The Alpha Prime Commander (9 page)

“Wat, get up and allow my
Roenh the pilot seat please,”

The pilot and every man there
looked shocked, the captain even started to protest, but Cordan snarled at them
all and they backed down, like fucking pussies.  Jackson smirked in the angry
pilot’s face before taking his place, half expecting a knife to his back for
his insolence, but besides locking a granite jaw, and promising retribution
through his gold eyes, the man did as he was told.  Jackson looked at the
foreign controls for a moment without touching anything.

“You can pilot a Prime
ship, can you not?”  The words were spoken with obvious challenge, and Jackson
took a second to send a needling smile to Cordan.

“How fucking hard can it
be?” he asked, and everybody stiffened and started to look worried, except for
Cordan, who just smiled at him with a show of teeth.

Jackson laughed and took
the helm.  “I need weapons,” he said, his eyes already flipping between the
screen showing a moon getting larger and the readings.

“Switch weapons to helm
control,” Cordan said mildly enough, and Jackson smiled when the control came
on line and the tension in the room skyrocketed.

What do you intend to
do? 
Cordan’s voice was just as mild in his head.

Afraid I’ll mess up your
pretty warship.

More concerned you seem
to be heading directly for the very solid moon before us.

Jackson Smiled. 
Ever
heard of an old Earth game called ‘Playing Chicken’?

On a collision course
with a moon, he had to give it to the Prime warriors, they could keep their
shit together.  Even as they flew closer to certain death and he could feel the
tension on the bridge skyrocket, not one of them showed their tension on their stoic
face or body.  Not a single man flinched.  On the stealth ship though, someone
flinched.

One second there was
empty space between them and the moon, the next there was a Galactic Cruiser
retrofitted with two space cannons and some significant shielding.  Jackson smiled,
while behind him there was more than one surprised grunt.  He turned to pursue
from one breath to the next.  For a star craft of its size, the
War Bird
handled well.  Even as he pursued something nagged at him.

She’s not on the ship. 
Cordan’s
grim thoughts flashed through his mind, but he already broke off pursuit
realizing the same thing.

One of the Prime looked
from his console to the Commander.  “A transporter was detected from the ship
to within the moon’s surface.”

The moon? 
Jackson
cursed.
  I still get no life signs, and it shows nothing but solid rock to
the core.

Another kind of cloak?
Cordan
asked grimly, moving up beside him to study the same readouts.

If so, how the fuck do we
find her?  We can’t transport in blind.

Next to him, Cordan
snarled.

***

Lena turned at the sound
of a transporter, and found The Collector had joined her in the cavern, along
with two dozen heavily armed mercenaries, making her wonder just how many he
had at his disposal.  Many of them were carrying light orbs, which they dropped
at their feet, creating a light nimbus over the small area they commanded.  It
messed with her night vision, so it was an adjustment period before another man
caught her attention.  She felt a coldness in the pit of her stomach when she realized
he seemed to stand in the shadows even with her night vision enhanced and the
light surrounding him.  Mercenaries she could handle.  She could feel that cold
part of her ready and willing to take them apart.  Something about that man
kept her from acting.  Unlike the rest of the mercenaries, he worried her.  
The Collector looked at her, the echoing cavern, and then the stone on its
marble pedestal. 

“Bring me the stone,” he
said in an almost mild tone, considering his eyes looked like gateways to hell.

“You have two hands,”
Lena answered just as mildly, stepping back and to the side making herself a
smaller target.  “Get it yourself.”

Every mercenary
unholstered a blaster and pointed it in her direction.  The shadow man made no
moves at all, and that was more worrisome than all the rest.

The Collector smiled.  “I
must insist you do the honors.  You see, while I needed you to pinpoint the
location and follow the connections to the stone, that is not the end of your
duties.  A rare few can handle an immortal stone, as I suspect your Captain
Jackson Ambar has already learned to his detriment.” 

Lena carefully kept the
expression off her face.  She was not about to let The Collector know Jackson
was still alive, or just how she knew both her mates were on their way.   

“Only a Cascian can claim
a true blood stone,” The Collector went on, “so I will need you to take it from
the resting place and bring it to me.”

She tilted her head and
studied his black eyes.  “What then?  If you can’t touch it, what good does it
do me to claim it for you?  And, more importantly, what does it do?”

The Collector motioned
towards the pedestal, clearly getting impatient.  “Allow me to worry about how
I intend to use it.  Bring me the stone.”

“I don’t think I will,”
she said after a long thoughtful moment while she watched the impatience cross
his face.  She looked at all the weapons trained on her.  “You can hardly kill
the only person who can retrieve your stone.”

The Collector smiled, and
then raised his hand.  “That is where you are wrong, my dear.”  The blaster
took her at the chest.  She was dead before she felt the pain of it.

***

Lo Cordan dropped to his
knees as the flash of pain felt like it was caving his chest.  He felt Jackson
fall to blackness just before him, and he had just enough time to feel his
Pletar die, before he joined him.  The black of nothingness was a relief after
that.

***

Lena came back
screaming.  She crab walked back, misting in and out in her agitation, until
she was far back from the men surrounding her.  She could feel the panic
swelling as she tried to get past dying. 

She knew she was alive; she
also knew she had taken a full blast to the chest.  Her hands ran over the
hardened and blackened leather at her heart.  It would have protected her from
the heat of the blast, but a hit like that would have caved in her chest
anyway.  She knew it had, because she felt it happen.

“Why am I still alive?” 
Then she remembered the other stone.  “The immortal stone?”  She looked at The
Collector and his bevy of men surrounding him.  “But there was no
transformation.”

“Oh, no my dear, that’s
the beauty of it.  You are Cascian, you have no need for a stone.  The blood
stones were made from the blood of your people.  Immortal blood, even if you
never knew it.  Your blood was diluted enough that I needed to give you a
little boost.  The immortal stone merely returned to you the blood of your
people taken to make it, making you Cascian enough for my purposes.  Now bring
me the stone, or you will die again as many times as it takes.”  The bastard
smiled again.  “I wonder, as his Pletar, what the Alpha Prime Commander is
feeling each time you die in agony?  I understand the bond is quite a close
one.”

Just like that Lena lost
her breath again.  She immediately searched inside herself and found the link to
her men.  Felt the overwhelming confusion and pain that both of them were
feeling.  She recognized the feelings and knew she was not the only one who felt
death.  It echoed down the link.  She closed her eyes and breathed through the
rising rage that wanted to rip asunder the man who would cause her mates this
agony.  When she opened her eyes again, the rage was banked behind cold, cold
purpose.

“You want the blood stone?” 
Her words a cold wind through the cavernous space.  “Let’s get it.”

She stood up and moved to
the altar.

Something in her tone
must have alerted The Collector because he lost his smirk and narrowed his
eyes.  “No tricks, or this time your death will not be as fast or as easy as
the last one, and you will not be the only one who feels it.”

***

Jackson pushed himself
off the floor and looked to see Cordan doing the same.  His eyes held the same
building rage he could feel smoldering in his own chest.  “She’s alive,” he
growled out.

Cordan nodded his head,
his eyes burning. “She has gone cold.  The danger is not past.”

Jackson turned to look at
the Prime warriors that surrounded them.  “Do you have coordinates for that
transport from the other ship?”

“You were dead,” the
captain said, looking between the two of them.  “Both of you.”

Cordan snarled at the man,
then turned to his science officer and repeated Jackson’s question.  “Do you
have the coordinates?”

As the man stood to
attention, Jackson could practically hear the snap of his back.  “I have the
general area, but not close enough for guaranteed accuracy.”

Jackson looked at Cordan
and nodded.  They would take whatever chance they needed to.  Neither of them ever
wanted to feel along the bond again what they felt when Lena died.  “We go,” he
said grimly.

Cordan nodded.  The captain
started to argue and the rest of the men looked alarmed.  “Sir, if you teleport
in without the correct coordinates you could end up inside solid rock.  Even an
immortal would not survive such a thing, even if we had a way of getting you
back out again, which we would not when your com unit rematerializes and is destroyed
along with you.”

Cordan smiled at the man
with a show of sharp teeth.  “Then I trust you will see that anyone trying to
leave that moon after I am dead will follow me.”

The captain opened his
mouth, looking equally grim, Jackson assumed to argue again.  Cordan spoke
first.

“My Pletar is among
enemies.”  The words were simple and hard, but the captain snapped his mouth
closed and jerked to attention just as the other warrior had done.  The rest of
the crew followed suit soon after.

The captain bared his own
teeth, his back ramrod straight.  “If you do not survive, my Commander, you
have my vow we will see that your enemies follow to their death.”

Cordan nodded, and then
as one, he and Jackson headed for the transporter room.  Word must have gone
ahead, because every hall was lined with warriors standing at attention.  It
was a fitting salute, Jackson thought, with an inner grimace, when men were
going off to probably die horribly for love.  Of course, when he thought it
straight out like that it sounded fucking ridiculous.  He blew out a breath
when they reached the transporter room. 

The plain fact was that Lena
had already died once; he had no idea how she was back, but he would do just
about anything to not feel that loss ever again.  And she was stone cold and in
the presence of enemies.  They would get to her or die trying.

Cordan turned to face
him, and something of Jackson’s thoughts must have come down the link because
he spoke.  “We will not die today,” he said stepping up on the transporter pad
behind Jackson.  “Visions I have seen have not yet come to pass.”

Jackson grunted.  “That
would be more reassuring if I believed in that shit,” he muttered.  Cordan
motioned the go ahead to his warriors and they were gone.

***

Lena stepped up to the
altar aware that every gun was pointed at her back as she did so.  She took a
deep breath and whispered quietly inside her own head. 
Whoever spoke to me
before, if you have the ability to do more than talk, now would be a good time.
 
She grabbed the stone.

Lena opened the eyes she
had closed anticipating another explosion of pain that didn’t come.  She looked
down at the benign softly glowing stone cradled in her hand, and felt a subtle
warmth seeping into her skin, and that was it.  After taking the first stone like
a blast to the heart, and then dying from a literal blast to the heart, it was
anticlimactic.  She turned to find the mercenaries had moved closer while she
stood there.  The Collector was almost within touching distance.  They had all
left their lights behind so they stood in darker shadows.  The only man still
standing further back was the shadow man, who was ironically in the brightest
part of the cave while everyone else had approached the darkness. 

Lena held up the stone so
The Collector could see it.  Then she tossed it as far into the darkness as she
could and threw herself behind the altar in the other direction while they
watched the stone’s ark.  The Collector yelled and everyone opened fire on the
place where she had been.  Without the glow of the stone to light the area, the
altar and Lena beyond it disappeared into blackness.  Their blasters went wild,
chipping away at old stone and nothing else.  Lena waited for her night vision
to adjust to the total blackness once again.  She felt a brush of wind through
her hair and that laughing voice returned. 

You do not truly need the
help, but we will give it anyway. 
Then all the lights went
out.  Hearing the confusion and wild clicking of guns that no longer fired,
Lena smiled and stepped out of her hiding place.  No one else had her night
vision, so no one knew when she was even among them until it was too late.

She killed the first
mercenary with his own blade.  Took a second weapon, his long sword, out of
still warm dead hands and kept going.  She was slashing another opponent behind
the knees when out of the corner of her eye she caught the distant glow of the
stone she had thrown and watched The Collector stumbling towards it in the
blackness.

Another light flickered
somewhere beyond them.  She recognized the hum of a teleport and cursed.  How
many mercenaries was she going to have to kill?  She headed for The Collector,
killing blind mercenaries as she went. 

Lena heard something come
out of the darkness she was unprepared for, but had her smiling all the same. 
The roar of an angry Prime.  She turned and saw both of her men come out fighting
from an area in the far distant cave.  She knew Cordan had his own brand of
night vision, but Jackson was human and as blind as the mercenaries.  He pulled
out his two swords and started hacking away at enemies while Lo ripped and
rendered.  Lena blinked.  He was blind fighting; she could tell by the way he
canted his head. 

Lena laughed, and headed
for The Collector.  Shadow man stepped into her path before she could get there. 
Lena planted her feet and lifted her stolen steel, her eyes narrowed on the
man.