She still sounded sweet, but there was a cold look in her eyes. “Uh, yeah,” I said, covering as best as I could. “Why, is that some kind of problem? We have some protocol surrounding catgirls I’m not aware of, Shay?” I forced a chuckle.

  “Of course not, Noah,” she purred. The sympathetic look on her face had gone sour, like milk curdling after being left out too long. I’m just curious about your relationship with this prisoner. This kitty. That you apparently want back so badly.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  Shay’s eyes narrowed. “That you’re fucking her, Noah. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. Nova was pretty much the only woman in the prison I wasn’t fucking. And here I was, getting accused of having a sexual relationship with her. Not that it would have been Shay’s business, in any case, but right now my psycho AI ex-girlfriend had the power to end Nova’s life with the push of a button. And if she hit her with a tractor beam and pulled her into her clutches, what she’d do to her would make instant annihilation look nice by comparison.

  What if Nova talks? I asked myself. She knew everything that was going on in Gamma - my harem, my plans to take back control of the station. She even knew about Bathory. I knew Nova wouldn’t tell Shay about any of these things willingly, but when Shay’s torture chamber came into play, willing didn’t enter into it.

  “I’m not,” I said, spreading my hands. “Shit, if you don’t believe me, hail her. She’ll tell you herself. She left because she wants to go back to her boyfriend. She’s his harem girl, Shay. Not mine.”

  “I thought you said she was in a gang?”

  I had, hadn’t I? And from the look on her face, Shay knew she’d just caught me in a lie.

  “Now that I think about it, I’m not going to waste the energy,” Shay purred, rolling her eyes. “The standard protocol for trash entering the station’s orbit is to blast it into atoms. I think whatever’s in that escape pod qualifies.” She pursed her pouty lips. “And so do you, Noah. You fucking liar.”

  Before I could say a word, the line went dead.

  I slammed my hand against one of the escape pod’s seals. How could I have been so fucking stupid!? I’d tipped my hand too early, tripped over my own story - and now Shay was going to blow Nova’s escape pod up. I was going to lose a member of the crew.

  “There’s got to be a way to catch her,” I growled, the pod’s seal flexing beneath my fingers. “Maybe if I could hot-wire one of these to run a little bit faster…”

  The door hissed open. Meiko and Bathory entered, the former looking shaken. I could tell they’d been listening in on my conversation, and had seen how well it had gone.

  “I do not know why you allow that woman to speak to you that way,” Bathory complained, arms crossed beneath her breasts. “Were I in your shoes, I would either subdue her through mating or slit her throat.”

  “Yeah, that’s about the way I’m feeling,” I growled. “I’m guessing you both heard all that?”

  Meiko’s face paled even further at the sight of the missing escape pod. She walked up to it, pressing her hand against the seal like she might summon Nova back to us.

  “She’s gone,” Meiko said, closing her eyes. “I hate it, but she made her choice, Noah. She put herself out of our reach.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking about that,” I said. “There’s no way we could make one of these pods go a little faster? Catch up to her before she gets in range of those guns?”

  Meiko thought about it for a moment, considering, then shook her head. “These pods are old,” she said, studying the remaining seals. “They’re not designed to do much - just travel on a set route to the nearest space lane and broadcast a signal for pickup. Even if you climbed into one and went after her, you’d just be sending yourself right to Shay.”

  “Yeah, we don’t want that,” I said. My nails dug into my palms at the thought of Shay winning. Of gloating over her confirmed kill - or her brand new prisoner. If she changed her mind last minute, what kind of secrets would Nova spill?

  All through this, Bathory watched us impassively. She looked almost bored, as if the life of a member of our crew didn’t matter to her in the least. It probably didn’t - she was almost certainly just counting down the minutes until she and I could mate again. She’d said as much when we were together on her throne…

  “Wait a second.” I turned to Bathory, a wave of giddy energy surging in my chest. “You can fly through space.”

  The Xenian Queen arched one flawless eyebrow, a hand on her curvy hip. “Yes, I can. You wish to leave this place so soon, my King?”

  My hands started to shake. “No, not a permanent vacation. More like a little day trip. How fast can you travel in one of your cocoons, exactly?”

  Meiko looked vaguely nauseous. “Cocoons? Like the one she hibernates in?”

  “You said you could take me in one, traveling through space,” I said, fixing Bathory with an intense look. “Unless you were just lying to me. But I don’t think you’d lie to your King.”

  “I would never,” Bathory said smoothly. “I can form a cocoon at will, completely impervious to the vacuum of space. As for how quickly it travels, that depends on the speed with which it is launched.”

  My mind worked feverishly. “So if you made us a cocoon and we shot it out of one of these pods...we can’t make the pods go faster, but we could definitely over-pressurize these launchers, right? Shoot us out like a fucking bullet!”

  Meiko gawked at me openly, her jaw hanging like I’d just asked her to start filming an outer space version of Jackass. “I could maybe do that,” she admitted, her eyes flickering to the empty escape pod frame, “but...that’s insane, Noah. If there was any mistake, even the tiniest one, you could end up floating out in space. You’d have no way of getting back to either spire - you’d just have to let the planet’s gravity pull you in until you made landfall.”

  “That would never happen,” I said, faking bravado with a laugh. “The second I leave the SATR, my…”

  I trailed off. Holy shit that was close!

  Bathory looked confused. “You what?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. I’d gotten about three words away from telling Bathory the truth about my android body. Dealing with that was the absolute last thing I needed right now. “It doesn’t matter, Meiko. I’m not letting Shay kill Nova.”

  Meiko looked like she was on the verge of tears. “I know you care about this crew,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “But you need to listen. This place doesn’t function without you. If you weren’t here, the rest of us would be at each other's throats within a week. And Nova, she...well, she’s new. And she ran from us.”

  She wasn’t part of the harem, in other words. For Meiko, that obviously made a difference versus being part of the crew.

  I stared down at her, mustering up all my forces of command. “Would you try and stop me if it was Ruby out there?”

  She looked completely taken aback. “That’s different,” she whispered, an ache in her voice. I knew she longed to have Ruby back almost as badly as I did. This place wasn’t the same without her and her infectious positivity. “That’s cruel, Noah…”

  “It’s not and it isn’t,” I shot back. “No one’s dying under my watch, Meiko. Remember when you taught me about the Prisoner’s Dilemma?”

  Her eyes widened. “God, that feels like a lifetime ago,” she said, that secretive smile spreading across her face. “I was so nervous about you back then. You seemed like such a good guy, and I was so attracted to you...but it had been so long…”

  She’d made the right choice - and I was very, very glad she had. “You taught me the way to beat the Dilemma. The prisoners stick together. No one turns, no one cooperates with the enemy. And they win.”

  She shook her head, but there was pride in her eyes. “Noah,” she said, a shocked little laugh escaping her lips. “It’s just a logic puzzle. It’s not real life…”

  “It is now,” I grunted. “We’re not letting Shay have this victory. The jailer doesn’t win this one. Now let’s fucking get our cat girl back!”

  Chapter Eleven: No One Can Hear You Scream

  “Bathory,” I said, pointing to the seal over the used escape pod. “I need you to rip that shit open.”

  “Gladly,” she purred, as content as a cat with a ball of yarn. Her claws raked the flexible material, ripping a seam where the previous one had resealed into a solid wall. The space inside was dark, colder than a refrigerator, and completely airless. There was a huge whoosh as the oxygen in the station rushed in to fill the vacuum.

  I climbed inside. The metal was so cold that it seared my fingers like a brand, but they didn’t go numb. The seal tried to reform behind me, mindlessly doing its job, but another rake of Bathory’s claws opened a new rent even wider than the first. She slid through, not even noticing the cold as she took up a place beside me.

  “Amp up the pressure in this thing as high as it can go!” I yelled to Meiko. Through the semi-transparent seal, she looked like she was standing in an aquarium. “We need to go fast! As fast as this thing can shoot us!”

  She nodded. Her lips moved, but whatever words they formed were muffled as the escape pod’s seal reformed. Bathory and I were alone in the airlock, in a space never intended for people to stand inside of. This close to her, I could feel the chitin around her hip poking me in the side.

  “Ow,” I said, gesturing at it.

  Bathory gave a little wink and did something with her fingers. In a blink of an eye, the chitin dissolved, running down her pale thighs. She was completely naked, inches away from me, sizing me up like a lion deciding how fast to eat its prey.

  “It’s cocoon time,” I reminded her. An image of her wrapped up in Gamma’s reactor bay flashed through my mind. The cocoon she’d worn then was almost like a sleeping bag, covering everything other than her face. “This won’t hurt, will it?”

  “It won’t hurt me,” Bathory said, grinning. “Don’t worry, my King. If my vestments harm you, it just means you weren’t truly strong enough to claim me. I’ll have to cancel the rest of our mating, consume you, and start looking for a stronger mate.”

  “I do want to mate with you, Bathory,” I growled, holding her closer. “Don’t think for a minute I’m not strong enough to tame you. You have no idea how much pain I can handle.”

  The Red Tigers know, I thought. Or knew, in any case. Besides that one Shay’s got trussed up in her dungeon. I wonder how she feels about all this?

  “I was merely joking,” the Xenian Queen said, with a look that was almost cute. “When we complete this task, you will owe me much pleasure, my King…”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Bathory immediately took me by the chin and closed it again.

  “You would not wish to get any of my hive in your mouth,” she said matter-of-factly. “You would find the experience most unpleasant.”

  She was definitely right on that front. I kept my mouth shut tight as more of Bathory’s jet-black hive began to spread across the floor, the bits that used to be her clothing stretching and expanding as if by magic. It rose around our ankles, slowly forming into the sheath that would keep us safe when the airlock opened and cast us out into outer space.

  At the same time, a wave of pressure built behind my eyes. Meiko’s hands on the controls had done their work, hacking the pressure level in the cramped pod to dozens of times more force than it usually required to launch. If I was a normal human, I’d have passed out by now - as it was, my android body barely held itself together. Strangely, Bathory didn’t seem fazed by it in the least.

  “Oh, God,” I growled, pulling the Xenian Queen closer. “This is really going to suck, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Bathory admitted with a smirk. “But it was you who wanted to steal your kitty back from Shay, was it not?”

  I could barely think as the tide of black chitin rolled over the two of us. It came together above our heads, turning the space where we lay into a perfect black oval. From the outside, it must have looked like a tiny seed, one that was about to be spit out of the mouth of a giant.

  “How are we supposed to see the escape pod?” I asked. The hair on the back of my neck vibrated with the pressure. “How do you even steer this thing?”

  Bathory shifted beneath me. “Like this,” she said, her back suddenly against my chest. “Hold on to me, my King. Give me your commands, and I will obey. This time, at least. Only because the life of one of your subjects is at stake!”

  Subjects? I thought.

  Then the pod released and I couldn’t think about anything for a little bit besides the terror.

  The world blurred as we were shot out of Gamma Spire, the pressure pushing down so hard that I nearly blacked out. It reminded me of the time my family went to the Kennedy Space Center as a kid and tried the g-force simulator, only this was real. I was in space, hanging onto an alien succubus, and I had no idea how I was going to save the tattooed, pierced catgirl who was trying to escape my prison.

  God, life is great sometimes, I thought, my hands tensing on Bathory’s shoulders.

  “Here,” she growled, nodding at a spot near the apex of the cocoon. As she did it, the chitin began to thin, melting away to other sections of our shield. After a few seconds I could see stars through it, pinpricks of light that guided the way. Then Alpha Spire appeared as the top of our makeshift craft went semi-transparent, allowing me to see where we were going.

  Suddenly the spire was upside down. We were rotating, spinning out of control. Without thinking, I grabbed Bathory’s arm on the spinward side and gave it a squeeze, like this was a video game.

  With a little hum, Bathory sent more of her ‘hive’ to that side of the cocoon. It stretched out like a tree branch, balancing the vessel. When I saw it on one side of our craft, I let out a whoop of recognition. She’d just built a wing.

  “Let’s make another one of those,” I said, my lips against her ear. “Balance the weight on them when I squeeze you up or down, Bathory. This is the craziest fucking plane I think anyone’s ever built, but I might just be able to fly it…”

  There was a steep learning curve, but it was literally do or die. A few squeezes, some figuring out exactly how much pressure ment ‘retract a wing’ or ‘spread it out like a fan to turn us’ and I was well on my way.

  The escape pod loomed large in my view, growing bigger by the second. Behind it was the massive bulk of Alpha Spire. The guns dotting it like barnacles on a sailing ship turned slowly as the craft approached, just waiting for it to get into range. We were going to make it, but it was going to be close. Really close.

  “How the hell are we supposed to slow this thing down?” I growled, hands tensing on Bathory’s shoulders. “We’re gonna slam right into that thing!”

  “We don’t,” the succubus hissed. “Aim for the back, where the seal is. You just hit that spot and leave the rest to me…”

  I aimed as carefully as I could, screaming with terror and exhilaration as we shot through space like some kind of crazy bullet. As the escape pod filled my view, vines emerged on the peripheral - jet black tentacles of Bathory’s hive, lashing themselves to the tiny craft. They slowed us down until we were matching speed, hanging off the back and throwing the whole thing slightly off-course. The vines tightened, pushing us against the rear of the escape pod. Bathory’s hive grew over the back like a hood, forming a tight seal against the vacuum of space.

  “Let me go,” Bathory growled, twisting. Her claws flashed in the darkness, slashing the seal of the escape pod in three quick strokes. There was a whoosh of air as the pod vented into our cocoon, but the pressure levels held. No leaks.

  We climbed inside. The pod was barely bigger than Bathory’s cocoon: it was like hooking a broom closet to another broom closet. Except that sitting in the other one was Nova, staring out the window with tears streaming down her face. Her mouth dropped open at the sight of us, her eyes bulging out of her head.

  “What the fuck!?” In an instant, her back was against the window. “Warden? What the hell are you doing here?”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders. “I came to get you,” I growled, tugging her out of her alcove. Without waiting for a response, I threw her over my shoulder like some kind of caveman. Her long, smooth legs kicked against my stomach, her shapely ass filling my view. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Wait - let me go!” Nova buffeted my back with her tiny, furry fists. “I have to get back to Vincent!”

  “If we don’t get out of this pod in the next thirty seconds, Shay is going to blow it into tiny bits of space dust,” I said, giving Nova’s ass a slap. “And your boyfriend never loved you. You know that deep down, Nova.”

  There was a pause. Then Nova started to sob. I felt hot tears against my shoulder as the catgirl cried, her lithe body shaking like a leaf.

 

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