He snarled in frustration and glared at the mask in his hand. And according to the damned readouts, she’d broken her wrist in the process. Not that he believed anything the mask had shown him. It still registered almost every female in today’s combat as an omega, which just wasn’t possible. There weren’t that many of them left.
He stormed into Jaxx’s workshop, the single-story temporary structure somehow already full of the crap the engineer had to tote about, and threw the helmet across the workbench.
“Fix this piece of korpa shit!” he roared. “It lost me the xarthing spy!”
Jaxx glanced up at him with a look of mild reproof. “Abusing the only working prototype isn’t going to make it work any better. What malfunctioned?”
The engineer’s calm demeanor only inflamed Warr further. “It would be faster to list off what didn’t. It registered nearly every soldier on the rebels’ side as being female. Not just female, omegas.”
Jaxx frowned. “That shouldn’t be possible. Our satellites scan and deliver the data directly. There’s no way a human could access or alter it. Though I have noticed a great many of the fighters we’re encountering are female.” He shook his head. “Such a waste.”
Jaxx picked up the mask, frowning at the dust streaked across the front. “What malfunction made you lose the spy?”
“It said she was an omega. I… it…” Warr paced in the tiny amount of space, frustration coming off him in waves. “And I couldn’t see with the faraked thing on, so I took it off.” He pointed to the swollen knot near his hairline. “And she did this to me.”
“You… took it off.” Jaxx’s expression was deadpan. His gaze transferred to someone behind Warr. “Pretty boy took it off, boss. Please explain how I’m expected to create armor that works when the xarthing fools take it off!”
Warr spun around to find the Lord Overseer’s second in command X’saav standing behind him, one eyebrow raised. Great, this was all he needed. Saav was a pain in the ass at the best of times and not really that much senior to Warr himself. He’d never commanded the same type of troops, to Warr’s knowledge. He didn’t actually know what Saav’s specialty was, just that Lord Tane trusted him with everything. It was… frustrating.
“Did ya take the damn helmet off?” Saav asked, his voice a rough rasp.
“It’s not a helmet,” Warr retorted. “It’s a heads-up display system that doesn’t xarthing work. Unless you think every rebel we met today is an omega? Because if that’s the case, you should probably be on your way back to Tane to give him the news.”
Saav cocked one dark brow, his gaze moving from Warr to the mask to Jaxx. “Omegas in combat? Sorry, Jaxx. I’m going to have to side with Warr on this one. The tech is broken.”
Jaxx hummed to himself as he tinkered with the device. “Maybe. I’ll work on it, but it would work a lot better if you’d keep it on… general sir.”
“And why did ya take it off?” Saav asked. His accent was from one of the smaller clans. Jaxx wasn’t sure which one. Like everything else about the overseer’s right hand, no one knew much about his past.
“I took a prisoner. The mask kept insisting she was an omega. I needed to see her with my own eyes.” He grunted. “It won’t happen again. The next time I get hold of her, she’s going to be shackled before anyone gets too close. Whatever she is, she owes me answers.”
For a moment he thought Saav’s eyebrow had taken leave of the top of his head, so hard and fast did it shoot up. Then he looked past Warr to Jaxx. “He took off armoring to look at a female.”
It was a blunt statement. Not a question. Jaxx grunted. “Seems to be the way it starts.”
“Perhaps we should insist T’kinn runs more tests.” Saav folded his arms. “It must be some kind of infection. Something we haven’t discovered yet.”
“I removed it to examine a prisoner. I had subdued her already.”
Jaxx eyed the lump on his head with obvious amusement. “Uh huh. You should have a healer look at that and make sure it’s healing as it should.”
“Get some tests done while you’re there. Infections are tricky things,” Saav said, his voice dry and his expression unreadable.
“No. I will be at the command center getting reports from those still out in the field. We’re going after them.” He glared around the tent. “Be ready to move.”
Jaxx watched as the grumpy general stomped out of the tent and then transferred his attention back to Saav.
“What is it about this xarthing species that the females make our warriors lose all common sense?”
“Haven’t a clue.” Saav shrugged, his lips quirking beneath the heavy beard as he moved idly around the work counter in the middle of the room. Along with Warr’s abandoned helmet, Jaxx was currently working on a multitude of other projects. He might up and move with the army, but his work always came with him.
He leaned against the back of his stool with his arms folded over his chest as he watched the other alpha. Saav was an odd one—some kind of cousin of his way back when. It wasn’t necessarily a relationship Jaxx liked to lay claim to. There was a sickness, a darkness, in that line that he didn’t want associated with him. One he wasn’t entirely sure Saav was clear of. One look at the male in battle was enough to prove that sometimes he wasn’t entirely stable.
Jaxx just hoped Lord Tane knew what he was doing, naming this guy as his second in command. If it all went sideways, they were going to be under his command, and… yeah, if that happened, they were probably all xarthed anyway. Lord Tane… Prince Tane back home… was the only reason they were all here.
Drawn from the corners of the Tolathian empire, they were the outcasts, the second sons, the cannon fodder without a future. Tane had given them that future, but with him in it. Without him… They’d be begging the humans for mercy because Kranov and the other gods knew they were losing this battle with the native species.
They’d come here convinced they could do what the L’crav had failed to accomplish. The other clan used fear and dominance to control every planet and species they’d come across, which was why they were one of the larger and more powerful clans in the empire. Or they had been until they’d come here. Decades of fighting and a total failure to create a breeding population of omegas had cost them their reputations and eventually had led to the forcible takeover by the H’thor.
Jaxx now saw why they had failed, and it wasn’t for the reasons they’d expected. The L’crav’s cruelty and arrogance hadn’t aided their cause, but by Kranov’s ball sack, these humans were something quite different. He’d heard rumors that it was because the L’crav had altered the humans’ genetic structure in new ways as an experiment. Others theorized the humans had always been this way, and the changes had only made them worse. More dangerous. More determined. More insane.
Tane had brought them here and promised this was their chance to claim omegas and create a new home world they could expand from to become a feared and honored force within the empire.
Having seen what it meant to claim a human omega, Jaxx wasn’t sure that’s what he wanted. The price was too high. No, he much preferred the quiet betas. As always, as he fiddled with a comms device in front of him idly, his thoughts turned to one of them… Naomi was one of the beta engineers assigned to him. Her specialty was old Terran technology. Even though he had the best training in the Tolathian empire, some of their technology… well, it didn’t make sense. Illogical leaps for an insane race. No wonder he needed a translator. Even though, he had to admit, for a beta, Naomi wasn’t either as quiet or docile as he was used to. A few times he’d caught flashes of what could only be anger in her eyes, and more than once, she’d actually seemed irritated with him.