Chapter Five
Kira, Sector 437, Battlegroup Karter, Shuttle Bay 9
“Damn it!”Commander Chloe Phan pulled her helmet off and threw it against the side of the shuttle in a fit of anger. “This isn’t working. That’s the third time we’ve gone out there and we’re no closer to taking that barrier down.”
Chloe was a fellow Earth girl, fellow I.C. asset, and my exact opposite. She was beautiful and exotic, with straight ebony hair and dark green eyes. I was pale and colorless next to her with my blonde hair and milk-white skin. But she was human, smart as hell, and right now, she was giving voice to the rage I, too, felt. We’d been out on the edge of Sector 437 three times now, looking for the central command nodes of the newest weapon the Hive were using to control space, an invisible network of mines so powerful they could destroy an entire battlegroup in minutes.
And it had done just that less than two weeks ago.
Since these nodes were undetectable by the Coalition’s current ship sensors, the Coalition had lost an entire battlegroup in a single day in Sector 19. Gone. Completely obliterated.
Because of this, Commander Grigg Zakar had shown up at I.C. Core Command—uninvited, which was borderline suicidal even for an angry Prillon—and demanded an I.C. asset with the brain implants be deployed to his battleship at once to keep the same thing from happening under his command.
The woman who’d gone with him, Erica James, was one of my best friends, a make-love-not-war hippie from Oregon. She was half black and half white…her mother was a hippie and her dad a rocket scientist. The woman was funny as hell, totally different and the most unexpected person I’d ever met on the front lines of our fight with the Hive.
No doubt, she was already rocking their world out there in Sector 17 with all those big, burly alpha-male aliens having to wait for her to hear things through the implant in the base of her skull. I’d spent more than a few hours with a grin on my face wondering how things were going and how the warriors out there were adapting to her obsession with 1970s-era Earth disco music. Thinking of a group of Atlan Warlords grooving to the Village People’s song Macho Man almost made me burst out laughing.
Insane! But dancing or not dancing, Battlegroup Zakar was still fighting and still whole, so I figured she was doing her job. I hadn’t heard of a group of warlords and warriors going AWOL either.
Erica was doing her job, but Chloe and I were struggling. That brought my wandering attention back to the here and now. Sector 437, and the Battlegroup Karter. Especially since Chloe practically had smoke coming out of her ears. This battlegroup had its own problems. They weren’t trapped, but they couldn’t move freely either. I could transport in and out, go back to my day job at the Coalition Academy. Others could transport, too, and they could move supplies, but until we took down that damned barrier, the entire battlegroup wasn’t moving anywhere. It was like being caught on a highway with a fifty-car pileup because of an invisible jackknifed eighteen-wheeler. No one was moving forward and because of the cars continuing to bunch up at the back, we were stuck.
In short, the Hive was winning, and none of us were happy about it.
“Then we’ll go out again and again until we find what we’re looking for, Commander.” The Prillon who spoke to Chloe was a gorgeous specimen, an excellent pilot, and Chloe’s mate. And while on the job, he called her by her title. I loved the way he respected her rank, her knowledge, even while being the blatant dominant. I didn’t know much about her other mate, but knew he must have some serious balls because Chloe needed a strong-willed partner—partners—and a very gentle touch. Per the Prillon custom that they followed—I couldn’t miss the matching collars about their necks—she had two mates, and she’d told me one was human, the other obviously very Prillon. How the hell that had happened, I had no idea. Two was one too many for me. One big Atlan was more than enough to satisfy my every need. I didn’t know how I could survive two. I’d die from orgasm overdose. Inwardly, I shrugged, thinking it wasn’t that bad of a way to go.
I thought of big, gorgeous, strong, sexy Angh. It still broke my heart, even with the depressing reminder of just how badly the war was going—and how much I was still needed—that I couldn’t keep him. Leaving him asleep in his bed had been one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do.
“No, Dorian, we won’t,” Chloe argued back. “I can’t do this alone. And she—” I was the she that Chloe pointed to with disgust— “can’t hear them.” The look she gave me was brutally honest and unapologetic. “Sorry, Kira, but your presence didn’t help like we’d hoped.”
“I can hear the Drones, but nothing else. I’m sorry.” I sighed, knowing I hadn’t been the least bit helpful on this mission. I’d been a failure, a dud and a complete waste of time. We’d discovered that when two of us with the implants were together, the sound was amplified. I was to be the signal boost for Chloe, but it hadn’t worked. My implant hadn’t done shit. I’d done shit for the mission.
“I know. I guess we should be counting our blessings that you heard the Hive trio that came for us on the surface of that asteroid. That saved our ass. I was too distracted looking for the mines.”
I had saved us, but it was more luck than skill. We’d been ambushed, the Hive protecting their asset from the Coalition threat. Which meant we were getting close. But close didn’t count for shit when an entire Battlegroup could go down in a matter of hours. I’d heard them coming and taken a hit on my arm blocking the Hive Scout who’d tried to take me. But that was the last thing he’d ever done. I’d ended him with a blast from my ion rifle while Chloe and the Vice Admiral took care of his two friends.
And I’d been trying, trying to hear the larger Hive network chatter in my mind, as disturbing as that was. Every once in a while, I’d get a buzz in my head, but it always faded before I could grab onto it and go deeper, before I could make it easier for Chloe to hear. Like a breeze whispering to my mind and moving on.
“I’m trying. And they’re right there. I can feel them, their energy, but it stays just out of reach.” I didn’t take her comments personally. It wasn’t as if I had any control over the stupid implant. Or the Hive, for that matter. I was a tool, a piece of equipment, not a person when it came to this kind of mission.
“No one said you weren’t, Captain.” That was my commanding officer speaking, a Vice Admiral from Everis, one of the only women I’d ever met from that planet. She was also the only female Everian Hunter on the Coalition Fleet’s asset list. Her name was Niobe, and she was the highest-ranking officer on Zioria, and in charge of the Coalition Academy, all the officers and cadets, and another of the I.C.’s hidden assets on the planet. We’d been on dozens of missions together, and although I didn’t consider her a friend, I did respect her, and her judgment. “And you did save us today. Good job. We’re getting close.”
“We’ve been close for months.” Chloe shrugged out of her space suit, her mate stepping forward to assist her, but she shrugged him off. “Thanks, Dorian. I got it. I just need a minute.”
He nodded, stepped back. “Anything you need, mate. Ask and it is yours.”
She smiled up at him and pressed her hand to his cheek, a wealth of intimate communication passing between the two that I envied. And missed. I had no doubt if he had the implant, the two of them could get synced and hear everything from the Hive. But that wasn’t how it worked. He was a pilot, an exceptional one, and listening to Hive chatter wasn’t his job.
Angh had looked at me like that. Looked at me as if he couldn’t believe I was there, that he’d gotten me beneath him, that I was the very center of his world. No, of his whole universe. At least, I’d thought so in the moment.
But that could have been orgasm induced hallucinations.
“I will contact Doctor Helion and ask for another member of the team to assist on the next mission,” Vice Admiral Niobe said. She was out of her gear and stacking it neatly for the clean-up crew waiting off to the side. They would search and scan the shuttle for Hive tech and make sure it was ready to go out again. A critical job since we would go out again. And again.
Unless we found a way to destroy this Hive mine network, we’d never regain the ground lost in this sector. The two mining planets, Latiri 4 and Latiri 7, were still active battlegrounds. The Coalition Fleet had been forced to retreat when the explosive weapons were first deployed more than two years ago. We’d gone from a firm foothold in this sector to nearly losing it in a matter of hours.
But Commander Phan had saved the entire battlegroup. Hell, the entire war, as far as I was concerned. And although we both had the experimental Hive tech implants in our heads, for some reason, she could hear the mines talking to one another, and I could not. I could hear the Hive Soldiers. The Scouts. But not their ships or their mines.
Which made me feel pretty fucking useless right now.