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“Would the drone send a signal?”
“We know they come pick up their dead. We found that one out the hard way. Nearly killed Orze.” I glanced at her. She was staring at me, her eyes wide with worry, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to reassure her. We were fucked, and it was her fault. Himari poked around the inside of the ship like she expected it to be manned, though it wasn’t. The open space where there would have been a cabin was just a starkly empty space, and I wondered if perhaps they used it to capture prisoners. What had the AI been intending to do with my little scientist when it grabbed her, anyway?
“This place raises more questions than it answers,” she murmured, spinning in the big space. “Find anything?”
“I need to go back outside. It’s relaying a distress beacon, and we should disable that.” I pulled my axe back off my back with a sigh. “I’ll try to get it away from us a little first. If I don’t come back, you know what happened.”
She frowned, studying me for a moment, then nodded. “Come back. The other option isn’t an option. I’d miss looking at your gorgeous abs.” I glanced down at my stomach as she narrowed her eyes. “You wouldn’t have killed me the other day when Uli interrupted our fun banter, would you?”
“That’s what you call fun banter?” I asked, that smile trying to come back again. She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her brows, waiting for the answer she needed. “No. I couldn’t kill you. I couldn’t harm you in any way.”
She beamed, her eyes sparkling. “I knew it. Me in particular? Or you couldn’t kill anyone?”
“Himari. Don’t think I’m not a dangerous man,” I said firmly.
“Oh, I wouldn’t ever think that,” she said, winking.
“Why do you keep winking when you respond to something I say that’s serious?”
“Oh yeah, totally serious.” She winked again, and I grabbed her by the throat and shoved her against the side of the cabin, moving in close and sniffing her like she was prey.
“I know you grew up on Earth, where it’s all sunshine and rainbows, so this may be hard to understand, but I am a violent man and you do not want to piss me off,” I growled in her ear. She whimpered, and I felt like a bit of an ass, but she needed to know.
Setting her down, letting her stare at me wide-eyed,I turned to walk outside, taking a deep breath as I scanned the sky for invisible things, then climbing on top of the ship and yanking my axe out of the hull. The AI seemed mostly dead, but there were a few components that were still operational, and I pried them out, taking the one that was transmitting a signal away from our location before destroying it by throwing it off of a nearby cliff. I had to hope like hell that they wouldn’t backtrack and look for the rest of it, because I needed to protect Himari.
I stalked back inside and ignored her as I sat down with my communicator and started searching the software for encrypted protocols that Uli had put in there. I wanted to relay a signal, but not one that the drones would see as a threat. Himari studied me but said nothing, so apparently I had accomplished my goal and scared the hell out of her. And it was only then that I wanted her idle chitchat back.
