“Ah, good, glad to see that piece of trash can receive a hailing frequency,” boomed the voice of the large holographic head in front of us.
Though I’d fortunately never met him in person, or at all, I recognized the sneering face of the esteemed Baron Oro Valrude, chief lieutenant to Xarren Elexae and the Elexae crime family. The same man I’d robbed only a week ago. It seemed he’d figured out who had done him in. Hmm, I needed to work on my stealth.
He was a bald, narrow-headed Elarri prick with fancy white tattoos etched along the sides of his temple and above his ears. He had wide, narrow eyes that glared at us and thin lips that curled into a sneer, with a hint of angry teeth peeking through. His cheeks were sharp, his chin a dagger, and a nose like a smooshed potato—the only round thing about him. I would’ve snickered if not for the fact that it would end in all our deaths.
“Ah, hello, sir, to what do I owe the pleasure?” I said, trying to sound coy and calm.
“Don’t be dense, boy. Do you have any idea who I am?”
I pursed my lips and shook my head. “Can’t say that I do.”
Valrude chewed on that for a moment. Contemplating whether or not to keep playing with his food or swallow us whole, no doubt. “Well, let me jog your memory.” He leaned forward into his own holo-recorder so that he appeared even bigger to us. Just a big old pointy face filling up our space. “I am the man who you so brazenly stole from.”
I scratched my chin and crossed my arms. “I steal from a lot of people, so you’ll need to be a little more specific than that.”
“Yan,” Amara hissed. “You—”
“I am Baron Oro Valrude, you swine!” the baron roared, spittle flying from his mouth but thankfully couldn’t travel via holo. “You desecrated my pleasure house, broke into my office, and stole from not only me, but from the Elexaes.”
“Oh… Baron Valrude. Yes, sorry, I hardly recognized you with your nose and face and eyes and all.”
The baron looked about ready to blow us out of the heavens. One might think that it was a bad idea to antagonize this man, and one would be correct. But someone like Valrude wasn’t going to let us live. Better to have some fun before we died in a ball of flames.
“You have no idea the forces you are dealing with, filth. But it matters not. You’ll be stardust in just a matter of moments.”
“Are you sure you don’t wanna talk this out, Baron? I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement that benefits us both and leaves you looking less useless to Lord Xarren.”
Valrude’s nostrils flared as his glare burned bright. “Hardly.” He turned to someone out of view of the holo. “Target their vessel. Send them to h—”
I put out my hands. “Wait, wait, wait!”
Valrude hesitated and glared at me, his eyes turning to narrow slits. “Pray tell, why should I spare you or your pathetic crew? What could I possibly have to gain?”
“I am Yan Slim Hands, as the bounty posters like to call me. I have a bounty in almost every settled star system and so do most of my crew. Your boss would especially pay you for the trouble of bringing us in, and I’m sure you’d gain a lot of respect and clout with the family. Think about it.”
I could feel my friends’ eyes burrowing holes in my back. But I had a plan, they just needed to trust me.
My words seemed to get through to Valrude. He stroked his chin, eyes still narrowed in suspicion. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” he asked, voice gravelly and low.
“Easy enough to prove.” I shrugged. “Check any of the bounty channels, you’ll find us on there. Call Xarren if you want.”
He leaned back and murmured something to one of his men, no doubt asking them to check if my words were true. Then he turned his attention back to me and folded his arms, a slight smirk playing upon his features.
“Why do this?” he asked. “Whether you die now or die after days of torture at the hands of Lord Xarren, you will die. I’d be offering you mercy right now, but you seek suffering?”
I gulped and straightened. “I will die, yes, but my crew hasn’t done enough to warrant that fate. Maybe they will be locked up, or maybe they’ll go free. But they’ll live. That’s all I want—that they live, that they’re spared.”
Valrude chuckled. “An admirable position from such filth. Surprising.” He stroked his chin again. “You must know that I can’t guarantee their survival. Xarren isn’t known for his mercy.”
“Maybe not, but it’s a chance. Dying here gives them no chance.”
“Hm, so desperate to cling to your pathetic existences. Fine, thief. I will take your ship and your crew and smile as I watch Lord Xarren slowly kill you.” And with a sneer and no further ceremony, he barked at his men in High Elarri—the language of the imperial elite—and then clicked a button.
His face vanished as the holo turned off.
As soon as the holo blinked out and the pale blue light faded, I was bombarded with words and curses and shouts as my friends all spoke at once in a cascade of worry. Amara looked like she wanted to put me in a grave, Rowan appeared ready to lose his mind, and Jinx was wide-eyed and talking with her hands in front of me.
I heard none of it. The ship lurched violently, and we were being pulled toward Valrude’s cruiser by his gravity beam.
No time to lose. I ignored my friends and sprinted from the room toward the cargo bay hatch. They yelled after me and moments later, their footsteps pounded in my wake.
“Yan! What the heck are you thinking?” Amara demanded.
“Patience, my love. I have this under control,” I called back. I could only imagine the scowl that response probably invoked.
Her and Jinx kept talking, but their concerns sailed over my head. I knelt beside the hatch to the cargo bay and threw it open with a creak. I thundered down the ladder rungs, hand over hand. I would have jumped I was so excited but spraining an ankle wouldn’t do us any good at the moment.
My boots slammed against the cold metal floor with a bang and I was running toward Pivek and his workstation. He was already turned to me, his large eyes wide with questions. He grumbled, the sound he made when he breathed heavily. The shirt he wore over his exoskeleton was charred in spots. His people didn’t need to wear clothes like mine did, but many did anyway just to fit in. His hands flailed erratically.
‘What is happening, Yan?’
I filled him in on the battle and the arrival of Valrude. Pivek put his hands on his hips and tilted his head, his mandibles twitching as he wondered what my play was. He seemed about as lost as the others. Speaking of, their footsteps sounded behind me as they came into the cargo bay.
“What’s your plan?” Jinx asked, cheeks flushed, eyes wide with terror. I hated to see her so distressed, but I didn’t have time to explain.
“Pivek, did you ever finish that vortex bomb you were working on? I know it was a bit of a passion project for you.”
‘It’s mostly done, but I wasn’t able to rig a timer yet.’
“How would you get it to detonate?”
He chittered, his wings expanding as he started to understand where I was going with this. ‘With enough kinetic force, it would detonate.’
I smiled. “Good.” I turned toward the others. They looked at me expectantly. “I have a plan.”
“No kidding,” Amara spat. “Mind filling us in on why we’re surrendering?”
“We’re not.” I nodded to Pivek, who nodded back and plodded into the mess of his workstation. He dug through junk and inventions and bits and bobs before he produced a large cylinder covered in wires and pieces, looking very ramshackle and not at all reliable as the bomb that it was. But if anyone could make a bomb out of garbage, it was Pivek, and he’d put a lot of work into this beauty.
I pointed at it. “Pivek and I are gonna load that little present into our escape pod. Once we’re snuggled inside the cruiser’s hangar, we’ll launch the escape pod and boom, there goes the cruiser and our attackers.”
They should have
been ecstatic, but they weren’t convinced.
“But what about the gravity beam?” Jinx asked. “The bomb will go off, sure, but we won’t be able to escape and will just get sucked into the vortex ourselves.”
“Yeah, I’d like to avoid getting compressed down into a singularity,” snorted Rowan.
“No need to worry about that.” I arched an eyebrow at Pivek.
‘I rigged the bomb to give off an electromagnetic pulse as it goes off.’
“But won’t it affect us too?”
‘Yes, which is why we’d need to be ready to jump as we fire the escape pod.’
I folded my arms behind my back and looked at Ketellin with a grin. “Think you can handle that? You won’t have a lot of margin for error.”
His frowned and crossed his arms, considering the task. He nodded. “I will do my best.”
“Your best will do.” I clapped my hands together. “Okay, we don’t have a lot of time to spare. K, get to the cockpit and prep the ship to jump to the closest system.” K nodded and turned before I could get another word out.
“Pivek, get our shields repaired as best you can. In case things don’t work out, I want us to have a fighting chance.”
“If that bomb fails, then we’re dead,” Rowan said, chipper as always.
“If we’re going down, I want to go down with a fight,” shot back Amara.
“Yeah,” said Jinx, though I knew she wanted to avoid that at all cost. We all did. And we would.
“It will work,” I affirmed. It had to. It was like she said—we were dead regardless, so we may as well try to go down fighting. Whether that was guns blazing or with a vortex bomb that would crush their ship and everyone in it to the size of an atom was yet to be determined. I hoped for the latter. “Amara, think you can tuck that bomb into the pod like a baby?”
“Sure, want me to swaddle it to? Let it suckle my breasts?”
I laughed. “Thank you for the enthusiasm. Only do that if you have time, love.”
She rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help the smile that formed.
“What about us?” asked Jinx, indicating her and Rowan, both looking just as nervous and not at all confident in my plan. She was usually optimistic and gave me the benefit of the doubt, but if she was worried, that made me worried. And I was. I knew this plan could fail and we’d all die or get captured and tortured and then die, but we had to risk it.
“You’ll be with me in the cockpit, helping K and I try not to die if the shooting starts. Rowan, get on the comms and send out some SOSs.”
Everyone looked at me. “Why?”
I shrugged. “Little bit of a wildcard. I like chaos. Maybe it will help.”
“Or maybe imperials or mobsters will come, and we’ll be doubly screwed.”
“Maybe, but that’s why it’s a wildcard.”
He rolled his eyes but didn’t argue. So, I clapped my hands like a captain breaking the huddle of a nerferball match. “Okay, team, let’s do this!”
Their response was less than enthusiastic, but I couldn’t worry about that now.
Pivek passed the vortex bomb off to Amara, who took it tenderly in her arms very much like she would a baby. If the baby weighed about the same as me and was half as large as I was. It looked huge in her arms, but with her Zarthian strength, it wasn’t much of an issue. She scrambled over to the small bay at the opposite end of the room, where there was a small alcove with a circular door that led to the escape pod. She popped it open with her elbow and gently laid the bomb inside.
Rowan climbed up the ladder to the main deck, with Jinx on his heels and me on hers. K had already gone ahead to ready the ship. Rowan broke off into the comm room and started clicking buttons, though I caught him muttering something about not understanding the point of his task.
A question everyone asked at some point when they crewed with me.
Jinx and I arrived at the cockpit in time to see us come upon the large bay doors of Baron Valrude’s cruiser. There was a large shield gate that shimmered a translucent orange. Their fighters could come through from the hangar, but blaster bolts and ships coming from space would bounce harmlessly off it. We got closer and closer until the orange surface was looming over us like the surface of a dying star. Closer and closer and closer until I could have reached out and touched it, close enough that the nose of the Sanara was about to kiss it. And we would crash and die.
Was Valrude duping us? Seemed like an odd way to kill, but maybe he had a sick, weird sense of humor. I certainly had one. I just didn’t think it would be the reason for me and my friends’ untimely deaths.
Then at the last second, the shield flickered and disappeared, giving the Elarri mob baron his precious prize to present to his master. Well, he wasn’t going to get us that easily.
The cruiser hangar was impossibly tall and went clean through to the other side of the ship. If not for the shield gate, a fighter could fly right through and do some damage. Course, that would be too easy.
Elexae fighters were docked all around, most resting comfortably and unused but a few having just arrived from doing battle with us. It made me smile. Good, come back to the nest so that we can blow you up with your momma. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, because there were still a million things that could go wrong, but I liked to look on the bright side, and all the fighters coming home to roost was a good sign.
Our ship hovered in the air for a moment before coming to a stop on the hangar floor. Already a whole battalion’s worth of Elexae thugs marched our way. And at the head of the column was Valrude himself. I almost admired his courage for coming down here to dispose of the trash. I doubted Xarren or many others would do the same. Still, I was about to compress him and his ship into a singularity, an experience that I’m sure was infinitely painful. So now I only felt slightly worse about it. Only slightly.
As they came, I settled into my seat, Jinx gripping the back of it, and turned to K. “You just about ready? Please tell me you are.”
He punched some numbers into the center console and pulled back the jump drive switch. He looked at me, his large cold eyes almost happy. His never-smiling lips curved up. “I’m ready when you are.”
I smiled too. “Good.” When we launched the escape pod, it would smash into the wall ahead of us, and hopefully—please, Saints, let it work—the force would be enough to set off the present inside.
“As soon as I launch, go hard to starboard and get us out of here.”
“And if the shield is up?”
I wriggled my lips. “Well, then the bomb didn’t work. So you’ll turn us around and I’ll blast the pod, if they don’t blow us up first.”
“And if Pivek didn’t do a good job on the pod?” Jinx asked in my ear. I looked back at her. She shrugged. I faced forward.
“Then we blast our way out of here. Or die.”
“Good plan,” she said, patting my shoulder.
“I try.” I cracked my knuckles and touched the intercom button on my right. It crackled to life. “Is everyone ready?”
There was a pause before Amara spoke through the static. “Pivek said the shields are as good as they’ll get.” Another pause, then, “He won’t elaborate on if that’s good or bad.”
“That’ll have to do. Get ready, this is gonna be a ride!”
So, I took a deep breath, nodded to K and Jinx, who nodded back, and gave one last look at Valrude and his men as they came within a stone’s throw of my ship. No way would I let them lay a finger on her. I flipped up the glass case over the escape launch button. It was foggy because we hardly used it or cleaned it. The big black button beneath was covered in dust.
I punched it, and it worked just fine.
The ship recoiled violently. There was a whoosh and we saw the escape pod shoot forward at blinding speed. It crashed against the hangar wall in a single second. Then another second. Silence. Ketellin should have had us in the air already but he was watching the pod. Nothing happened. Only some fire and smoke. One
second, two.
And then a shockwave ran through the cruiser. Lights flickered and went out, and the ship started to tilt. It had done it. The bomb went off! We didn’t need to see the glory of a small blackhole consume their ship—or ours.
“Let’s go!” I yelled.
“With pleasure,” K replied with more vigor than I’d ever heard from him.
The Sanara rose into the air as the cruiser began to rumble around us. The very air started to shake as all the matter was pulled toward the vortex. I gripped the edge of my seat while Jinx’s nails dug into my shoulders. They hurt, but I was too focused on the carnage outside the cockpit.
As the ship quaked and quivered, we still didn’t move. We just hovered in the hangar while things sparked and flamed and cracked apart. Our ship was spared that, but I was sure Pivek’s shielding could only take so much punishment. I looked at K, who had his eyes focused forward, his grip on the stick.
“Uh, K, why aren’t we moving?”
“We are moving, but Pivek’s bomb is too strong. We’re caught in its pull.”
“Does that mean we’re gonna die?” Jinx asked, her nails digging deeper and deeper. I had to slap her hands away.
K typed and prodded away at the console. “I’m still getting us ready for a jump, but I need more time.”
A panel from the hangar ceiling crashed down and smashed against the cockpit. The glass got scratched but that was it. Still, we all jumped. The deflector shielding that surrounded most ships were meant to withstand blaster fire, plasma bolts and the like, but pure physical force couldn’t be stopped so easily. So, if the whole hangar collapsed on us, well, we’d be seeing the saints real quick.
Explosions shook the air around us. Even I started to feel heavy. My gut dropped as a force pulled me back against my seat. Jinx gasped as she felt it too. She wrapped her arms around my neck and chest and held me tight. I covered them with my hands.
“K, get us out of here now!” I yelled.
I knew I was being unreasonable. Charting a jump couldn’t be rushed, lest we jump right through a star or planet or come out of it near an uncharted wormhole or quasar. Space was a scary and dangerous place, and she needed to be treated with cautious hands. But when you were slowly being condensed into a singularity, it made you panic.
The Elarri Heist (Plundering the Stars Book 1) Page 10
