Wings of Retribution (68 page)

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Stuart said, as the weakened L’kota snarled up at him.  “We’ll finish this later.”  He kicked the shifter again, laying him out on the floor.  He flipped him over and, with one knee keeping him pinned, he pushed a node into his palm and pressed his hand into the small of Ragnar’s back.  The direct current that he applied to the neural center sent the shifter into convulsions.  His teeth, claws, and hair fell out as his body instantly reverted back to its natural state.  Stuart winced as the stomach compartment became visible—he could see five distinct fingers, as well as what looked like a human jaw.

Stuart pulled the cargo sack from under his belt and flipped it open.  Then he proceeded to lever the shifter into the bag.  When he was finished, he knotted the sack and hefted it over his shoulder.

The gashes in his leg made for slow going, but at least Stuart could manipulate the capillaries to somewhat staunch the flow of blood.  Starting down the stairs, however, Stuart began to wonder if he would need a new body by the time he got them to safety.

He didn’t want to take a new body—with their current situation, every human he took would have to die.  He simply made an apology to the Seeker and severed their cerebral connections upon entering.  He couldn’t afford for any of Xenith’s inhabitants to know about him.

Stuart carried the sack down twelve flights of stairs, then turned into the hall and started walking south.  He needed to get back to Dallas’s room before she got sent back out on another mission.  If they were going to get off of Xenith, they needed to do it
now
, before that beacon got through.

By the time they reached Dallas’s room, Stuart was no longer able to ignore the abuse that Ragnar had given his host.  He stayed just long enough to discover Dallas was gone, then he dropped Ragnar in the corner of the room and hobbled outside.

He had used extra current on Ragnar, not about to take a chance with a shifter royal.  He just hoped he had enough shock left to take a new host. 

A few yards down the hall, Stuart found a young man scrubbing the floors with a bucket and brush.  Guilt already forming a hard knot in his soul, Stuart approached the boy slowly, allowing him to see he was wounded.  As expected, the kid stood up and asked if he needed help.  Stuart stumbled, like he was about to fall, and the young man caught him.

“I’m so sorry,” Stuart told him, looking into the kid’s innocent brown eyes, hating what he was about to do.

“Don’t worry about it,” the boy said, helping him back to his feet.  “You’re wounded.  Here, I’ll help you get to—”  The teenager’s words ended as Stuart applied the remainder of his current to his body.  As the kid was falling, open-mouthed, brown eyes wide in confusion, Stuart began disengaging from his host’s brain. 
Seeker forgive me,
he prayed, as he pulled his tentacles free. 
But it’s not just for myself this time.  My friends are depending on me. 
Hopefully, that meant something.  He still felt dirty, cowardly—a disgusting little parasite. 

To take an unwilling host…  To
kill
it intentionally…  These were the things done by monsters.

Yet Stuart positioned himself over the boy and leapt.

A brief moment of searing, dry cold, then he found his body cradled within his next host’s warm inner ear.  The boy was moving already, grabbing at his head.  Feeling the rough salty human skin brush his body, Stuart panicked and fled the searching fingers, doing more damage than usual.  The young man began to scream and flail.  Stuart felt himself struggling to hold on as the world thrashed violently around him.

Stuart felt himself losing his grip as that self-loathing started creeping back into his awareness at the vibrations of his new host’s screams.  Hosts were not supposed to scream.  They were not supposed to dig at their skulls and try to tear him free.  This was
wrong.
  He almost let go, almost gave in to the self-disgust right then.

Then a moment of clarity, like a crystal ring amidst a sea of silence, brought him out of his revulsion.

Dallas.

The one human who had
willingly
offered herself as host.  He thought about her, afraid and alone, stuck on this twisted planet for the rest of her life. 
No,
he thought immediately. 
She’s depending on me.

Stuart renewed his efforts, boring into the host’s soft tissues, evading the boy’s fingers with sudden resolve.  By the time Stuart managed to get himself inside and merge himself to the boy’s senses, he was horrified to realize that he had gathered a crowd.  He began making connections rapidly, fear spurring him to hurry.  He was just gaining enough control to lift himself from the floor when a female voice demanded, “What is going on here?!”

Stuart sat up, but was not quick enough to hide the trickle of blood from his left ear.  He glanced up and his heart stopped when he realized that the woman who had spoken was the same woman who had captured
Retribution
and left Athenais naked in a boat.

The woman’s eyes fell on Stuart’s previous host, who was a twitching husk, the mind long-vanished.  Then, slowly, her eyes flicked over to the blood dripping from beneath Stuart’s hand, then to Stuart’s face.

Her angular features twisted with a disgust that Stuart knew all-too-well.  “I know what this is.”

Oh gods,
Stuart thought. 
Oh Seeker help me, she knows.
  He tore his way through the host’s brain, frantically trying to reestablish enough connections to run away.

Above him, the woman said, “Warrior, give me your gun.”  He looked up in time to see her shoulder a rifle, aimed at his new host’s chest.  She pulled the trigger and it suddenly felt as if someone had kicked him in the heart.  He gasped and fell backwards.

His host was dying.  Stuart could feel the blood seeping out, sense the numbness spreading to his extremities.
 
He realized there was nothing he could do.  No one was going to help him.  Finally, after a lifetime of cowardice and deception, he was going to face the Seeker. 

I don’t want to die.

Like the wild storm outside, the all-consuming panic rose in a haze of terror that clouded his thoughts.  Desperate, not thinking of anything except finding a live host, he tried direct his host’s weak limbs to crawl toward his last host.

The woman stepped forward and easily kicked him backwards.  “Remove the other body and incinerate it.  Our little parasite is trying to save himself.”

Stuart’s host’s vision was going dark.  Mindless with desperation, he reached toward the woman’s leg.

She blew off his hand with her rifle.

Unable to control himself, Stuart opened his mouth in a silent plea for help.  The faces staring down at him were impassive, uncaring.  Strings of his old language flowed from his lips, begging, but their faces never changed.

The last thing he heard before everything went dark was, “Stand back.  No one touch him.  I want a good shot when he comes crawling out of his hole.”

Dallas doubled over the console, her headache increasing.

“This isn’t the time to be panicking, worm,” Tommy said.  “Let Dallas back at the controls before we get our asses blown outta the sky.”

Dallas jerked her head up.  “Stuart’s not
in
here, you bitter old man!”  At that, she kicked out with her left foot, jamming the stick forward and down.  They spun and dove under the warship pursuing them, narrowly missing having their nose sheared off by the warship’s front deflectors.

She hit the right pedal and twisted the top four throttles with her right hand. 
Retribution
snapped around again and fell into a spin.  They came up behind their pursuer and fell underneath its left main engine.  Dallas jerked up on the stick even as the other warship’s guns turned on them.

The scream of steel grinding against steel echoed throughout the length of the ship before Dallas loosened the throttle and let Retribution fall behind.

“Dallas, what the hell are you doing?!” Tommy shouted.  “I’ve never seen something so stupid.  We were right under their main guns!  We—”

He was interrupted by a resounding boom from ahead.  The final warship was falling toward the ocean in a spin, the left engine a tangle of twisted metal and flying shrapnel.  Dallas held her position, waiting.

The captain of the other ship managed to get the fall under control before it hit the ocean, utilizing the two left-hand minor thrusters and an array of the lower supplementals.

Limping, the enemy warship began the struggle back to the Fort.

As soon as the ship abandoned the fight, Dallas turned on Tommy.

“That was a Raptor-class warship with energy-resistant plating.  We had to take out a main engine and we couldn’t do that with our weapons.  If we held still long enough to fire,
they
would have enough time to fire back, and
Retribution
isn’t equipped to take a photon burst through the hull, all right?!  Plus, I wanted to get this whole thing over with.  My head is killing me.”

Tommy was watching her oddly.  “What did you mean, Stuart isn’t in there?  I assumed he was the one who helped you through the brainwashing.”

“He is.  And he left me to go find the shifters.”  Dallas set a course for the debris field and slumped over, holding her head.  “Damn, I’ve just got the worst headache.”  And she didn’t feel right.  She felt like crying.  Like just slumping over the controls and sobbing for twenty-four hours straight.

“You all right?  You’re looking kind of pale.”  Tommy was peering at her narrowly.

“I’m fine,” Dallas muttered, though for some reason her heartbeat was speeding up and she felt like vomiting.  Her hands were shaking on the controls, and she almost felt like peeing herself.  She looked around the room, panting.  Why did she still feel so creeped out?  She just took out their last pursuer…

Realizing Tommy was watching her too closely, she hid her nerves with a rough mutter of, “Just make sure there’s nobody following us.”  Then she closed her eyes and dropped her head into her hands and started rubbing her temples.

Tommy glanced at the monitors, then back at her.  “You sure?  Want to lie down?  I can take us from here.”

Dallas jerked her head up, heart suddenly hammering like a broken freighter engine.  “Take us
where?
” she snarled.

Tommy flinched away from her, looking taken aback.  “Back to the Utopia.”  He frowned at her.  “Why…where were you
planning
on going?”

“I wasn’t
planning
anything,” Dallas moaned.  “I just had to get my ship back.  Now that I’ve got it, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”

God, something was
wrong
.  There must be a ship out there she’d missed.  Something that was triggering her subconscious alarm bells.  She’d never been so scared in her life.  Her heart wouldn’t stop pounding and she just had this insane urge to wad herself into a ball in the corner and sob.  She started searching through the debris fields, looking for anything remotely the same size as a ship.