Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
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
Epilogue
Angle of Truth
Sky Full of Stars, Book 2
by Lindsay Buroker
Copyright © 2017 Lindsay Buroker
Illustration Copyright © 2017 Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Acknowledgments
The adventures of Jelena, Erick, Thor, and crew continue in this second installment in the Sky Full of Stars series. As usual, I had lots of help getting the story together. Let me pause to thank my editor, Shelley Holloway, and my beta readers, Sarah Engelke, Cindy Wilkinson, and Rue Silver. Also, thank you to Tom Edwards for the fine cover art for this series. Lastly, thank you, good reader, for coming back for another adventure!
Chapter 1
Alfie charged up to the crates being floated out of the cargo hold and barked in protest. One of the workers using a hand tractor arched her eyebrows, as if to ask if she was in danger, but the dog hadn’t connected the unfamiliar man and woman doing the unloading with the disappearing cargo.
“Here, girl.” Jelena Marchenko, captain of the Snapper, and Starseer in training, patted her thigh and dug out a vat-grown ham cube. She tossed it to Alfie when she ran over and sat next to her. The black-and-white, forty-pound dog Jelena had rescued from a laboratory engaged in animal experiments accepted the treat enthusiastically, but her hackles remained up as she watched the crates leaving the cargo hold. “Guard dog,” Jelena explained to the workers, though she hadn’t trained Alfie for such a job. She also wasn’t sure if the dog cared about the cargo per se or was protesting because those crates were filled with dehydrated food rations.
“Just let me know if I need to protect my ankles,” the woman said.
“She’s taller than that. She would go for your knees.”
The woman scowled and walked the floating crates out the cargo hatch and down the ramp to a big ground truck waiting on the busy dock outside. Jelena admonished herself for making jokes, at least when dealing with the client’s people. She needed to be professional and act older than her eighteen years, since her position as captain was very tenuous. She’d already failed once to prove herself capable of the responsibility. This was her second chance. Most likely, her last chance.
“Are you threatening our clients?” Erick asked, walking out of engineering and joining her. For some reason, he carried his Starseer staff instead of a hand tractor to help unload the cargo, and the runes running down the side glowed faintly.
“Not me. Alfie is considering making herself ferocious.”
“She’s awfully fluffy and cute for that.”
“I didn’t say it would be effective.” Jelena waved to his staff. “Are you expecting trouble?”
“There are a lot of people outside.”
“It’s a city.” Jelena nodded toward the drab gray skyscrapers and apartment buildings beyond the head of the docks. An even grayer sky spat a misty drizzle onto them. “I hear cities often have lots of people in them.”
“Lots of people who might find us interesting?” Erick’s eyes grew distant as he gazed into the drizzle, his face scrunching up as it did whenever he concentrated on using his mental talents.
“Why not? I’m quite fascinating.”
Alfie flapped her tail and nuzzled Jelena’s hand.
“Alfie agrees.” Jelena didn’t mention that her hand currently smelled of ham.
“There are a dozen ships docked along the promenade here,” Erick said, ignoring her comments, “but for some reason, about thirty people out near those shipping containers are looking in our direction, studying the Snapper.” He flicked his fingers toward the freight yard on the other side of the road, where massive lifting vehicles meandered between stacks and stacks of giant, multicolored containers.
There would be plenty of places for people to hide back there, but the machinery was automated, and Jelena couldn’t see anyone.
“I’ll try to see what some of them are thinking,” Erick added.
Jelena reached out with her own senses, intending to seek out the potential spies, but a graying man with a potbelly strode up the ramp and into the ship. He wore a dyspeptic expression that looked like a permanent fixture.
“Make your staff stop glowing, Erick,” she muttered. “We’re incognito Starseers, remember?”
He didn’t seem to hear her, but his runes did stop glowing, fading into what appeared to be ebony wood. The material was much stronger than wood. It was a proprietary metal alloy enhanced with power by the tool-builder who had crafted the staff. In this case, Jelena’s grandpa, Stanislav. A nearly identical staff leaned against a bulkhead in her cabin.
Alfie stood up and looked from the man to Jelena, silently asking if she was supposed to do something fierce. And if ham rewards would be involved if she did it correctly.
Jelena used her telepathic link to soothe Alfie and stepped forward to meet their visitor, Sergeant Lemaire, the security man overseeing the delivery of his boss’s cargo. Since he looked like a person about to lodge a complaint, Jelena spoke first, holding up her netdisc as a holodisplay popped into the air above it.
“Sergeant, did you come to sign for the cargo?” She smiled, tempted to use the same mental soothing that she’d used on Alfie. But touching the minds of strangers was deeply personal and made her uncomfortable. Touching the minds of animals was far more appealing.
“I came to see what’s taking so long,” Lemaire snapped.
“We’ve only been here for five minutes.” Jelena wasn’t sure why he was complaining to her instead of his own two people. They were moving crates efficiently but not with obvious urgency.
“You’ve been here fifteen minutes. It took you ages to land and open the hatch so we could get to work.”
Ten minutes was “ages”? Ten minutes during which she’d been affixing docking clamps and tubes to resupply water and fill the oxygen tanks while answering questions from the port authorities about their cargo and how long they would be staying?
“Don’t you have people who can help?” Lemaire propped a fist on his hip. “Mop Head is just standing there, rubbing that staff.”
Erick blinked. “Is that me?”
He could use a haircut. His blond locks were covering his ears and dangling in his eyes.
“It’s not Alfie,” Jelena said. “She’s female.”
Erick squinted at her.
“No staff,” she explained.
As a twenty-four-year-old man, shouldn’t Erick be quicker to catch on to innuendoes than she was? She’d read books and surfed the sys-net of course, but when it came to personal experience, she’d led a sheltered life, growing up on her parents’ freighter and until recently, usually having her very large and very muscular cyborg stepfather as a duenna whenever she’d left the ship at its various ports. The one boy—man—she’d dated while practicing for her piloting exams hadn’t been one to crack lurid jokes. As focused as he’d been on academics, he might not have even known lurid jokes.
“I agree that we should get the cargo off-loaded quickly,” Erick said, his humor apparently on vacation today. He leaned his staff against a bulkhead and jogged into engineering. “Austin? Come help. Jelena, you might want to call Masika and Thorian to help too.”
Sergean
t Lemaire’s eyebrows twitched at the name Thorian. Jelena didn’t allow herself to wince, not with Lemaire frowning at her, but she wished Erick hadn’t used his name. She was sure that former Prince Thorian, the only heir to the now-defunct Sarellian Empire, wasn’t the only Thorian in the Tri-Suns System, but he was certainly the most famous. Ten years had passed since his father died and the empire fell, but thanks to his recent assassination hobby, his name was back in news vids being broadcast all over the system.
Erick returned with Austin behind him, his younger brother as tall as he but ganglier and more pimple-prone. Erick tossed a hand tractor to Jelena, and he and Austin set to work, moving stacks toward the ramp with more alacrity than Lemaire’s people had shown.
Under Lemaire’s ongoing impatient glare, Jelena headed for another stack of crates. She noticed he wasn’t offering to move anything. At least it wasn’t like the old days when people had needed to physically lift crates with their own strength.
As she applied the hand tractor, its energy beam lifting the cargo, she tapped the earstar draped over her right helix. Trusting the AI to figure out she wanted to comm the rest of her crew, she spoke without preamble. “Thor and Masika? Can you take a break from beating on each other and come down to help—”
Trouble! Erick telepathically warned her as something clanged onto the Snapper’s ramp.
Alfie’s head came up, and she barked in that direction.
Instinctively, Jelena used her mental powers to raise an invisible barrier around Alfie and herself. Belatedly, as she identified the item, she realized she should have raised a barrier around it. The grenade rolled to the base of the ramp and exploded.
Smoke filled the air outside the ship, and a woman cried out in pain. The female cargo handler. She’d been on the way back from the truck for another load.
Lemaire cursed, yanked out a blazer pistol, and ran to the hatchway, using the hull for cover as he pointed the weapon around the edge.
The people from the freight yard? Jelena asked Erick telepathically, now wishing her staff wasn’t back in her cabin. She could use her powers without it, but the tool amplified them and helped with focus.
Yes, and some more are coming from between two other ships docked farther down. They seem to be part of the same group. Erick set down his cargo, lifted his hand, and his staff floated into his grip.
Jelena winced when Austin dropped his hand tractor—and the crates the tool had been levitating. The younger Ostberg had never developed Starseer abilities, and he raced for engineering instead of preparing to defend the ship. Jelena didn’t know him well enough yet to know if he intended to hide there or grab some tool to help. He’d only been on the Snapper for a couple of weeks and hadn’t arrived with weapons unless one counted his ghost-hunting paraphernalia.
Another boom came from the base of the ramp. Tires screeched and metal crunched as one of the hulking freight vehicles rammed into the side of Lemaire’s truck. With all the smoke, he couldn’t have seen much, but he fired in that direction.
Jelena ran toward the controls for the cargo hatch, figuring the best course of action would be to lock down the ship—grenades and hand weapons shouldn’t do much against the armored hull of the old freighter. But if grenades were flung into the hold, that would be another matter.
“What are you doing?” Lemaire grabbed her wrist when she reached for the hatch controls.
“Closing the door.”
“They’re trying to steal our cargo,” he growled, shooting into the smoke as he kept his grip on her wrist. Jelena was tempted to yank her arm free—and use her power to knock him on his ass—but he added, “You will help us drive these thieves away. I’m not signing for anything if we don’t get our full cargo.”
Jelena wasn’t positive her crew was still responsible for the cargo at this point, but her parents—the owners of the family business and her employers—wouldn’t appreciate it if they didn’t get paid for the freight run. She winced, envisioning her second chance to prove herself failing through no fault of her own.
“We’ll help,” she said, extricating her wrist.
Erick stormed out onto the ramp with his staff in hand.
“Thor!” Jelena called over her shoulder. “Masika, are you—”
Masika, a dark-skinned, muscular woman with unnatural speed and strength, raced around a stack of crates and blurred past to join Erick at the base of the ramp. Thor came right behind her, wearing his usual black clothing with his retractable sword extended and glowing blue, a promise that it was more than a simple blade.
“Never mind,” Jelena said.
Thor carried her staff, and he tossed it to her without a word as he ran past. Another grenade went off close to the ship, and Jelena grimaced, imagining her ramp being mangled or blown off.
She silently ordered Alfie to stay back and strode out, keeping her barrier around her. Smoke filled the air, and she couldn’t see much with her eyes. Thumps and clangs came from the direction of the truck. Jelena’s senses told her Masika and Thor were there, striking and hurling away armed people trying to reach the cargo bed. Erick blocked someone’s attempt to leap into the cab and drive the truck away. One man came in from the side, leaping onto the bed and tearing into a crate with a crowbar. Masika heard him and pounced, lifting him overhead and throwing him into one of the shipping containers across the road.
Most of the would-be thieves didn’t have blazers or even guns with bullets, instead clobbering people with crowbars or makeshift clubs. Thor leaped into the cargo bed and found one who’d made it in before he arrived. The scrawny man swung at him with a crowbar. Thor parried the blow, his enhanced blade cutting the lesser weapon in half. His foe stumbled back, and Jelena sensed his alarm and fear. Whatever he had expected for security, it hadn’t been a Starseer.
Thor grabbed the man and, much like Masika, hurled him farther than he should have been able to, though he used the power of his mind rather than genetically enhanced muscles. Soon, Masika and Thor stood side by side on the edge of the cargo bed, blocking any who approached. The locals had no chance of getting past them, not with their current tactics.
The number of thieves—as they did indeed seem to be—surprised Jelena. As did the ragtag nature of their clothing and the griminess and gauntness of their faces. Did they know the Snapper was delivering food? Was that why they had attacked?
Still on the ramp, Jelena looked up and down the street, her staff ready and her defenses up, but she didn’t attack anyone. She had a notion of finding the leader and mentally coercing him or her to call off his comrades. That idea faded when she spotted a grenade hurtling straight toward her.
Her heart skipped a few beats, but she kept her calm and pointed her staff at it. She batted at the projectile with a soft whisper of power. The grenade flew back in the other direction, and someone cried a warning. Or maybe that was a curse. She knew the natives of the Hierarchy Moons spoke Solis Lingua, but she couldn’t understand their heavy dialect.
Her senses warned her of three people approaching her from the opposite direction, following the hull of the Snapper, as if they meant to pull themselves onto the top of the ramp and sneak in behind her—or maybe knock her to the side and charge in behind her.
Jelena whirled toward them, thrusting out with her barrier, using it like a battering ram. The three men—no, those were three boys, barely into their teens—stumbled back. They were as gaunt as the rest of the people, all clad in clothes that didn’t fit. Two of them didn’t have shoes. Even though she hadn’t hurt them badly, mostly startling them, she promptly felt bad about the assault. She lowered her barrier, trying to think of something she might say or do to convince them to break off before they were seriously hurt. She didn’t want to fight starving kids.
Lemaire fired from behind her, and she jumped. She’d forgotten about him, and she gaped in horror as his blazer blast struck one of the boys in the chest.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
The boy c
lutched a hand to his chest, eyes huge with pain and horror. He tripped backward and fell to the ground. Dead.
“My job,” Lemaire growled, starting to fire again.
This time, Jelena grabbed his wrist, pulling it to the side so his blast didn’t hit a second boy. The two remaining thieves were standing in shock and staring down at their companion. Seeing Lemaire’s blazer bolt bouncing off the hull of the Snapper spurred them into motion. They sprinted away, disappearing into the smoke.
“They’re just kids.”
“They’re thieves.” Lemaire pushed past her, shooting into the smoke again. “If you won’t help, get out of my way.”
She had been helping.
She was tempted to knock Lemaire off the ramp, but more cries from the truck distracted her.
Try not to hurt them, please! she spoke into Erick’s, Thor’s, and Masika’s minds. There wasn’t time to elaborate. She was forced to turn to the side to defend against two more boys coming at her. One had a slingshot, and the other was throwing rocks.
Retreat, or you’ll all be killed, Jelena silently ordered them, breaking her personal rule about not using telepathy on strangers. She made the words forceful, hoping to scare the boys into running.
Their eyes widened with fear, but they still hurled their rocks. Through her brief mental contact with them, she could sense the hunger gnawing at their stomachs, along with their surface thoughts. If they could just get one crate, they could gorge themselves and be full for the first time in months. Maybe years.
Jelena raised her shield again, halting their approach, but feelings of sympathy almost made her falter. A big part of her wished she could let them slip in, to steal a few items from one of Lemaire’s boss’s crates. She had no idea where the food was going—her job was to deliver it and nothing more—but Lemaire and his colleagues all appeared well fed. She imagined they could part with a few items.
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