She closed her eyes and leaned against his shoulder. “Me neither,” she agreed quietly.
Raven was only drowsily aware of when he kissed the top of her head and whispered, “Thank you, Rave, for everything,” before she fell asleep yet again. This time hoping to be allowed to actually sleep for a time, and not be woken up for another emergency.
29
Three Days Later
“Glad to be setting off again?”
Raven turned around to see Blake standing behind her. He looked much better now that his wounds had been treated, and he’d been able to take a shower and change into fresh clothes. His short dark hair was back to its usual messy-on-purpose look rather than messy because I got the crap kicked out of me look. His eyes were bright, and he was smiling.
She smiled back, feeling pretty good after three days of rest.
The pair hadn’t seen each other very much over those days, between talking to the police, being treated in the medical facility, and sleeping. There were also repairs to be made on each of their ships, since both had been pushed well beyond their limits.
However, the days had passed and now they all—hunter, AI, and animal companion alike—were hale and whole again, ready to go.
“I am,” she said.
The news had come down the wires just that morning: Jason Stillwell, Natalia Rhodes, and two other employees of Halliwell Bounty Hunters Services—neither of them current hunters—had been arrested on charges of smuggling illegal narcotics into Earth-Allied space. Stillwell had been further charged with abduction and assault for what he’d done to Blake and Axel, as well assault and, finally, property damage for Nyx.
Raven and Blake knew they would be called to testify if it came to trial, and they were pretty sure that the police were still eyeing them sideways, but they hadn’t been arrested and it hadn’t been hinted at that they would be.
It was enough for her.
They were both free to go. After this long stretch of chaos, they could get back to their lives. The police were taking care of bringing in all the hunters still under contract so their ships could be searched and they could be questioned, but Raven was willing to bet they were all as ignorant as Blake and Marlo had been.
“Where are you going?” he asked, walking closer to her so he stood right in front of her as they spoke.
“First, I’m going to Stala Colony. I have a little piece of business there. Then I’ll go through my contact calls and see what job suits me, then I’ll be off to that,” she replied easily. It was all so “normal” sounding, and she loved it.
“Sounds good,” he said, but as he stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at his shoes, she knew he had more to say.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
She tried not to roll her eyes. “I know there’s something else on your mind. You forget that I can always tell when you’re up to something. So spit it out before we stand here until some other mess finds us.”
Blake chuckled. “I always do forget,” he agreed. “I’ve just…liked being a team again, Rave. I liked working together.”
Raven held his gaze, her own curious. “I kinda have too,” she said, suddenly feeling alert and cautious. She wondered where he was going with this, although she was pretty sure that she already knew. What she didn’t know was how she wanted to respond, or how she felt about it.
“Do you…think we could be a team again?”
“As in being hunters together?” she began, tilting her head slightly. “Or more?”
It was a blunt way of going about it, but she didn’t have the time or patience to dance around things anymore. Not driving straight at an issue was what led to their divorce, and she had no desire for a lack of communication to end up with such pain again.
“Either? Both?” His answer was a little sheepish, but honest.
“I don’t know, Blake,” she told him, just as honestly. “You really hurt me, and it’s hard to just let that go, but I liked working with you too, even if it was a pretty bad situation overall. I liked being around you again, but it’s hard to trust that you won’t bail on me again.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together. “I deserve that.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I made a really big mistake,” he said. “I’m hoping that maybe I can get a second chance. If I screw it up again, you can shoot me. How’s that?” He tilted his head with a small, crooked smile.
She laughed in spite of herself and shook her head. “I think it’s more likely that you’ll be the death of me.” Raven rubbed the back of her neck with a sigh. “We can work together,” she said carefully. “Let’s start there and see how it goes. I don’t promise anything, professional or personal. I’m just willing to give it a start, and see.”
Blake’s small smile grew until it was full-on, and then he took her hand. He squeezed it briefly, then let it go. “It’s a deal.”
“Well, board up. We’re on our way to Stala,” she said, gesturing for him to get Nyx ready to go.
He took a step back like he was going to do that, but then leaned in at the last minute and kissed her cheek. “You really are the best, Rave,” he said quietly, then turned and walked back to his ship.
Her gaze followed him until he was up the ramp, and then she laughed at herself and shook her head.
What had she just gotten herself into?
Epilogue
In a small café on Earth that sold coffee from various alien worlds, or at least what was coffee-like on that world, sat a woman.
She appeared to be human, although she was a little more than that. She appeared to be a businesswoman, although she was a little more than that too. The woman was, simply put, far more than she looked to be.
As she sat and sipped her Aloan calla-drink, a very spicy drink reminiscent of Earth’s hot chocolate but far less sweet, she scrolled through the news on her tablet. She saw the headline about the drug smuggling organization that had been taken down inside the most renowned bounty hunter service in the galaxy.
Sighing, she shook her head. She’d always known that Stillwell would turn out to be a buffoon, but his connections inside the company had been too valuable to turn down.
He was the only one who had ever met with her. He didn’t have her real name, but he had seen her enough. She made a mental note to reach out to one of her contacts and make sure that Stillwell was silenced before he had a chance to get too far in the legal process. Would he actually turn on her? She didn’t know, but it wasn’t a risk she was interested in.
Besides, he was an idiot. It would be no great loss to the universe.
Toward the end of the article, two hunters from within the organization—or formerly so, now paid off—were referenced in being “critical” to the breaking open of the case and exposing the smuggling ring to the authorities.
She tapped the face of her tablet with a long fingernail.
“Raven and Blake Sharpe,” she said softly to herself, cold and intent, “that was a very big mistake.”
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading Double Sharpe, the second story in the Raven Sharpe Chronicles. She might not know it yet, or maybe she does, but she has stepped into a big mess which is going to require all of her skills to get out of.
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Preview: Mercury Blade
If there is one thing you’re not supposed to do, it’s lie to Trader Hogan, Eliard Martin, Captain of the Mercury Blade thought as he stared into the small, fierce eyes of the man in front of him.
Trader Hogan was only a small man, barely over five feet, and clad in the goldish-red robes of the Traders’ Belt. He had the sort of head that made the thin and rakish-looking Eliard think of rats—but this would have to have been a bald one, save for the black nodules of implants across the trader’s cranium. Hogan was surrounded by four very large mercenaries, who all dwarfed the captain in his green duster and form-fitting encounter suit. They had the sort of shoulders that could play pro-SpinBall even before the heavy layers of exo-suit armor were added on top. They weren’t carrying guns, but instead, steel grey stunclubs that would certainly put a dent in Eliard’s already terrible day.
Frack. The captain took a deep breath.
Eliard—or ‘El’ to those that knew him—knew that he was making a bad choice. But when he thought about his career, the man thought that he had never made anything but bad choices. He pulled his duster coat closer around his shoulders, making sure that at least the gold pips on the high collar were visible.
“I can’t pay, Hogan. You know my last run was unsuccessful,” Eliard said, managing a tight-lipped smile. Eliard wondered if he could make it back to the door behind him before Hogan’s goons got to him. He wondered if he could make it off the Trader Base of Charylla before Hogan had the ports shut down. Hogan was a big cheese in the Traders’ Belt. A senior member of the council, if only because he had blackmailed, bribed, or threatened every other councilor. The station of Charylla was his.
The little man did not return the smile. “You want to repeat what you just said to me, El?”
Double-frack. “Didn’t you hear? There are Armcore customs ships up and down the Delta Sector, I couldn’t get through. No one can.”
Trader Hogan pursed his lips. A bad sign, Eliard thought. “So, you are telling me that the fearless Captain Eliard, on one of the fastest ships in this sector, couldn’t make it past some lazy Armcore officials, sipping their coffee and eating daze-cakes all shift?”
No, what I am telling you is that I still have your loot stashed in one of my aft lockers, and I’m going to sell it myself! Eliard tried not to betray a flicker of emotion. He was through working all these terrible jobs for Hogan and getting paid next to nothing for it. Not even a cut off the top of the deal—and Hogan always gave him the furthest, most dangerous jobs.
Maybe because he knows that the Mercury can do it, a sarcastic thought crept into Eliard’s head. Of course the Mercury could do it, just not for creeps like Hogan and his goons anymore.
It was time that we started making some real money, Eliard had thought. Time that we strike out on our own…
“Hm.” The little man reached up to very slowly and very carefully scratch at one of the nodes on his head. Rumor has it that he had quantum receivers in there, wired straight to the Coalition data-space, so that Hogan could read, in real-time, just what the galactic stock markets were doing, which was also why he was so fabulously wealthy.
“Then the next thing that I have to ask is…where is the cargo that I entrusted to you?” Hogan glared at Eliard and there was a shift in the four guards around him, from ‘look threatening’ to ‘let’s paint the walls with this guy’s face.’ Hogan was like that, Eliard knew. He was famed throughout the Traders’ Belt of non-aligned asteroids and habitats for his means of ‘settling up’ with those who lied to, stole from, or cheated him. Usually, that meant a long walk out of a very short airlock—without your suit. Or else it could mean that you and your crew found yourselves in the fertilizer vats and pumped back into the synthetic food or sprayed across terraform projects as a fine particulate mist.
Eliard felt the heavy iron of the bulkhead lock behind him. He stood in one of the many octagonal corridors that wormed its way through Charylla. On the other side of that bulkhead, it was a short sprint to the Charylla Markets—a chaos of neon and noise. Surely, he could lose them in there, right?
“If you’re thinking about opening that door, I wouldn’t advise it,” Hogan said in clipped tones, as the nearest of the thugs—surprisingly quickly, Eliard thought—reached forward to prod him, hard, in the shoulder with the stunclub. Luckily it wasn’t turned on, but it still hurt.
“Get off me!” Eliard batted it away, which only caused the guard to grin even wider, and raise the stunclub as if he were baiting a wild animal.
“Where is my cargo, Captain?” Hogan repeated.
“Armcore customs were on to me. I had to jettison it out by the Betel 9 transponder. Heaven knows who’s got it now.” Eliard had had his story ready of course. The Betel 9 transponder was just one of the many routine deep-space signaling devices that ships could use to navigate by, and that meant that a lot of traffic passed by. A bit of space flotsam out there could easily be picked up by a passing vessel or burned up in the passing warp signatures.
“Had to jettison it,” Hogan repeated in a tone that could slice steel. This time, the other guards rolled their shoulders.
“Well, normally in this kind of situation, Eliard, I would have you and your crew cleaning my boat without spacesuits, but then I would be down ten thousand credits.”
That cargo was worth ten thousand? The captain of the Mercury Blade was shocked. It had been a small cargo box. Barely big enough to hold a pair of gloves. Oh, frack.
“I can make it up next run,” Eliard said through gritted teeth, whilst on the inside, he was berating himself for trying to cheat the most powerful crook in the Belt. What had Hogan put in there, diamonds?
“If I let you live, you mean,” Hogan said sourly. “I don’t think you could earn that much in a year, Eliard. How much is the Mercury Blade worth again?” Hogan gave him a quizzical look.
Much more than that! “She’s not a part of this deal,” Eliard said quickly.
“The deal? Deal?” The trader betrayed a momentary flash of anger. “And who are you to tell me what is and isn’t in the deal? This isn’t even a deal, you dimwit. This is recompense.” The thugs flexed their muscles and took a step forward.
“Wait.” The trader held up a hand. “I can see the advantage of having you owe me, Captain Eliard. Here, then, is the ‘deal,’ as you so eloquently put it: you get me my ten thousand, or I take your boat.”
Where am I going to come up with that kind of money? You just want the Mercury as your personal slave-galley. Eliard looked at the guards. Could he take them? He would rather give it a go than have to tell his crew they were going to lose their money and their ship and their home. That was the kind of thing that made a crew very angry indeed, and then made them think about words like ‘mutiny’ and ‘lynching.’
I am so fracked. “I’ll get you your money, and then we’re clear.”
“Really?” Hogan said.
“Really. I promise. Ten thousand credits,” Eliard heard himself say.
“I changed my mind.” Hogan smiled. “Twenty thousand, due in one Sol week.”
One week! Eliard could have spat. That was an awful lot of money in a very short time, but he was being allowed to live, and to fly. He wondered if he could convince the rest of the crew to leave near Coalition space and never return to the Traders’ Belt.
Unlikely.
“You got a problem with that, El?” Hogan’s eyes were scouring his like a s
pider, waiting for a fly to land. “Because you know, I can just have my boys push you out of the nearest airlock and take your boat instead, if you’d prefer?”
“No, a week sounds just about fine, Trader,” Eliard was forced to say.
Now all I have to do is to find some well-paying work, very fast.
“You owe how much?” Irie, the Mercury’s mechanic, looked at Eliard from between her long braids of dark hair. They stood at the side of one of Charylla’s many bars, where he had managed to track down the leather-clad engineer as she had been routinely acing everyone at darts.
Irie Hanson was a marvel of the engineering world, or so Eliard thought, anyway. If only she didn’t know it at the same time, too, he had thought on many occasions. She was a little shorter than he was, with skin like burnt umber and a home-made set of goggles permanently slid halfway up her forehead. From her utility belts she could produce, almost at any given moment, an array of tools and spare parts from spanners to circuit boards. She was the reason that the Mercury was still flying after all of the misuse that Eliard put it through.
“Twenty thousand credits. For Trader Hogan’s cargo,” Eliard said.
“Wasn’t that the box that we were supposed to drop off at Kavon 3?” Irie squinted at him over the top of her bright green drink. They had been in space for a long time this run, and even the usually humanity-hating engineer had decided to venture into society for a change of faces.
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