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  And waited.

  The sun climbed even higher overhead and sweat tickled the back of Peyton’s neck. She wished she had something to keep her entertained, a game on her communicator, a particularly tricky piece of tech to figure out, or even just conversation with one of her companions, but they needed to remain silent and ready. They could get their signal at any moment, and even if they didn’t, they needed to be prepared in case the enemy spotted them.

  She hated the tension, the waiting, she just wanted this to be done, no matter how terrifying the prospect of her responsibility was.

  She glanced at Dryce and their eyes met. He offered a small smile and though it shouldn’t have done much, it steadied her, reminded her that she wasn’t alone in this. She still had a lot to talk about with that man, everything to figure out. What did it mean to be mated? Where did their relationship go? Were they dating? Did he love her? Did he wish he hadn’t met her?

  Okay, maybe she wouldn’t ask all of that. She didn’t need him to know just how insecure she was when it came to him, not on top of her insecurity about saving the planet.

  Ha! If she rewound the clock a month and told her past self what was about to happen, that Peyton would have laughed in her face.

  Dryce grabbed her hand and placed a kiss on her knuckles, crashing through all her doubts and landing his place securely in her heart. Yeah, they needed to talk, but if he kept looking at her like that talking would be the last thing on her mind when she got him alone.

  And out of danger.

  Even knowing this was his job, she really wished that he could stay out of the line of fire.

  Around her the soldiers came to attention even though she hadn’t heard or seen anything. Then Toran made a gesture and it all became clear.

  The signal had come in. It was time to move.

  AS THE REST OF THE team moved on, Dryce waited for the second signal. He and Peyton couldn’t move forward until most of the hostiles were pulled away from the weapon. It would be no use to charge in quickly and be cut down by blaster fire before they had a chance to do what they were there to do.

  Peyton’s eyes were closed and her bottom lip trembled. Her honey skin had gone a bit pale and she looked like one harsh wind would shatter her into pieces. He wished he could remove her from this danger, that this responsibility didn’t lay heavy on her shoulders. But she was their best hope for survival.

  And she hadn’t fallen apart yet. Yes, she’d wished this was someone else’s responsibility, and she feared that she wouldn’t live up to the task. But she was here now and still standing, and only the strongest of people could do that despite their fears.

  He believed in her with his entire being, and not only because she was his mate. Their bond was a blessing, but her intelligence was all her own and it was an honor to watch her work. Or it would be. And Dryce would do everything he could to see her safely through it.

  A red light flashed on his watch, their sign to move.

  He waved Peyton forward and she followed close behind him. She didn’t carry a weapon, having never been trained with anything that might be useful. That didn’t matter. If Toran and the rest of the team were doing their job, his blaster would be more than sufficient to see this through.

  Yormas’s weapon was the size of a building and as Dryce and Peyton cleared the tree line it became apparent that it actually was a building. Two Wreetans ran out of an entrance, both carrying las rifles and heading towards where trouble brewed.

  Dryce pulled out a scanner and pointed it at the weapon, calibrating it for living beings. Whatever the weapon was made of messed with his signal. The scan returned an inconclusive result. Dryce tilted the screen towards Peyton so she could read it and heard her hiss out a breath. He wanted to look back and reassure her, but he had to keep his eyes open for the enemy.

  They waited another minute, but no one else came running out of the building. “If anyone is in there, they’re likely to stay put,” Dryce murmured. “But the main forces are engaged now.”

  Peyton let out a breath. “Then let’s get this done.”

  They moved forward cautiously, Dryce’s scanner active but still only offering inconclusive results. It started blinking and protesting the closer they got to the weapon and when they were only a few meters from the entrance Dryce turned it off. If it wasn’t going to work, he didn’t need the distraction.

  Unlike the warehouse from the day before, there was no forcefield to keep them from entering.

  He led Peyton inside, his blaster drawn and senses on high alert. Sound echoed all around them, a symptom of the metal walls that towered overhead. The entire thing was made of metal, with a catwalk along the ceiling to access several hubs, and every few meters there were recesses in the walls. Dryce couldn’t tell what anything was for, but he never would have guessed this place was a weapon. It looked more like a space ship than anything else.

  “This place kind of looks like my first apartment,” Peyton admitted. Her voice carried with the strange acoustics and Dryce tensed, but no one came after them for the sound.

  He hoped that meant they were alone, but he didn’t dare believe it. “What are we looking for?” There was no convenient red button that said “SHUT DOWN WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION” and he hoped Peyton had better ideas.

  She pulled a small device out of her pocket and it took Dryce a moment to realize it was the piece of tech that had been recovered from Brakley Varrow’s belongings. “I need to hook this up somewhere. Once we’re connected I can get to work. Look for a junction box, or some place with exposed wiring.”

  He was too busy looking for the enemy to do that, but he kept alert while Peyton looked. There was nothing on the ground floor, but when his denya tilted her head up towards the catwalk her eyes narrowed. Thin shafts of sunlight came in through openings above their heads and one seemed to illuminate one of the hubs up there.

  She pointed. “That looks like a good bet.”

  Dryce didn’t like it. They’d make a lot of noise climbing one of the ladders and they’d be exposed while he needed at least one hand to haul himself up. “You’re sure there’s nothing down here?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.” Peyton took another look around, but she was already shaking her head before she’d finished her scan. “If anyone can just waltz in like this, it would make sense not to keep the important stuff on the ground, right? Not to mention the risk of weather or wild animals.”

  On that he had to agree. So Dryce led her to the nearest ladder and let her climb first. They hadn’t seen anyone on the catwalk which was completely exposed. The bigger danger came from someone below.

  Peyton climbed quickly, but not quietly. She clambered up and Dryce gave her a minute before heading up behind her, keeping one hand on his blaster just in case someone showed up. It meant that he couldn’t go as fast as he would have liked, but they weren’t completely vulnerable to a threat.

  And it was the right move. He’d only moved up three rungs when a shout rang out. Without saying anything, Peyton scrambled up faster, abandoning any pretense of stealth. Dryce swung around and started firing, wincing as a blast hit the wall of the weapon and set wires sizzling. He took his finger off the trigger, quickly realizing that he could set this thing off if he wasn’t careful.

  Above him Peyton grunted, but he couldn’t spare her a glance when he saw a figure covered in body armor coming out of what he’d thought was just another recess in the wall. Dryce aimed his blaster and shot, even knowing it was no match for the armor. And he was right. All it did was tell the hostile where he and Peyton were.

  Rather than defend his position on the ladder he jumped off the three rungs and rolled, coming up right at the feet of the armor clad soldier. Hand to hand combat was almost pointless. But body armor could withstand fists, not claws. He kept shooting his blaster, more as a distraction than with any hope of making contact, while the claws of his left hand slid out, wickedly long and sharp, a throwback to a time before Detyens had been
civilized.

  He dug those claws in against the joint of the armor and grinned when something shorted in the mechanics. The hostile let out a grunt and aimed a punch to Dryce’s jaw, but with him so close the angle was off and it glanced off his shoulder. Fire radiated down the limb and he dropped the blaster and his claws were nearly wrenched out of the hostile’s armor. But Dryce held on. If he didn’t fell the enemy, Peyton was defenseless. He couldn’t let that happen. He would not fail his mate.

  No longer worrying about his blaster, he swiped at the armor with his right hand as well, digging in around the neck and looking for weak points. He was all wrapped around the soldier and while it meant he took blows that battered his ribs and were sure to leave his skin bruised and sickly, the soldier didn’t have enough leverage to do real damage.

  And there was nothing that could make Dryce let go.

  Finally, a clasp of the helmet released with a hiss and Dryce managed to sneak his claws in, digging into soft flesh and making blood spurt.

  And now the soldier took him seriously. He bucked and managed to throw Dryce off, kicking him until something cracked and Dryce could taste the metallic hint of blood in his mouth. It didn’t matter. He had to get this done.

  He threw himself back at the soldier, doing his best to break through the armor that was already coming off in patches. And the man under the armor was fading fast, his blood pouring out of the wound that Dryce had managed to make. It might not have been fatal if the man had time to get to a medic. But with his heart pumping blood out every second, the man didn’t have much longer.

  His next punch was too light to do any damage, and when Dryce backed up two steps the soldier tried to follow. But he stumbled. And then fell. Blood pooled around him, but Dryce waited. He wasn’t going to turn his back until he was sure the enemy was dead.

  And once that was done, he wasted no time climbing up the ladder and joining Peyton, keeping enough distance so she wouldn’t be sickened by all the blood.

  She looked over at him and her face held such defeat the he looked for the wound, but she was completely unharmed. Her hand rested on the device she’d brought from the lab and her head was bowed. “It’s not working,” she lamented. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Peyton couldn’t pay any attention to what Dryce was doing on the ground floor. It was her time to shine. But when she found her way into the system, it quickly became clear that anything she’d hoped to accomplish wouldn’t be happening. All of her research counted on the device using Wreetan, Oscavian, or Earth technology, and the only reason she’d thrown Earth into the mix was because it was her home. She’d been almost certain it would depend on Wreetan engineering, since that was where Yormas was from.

  What she was looking at now was like nothing she’d ever seen before. She did a scan, but whatever was in the walls was messing with her equipment. Her only hope was that the trigger she’d turned into a kill switch might do the job.

  But when she pressed the button nothing happened.

  Dryce clambered up the ladder, covered in blood and looking like he’d just crawled home from battle. But there was still hope in his eyes, a hope that Peyton couldn’t let grow. She waved the kill switch at him as her shoulders sagged. “It’s not working. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Dryce opened his mouth as if to offer words of encouragement, but quickly snapped it shut. He knew what she was capable of, and he had to know that if she said it couldn’t be done, then it couldn’t.

  But there had to be another way. They hadn’t come this far just to know the planet was doomed. Even if all Peyton could do was kill whatever trigger mechanisms there were so Yormas was forced to come down to the planet again and trigger the damn thing himself, that would be better than nothing.

  She stood, taking a deep breath and glancing out the opening near the roof. A green scent of the wood outside filtered in, momentarily blocking out all the metal around her. But it wasn’t the trees that caught her attention. She could just make out a corner of the teleportation pad from where she was standing, but it was enough and a light went off in her mind.

  “That could work,” she muttered. “Maybe.” Teleporters were tricky beasts and prone to failure when not calibrated correctly and constantly monitored. But Peyton just wanted the thing off her planet. She didn’t care where the bomb went after that.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. She didn’t want to doom another civilization by sending it to the wrong place, but if the teleporter was already programmed to send things to somewhere in Yormas’s fleet, she couldn’t feel too bad about returning their weapon to them and letting it wreak its havoc.

  “What are you thinking?” Dryce asked. She must have been quiet for some time as she went over the variables.

  It wasn’t difficult to reprogram a teleporter, and from the look of the landing base she was willing to bet that Yormas was using a type that was mass produced in the Oscavian Empire. Peyton had seen plenty of those.

  She could do this.

  “We need to get out there.” She nodded out the window.

  Dryce came to stand at her side and looked out, trying to see what she’d seen. “Back in the forest? Why?”

  “Not the forest. I can’t disable this bomb, so I’m going to make it go away.”

  They didn’t waste any time talking after that. Dryce led them back down the ladder but there were no hostile forces to meet them. The forest seemed quiet around them and Peyton hoped that was because the Detyen team had been successful in their mission.

  Once they were close to the teleporter she pulled out her gear and fashioned a connection, smashing through the basic security with ease. She preferred to deal with physical products rather than hacking through code, but she had skills enough to change some basic coordinates to get this done. The Oscavians knew how to make a user friendly device and she would have been grateful to them if there weren’t a bunch of them intent on destroying the planet.

  The sound of footsteps cut through her concentration and she looked over to see the Detyen team making their way back. They were covered in dirt and one of Dru’s arms seemed to be hanging unnaturally, but they were all accounted for.

  “The hostiles?” Dryce asked, scanning behind them to make sure no one else was coming.

  “Taken care of,” Toran confirmed. “What’s the status?”

  Peyton sat back on her heels and rolled her neck from one side to the other, trying to work out the kinks. “I can’t disable it. I don’t recognize the engineering, it’s too alien. I’m reprogramming the teleporter. If all goes as planned, we’ll be sending this little chunk of forest out into space where Yormas can deal with it.”

  “And that will work?” Kayde asked. “Could he just send it back?”

  “Maybe,” Peyton conceded. She was too much of a scientist to rule out the possibility just to offer comfort to her team. “But it will likely be damaged, possibly beyond repair, and if it gets exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space, it could further disrupt whatever makes it function. Either way, it won’t be a direct threat to Earth anymore. At worst I’m buying some time.” And she hoped it was more than that, hoped that this would be enough to quell the alien threat. She wanted her planet and her people to be safe, and she didn’t want a weapon like this to exist anymore. No one needed this much destructive power.

  “I’ll trust your judgment,” said Toran.

  “Then I need all of you to get back. You need to be at least a kilometer away from this thing when I trigger the teleporter. I should have it configured correctly, it should just take the weapon, but since it’s no longer directly working off the teleportation pad, something could go wrong.” If Peyton had a few hours, or preferably days, to get things right, she’d know the exact coordinates that would be sent. But even with an easy Oscavian system, she was still putting it together mostly with ingenuity and hope.

  The request didn’t seem to faze Toran. “Very well. Let’s head out.” Bu
t they didn’t move immediately and Peyton realized they were waiting for her.

  “I’ll need to stay here,” she said. “I should be safe, but I can’t do this remotely.” She could risk herself, risk being transported into the black of space or onto an enemy ship, but she wasn’t going to risk the team.

  “I’m staying with you,” Dryce said before anyone could object to her announcement.

  She’d expected it. Peyton didn’t want to put her mate in danger, but a part of her was grateful to have him at her side. If he was here, nothing could go wrong, right? “Dryce stays,” she agreed. “But the rest of you need to go. Please.” She wasn’t in charge, she knew Toran or any of the others could countermand her declaration, but she was willing to beg. There was no use risking them all.

  Toran gave Dryce a hard stare before returning his gaze to her and giving a single nod. “Give us a few minutes to clear the distance. We’ll expect you at the ship when this is done.”

  “We’ll be there,” Dryce promised.

  Peyton hoped she could make him keep his word.

  The team left, leaving her and Dryce alone with the teleportation pad. Peyton went over the settings three times, and then a fourth and fifth for good measure. She’d relied on a mapping application on her communicator to grab the coordinates of the weapon. It wasn’t exact, but she wasn’t too concerned about cutting off bits and pieces if that ended up happening. Whatever destruction it could do once it was strewn in pieces across land and space was nothing compared to what it would do if she just left it sitting there.

  And now there was nothing to do but send it away.

  The team had been given plenty of time to make their retreat. Peyton counted down another minute in her head just in case. Then she looked over at Dryce and offered an over confident smile. “Ready for this?”

  He nodded and placed his hand on her shoulder in a show of support.