Havik

by Starr Huntress

  He blinked again, pulling the utility knife away. “The automatic cleaning system broke this week. You’ll have to haul in the water in buckets. I hope you don’t mind shit,” he said with a giggle.

  Naston brought her to the one door she could never open. He pressed his palm to a scanner, and the door slid open to the cargo hold.

  The stench of urine made her eyes water. She coughed, covering her mouth with a handkerchief. “What the hell? Did the sewage treatment tank leak?”

  Naston tossed her a mask with a small filter. “Don’t open the cages. Hose the animals down. Mop up the floor. Refuse goes down the drain. Simple enough for a Terran.”

  Cages stacked on top of each other lined the cargo hold, arranged around a large drain in the middle of the floor. Alien animals she did not recognize screeched and cried and growled and called to each other. One cage held a flock of bird-like creatures that bounced from branch to branch, the talons of their back legs gripping the wooden dowels. Their front paws moved from their mouths to their round ears as they cleaned themselves. Green with white bellies, their wings fluttered. They were lovely, and it made Thalia sad that the floor of their cage was a thick layer of empty seed husks and shit.

  Not in a cage but chained to a wall, an animal the size of a moose stamped its feet. Tawny with a black mane and tail, black stripes decorated its neck. A thick black stripe ran down the length of its face. She recognized it from a documentary about endangered animals she watched with Havik. Turns out Danger B loved animals, the scarier, the better.

  Looking over the cargo hold again, she recognized more endangered animals from the same documentary, like the smugglers used the film as a shopping list.

  Endangered animals.

  That they were bringing to auction.

  Fuck.

  Her stomach turned from more than the stench.

  Thalia approached slowly. From this distance, she could see its coat caked with mud—probably shit but she was going to call it mud—and blood. The shackles on a hoof had rubbed the skin raw.

  It reared back to lash out with a hoof, but the chain jerked back, obviously programmed to snap back if the animal pulled too much. With a squeal, the animal fell to the ground.

  The sound made her heart hurt. She wasn’t sure how she could get close, but she had to help the poor thing.

  With her attention focused on the large animal thrashing on the ground, a paw reached out from the cage closest to her and grabbed onto the pant leg of her flight suit.

  Thalia jumped, knocking the paw away. “I’m so sorry! Are you hurt?”

  She crouched down, only to find that the animal had retreated to a far corner. She coughed again at the unbelievably bad smell of ammonia. Had the cages even been cleaned? How long had the animals been kept like this?

  She had no idea what to do. Opening the cages was not only dangerous, but pointless. The animals would still be contained in the ship, heading toward the auction. Any chaos or confusion that resulted would give the mean-tempered crew a reason to kill the animals.

  Thalia immediately rejected the idea. Maybe she could sneak in and free the animals when they reached the auction. No, the result would be more of the same. She needed to alter the course, to return the ship to the planet from where the animals had been stolen.

  Except she didn’t know where that was.

  And she didn’t know how to fly a spaceship.

  She did know how to clean up a mess and doing that would improve the animals’ lives, albeit temporarily.

  Thalia found a hose with a spray nozzle and a waterspout. She rinsed off the floor, directing the worst of the filth into the center drain. At least the ship was generous with water. The potable water was on a different supply tank than the recycled gray water used for almost everything else.

  Wet and up to her knees in filth, Thalia did not hear the door open.

  “Who let you in here?” Sue demanded.

  Thalia released her grip on the hose’s nozzle. “Naston.”

  “Lazy bastard.” Sue narrowed her eyes. “I suppose you’re some bleeding-heart animal lover and you want answers.”

  “You’re poachers.”

  Sue grimaced. “Nah. Smugglers. I don’t do the actual poaching, just transportation.”

  “These are endangered animals. Don’t you care that you’re destroying something special and rare?”

  “What did you think we smuggled, sugarplum?” Sue’s fingers brushed against the blaster on her hip.

  Thalia held up her hands in surrender. “I don’t know. Overtaxed goods. Luxury cheese. Drugs. Weapons. People.”

  Sue laughed, almost barking. “You didn’t think we smuggled people? There’s no profit in people. I’d have to stack them tip to tail, and there would be no way to keep the inventory healthy in those conditions.”

  “People are not inventory,” Thalia said, knowing full well that other smugglers had no problem with the conditions Sue described.

  “People are not profitable inventory,” Sue clarified.

  “What about stasis chambers?”

  “Do you want me to traffic people? Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “No! No. The cages are cruel and difficult to clean. Stasis chambers seem more humane,” Thalia said.

  Sue shook her head. “The tech is controlled too tightly by the military and planetary governments. Any working units you can find are ancient or cobbled together from decommissioned parts. They’re finicky and the failure rate is too high.”

  Thalia nodded, remembering what the warlord had said about the backup batteries failing in the recovered chambers. “What’s going to happen to the animals?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea. Whatever the collectors want: a new pet, to eat them, to fight, grind up their bones for tea, or maybe even fuck them.”

  Thalia’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “So, no people?”

  Something cold flashed in the captain’s eyes. “Not unless they’re profitable. I’m going to need your comm unit now.”

  Thalia swallowed the lump that seemed to have lodged itself in her throat but complied.

  Sue continued speaking as she slid the comm unit into a pocket. “It’s really fortunate the way you fell in my lap. I had a whiny little man—Toddy, Timmy, something boring—to bring to the auction. He owed my boss a lot of money, but some idiot paid me twice what Tommy was worth. You’re just pure profit.”

  Thalia was wrong. She had never put her plan into action. She had been bait the entire time.

  Chapter 15

  Thalia

  After mucking out the cargo hold, Thalia spent the next two days locked in Paadric’s old cabin. She tried to keep herself from thinking about the dead man but went through a closet and drawers full of mismatched, oddly sized clothes. Perhaps there had been a Paadric once and his weight might have fluctuated enough for the various sized flight suits, but not his height. This cabin seemed to be the dumping ground of all the belongings from Sue’s deceased crew members like some space-age Bluebeard.

  Thalia would have read the hell out of that book. Living the reality? Not so much.

  She organized the wardrobe into piles that represented the deceased. Some were obvious, like the very tall flight suit or the one with the generous waist for a belly. Most of the garments were drab, practical blues and grays, but someone had enjoyed bright bursts of color. The bright hues went into their own pile. It was a twisted type of puzzle, but it kept her from worrying about the auction and Havik.

  He knew she didn’t ditch him, right? When they parted—not that she knew it would be their last words together—she was going to get a drink, not run away with smugglers. Joining a smuggler crew had been the plan she pitched, so she seized the opportunity when it landed in her lap.

  She was dumb. So dumb.

  The original plan to use her as bait was simple and had fewer opportunities for things to go sideways. It wasn’t flashy enough for her, not as exciting as going undercover like in a book, and Thalia had b
een certain she knew best. Well, now she was Bluebeard Sue’s captive, so that showed how much she knew.

  She hoped Havik grokked that she did not abandon him, and she hoped that the tracker worked as intended.

  Havik

  An unplanned, haphazard collection of derelict ships had been welded together to form a station. The sprawling mess filled the viewscreen.

  “It is an ingenious design. The ships are fully functional, separate for travel and reassemble when they reach their destination,” Ren said.

  “That explains why we’ve never found an operational auction site,” Havik said. On the rare occasions they received coordinates, they arrived to find empty space. He had assumed the auctions took place on individual ships or massive luxury cruisers, with a new location for each new event.

  He did not imagine that the station itself disassembled and moved itself in a swarm of a dozen ships.

  They picked up encoded messages a day ago. Ren easily cracked the encryption and continued to monitor transmissions for several hours now and knew that an auction of various live specimens was scheduled to take place within an hour.

  The event had a catalog, which disgusted Havik to no end. He scrolled through the collection, recognizing a dozen endangered animals, one famously stolen work of art, a lot of one highly toxic and controlled substance, a plant thought to be extinct but valued for its medicinal properties, and a handful of beings. The beings did not warrant as lavish of a description as a millennium-old vase but were written to be “good for breeding.”

  Disgusting. If Thalia were part of that listing, he’d tear the makeshift station apart with his bare hands.

  He had alerted the Judgment and the nearest authorities about the auction. The Judgment was too far away to arrive swiftly, but the warlord sent fighter ships and a raiding team. Soon, when those forces arrived, the rich collectors who thought themselves above the law and smugglers who fed their greed would be in custody.

  Anticipation zipped through him as he checked his weapons again, making sure they were fully charged and secure on his person. He and Ren had conducted raids before, but not on this scale and not supported by a clan behind them.

  “Ren, is the comm operational?” he said.

  “Yes. For the third time, it is operational,” Ren replied over the comm. Equally suited up for combat, Ren wore a helmet with a black visor that masked his face.

  No other recourse remained but to wait for reinforcement. In the confusion of the raid, he would find Thalia. She would be safe.

  And he would never let her out of his sight again.

  Thalia

  Glasses removed and blindfolded, Sue marched Thalia from her cabin. Recognizing the hiss of an airlock, Thalia assumed they transferred to another ship or station. More marching, followed by cold metal of scissors ripping off her clothes. Thalia tried to fight but it was impossible while blindfolded.

  Naked and vulnerable, she tried to cover her most sensitive bits. That didn’t last long before unseen hands pricked and poked her. She shouted and tried to fight off her assailant but that earned her a jab with a shock stick.

  “Good female. Stand still. Let me see you,” a rough voice said before slapping her ass. “A bit scrawny. Are you sure the female is fully mature?”

  “She’s an adult,” Sue said.

  Thalia turned to the sound of the woman’s voice. “I’m getting out of here, and I’m going to kill you,” she vowed.

  “Oh, darling, you’ve never killed anyone. You don’t have the guts.”

  Probably. Stealing property or money was one thing. Taking a life was on an entirely different level.

  “Don’t let me find you,” Thalia said. “My alien is going to tear you apart limb from limb, and he’s going to make you suffer.”

  Sue laughed. “I’m going to miss your smart mouth. Don’t let your new owners beat that out of you.”

  Before she could think of an appropriate blood-curdling threat, Thalia was doused with a cold cleaning solution. Shivering and blinded, she fought the hands that roughly scrubbed her skin with industrial-grade steel wool, or at least that’s what it felt like.

  “Behave yourself or I will sedate you,” the same rough voice from earlier warned.

  Thalia counted in her head, imagining herself back on Havik’s ship, curled up next to him watching some wildlife documentary. She needed to stay calm and keep a clear head to get out of this.

  Scrubbed and rinsed off again, warm air shot up from the floor, drying all of her in a hot blast. Then she was hit with soft, cottony puffs covered with a powder.

  Thalia coughed, hunching over to protect herself from the puff assault.

  The blindfold came off and Thalia found herself in a clear tube, mostly likely acrylic, just wide enough to flex out her elbows but not much else. The floor was brightly light and the powder on her skin shimmered like crushed gemstones. She wore what generously be described as a shift dress made from a thin, nearly translucent material. The dress barely reached her ass.

  Her tube was one of six, similarly lit with nearly naked women of various planets inside, and all arranged in a circle. Shadowy figures moved in the dark room beyond the light of the tube. She couldn't tell if the figures were vague shapes because of the lighting or her lack of glasses.

  The woman in the tube nearest to Thalia was also human. She had so vivid a shade of red hair it obviously came from a bottle. Tattoos decorated her arms. Thalia squinted but couldn’t make out any details. Maybe red roses and a black bird? Black and red ink.

  Frustrated, she balled up her fists. Her missing glasses made her feel more vulnerable than being practically naked and rolled in stripper glitter.

  “Hey! Hey,” Thalia shouted. The woman did not respond.

  Thalia slapped a hand on the glass barrier and received a shock for her trouble. Hissing in pain, she clutched her injured hand to her chest.

  The action snagged the woman’s attention. The woman’s mouth moved but Thalia couldn’t hear a word.

  Great. Soundproof display cases.

  The audience milled around the tubes. Some barely glanced at the naked flesh on display. Others leered and made Thalia wish for Havik to hurry up already and crash the party.

  Barely dressed and vulnerable, she tugged down the back of the dress to cover her ass.

  “I’m gonna steal the rings right off your fingers, you pig,” she promised one particularly lecherous frog-like alien male who licked his lips and waggled his long, grotesque tongue at her. “Then I’m going to rip the warts right of your slimy skin and shove them down your throat.”

  His eyes sparkled like the fucker thought she was cute.

  Cute. She was a damn goddess of wrath and righteous fury.

  Thalia spat on the barrier and the lech reared back, a look of disgust on his purple face.

  “No. Wait. Come back,” she said mildly, not done threatening him. She had barely scratched the surface on her creativity.

  “Warning, specimen is agitated. Initiating gentling protocol,” a robot voice said. A hiss was all the warning Thalia had as an odorless gas filled the chamber.

  “No! Don’t gas me!” She pounded on the glass, like that would help.

  Her muscles relaxed and her eyes felt heavy. Suddenly she didn’t care so much about the strangers leering at her, wanting to purchase her like livestock. Her head floated away from her body, attached only by the thinnest of strings.

  She wanted to be present. She clawed her way back, the force of her will making her alert, but the world outside her cage felt so distant.

  A figure drew closer, more shadows than man. His eyes gleamed but he remained too far away for her to see him clearly. Recognition pricked along the back of her neck. He was bad news, but Thalia found it hard to muster fear or panic.

  The shadowy alien who bought her on Earth.

  For a long, horrible moment, Thalia could taste Nathan’s blood in her mouth again and hear the pounding of rain on the metal roof of Nicky’s warehou
se.

  Thalia squatted down, wrapping her arms around her legs. The gas had slinked in over her protective walls and that memory seemed too real. The feel of it kept repeating on a loop that would not break, like being trapped in a nightmare.

  Paax had sent a message that Nicky had been apprehended, which she knew was a death sentence. If Nicky went into county lock-up, a rival would put a bullet in his head. He couldn’t hurt her or anyone else, but her body hadn’t caught up to her mind yet.

  Was the shadowy alien going to demand his lost property? Purchase her again?

  Remaining still, she sighed with relief when the shadows shifted. The figure moved away, intrigued by the far more colorful redhead.

  Her legs burned in protest from holding a squat, but Thalia stubbornly remained. She teetered and almost lost her balance. Instinctively reaching out a hand to catch herself earned her a shock.

  An alien with an unhealthy purple complexion knocked on the tube and waggled a finger at her. With indignation smoldering in her gut, Thalia rose to her feet.

  The lights went out.

  Chapter 16

  Thalia

  The room went silent for a moment before erupting into a panic. The auction house employees shouted for people to remain calm. The computer announced the same command in a flat voice, repeating it in various languages. Emergency lighting in the form of yellow stripes on the floor pointed to the exits. The audience scrambled for the exits. In their desperation to reach their private ships, chairs and the displays of unique artifacts were knocked over. Cages filled with endangered animals were tipped on their side. People were pushed down and stepped on.

  The squeals and cries of the animals hurt Thalia’s heart. She didn’t care so much about the audience. Those fuckers could trample themselves into a pulp, and Thalia would sleep just fine.

  A frantic male, as broad as he was tall and green as grass, knocked into her tube. The base rocked and she fell into the side. The alien male kept moving, never pausing.