Page 12 of Alien Mercenary’s Wife (Lathar Mercenaries: Warborne #7)

R ust and diesel fumes drifted between the containers.

A truck rumbled somewhere in the distance, the sound of its engine echoing off the corrugated metal walls around her.

Reese moved between the containers with the same caution she would a minefield as the motors of the exo-legs hummed softly against the sides of her knees.

She crouched against the side of a container, keeping herself low as she looked around before moving again.

The co-ordinates on the message had brought her to a storage location on the far side of the city’s industrial sector.

Industrial buildings blocked sections of her view, their windows flashing with reflected light as she moved between the machinery.

She'd been tracking the surveillance teams following her for twenty minutes now, and the picture they painted wasn't encouraging. Their routes would have looked random to normal people, but Reese easily recognized a pattern when she saw one.

Sheesh, who the hell did they think they were hunting? Some civilian straight off the streets.

Oh, they were good, she’d give them that. But they weren’t good enough to fool her. The problem was that they were good enough to make getting the hell out of here complicated, especially if her legs decided to play silly sods.

She should walk away, disappear into the urban maze of the city, and find another way to survive that didn't involve walking into what was about to become a trap. She should… but that'd just reset the clock, and a day, a week… she’d be back somewhere like this, trying again.

Besides, someone had answered her message. Someone who knew the authentication codes from her unit. She worried her lower lip with her teeth.

Fifty-fifty odds it was genuine help versus another trap. But fifty percent was infinitely better than the zero percent she faced everywhere else.

She checked the time and grimaced. Time to get moving. The co-ordinates from the message led to the big warehouse ahead of her. Sliding out of cover, she approached slowly, carefully, using the industrial debris around her as cover.

She was halfway there when her left hand seized without warning, fingers curling into a claw.

”Fuck it,” she hissed between her teeth at the pain, trying to straighten her fingers with the other hand as she massaged feeling back into them.

The implant was getting worse. It wasn’t just paralysis anymore, but it had evolved into active rebellion... Crap crap crap. She really hoped the message wasn’t a setup. She had to get this done now. Soon, even the exo-legs wouldn't be enough to keep her mobile.

She was positioning herself to observe the loading dock when movement caught her eye. Without pausing, she slid into the deeper shadows and froze. Someone was following her, and it wasn't any of the surveillance teams she'd been tracking. They were ahead and to the left, not behind her.

This was different. A woman, moving with fluid confidence. She wore civilian clothes chosen for mobility over concealment, but the hood of her jacket was up. Smart move. No way for facial recognition to get a look at her that way.

Reese leaned back, using a pane of glass from an old window leaning against the container opposite to get a better look at her pursuer.

Average height, with dark hair, and a bearing that screamed military background, despite the casual clothes.

Reese frowned. There was something familiar about the woman’s movement, something that nagged at the edges of her memory.

The woman was closing the distance, but not aggressively.

Reese palmed her knife in her good hand. It wasn’t much against serious firepower, but it was better than trying to negotiate with empty hands.

Sliding from her hiding spot, she made sure the woman saw her and then led her deeper into the maze of containers, away from the main surveillance net.

If this were another hunter, she'd isolate her and use the element of surprise.

If it was help... well, genuine allies wouldn't mind a little paranoia in someone who’d almost gotten blown up yesterday.

The woman followed, maintaining a professional distance while never quite losing contact. Good fieldcraft, but that familiarity kept nagging at the edge of Reese’s mind. What the fuck was it about her?

She turned the corner and ran half the length of the next container to slide into cover, turning just as the woman rounded the corner.

She stepped into a shaft of sunlight between the two containers, and Reese's world tilted sideways.

"Archer?" The name escaped as barely a whisper, disbelief and hope colliding in her chest.

The woman—Eris Archer, Tank, the best damn pilot Reese had ever had the privilege to command—smiled.

"Hey there, Captain. Wondered how long you were going to lead me on a chase."

Reese's legs nearly buckled. Tank was alive.

"Shit. They told me you were dead," she managed as she walked clear of cover, voice cracking despite her efforts to maintain command composure. "Official records said?—"

"Records say a lot of things." Tank stepped closer, her eyes scanning their surroundings with professional awareness even as genuine warmth showed in her expression.

"Got your call for help. The question is, can you move?

Because we need to extract from this area before those surveillance teams decide to tighten their net. "

Can you move? Not "are you ready?" or "when do we leave?", but "Can you move?"

Because Tank knew. She'd been a scorperio pilot just like Reese. She knew what those implants could do… had done.

"I can move," Reese said, pride making her voice steadier than she felt. The lie came easily—command training had taught her that confidence was often more important than truth when it came to maintaining unit cohesion.

"Good. Because my partner's working on a solution to our surveillance problem, but we're operating on a tight timeline."

Partner. So Tank hadn't come alone. Smart.

"A partner? There aren’t many of us left.”

Tank smiled. “He’s not one of us.”

Reese blinked. “Can we trust him?"

"With my life," Eris replied without hesitation. "And yours, if you're willing."

Reese studied her former pilot's face. Tank was telling the truth about the trust part, but there was subtext she wasn't sharing.

"Good enough for me," Reese decided. "Those teams won't maintain overwatch positions indefinitely, and I'd rather not discover what their extraction protocol looks like."

Tank grinned.

"Copy that, Captain. This way."

As they moved deeper into the industrial maze, Reese allowed herself something that might have been hope. She wasn't fighting alone anymore. Whatever came next, she'd face it with backup that had proven itself in real combat.

But it was more than that…

Tank was alive. Tank had come for her. And for the first time in months, the universe felt like it might have room for something other than failure.

The crack of boots on concrete echoed off rusted shipping containers as T'Raal pressed himself against corrugated metal, the smell of machine oil and rust thick in his nostrils.

Fifty meters ahead, two males rounded the corner of a crane housing, their movements too coordinated to be the casual workers their clothing said they were.

Their comm chatter carried on the wind, clipped and professional.

His eyes narrowed. They were getting ready to close the net.

He keyed his comm. "Tank, status."

"Inbound. About thirty seconds to your position."

He shifted his weight, double-checking his lines of sight and firing arcs. Their enemy had positioned themselves well. They’d covered all the main approaches, which would force any extraction into a narrow corridor between the container stacks. Professional work.

Footsteps approached from his left. Two sets, one lighter than the other. He turned toward the sound and?—

Draanth.

His brain shut off as the woman with Tank stepped into view behind Eris. For a moment, there was nothing but her… the sharp intelligence in her dark eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw, and the way afternoon light caught copper highlights in her dark hair.

His stomach dropped like he'd missed a step. Heat slammed through him, pooling low and urgent, as it headed straight for his cock.

Fuck. This was not the time.

Training reasserted itself with brutal efficiency.

She moved like Eris—there was something in her gait, a particular rhythm he'd noticed in Eris but never seen in other humans.

Sparky moved like the fires and explosions he loved to set, Nat moved with feline lethality, while Eric…

he was in a class of his own. But this woman was something different.

She moved with the controlled power of someone trained for something else entirely.

Scorperio pilots. That's what he was seeing—both Tank and this woman were trained to fight in massive combat mechs, the training still written in how they moved.

But she was hurt. He saw it in the careful set of her expression and the slight hitch in her left leg.

Hard lines under her pants legs said there was more than just skin underneath, and his sensitive hearing picked up the faint whir of motors.

He frowned. She was hurt, like Tank had been when she first joined the Warborne, and she was using some kind of mechanical assistance to hide it.

"Captain," Eris said, tension crackling in her voice as she scanned the surrounding containers. "I'd like you to meet T'Raal. He's?—"

The woman tilted her head toward Tank, but her gaze didn’t leave him. He approved. He was the unknown threat at the moment.

"You didn't mention when you said help that you meant a Lathar." Her voice was hard, with an undertone that suggested the Lathar ranked somewhere below intestinal parasites and were about as welcome.

He snorted. Fair enough. He didn’t like the empire either. "I'm not Lathar. I'm worse. I'm Warborne."