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Aliens who showed up on Earth without permission always had something to hide.
And now, so did she.
“Magdalena, where are you?” Zirkov’s deep voice bounced off the warehouse’s metal walls. He called her Magdalena, which he only did in relaxed situations to annoy her. During ops, he called her Marshal Walsh or Maggie.
That meant whatever happened here, Zirkov didn’t know about it.
Maggie opened her mouth to yell out to him, but a pain in her head stopped her. That and an inner voice telling her she couldn’t let him see her covered in blood, with a dead og’dal beneath her.
She wouldn’t drag Zirkov into this mess. He already thought of her as an incompetent female simply for being human. Zyanthan warriors leaned toward arrogance. Zirkov was a prime example.
Maggie wiped the bloody blade against the og’dal’s pants, then reached down to hide it in her boot. The blade slid into her knife sheath… heremptysheath. What the fuck? She never left home without her boot knife.
“Come on, Magdalena, enough of these games.” Zirkov sounded closer.
Shit!Maggie wove her way through the rows of old forklifts stored in the warehouse.
“Drekk,” Zirkov swore nearby as she wove through the maze of abandoned machinery. “Stenikov, ovis eben nissik og’dal vozz. Maggie avuth caz.”
Even with her limited knowledge of zyanthan, she could tell Zirkov had discovered the body. She had to escape the warehouse unnoticed and devise an alibi… for murdering an alien she didn’t even know.
* * *
ZIRKOV
Zirkov checked his comm again.The message he’d received from Stenikov said he’d tracked Maggie to the upper portion of Terminal Island, a mostly artificial land mass between the San Pedro portion of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Unlike the warehouses around Fish Harbor, the buildings at this end of the island hadn’t been used in decades.
Maggie had no active cases that required her presence here, at least none that Zirkov knew about. She worked for Earth Intelligence in the DAA, not for Zirkov. As commander of Galactic Intelligence Sector 7, he had a duty to supply Earth Intelligence with any information affecting Earth’s security. Which meant his marshals had to comply with Earth’s laws, or the Department of Alien Affairs would rescind GI7’s access here.
Zirkov turned the dead og’dal over, looking for clues that Maggie had been here. Anything more than her scent. Fortunately, he found nothing. One missing marshal and one dead og’dal. He didn’t like the narrative the DAA would build.
Or the one forming in his head.
For seven months, a mole had been leaking information about witness locations to the Brotherhood and og’dal slavers. No one person had access to the confidential information leaked. Except Zirkov… and Maggie.
The female he watched from the corner of his eyes every chance he had would not betray her own people. Since the day he met her, he’d seen nothing but honor in her.
“I lost Marshal Walsh,” Stenikov reported over the comm.
“I don’t see her either,” Zirkov replied, his worry starting to distract him. He liked knowing where she was, that she was safe. “But I found a dead og’dal.”
“Drekk, that’s not good.”
“No, it isn’t,” Zirkov agreed. The situation continued to decline, and he couldn’t share all the details with his marshals. Not without risking Maggie.
“I’ll be at your location in a few minutes.”
Stenikov had experience in both war zones and peaceful worlds, but he’d lost Maggie not long after she’d boarded a bus that stopped a mile from this site. Zirkov wondered if she knew he’d assigned Stenikov to follow her and that he’d posted the warrior outside her apartment building. She might have taken measures to lose Stenikov. Equally probable, Stenikov lost her due to his unfamiliarity with Earth.
Either way, Zirkov needed to move faster, be smarter, and find a way to stop whatever the drekk was happening… all while protecting Maggie.
He bent down to inspect the body. The og’dal’s throat had been cut. Though Maggie carried a knife in her boot, he’d never seen her draw or use it. She favored the semi-automatic Glock Earth Intelligence issued to all its agents. Whoever killed this og’dal didn’t hesitate slicing across his carotid artery. The male bled out in ten, fifteen seconds.
“I checked the perimeter,” Stenikov said as he approached from behind. “No sign of her or anyone else. Any idea who the og’dal is?”
“No.”
“Are you sure Marshal Walsh came this way, Commander?”
