Page 52 of Alien Healer’s Mate

“No, you’re not.”

He spun around at the sound of the voice. Rivaan Z’Saai stood in the doorway, warriors filing into the chamber at his back.

“Your papers on her were remarkable,” Z’Saai said. “I read them three times. I told you that much, but I didn’t tell you what I found.”

“Delilah,” Kellat said, keeping his eyes on Z’Saai. “Ignore him, I’m getting you out.”

“Touching but incorrect.” Z’Saai took a step closer. “The adaptive regeneration you spoke about, V’Raav. You called the neural reconstruction a healing response. But it wasn’t. It was an inheritance.”

“What do you mean by ‘inheritance’?” he sneered at Z’Saai. Anything to keep him talking. Every word… every step brought him closer to the reach of Kellat’s blades.

Z’Saai smiled. “My clan descends from the same line as your female. The old clan that built the drakeen link-band technology. We used a quirk of our genetics to bond with the machines instead of merely piloting them” He took another step forward. “Stupidly, my forbears passed that information to the empire when we should have kept it for ourselves, consolidated our power within the empire as the B’Kaar did. But we still have our genetics, so I took another look. The DNA tweak for the drakeen-link was not the only thing there. There were others. Just dormant. Waiting for the right key.”

“What does that have to do with Delilah? She’s human.” His voice was flat as he measured the distance. Four strides… Three, if he pushed off the bars… and he could have his hands around Z’Saai’s throat. One snap and this would all be over.

“I read about her in your paper.” Z’Saai paced like a player on a stage, clearly enjoying his moment. “Her pathways rebuilt themselves instead of scarring. That’s not healing, Healer. That’s one of the dormant elements surging to life.”

Kellat bit back his groan. All those nights he’d spent hunched over her scans trying to work out what was going on and all those hours in the lineage archives seeing if he could find an answer, if something similar had happened before. It had, but he hadn’t been able to find it because it was locked into a clan database. So he’d documented it all, and this draanthic had read it in his paper like it was a gods-damned menu.

“So?” He shrugged. “That’s just genetics. Characteristics can lie dormant then re-express generations later.” Hundreds of generations in Delilah’s case, but that didn’t make it any less true.

“So I’m building a new variant of the link-band. Not the pale imitation that the empire uses. My link doesn’t share; it overrides.” Pride crept into Z’Saai’s voice. “My warriors are linked permanently to their machines. Pilot and frame, fused into one perfect organism. They can’t desert. They can’t be captured or turned. The link holds until death.”

Even through the rage, the healer in Kellat flinched. That wasn’t how drakeen worked. The link was severable by design, and had been severable for thousands of years… because pilots died and machines were destroyed, so no sane person welded a living being to a machine in that way. What Z’Saai had built was a perversion of the entire technology, and he described it with the pride other males used to describe their offspring.

“Still not seeing what the draanth this has to do with my female.”

Where the hells was Amaelii? Kellat knew better than to try and look past Z’Saai and tip him off that he wasn’t alone.

“Her DNA carries the markers I need to push the variant further than the old clan ever dreamed.” Z’Saai glanced at Delilah in the cage the way a farmer glanced at livestock. “She and her daughters will breed generation after generation with the new link DNA, and create the army I need.”

Close enough. Kellat moved.

His fist took Z’Saai in the throat. It was a bad angle, the blow half-formed, but that didn’t matter. Z’Saai staggered back, hands over his throat as he choked. Kellat’s knee snapped up into his gut and folded him in half.

Z’Saai’s warriors surged forward, surrounding him. He put his elbow through the first one’s jaw and his heel through the second one’s knee, shoving them out of the way to grab Z’Saai again.

Yanking the male up by the robes, he hit him. And hit him again over and over, until blood slicked his knuckles… the mask of the calm, professional healer dissolved under rage.

This male had threatened his female, had taken his female, and the primal male part of Kellat wouldn’t be appeased until the deck under his feet ran with his blood.

Somewhere behind him Delilah screamed, but he couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to stop.

He didn’t realize she was screaming a warning.

The drakeen came out of the dark, hitting him from three sides at once.

Metal cracked his ribs and something deep gave way. He groaned, knocked away from Z’Saai, and an arm hooked around his throat. He was hauled backward, his spine bending wrong as agony flooded every cell in his body. A third one swept his legs from under him, and Kellat went down under the weight of the machine, crushing the air out of him.

The deck was cold against his cheek as he roared, trying to buck the machine off. But it was no good, he is vision narrowed to a grey tunnel with Delilah at the end of it. Her mouth opened in a scream as darkness crowded the edges of his vision.

He’d come for her, and now he was dying because of it and she couldn’t do anything but watch. The bay stank of machine coolant and hot metal, the overhead lights throwing everything into hard-edged shadows, and she could see every detail of him dying.

“No! Kellat, no!!”

Screaming, she yanked at the bars, trying to tear them free through sheer force of will as not twenty feet away machines were crushing the life out of the man she loved. Horror filled her as three of them piled on top of him as he struggled beneath them. One had a leg around his throat, and his face had gone a terrible, grey-purple color.

“No, no, no! Stop! I’ll do whatever you want!” She screamed at Z’Saai, desperate to save Kellat.