Free Blood of Denebria (Star Sojourner Book 4) by Jean Kilczer Page A

grind of wheels or the whine of motors.
    Joe halted us on a ridge above a wide valley.
    Below, the BEMs' main camp.
    “Keep your thoughts down,” I told the team as we gathered beside the armored truck. A cold wind skimmed sand and whipped it against my legs. “They can't affect you with mind attacks, but they can receive your thoughts.”
    Chancey squatted and checked his stingler's ring for grains of sand that might have gotten into it. His dark skin with its curves of muscles, his tight black hair and black leather clothing reflected little light and would afford him protection on this dangerous foray.
    “What about you?” Wolfie said to me. “Can they make a grab for
your
mind and control you?” He flicked a glance at my stingler. His bony face, his sunken chest and scraggly light hair, gave him the look of a scarecrow in deep shadows.
    I shifted position. “If I feel an intrusive probe that's liable to take over my mind, I'll hand you my weapons.”
    Wolfie glanced at Joe. “I say we disarm him now. We don't need a loose cannon.”
    Reika hooked her thumbs behind the straps of her backpack. Her cheeks rounded with a smirk as she peered up at Wolfie “Why don't we just feed him to your wild relatives while we're at it, Wolfie? You'd send him into battle unarmed?”
    “He's got us for protection,” Wolfie said.
    “What's your take on this, Chancey?” Joe asked.
    Chancey stood up and holstered his stingler. “Can you give the tag a guarantee,” he asked Wolfie, “that you'll be around to protect him?”
    Huff sat on his haunches beside me. I worried about him. His broad body, reflecting moonlight in a white sheen of fur, could give him away even at night. “I will guarantee my person,” he said, “that if Jules Terran friend separates his mind from his body again, I will…” He looked at me. “I will…sit on him.”
    Bat leaned against the vehicle's fender and chuckled. His pale eyes, so gentle they were almost incongruous within his broad, chiseled face, surveyed me. “Did they take over your mind,” he asked me with raised brows, “when they were interrogating you?”
    “They had no reason to.” I looked down and pushed a pebble with my boot. “They were after information, not mind control.”
    There was a pause you could have sliced with a knife. I bit my lip as I thought of Sye Kor, the demented Loranth from planet Syl' Terria. He had drawn me into his lair with powerful telepathic invasions that reduced me to a slave. I did his bidding without question, until I managed to break free. And here was a tel mind of thousands. If their combined objective was to control my mind, what chance did I have to fight them?
    Joe was watching me.
    I unstrapped my holster, took out the weapon I'd removed from the dead BEM in the ravine, and handed them both to Joe.
    “You sure about this, kid?” His lined face, beneath the white stubble, looked drawn.
    I nodded. “Wolfie's right. I could become your worst enemy.” I stared at the dark valley below, and kept my thoughts to a bare minimum. I felt pretty naked without a stingler. Those hand beam weapons had seen me through some tight spots. But the prospect of turning it on my friends was unthinkable.
    Joe slid off his backpack, opened it and stuffed the weapons inside. “
You,
” he said to Wolfie in his gravelly voice, “have just earned yourself a comrade in arms to protect with your life! Jules. He's wearing a Warrior system. I want you to stick to him like you two were joined at the hip.” He turned to Wolfie. “If your comrade is killed in action, you'd better have one helluva good reason for coming back alive!” He slung the backpack over his shoulders. “You got that?”
    Wolfie glanced at me and nodded.
    “Let's go!” Joe said.
    We drove the vehicles to the cover of outcrops on the ridge and left them parked away from each other. Joe hid the keys under clumps of sere grass. If the BEMs located one vehicle and took it or destroyed it,