear plenty of times. One that Cat’s wearing right now. It’s covered in dried blood. There’s something rotten at the bottom of the cage and I realize I’m staring at an old corpse of a human.

All of these are old human corpses. Pieces of them anyhow. Mutilated, discarded pieces of people that met a bad, bad ending. I’ve seen vids of racer kennels on the black market that were raided by authorities and found to be cruelly mistreating their animals. This reminds me of them, except that when I look into one collapsed, rusted cage haphazardly stacked atop another, I don’t see the snout of a racer. I see a desiccated five-fingered hand that once belonged to a delicate human much like Cat and Fran. This human died in her cage. So did the one below her. If I had to guess, I’d say every one of these trashed, filthy cages once held an unfortunate human.

No wonder Cat freaked out.

Anger burns in my gut. I drop the lead chain and am silent as I look to Kivian. “Two of the bastards on the bridge. Still alive. Mostly.”

He crosses his arms and nods slowly, and I can tell this is a lot for him to swallow. Kiv didn’t see the same action I did in the war. This’ll be new to him. “What happened here?”

I glance around at the stacked, scattered cages, the bits of material—and other bits—scattered in the dark depths of the cargo bay. “They like to break their toys, it seems.”

Cat gags. “I can’t believe I volunteered for this.”

“Never again,” Tarekh grinds out, his tail tightly wrapped around his mate, as if that can somehow make it better. “Never leaving the ship again.”

“Oh, kef off with that.” She lightly slaps at his chest and sniffs. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“Yes, it could have,” the big male growls. He’s not going to let Cat out of his sight for a while, I suspect. He helps her to her feet, then picks her up in his arms. She gives a little protest, but when his tail tightens around her waist, she sighs and puts her arms around his neck and clings to him, giving in and seeking comfort.

I don’t watch as they go. I don’t need to, because I know Tarekh’s going to murmur soft words of comfort to Cat and hold her close until her terror subsides. It’s what I’d do.

Kivian waits behind. When Tarekh and Cat are gone, he glances at me. “I haven’t said anything to Fran. I turned off comms the moment we realized Cat was fine. So the crew is still alive?”

“Not for much longer.” I’m about to go back to the bridge and take care of things, because those bastards are not breathing more oxygen if I can help it.

He nods. “I’ll help. We can get the guns later. For now, we should check for survivors, too.”

I give him an incredulous look. “Survivors? Look around you, Kiv. These guys weren’t interested in survivors. They were interested in making a keffing mess. They were interested in pulling things apart just to watch them scream. You think they’d leave anything alive?”

Kivian’s normally laughing face is somber. “I don’t think they would, no. But then I think of my Fran, and I know I can’t leave here without checking first.”

“We should set this entire keffing ship on fire and launch it into the nearest asteroid, that’s what we should do.” I kick one of the discarded, bloody collars across the floor. It doesn’t go far. It lands in a puddle and stops, and for some reason, that just makes me angrier. “Execution is too quick for those bastards. They need to hurt and they need it to last for a long keffing time. New plan. We hurt them for a while.” I put my hands together and crack my knuckles.

“We can do that,” Kivian agrees, arms crossed. He still doesn’t look sold on my idea. “Or we can get the guns, check for survivors, and make this quick. You forget that we’re still in Rakhar IV’s airspace. You think someone won’t notice the distress signal they sent? Because you know they sent one. Truth is, as much as I’d love to torture those szzt and make them suffer, if we want to protect ourselves and our crew, we need to leave. Fast.”

“Kef that. Don’t you want to avenge your mate’s people?” I gesture at the cages. “Aren’t you angry?” Because I’m furious and I don’t even have a human mate.

“Of course I’m angry.” Kivian narrows his eyes at me. “But I’m also the captain. I need to think about the safety of all of the crew, and the longer we stay here, the more likely it is that we’ll get caught. So we do a cursory check and then we get the kef out of here—”

I snarl, slamming my hand into a cage. It rattles and several others fall over. “Kef that. They deserve to pay. They deserve to hurt like they were going to hurt Cat. You know what Fran would say if she knew you were going to turn tail?” I ignore the fact that Kivian’s look gets deadly and that he takes a step toward me. “She’d tell you to ‘go fuck yourself’ in that human language and—”

Kivian raises a fist, even as I speak, and I’m practically gleeful because I want him to be as angry as I am. I want him to rage with a burning misery in his gut like the one I can’t ever get rid of. I want—

“Hello?”

The voice is whisper soft, so fragile I barely hear it.

I pause. My imagination, perhaps—

Kivian’s hand slams into my jaw, knocking me backward. I stagger against a couple of cages, the stack breaking my fall. I grin at him as I straighten, because I probably deserved that.

“Shut your keffing mouth,” Kivian says, dropping his hand.

“Hello?” The soft voice calls out again. It’s somewhere in the dark depths of this room. This time, I know it’s not my imagination. Kiv and I stare at each other for a moment. I turn on the emergency light on my wrist-comm and shine it into the gloom.

Nothing but filth meets my gaze. “Who’s there?” I call out in the human language.

“Me…I…I’m human.” The voice is small and timid, almost as if afraid to speak up. “Please…you speak English?”

“Yes,” I call out, shining my light into each cage. I run across a fresher corpse and bite back a groan of disgust, continuing to flick my light as I move deeper into the cargo bay. Kef, how many cages of humans did these things keep? “Where are you?”

“I don’t know.” The voice is surprisingly calm. I’m a little shocked by that, given how frantic Cat was. I can also tell that the voice is female, too. The timbre’s a little different than Fran’s husky voice or Cat’s sharper one. This one’s softer, gentler, and has a lilt to certain words. “Please don’t leave me.” Her voice turns desperate. “I’ll behave.”

“We’re not leaving you,” Kivian says, charging past me and shining his light down what looks like a cramped passageway lined with more cages. “How many of you are there?”

“I think I’m the only one left,” the voice calls, and there’s a tremble in it. “I promise I’ll behave.”

Such a keffing odd thing to say. I flick my light through cage after cage, looking for the owner.

“Give us a hint of where you’re at,” Kivian calls again. “We don’t have much time to waste.”

“I don’t know,” the woman says again. “I’m sorry.”

But the voice is closer, and I continue forward, checking every cage with my beam. My stomach turns at some of the things I see, but that isn’t important right now. What’s important is finding this female. She sounds so very calm I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t a trap.

A moment later, I catch sight of a female’s bare foot, though. I race forward, shining the beam into the cage. She’s sitting, facing the wall, with her legs tucked underneath her. Filthy, dark hair cascades down her back and she’s clearly starving and dirty. The clothes she has on are mere scraps.

She doesn’t turn when I shine the beam of my light, though. “What’s your name?” I ask.

“Iris,” she says in that same calm voice. “Iris Mayweather.”

Kivian comes racing over even as I squat near the cage. I work the latch, but it’s rusted shut, and judging from the filth lining her cage, she’s been stuck in here for some time. There’s a cage above her, and one below, and it looks like the one below has been functioning as a toilet for quite some time. The stink is terrible, but I can’t blame Iris. It’s not like she had a choice. I’m curious to see her face, though.

“I’ll be very obedient,” Iris tells us again in that placid voice. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”

“Turn around,” I say.

She does, and Kivian shines his light on her features. The first thing I notice is that she’s lovely. Dainty despite the filth covering her and the shadows on her face. I can’t see what color her eyes are as the shadows hide them. Her features are small and regular, her skin slightly duskier than Fran’s. She has dark brows and a round face, and the prominent teats I’ve learned is a normal thing with humans.

Iris lifts her chin, and both Kivian and I suck in a breath at the same time. Her eyes aren’t hidden by shadows. They’re gone, nothing but dark, angry scars remaining in their place.

“I’ll be very obedient,” she says again. “Please.”