The Alien's Equal (Drixonian Warrior #7) - Ella Maven Page 0,17

get to it.”

I left her standing in the middle of the floor to process my words. When she joined me a moment later, her posture stiff and her lips set in a thin line, I smiled to myself. I was going to enjoy every minute of this.

Justine

Nero’s words had left me reeling. At first, I’d been stunned, but that emotion had quickly shifted to indignation. How dare he? I wished I had time to go sit in my room by myself and stew. I needed a plan to thwart his advances, and I couldn’t work on that while also listening to him teach me how we planned to infiltrate the Uldani fortress.

We had five rotations. I had to get my shit together and focus. Nero on the other hand, seemed totally fine, pleased even, sitting beside me with a secret smile I wanted to kiss off his face. No, slap! I wanted to slap it off his face. Yeah, that was it.

Shit, he was talking. I switched mental gears and clued in. Now wasn’t the time. I could think about it when I lay in my furs at night. Alone. Which was how I liked it.

The dozen screens in front of us all showed different areas of the Night Kings boundaries. The dashboard, or mainframe, looked similar to something I’d see in the cockpit of a 747. There was no keyboard, only a series of small touchpads, switches, and joysticks. The Drixonians had a written language, but it looked like a bunch of slashes, X’s, and O’s to me, like some foreign binary code. The Uldani language was a whole other beast with lots of curls that reminded me of filigree.

Nero explained that he was fluent in most written languages in the Rinian galaxy. Because of course since he was basically a genius. While I could understand the Uldani with my updated translator implant, that only worked for oral languages.

“It doesn’t matter you haven’t learned to read their language, or ours,” he explained. “The symbols are going to be the same. Most of what the Uldani use is universal.”

I nodded since that made sense, just like the power signal—a circle with a line through the bottom—was recognizable all over Earth.

“Thanks to the controller Gar stole off the cruiser, I was able to tap into the system before the Uldani realized it and threw up a firewall.” He tapped on a track pad until what looked like a drone aerial shot appeared on the screen in front of us. I leaned closer to see that Alazar looked every much like a massive walled city. There were neighborhoods of varying sized homes, a section of several-story buildings that seemed like a business district or high-rise apartments, as well as one large low-level structure that appeared to be a hub. But what was most interesting were the many floating pods that hung in the air above the city like small blimps.

“That’s where the royals live,” Nero said, pointing to the blimp homes.

“They live in those things?”

“Their elite live in these buildings,” he pointed to the skyscraper-type apartments. “And their middle-class lives on the city grounds.” He gestured to several of the neighborhoods. “The lowest class is…” he pointed to a large set of stairs, as wide as a house, which descended below the surface. “Underground.” he finished. “Most of them are miners.”

I wrinkled my nose. “They live down there?”

“Conditions are not good. Air quality is terrible.”

“And the rich bastards live above it all.”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t think I could hate the Uldani more.”

Nero tapped the trackpad, and the aerial shot changed to a black and white set of blueprints. “The Kaluma will get us inside the walls. We then need to access the mainframe which is in an underground network of tunnels. Sax and Val were kept down there.” The image shifted to a side view of a leveled underground base which made me think of a complicated bunny burrow. He pointed to the lowest level. “This is it. Their signal tower emerges from here. That’s where we have to go.”

“Underground?” I shuddered. “That leaves us vulnerable with no real escape.”

He nodded, somberly. “I know.”

That … sounded not good. “Well shit.”

He snorted. “Your curse is right. So now you know what we’re working with. Today, I’m going to teach you the basic skills you’ll need. Tomorrow, I’ll go over the specific plan. The next three rotations, we practice.”

I had … half a day to learn the basics. I had a feeling we weren’t getting