Star Child

Thirty-Two - The Sound of Silence

"Where. Is. She?" Dhare's mask recited a series of pre-recorded voice clips to the puny male held against the wall.

The crack of his prey's skull delighted the unsatisfied fury that burned in Dhare's veins. This s'yuit-de soldier had put up a pitiful fight. Blood trailed down the soldier's face, painting his ugly human face crimson. Fear burned in his dark eyes and reflected the raging fire that was burning in the corner of the formerly white room.

The soldier was the last one alive. His fellow soldiers lay dead, scattered around the room in wet piles.

"I-I don't k-know!" He sobbed, struggling under Dhare's meaty paw. Snot dripped from his nose, mixing in the slurry that fell onto the Yautja's hand.

Dhare snarled and his mask assembled another sentence. "Ashaki Sawyer!" Which pained him to hear her chipper cadence from his mask. "Where. Is. She!"

He tightened his grip around the male's neck, reveling in the tears that streamed down his face, his begging, and his weak struggling to free himself from Dhare's grasp. Redness warmed the soldier's face and he shook his head.

"Please! I've never met her! I don't know who that is!" The man choked, "I swear!"

"She. Is. At one of. Your. Facilities! Weyland-Yutani!" Dhare responded.

Again, his prey shook his head in the negative.

Pauk! Another dead end!

Fed up with annoyance, Dhare crushed the windpipe of the male and dropped him. His body crumpled against the wall in a pathetic heap. He roared, his anger mixing with the worry for his mate. Rather than leave the facility as he came, he blasted a hole in the walls with his plasma cannon until he stepped outside into the brisk night. Outside, he stormed his way across the concrete airfield where non-combatants were fleeing in their ships. He marched past them and into a field of knee-high grass. The humans screamed at his sudden appearance, satisfying his ego.

Good! Be afraid, you pau'jits! Worthless, honorless zabins!

Ashaki wasn't here either! This was the sixth facility he had hit in the past two weeks. Facility after facility searched and destroyed and each were devoid of human experiments, instead focusing on weapon prototyping, alien biologies, terraforming, and energy-generating technologies. Useless human crap!

He was beginning to despair that he would never find her!

And the Weyland-Yutani facilities were endless. With each new facility he flattened, another appeared.

As second nature, Dhare stole each labs' data and sifted through the information once back on his ship. In these documents, he discovered many of Weyland-Yutani's plans, quickly sending those to Rhage and the Council back home, before digging deeper to find other locations in the galaxy. Now that he was done with this place and the scavenged information was uploaded to his gauntlet, he was ready, and eager, to blow it sky high.

At a safe distance away, he activated the bomb he planted deep within the complex with a few taps on his gauntlet. Heat and fire mushroomed once and then twice. Dhare watched as one last of the ships escaped in time for the bright blue light of the blast to rise up and shoot out in all directions, rocking him slightly on his feet. One of the human ships didn't escape the blast, however, and was vaporized in the expanding wave of nuclear baptism.

Task complete but still raw like an exposed nerve, he boarded his ship and returned to the stars, leaving the small planet behind. Dhare sat in his pilot seat, cleaning his armor with practiced, repetitive motions that helped to ground him while he scouted the stolen data for something that would point to Ashaki's location. As he poured through the data, he thought of his next known move, a rendezvous with an old friend for much needed supplies. After that? He'd have to let the data direct him to another location.