Page 3 of Command

Threxin secured his helmet. Renza exited the cockpitalready prepared. They exchanged raised chins over the heads of the others. Finally Threxin entered the tube and, on the other side, pushed through the barrier of the opening sealed toClossal’shull gash.

As expected, the humans had blasted oxygen from the part of the ship Threxin had been targeting. It looked like a storage area, strewn with containers full of shiny packs. Threxin ripped one of them open with gloved fingers while two of his men put a temporary seal back on the hull and two others worked at the door on the other side. Green gel spilled up from the packet, floating in beads around his head. Threxin appreciated the magnetic force holding his boots to the floor in the absence of gravity.

He hoisted his weapon from the harness on his shoulder and approached the door when it looked like the work was nearly finished. His brother stood beside him, followed by twenty other males and three females.

“Kill them all?” Renza checked.

“May as well.”

The door opened on laser fire, and they killed them all.

Threxin was wiping human blood spatter from his visor when red alarms shrieked overhead and oxygen was once again vented with a deafening gush. He ducked out of the way of bodies and equipment that careened toward him.

“Shoq,” he muttered, nodding at his men to take the next door. This was not convenient.

This time Threxin did not waste any time while the others were dispatching another group of humans. He scanned the space for any semblance of a gene reader. Spotting it, he cleared the bodies in its path and unsealed his suit. Shrugging his arm free to expose his hand, Threxin struck his palm to the indentation in the wall. For several ticks he waited, hoping the thing was indeed what he thought it must be.

It was. He smiled at the sensation of faint pricks applied to his palm.

A high-pitched sound chimed overhead and a soothing voice surrounded him with a Human phrase, playing over and over. It took Threxin some time to wrestle his mind into processing the language—Universal—so the repetition was appreciated.

“New Commander authenticated.”

The human female who had burst into the command center in a panic continued to interrupt matters.

“Quiet her,” Threxin told Renza, who did the job by slamming his knuckles into the side of the female’s tiny head. He pushed her body away as she went limp and crumpled to the floor.

Threxin turned his attention back to the hybrid before him. His kin.

“I note the resemblance,” he mused in Universal. Barely, but it was there. The faint glow behind this male’s eyes, thisOrion Halen, matched his own, and the male’s movements betrayed a certain jerky kinship. He was bigger and wider than the other humans too. Not as big as anyone in Threxin’s cohort, of course, even the females. But bigger.

“What do you want?” his human-kin asked.

It took a few ticks for Threxin to catch up with the pace and manner of the human speech and translate the question in his head.

“My ship, of course.”

“Don’t need my permission for that,” Orion Halen leveled him with a dull glare.

Threxin scanned the commander’s seat in which he had settled while he processed the male’s words. He ran the sharp tips of his fingers down the sleek armrests as he searched for the sampler port. When he thought he understood wellenough, Threxin huffed a chuckle. “I do not need you for anything.”

He held his wrist over the probable spot. To his satisfaction, the sampler needle extracted itself with a little click and hovered at a point just above Threxin’s right wrist. His apertures tightened as some of the resignation Threxin had sensed in the human’s demeanor was replaced with a blackness he should recognize, but of course never could.

Threxin smiled as he lowered his wrist and the sampler found purchase in his vein. He noted that Orion’s own arm had a small round socket embedded into a nearby spot—he would need to arrange for that.

“Transmit toElssian,” the uhyre instructed.

Threxin followed the former commander’s gaze over his shoulder toward a pale-faced human shaking down at the control deck.

Something nonverbal passed between them. When the human moved to unsteady action, Threxin growled a warning, and weapons clicked from the door where his cohort stood ready.

“She’s doing what you said,” Orion spoke, slowly this time. “She’s the comms officer. Configures the transmission.”

Threxin studied him, then the “comms officer,” who was frozen in place as she waited. He grunted his assent, to which the officer and Orion Halen exchanged communicative looks again. Threxin looked to the thermaview hull where the feed would be projected and waited.

There was still the small angry female who stood behind his human-kin’s side, and the fury rolling off her made Threxin’s limiter work in overdrive. She was, for some reason, not as fearful as a human should be, but he would deal with that later.

The humans recoiled in unison when the view ofElssian’scommand center appeared on the projection, along with thetechnically living but practically very dead commander of that ship. It had taken some time to find the right configuration ofElssianand Apthian technology to keepElssian’shuman key just alive enough to retain control of the ship. It had been damaged and could no longer leave the galaxy, but remained useful as a mine of human tech and a residential hub for those who were not staying planetside. The ship was depressing, but perhaps not as depressing as living on the surface of Apth.

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