97 A Roar

Chapter Twenty-Four

A Roar

"You couldn't bother showing up earlier?" Junior growled.

"You're lucky I came at all," Jackal said, swiveling this way and that to get a better look at the carnage I'd wrought, swinging me along by the neck. "One little pest did all this?"

Junior squared his shoulders. "She snuck in here with a rifle and disregarded all rules of engagement and ignored attempts at negotiation. It would have been dealt with quickly if that idiot hadn't kept getting in my way."

I was going to scream about how rich that was coming from literal criminals, but Jackal cut me off by squeezing his arm around my throat. All that came out was a strangled gag.

"I suppose we can't expect more from such a primitive race," Jackal pointed out.

Their audacity and hypocrisy were a very small issue undercut by the growing problem of my capture. I had to get out of his hold, but I wasn't going to break out of it using any traditional means, so all I had left was my usual methods.

Desperate cruelty.

While they were casually shitting on my dirty tactics while completely ignoring their efficacy, I started wiggling a little more. I needed to disguise my movements, so pretending to try to squirm free was the only thing I could do. Jackal grunted in irritation and tightened his grip around my neck, cutting off the flow of blood to my brain and setting a rather short time limit.

Thankfully, I didn't need time nor extended brainpower. I just slipped my carving knife out of its scabbard and jabbed it into Jackal's arm. Though I'd expected some sort of backlash, I hadn't expected him to fling me away. The undignified howl of pain he made was satisfying, at least.

I hit the ground and sucked in a huge breath before devolving into a fit of coughs. I stood up and immediately turned on my cloak so I could retreat and regroup, but a hard blow to my back took me down and out before I could even complete the action. A large stone rolled past my line of sight and I was so angry I could start spitting blood.

They'd thrown a god damn fucking rock at me. Suddenly they weren't above casting aside their precious code and using street fighting rules? I shouldn't have been surprised.

Before I could recover, I was heaved up and turned over onto my back. I saw the spear before anything else. Then came the sound of splitting flesh and cracking stones. Jackal was on the other end of the spear, his intimidating mask staring down at me with an uncanny amount of apathy contrasting with the sadistic cackling come from him.

And then the pain hit.

Despite myself, I screamed. My legs kicked and bucked with no other outlet for this agony. All that did was make the pain worse. Gasping, I curled toward my left shoulder and grabbed the spear there, skewering me to the ground. My nerves were on fire. Eventually, I was able to force myself to be still so I didn't make the wound more awful.

"Stay there," Jackal sneered, leaving me and returning to Junior.

He had stabbed me cleanly through the shoulder in the meaty part below my clavicle, almost exactly where the xenomorph drone had bitten me all those years ago. The spear had gone all the way through and into the rocky ground beneath me, impaling me in place. I wasn't naive enough to think it was going to be okay. The bundles of nerves in that space were crying out and I could barely move my fingers.

Maybe my internal organs would be okay, but I wasn't sure how much use I was going to get out of that left arm until it was able to be treated.

If it was ever able to be treated.

Even if I wanted to, I doubted I'd be able to move the spear. I knew better than to try. It was the only thing keeping me from bleeding at the moment. The spear was so close to my head that I couldn't move it to look left at all. Just barely, I was able to crane my neck to see what the two assholes were doing, but they were just chatting.

Whatever they were saying, I couldn't hear it over the sound of my own heartbeat and pitiful whimpering. Each breath I took still hurt from when Jackal had thrown me against the wall, and now my shoulder screamed in pain every time my chest rose and ever so slightly jostled the spear. It didn't matter what they were saying, anyway. They were likely just plotting out what to do to me, which horrific way they were going to torture and kill me.

I'd rather not listen to that, but they seemed to catch my glancing at them and they started speaking louder.

"We'll take her to them. Let the arbiter watch his prized human fall apart in front of him," Jackal said, his head turned ever so slightly toward me to gauge my reaction. I refused to dignify it and merely flattened back out.

Blocked their words from my mind.

Clearly, they wanted to keep me alive for a little longer. I would have been dead already if they weren't planning to torture me. I would have been impaled in a lethal position, rather than a way that just crippled me. They knew where to hit. How hard to hit.

They were going to make it last, whatever they were going to do to me.

The mask on my face was stifling and muggy. I wondered how long it would take for me to asphyxiate in this atmosphere. How painful it would be compared to whatever they were cooking up. At least I could go out on my own terms and not subject myself to their whims. Save Wolf the pain of watching it.

At least I'd taken half a dozen of them with me. I hoped he could be proud of me for that. For trying. For doing as well as I did. I hoped it could make up for the fact that it was all my fault in the first place.

That maybe he wouldn't regret the time he'd wasted on me.

Though I had my handgun hidden in my braces still, I couldn't reach it. Trying to contort my body in order to grab was awful, so I gave up.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and steeled my resolve. I still had to work up the courage, fill my right arm with the strength required to do what I needed to. I lifted my hand to my face and hesitated for a second. Just long enough to remind me of all the awful things they could and probably would do to me.

This was better. Creature would fix the ship and get another signal out there. Wolf would get help eventually, and he'd be able to move past this all and live his best life.

Yes, I was tough. I had been through a lot and come out on the other side. Still, I didn't believe for one second I was going to be able to handle literal torture.

Closing my eyes, I took one last deep breath and wished that, instead of stale air from a purifier, I was breathing in the cool mountain air back in Colorado. As I pulled my mask off, I tried to remember what the pine trees smelled like. I pretended it was smoke from a campfire choking my lungs as I sat and roasted marshmallows; when things were simple and safe.

A bellowing roar shattered the illusion and snapped me back to reality. I let out a gasp of surprise and the burning in my chest became unbearable. My nose stung, my mouth was raw, and it felt like I'd licked a hot stove.

That roar hadn't been either Jackal or Junior.

That roar was familiar.

I risked damaging my arm further to dig my respirator out of its place and all but shoved it in my face, sucking in breath after breath to try to wash away the acrid taste of the toxic air. I couldn't see anything, but all around me there was fighting and snarling; shots from a plasma caster flashed in and out of focus as sweet oxygen returned to my bloodstream.

Just as soon as it began, it was over. Silence fell over the canyon save for the sound of heavy footsteps and the crunch of stone beneath. I couldn't move, the spear keeping my torso completely locked down.

It didn't matter. Soon, a wholly familiar face loomed above me and the relief I felt at seeing it was so visceral I thought I would burst into tears of joy.

Brutus ruined it by speaking.

"You are a mess."

The spear was foisted up and away and I was finally able to soothe myself, gasping and cradling my arm. It immediately started bleeding, soaking the whole left side of my body and making me woozy.

Scoffing, Brutus crouched down and peeled me out of my fetal position, assessed my wound, then pulled my med pack off of its clasps. While he brusquely gathered what he needed, I searched for the two enemies that had been there a few minutes ago, but they were indistinguishable from the rest of the bodies littering the ground. Except, perhaps, Junior. He was the biggest, so I did spot him somewhere in the center.

He'd taken them both out. Summarily. Robbing me of any closure with Jackal.

"He is dead. One ran off, but I doubt he will be back. I severely injured him," Brutus said. I doubted he said it to comfort me, but it did anyway. In more than one way.

One, we were safe.

Two, Jackal was out there and I might yet get my revenge. It didn't surprise me that he would run off at the first sign of defeat.

There wasn't time to think about it. Brutus shoved something hot against my impalement wound, taking me by surprise. I yelped and instinctively moved away from him, but he held me tight and just growled at me. "Hold still and stop panicking. You are going to live . . . How does he put up with such a squishy and sniveling creature . . . ?"

I bit back my retort. Mostly because I wasn't sure, either.

Though, he was going a bit far by calling me "sniveling". This fucking hurt. We had a lot of nerves and probably felt pain more intensely than they did, just going by the different reactions I'd seen them have when taking damage. It varied from complete lack of care to maybe anger at being inconvenienced. What would he know?

"How did you know to come?" I asked him when I felt like I had enough control of myself to use my voice properly. My voice was still hoarse, but that actually made my pronunciation a little better, believe it or not.

Brutus recoiled as if I'd slapped him. "You speak, now?"

Hadn't he just been talking to me? The entire time he'd been saying those things even though he didn't think I understood him. What an asshole.

I frowned and asked him again, and this time he answered. "Why are you asking? Did you two not send me a distress signal? It automatically has your location encoded. Of course I would know to come."

Realization hit me. I'd told Creature and Critter to send two signals: one that just broadcast to anyone within range and a direct one to the last hailed frequency. I hadn't thought in a thousand years that it would have been sent to Brutus. I thought it would have been sent to the Clan at the very least.

He and Wolf really were good friends. Cute.

"Do the rest yourself," he said, pushing the medkit toward me and spilling some of the tools to the ground.

I glared at him, but wrapped the wound and rifled through the rest of the kit for some fucking painkillers. I needed to function and the pain was not going to allow that.

"Where is Sha'ktil-ar?" he asked me. "I imagine he would not leave you alone with those two on purpose. He did quite the number . . . perhaps he went ahead to finish the rest and they ambushed you."

"No," I said after injecting myself with a small amount of the numbing agent. "I did this. He was captured and I came to free him."

Brutus whirled to face me, his dreads arching through the air. "Do not lie to me."

His reaction was expected but it still stung. I picked up my mask off the ground and offered it to him. "You can check yourself. Everything should be there. I need to rest a moment and cannot entertain you right now."

While I found somewhere comfortable to sit and parse through the last hour while nursing the rest of my wounds, Brutus watched me. Then, reluctantly, he synced my mask with his sat com and caught himself up on current events.

I couldn't wait to see his dumbfounded reaction.