Chapter 217: Regretting My Decisions
"What do you mean, you lost her?" demanded Jun Li as soon as Ye’tab had contacted him. "How hard is it to keep track of a female that is half of your size?!?"
"The Istar came down through the ceiling and grabbed her before disappearing," said Da’kea through gritted teeth. The AI wasn’t wrong. It should have been impossible for something to sneak up on the five of them.
"Hold on, I’ll find her," grumbled Jun Li before the link went quiet.
"What do we do?" asked Tha’juen, looking around at the other males.
"We find her," sneered Midnight before letting out a long howl of rage. "And then we rip this queen limb from limb and bathe in her blood."
"It’s acidic, remember," pointed out Au’dtair, rolling his eyes.
"Fuck off," growled Midnight. He could feel the same rage that he felt when the three Saalistaja first boarded Jun Li, only this time was a hundred times worse. It was like every nerve was both on fire and frozen inside of him.
Standing still was killing him, but it would be stupid to take off in a random direction.
He watched Da’kea pacing back and forth as if he, too, felt that pain and need.
"Pumpkin!" blurted out Ye’tab. Looking down, he tried to find the two younglings Istars. The first one, Pumpkin, seemed to have formed a bond with Mei Xing. He should be able to find her.
The five males twisted around, trying to find the two tiny bunnies, only to discover that they had disappeared at the same time as Mei Xing. Was that their purpose? To be the distraction and target an individual for consumption?
"Bad news," said Jun Li, coming back onto the link. Ye’tab held up his hand and put Jun Li on speaker. "I can’t find Mei Xing anywhere."
"What do you mean?" demanded Midnight, his eyes flashed bright with suppressed anger. "Don’t you have a direct link with her?"
"I do," assured Jun Li. "And that is what worries me the most. I have both an internal and external tracking device on her, plus access to speak to her using the translator I installed. And even with all that, I have no way of accessing Mei Xing."
"Then we start at the bottom and work our way to the top," said Da’kea, coming to a decision.
"Wait," said Ye’tab, quickly thinking about something. "Is there a dark place in this ship?"
"The entire ship is dark; I’m afraid that you are going to have to be a bit more specific than that," responded Jun Li with more than a touch of sarcasm.
"Is there a place on the ship that doesn’t have any type of working electronics?" explained Ye’tab.
"Let me check. Sha Shou isn’t responding to me, so I have to do everything the hard way."
"Why isn’t she responding?" asked Au’dtair, his head cocked to the side. "She is the ship now, correct? So if she isn’t responding, maybe it has something to do with why Mei Xing isn’t responding either."
Jun Li hummed for a moment before disengaging the link a second time.
"We should have just blown up the ship," said Midnight, looking at Da’kea. "We could have found another ship for Sha Shou to use, but this one needs to be destroyed."
"I agree," grunted the older male with a stiff nod. "And if I had even a sneaking suspicion that there was an Istar queen and her eggs on board, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Even if my female offspring was still the one in charge of it."
"And yet, that doesn’t help us right now. We can play that game some other time. Right now, we will start on the lowest level and work our way up. There is no point in just standing around waiting for Jun Li to get back to us," interjected Au’dtair as he spun around and headed for the lift.
The others quickly followed, not wanting to be left behind.
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By the twentieth jerk up and down, I was losing the battle against my stomach. But unfortunately for me, my stomach was not the worst of it.
No, I think that the Istar injected me with something if it was even possible for her to do something like that. My limbs alternated between feeling too heavy and completely normal. My heart went from beating like crazy to completely normal. It felt like I had been poisoned by some sort of toxin, and then I felt completely normal.
My nanos. That must be the reason why I didn’t have my suit of armor on anymore; the nanos were trying to fight whatever it was in my system, and they didn’t have the ability to do both. Feeling a bit better, knowing that the alien wasn’t able to disengage my armor on her own, I tried to take in a deep breath.
Unfortunately for me, by trying to take a breath, I only ended up puking all over the place. And since I was upside down, that meant that my nose, eyes, and hair were now covered in whatever I had managed to eat at my last meal and a whole lot of water.
Just the feeling and smell of the puke make me gag and throw up again, completely unable to control myself. My eyes were screwed shut, refusing to open until I had a big bucket of water to wash my face first. I wasn’t even going to think about my hair.
Because I had my nano armor on, I had opted to leave it loose. Now, I was regretting that decision like there was no tomorrow.
When I got out of this, I would. I was going to spend a week in the shower, bleaching myself from head to toe just to make sure that I was actually clean.
I felt my stomach cramp down hard on itself, and my eyes flew open out of panic, looking around to try and find something to focus on so that I would throw up again.
I looked at the nest under me, but... I could have sworn that there were less than ten bunnies under me... so why was there now 18?!?
