Fuck. What a bad day. He hated bad days. They made him want to break things.
Chapter Two
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
Kim chewed her lip as she furiously clicked on the computer. Different alarms relayed to her just how roughly she’d handled the ship. She triggered a jump point some three kilometers in front of the prow. A rip of smoky blue-green opened and she angled the Femme Metal alongside the tear.
“I’m in total, big, stinky shit.”
Five second later, the rush of the jump forced her back in her seat. The harness bit her shoulders and hips as she maneuvered the Femme Metal along the iridescent conduits leading her thousands of light-years away from Land’s End and the madman after her. Stars flashed by in multicolored swirls. Kim clenched her jaw when she felt as though someone were pulling her guts through her navel. Deep clunks and clangs reverberated along the old ship. She thought she recognized the sound of a few rivets popping. She’d have to fix those.
As suddenly as it’d begun, the stretching sensations stopped. She blew a long sigh and returned to biting her lip. When that hurt too much, she started on her fingernails but even this usually satisfying pressure vent didn’t do anything for her this time. Kim spent almost an hour plotting her next few jumps. They’d have to be evenly spaced so the ship could withstand the strain, and they should also take her far from Land’s End in no particular pattern, otherwise he’d be able to track her. She’d stay away from human settlements as well. For a while anyway.
“Titan,” she muttered, spitting a piece of cuticle. “Who calls himself Titan? Like, not cool.”
The funny thing was, the first thought that’d popped into her mind upon seeing the guy was “YUMMY!”
Hovering at around six feet, he wasn’t huge or anything, not compared to others, but he exuded such power, such raw energy that it made him look larger. Kim recalled how muscles tightened his black suit and stretched the white dress shirt underneath. With a number one on the clipper scale, his skull had gleamed under the club’s colored lights and she’d wondered for a split second how it’d feel to have that prickly head between her thighs. Wide, his chin had jutted out as though he were arguing with someone. She’d just loved that shiny purple tie! And that pinstriped suit! The guy could dress.
The gun though, had left her quite cold. Matte black, old, ancient. A relic, more appropriately. No one used breechblocks and gunpowder anymore, unless one enjoyed recoil and the smell of rotten eggs. And what about that tooth? Metal? Come on.
The eyes though, had riveted her to the spot. A shade of dark gray she’d never seen before. His eyes had blinked rhythmically, quickly, as if he were afraid to miss something.
“Okay, now that we’ve appraised, weighed and classified the jerk under ‘super yummy’, can we move on to the important bits, like getting the hell out of here?”
Kim looked around and cursed. Carmela wasn’t there to answer…wouldn’t be there to answer her. A stitch of pain jabbed her in the chest. The woman could take care of herself but still, Titan looked dangerous with a capital D.
And sexy with a capital S. She still felt his lips on hers.
Shoot, what to do, what to do?
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the external sensor display where a tiny blue dot blinked. Another ship had just dropped back into normal space. Pulling it closer, Kim clicked on the screen, called up the ship’s registration number, cracked the manifest codes and pulled out personnel files. Only one crew.
“Double shit.”
Kim stared disbelievingly at the face of one named Titan Harris on the ID sheet.
How, how, had he managed to find her so damn fast?
Fortunately he wasn’t using some kind of tracking device, otherwise it’d show on her console. According to the ship’s schematics, with the boosted engines he packed, there’d be no way in hell she’d outfly him. So she’d have to be smart about it and use the Femme Metal’s reduced heat signature—her newest adjustment and one totally worth the exorbitant expense if she managed to elude him—to get away. Or at least to let him fly by her unsuspectingly. She powered down to stealth mode, keeping all systems dormant except environmental controls.
Then Kim waited.
Minutes stretched to half an hour as the ship grew in size on her viewscreen. Its hull bristled with antennas, all of which could detect the minutest sound or frequency. If she so much as turned her dildo on, he’d catch the electrical “noise”.
Four thousand kilometers and closing.
Sweat dampened her brow, clammed her hands. She leaned back in the seat, taking care not to make any noise. With her finger on the weapons’ console, ready to whip out the pulse cannon and make him cry uncle—or auntie—Kim obsessively chewed her lip and followed Titan’s progress through the screen.
Two thousand kilometers, keeping steady.
Why was he flying so damn slow? His ship was capable of much more, she could tell by the schematics she’d cracked. Nice array of weapons. But he was an arms dealer too, wasn’t he.
She’d never even heard of the guy, how could she have known she’d nicked one of his clients? It wasn’t like there was a sign at set coordinates announcing “Titan Domain—Everyone Is His”. She’d never had problems before at Land’s End. There’d been no need for him to go caveman on her when a polite “get off my rock” would have sufficed. Although his fit and firm body pressed against her hadn’t been the nastiest encounter in the galaxy. It’d been quite nice. Totally yummy, in fact. Too bad he was such a…man!
We could’ve been partners, maybe. Or friendly competitors at least. But nooo, Mister Mine-is-bigger-than-yours had to make things complicated.
Air cooled noticeably and Kim hoped he’d get the hell out of her space soon so she could restart the systems. There’d be condensation soon, not good for the electronic bits she had hanging around. The blackness of space pressed in around her, reduced her attention to the narrow, dull-green window her viewscreen provided, and even the silence, something that’d never bothered her, did so now, pushing, trying to get in her ship, clawing at her hull.
A thousand kilometers. Still coming for her position.
Space is big, man, go sniff somewhere else!
Titan’s ship neared, barely a few tens of kilometers away, like a predator hunting for prey. She hunched lower over the weapons’ controls. She couldn’t fire without betraying her position, and right now she preferred watching than engaging him. She didn’t know what he packed under that titanium plating but was sure it’d hurt like a bitch.
In the viewscreen, the black ship’s prow began to open. She magnified the resolution, squinted to see better. Too little light. The pixelated effect ruined focus. Shit. What was that coming out of the hull? It wasn’t a missile bay for sure. A thick, silvery rod with no hole at its end slid out…
“Oh fuck!” she cried out as she flicked her systems back on.
An electromagnetic surge cannon. A single shot of that thing and she could kiss her entire electrical grid goodbye for at least an hour. It’d short everything until someone manually reset every single system. For a split second she wondered where he could’ve gotten a beauty like that. They cost like half a million credits! The thought quickly passed.
Hurry. Hurry…
Her sensors indicated he was tracking her, trying to pin her down to his screen. Kim grabbed the plastic penises her former boss had glued to the controls sticks and yanked on them hard enough to make her rock sideways in her seat. Sparing only one hand, she buckled herself back in really tight.
The alarm of a successful target acquisition wailed. The bridge’s lights switched to tactical amber. He’d pinned her down.
Kim banked far to the right to avoid exposing her sensitive antennas to his EMS cannon. A glancing blow wouldn’t cripple her but a direct one would. In her screen she saw a blue arc dancing over the blind cannon’s tip. She had a few seconds, tops.
With a loud clunk and a grating noise, Kim
activated her pulse cannon, slid it out of its shield plating and aimed it at Titan’s ship. She didn’t even wait for proper target acquisition and just fired on visuals alone.
Whomp.
A shudder quivered the Femme Metal when she fired her mammoth missile at the other ship. With a bore diameter of about eight inches, Kim silently prayed her “can opener” would live up to its name and send Titan crawling home.
She cursed when he evaded the missile, which turned and was coming back for another pass when he fired some small caliber at it. It disintegrated into a million shiny bits.
Kicking against the floor, Kim tried to outmaneuver the larger ship, throwing every spin, roll and bank she knew of. No amount of bearing down at tight angles, coming back around and firing the cannon from all possible slants would tear the man from her ass.
Whomp-whomp-whomp.
She was giving it to him and he was taking it. If she hadn’t been busy trying to demolish his ship, she would’ve patted the man on the back. Then she made her first—and last—mistake. While she rolled away, the Femme Metal spinning on herself with dizzying speed, she forgot to keep her vulnerable antennas away from him. When she leveled off, he was waiting for her. She’d come way too close. Kim only had time to cringe.
The blue arc of the electromagnetic surge blazed then arced toward the Femme Metal.
“Shit!”
With cry of rage, Kim took her hands off the controls and watched as every single display unit died around her. First to go was the gyrocompass, navigation also went quickly then propulsion and environmental settings. The smell of burnt plastic wafted to her. Radio static died out when the external comms channel blinked to slate-gray death. Total silence pressed in on her again, but this time she wouldn’t be powering up the Femme Metal anytime soon.
Unless she reset her grid, at this rate, she had a few standard hours left of oxygen then this too would go. All she presently had was gravity, which not even an EM burst could trip, and internal comms.
“Great,” she muttered as she clawed at the webbed belt.
She would’ve preferred he finished her quickly instead of this. For in the back of her mind, Kim realized he hadn’t wanted to kill her, only temporarily cripple her ship. Otherwise, he would’ve used something else other than an EMS cannon. Fear and shameful thrill squeezed the nape of her neck. So he wanted her alive…
* * * * *
A whoop of triumph escaped Titan when the ship lit up like a neon blue flea for a second or so and floated dead in space. Man, she’d been hard to pin down. Good thing he’d managed to pry out of Collins that the son of a bitch had copied her signature when she’d used the comms around Land’s End air space. Otherwise, Titan never would’ve been able to jump to the exact coordinates she had.
If someone would’ve told him he’d have to work so damn hard to catch this one little, hundred pounds tops, pain in the ass, he would’ve put a bullet in their kneecap just for insulting him. It’d taken all the tricks in the book to get just this one shot. And a lucky one too, on top of things.
Alarms bleeped and blinked at him from the consoles. He’d taken a few good hits from that monstrous thing she had on her aft section. Who knew they made pulse cannons so damn big? That had to be custom built. No way in hell a manufacturer would risk getting caught with a monster like that.
He wasn’t even sure why he’d used the EMS instead of just pulverizing that piece of crap out of his sky.
Because I wanted to see her again, that’s why.
Was this his big brain talking or the little one?
Yeah so, he did want to see her again. So what? He wasn’t going to act like the dumb shit he had. No sir. Not again. This time, it’d be just about business.
He’d have to dissect that annoying new “me like her” concept and promptly as it could cause further nuisance to his carefully organized life. But not now. He still had to board the thing to get at her, and the thought didn’t particularly entice him. She’d make the job unpleasant at best, and only the devil knew what she packed in that tiny but mighty ship. Femme Metal. Pfft. What a girly name for a ship. He’d get a fair price for it. As for her captain… Titan was still considering his options.
He was about to push off the armrests when the comms blinked on.
“Argh, no time for this,” he raged as he punched the receive button.
After a second or two of static, the distorted image of a blue-skinned person came into sharper focus.
“Mister Harris,” Drokesh said.
Titan stifled the deep sigh that swelled his chest. The Yithian crime lord may be a good client but it didn’t mean he enjoyed having contact with him.
“I’m busy.”
A sort of catlike smile stretched Drokesh’s mouth. He looked positively beaming. Titan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his client grin. In truth, he’d rather not see the set of wicked-looking teeth at all if it could be helped. Gave him the creeps.
“Yes,” he said at length. “I know. And I can help.”
Titan kept his hands busy maneuvering his ship closer to the Femme Metal while his face remained impassive. Multitasking had become an art form for him. “You know I’m listening, Drokesh.”
A flicker of anger flashed in the opalescent eyes. “You were in Land’s End not too long ago. A trusted source told me you had contact with a certain human female, one called Kim.”
“Maybe. Who wants to know?”
“I do.”
Titan stopped fiddling with the keyboard and leaned back in his seat. The rubber creaked under him. “Now, I’m listening.”
“Yes, I can tell.” Drokesh smiled. Those awful teeth gleamed.
Argh, man, put them away.
Titan fought the revulsion from showing on his face. He may have had a metal tooth put in, but that Yithian just didn’t know when to leave a good thing alone. Had he filed his teeth to make them that pointy? Titan suspected so.
“The human female belongs to my establishment. I want her back.”
The fact that Ballistic Kim worked on a brothel-ship bothered Titan much more than it ought to.
“And the ship?”
“I care little about it. Keep it for target practice. That is what I would do with the worthless carcass.”
“I’m not a bounty hunter, Drokesh.”
The Yithian cocked his head to one side, his silver hair spilling over his wide shoulder. A black tattoo representing some form of serpentine shape gleamed on his collarbone. “You would be very well compensated for your trouble.”
Titan chuckled. “I’m a numbers kind of man. How much is ‘very’?”
“You would have exclusive rights for the entire system. Total monopoly. Are those numbers satisfactory?”
Whoa. “Very.”
“I will meet you at your home in thirty standard hours. Be ready to hand over the human female at that time. Drokesh out.”
The screen flipped back to dull slate-gray.
Titan let out a long sigh. Monopoly over the entire system…the one and only arms dealer for thousands of light-years in every direction.
All he had to do was catch that tiny little woman and her ugly ship. Wait, he’d already done that. Ha! Easy money.
Yet at the back of his mind, the notion that Ballistic Kim “belonged” to Drokesh’s establishment didn’t sit so well. Had she been an escort? A whore? A performer? All three?
“Why the hell should I care about it anyway?”
Time for business.
Firing attitude jets at regular intervals, he drew near the crippled ship and clamped on. The dull clunks indicated he’d been successful. The airlock light switched on when he equalized pressure between the two exterior hatches. Now locked together with the clamps and secured airlocks, Titan could transfer ships and reel the purple-haired pocket rocket back in.
For some reason feeling the need to smooth his suit jacket and make sure everything was perfect, he stepped out of his ship, peeked into the darkness of the Fe
mme Metal’s interior and used the butt of his gun to press the open button on the panel.
Titan plastered himself against the bulkhead, waiting as the circular hatch rolled inside the hull. A very pleasant fruity smell wafted out of the ship. He took a long whiff and grinned. An image of her glossy lips flashed in his mind. This was going to be fun.
Unless she caught him first and plastered his brains all over her ship. Then it wouldn’t be so fun.
Both hands on the gun, Titan checked once, twice, before rushing across the hatch and into the darkened ship. He was turned on as never before. Not that he’d do anything about it, he wasn’t some fucking Neanderthal, despite what Ballistic Kim thought of him. He’d never had to throw himself at a woman before and sure as hell wouldn’t start now. No, what he enjoyed best was creating a fog of sexual tension, fill the whole damn room with it, letting them come to him, making them so damn horny they couldn’t help themselves. Either that or pay for professional company—someone like her apparently—and fuck like rabbits. Whichever worked.
He wanted to say something, taunt her, but he didn’t want to give his position away, not to a smart cookie like her. Legs spread wide, back against the bulkhead, Titan padded softly along the passageway. Smells of electrical heat and grease greeted him, and though he couldn’t see two paces in front of him, he knew he stood in the engine room.
A flicker of movement somewhere to his left made him tense. Crouching lower, he rushed across the room, banging his shoulder on something sharp and gritting his teeth then followed another passageway. He neared the hatch and slowed, letting his eyes accustom to the deeper darkness beyond. By the sound of it, he was in a large room. The cargo hold no doubt.
A very high-pitched buzz froze the blood in his veins. He’d heard the sound many times before. Night-vision goggles. He should’ve thought about that. Cockiness had killed many cats he knew of. Shit.
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