Page 36 of Tamed By the Alien Warlord
He stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “You want me tonotkill him?”
“Yet,” I stress. “We tail him. We get the evidence.Thenyou can paint the walls with his internal organs.”
He considers it, then nods once. “Deal. But if he touches you...”
“I’ll break his fingers myself.”
Nakamura moves toward the back of the auction hall, likely heading to the payment enclave. We follow, shadows in a den of monsters.
I squeeze Lanz’s hand once. He squeezes back.
The hunt has begun.
CHAPTER 16
GEORGIA
Nakamura’s ship sits at the edge of Gur’s spaceport like a predator in wait—black-plated and bristling with retrofitted weaponry. Even at rest, it hums with menace. A refurbished Coalition cruiser, decades old, but clearly enhanced with bleeding-edge tech.
I run my hand along a heat-scarred panel near the cargo ramp, grimacing. “He bought this thing on the black market. Probably paid in blood and backdoor biotech.”
Lanz steps up beside me, his single arm twitching at his side. “This ship’s capable. Comparable to the Ravager. I’d rather not fight her in the sky. Not until we fill the gaps in our crew.”
I glance at him, catching the weariness in his expression that he tries so hard to bury. “So we hit him now. While it’s still docked.”
His growl is pure agreement.
We’re in and out within the hour, hidden under cloaking shrouds and pirate stealth tech. Lanz picks a crew of ten Reapers—lean, lethal, and far too eager. I tag along, clutching a datapad loaded with hacking subroutines and every dirty trick I’ve learned in a decade of journalism espionage.
The corridors of Nakamura’s ship are quieter than expected. No sentries posted. No alarms. Just the hum of the life support system and the low murmur of data lines pulsing through the walls.
Too quiet.
We split. Reapers peel off to create diversions—smashing conduits, locking down corridors, disabling automated defenses with precise bursts of plasma.
I make my way to the ship’s central console hub, the databank glittering in the low blue glow like a treasure chest. The security is sophisticated, but not too sophisticated. A few subroutines, a dummy handshake protocol, and I’m in.
Thousands of records flow across my screen.
Shipping manifests.
Patient logs.
Experimental trials.
Each one stamped with the Helios Combine insignia.
Each one naming a victim.
Humans. Hybrids. Aliens.
Some marked "salvageable." Others "expired."
I snap a full copy and send a compressed archive to a hidden node in the Holonet, just in case.
Just as I finish the upload, a distant boom rattles the walls. Gash’s voice cuts in over comms—half-laughing, half-cursing. “They know we’re here.”
“Good,” I mutter. “Let’s burn their house down.”
