Chapter 582 - 582 Finishing Off the Odium Syndicate

Avery had been surprised by Delia's reveal that she had a bomb in her chest. But he did not panic.

'It's lucky that she wanted to get the last word in. If she had just gone boom, we would have been in trouble.'

Avery reached his extrasensory perception out and found the flow of energy within the bomb.

One look was all it took for him to tell that Delia was not underselling the explosive.

When it went off, it would likely take everything in a roughly two-hundred-meter diameter with it.

"You're staring so intently at my chest. Did you finally decide that there's no more point in holding back? You can go ahead and give them a feel if you want. Make one last good memory before you go out." Delia said, a wide grin on her face as she thrust her chest forward.

She obviously believed that she had won. The bomb inside of her would go off, and Avery and some of his closest allies were going to be vaporized.

There was a distinct possibility that the blast would also breach the Intrepid's hull. Something that would lead to all sorts of problems and likely kill even more people.

"You know, you're not as cute of clever as you think you are. You're rotten to the core on the inside, and no matter what your appearance looks like, it makes you ugly. I'd rather cut my own hands off than do anything with you. And if I was looking to make a memory like that, my wife is right there. And she's a thousand times better than you'll ever be." Avery said, glancing towards Kasandra and at the same time making a slicing motion in the air with his right hand.

It took Delia a few moments to notice, but her smug smile soon warped into a frown.

The rhythmic beeping of the bomb in her chest had stopped. Yet it was not followed by the fiery explosion she was expecting.

"What is going on? Why did it stop working all of sudden?"

Delia began patting her chest while wearing a baffled expression on her face. As if she could get the bomb to explode somehow so long as she jostled it a bit.

Of course, she quickly realized that that was not going to work.

"How?"

At this question, it was Avery's turn to flash the detestable woman a victorious grin.

"I'm guessing that you don't know exactly what my psionic abilities are. I can perceive the flow of energy and sever it. That bomb you were counting on to kill all of us uses and electronic trigger. All I needed to do was cut off its power, and there was no chance of it going off. You employed that trick on the wrong person. Had you waited until you were alone in the brig, or just blew yourself up, I wouldn't have been able to stop you. But you just had to gloat. That's why you lose."

A host of emotions twisted onto Delia's face over just a couple of seconds.

They ranged from rage to embarrassment, but the slightly condescending smile she usually wore was long gone.

Avery was feeling pretty satisfied that he had triumphed over the woman, when Kasandra shot forward and jammed her hand into Delia's mouth.

"Did you think that I wouldn't be able to hear what you're doing? I might not be able to tell when you're lying, but I can detect when you dislodge a fake tooth."

Kasandra yanked her hand out of Delia's mouth and held a false tooth between her index finger and thumb.

Naturally, this caused Delia to start coughing and sputtering. Though Kasandra's hands were fairly small, she had shoved her hand into Delia's mouth without warning.

"First a bomb in your chest, and now false tooth with poison in it. You certainly want to die a lot more than I was expecting considering your personality. I suppose you did say something about contingencies. You wouldn't happen to have some sort of psionic ability as well? Maybe you can transfer yourself to different body's or something?" Avery said, more just to voice his own thoughts than expecting an answer.

Of course, Delia did not tell him anything and instead tried to kill herself again.

This time it was by trying to bite through her own tongue.

Avery had had enough of this though and pressed the button on his wrist terminal to activate the cuff's she was wearing.

Delia immediately seized up and went limp. She was no longer able to move and was quickly knocked unconscious.

"Change of plans. We're taking her to Doctor Raiti. Obviously, our scans obviously failed to pick up everything she had hidden in her body. Before we interrogate her, I want to make sure she doesn't have any other surprises in store for us."

No one voiced any disagreement to this, and Kasandra picked the unconscious Delia up and they made their way to Mercedes' lab.

Avery made sure that his ship's resident doctor knew not to let Delia regain consciousness under any circumstances until she had thoroughly examined her body.

For good measure, he also left Ezra and Olivia there as guards. When dealing with a schemer like Delia, one could never be too careful.

After that, Avery headed back to the Intrepid's bridge where he oversaw the rest of the operation.

There had been a few hold outs that had barricaded themselves within a mess hall on the station, but a team led by Liesel and Burke along with some of the Alliance Police troops Cerise had brought along were already wearing them down.

It would not be much longer until they had accomplished their goals for the mission.

A call from Cerise came in just a few minutes later, and Avery opened it on the command console in front of him.

"I have Doctor Sarelett and the entire warehouse district secure now. But it's a lot worse down here than expected. We were very lucky. Things easily could have gotten out of hand." Cerise said before transmitting several images to Avery.

He went wide eyed when he looked at the rows upon rows of mutated people sealed within tanks. It seemed that the ones he attacked Avery with and deployed to defend the warehouse were not all he had brought to the station.

There were at least a thousand of them. Each having been twisted into a horrible monster by Doctor Sarelett's mutagenic experiments.

'When he was furiously pressing buttons on his remote at the end, he was probably trying to release them all. I'm glad that I disabled everything in the area once Cerise helped me out. Otherwise, we would have been in for the fight of our lives.'

Avery had come prepared with some countermeasures to Layton's mutated monstrosities, but dealing with a thousand all at once would have been a nightmare.

Honestly, he probably would have needed to call a retreat and abandon their takeover of the station.

He was not going to risk the lives of his crew just to take a few more prisoners and gather extra information.

At that point, he would have just pulled back and blown the station away with the Intrepid's weapon systems.

Luckily, the worst had not come to pass and the monsters were still sealed in their tubes.

Over the next two hours, the station was scoured and anything of importance was taken and loaded onto the Intrepid.

However, while there might have still been some people hiding about or data they had not gathered, Avery had no intention of sticking around any longer.

If the authorities of the Zatis Consortium showed up, they were in for some trouble.

It was one thing to fight against a criminal organization, but another to fight against actual military personnel.

Avery did not think that his company would be beaten by just a few ships, but the Zatis Consortium would likely send hundreds after them. No matter how skilled their pilots were or advanced some of their vessels were, raw numbers could still overwhelm them.

"Okay, let's finish this off and get out of here." Avery said before giving the order to open fire.

To make sure to leave as little evidence of their involvement as possible and make sure no one else moved into the base, Avery's company bombarded the station until it was just an unorganizable debris field.

With all of their objective now complete, they set course for their escape route back to the Dramid Alliance.

Considering there was a war going on, it was going to be a lot more difficult than usual to cross the border, but Cerise had assigned part of her fleet to guard and area that was not of great strategic importance.

The Zatis Consortium would hopefully not have too much of a presence there and the Intrepid could break through and return to friendly space.

Because Avery truly was done with all of this. He wanted to return home, collect his pay, and head to the other side of the Dramid Alliance to get as far away from the Zatis Consortium as possible.