Free B00BFVOGUI EBOK by John Jackson Miller Page A

they’d frequented. His chapel was the messiest of all the areas,
owing to his own habits, but the mess, and the spatters from Tellmer’s wound, had been hastily cleaned.
    It was a lesson from Kolvax’s training with the Stalkers, the Xylanx’s ruthless paramilitary: “The longer your prey
stands in ignorance of you, the mightier you become in their fears.”
    And then they had hidden using
the warren of vents and service corridors to move about the station. When the
humans left one of their number behind, Kolvax saw
the chance to act — and to learn what they were up against.
    Not
much , Kolvax concluded as he studied the pale face of the human. Hair on his head the color of sand, with a narrow nose and chin.
And thin. So thin! The Xylanx knew of humanity; from
childhood on, every Xylander learned of the great
existential threat that these creatures posed to their domain. But Kolvax wasn’t impressed in the least. “His home must be a
soft place for this thing to have lived,” he said.
    “It’s repugnant,” Rumber said. “We should kill it before it infects us with
whatever makes them waste away like that.”
    “Later,” Kolvax
said. He slapped a powerful hand on the human male’s shoulder and lifted him. The
man howled, and Kolvax kneed him in the stomach. That
stopped the howling but not the noise. The creature whimpered and mewled,
clutching his midsection.
    Kolvax’s followers, clearly nauseated,
held their captive’s arms. Kolvax ripped the headset
from the bewildered human and crushed it in his gloved hand. Then the badge
caught his eye.
    “I know this symbol,” Kolvax said. “It’s issued by the Signatory Systems. I
gutted a few of their other members before the Dominium withdrew us from the
wider galaxy. Evidently, they’ve let the humans in.” He stared at it. “They’ve
advanced faster than I would have thought.”
    As Kolvax
started to pull off the trader’s badge, the eldest surviving member of his
party spoke up. “It grows warmer,” Liandro said,
looking worriedly at a gauge. “They have control of the environmental systems
again.”
    “We take him,” Kolvax said. He looked to his followers. “The Xylanx have a destiny. We have all sought Forrah Glay, the great unknown.
This human’s coming is proof we were right — and a sign of the danger that awaits
us all if we fail to act.”
    He grabbed the human by his slick
and disgusting hair. “ You’re the
sign,” Kolvax snarled at the terrified being. “And
I’m taking you back to our people — now! ”
***
    Jamie was no xenobiologist.
He wasn’t even slightly interested in the subject. Documentarians had gone wild
in the days after first contact, recording millions of hours about what existed
out there; some people were really into it. Jamie thought it was all noise. The
beings that were out there weren’t anything he could relate to at all.
    There were no humanoids with
bumpy faces and extra arms, buxom females with exotic skin colors and
odd-shaped ears. The old entertainment programs had lied to him. Sentient life
ranged from the amorphous to the ethereal, and you could never read expressions
or body language. How did the company’s traders even have anything to work
with? Jamie had no idea.
    Jamie also had no idea what the
armored beings that carried him were, but he was sure they weren’t human. They
had the requisite limbs — well, all but the little guy — but nothing about the
powerful brutes or their odd barking language seemed familiar to him. If
humanity ever opened up trade with these people, they’d need to shop from the big
and tall section.
    At the moment, that didn’t seem a
likely prospect. Following the black-clad warrior, who was evidently their
leader, Jamie’s captors dragged him through one darkened corridor after
another. He could feel his limbs growing lighter as they ascended from level to
level; even Jamie knew that meant they were heading toward the station’s spine,
where there was no