Chapter Thirteen
Tyran
Hunt snarled at my words. “Shut up. We’re going to be smart about this. They don’t know how strong you are, what was done to you. We’ll get out of here, and then we’ll kill the traitor.”
“How could we not know about Krael, about his treachery?” That’s what I wanted to know. He’d lived among us, worked among us. He had friends. Why had he turned? And turned he had indeed. He was acting of his own free will, not controlled internally and automatically by the Hive menace. I’d seen the bastard walking around, giving orders.
I wanted to kill him. But first, we had to get out of this cell. And to do that, we had to either figure out how to walk through solid rock, or discover a way to get around the force field trapping us here. I’d stopped trying to find ways past the shimmering energy field blocking the front of our rock cell, that energy the sole barrier keeping us imprisoned for the past few hours. Had it been hours? Days? How long had we slept?
Deep in the cave, there was no sense of time. Nothing for us to gauge how long we’d been held, how long until they would come for us. How long it would be until our transformations were complete. They’d started on us once before, but we’d escaped. Soon they’d finish us.
I’d tried to get out. Yeah, there was no fucking way to escape. Thick rock on three sides with the fourth deceivingly open. It was like the Atlan cells, with an impenetrable field of energy even an Atlan beast couldn’t break through. It wasn’t about strength, but science. I knew what happened when touching it; I was lucky only my fingers were broken. I could have lost a hand if I’d pressed against the invisible field too hard.
“It was our jobs to know,” Hunt replied.
I turned my head, looked at my friend, my fellow warrior, my fellow mate. “There was no way we could have known. We trusted one another too much. Without Lady Rone, we might never have discovered the deception. Maxim didn’t know. He’s the governor and still had no idea. Unless you are implying he was in on it?”
Why was I the practical one in this? We hadn’t known the depth of Krael’s treachery, not until now. No, that was wrong. We knew someone was destroying the Colony, one warrior at a time. Preying on them, kidnapping them, converting them and making them into moles, into warriors for the Hive.
“Fuck no. I trust Maxim with my life.”
“What’s done is done. Brooks is dead. And the Colony will be destroyed if we don’t stop Krael. Yes, he got away once before, but we knew who to look for. And now he’s here. With us. We have to kill him.” I didn’t keep my voice down, I wanted Perro to hear us, hoped he’d be foolish enough to turn and lower the force field trapping us. He twitched, as if listening, but resumed pacing, ignoring us completely. He was gone.
“Krael is one thing. No one is prepared for this.” Hunt waved his hand through the air indicating our current predicament, the secret base. All of it. “I don’t know if killing Krael will be enough.” This complex, the number of Hive walking around, was much more than we’d expected to find, and much more dangerous to everyone on the Colony.
“I know.”
We sat in silence and I welcome the quiet preparing myself for what was to come. I would not succumb to the Hive processing. I would fight to the death, take as many of them with me as I could. Hunt had to escape, warn the others, take care of Kristin.
“I’m going to rip them to pieces, Hunt. When it starts, get the hell out of here. Take care of Kristin. Warn the others. This has to be stopped.”
“There is no stopping us.” Krael appeared at the front of our rock cell, standing on the other side of the force field, just out of reach. We were on the floor, our backs resting against the cold, unforgiving rock. We’d stood and paced for a long time when we’d first arrived, but knew to conserve our energy for when it was time to fight back. We would have risen if the person facing us warranted respect, but Krael deserved none.
More, we hoped our appearance of cooperation would entice them to lower the force field.
Krael did no such thing, just stared down his pompous nose at us. “The Colony will be slowly infiltrated by the Hive. We will conquer this world and it will host a complete Hive battlegroup. We will be able to attack the closest member planets with ease from this location. After that, all of you veterans—” he spat out Queen Deston’s honorific for those that lived on the Colony as if it were foul, “—will be considered ruthless killers and destroyed on sight.”
He was right. If the Colony was taken over by the Hive, the general population of all Coalition planets would think all returning warriors were tainted, regardless of whether they’d been integrated and escaped or not. Any hope of recovery from Hive implants and integration would be lost. Hatred and loathing would spread for us, already the most feared members of the interplanetary community. We’d destroy ourselves, be exterminated by our own peoples, and the Hive would ensure the job was complete.
“Not going to happen,” Hunt growled, refusing to look up at the traitor.
Krael had the audacity to grin. “Yes, it will. And by you. The two of you will mindlessly work for the Hive in destroying first this planet and the community you’ve worked so hard to create.” The horror that would follow he left unsaid. We all knew what would happen if the Colony fell under the Hive control. Earth was the closest, and least protected, planet. Humanity would fall first. Kirstin’s home. Her people.
He was a worthless excuse for a Prillon. While he was as large and forbidding as Hunt and myself, he lacked honor. I had no idea when he’d switched allegiances, but he’d destroyed plenty already. At least what we knew about.
He had no Hive integration that I could see. No new eye like Hunt. No bots in muscle like I had. What had the Hive done to him? Did he have integrations in his arms, torso? Or had they modified his brain? He spoke as himself, sounded cognizant of his choices, and that made me hate him. He wasn’t being controlled or manipulated, he betrayed us all for his own selfish ends. What those were, I neither knew nor cared. His motives were irrelevant. He was the enemy. First chance I had, I was going to rip him in half.
The missing men who’d been taken recently were mindless Hive drones now. We’d seen them as we were brought here. While they looked like their former selves, they were a shell, a functioning unit controlled by the Hive. The portion of their brains that made them individuals was gone, disconnected.
But Krael? He wasn’t mindless. No, he was too cunning, too ruthless. While he worked for the Hive, I had to wonder how he was controlled by them.
He worked alone, at least as far as we could tell. It was unusual for a Prillon, most had a second, even if they had no mate, a trusted brother to keep the loneliness at bay. But Krael was a mystery, one we would solve if we could get out of the damn cell. He had no collar, no connection to anyone but the Hive.
He grinned, but the expression was cold.
“Your time is coming. Soon. But I’ll leave you here to wonder when.” He angled his head toward Captain Perro. “He’s been converted so nicely. He used to side with you, protect your back. Now he will shoot you there. At my command or at the Hive’s whim. He patted the now Hive controlled warrior on the shoulder, but Captain Perro didn’t even blink in response to the action. “With him, we put him under before we inserted the Hive processing unit in his prefrontal cortex. He can’t decide to take a piss without permission. But with you?” He shrugged. “We’ll see. The fun of what they are doing here is finding different ways to re-integrate. What was done to you before was simple experimentation in comparison.”
He studied Hunt’s eye, squinting. “They’ll finish what they started with you, Hunt. The frontal eye fields will be fully integrated. You’ll be walking eyes for the Hive.”