Deuces Wild Boxed Set: Books 1-4: Beyond the Frontiers, Rampage, Labyrinth, Birthright

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  She strolled over to the counter and took a seat, and a bartender was standing in front of her before Nickie could even lift a hand to flag one of them down. It was a brief matter to order a drink, though the bartender lingered once she set the glass down on the counter in front of Nickie.

  “You after something other than just a drink?” the bartender ventured, folding her arms on the counter and leaning on them. “You’ve got that twitchy sort of look about you.” She sounded a bit like she was revving up to kick Nickie out of the bar if she was up to anything untoward.

  Nickie snorted indelicately and drained half of her glass in one swig. “Any idea where I can find some people who know something about ships?” she asked, leaning one elbow on the counter and propping her chin in her hand. “I’m a little short-staffed right now.”

  The bartender didn’t even bother to hide the way she relaxed minutely at how tame the request turned out to be. She thought it over for a moment, then lifted a hand and pointed to one of the tables. “I would try him first,” she answered, and then she listed two other names and pointed to nearby tables, quick enough that Nickie barely had time to make note of them. “Other than them, I can’t help you.”

  Nickie saluted her with her glass and hopped down from the stool to head to the first table.

  Are you sure this is the best place to try to pick up a functional crew member? Meredith wondered dubiously. To my knowledge, there are places one can go that are dedicated to hiring such people.

  It’ll be fine, Nickie assured her, and she threw back the last of her drink. Just leave it to me.

  She came to a halt at the edge of the first table. The man seated there was attractive—tall, broad, and clearly accustomed to keeping himself in shape. There was a young woman practically sitting in his lap, running the tip of one finger in a circle on his chest as she simpered in his ear.

  Nickie sat down across from them, set her empty glass down, perched both elbows on the table, and cupped her chin in both hands. “Hi there,” she offered brightly as if there wasn’t anywhere else in the world she was supposed to be. “I’m looking to hire a few new crew members on my ship. Heard you might be good for it.”

  His eyebrows rose slightly, and he waved off the girl draped over him. With a pout, she shoved herself away from the table and skulked away.

  The man gave Nickie a once-over, slow and deliberate, before he licked his lips. “And what’s the pay like for being part of your crew?” he asked. Nickie could feel her hackles rising already. He grinned slowly. “Trust me, I’m good enough to earn it.”

  “Egos get people shot out of the sky,” Nickie informed him, her tone almost sickeningly pleasant. “You might want to keep an eye on that.”

  He scoffed. “Give me half an hour and I can prove it.”

  Frankly, Nickie already knew she didn’t even want to give him half a minute. Instead, she asked, “Got any credentials I can see? Just to prove that your ego isn’t smoke and mirrors.”

  He grunted in irritation but presented an engineering license. Nickie squinted at it, scrutinizing it carefully. It was definitely him and it didn’t look fake, but she had never heard of him. So really, how good could he be if he hadn’t even made a name for himself?

  She flicked the license back at him like a paper football, and he fumbled to catch it.

  With a tight smile, Nickie assured him, “I’ll be in touch.”

  She got to her feet and pushed herself away from the table with more force than was strictly necessary, moving on to the next target the bartender had pointed out to her.

  The next target turned out to be two targets; a pair of twin girls sat at the table. They listened to Nickie’s pitch with a cheerful sort of patience and then they launched almost simultaneously into a rambling speech about their skills and assets, speaking over each other so loudly and so quickly that Nickie recoiled slightly. She could barely make out a word of what they were saying until they finished, with one of the girls saying, “And the first four blew up pretty spectacularly, but two of those at least made it out of dry dock, and the fifth one held up pretty well for a few weeks!”

  Nickie stared at them blankly for a long moment, then got to her feet and walked away without a word. Behind her, one of them called, “Okay, bye-bye!”

  Nickie started walking faster. She shot the bartender a beseeching look as she hurried away from the table, but the bartender simply shrugged unsympathetically and went back to wiping down the counter.

  Rude.

  Nickie could practically feel Meredith gearing up to say something, so she cut the EI off with a preemptive, Not a word. I still have this under control.

  Rebus Quadrant, Minerva Trading Outpost, Aboard the Penitent Granddaughter

  Occasionally, Grim wished he had more arms. Maybe just another pair. Or two extra pairs, at most. He wasn’t asking for a lot. It would just be convenient sometimes, he reflected as he hammered the dented mug against the wall to get the Skaines in the next room to be quiet again. He immediately dragged his attention back to the pot on the stove in front of him.

  The shouting and the thumping next door went quiet for a few seconds, but it started up again almost immediately. With an exasperated, “Gaaaaah,” Grim tried to tune it out. He snatched up a container of…

  He squinted at the label.

  He couldn’t tell what it said. But all the ingredients he had picked had looked familiar, and when he pulled off the lid and took a tentative sniff, it smelled familiar. So with some trepidation, he tipped a couple teaspoons of what gave every indication of simply being red pepper into the boiling pot.

  Nothing happened at first, so he put the lid back on the jar and put it aside. Then the contents of the pot burst into spectacular flames. With a yelp high-pitched enough that it could have shattered glass, Grim pulled the pot off of the burner and leapt away from it. His legs got tangled in a chair, and he went to the floor in a heap.

  He kicked his way free of the chair and scrambled gracelessly back to his feet, and for a moment he just stared at the still-flaming pot before he started frantically searching for the lid. If he could suffocate it before it caught anything else in the kitchen on fire, all the better.

  He cringed so hard it was very nearly audible when the fire alarm started to go off, a strobe light flashing rhythmically as a high-pitched siren whined unendingly. Grim paused in his search for a lid to put on the pot to instead throw a mug of water at the pot. As he suspected, though, it had little effect. He didn’t really expect water to have much of an impact on the flames when the contents of the pot were mostly liquid.

  The shouting in the room next door was getting louder, and he could hear it picking up in the room to the galley’s other side and then across the hall. Soon enough it was so loud that Grim could scarcely hear himself think, and the idea of just letting the ship catch on fire suddenly became that much more tempting.

  But no. No, he couldn’t do that. He would just have to…do something else.

  Chaos erupted ship-wide.

  The Skaines in every room in every direction began shouting and arguing with all the door controls once the fire alarm started to go off. Krask seemed curiously unconcerned about it. Durq ducked farther back into his spot between the cabinets, but Krask’s gaze fell on him anyway.

  “You suppose the heat would be enough to cook this one?” he mused out loud, slow and mild, as he eyed Durq thoughtfully.

  Barqx snickered and replied, “If you throw him in deep enough, it probably would.”

  Durq wedged himself even deeper into the corner and tried to pull one of the cabinets closer to close off the gap. It was firmly bolted to the floor, though, so it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Slowly, Krask started advancing toward him, one steady step at a time, as if he were being egged on by the sound of the siren and the shouting of every other Skaine down the corridor.

  Durq whimpered and sat on the floor.

  Chapter 6

  Nickie

 
Rebus Quadrant, Minerva Trading Outpost

  With a mounting sense of dread, Nickie sat down at the third table that had been pointed out to her, practically slumping on it. The man across from her was older than she would have expected, but maybe age bred experience in his case.

  He waited until Nickie finished explaining the specs of the Granddaughter’s core and engine before he cut her off with a snap of his fingers.

  “I’ve worked on plenty of those!” he assured her, and for a moment Nickie felt a spark of hope. “You’ve probably heard of some of them!” He started ticking them off on his fingers as he listed names. “The Oglethorpe, the Wrassler, the Orange Marmaduke…”

  He kept listing ships, and true enough, Nickie recognized some of the names.

  She had seen each and every one of them listed for sale in scrap shops. Some of them had fallen out of the atmosphere pretty spectacularly.

  Before Nickie could come up with a reason to excuse herself from the conversation, Meredith interrupted her chain of thought.

  We have something of a situation back on the ship. I’m doing what I can to keep outpost security at bay, but you should return.

  Nickie cleared her throat and told the old geezer, “You know, I don’t think you’re going to work out,” and shrugged blithely. She got to her feet, and as soon as she turned away her face fell, exasperation creeping across her features.

  Seriously? You can’t handle it on your own?' Nickie griped at her as she stormed toward the door.

  Not if you want the Skaines on board to survive.

  There was a beat before Nickie pointed out slowly, I mean, I’m not exactly their biggest fan.

  Nickie! Meredith snapped.

  Nickie nearly leapt out of her boots and cast around quickly to make sure no one saw her jumping at shadows.

  Don’t yell at me, she groused in return.

  But she picked up the pace.

  Then get your sorry excuse for a behind back to your ship and handle this.

  As if to cap off her point, the feedback from Meredith’s arguments with the outpost’s security appeared at the corner of Nickie’s vision. An ever-growing list of blocked fire-suppression attempts as Meredith kept the station’s security from running onto the ship and finding a very unwelcome surprise.

  Nickie heaved a sigh as if she were being forced to watch someone eat the last slice of cake she would ever be offered, and she broke into a run toward the docking bay. People stepped aside as she charged along, getting out of the way of both her bull-rush and the look on her face.

  Rebus Quadrant Minerva Trading Outpost, Aboard the Penitent Granddaughter, Kitchen

  It was a simple matter to storm through the corridors to the galley. Nickie was pretty sure the vendor was still shouting on the dock after she sprinted past him and told him to hold his horses. But she hadn’t expected to open the door to the galley and find Grim staring at a flaming pot.

  He was calm in the way of a man who was standing at the eye of his own storm. At any moment, he might erupt into a panic.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a chef?” Nickie asked, stepping into the galley and waving smoke out of her face. She could barely even hear herself speaking over the siren and the rioting going on in every direction.

  “I don’t speak or read Skaine,” Grim replied. He very nearly sounded like he was sulking. “I found what looked like red pepper. How was I supposed to know Skaine spices burst into flame?”

  Nickie snorted. She couldn’t say that was surprising, all things considered, but that wasn’t the most helpful observation at that point. “Fire suppression shit?”

  Grim seemed half a second away from saying something snide in response before he realized she was probably talking to her EI, who knew where basically everything was.

  In the back of the closet on the far wall, Meredith answered promptly.

  Nickie scoffed as she jogged over to the closet and started digging through it. Of course it was about as far away from the hottest parts of the galley as it could get without being in a different room entirely. That definitely made sense.

  She emerged from the closet with a fire-retardant blanket folded in her hands. Grim met her halfway to help unfold it before they tossed it over the pot. It made a steaming, fizzling noise, and a few more gusts of acrid smoke crept out from beneath it.

  Abruptly, the siren died down with a final squawk and the lights stopped flashing. It seemed a bit too quick, but Nickie was willing to assume Meredith had shut it down.

  Nickie, there’s a bit of a situation building next door, Meredith reported, as if the silencing of the fire alarm had simply been her version of clearing her throat.

  Nickie groaned and threw her hands up. “What now?”

  “Did she mention the noise next door?” Grim asked blandly, lifting the edge of the blanket to peer at the pot underneath. He recoiled when the pot coughed out a puff of semi-noxious gas right in his face.

  Of the seven Skaines in the next room, one of them is considerably smaller than average. From what I can interpret, I’m concerned that if someone doesn’t let him out of there he’s going to be eaten, Meredith supplied.

  Nickie blinked slowly. “These guys are cannibals.” It was supposed to be a question, but it came out sounding more like a very tired statement. Grim gave her a look like she had just sprouted a few extra heads.

  Ordinarily no, Meredith replied, like an eager history teacher. But it’s not entirely unheard of, and a larger one is making threats that seem increasingly likely.

  With a slow sigh that seemed to scream “Why me?” Nickie looked at Grim. “Wait here.”

  That said, she stepped out of the kitchen again and stopped in front of the door to the next room. All right, let’s get this over with.

  Meredith opened the door so abruptly that the three Skaines clustered in front of it toppled into the hall. One by one, Nickie booted them back into the room and stepped inside. The door closed once again, sealing her in but making it so none of the Skaine could make a run for it while she was occupied.

  The largest of them didn’t even come up to Nickie’s nose, but he was nearly twice as broad as she was. He was standing in front of a pair of cabinets, and it took Nickie a moment to realize that a considerably smaller Skaine was huddled on the floor between the cabinets.

  Nickie arched one eyebrow pointedly. “Really?” She sighed like a disappointed parent. “Twelve hours without food and you jump straight to cannibalism? Most people would go for, like, their boots or their belts before going straight for their coworkers.”

  “Uh, Krask?” one of the average sized Skaines asked. “What do we do about her?”

  The larger one—Krask, presumably—heaved a sigh and turned to face Nickie, ignoring the cabinets and the runt for the time being. “You get out of the way and let me handle this.”

  Like a sea parting, five of the Skaines huddled back against the walls, getting well out of the way as Krask charged. Nickie sidestepped, stuck a leg out, and sent Krask tumbling to the floor when he tripped over it. She knew her enhancements were just waiting there for her to use them, but she got the impression she wasn’t going to need them for this.

  Krask caught his balance against the wall and whirled toward Nickie again in a hail of flying fists. She blocked one strike, then the next, and wove away from the next two. Finally, she clamped her hands around the sides of Krask’s head, forcing him to come to a halt if he didn’t want to wind up snapping his own neck.

  Nickie’s grip tightened, and she slammed one knee straight into Krask’s chest. She let him go, and he sank to the floor in a wheezing heap. Around them, five of the Skaines muttered to each other uncomfortably and shifted closer to the walls. They had no interest in getting their asses handed to them.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Krask wheezed as he caught his breath. “Do something! You saw what just happened!”

  The others hesitated for a moment—if the strongest of them had landed on his ass, they didn’t have
much hope for themselves—before they decided that Krask was scarier than the challenge ahead of them. As one they lunged at Nickie, hoping numbers would give them an edge.

  Nickie pirouetted out of the way, so two of them slammed into each other and tumbled to the floor in a heap of tangled limbs. As they disentangled themselves, Nickie caught the arm of a third Skaine trying to rush her. Grip tight, she ducked an incoming blow from a fourth and turned in a swift circle, letting go at the last minute so that the Skaine in her grasp crashed into the wall like a crash-test dummy.

  She slammed one elbow into the side of another Skaine’s head, and he dropped to the floor on top of the two who were still trying to regain their footing. Already, there were four out of the way, and she turned her gaze to the fifth.

  The clever one of the bunch, apparently. He looked back and forth between the Skaines on the floor and Nickie before he held his hands up in surrender and sat down right there on the floor. Nickie offered him a toothy shark-like grin and nodded once. There was no time to celebrate just then, though. She wasn’t quite finished.

  Krask got back to his feet just in time for Nickie to kick out with one leg, catching him in the chin with the heel of her boot. His head snapped back, and he toppled to the floor once again.

  Nickie stood in the middle of the room for a moment to make sure nothing else was going to happen. Once she was certain that she was in the clear, she walked toward the back of the room. She stopped in front of the cabinets the runt was still hiding between and offered him a hand. “Come with me if you want to live.”

  Really? Meredith sighed.

  The runt wasted no time in taking her hand and letting Nickie pull him to his feet and lead him out of the room. They stepped through the door quickly once it opened, and it locked behind them once again as soon as they were through.