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Chapter Thirty
Tayla
I spent the rest of the early morning hours sobbing into my pillow, raging at myself, the world, Adreax. Anything would do. When I finally got myself together and emerged from my cabin into the daylight, I came down the hall to find Alec in the hallway, his shoulders slumped.
“The battery,” he said.
Fresh rage coursed through me. I should have known he would take it. I should have known that he would stop at nothing to destroy my work and protect his own livelihood. I was nothing to him but a steppingstone to his next payday, and I should have seen it from the very beginning.
Sick to my stomach, I ran to the airlock and made my way outside. I knew he was long gone, but that didn’t stop me from screaming.
“Adreax! You monster!” I wailed to the deserted sands all around me.
I could still see the jagged outlines of his footprints leaving the shuttle, and I had half a mind to follow them. But what would I find? If the battery was all he needed, I doubted his ship would even be there when I arrived.
And then there was the Patrol. Even from here I could see that my shouting had garnered their attention. When I squinted, I could see them huddled together, pointing in my direction as I continued to fume at my own stupidity.
“That’s fine,” I muttered to myself. “If those assholes want to come steal my research, they can have it. A lot of good it’s going to do them now with no battery and no way to access the data on the machines.”
But despite my anger, the guards’ movements were making me nervous. They looked like they were planning something, organizing in groups, and there was no mistaking the fact that I was their target. Feeling antsy, I hurried back inside and locked the door behind me.
“Alec, we need to get ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“They’re coming.”
I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that the Patrol would knock on our door shortly, and we would have to be prepared to engage with them. As far as I could tell, no new ships had landed since the night before, and nobody had mentioned any sort of translator as part of this deal with the Department of Defense. I only hoped that the people in charge had thought this all the way through. But if I knew anything about humanity or government, my guess was that I was on my own to figure this one out.
I ran through a list of options in my mind, trying to sort out what was most likely to get us through this alive and discarding any ideas that were likely to get us killed.
“Alec, get on the radio and call back to the lab. They need to know that something is going on. I don’t know what yet, but something. Now would be a good time to ask about those researchers who are supposed to be here to question us, because as far as I can tell, we’re about to be questioned by the military, instead.”
He gave me a startled look, but nodded his understanding. This was serious, and I needed him to get a move on.
As soon as he was out of my way, I set about cleaning up our workstations. Wherever I could, I disassembled equipment and packed it away. I coiled up loose wires and tucked them into storage lockers. Right now, nobody out there knew what kind of experiments we were running. This was my chance to give them only the most obvious of details. I only needed one or two tests up and running to make this convincing.
“What are you doing?” Alec hissed over his shoulder as he waited for a response on the radio.
“I’m doing what I have to do to protect myself,” I snapped.
This whole time, I had been operating under some naïve assumption that everyone else cared about what I was trying to accomplish here. With the research battery gone, Adreax had made it perfectly clear to me I was the only one who could look out for me.
That I was supposed to play along with this farce of a negotiation with no regard for my intellectual property only made that more true.
I didn’t harbor any ill will toward Alec. He was a victim of this situation as much as I, but that didn’t mean he understood what I stood to lose. I, alone, could determine how much of my research was lost in this exchange, and I meant to do everything I could to keep from losing everything I had worked for.
