Molten Coil. Copyright © 2017 Ella Drake.
All rights reserved.

* * *

Brice’s head ached like it’d been stomped by a stampede of bulls, a stampede of heifers, and probably a stampede of those tai-mecha robots Celeston liked so much.

Celeston.

His eyelids snapped open and he winced. The light’s glare shot through his skull like knives. Squeezing his lids shut, he counted to ten, trying to calm before he tried that again.

“Take it easy.” Celeston, the traitor, soothed the hair back from his forehead. His head rested on a vibrating surface that was flat and slightly cushioned over a hard surface. His thoughts scrambled but it didn’t take long for him to put it together.

He tried to sit up, but something tugged on his arm and he fell back, bonking his head.

“Damnation,” he bellowed, and winced from the hoarse sound that still made his ears ache.

“You’ve been shot on stun one. Give yourself a minute.”

“Why the’hell’did’ya’stun’me?” He tried to say, but he wasn’t sure.

“Relax. The program will be done in a second and then we’ll go pick up Zill, the bastard.”

“Program?”

“There. That should do it.”

The horrid clenching that tangled in his gut pulled him right out of his stupor. He squinted and ground his teeth, putting the pain at bay as his vision cleared.

Deputy Celeston sat on the floor of the transport next to him and stared at her comm while she held his wrist in her hand. He frowned and tried to puzzle that out. Gently, she put his hand on the floor as the feeling came back into his body, though he wished it wouldn’t. He ached everywhere. His head throbbed, but it made sense, finally.

“Why be careful putting my hand down, since you just shot me?”

“I didn’t do it to hurt you.” Not even glancing at him, she didn’t appear to feel guilty in the least. “But I needed that bracelet of yours.”

“The pilot band?” He didn’t like to call it a bracelet.

“Let’s see how it worked.” She rolled up her uniform pants leg until it exposed the silver markings embedded in her flesh.

Her legs were long and strong. The skin smooth and unblemished. An image of him hiking that leg up over his hip as he pounded his cock into her snapped through his brain and his body tensed. That thought was uncalled for. Wrong. Not him. His mind wasn’t working right. “Sure you used stun on me? My brain seems scrambled like you shoved a cattle prod in there and swirled it around.”

Somehow, just saying that aloud helped release the unease that had crept over him. He’d never indulged in silly fantasies over women he knew, much less a deputy.

“Shouldn’t this countdown have stopped?” Celeston turned a frown toward him and the remaining fog in his head disappeared.

“What did you do?”

“I uploaded a program to the control band. It’s supposed to pair with the nanomites and then block them from communicating with one another.”

“Looks like it’s counting down faster.”

“Yes.” She nodded and turned back to stare. They both did.

The numbers went faster and faster, decreasing in a blur. His breath clogged and he sat up, maneuvering himself to a sitting position as best he could—because apparently his deputy had secured one of his wrists to the back of the pilot’s seat.

Celeston gasped.

Brice jerked his attention to her leg.

There, in silver lettering, the Countdown nano-silver displayed: 0.0.0:00