Thresha leapt into the air high above Letho and tackled a Mendraga in the hatch, slamming him onto his back. A blast from the Mendraga’s own rifle, quickly snatched from his grasping hands, silenced him.

“What’s she doing, Letho?” Saul shouted between shots from his gun. There was an uncharacteristic tinge of alarm in his voice that set off Letho’s own concern. “What the hell’s she doing in that ship?”

“She’s just taking care of business, Saul,” Letho shouted.

One of the Mendraga fired, and its aim was true. Letho staggered back, blood welling from a wound in the thick meat of his shoulder.

“GRAAAAAH!” Letho roared like a Tarsi and crouched down low, then launched himself into the air, impossibly high and with a kinetic force that would make a ballistic missile envious, if missiles were capable of emotion. When he came down, he planted his feet on the Mendraga and rode atop him like a waveboard as the lifeless creature skidded across the dusty earth. Then he leapt again, raising Saladin over his head, and brought it down in a terrible arc that split another unfortunate Mendraga from head to toe.

Letho felt a few bullets whip past him, and he wheeled around to look at Saul. The man grinned and offered Letho a mock salute. A gagging sound drew Letho’s attention, and he turned to see a large Mendraga clutching his throat. A menacing knife dropped from the creature’s unfeeling hands as he collapsed.

Letho and Saul scanned the area for more targets and found that they had won the battlefield. They moved toward one another, Abraxas’s ship hovering over them.

“We need to get up there and help Thresha!” Letho shouted, his voice barely audible over the roar of the enemy ship’s engines.

“No way!” Saul shouted. “She got herself up there, she can get her damn self down! No way I’m walking into a trap like that!”

Letho was just about to jump when the ship began to turn its nose in the direction of what Letho guessed was Hastrom City.

His head vibrated with conflicting thoughts and images. His insides felt as if he had swallowed a frozen anvil.

They’ve overpowered her! You have to save her.

Letho knew this not to be true. She had demonstrated her prowess over other Mendraga by killing her own kind time and again.

She killed Jim for me. Why is she leaving?

The cockpit came into view as the ship continued to turn, and Letho’s fears were realized when he saw a very intact Thresha at the controls of the ship. She looked at him, and she didn’t smile. She was close enough that Letho could see her eyes, but not the whites of them. She was mouthing something, but he couldn’t make it out through the marred glass of the windshield. The imagined anvil sagged in his guts, weighing him to the ground. He could have easily leapt onto the ship—in fact at that exact moment, Saladin was showing him a rapidly dwindling window of opportunity to do so. Saul was shouting something, but Letho was unable to make it out over the roar of the ship’s engines.

The ship roared off, and Letho sank to the earth, his knees hitting the sandy ground beneath him. He took one last look at the ship as itgrew smaller on the horizon, no doubt taking Thresha back to her master.

****

“What the hell was that? You could have taken that whole ship out barehanded!” Saul said, flapping his arms in rage. If the circumstances had been different, Letho might have laughed. But the part of him that would’ve laughed felt broken. He was a little surprised at the fact that he felt no urge to cry. In fact, the ragged numbness that filled his chest was comforting, like falling back into an old habit. It soothed him, this notion that the struggle to prove Thresha’s loyalty was finally over. And he no longer had to deal with his feelings for her. That, too, had been torn from him.

“Hey, jackass! We’re still on the clock! Let’s get what we came for and get the hell out of here!” Saul entered a few keystrokes into his uCom. Moments later the truck fell to the hot asphalt with a resounding crash.

Letho leapt up and fell in behind Saul. He went through the motions like an automaton, not out of loyalty to Saul, but simply because he didn’t know what else to do. Saul pointed at Letho, and then to the passenger door of the truck. Letho nodded and moved into position.

“Grab him, now!” Saul shouted, throwing open the driver-side door. Letho did the same on the passenger side. Moments later two men were being wrangled to the ground in a cloud of upturned dust. They placed plasticuffs around the men’s wrists and left them in a heap in the middle of the road.

The two men were shouting at Saul in some crude, drawling tongue. Occasionally Letho would catch a word he recognized, particularly the expletives. Saul paid them no mind.

“Wait, what are those things? Are those people?”

Saul, recognizing Letho’s complete bafflement, paused to enlighten him.

“Letho, meet Hastrom City’s servant class. Born, bred, and raised to lift heavy things, do dirty work, and not ask too many questions.”

Letho goggled at the two beings he was reluctant to call ‘men.’ It was like someone had turned back the dial on Eursan evolution, plucked out one of the precursors to Letho’s species, and plopped it down right in front of him. They were short, with blunted features and burly arms. To say they were ugly was an understatement, and the crude syllables that came from their mouths didn’t do them any favors.

Saladin felt the need to remark upon their speech. “These men are speaking a very limited form of English, with some sort of vernacular that does not show up in my data banks. Numerous single-syllable contractions of recognizable words. They seem to be rather upset that Saul has commandeered their vehicle.”

“Yeah,” Letho said, watching the crass men kick dust in Saul’s direction.

Saul drew his sidearm and threw open the truck’s back hatch. “Truck is clear. No bad guys. I’m going in. Letho, keep an eye on our two friends.”

When Letho didn’t respond, Saul took a few steps toward Letho and began snapping his fingers.

“Hey, Letho, you there? Stop moping around and do what I asked you to do. Our asses are on the line here.”

“Okay, okay.”

Letho watched as the sounds of Saul rifling through the truck’s goods filled the air.

“Jackpot!” Saul finally shouted from inside the truck. A moment later he leapt out with a wide grin on his face. “Looks like somebody raided a very well-stocked weapons cache, and we get the spoils,” he said, tossing Letho an assault rifle, which he caught with his good hand. It was rather archaic, and corroded in some places, but it had that reassuring, heavy-in-hand heft to it that he always felt when handling his Black Bear .50 caliber.

Saul seemed to be waiting for a reaction to the gift he had just given to Letho, so Letho faked a smile.

It would have to do. Even if Saul had pulled Abraxas’s and Alastor’s severed heads out of the truck, Letho still couldn’t have cared less. But Saul was right: there was a job to do. His mind was a burning beehive, full of noise and clutter, but he focused as best he could and pushed thoughts of what Thresha had done to the back of his mind.

“Is it usually this easy?” Letho asked.

Saul’s face scrunched up like Letho had insulted his mother.

“Well, my men don’t have superhuman strength and speed, and jumping inside a Mendraga ship and piloting it away typically isn’t on the tactical menu,” Saul said, punctuating the last two words with quotation fingers. “So the odds are usually a little different in these little sorties. Sometimes the trucks come with the calvary riding alongside; sometimes they don’t.”

Letho nodded, then dipped into the torrent of thoughts rushing through his head. He had no idea where they were, or how far away they were from Hastrom City, but he wagered that it wouldn’t take Thresha very long to get there in her new ride. There was still a small sliver of a chance that she was on his side, that she was merely angling to get back into Abraxas’s good graces in order to assist Letho when the time came. But that seemed highly unlikely, and there was no way he could be sure. Besides, if that was her plan, why didn’t she tell him before?