Page 54 of The Captain's Bounty
She rolled away from Bruwes first, and as fast as she was, he still snagged her shirt with one wild sweep of his arm. Except it wasn’t really her shirt, it was his, and all she had to do was let herarms go limp as she scrambled up, leaving her bare-chested and him cursing at the handful of cloth that was all he caught.
Time seemed to slow as the being within her took over, blurring her vision and turning her blood to fire as the being inside her began to charge. Somewhere at the fuzzy edge of her perception, Bruwes was reaching for her, the other crewmen shouted for her to get down, and the scavengers were circling around to get a clearer shot, but they were strangely insignificant. She could feel the heat of alien determination crashing through her an instant before the alien being exploded through her mind, usurping control of her thoughts and her intentions.
Bright red bolts of ungodly power erupted from her every pore. It came from her eyes, her screaming mouth, burning through the palms of her hands. If her skin wasn’t actually melting away, it damn sure felt like it.
Bruwes tackled her, but her arms still stretched out, the being inside her slapping her hands to the unyielding floor grates. Pure fiery heat burst from her soul, shooting through her arm, snaking across the floor as runnels of light that split and stabbed into each of the scavs, knocking them over.
Their bodies jumped and quivered and shook. Lissa shook too, and then her racing heart stopped. She felt it happen, felt the stillness growing huge and heavy in her chest, and realized what it meant.
Help, she tried to say, but her body was not her own. And yet, it was completely her own, she suddenly realized. She could no longer feel the being inside her. He was gone.
And so too was she. Diminishing in sensation and awareness, sinking down into herself as her body wilted under Bruwes, collapsing flat upon the grates.
Blackness crept in around her, the burning heat in her flesh dwindling to a comfortable haze, the pain fading into the background as her eyes closed against her will.
Grabbing her shoulder, Bruwes flipped her onto her back, his frantic face popping into her darkening view. His mouth was moving, but her ears rung so loudly she couldn’t make out the words.
It’s okay,she tried to say, but her mouth refused to obey her and Bruwes just grew darker and more distant the harder she tried to focus.
She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t do anything but listen to the chaos of voices and movement around her.They say hearing is the last sense to go, she thought, her last clear thought, as it all went quiet.
There on the tech bay floor, she died.
“Lissa!”Scooping her into his arms, Bruwes heaved her limp body off the floor. He cradled her, rocking her in his panic, jostling her, searching for any signs of life. She wasn’t breathing. He knew the beating of her heart, but he couldn’t find it no matter where on her chest he pressed his hand.
“Doc!” he bellowed over his shoulder, aware of nothing but the unnaturally heavy weight of her in his arms. “Doc!”
A shadow fell over him, and he looked up into the shiny faceless helmet of one of the scav bounty hunters. His hand snapped back for his gun, but it was six feet out of reach, lying on the grate among a scattering of parts he’d abandoned in his scramble to get to her. It was over. All was lost.
Clinging to her lifeless body, fury exploded through him. The pulse and pressure behind his eyes gave proof of how wildly hewas reddening. The berserker in him, fighting now to be free while the whole of him clung to Lissa’s body, shaking.
“I will hunt you,” he growled. “I will find you, and I will make your slow, painful death last for days.”
“I am well beyond your primitive concept of death,” the scav replied indifferently, but he didn’t secure his victory by blowing a hole through Bruwes’ head. He wasn’t even armed, Bruwes belatedly noticed. And for that matter, hadn’t he been dead on the floor in a halo of red lightning a moment ago?
As these thoughts tumbled through the churn of Rage, the scav hunkered down where he stood and if Bruwes could only make himself drop Lissa, he could have easily lunged and fought this out, one unarmed man to another, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. All he could do was shake and hold her, watching through pulsing eyes as the scav stretched out his hand to touch two fingers to her chest.
Bruwes grabbed at him, but the moment they touched, a shock of electricity surged through him. It rocked his head back onto his shoulders and, perhaps as was the intention, knocked Bruwes’s restraining hand aside. His entire body tingled. The scav simply bowed his head, and suddenly, in his arms, Lissa’s whole body bucked upward.
Her eyes flew open, so did her mouth. She sucked air into her once motionless chest, and then coughed, gasping and grabbing wildly at Bruwes’s hugging arms for something to hold onto.
He yanked her away from the scav, but already the other was retreating out of reach.
“Who are you?” Bruwes snarled, very aware of how far behind him his gun was and how easy it would be to get it. He just had to put Lissa down first.
His arms instinctively tightened, holding her closer.
“My name cannot be spoken with your inferior mouth,” the scav somberly replied. “But we have met.”
It was the tone, that impatient disdain, more than the vocabulary and terse enunciation so uncharacteristic of scavengers that finally brought recognition through the Rage. “You’re the thing that was inside Lissa,” he accused. “What are you doing to her now?”
He couldn’t see it through the mirror-mask, but he could sure feel the withering stare of the entity when it turned its faceless head toward him. “Saving her life. I have left this husk before my presence could destroy it completely. Some residual effects may surface. It was unavoidable that I should leave some… echo behind, but it will pass in time.”
Bruwes looked down at Lissa who was only now getting her breathing back under control.
“W-wait…” she gasped, but the scav stood up.
“There is no time for waiting, and you are all still in danger. If you think this is the only ship chasing you, then you are very much mistaken. They have a description of you, they know where you are heading, and they are coming for you.”
