Chapter 1
Once again, he dreamed he was drowning in blood.
He woke with a sated smile… Only to discover the liquid shushing over his gills was nothing more than the warm, salty geyser oozing through his prison.
Because of course, the war was over.
With a disappointed sigh, he opened his eyes in the darkness—though no darkness was deep enough to truly blind him—and focused on the reinforced cage that contained him. How long would he be held by these plasteel bars?
Or by peace.
A slow flutter of his gills washed the remembered taste of soil-sucker blood between his teeth. No bars could hold back that memory.
So. Maybe bars were for the best, lest his hungry dreams become a nightmare for his long-suffering people. He didn’t want to hurt them.
Even if he was nothing more than what they’d made him.
For a while longer, he lay at the bottom of his cage, unmoving, his eyes opened to the void, and breathed. They’d given him this roomy chamber next to the deep-sea vent because they believed the minerals in the softly bubbling flow would soothe him.
And it did. But what if the peace and serenity threatened to weaken his iron hold on the beast within? Because those plasteel bars were not the confinement his captor cousins seemed to believe they were. To truly keep them safe, he should open a vein on the edge of his tooth and let the ugly tide of what he’d done and what he was shine in the darkness.
His battle hunger had been briefly sated when the soil-suckers attacked his commander’s ship on a recent away mission.
Despite the calming minerals, his skin stung at the memory of his commander’s reprimand after Sting had returned to Tritona with the Axis cruiser that he’d appropriated from the Cretarni soldiers.
“The war is over,” Coriolis had told him. “Now, we take prisoners where we can, we interview them as appropriate, remand them to the justice of the Tritonesse, and exchange them as political prisoners back to their people to our advantage. Not—”
“Kill,” Sting finished for him in the hopes of ending the scold.
“Not kill,” Coriolis corrected.
Sting ducked his head. “I was saying that.”
His commander sighed with a stream of long-suffering bubbles, and somehow the popping fizz of air bit like the vicious suckers of a hectopi. Sting had only wanted to remind the soil-suckers that such suffering would pour over them like a thousand-year flood, to assure them that their cowardly flight from Tritona had indeed been their only chance for survival.
As for Tritona’s survival postwar…
“At least I got you a spaceship,” he reminded his commander a little sullenly.
Coriolis sighed again. “I need you more than I need another ship.”
Sting stared at him, unblinking. “That’s not true.”
The briefest flicker of silver across the Tritonyri’s eyes betrayed the lie. “We do need ships,” he acknowledged. “But the only reason for the ships, the fighting, the dying, all of it—the only reason is to save Tritona for all of us.”
“For Tritonyri and Tritonesse,” Sting agreed.
“And for the one-time Earthers who immigrated here,” Coriolis added resolutely. “For anyone else who believes our home is worth saving.”
Sting let out a slow breath of his own, with no bubbles. He was too well adapted to their watery home, not just for breathing underwater, but for the stealth and savagery that had been necessary during war.
Salvation—the world or his own—had not been part of his heritage. “There will be more?”
Coriolis furrowed his brow. “More ships? Battles? We sent the Cretarni home in defeat once again. I hope—”
“More females.”
Coriolis stilled, so still that Sting was reminded the commander of the western fleet had not been chosen for his diplomacy alone, not at the start of the war. “Maybe someday. After our meeting with the intergalactic council representative. Once Tritona is granted open-world status for aid and trade—”
Sting grunted. The hard, sub-acoustic pang he sent would’ve staggered a lesser Tritonyri.
Coriolis just gave him a reproving look. “You asked.”
“Not aid and trade,” he rumbled. “Mate.”
“The Tritonesse—”
“Would leave me on the highest mountain top to wither, dry, and blow away now that they are done with me,” Sting noted without any particular ire.
His commander’s armored scales pebbled protectively. “You are in my charge.” The serration of his voice rivaled the obsidian-edged blades they’d used to be undetectable to the Cretarni’s sensors. “We made you to fight. And you did. Your reward for your service will not be an empty mountain top.”
“A mate?” Sting prodded.
His commander’s lips quirked, whether in amusement or frustration, Sting didn’t have the