“Not that one, boys,” the man said, swatting their backsides. “That’s the captain’s brother. He’s on our side.”
“The captain’s my brother,” Orion pointed out once again, not taking his hand off his bolt bow until the beasts rose from their crouches.
“So I heard.” The man waved in the direction of the airlock, then walked between the big svenkar and offered the typical greeting salute, a hand to the forehead and then fingers spread in the air, palm facing out. “Treyjon.”
“Orion.”
“Glad you got the shields down, Orion.”
“Was Sage complaining that it took me so long?” Orion turned toward the bridge again when it looked like Treyjon was going the same way.
“No, but it was getting hard to pretend we were trying to blow up the ship without actually blowing it up. I was a little surprised he let it get through the gate, but I didn’t know about the qazar field he’d had set up, either. I didn’t even know he knew that was a four-way gate. He must have hunted down more intel than you gave him.”
Orion bristled at the idea that his intelligence hadn’t been enough, but he wasn’t surprised Sage had sought out other resources.
“Zakota, our helmsman, didn’t know anything about the gate’s many exits until right before we went in. But you know the captain. He always has some secret intel up his sleeve.” Treyjon smiled, getting that worshipful expression on his face that so many men did when talking about Sage.
Orion managed not to roll his eyes. “Yeah,” was all he said.
They walked onto the bridge together. Something snapped near the captain’s chair, and a black blur rushed toward them. Orion leaped to the side before he registered what it was. Cutty's svenkar.
Treyjon stumbled to the side as his own beasts leaped past him to intercept it. Faster than the eye could follow, all three animals were writhing about on the deck, jaws snapping, fangs tearing at scaly flesh.
“No, get the traitor!” came a cry from the other side of the bridge.
Cutty. If his svenkar heard him, it was far too busy to obey. That was good, because there wasn’t any doubt who the captain had meant. He stood between two armored Star Guardians, Sage and someone else, their gauntleted hands wrapped around his arms. Cutty had been disarmed, and his disheveled clothes suggested he’d been searched thoroughly.
Orion smiled, wishing he’d been there to witness the indignity.
Another Star Guardian farther back gripped the first officer, a man watching everything unfold quietly, as was his way. The rest of the bridge crew had been cleared already.
A flash of blue light filled the dim bridge, a stunner firing. Energy flared around the svenkars, and even from several feet away, Orion felt the crackle of electricity in the air. The hair on his arms stood up.
“Captain,” Treyjon said in protest. “You stunned my pups.”
As if snarling, four-hundred-pound svenkars could be considered puppies.
“We’re without a doctor right now,” Sage said. “It would have been difficult to fix them up if they were grievously injured.”
“Doc Svetloka always seemed more interested in eating my pups than in fixing them. You can’t trust a big game hunter to have a deft touch with a laser scalpel. I’m not surprised one of those lava rhinos from Amalcari got him in the end.”
“We’re going to lock up the captain.” Sage gave Cutty a prod. “Either have his svenkar put to sleep or—”
“To sleep, Captain?” Treyjon knelt beside the pile of unconscious beasts. “Just give me a few days. I can get her retrained and add her to my tracking team.”
“Don’t count on that,” Orion said, looking across at Captain Cutty, who was glaring glaciers back at him. “That hound is as mean as its owner.”
“I’ve got a knack for pups. I’ll retrain her. You’ll see. Bet she won’t even try to tear out your throat by the end of the week.”
“Lovely.”
“Do whatever’s practical, Treyjon,” Sage said, “but don’t let it endanger anyone on the Falcon. Once yours wake up, take them down all the corridors on this ship. Our sensors show that there are still people aboard, but they look to be hiding in secret compartments, so it’ll be a chore to find them. We’ll need the svenkars’ noses.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why not just ask the captain where his people are?” Orion said, still holding Cutty’s gaze.
“We asked,” Sage said. “We didn’t bring any truth drugs over, and he chose not to answer.”
Orion pulled out a dagger and stalked toward their prisoner. “Maybe a little force would be preferable to drugs.”
“You’ve already used enough force,” Sage said, his voice like ice.
The condemning tone surprised Orion, and he stopped a few feet away. He had intended to bluff, mostly. He didn’t torture people as a matter of habit, but he would consider making an exception for the man who had captured those women and who knew how many other humans in his life? How many people had he sold to the Zi’i so that the aliens could torture, kill, and eat them? His own people? That was what was so despicable about these slavers. That they sold out their own kind, turning human beings over to aliens. Enemy aliens.
“We’ll find them without your help,” Sage said, his voice a dangerous whisper.
Orion shook his head, not sure how to respond to the venom.
He and Sage hadn’t gotten along, not even remotely, since Orion had been kicked out of the military and had chosen to become a bounty hunter. Sage had apparently had run-ins with enough sleazy bounty hunters to believe Orion was essentially a criminal himself now, capable of doing all manner of vile things in the pursuit of the money he earned from turning people in. It hadn’t ever seemed to occur to Sage that Orion had chosen the profession because he’d wanted to do good, and because neither the military nor the Star Guardians would have him. And he’d been the one to alert Sage to this kidnapping scheme. Shouldn’t that count for something? Orion had nothing to gain from this.
Sage pointed his helmet toward the door, and he and his man led their prisoner away.
Cutty sneered at Orion as he passed, then spat.
Orion whipped his arm up, deflecting most of it, but droplets still landed on his face. He growled and launched the punch he’d wanted to launch since he first came aboard the ship and had to grovel to get a job he hadn’t truly wanted.
But Sage spun and caught the punch in the air, inches from Cutty’s face. The armor gave him extra power, and he stopped it without trouble, his gauntleted fingers squeezing down on Orion’s fist in warning.
“What are you doing protecting this animal, Sage?”
“You will not brutalize unarmed prisoners.” Sage released him and turned toward the door again, his man following him wordlessly.
Cutty smirked over his shoulder at Orion, looking like someone who had just won a great victory rather than someone being dragged off to jail. To a life sentence in jail. Surely, the jurors back home wouldn’t assign him anything else.
“Trust me, he deserves brutalizing,” Orion said, suspicious of Cutty’s smugness.
Did he have some backup plan up his sleeve? The man was slicker than a greased snake, and Orion was sure it wasn’t chance that had kept him in this business for so long. He had been excellent at avoiding the Star Guardians and the regular military, and he might have kept on avoiding them if Orion hadn’t chanced across notice of him hiring.
The Star Guardian restraining the first officer also crossed the bridge, the man smiling slightly as he was marched away.
As the men disappeared into the corridor, Orion couldn’t help but think he should have found Cutty and broken his neck before the Star Guardians had ever arrived.
10
Juanita sat on a bench beside Tala and Angela, the day and the bruises she’d received catching up with her. This had seemed like an exciting adventure while she’d been helping Orion, however limitedly, defeat bad guys. Now, she was tired and hungry and found her
self wishing for her own bed and the leftover ribs in the fridge from her favorite barbecue restaurant back home.
“Do you think they’ll feed us?” Angela asked, gazing around at their new prison.
Quarters. That was what the armored man who’d led Juanita and all the other women to the area had called it. It looked to be a recreation room with tables on one side, some with holographic games or maybe movie displays paused over them. There were a handful of benches and newly added blankets and cots, though there weren’t enough cots for everyone.
The other side of the room held exercise mats and gym equipment. Juanita didn’t recognize most of the machines, but there were dumbbells and sandbags that didn’t look much different from what the YMCA had back home. None of the crew was using the tables or equipment right now, and a lone man stood guard by one of the doors.
That was what made it feel like a prison. The guard. Was he there to keep them in? Or to keep the crew out?
He wasn’t in armor, like the other men—Star Guardians, Orion had called them—from the boarding party, but he cut an intimidating figure with weapons hanging from the belt of his pressed black fatigue uniform. He had broad shoulders, with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, displaying a tattoo on the top of his muscled forearm. The uniform and weapons looked military, but he lacked the clean-shaven face and tidy short hair of US soldiers and police officers. He had green curly hair cut in a short Mohawk with a matching beard. Bleached white sticks of bone pierced his ears in several places, top and bottom, and tattoos on his eyelids creeped Juanita out whenever he blinked slowly enough for her to see them.
“I don’t know, but I’d happily take a steak and potatoes right about now,” Juanita said.
“Me too,” Tala said, rubbing her injured elbow.
Juanita didn’t know how badly she had hurt it, but she seemed to be moving the arm without more than a wince or two. Juanita’s shoulder throbbed, and she would trade all her Magic: The Gathering cards for a bottle of ibuprofen. Angela didn’t appear to be wounded at all. Maybe she had been smart to stay in the cell instead of escaping, though she had sheepishly admitted to being ashamed that she hadn’t thought to slip out when she’d had the opportunity. Fortunately, the attacks from the Star Guardian ship had distracted Baldie, and he hadn’t had time to molest anyone else.
“I don’t eat steak,” Angela said. “Or a lot of meat in general. Or meat-based products. Or byproducts. I’d take one of your homemade quesadillas, Juanita.”
“I’ll be sure to ask if they have a kitchen with a tortilla press that I can use.”
“You may have to be flexible with your diet here,” Tala said. “Assuming they offer us food at all. Our other captors didn’t.” Her lips thinned in displeasure.
So, she also hadn’t missed that they were basically in a new prison.
“Can you ask someone, Juanita?” Angela asked. “I’m wasting away here.”
“I doubt it’s been eight hours since we were originally captured,” Tala said dryly.
“I hadn’t eaten since lunch!”
“So you’ve gone twelve hours without food? That’s barely more than you’d miss with a good night’s sleep.”
“Not for me. I snack before bed. And first thing in the morning. And when I’m in bed, I’m unconscious, not being kidnapped and drugged and terrorized. Those are things that’ll make you hungry.”
The words got some nods of assent from the other women in the room, most of whom had banded together in little knots and were sitting as far away from their green-haired guard as possible. A few were hiding among the gym machinery, maybe hoping not to be noticed.
Juanita pushed herself to her feet and walked toward the guard. She was the only one with a translation device, so she supposed that made her the spokesperson for the group. Assuming this fellow also had let someone stick a biting chip in his ear.
“Hi, can you understand me?” Juanita smiled at him, pointedly not looking at the crossbow-like weapon cradled in his arms.
“Yes, of course, ma’am.”
Juanita found the ma’am promising, even if it made her feel old. “We were wondering if it’s possible to get something to eat. Some of us have gone more than twelve hours without eating.” She grinned over at Angela. Juanita was hungry, too, but she’d had a crazy yoga-loving roommate in college who’d convinced her to do detox fasts. After that, twelve hours wasn’t a big deal, especially if she didn’t have to chant and meditate while doing it. She’d never confessed to that roommate that she’d used her meditation time to come up with story ideas. The comic-book-artist roommate she’d had the following year had been a much better fit for her.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Angela called across the room to Juanita, “but I can tell you’re teasing me from that grin.”
“Just making sure he knows you’re the pushy one.”
“You’ll thank me when we get our quesadillas.”
Juanita snorted, wondering what the chip would translate quesadillas to.
The guard watched the exchange, then lifted his wristwatch to his mouth. What had Orion called it? A logostec?
“Lieutenant Boca?” he asked. “Our guests are hungry.”
A grunt came by way of response.
The guard lowered his watch.
“Does that mean room service is on the way?” Juanita asked. “Or that we should start picking teams in case we need to engage in cannibalistic warfare?”
He lowered his tattooed lids halfway and studied her. “Are you joking?”
“Yes.” Juanita glanced at Angela. “I think.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll just go back to my seat.”
“A good idea, ma’am.”
Juanita officially missed Orion. She’d only gotten a chance to communicate with him for a few minutes, but she felt certain he would understand her jokes. At the least, he might put his arm around her to comfort her, and she could lean against the chiseled muscles of his chest.
Tala sighed when Juanita returned to the bench.
“Are you dreaming longingly of quesadillas too?”
“No. Just thinking that I went up to Flagstaff to get away from it all. This is more away than I had in mind.”
“Regretting leaving your job?”
Tala hesitated. “Regretting leaving Phoenix maybe.”
“It’s true that aliens rarely land in big cities,” Juanita said. “It’s so much easier to kidnap people in rural areas. And hide your spaceship while you do so. Unless you have a cloaking device, like in Star Trek IV when the Klingon Bird of Prey landed in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Oh.” Juanita snapped her fingers. “I hadn’t thought of that. We already don’t think these guys are aliens, I know, but what if they’re from the future? And they came back through time to… well, they weren’t saving whales if they were kidnapping us, but what if slavers went back to get people from our time period for some reason—like maybe women aren’t fertile in the future, so they needed some fertile women?—and… oh, no, none of that is like what Orion was telling me about. He said there are aliens that want to eat us. But he could have been lying. If he was from the future, there might be a rule to keep from enacting the Grandfather Paradox.”
Tala was gazing at her with a bland, almost concerned, expression.
“I can see you’re not as much of a fan of all things science fiction,” Juanita said.
“I’m trying to decide if you’re being serious when you seemingly use fictional events to extrapolate what might be happening to us here in reality.”
“I’m rarely serious. It’s part of my charm.”
Tala turned her bland gaze toward Angela, as if looking for confirmation.
“It’s true,” Angela said. “But her real charm is that she makes excellent quesadillas. And tamales. And that soup with the peppers. You should have been there for the Christmas party at the shelter, Doc.”
“Menudo,” Juanita said.
“What?”
“That
’s the name of the soup.”
Tala arched an eyebrow. “Isn’t menudo made with tripe?”
“I make a vegetarian version for the gringos,” Juanita said, smirking at Angela, though she used the term jokingly. She’d been born in the US and had grown up in Phoenix, so she was a foreigner, too, when she went to Mexico to visit her grandparents. Nobody in her grandparents’ little village dyed their hair cute colors and binge-watched Battlestar Galactica on Netflix. Her cousins all thought she was odd, and Juanita had never felt at home in her extended family.
“What vegetable mimics tripe?” Tala asked dryly.
“I used eggplant.”
“Could you stop talking about food?” someone groaned from a corner, a black woman of about thirty. She sat with another woman about the same age and wore an NAU sweatshirt, like many of the girls, but looked like she might be a teacher rather than a student. “I’m so hungry.”
“I’ll offer to cook for them if they let me use their kitchen,” Juanita said. “I can make anything taste good. Angela and I even make homemade dog food for the dogs at the shelter.”
“The shelter on the north side of town?”
“Yeah. We all volunteer there.” Juanita pointed to Tala and Angela.
“We got our pointer mix there. But he went with Jace in the divorce.” Her lips peeled back in displeasure. “I miss the dog more than the man.”
“Dogs have softer ears. They’re more appealing.” Though Juanita wouldn’t have minded stroking a certain male chest. It had also been appealing.
“No kidding. I’m Indigo—you can call me Indi.” She pointed to the woman sitting next to her. “This is Katie, a pilot and the only other woman working at the United States Geological Survey office in Flagstaff.”
“Can you pilot spaceships?” Juanita asked.
“I think that’s above my pay grade. But I’d try.” Katie winked. She looked to be in her late twenties with her hair back in a ponytail. She wore a brown leather jacket and jeans with holes in the knees. They appeared to be legitimately made holes rather than ones trendily added at the factory.
Orion: Star Guardians, Book 1 Page 8
