Captive - Cheryl Brooks Page 0,27

to be well on the way to somewhere—anywhere—else. His children might be conceived on Haedus Nine, but he was damned if he would let them be born there.

Of course, all of this was assuming either of them lived long enough to get the chance to mate. The trouble with paying hush money was that you had to keep paying it. Moe could only assume Klara had used most of the credits he’d had to get those Nedwuts to forget they’d ever seen her. She might have even needed to pay them an additional fee to regain custody of him.

Mother of the gods, that sounds weird. Almost as if he were a young child whose parents were in the process of splitting up. Although to be honest, this was probably a worse scenario than that. Instead of being shared between estranged parents, he had actually joined a gang of outlaws.

Moe had never had to stoop to thievery to survive, but there was a first time for everything. His only other alternative was to do the whole gladiator bit and hope he didn’t wind up dead.

There was a problem with that option, though. Moe had never killed anyone, and he hated the idea of voluntarily entering a competition where he would be required to kill his opponent. It would be different if he were to have no choice in the matter. It was the voluntary part he couldn’t stomach.

“I’m thinking too much,” he muttered to himself, and made a mental note never to volunteer to stand guard alone again. Even hanging out with the Racks was better than dwelling on his own disturbing thoughts. The funny thing was he’d never actually spoken with a Rackensprie before. He wasn’t even sure if they could talk well enough for him to understand them. The best he could tell, all they ever did was chatter amongst themselves. He would have to ask Klara about that.

Should’ve done that while she was here.

Purely to divert his mind, he got up and peered through a chink in the shutters. The street outside was empty, save for the occasional bits of debris stirred up by the fierce winds. He was about to sit back down when movement across the way caught his eye. It could have been one of those dwithan things, except that if Nexbit was too big to be convincing as a dwithan, this was no dwithan. What he’d seen was roughly the size of a Nedwut.

Scanning the street in all directions revealed nothing that shouldn’t have been there. But if he’d been a Nedwut hunting Klara and her gang, surrounding the building and surprising them at night would be his tactic of choice, and tonight’s howling wind would provide excellent cover.

Nevertheless, he waited a few moments until he glimpsed the wave of a furry paw, the gleam of moonlight on the barrel of a pulse rifle. Attack was imminent.

Time to wake the troops.

Moe had almost reached the room where Nexbit lay sleeping when a blast nearly knocked him off his feet.

With no further need for silence, he yelled “Nedwuts!” at the top of his lungs.

Klara came flying out of the room across the hall, fully clothed and armed to the teeth, proving she probably hadn’t taken his advice and tried to sleep. The Racks came scurrying from their room like a pack of rats fleeing from a fire—an apt simile because their room really was on fire. Nexbit and Temfilk came running from their rooms only to collide with each other in the hall.

Moe closed his eyes, mapping out the floor plan in his head. Fire to the left meant Nedwuts to the right, which was the direction he’d been looking when he’d seen them.

“We need to go out that way,” he said, pointing toward the fire.

“Are you out of your Zetithian mind?” Temfilk screamed. “We’ll be burned to a crisp!”

“Trust me,” Moe said grimly. “This is our only chance. As dry as this place is, we only have a few seconds.”

“He’s right,” Klara shouted. “They’ll be covering the exits. Blast a hole in the wall!” She pointed inside the room next to the fire. “Aim for that corner with narrow pulse beams. On my mark. Ready, aim, fire!”

Moe had to hand it to her, she had trained her henchmen well. Without question or hesitation, they followed her commands to the letter. The wall splintered but didn’t give, which surprised the hell out of Moe. As flimsy as most of the structures in the Barrens were,