Nepala’s end of the transmission. “Celebrating already?”

“I’m afraid some of the males have devised… creative ends for the surviving guards.” Nepala sighed, the weariness even more apparent. “I don’t approve, but I’m not going to try and stop them.”

“Probably just as well. You would do well to pick your battles carefully. It’s going to take a strong hand to make your plans work, but I know you can do it.”

“I hope so.”

The engines finished firing up, and Varga lifted the ship into the air. “I’m airborne. Expect fireworks very shortly.”

“I look forward to them. Thank you again, Varga, and please thank your mate as well.”

Nepala signed off, leaving Varga staring at the console.

His mate.

In the flurry of events that occurred since they met, he had never stopped to put a name to his relationship with Joan, but the word settled into his heart with a sure and certain knowledge. Of course she was his mate. Now all he had to do was make sure that she understood that as well.

Chapter Sixteen

Joan jerked awake, a confusing array of images rushing through her mind, but she seized on the only one that seemed to matter: Varga bleeding and falling to his knees when the whip struck him. She tried to sit up and bumped her head against a clear plastic canopy, but as soon as she moved, it began to retract. Where the hell was she? The device she had been lying on was the only object in a small white room except for a padded chair with a familiar golden figure— “George!”

He chirped enthusiastically, but when he tried to move, she could see that one of his rear legs was injured.

“Oh no,” she whispered as her eyes filled with tears. She climbed down from the bed and went to him, absently noted she felt better than she had since before she left Earth.

“What happened to you?” she asked as she carefully lifted him into her arms. “Where’s Varga? And where are we?”

“We are on Varga’s ship.” Taliane’s head peeped around the door opening, her eyes sparkling as her hair swirled with excitement.

“You mean we made it?”

“We did. And if you feel up to it, Varga is about to destroy the guards’ quarters.”

“I definitely don’t want to miss that.”

Still carrying George, she followed Taliane down the corridor and into a big, luxuriously furnished room. Everyone except Varga was gathered in front of a window that ran the length of one side of the room.

“Where’s Varga?” she asked. As happy as she was to see that everyone was on board, she wanted Varga. The memory of him bleeding still tormented her thoughts.

“He’s on the bridge,” Issar said. “Through there.”

He pointed to a door at the opposite end of the lounge and she hurried over to it, but when she reached for the control, she realized her hand was trembling. What if everything had changed now that they were free?

He was seated in the pilot’s chair, his big body covered with dirt, and she could see his exhaustion in the tired slump of the shoulders, but he was vibrantly alive. She burst into tears.

“What’s the matter? Are you still ill?” His voice was frantic even as his arms closed gently around her.

“I’m fine. Really. I just keep remembering that you were bleeding.”

He gave a relieved laugh and scooped her up, along with George, carrying them both back to his chair and settling them in his lap. “I’m very hard to damage, little bird. You didn’t need to worry.”

“I should have known,” she agreed, nestling into his warm, hard, apparently uninjured chest. “But it was the last thing I remembered. What happened?”

“I’ll tell you everything,” he promised, “but first I promised Nepala that I would blow up the guards’ quarters.”

The words took a minute to sink in, but then she gave an excited bounce. “Nepala? You mean he succeeded?”

“It sounds like it. But some of the surviving guards have holed up in their quarters. So now I’m going to expose them to life on the surface.” He pressed a series of buttons, and she leaned forward eagerly. They were hovering a few hundred feet above the ground, and she could easily distinguish both the landing field and the hangar.

Nothing seemed to happen at first, and she was about to give him a questioning look when there was a puff of smoke far below. The second followed immediately, then a third, until a row of them appeared. And then the ground simply seemed to give way, collapsing in on itself until nothing was left but a deep rocky trench.

“Wow,” she breathed, staring at the destruction in open-mouthed wonder.

“That was one of my little additions. Very satisfactory,” Varga agreed. He bent over the console for a minute, then the ground began to retreat beneath them, and she realized they were ascending. A huge sigh of relief emerged from her lips and he laughed, hugging her shoulders. “Happy to see the last of Drahana, sweetheart?”

“Very much so. But what happened? How did we get away?”

“Issar and I took care of the guards. Rummel disposed of Ahona,” he said grimly. “That bastard poisoned you.”

She shivered. “I remember my arm burning and then everything went black. That machine where I woke up—did that bed cure me?”

“It just finished the job. George here is the real savior. He licked away the poison.”

“George? You’re such a good boy.” She started to lift him up and kiss his head, but he squeaked, and she remembered his injured leg. “Is that when he got hurt?”

“No, that happened when he attacked Baahy,” Varga said grimly.

“I don’t understand. Where did Baahy come from?”

“He was waiting here at the ship.

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