"So, you both refuse to surrender the evidence of your treason?" Nar'Jat's jaws curled as he focussed his attention on Scar again, "Tell me, S'Kia, is it for these same misbegotten, half-blood whelps that you abandoned your clan brothers? Is it for them you threw down your loyalty and honour? For them, and for the charms of the soft-meat witch, no doubt. She must be very skilled in the shadow arts to keep you under her spell for so long. Or perhaps she is merely a skilled concubine, adept in the arts of pleasure? How many males did she have to fuck before you, I wonder, to learn such sluttish tricks?"
Scar's eyes narrowed at this and he lunged at Nar'Jat, a low growl rattling his throat as his jaws spread wider. He came within inches of the other's face before the two guards behind him seized his bound arms and yanked him backwards. The clan leader's jaws twitched, a smile breaking slowly across his face.
Scar fought to break free of his captors, hitting the nearest with his shoulder and knocking him to the floor, headbutting the other in his frenzy to get at his former commander. Nar'Jat pressed the shocker switch and he collapsed to his knees again, jaws and fists clenched, blood flowing from his palms and the corners of his mouth.
"I am no witch and no concubine, Nar'Jat." Lex said, calmly, "I am Sain'Ja. I am blooded. You shame only yourself when you insult me."
This time, it was she who jerked forward, contorted and helpless as the electrical current hit her, but she made no noise.
"She will never show them her pain. She is Sain'Ja, no matter what Nar'Jat may say…" Scar felt the hollow twist in his chest again.
When she finally raised her head, trying to get her breath, one of the Rough Skulls behind her caught her hair in one fist and yanked her head back roughly.
"Silence, witch!" He snapped "We do not want any of your spells here."
Nar'Jat sighed, "I was hoping at least one of you might choose to remember where your duty lies. It is most tiresome, but no matter. You can still be of use to us in other ways – "
He was cut off as a noise rumbled through the hot jungle night, the sound of a shuttle's turbines during take-off. Nar'Jat looked back at Lex as the roar of the engines shook the jungle, "Your offspring stole your shuttle and ran, did they? They will not get far." He said, jaws bent in a grin, "I do not doubt that Varrik will… retrieve them for us." At his words, Scar began to growl again. Lex just stared at him blankly.
Then, there was a cry from the darkness, sharp and high pitched. The heads of both Lex and Scar snapped towards the sound as a yautja scout emerged from the forest, a wriggling shape dangling from one fist.
"Let me go, you coward!" Spyrro screamed, lashing out at him with her fists and her feet.
"I found this little vermin, sneaking around." Snarled the scout, "Do you want me to silence her squeaking?"
In spite of the whirl of razor claws, he seized the girl by the throat and extended his dah'kte. Spyrro became still as the sharp, metal points gleamed just inches from her face.
"No!" Both of her parents cried in unison, Scar renewing his violent struggles whilst Lex strained desperately forward, despite the tight grip on her hair.
"Do not hurt her, Nar'Jat," She pleaded "We will do whatever you ask!"
The Rough Skull leader shook his head, "I thought you were better than this, Lexsss! Sain'Ja should feel no fear and no pity. I see you are just a sub-creature after all."
He turned to the scout who still held his blades at Spyrro's jugular, awaiting the word of command. "I want the female child alive. Put her on the ship and see that she does not escape, if you value your own life."
After the scout had left, Nar'Jat turned. Scar's eyes were fixed on him.
"Nar'Jat," He said softly, his voice dripping with menace, "If you harm any of our children, I will make it my life's mission to hunt you down and fill your last hours with pain. You will cry like an infant and beg me for death before the end. That goes for all of you here. I will get my vengeance on those who do not honour the D'aRan-thwei. I know your faces and I will visit the same fate on any who harm our offspring, whether I am living or dead – "
Nar'Jat threw back his head and laughed at this, "You cannot threaten us from the next world, S'Kia," He said, adjusting the settings on the shocker switch, "And that is where you are going, by one path or another. But first, you will render service to the clan. You will aid us against this contagion, whether you choose to, or not."
He pressed the switch again. Scar collapsed, his eyes feeling like they were cooking in their sockets; saw Lex go down too. Then he couldn't see anything, couldn't hear, couldn't think. Everything was swallowed up in the hissing red blur that consumed both of them and burned everything away in an inferno of heat and light and pain.
Varrik pressed the control on the gauntlet again but nothing happened. "The disobedient creatures must have hit the override button," He snarled "They have locked all external sources from the controls!"
Y'Kryss stopped pounding his fists on the cockpit doors, "Surely you are joking! They are not old enough to know how!"
"Then perhaps we have underestimated them," Varrik closed the wrist com with a frown, "We must find some way to open the door."
The third male, H'Jarkhe, snorted, "Why do we not wipe out those misbegotten half-breeds? Surely we can just detonate this entire shuttle?"
"And destroy ourselves in the process? Do not be a fool!" Varrik clicked, "Besides, our orders were to take the offspring alive – or had you forgotten? And if you had not yet realised, there is nothing to stop those so-called half-breeds from opening the hatch and killing us, once we reach a high enough altitude, while they remain safe in the cockpit!"
He cast about the shuttle, pulling open the nearest locker and searching through the contents, yanking out supply tins and weapons and other strange objects that he did not know the purpose of, letting them clang onto the floor.
"What in the name of the many festering hells are you doing?"
"Nar'Jat says that S'Kia had become a pirate – a plunderer of other ships – surely he must have something here I can use to breach the doors!" Varrik rifled through the huge storage compartments lining the corridors until his clawed hand closed around a large metal disc – a blackout bomb.
The other two watched he pressed a control on the deadener and attached it to the door of the cockpit.
A deafening wail barrelled up the corridor – the noise of the airlock hatch opening. Varrik and Y'Kryss threw themselves down, each of them struggling for any hand hold they could find; Varrik unsheathing his wrist blades and plunging them into the floor just outside the cockpit doors, Y'Kryss wrapping his fingers around the edge of a vent shaft.
H'Jarkhe was dragged out of the hatch, spat out into the sky by the sheer force of the air pressure equalising.
Varrik hung on, praying his dah'kte would not come loose "We must still be within the planet's atmosphere yet or myself and Y'Kryss would surely have shared his fate!"
He concentrated on holding on and tried not to think about what would happen when the shuttle did manage to break free of the ooman planet's orbit. Then, the deadener activated, the pulse of disruptive energy knocking out the power to the cockpit doors.
Using every ounce of strength he possessed, Varrik pulled one of his blades free and plunged it into the door seal of the cockpit, hauling on it with all his weight.
Selim and Isaac both turned as the air began to howl through the gap that had appeared in the cockpit doors. Green alert signals blinked madly on the console as the cockpit temperature began to drop and the oxygen levels plummeted.
"Ize!" Selim bawled "Seal the door!"
Isaac leaned forward, fighting the air that was dragging at him, tried the controls "It's dead Sel, the power's gone!"
"Then we need to get to the weapons," Selim unstrapped himself from the co-pilot's chair, but the gee forces kept him pinned as the ship's autopilot continued to accelerate, pushing the ship fast enough on its upward trajectory to punch free of Earth's gravity.
Isaac looked at his brother, just about managing to turn his head. He had only one option left. "I have to reseal the airlock! Even if it means the Rough Skulls get in here – otherwise we'll die with them when we leave the atmosphere!"
He stretched forward, using every muscle in his body to reach the console, the constantly dropping pressure in the cockpit making it an agony.
The tips of his talons managed to touch the control to seal it and the tortured scream from the airlock ceased. In the quiet that followed, the whirr of the cockpit doors opening was very loud…
Lex awoke to a bewildering fog of darkness and pain. Her body felt battered and bruised, almost as bad as waking up after the car crash. She was lying on something hard and her hip and shoulder ached, as if she had lain in that position too long. Her mouth was agonisingly dry. She tried to push herself up but then realised that her arms were bound tightly behind her back. As she moved, a sharp pain under her collarbone made her pause and wince. She realised she must still have the metal electrode spikes embedded in her chest.
She lifted her head to look around. She was in a hot, dark room. The floor felt like metal, the only illumination; the dim, red glare provided by a tiny lighting panel above the door. The throbbing of engines surrounded her. What she could see and hear and the slow reassembly of the scattered memories from before she lost consciousness confirmed her worst fears, "I must be in a Rough Skull cell. Yautja do not usually have cells on board their shuttles, so this must be one of their large ships. Nar'jat must have had me brought here after he knocked both of us out. I wonder if that means Scar and Spyrro are here too? And what about the boys – what happened to them?"
She felt like she would go crazy. All these questions and she could do nothing but sit here in the dark. "What the hell does Nar'Jat want? Why didn't he just kill us?"
It felt like she was in there for days, though she guessed it must only have been hours before the door slid open and two Rough Skulls came in.
She pushed herself to her feet, not wanting to be jerked upright, "Where are we going?"
"Do not speak, witch." Said one of them, who seemed to wear a permanent sneer.
Lex stared at him for a few seconds, a memory was nagging at her, prompting her that she knew him, "H'Ritz?"
Now she recognised him as the malicious loudmouth Scar had beaten almost to death for threatening her when she was pregnant, back on the yautja warship. His jaw was bent in a strange angle, she now realised, because it had healed crookedly. "I thought you died on the Void Cutter."
"S'Kia was too much of a coward to kill me." His eyes reduced to slits of burning malice, "Corrupted as he is by your ooman weakness."
"He would not dirty his hands to kill a crawling thing like you. A would-be murderer of pregnant females."
His mangled jaw bent further as he snarled at her, "An obscene pregnancy you convinced him to put in you. Every foul rumour about the two of you has proven true; you were opening your legs for him all along!"
"The only foul thing I see here is you. I notice you only had the courage to fight me when you had me outnumbered, three against one."
His jaws opened and shut a few times, "I told you to be silent, witch," He snapped, finally "Or shall I cut out your tongue?"
They dragged her out of the cell and into a cockpit not much larger than that of the Chameleon. She now knew she had been wrong: she was on board a shuttle, a larger one than she had seen before. She had thought the hunters did not give quarter to prisoners, preferring to dispatch them immediately instead. "I guess yautja have to transport captives sometimes – even if they're prisoners from their own clan – but where the hell are they taking us?"
Scar was hauled from the opposite cell by more guards, throwing off the hands that were restraining him, snarling and hissing. He too had his arms bound behind him and the metal electrodes were still lodged in his chest. As their eyes met, he raised his spiny brows at her. Even their earlier conflict could not erase years of shared intimacy and she could tell that he was asking if she was unhurt.
She nodded very slightly, "The children?" She mouthed, her lips hardly moving
He scowled and shifted his shoulders in a shrug. Obviously, he didn't know where the children were.
She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. She had been hoping his former clan brothers might tell him things that they wouldn't tell her, but it seemed he was equally in the dark. His head turned towards the viewscreen but at present it showed nothing.
"Where are you taking us?" He demanded.
"What is wrong S'Kia, are you afraid?" H'Ritz was watching them with an expression of obscene glee.
"H'Ritz? Is it you?" Scar's eyes glittered evilly as he recognised his old antagonist, and she knew he too was remembering the public beating he had given their tormentor all those years ago, "I have occasionally wondered if you managed to crawl out of the puddle of your own blood and piss I left you whimpering in and look… here you are! Still whining – "
"You cannot speak to me that way, S'Kia!" The other male snarled, "You are no longer R'Zuul's petted protege and you have lost the favour of Nar'Jat, now that everyone knows the truth about you!"
"Everyone always knew the truth about you H'Ritz, did they not?" Scar grinned at him, "D'Kand's snivelling follower, attacker of gravid females. I congratulate you on managing to find a position under Nar'Jat. I would have expected him to be disgusted by the stink of your cowardice, but it seems he has a stronger stomach for worms and crawlers than I thought."
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Lex found herself having to fight down a smile at the sight of the utter outrage on H'Ritz's face.
At that moment one of the other yautja, more senior than H'Ritz judging by his armour and stance, turned from the console. He pressed the shocker switch that he held in his hand, causing Scar to fall silent as the current battered him down.
"Keep your mouth shut, Abomination," He rumbled, "As a traitor, it is not for you to insult blooded warriors… even if you happen to be correct." He finished with a contemptuous glance at H'Ritz and Lex saw the other male's emerging smirk wiped from his face.
"D'Jukai – " He began.
The older male looked round at him and H'Ritz fell silent.
Meanwhile, Scar's eyes glowed as his head came up to look at his tormentor but he restrained himself from answering back.
"As for where we are taking you, that is no secret." The senior male continued with a nasty smile, "You are on board the D'ar-Kande {Trans: The Dagger} – an emissary ship of the Cutter – and I am returning you to the Vortex. The GhaRan-S'i-Ka is hungry to get her clutches around you: the rogue male who broke onto her ship and killed some of her best pilots. She is willing to reward us handsomely in return for your capture."
"Reward?" Lex asked, "What kind of reward?"
"The females have an antivirus which they claim can slow the contagion that is destroying us." The one called D'Jukai told her, "So far they have been intractable about releasing it, but now we are bringing the GhaRan-S'i-Ka the offenders she so covets, they have become more… willing. Her desire to punish you must be very great!"
"GhaRan-S'i-Ka?" Lex frowned to herself at the unfamiliar, compound word, "To erase… to take life… to make as nothing? But that cannot be right – "
Then the Dagger lurched, the loss of motion causing the gravity in the cockpit to lessen for a split second as the ship ceased to move, before the gravity of a larger vessel's acceleration pushed down on them again.
They had docked with the Vortex.
Sorry it's been a bit longer than usual, it's been a busy January. Hope everyone is having a Good New Year so far.
LovyDovy7: Some more cliff hanging for you. I've been enjoying writing Varrik, we'll see how long he lasts.
Nubian Queen: Oh yes, I've had plenty of experience with stubborn four (five, six etc) year olds. Also plenty of ass kicking to come!