Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,57

just shoot me out of my hiding spot. My ship is fast, powerful, and armed to the teeth, but stealth is my greatest weapon here. As soon as I reveal myself to an entire battalion of ships, I will be at their mercy.

“I know this woman,” a voice says. “She stole from me.”

No. Gethros Mi Kiorus is here?

“Explain,” someone says.

He gives a very brief and unfavorable account of our time on Summer’s Breeze, ending with some serious distaste for me. He doesn’t seem to know my real name, though, as he just calls me ‘that pirate.’ He also has to glaze over what exactly we stole, since he wasn’t supposed to have either of those things himself.

“Will she really do it?” someone asks. “Blow up the ship?”

“I think she will,” Gethros says.

“We take out the engines then,” someone says. “Surgical strike.”

“The anti-matter core is in front of the sleepers,” someone says. “She’ll still have the kill switch.”

“Why would she detonate if we prevent the attack?”

“She saw Summer’s Breeze,” Gethros says. “She confided in my wife. She didn’t seem particularly happy with how humans were treated on our habitat.”

“Why did you let her leave?”

“She stole my most prized possessions!” Gethros snarls. “You think I let her leave intentionally? And that pirate! She was working with the fucking swarm!”

“That pirate here,” I say, speaking into my comms mic. “Krakon of the swarm. I’m alone, but I have a proposal for you.”

39

Catherine

Sanchez looks at me with sweat dripping down her temples. “I can’t believe we are fucking doing this.”

I sigh.

The comms mic is on my lap. I’m shivering. How can Sanchez be sweating? No one has replied to us yet, and no one has kicked the door down either.

It took me a week to feel things out and get Sanchez on my side, and I didn’t know if she’d go with my plan or just turn me into Yakuri, but I was out of time. If I was wrong, I’d die anyway, and it wasn’t like I could get into this room without high-level access.

“I still think we should have just tried to kill Yakuri,” Sanchez says.

We seriously considered it. The problem is that we didn’t know how many others in the chain of command agreed with him. We’d have needed to kill at least six people to be sure, and that simply wasn’t possible. Sanchez had a few other people she trusted, but not enough to assassinate colleagues. Just enough to help us get into this room and do what we needed to do. And hopefully to keep us in here long enough to give the Cygnians time to stop the ship.

“This isn’t just about stopping Yakuri,” I say. “The dream he gave the sleepers was horrendous. So much worse than the reality...but still, the reality isn’t great. If we can stop Yakuri like this, I then have leverage to get us a good deal with the Cygnians.”

Sanchez looks at me not like I’m insane, but as if she can’t understand how some no-name girl from the twenty-first century could possibly be thinking like this.

“A lot has happened to me since I first woke up,” I say, grinning. “Is it bad that no one has responded to us yet?”

Sanchez frowns. “They jammed our comms. Just now.”

“Did our message get out at least?”

She nods. “Yes, it did.”

“How can I bargain with them if we have no comms?”

“Yakuri would have to give them back to you. If he feels like his back is against the wall enough, he might.”

We over-rode all the safety measures on the core before we sent out the message. There’s a small device connected to the core via a bunch of wires--Sanchez did all that--and with one button press we can blow the core.

I eye the door. We welded it shut, but that’s mostly just to give us time to press the button and blow the core when we see them cutting the door back open. They might be able to open the door in a minute or less, which gives me one minute to decide if I’m really going to press the button or not. I know I will press it. There’s a lot of innocent people on Cygnus, and I’m not going to be part of their genocide.

I have Sanchez switch the comms to internal, to give me a line to Yakuri.

“It might be blocked,” Sanchez says, “but it’s probably not. He likely wants to hear what we say.”

I nod, holding the mic to my mouth. “If you