by Zoë Archer
She kept her hands on the controls, but gaped at him. “What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you.” She shook her head. “At least tell me they were combat missions.”
His gaze slid away. “Research and discovery.”
“Research.” She cursed. “They saddled me with a damned cub.”
When his gaze met hers again, it flared with anger. “Not a cub. I’m an officer. And I’ve already proven that I can handle myself.”
“In a controlled environment. We don’t know what we’re going to face at the end of this signal.” She tapped the tracking screen. “Whatever comes, I need an experienced fighter at my side, one who can handle anything thrown in his path.”
“I’ll carry my weight.” His voice was tight, his jaw hard. They held each other’s gaze, neither willing to budge. Finally she broke the stalemate, turning back to face the window.
“Yes, I’m being a hardass.” She stared out at the passing stars, the hundreds of worlds bound together in the galaxy. Some were allies, others weren’t, and everything she saw was threatened by PRAXIS. A very long time ago, the 8th Wing had actually been part of PRAXIS, serving as part of its military force. But when the goals of PRAXIS turned from the betterment of the galaxy to its exploitation, the 8th Wing had rebelled. It formed a resistance group, retaining its name as a show of defiance. That same spirit of disobedience and willingness to battle ran through every member of the 8th Wing. Including, it seemed, the engineers.
“And you have shown that you can fight,” she continued. “But I need to make sure this mission is a success.” Not just for the sake of her reputation, but for the cause for which she fought.
“We all have something at stake.” Even though she had been raking him over the plasma coils, his voice held surprising gentleness. “Black Wraiths are the 8th Wing’s best weapon. None of us can afford to lose them. The whole resistance is counting on us.”
She blew out a breath. “Oh, when you say it like that, I don’t know why I should be worried.”
His chuckle held low warmth. “No pressure.”
She couldn’t stop her answering smile, but when she glanced over at him, his laugh faded and he looked…stunned.
“What?”
He shook his head, and returned his attention back to the tracking screen.
“Calder, tell me.”
“This is strange,” he finally admitted. “Me, sitting here in a Phantom cockpit with the famous hero Lieutenant Celene Jur.”
Oh, gods, this again.
“No one can outfly you,” he continued, “or best you at shooting. They say you once took out six PRAXIS Wasps on your own.”
“Seven, actually. It would’ve been eight, but the fucker crashed his own ship into an asteroid as he tried to get away.”
He shook his head. “You’re legendary. Idolized. And here I am, your partner on a maximum-level priority mission.” His laugh was rueful. “Never thought that when I finally talked to you, it would be under these circumstances.”
“You thought about talking to me?”
He blushed again. Celene had never imagined she’d find a man who blushed attractive, preferring to keep company with men who were just as outspoken and brash as she, fellow hotshot pilots who bragged and liked to show off. Practically everyone in the Black Wraith Squad fit that description. A bunch of loud-mouthed swaggerers. Her included. They boasted to one another about being in command at all times, dominating any situation. At least among her fellow Black Wraith pilots, no one considered her to be a living legend. She was a friend, and they were her friends.
Which didn’t translate to satisfying romantic relationships. Kell was proof of that.
She now looked at Lieutenant Nils Calder. There was something endearing about his flushed cheeks, as if he couldn’t control his response—to her.
“Perhaps once or twice,” he muttered. “I can’t remember. It isn’t important.”
“Seems pretty important to me.”
“The tracking device needs further enhancement.” He surged to his feet and moved out of the cockpit, into the main body of the ship. Leaving her alone and bewildered at the controls.
Gods, did Calder have a crush on her? If he did, that might explain his blushes, his awkwardness when they came into close contact. She didn’t know whether to be amused, flattered or horrified. He wasn’t unattractive; far from it. And if he could solve complex engineering conundrums, imagine what he might do if he set his inventive mind toward seduction.
But it was another case of someone wanting Stainless Jur. Not Celene. She was just as fallible as any organic creature.
At some point on this mission, just like all the men with whom she had tried to get close, Calder was going to discover that the hero he venerated was only a woman.
By tacit agreement, neither of them spoke about their earlier conversation. When Calder returned to the cockpit, sliding his long body into the seat beside hers, she made sure not to stare at him—though it was something of a challenge. Something about the way in which he inhabited his physicality, as if learning and testing its limits, captivated her attention. He reminded her of a siyahwolf raised in captivity, finally released into the wild. What might he do, when he learned the full measure of his strength?
Right now, all his energy was focused on tracking the power signature. “It’s getting stronger. Still too far away to calculate its exact position, but we are headed in the right direction.”
“Distance?”
He shook his head. “Unknown. Could be a matter of a few days, at least.”
Terrific. Nervous energy hummed along her body. She didn’t realize that she was tapping her hand against the controls until Calder placed his hand over hers. His touch came as a surprise, the feel of his large, warm hand covering her sending a visceral jolt through her.
“Throttle down, Jur,” he murmured, “or you’ll burn your engines out too soon.”
“Tough for me to sit still if I’m not on patrol or in combat. Bad habit.”
He raised his brows. “Stainless Jur doesn’t have any bad habits.”
Damn, it was starting already. Soon he would discover she was not the paragon everyone imagined her to be, and then he’d be another man looking at her in angry disappointment.
“Stainless Jur has none.” She tugged her hand free. “I have plenty.”
He shifted back, his expression distant, and then he returned his focus to the tracking screen.
They flew on in tense wordlessness. He did not look at her with veneration. He did not look at her at all.
Celene knew silence. She’d flown enough patrols to grow used to it. Chatter between ships had to be kept to a minimum in case the frequencies were monitored. A Wraith usually held a lone pilot, but it could also be configured to accommodate a gunner. Even when her ship contained herself and another, they talked infrequently, for security purposes. It was an easy silence.
So she understood long stretches of utter quiet, when it was only her, her Wraith and the deep, jeweled infinity of space.
This silence, however, between her and Calder… Nothing familiar or comfortable about it. It pulled tightly until she thought she might crack from the strain.
“Tell me what you know about Marek.”
The illumination from the display traced the contours of his face. His high cheekbones, the straight line of his nose and fullness of his mouth. Again she felt a strange flicker of memory, a far-flung sun glinting across light years of distance.
“He had almost two decades with the 8th Wing. Career. Or so I thought.” Though his voice had been toneless before, now it held a sonic blade’s bite. “There were discussions, ongoing debates. If we had a shift together, we’d talk of circuitry arrangements, the best way to make ships faster, more responsive. The whole time he sat drinking kahve in the mess, listening to stories about sweethearts on homeworlds, he was plotting. Planning.” His tone hardened with self-recrimination. “None of us in Engineerin
g knew.”
“Nobody blames you.”
His mouth curved, sardonic. “The fact that you immediately try to absolve me causes me to believe that I do actually shoulder some responsibility.”
“I don’t shoot down every PRAXIS ship I face. I try, but sometimes even my best effort is not always enough.”
She waited, wondering what he might make of this admission of imperfection. Denial, perhaps. It often went that way, when the fissures in the cation armor began to show.
He stared at her. Then, slowly, nodded.
She didn’t know who was more surprised: her, from his acceptance, or him, for offering it.
“But Marek did keep himself aloof.” He returned to the subject as if eager to put the strange, tenuous moment behind them both. “Didn’t take criticism well. Whenever review came around, he’d be sullen for solar weeks. If he thought he wasn’t getting enough recognition, he’d get angry.”
“Violent?”
Calder shook his head. “He never kept up with his PT. If he wanted to hurt someone, he’d find another way to do it.”
“So he might not be a threat.”
“Physically? No. But Marek knows his tech. Wherever he is, he’ll have systems in place. And the leash will be off.”
“Leash?”
He stared out through the front-facing window as planetary systems slid past, and it surprised her now, how such a lean man could fill the cockpit with his presence. Rather than growing less aware of him as time passed, she had somehow developed a new sensitivity to him. She had seen him in combat, so that now, with each shift of his body, she had a precise knowledge of his muscles, and how he moved.
“Marek pushed for making the weaponry more aggressive, stronger.”
“We need all the firepower strength we can get.”
“Not the way he wanted it. It had elements of…cruelty. Not fast, quick enemy deaths, but a drawing out of their suffering. He wanted their ships to burn around them, giving them time to die slowly, smell their own charred flesh.”
Celene cursed. “Someone had to suspect that we had a monster in our ranks.”
“When called before a panel, he retracted. Said he was only joking. But, Lieutenant,” he said, turning to face her, “there was no jest. I didn’t know Marek well, but I knew that he wasn’t prone to jokes.”
“Then we’ll need a strategy to face him.”
His brows raised. “Word on base is that the best pilots rely on intuition, not strategy.”
She shook her head. “As a Wraith pilot, I’ve faced so many battles, I can’t count them anymore. Some arrive with no warning. I might be on patrol, or escorting a ship of refugees to their new homeworld, and then PRAXIS is there, in small force or large. Always deadly. Years of training and experience taught me to react without thought, to trust instinct and my squad mates not merely to survive, but to prevail.”
She gazed at the tracking screen, and its faint flicker showing her the way to find a traitor. “But sometimes, when I’m fortunate, I get a chance to formulate a strategy beforehand. I’m not so faultless that I won’t grab any advantage.”
Calder studied her for a moment. “Wherever Marek’s situated himself,” he finally said, “he will be well guarded. Count on very tight security protocols. And cutting-edge tech.”
She allowed herself a smile. “Good thing I’ve got the NerdWorks’s best as my partner.”
Chapter Four
They had been following the tracking signal for three solar days when the com shrilled to life. Nils manned the controls as Celene slept in the single bunk in the sleeping chamber at the rear of the ship. The Phantom came equipped with autopilot, but the safer option meant having a live human at the controls, and he needed to keep readjusting the tracking device.
Now alone in the cockpit, he started when a man’s voice crackled through the line. It came in faintly, pops and hisses cutting into words.
“Any ship within range—can you hear me? This is a distress call. Anyone?”
“Reading you,” Nils said into the com. “Identify yourself.”
“Akash Gabela, Galactic Registry number 473-Beta-Rho-229.”
Nils ran the name and registry number through the ship’s database.
“Who is he?”
He glanced over his shoulder to see Celene coming into the cockpit, strapping on her plasma pistol. As always, he needed to hide his reaction to her. It didn’t matter how many times they changed shifts, seeing her made his pulse accelerate, his breathing quicken. She might have been asleep moments ago, but her silver eyes were alert now as she stood beside him and scanned the readout.
“Smuggler, pilot for hire.” Nils focused on the information scrolling on the display rather than Celene’s hand braced on the back of his seat. “He has a few outstanding subpoenas for trafficking black market goods.”
“Untrustworthy.” She narrowed her eyes.
“Not an upstanding citizen, no.”
“Hello?” Gabela’s voice came fainter now. “Unknown pilot, you still there? Situation critical on this end.”
“What is your situation?” Nils asked.
“Ran into a debris storm. Took out propulsion systems, life support on emergency power. I’ve got maybe four solar hours left. You going to help, or what?”
Nils clicked off his end of the com. “His ship’s a standard hauler. I could get him up and running in less than a solar hour.”
Tension resonated through Celene’s posture. She balanced on the balls of her feet as if ready to fight. “Could be another ambush.”
He remembered the debriefing report he had read. She had been on patrol when she responded to another distress signal. And went straight into a trap that nearly cost the 8th Wing a Black Wraith, as well as Celene’s freedom. Easy to see why she would be wary of making the same mistake twice.
These past few days had taught him well: Celene Jur had earned her reputation. Nothing had been given to her.
“Mara Skiren used to be a smuggler,” he said now. “She would know him.”
Celene nodded. “Let’s get her on the line.” They would be breaking com silence, but 8th Wing never ignored a distress call.
Quickly, Nils patched them through an encrypted line to base. “Trouble already?” Ensign Skiren asked.
“Akash Gabela’s giving us a distress signal,” Nils said. “Says he’s drifting and solar hours away from life support failure.”
“Can we trust him?” Celene asked.
“Gabela’s a terrible geluk player,” Mara said, “and he’ll drink all your Lulani rum the second your back is turned. But he doesn’t run bait and switch. If he says he’s in trouble, he’s in trouble. Besides,” she added, “that grizzled bastard knows the darker sectors of the galaxy. He could give you some valuable intel.”
“Then you vouch for him?” Nils asked.
Ensign Skiren’s laugh was rueful. “As much as one former scum can vouch for another.” A deeper, masculine voice sounded behind her, and her response was another husky chuckle. “Oh, you get off on having a shady lover. What? Going to give me a spanking?”
“I don’t think she’s speaking to us,” said Nils, dry.
“Save the dirty talk for later,” Celene said into the com. “If you say that Gabela’s trustworthy—reasonably trustworthy—we’ve got to help him out.”
“Tell that son of a dirtroach that he still owes me for that case of Lulani rum,” answered Skiren. “And stay safe.”
After signing out, Nils cut the com line. He glanced at Celene, seeing the wariness that tightened her mouth, the nervous energy that made her tap her fingers against the control panel.
“There’s a difference between what happened last time and this,” he noted.
She raised one neatly arched black brow.
“This time,” he said, “you aren’t alone.”
“By the ten demon lords, I never thought you’d get here.” Akash Gabela trundled toward Nils and Celene as they stood in his loading bay. Afte
r responding to Gabela’s signal, their ships had linked, and, with plasma pistols ready just in case, they had come aboard.
“We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Celene answered.
Gabela wheezed a laugh. He had the short stature and green skin of a Dejanian, and he hobbled around on a sherica-powered artificial limb. It wasn’t the newest in tech, hissing a little with each step, but the smuggler seemed unbothered by it.
“You’re 8th Wing.” Gabela shuffled closer. “So I know I can trust you. Bunch of galactic do-gooders.”
“If you want PRAXIS running the galaxy,” Nils said, “controlling every aspect of your life, and death, by all means, we’ll gladly step aside. I hear the PRAXIS prison barges are particularly brutal.”
“Fine, fine.” Despite the smuggler’s grumbling, his skin paled. “We going to stand here all day, using up the last of my oxygen, or we going to fix my damn ship?”
“We’re fixing your damn ship,” Celene answered. “Take us to the damage.”
Nils was already striding down the passageway toward the systems room. “I know the way.”
“Want some tools?” Gabela shouted after him. “Mine couldn’t do shit to fix the damage, but you might have better luck with ’em.”
“Brought my own.” He hefted the satchel slung over his shoulder.
Celene was at his side, her long legs matching his stride. “You studied the ship’s schematics before we linked.”
He shook his head. “Haulers usually follow the same configuration. I take what knowledge I already have and extrapolate the rest.” He glanced over when he heard her low laugh.
“Most people are either attractive or smart. Seldom both.”
He almost stumbled. “You think I’m attractive too?”
“Assuming I already consider you smart.”
“That’s a given.”
They reached the door to the systems room. The control panel wouldn’t respond to his fingers on the keypad, so he had to pry the heavy door open. Celene provided assistance, tugging on the thick metal until it opened with a groan.
Inside the systems room, the atmospheric temperature soared, a symptom of the failing life support. Torn wires and ripped-out panels lay on the floor, and a huge gouge ran the length of the external bulkhead. The blackness of space showed through the gouge. Fortunately, the ship had enough power left to generate an electrical shield over the tear, or else everything would have been sucked out into the void.
