by C. F. Harris
Because damn was this alien a good kisser!
22
Vrath
I finally pulled away from the kiss. I turned to the rest of the human crew who stood there dumbfounded. I wasn’t sure if that was because they were being rescued by a Vosk and a human, because Rachel had been so merciless in killing Doran, or because we’d then started kissing afterwards.
I didn’t care, either.
“I believe you were planning on doing something with the control panel?” I said, gesturing to the panel I’d pulled her off of earlier.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, tossing me her plasma rifle.
“What are you doing Rachel?” an older male human with hair all around his face said. He sounded scandalized that she’d give up her weapon to the enemy so casually. Though with everything that had happened we were hardly enemies any longer.
“What I need to do,” she said. “This ship is going to blow if I don’t take care of business.”
“And she insisted that we come down here and rescue all of you before we took care of that business,” I said.
“You could’ve killed me!” the one who’d soiled his pants finally shrieked. It was a shriek that was every bit as grating as when he’d been blubbering as a hostage.
I couldn’t imagine that this was the kind of human who’d constantly pushed back at us on the front lines. No, if they were all like this one then we would’ve won the war long ago.
“Be quiet Dirk,” Rachel said. “I have to think if I’m going to figure out how the fuck to get through this thing.”
I looked around the room to see if there were any other humans in here I might trust in the same way I’d come to trust Rachel in our brief but intense time together. There was a mix of males and females, but none of the males looked like they were of fighting age or in fighting shape.
Well there was the one male. The one who’d been taken hostage. Unfortunately he was still standing in a puddle of his own waste, and I didn’t think I was going to get much help from him. I certainly wasn’t going to hand him a weapon after the look he gave me when we stepped into the cargo bay.
So I settled with holding a plasma rifle in each hand and turning to face the entrance. The doors were closed, but I knew that at any moment Vlox could figure out some of his men were dead, even if communicating that to everyone would take longer since intership comms were down.
When that happened things could get very interesting down here. I could only hope Rachel could take care of business before it came to that.
“How are we doing?” I asked.
“Would you please let me concentrate?” she asked. “This isn’t like some movie where hacking into something is a matter of typing fast.”
“You do your thing,” I said, gritting my teeth and trying not to think about how we were seriously in danger of dying in here if Vlox figured out what was going on.
So far we’d killed nine mutineers. That meant there were still at least a hundred on various parts of the ship. Assuming everyone who remained on the ship had been among the mutineers. Either way there were too many for us to take one on one. I had to get my loyal crew back over here.
“Got it,” Rachel said. “Oh this was almost too easy. It’s a miracle these hijackers ever get anything done if all their tricks are like this. They just reversed the polarity on the computational intermix chamber and…”
“What are you doing Rachel?” the human with that facial hair asked. “You can’t possibly be thinking about assisting this Vosk! He’s the one who attacked us!”
“I knew she was a traitor,” the one who’d soiled himself said. “I knew it and I knew she was going to betray us!”
“Vrath?” Rachel asked, her voice sounding entirely too sweet for the look on her face.
“Yes Rachel?” I asked.
“You have my permission to shoot Dirk if he speaks up again,” she said.
I didn’t even need to ask her which one was Dirk. The one who’d soiled himself looked indignant, but that wasn’t going to save him if he spoke up again. He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but I raised my plasma rifle as a reminder of what would happen to him if he spoke again.
“And now we’re back in control!” Rachel said.
The lights started to flash all around us. Lights that indicated the cargo bay was about to open. Ice settled in the pit of my stomach and then moved down to my balls as I saw those lights flashing, so different from the self-destruct lights and yet just as terrifying.
If she managed to vent the cargo bay to the vacuum of space with all of us in here then things were going to end very poorly for all the living creatures in this room. Like we’re talking everyone in here was going to be dead within the next thirty seconds or so depending on what shape they were in.
“Whoops,” Rachel said, hitting a couple of buttons on the control panel. “Sorry. The exploit I was using involved going through the cargo bay doors, and it sort of sets them off before giving me complete control. We had the same problem earlier.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as the lights went back to a dull flashing red that told me the ship was only about to be destroyed all around us. The thought that I was relieved that we’d gone back to the ship merely counting down a self-destruct timer was a measure of just how terrifying the thought of dying relatively slowly in the vacuum of space was compared to having the reactors on the ship going up and killing everything onboard instantly.
“Here we go,” Rachel said. “I now have complete control of the ship. When was the last time you patched your systems, by the way?”
She looked up at me with an accusatory look. It was the kind of look I’d grown used to getting from our IT person back before he had to be vaporized because we’d discovered he was using his access to ship’s systems to skim off the top of everyone else’s earnings.
“It’s been awhile,” I said, thinking back to when Ruark had been vaporized at his station in the command center.
It’d been the only way to make sure he didn’t activate any of the surprises that IT people typically had lurking in the systems to make sure they got some revenge for being vaporized. An extreme form of being escorted from the job immediately that was typically only found in privateer HR negotiations. I doubted it was quite that extreme in the royal fleet or the private sector.
“Yeah, well you’ve got communication access to the Lucky Linda now,” she said. “So say what you’re going to say to your dudes over there.”
“Is that wise?” I asked. “Any communication we have with your ship is bound to tip off Vlox that something is going on here in the cargo hold.”
“And don’t you worry your pretty face about that,” Rachel said. “All you need to do is come over here and have a chat with your people on the Linda, and let me worry about the mutineers.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but I also figured if she thought she had the situation well in hand then I wasn’t going to argue with her. She’d already proved to be more than capable when it came to everything else she’d done, so why should I doubt her now?
I stepped up to the commlink. It wasn’t as nice as, say, some of the commlinks in the command center where there were dedicated microphones, but it would have to do.
“This is Vrath calling to the human ship. Would any Vosk still on the human ship please get in touch with me?”
Rachel grinned up at me. A too sweet grin. The kind of grin she usually had before she killed someone in a very nasty fashion, if I’m being honest.
“It makes me very nervous when you look like that,” I said.
“Get used to it,” she said.
“Vrath?” Gorel’s voice came through the commlink. “Is that you?”
I let out a relieved sigh. I’d worried that maybe they were all dead over there and there wouldn’t be any way of retaking the ship. Well, not short of employing the humans to take care of the mutineers, and I was reluctant to do something that extreme.
“We’ve been over her
e waiting on you to get through to us,” Gorel said. “What’s going on over there? Why did you go silent?”
“Vlox has decided to mutiny,” I growled into the commlink.
Gorel let out a stream of invective that had Rachel and a few other humans who could presumably understand the Vosk language blushing. I let him do his thing. He was good at his job, and part of being good at that job was that I let him do his thing when he needed to.
“I’ll kill him,” Gorel said. “I presume you have the ship secured and are ready to begin executions?”
“Not quite,” Rachel said, stepping into the conversation.
“Who is that Vrath?” Gorel asked. “Is that a female voice? We don’t have any females on the ship!”
“Well we do, sort of,” I said, taking a deep breath because I knew that he wasn’t going to be happy about this next part. “That voice belonged to one of the humans I captured and brought over to this ship. She’s sort of been helping me to get to this point.”
Sure enough he let loose with another string of curses that would make his grandmother blush from beyond the grave if she could hear some of the things he was saying. Especially since some of the things he was saying were in his dead grandmother’s name.
I waited for him to finish, only by the time he did finish Rachel held a hand up. I decided to keep quiet and see what she was going to do. I told myself it was because I was interested in what she had to say and not because I had a sneaking suspicion that at this point she might be more in control of this situation than I was.
23
Rachel
I took a deep breath. There was a good chance I was going to get a bad reaction from Vrath when he realized exactly what I’d done, but at the same time it was something that had to be done.
I only wished I could have one of those rifles I’d tossed to him. Unfortunately it was a pain in the ass to work the controls on one of these consoles while also trying to hold a rifle, and he’d seemed to have everything well in hand on that score.
“So you want your ship back?” I said.
“That would be nice,” Vrath said, tension coming to his voice as he seemed to realize that this might not be going quite the way he’d anticipated.
I took a deep breath. Looked at the human crew all around me. Turned back to Vrath and forced myself to remain steady.
It was surprisingly easy. It turns out that after facing down alien invaders coming at me through the inky blackness of space, facing down those invaders more directly with nothing but a hunk of brig bar to protect me, and then shooting a few of them, facing down the one alien on this whole ship who’d actually treated me halfway decently wasn’t all that crazy.
“If you want your ship back then you’re going to have to negotiate terms,” I said.
“What the hell is this human talking about?” the Vosk on the other end of the line asked. “We have to get over there and defeat the mutineers girl! If you don’t let us over there to fix this mess then you’re going to be in serious trouble!”
The other humans all around me were muttering. Some were looking at me like I was crazy for doing this. Others were staring with the kind of hope that said they thought we might actually get out of this if I played my cards right.
I really hoped I was playing my cards right. The thing was I wanted to play those cards so that I had Vrath as part of my winnings when this was all over. I almost didn’t care about my crew getting back to the Linda.
Almost, but I looked to Kotomi. She was staring at me with the kind of hope that I couldn’t just brush aside. No, I would get these people back to the ship, damn it, and from there we’d see what happened.
“There’s no need to take care of the mutineers,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” the Vosk on the other end of the line spat. “Half the crew has gone in with Vlox! If we don’t do something he’s going to kill all of us and destroy this ship on top of it!”
“He’s not going to destroy the Linda because I have control of all the ship’s systems,” I said. “And they’re not going to try and take out the cargo area because I’ve used that control to remove life support from the rest of the ship.”
I looked down at my watch. It was an old mechanical thing that’d been in the family for generations. The thing was pretty anachronistic and next to useless when we weren’t underway considering every planet and station had its own version of time that we had to sync to whenever we were visiting.
Still, it was good for timing things out, and if my calculations were correct then there was a good chance all the Vosk who’d been threatening to take over this ship were good and dead now that I’d removed the atmosphere they needed to keep living from all the places where they could live.
Everywhere but the cargo bay, that is, though it’d been touch and go there for a moment with the cargo bay doors almost opening. Talk about a reverse HAL that would’ve seriously fucked us over.
“You did what?” Vrath asked.
“See for yourself,” I said.
I hit a couple of buttons and a projection shot out from the panel and floated in the air where everyone could see it. It showed the security cameras that the mutineers couldn’t use, but I had access to them now that I had control of the ship.
The live view showed Vosk who were either suffocated or in the process of suffocating. I suppose I should’ve felt bad that I’d just killed at least a hundred Vosk with the push of a button, but as before I had a difficult time working up much in the way of sympathy for them.
Which was pretty much how I’d been feeling about the Vosk we were taking on ever since I stepped foot on this ship.
“You killed them all?” Vrath said.
“Are you serious?” the voice on the other end of the commlink said. “She seriously just killed all the mutineers?”
“She did,” Vrath said, his voice unreadable.
I wondered if I’d done something wrong. I wondered if he was looking at members of his crew and thinking about all the good times they’d had together. I wondered if he’d wanted the pleasure of killing all of them himself and now he was angry at me for doing that killing myself.
Then he turned to me and got down on his knees. Which surprised me. Not to mention he still came up nearly to my shoulders even when he was down on his knees. He held out a rifle to me, and I blinked in surprise. I had no fucking clue what the fuck was going on here.
“You have my weapon until the end of my life and beyond,” he said.
That had the sound of some sort of pirate oath or something. The only problem was I had no fucking clue what pirate oaths even were, so I had no fucking clue what he was offering me when he said something like that.
There was an intake of breath on the other side of the commlink though. I guess whatever he’d just said had meant something to the person talking to us from the Linda, for all that I had no fucking clue what he was on about.
“Um, okay?” I said.
“Are you sure about this Vrath?” the voice said. “She’s a human.”
“She’s a human who took me on in single combat with nothing but a plasma lance, fought off several mutineers who were doing their best to rape her with nothing but the bars of a brig cell they’d cut out for her, shot more mutineers with better accuracy than most of our crew could hope to emulate, and now she’s killed all the mutineers,” Vrath said. “She has my weapon until the end of my life and beyond.”
He stared at me and I got a really intense vibe from the dude. Like more intense than I’d ever got from any guy before. It was the kind of look that had butterflies rising in my stomach.
“Holy shit Rachel,” Kotomi said.
I jumped. I hadn’t realized she was so close to me. I turned to see her staring at me with wide eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“He just made the Vosk bonding pledge,” she breathed. “Do you have any idea what the fuck that means?”
I looked at him. Looked at the humans all around me.
The Vosk bonding pledge. I’d heard of it, of course. It was sort of like marriage for them, but then again it sort of wasn’t. I didn’t have the specifics because we’d been at war with for decades and it was difficult for much about them to get through when the only contact humanity had with them on the regular was trying to kill them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I looked down to Vrath. Down to this perfect specimen of Vosk man. This man who’d made me feel so incredible on our ill-advised tryst in the middle of a mutiny and potential death. I looked at his perfect body, and at that ruggedly handsome face that was looking up at me with something that looked almost vulnerable.
And I started to shiver and shake. Was this fucking serious? Was this fucking happening?
I suddenly felt lightheaded, and before I could do anything about it the world started to go dark all around me. Motherfucker. Talk about the worst possible time to get overwhelmed and black out!
24
Vrath
I stared down at Rachel as the Terran medic did his thing. They didn't have a doctor. Not that we had a doctor on our ship. Merely someone who was trained in using the automed unit addon we “acquired” from a ship that had submitted to us after a very long and interesting fight.
Though the humans didn't even appear to have something as primitive as an automed. Perhaps that was only a standard feature on their military ships.
The medic put something into her arm. They didn't even have hypomedication distribution. Again I was surprised at how primitive these humans could be for a species that had managed to discover faster than light travel. How was it possible that they'd been pushing us back on every front of the war we'd been fighting for the last fifty years?
And yet they were able to do it. The fact that I was standing here on this human ship very much at the mercy of a human was proof of that.
We were more at the mercy of these humans than they could possibly know judging by the way they kept casting nervous glances in my direction as we moved through their ship to find human medical supplies.
