Tiny and Fierce Margo Collins (acx book reading txt) 📖

Evik would smell the anxiety seeping from my pores.

Lise stirred in my arms, a groan of pain escaping her lips. Her eyelids fluttered erratically, and her breathing was almost indiscernible now.

I had to do something.

Unfurling my wings, though it was less an unfurling motion now and more a metallic scrape of rainbow-tinted alloy folding outward into a wingspan double the size of my original spread, I gripped tighter onto Lise, bent my knees, and launched upwards.

I flew high, nearly into the fog cover, and headed toward the ship.

My movements were unsure, untested, and I found myself dipping and rising involuntarily. But I held onto Lise with all my might, willing myself to get her to Blue’s hull safely.

The prisoners and Bufo soldiers were embroiled in their own fight of wills, and no one noticed me descend soundlessly down to pad against the thick metal ship. I kept my wings high, making sure the tips of them didn’t scrape.

I hadn’t thought through how to communicate with Blue, how to get the AI to open the rarely used escape hatch.

Glancing down at Lise, I saw the bump of her communication implant.

Shit. This was going to hurt her.

Still, it had to be done. And the medbay could fix it later. Carefully, I pulled one wing forward and held her up until I could lightly run the tip of my sharp metal wing across the communicator implant scar, opening it back up.

I held her with one arm, balancing part of her body atop a lifted thigh. Fishing out the communicator, I wiped off the blood and tucked it into my own auditory tunnel.

Ship, can you hear me?

Silence.

Blue, this is Morpheus.

Crackle. Buzz. Maybe it was damaged?

I was nearly at the point of ripping off the port cover with my bare hands when the AI’s synthesized voice came to life. Morpheus. Why do you have Lise’s communicator?

Lise is damaged. She cannot speak. I pushed my thoughts towards the ship, glad that I did not have to raise my voice to be heard and alert the enemy.

I sense you. You are at the south point escape hatch.

Yes, can you open it? I adjusted Lise so that she was pressed against my body in a near-standing position. It would be easier to fit us both through the rounded entrance this way.

A hiss and whoosh of cool air gave way to dark inner shadows of the ship as the escape hatch opened. Relief washed over me, and I gave a small jump forward, dropping us down into the belly of Blue.

Once inside, I began moving quickly, asking for directions as I murmured to Lise to stay alive for just a little longer. Med bay. Blue, which way is it?

Take a right, Morpheus. Now a left. Follow this path until you terminate at medical. I will be ready for her.

I couldn’t get there quickly enough for my comfort. Lise’s breathing… I couldn’t sense it now. She hadn’t made a sound or so much as twitched slightly since I’d left the others.

When I entered the sliding doors into the medbay, I saw that Blue had already prepped a healing chamber. The bright green and yellow lights blinked at me, willing me forward. I obliged, hurriedly setting Lise down inside the waves of undulating color.

There was nothing more I could do. She would live, or she would die.

And I had other problems to solve—like how to get rid of the breeders and soldiers. And how to get my shipmates on board.

Nothing was ever easy, it seemed. And becoming a crew to this small human woman was no different.

13

Tommelise

I came to in Blue’s medbay, bathed in the yellow lights of a purification bath. Small tidbits of memory poked at me. Morpheus snatching me up in his arms and running down the hall. Alder running beside us, his skin an odd, ashy color. And Evik running up the wall, Alder clinging to his back like an Old Earth cowboy clawing desperately to stay on a bucking horse. Or did they ride cows back then?

Anyway, that last one had to be a hallucination.

Tinging all the images was the memory of pain. Stinging, burning, searing pain.

Tentatively, I touched my arms, relieved to discover my hand worked again. Finding several needle-marks, blood running out a shunt in a vein on one arm, and a dark IV solution flowing into the other arm, I leaned back against the headrest in the upright pod.

“Sitrep, Blue,” I ordered.

When my ship didn’t answer, I touched my ear.

Dammit. My transmitter implant was gone, already healed into a thin scar by Blue’s medbay. And I couldn’t access voice controls from inside the medical pod—a holdover from the previous owner, who had first disabled, and then destroyed, the voice-control system when his crew had gone mad with space-sickness. It didn’t do to have a raving captain issuing insane orders from his sickbed. I hadn’t ever gotten around to fixing them.

I was beginning to regret that decision.

My brain was still fuzzy from whatever poison that medtech had injected into me with his tongue.

Gross. I’m glad I cut it out of his nasty mouth.

Usually, I regretted maiming other sentient creatures. Not that I wouldn’t do it when I had to—there had been plenty of times in my life, both as a junker and a smuggler, that I had come up against opponents who were determined to make sure I died, so it was either them or me. So far, I’d always been able to make sure it was me.

With Morpheus’s help this time.

As if my thoughts had summoned him, Morpheus swung in through the medbay entrance, his brow furrowed worriedly. He brightened up when he saw me awake in the healing chamber. “Thank all the gods and goddesses, you’re alive.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, raising my voice a little to be heard outside the pod.

“Alder has some half-flown idea that he can save a bunch of the breeder slaves. They’re milling around the ship like herd animals, and the empress bitch’s guards are trying