Page 44 of Reaper
“They speak truth,” the Scelk said. “They came here looking for a glorious rescue. They had no idea what the crewmates assigned to them were up to.”
The relief from the two humans was almost palpable. But it was the gratitude in their eyes as they looked at Reklig that touched me the most. Upon their arrival, their wary and somewhat distrustful stance towards him had not escaped me. Most humans feared the Scelks, and especially their mind reading and mind controlling abilities.
“I wish I had read the other two,” Reklig added in a semi-growl. “Any clue where he’s headed?”
“Thanh is running long range scans,” Doom replied. “And you’re not the only one who wishes you had.”
“Why didn’t you?” Martin asked with genuine confusion.
“Because it would have been morally wrong,” Reklig deadpanned while looking at the human straight in the eye.
Martin flinched, and I couldn’t help but smirk despite the current situation. Most humans assumed that Scelks constantly abused their power to violate other people’s minds. As much as it would have served us in this instance, it pleased me that we had stuck to our moral standards if only to placate yet another person who presumed the worst.
“Hmm… listen,” Martin said, shifting uneasily on his feet. “This is more than we had bargained for. I don’t think that a two-men crew is suited anymore to transport close to a hundred Creckels to their homeworld. It would have been busy with four, but now…”
“We fully agree,” Doom said in a friendly tone.
“Excellent!”Janelle mind-spoke to me with obvious relief.
I repressed the urge to chuckle and simply gave my mate an affectionate psychic nudge. Last night, Doom and I had decided we wouldn’t entrust the humans with the Creckels. It might indeed have become overwhelming for the two men to handle so many of them without any real understanding of their language. However, I suspected that on top of wanting to be done with this mess, Martin had also guessed our intentions and was trying to save face.
“We thank you for volunteering to assist and for your help cutting up all of that damn meat,” Doom said. “I will send a report to the Coalition HQ and your Division Team Lead. I will make sure to state that both you and Jasper are fully exonerated of any wrongdoing.”
Both men sighed with relief and thanked Doom profusely.
“Thank you, we greatly appreciate it. We’re going to go finish running diagnostics on our vessel, and then we’ll be on our way back to Earth,” Martin said. “Sorry again for this mess.”
We extended our good wishes to the two men, and they took their leave. Along with Reklig and Madeline, I performed a thorough diagnostic of our own vessel to make sure Rickon hadn’t sabotaged it. Janelle and Jessica performed an autopsy of Terrence’s remains. Thanh and Martha focused their efforts on trying to track Rickon’s whereabouts in the slim hope that one of our other patrols could intercept him or whichever vessel he might be meeting with. But even using our scout drones, it came down to looking for a grain of sugar in a bowl of salt.
Meanwhile, Doom telepathically communicated with Ayana to inform Legion of the latest developments. Thanks to her unlimited psychic range, it allowed us to bypass the delay of normal communication due to the great distance from Khepri. To our dismay, similar incidents were being reported by a number of our rescue teams with unrequested offers of assistance, or Coalition teams never reporting their findings at their assigned secret bases.
Steele’s team actually ended in battle against a couple of Coalition vessels that had gone rogue and were attempting to take over the base they were investigating. Some advanced weapons, including portable psychic disruptor devices and psychic inhibitor drugs had been developed there. We kept the blueprints of such weapons strictly confidential and only within the Vanguard as they could severely cripple our ability to fight on the battlefield. That former Coalition members tried to acquire this technology did not bode well.
More disturbing still was Giles Dalton’s sudden disappearance. As the human Coalition Division Leader, he had assigned a large number of teams to the rescue missions. More than half of them had fallen off the radar. Worse still, many of them happened to be flying some of the best combat or transport vessels of the fleet. This whole thing had been too well-coordinated to have been a last-minute thing. These people had carefully planned their exit. And it didn’t just include humans, as I’d first presumed, but also members of most of the other species of the Coalition.
The leadership of every planet of the alliance was now scrambling to account for all their people, vessels, weapons, and general resources—a mammoth task considering the Coalition troops numbered in the millions.
At least, like with Martin’s vessel, Rickon hadn’t messed with our ship either. After hours of examining every inch for integrity defects, bombs, bugs, and spyware, we concluded that Rickon had only focused on eliminating the threat to whatever organization he belonged to. Terrence had known enough to jeopardize it.
Thanh and Martha managed to identify two dozen vessels that Rickon could have rendezvoused with, but intercepting them would be useless. Rickon could easily leave the ship in stealth mode while we searched it, then return upon our departure. Nonetheless, we had warned those ship’s destination ports to be on the lookout for him once they docked and their crews disembarked. However, our chances of finding him were slim to none as some of the vessels that had fallen off the radar would also have been in that general area.
But we would deal with that headache at another time. My mate, my team, the surviving Creckels, and our ship were safe and whole. The rest didn’t matter.
Chapter 17
Janelle
That night, Reaper gave me the massage Jessica had meant for him to give me the previous evening. While my body didn’t need it, my mind did. I kept berating myself for not realizing sooner that the man had been dead. More than two hours had been wasted in our efforts to track down his murderer. I should have been more thorough. I should have listened to my instincts that said something didn’t feel right. I should have…
“I can almost hear your neurons firing,” Reaper said in a disapproving tone. “You’re supposed to be relaxing, not whipping yourself over a very understandable mistake. It’s not like you could have reversed his fate, anyway.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking, or even if I’m thinking at all,” I mumbled, torn between wallowing in self-pity and enjoying the wondrous feel of his hands kneading out the knots in my muscles.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head, and I yelped more in surprise than actual pain when Reaper’s right hand stopped massaging my back to smack my right butt cheek. Oddly enough, a pleasurable sensation in the pit of my stomach immediately followed the slight sting on my behind.
“Don’t lie, you naughty girl,” Reaper said in a grumbling voice. “I can see your aura, and it screams deception.”
“I didn’t lie!” I said in false outrage.