Page 7 of The Captain's Bounty
A soft grinding caught Lissa’s ear and she looked up. She was still staring at the smooth orb descending from its hiding place behind another ceiling tile when Dex grabbed her arm again.
“Run, damn it!”
They were in unmapped territory now, hitting their first dead end almost immediately. The quick about-face as she was pulled out of it immediately into the next one quickly had her hopelessly lost. The maze walls went all the way up to the ceiling. There was no climbing over, and she lost all sense of direction.
Then they lost the map technician. One minute they were three, racing down a long corridor, ducking from one open archway into the next, and in the next, Stine shouted. When she turned, he was gone. It was just her and Dex now.
“What—” she panted.
“I don’t know,” he said shortly. “Move!”
We are going to die in here,the practical part of her brain said. They were going to get turned around, stymied by the same dead ends over and over until either that sphere found them or they became so hopelessly lost that lack of food and water got them first.
The practical half of her engaged, and she began hugging the right side of the wall.
“No!” She grabbed Dex, stopping him before he could lead them right back into the same dead end they’d already found. “This way.”
She had no idea where they were going, but she hurried them through the maze, mapping it the only way she knew how, by constantly following the same side of the wall in the hopes it would eventually lead them out.
It didn’t. They found a door instead.
A single hand panel without glowing symbols waited to the right of the solid, unadorned stone access. Someone shouted in the distance, a high-pitched cry of terror and pain, and she didn’t need to see the flash shot from another hunting sphere 9r the collapse and thrash of electrified limbs to know another man had just died. She had her own hunting sphere to worry about, and it was so close behind them she could hear its energizing hum.
She barely hesitated before laying her hand on the panel. The door opened and without waiting for it to fully rise, both she and Dex rolled underneath.
That the room wasn’t empty hit her the second she straightened, only to come face to glowing silver-white face with the impossible.
She’d never seen anyone like the being that stood in front of her, wraith-thin, its too-long limbs twice the length of hers. Black holes bored into her where eyes should have been; its thin, lipless mouth unsmiling as it moved, speaking without sound.
Holographic projection,her brain supplied, a bare second before the being reached out and pressed its very solid palm to her forehead.
Her head snapped back as an electric jolt punched through her. For a moment, she was sure the sphere had shot her, except she was still very much aware of what was happening as she hit the floor, every inch of her jerking in response to the invasion of the being that injected itself into her.
Two things happened then.
She lost control of her body, pissing herself as she jerked and flopped like a fish on the river bank. Then the soft drone of the recording playing from hidden speakers above her in yet another language she’d never before heard… and which suddenly made sense.
“Warning,” it said. “You have entered restricted space. Leave immediately, or you will be annihilated. Warning. If you disregard this message, you will die.”
Her ears were ringing, crackling with the sizzle of all that energy now filling up every inch of her body, spreading from nerve to electrified nerve inside skin much too small and tight to contain it.
Dex appeared over her, his shocked face snapping from hers to something beyond her.
She heard the hum of the drone and her hand moved even as she, lying limp now on the stone floor, arched her head back in time to see the drone drifting through the door. The discs took aim on Dex; she took aim on it.
Pure energy shot from her empty hand and shattered the sphere, sending a rain of broken pieces ricocheting off the walls to the floor.
“Shit!” Dex shouted, jumping back, both from it and from her.
Shit. The curse echoed in her own brain, a startled scream that never made it as far as her mouth.
Her body no longer her own, she sat up and looked at herself. The appalled part of her brain that couldn’t begin to comprehend what had just come out of her hand was buried now under the slightly disgusted alien presence that couldn’t believe her ugly five-fingered appendage was now its hand.
She glared from it to her arm, and then her legs and sighed, and like a switch suddenly being thrown, Lissa was once more in control of herself.
She scrambled off the floor, her legs shaking, the wetness in her pants an unpleasant sensation that did not rank anywhere near high enough in importance for her to deal with right now. Staring at her trembling hand, she suddenly remembered Dex.He was standing not far from her side, staring back with the same shocked look on his narrow face.
“What did you just do?” he breathed.
