Page 25 of Taming Chaos

“I don’t know if Markov even ended up securing the plasma weapons.” She laughed bitterly. “Part of me hopes he walked out of there empty-handed, without me or the product. They’ll demote his ass so far down the food chain he won’t see sunlight for a decade.”

Torin snorted, sharing her sentiment. Given the circumstances, he had to admire her spirit. She’d been betrayed, abducted, imprisoned, and had just seen him kill an Ephrenian in the blink of an eye, and yet she wasn’t cowed.

She was funny, sarcastic, and brave.

I could spend a long time getting to know you, human. I could take you on a slow ‘date’, one where we would dress nicely and go somewhere special… on Earth, of course. We would talk and eat and watch the stars appear in the darkening skies above, and I would drink my fill of you, over and over again.

Persephone dragged him back into the present. “So how are we going to convince the Ephrenians to… whoa!”

The chamber shook. Torin’s hand shot out as Winters overbalanced. He grabbed her upper arm, steadying her. A loud metallic scraping noise filled the room.

Torin shifted on the balls of his feet as the cabin swayed. His finely honed sense of balance told him they were moving.

Behind them, the lifeless body of the Ephrenian rolled and flopped around. Torin moved so that it was out of Persephone’s line of sight.

“Wh-what’s happening?”

“The chamber is moving,” he said softly.

“How is that even possible?”

“I’m guessing this is some sort of detachable live cargo container.”

“So we’re being offloaded?”

“Ejected would be my guess. Sometimes cargo is left for the customer to pick up at floating waypoints in space. The Ephrenians must have decided they’ve got no choice but to deliver both of us.”

Torin suspected the Ephrenians hadn’t informed their client that he was inside. Whoever was on the receiving end was in for a nasty surprise.

Boom. There was a soft pop in his ears as the pressure changed, and then his feet started to lose contact with the floor.

The internal gravity was dropping.

Persephone gasped as she floated up toward the ceiling.

“They’ve ejected us,” Torin informed her. Being familiar with the sensation of weightlessness, he grasped her wrist and pulled her toward the wall, where there were a series of metal protrusions—hooks of some sort. He grabbed one of them and pulled her close. “Hold on here.”

“Th-thanks.” She breathed a sigh of relief as she grasped one of the protrusions with both hands and held on tightly, her knuckles growing white. “I’m not so good with heights.”

Not really understanding what she meant, Torin glanced over his shoulder. “I’m going to secure the…” Corpse. The dead Ephrenian floated in mid-air. “You don’t have to watch.”

“O-okay.”

Torin gently disengaged and drifted toward the weightless body.

Part of the Ephrenian’s face was visible through his cracked helmet. A brief stab of remorse coursed through Torin as he contemplated his actions.

Death walked in his shadow, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t spare a moment to think of the life he’d taken.

“May the Goddess grant you peace in the afterlife,” he whispered under his breath, so softly that Winters couldn’t hear. Torin wasn’t a religious man. He didn’t necessarily believe in the Kaiin and the Goddess and their mythical underworld, but he often invoked the spirits to express certain feelings.

He grabbed the weightless Ephrenian, gently kicking off the wall to propel himself toward a bank of seating to the left. He slipped the alien’s ankles into the gap between two seats, turning the body so the feet acted as an anchor against gravity.

The Ephrenian’s body was already going cold.

It was crude, but it was all he could do for now. Perhaps he could give his victim a dignified send-off later, but he suspected that wouldn’t be possible.

When they finally docked—if they docked—he feared he was going to have to do a lot of fighting.

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