Dark Minds (Class 5 Series Book 3) Read online

  Dark Minds

  Michelle Diener

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dark Minds

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  The Class 5 Series

  Dark Horse Excerpt

  Also by Michelle Diener

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2016 by Michelle Diener

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction and all names, people, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are a product of the author’s imagination.

  Created with Vellum

  Dark Minds

  The mind is the most powerful weapon of all . . .

  Imogen Peters knows she's a pawn. She's been abducted from Earth, held prisoner, and abducted again. So when she gets a chance at freedom, she takes it with both hands, not realizing that doing so will turn her from pawn to kingmaker.

  Captain Camlar Kalor expected to meet an Earth woman on his current mission, he just thought he'd be meeting her on Larga Ways, under the protection of his Battle Center colleague. Instead, he and Imogen are thrown together as prisoners in the hold of a Class 5 battleship. When he works out she's not the woman who sparked his mission, but another abductee, Cam realizes his investigation just got a lot more complicated, and the nations of the United Council just took a step closer to war.

  Imogen's out of her depth in this crazy mind game playing out all around her, and she begins to understand her actions will have a massive impact on all the players. But she's good at mind games. She's been playing them since she was abducted. Guess they should have left her minding her own business back on Earth…

  Chapter 1

  The change in mood onboard the runner slowly forced Imogen Peters to come back to herself. The small crew's tension wound around her like a choking vine, tightening until she couldn't ignore it any more.

  She was becoming more withdrawn as the days passed or she would have noticed the quicker movements, the sharper focus in the ten-person team much sooner.

  She lifted her hands from where they rested on her knees, thumb and forefinger together, and stretched out legs that had been in the lotus position for . . . she didn't know how long.

  Her escape into her own head seemed to run on its own clock. Sometimes she lost track of time all together, her days punctuated only by meals.

  Now, the usual easy routine she was familiar with was gone.

  Three of her guards were donning body armor and checking shockgun settings and she stared in disbelief. Could they have finally reached their destination?

  Because they didn't have anywhere else to put her, they kept her in a corner of the staff lounge and it gave her a view of most of the bridge and the massive screen on its far wall. All she could see now was the darkness of space, just like she had for the last two weeks, except when they'd first got underway, and she'd watched the planet Balco fall away behind them.

  “Are we there yet?” she asked, unable to help the faint smile that came with her words, but Fri, her usual guard, wasn't even looking at her.

  Lieutenant Baq walked toward them, shoving his shockgun into a thigh holster as he came.

  “Get suited up,” he said to Fri. “We'll need everyone armed.”

  “Are we landing?” Imogen directed her question to Baq this time.

  He shook his head, too distracted to respond, but before Fri moved away, Imogen reached out and grabbed his jacket.

  “What's going on?” she asked.

  He jerked free. “Krik,” he said.

  Imogen stared after him as he moved toward the far wall to grab some body armor.

  She'd had plenty of cryptic words to decipher in the last three months, and she was pretty sure whoever or whatever the Krik were, it wasn't good.

  From the corner of her eye, she caught movement on the large screen, and turned to stare at a large vessel inching its way across their bow.

  The crew reacted as if the bogeyman had just jumped out from under the bed, wielding an ax.

  They readied themselves for a confrontation, voices raised, until all other sounds faded and their movements seemed to be set to the jerky soundtrack of her heartbeat.

  They'd been crammed on top of each other, in what was surely meant to be a short-range, day tripper vessel, for fourteen long days, and Imogen knew every single crew member.

  Their fear scratched at her, looking for purchase, and she tried to shake it off.

  The enemy of my enemy and all that.

  Only, as a counter to that piece of wisdom, there was also better the devil you know. She was caught between two overused idiomatic expressions.

  She turned her attention to the captain, trying to work out what he was calling to his team, the Tecran he was using faster than she was used to and full of abbreviations and military codes she didn't know.

  Fri caught her eye, his hands holding his helmet over his head, the feathery protrusions on his neck sticking up in alarm. The look he gave her was one of seething resentment and then he pushed the helmet down, and she saw nothing except a black, glossy reflection of herself sitting on the long couch that was her prison cell.

  It was like a slap.

  She had managed to convince herself that Fri liked her.

  Maybe he did. But it seemed he also now blamed her for his being here, in a tiny vessel without Tecran military support and the Krik approaching.

  Which was unfair in so many ways, but then, as she'd learned in the last two months, life wasn't fair. The less time you spent whining about it, the better off you were.

  She hadn't whined.

  She'd learned Tecran on the handheld they'd given her instead.

  Her guards had been surprised when she'd said her first, stumbling words in Tecran. Uncomfortable, even. Because she'd been kept in a cage in a massive storage room of exotic animals from all corners of the galaxy at the time, and her speaking and making sense drew the whole exercise into a darker place.

  Slowly, though, they'd become proud of her progress, spending time talking to her every day, teaching her the swear words and rude idioms and expressions the handheld did not. She'd become their clever pet.

  And to be honest, her French teacher would have been astonished, too, at how quickly she'd become fluent.

  Imogen hadn't been one of her best students, but then, Mrs. Ventor had not taught French the way Imogen's handheld had taught her Tecran.
It used ways of learning Imogen hadn't encountered before, ways that she found easy and interesting, and as a teacher herself, she'd been fascinated by.

  Or maybe her progress was a life and death thing.

  Because understanding what was being said around her might save her life. Even if it was just making herself the cute mascot that they'd find hard to kill if ever given the order.

  She'd learned Grihan, too, but quietly, when she was alone in the menagerie hidden deep underground on the planet Balco, with only the other animals for company.

  The Grih seemed to be all her guards talked about when they spoke among themselves, and it had been a happy discovery when she'd found that Grihan was one of the five languages on her handheld.

  The Tecran were worried about the Grih, and there was that whole enemy of my enemy thing again.

  It couldn't hurt, she'd reasoned, to be able to communicate with your enemy's nemeses, should you encounter them.

  But she'd never even heard of the Krik.

  Lieutenant Baq passed Fri as he finished checking his shockgun, and said something to him about her——she saw it in the way both their gazes cut across the room to where she sat.

  Fri gave a nod, walked over.

  “Please tell me what's going on. Who are the Krik?”

  “Pirates.” Fri's voice was slightly disembodied from behind the helmet. “Tecran High Command has an agreement with them that they leave us alone, but they aren't responding to us, they just keep coming.” He bent and suddenly she knew exactly what he was doing.

  “The force field?” She stared at him as he lifted his head briefly and then back down to the panel at his feet as he punched in a code.

  The force field that had been installed around the couch she was sitting on powered up and encircled her. Impenetrable. Deadly.

  “We need all hands, no one can guard you, so this will keep you safe from them.” Fri made the explanation with a shrug of his shoulders.

  When she'd first been marched out of the facility on Balco into this small vessel, the force field had been activated immediately. But it had an irritating hum, and it chewed power, apparently, and really where was she going to go? There were only two main rooms, plus the sleeping quarters. And she was outnumbered ten to one.

  After about twelve hours, they'd turned it off and never touched it again.

  “You think they're going to attack?” Imogen asked.

  Fri lifted his hands up as he turned back to the bridge. “It's what the Krik do.”

  Chapter 2

  The captain allowed the Krik to board them after they fired two shots. The Tecran runner couldn't outgun them and it was too late to run.

  “We need to sort this out face to face,” he said, but Imogen heard the bravado in his voice.

  They all had.

  And still, what choice was there?

  While the Krik linked the ships, the captain called High Command over and over, telling them what was happening. He received no answer.

  She'd expected aggression, the crew would not be so afraid of the Krik if they didn't have a reputation for it, but she hadn't expected the level of it. They weren't here to parlay.

  They seemed intent on extermination.

  At her first sight of the Krik, she was struck by their elegance. They were slim and graceful, and their white hair and peach skin were as surreal to her as they were pretty.

  But their eyes . . . red, like a white rabbit or white rat.

  And their teeth.

  They came onto the bridge dragging Lieutenant Baq, who'd been waiting to greet them, by the back of his uniform, teeth bared.

  Long, sharp incisors. If they'd thrown back their heads and hooted like baboons, she wouldn't have been surprised.

  Baq was dead, she realized——everyone realized——when they threw him down in front of the captain.

  And then the bloodbath began.

  The Krik wanted to kill her.

  Imogen could see the need for yet another death in their eyes, in the way they held themselves, clenched and angry as toddlers denied.

  The force field was impenetrable, and they didn't have the code to disable it.

  She wondered if, when they calmed down and got hold of themselves, they'd be able to do it, and shivered at the thought.

  They were definitely less volatile now than when they'd started, winding down from a bloodlust high.

  She curled in on herself, carefully making herself smaller as they raged.

  She didn't speak their language, but then, because she hadn't spoken any of the languages around her at first, she'd gotten really good at reading body language and intonation.

  More than once, the Krik pirate she guessed was the leader had restrained one of his team from throwing themselves at the wall of pale purple light around her, but the eyes he turned her way time and again were full of death, too.

  She had the sense the Krik couldn't help themselves. Like Viking beserkers losing all sense of self, they had started killing and stopped when there was no one left. Except her.

  Imogen had forced herself to watch each death. She was the only witness to their suffering, the mindless waste that was their slaughter.

  The Krik left the bodies where they'd fallen, lying broken and still on the ship's floor.

  The terror and horror at watching people she knew, even if they had been her gaolers, murdered, had slowly been replaced by a numbed state of shock.

  Like before, it was the change in mood that brought her out of her mental safe place. The Krik were calm now, standing in a semi-circle around her, watching her with an intensity that hadn't been there before.

  When they'd lost control and rampaged through the ship, she'd wondered how they were capable of space travel, of coexisting with a race as technologically advanced as the Tecran.

  She saw now.

  There was plenty of canny intelligence in the eyes of the soldiers who surrounded her. And they were an ordered team. They had a command structure and they wore a uniform, all black, which made the pastel of their skin and the white of their hair stand out even more.

  They seemed to be aware she was more present than she had been, and the leader shifted the shockgun in his arms.

  She forced herself to stay watchful, focusing on the tap, tap, tap of his finger on the barrel. The finger had three joints instead of two, but like the rest of him, it was long and elegant, the subtle peach of his skin darkening at each knuckle.

  He made a sound and she lifted her gaze to his face to find him looking straight into her eyes. He lifted his upper lip to reveal bloodstained incisors and she couldn't stop her flinch.

  “Who are you?” His Tecran was stumbling, far worse than hers.

  “Why do you care?” she asked, and her voice shook. “Like to know the names of those you murder?”

  He blinked at her, then looked around the room, almost as if he was seeing the carnage for the first time. Then he shrugged. “No. When the fighting spirit is upon me, I don't care.”

  She considered her response. She didn't want to antagonize them, that would be stupid, but she didn't know if it mattered. None of the Tecran crew had antagonized them——they had been diplomatic until Baq's body hit the deck——and that had not saved them at all.

  And there was the rub.

  Because she would not go out all false politeness and appeasement. She'd made a vow to herself the second week into her abduction. It would be with a bang, not a whimper.

  “Who,” the leader said again, “are you?” There was an edge to his voice, this time.

  “Imogen Peters. Who are you?”

  He stared at her for a long time without responding, perhaps hoping to creep her out or make her uncomfortable.

  Too bad for him she'd been an exotic, clever pet in a cage for two months, and for the last two weeks had spent every minute of the day in open view. She'd found a way to ignore the stares long ago.

  She stared back, face bland, eyes a little wide, showing interest and nothi
ng else.

  “I am Levek Toloco.” He let out a laugh. “You're interesting.”

  She said nothing to that, simply looked around the room again, looked at Fri, lying on the floor like a broken doll, face turned toward her, helmet ripped off, eyes open and blank.

  Levek Toloco seemed to catch her inference.

  “When the fighting spirit takes us, we are not as controlled as we should be, and yes, perhaps we kill those we would otherwise find interesting. But it is what it is.”

  In other words, he really didn't care.

  She could only guess they got too much enjoyment out of the 'fighting spirit' to want to control it.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  They couldn't switch off the force field. She wasn't sure she wanted them to, anyway, although soon enough she'd need food and water.

  Toloco barked something at his team, and they moved off, but reluctantly. This wasn't a military organized like the Tecran she'd been with for over two months, it was more egalitarian, and the team members did not blindly obey orders. They looked more like sulky teenagers, begrudgingly doing their chores.

  “Switch off the force field,” Toloco said, and she suddenly realized he'd forced his team to disperse so she would feel less threatened.

  He thought she knew how to turn it off. Which meant he thought she'd been put within the force field by the Tecran because . . . what? She was important?

  “I can't.”

  “We are no longer in the grip of the fighting spirit. You will be safe.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. That, she did not believe.

  “Whether I am or not, I can't switch it off.”

  Toloco canted his head to the side. “Either you switch it off, or I'll find a way to do it for you. And you won't like the second option.”

  Imogen stared back at him, face as serious as his own. “I haven't liked anything I've seen of you since you and your team first set foot on this ship, so that comes as no surprise.”

  “Switch it off!” His voice swelled to a shout.

  She jerked, blew out a shaky breath. “I can't switch it off, I don't have the code.” She could tell him she was a prisoner, not a VIP, but why would she share anything she didn't have to?