Only then he saw movement, and realized it was Lira returning at last, almost three hours after she had first left. Thank Alenthan. Rast got up, intending to meet her at the door…and then saw the dark shapes of several men emerging from the secondary entrance to the landing pad, the one near the nose of the ship.
That couldn’t be good. A shouted warning rose in his throat, but that wouldn’t help. She couldn’t possibly hear him.
Suddenly the little ship felt far too large. He bolted for the door, flung it open, and rushed down the gangplank, hearing as he did so the sound of pulse bolts firing. And Lira was unarmed.
Swearing, he dropped to the ground and rolled under the ship, pulling out his own pistol as he did so. From that position he could see Lira lying on the rough concrete of the landing pad, her hair spilling free from the its knot at the back of her neck.
No. The denial rose in him, a furious black negation of what he’d just seen. She couldn’t be dead. He wouldn’t allow it. She had just dropped to the ground to give herself what cover she could.
But she wasn’t moving, and he pushed himself forward, rising from beneath the ship to strike at the unknown assailants the way a sand snake might lie coiled under a concealing rock. One pulse bolt took the first man directly in the chest, and he dropped at once. The second shot went a little astray, hitting the other man in the leg. He stumbled but managed to fire back, the bolt whizzing by only a few inches from Rast’s head.
Teeth bared, Rast shot again, this time blasting the pistol right out of the man’s hand, leaving a blackened stump where it had been. The human dropped to his knees, moaning in pain, as Rast came to tower over him.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Who sent you?”
But the pain must have been too much, because the man fell over on his side, face going slack with unconsciousness. And that brought back to Rast the realization that Lira, too, lay crumpled on the surface of the landing pad.
With a growl Rast turned and ran to her, dropping to his knees at her side. He turned her over carefully, fearing the worst. A trailing edge of reddened flesh near her temple and some singed hairs told him she had taken a glancing shot, but no worse. And as he held her, she opened her eyes and stared up into his face.
“Did you get them?”
“Of course.”
With a groan she shifted more or less out of his grasp and into a sitting position. “Can’t believe those sons of bitches got the drop on me. I hate not being able to carry a sidearm.” She reached up to rub her temple, scowled as she encountered the burned flesh and singed-off hair. “That’s going to take a while to grow out.”
Females. Their priorities could be so odd. And besides, if she would just wear her hair down, the spot in question wouldn’t even be noticeable.
“Are they dead?”
“One is. The other…I’m not sure.”
“Well, let’s find out.”
Ignoring his outstretched hand, she staggered to her feet and stumbled her way over to where the second assailant still lay in a limp little heap. “Hey,” she said, and prodded him with the toe of her boot.
Moaning, he rolled over onto his back and stared up at her with frightened dark eyes. Definitely not dead, then.
“Who sent you?” Lira demanded.
Another moan, and a shake of the head.
She crossed her arms and glanced up at Rast. “Maybe he needs a little more convincing.”
“Be glad to oblige.” And he reached down and grasped the man by his collar, dragging him upright, holding him so his feet dangled an inch or two above the floor of the landing pad. “You answer when the lady asks you a question.”
“T-Tomas!” the man gasped.
Lira’s scowl deepened. She nodded slightly, and Rast shook the man like a rag doll.
“I told you — Gared Tomas!”
“And how did he find us?”
Sweat stood out on the man’s brow. Rast could smell the stink of him, the fear rising from his pores. Probably not one of Tomas’s actual men, but a local hired to carry out his dirty work.
“The ship — ”
“What about it?”
“Second tracker — in the cargo hold.”
“Well, shit,” Lira said, her disgust with herself clearly evident in the downward tilt of her mouth. “And here I thought I was being so clever.”
“Anything else?” Rast demanded, giving the man another shake.
“No — not that I know of. Just told us to come here, secure the vessel, and wait for one of Tomas’s agents to come get it. That’s all.”
It probably was. Rast couldn’t imagine that Tomas would have asked the men to do anything more complicated than that. Still, one would have thought the crime lord would send more men than these two fools to secure such a valuable ship, let alone take out the two people responsible for killing his right-hand man and best muscle. Rast’s eyes narrowed. “Are there more of you?”
“No — no, just Davvin and me, that’s all — ”
“He’s lying,” Lira said coolly. “There’s no way Tomas would send only these two losers to recapture the ship. I’m sure there are more on the way.”
“No — ”
“Any reason to keep this one alive?” Rast inquired, as the man squirmed in his grip.
“You mean besides the oath I swore to protect the citizens of the Consortium?”
“You’re not an officer of the fleet anymore.”
“Thanks for reminding me.” She shook her head, then added, “Let’s just get out of here…but make sure he won’t do anything about it.”
“Not a problem.” And Rast took his pistol with his free hand and rapped the hired gun across the head with it. At once the man sagged, and Rast dropped him on the ground.
Lira was already heading toward the ship, so Rast lengthened his stride just a little to catch up with her.
“What about the second tracker?”
“I’ll deal with it once we’re out of here. Now I know where it is, it shouldn’t take too long.”
He understood the wisdom of getting away as quickly as possible, so he nodded and let her move ahead so she could get to the cockpit ahead of him. Good thing, too, because even as he pushed the button to retract the gangplank, he saw three more men emerging from the landing pad’s two separate entrances, guns drawn. Ducking out of the way, he engaged the controls to lock down the exit and repressurize the cabin. From outside, he could hear the muffled thump of pulse bolts hitting the ship’s shell. He had no idea how many hits the Mistral/Chinook could take before its hull integrity was compromised, but he really didn’t want to stick around and find out.
“Get in here and strap down!” Lira commanded, and he hurried forward and more or less fell into the copilot’s seat as she engaged the atmospheric thrusters and shot them straight upward at a velocity probably never intended by the ship’s designers.
The comm squawked. “Chinook, you are exceeding the designated lift-off speed by approximately three hundred kilometers per hour. Throttle back, or you will be cited.”
“Send me the bill,” she snapped, and sent the ship hurtling at a 45-degree angle away from Michende and out into space.
Rast smothered a grin, but then sobered abruptly as Lira turned to him and asked,
“You know how to fly one of these things?”
“Not a Sirocco-class precisely, but — ”
“Just get us out of the system while I disengage that second tracker. I doubt anyone is going to follow us, but just in case New Chicago’s planetary security patrol is bored today and decides to write me a speeding ticket…”
“Got it,” he said, and turned to the controls, taking a brief read of the optimal trajectory to get them away from the planet and out into the nothingness that lay between systems. The Westin system, where both New Chicago and its sister planet Nova Angeles were located, was something of an oddity, in that the twin worlds were its only planetary bodies. Here, it didn’t take too long to get into deep spac
e.
Lira nodded, said a brief “thanks,” and hurried out.
Apparently New Chicago’s security patrol had better things to do that day, because he saw no sign of pursuit. The space around the two planets was far from empty, though, as freighters and passenger liners and small ships designed only for intrasystem travel shimmered in the darkness. None of them seemed to take any notice of the sleek craft speeding away from the twin worlds, and within a quarter-hour they were quite alone, hanging at the edge of the Westin system.
Here, Rast throttled the Chinook back slightly; it wasn’t safe to keep heading blindly out into open space. It had been a while since he’d programmed a subspace jump, but he couldn’t even do that if he didn’t know where he was heading.
Just as he’d begun to wonder whether he should go down to the cargo hold and check on Lira’s progress, she reappeared, looking rather more cheerful than when she left. A small black object, its composite shell cracked open and its innards clearly smashed, dangled from her right hand.
“Got it,” she said, and then turned and tossed it onto one of the couches in the passenger compartment. “Also found about a dozen cases of moon-moth silk down there, plus some items that are sure to get us arrested on any civilized world.”
He didn’t think he liked the sound of that. “Such as?”
“Crate of katahn, couple more cases of pulse rifles. The usual.”
Rast’s frown deepened. Katahn was a hallucinogen derived from a species of flower that grew on Menari…and was illegal across the Consortium and in the Stacian Federation as well, due to its mind-ravaging properties and highly addictive nature. “We should dump it into space.”
“Probably,” she agreed. “But first things first. We need to get our course plotted.”
“So Jackson was able to break the code.”
“Not exactly.”
He raised an eyebrow and stared at her, waiting for her to let him in on the joke.
She appeared to relent, saying, “Horner’s clean, or at least Jackson couldn’t find anything on him. Your admiral, though — his information is so well hidden that even Jackson Wyler couldn’t access it. But he did give me a lead on someone who might.”
“So where are we going?”
A corner of her mouth quirked. “Gaia.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
If the situation hadn’t been so serious, Lira might have laughed at the crestfallen expression that overtook Rast sen Drenthan’s craggy features. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire…
“I’m not exactly thrilled about it, either,” she told him as she plotted the coordinates into the navigation computer. “But at least I know the Gaian system. It’s where I was born.”
“I know,” Rast said, and then looked as if he wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“You know?” she demanded, pausing to give him a very narrow stare. “What, were you checking up on me or something?”
“I had to know where you went. I had to know that you were safe.”
Those words, spoken calmly yet firmly, doused the flare of anger as quickly as it had come. It was hard to be angry with the one person in the galaxy who seemed to give a damn about her, about what happened to her. The dark copper eyes weren’t exactly pleading, but something in his expression seemed to indicate that he cared very much whether she was upset with him.
The crazy thing was…she wasn’t angry. Maybe she should have been. God knows what he’d dug up about her. Then again, Jackson Wyler was the main skeleton in her closet, so it couldn’t have been that bad.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. In that moment he seemed far too close to her, separated by only a half-meter or so in the cramped little cockpit. Even from where she sat, she could catch a faint drift of the spicy-sweet scent that clung to his hair and clothing, and an unexpected and unwelcome rush of heat seemed to start somewhere in her stomach and end up between her legs.
Taking a breath, she turned back to the computer, and input the last of the data the ship needed to make the subspace jump. Her plan was for them to come back to realspace out beyond Pluto, in the darkness where comets were born. From there she’d transmit the code Jackson had given her and hope for the best. With any luck, the mystery woman would pick up on it quickly and guide them in to…wherever she was.
Rast was silent, watching her as she worked. It was only after she activated the subspace drive and the Chinook propelled itself into the strange non-reality that allowed ships to travel between the stars that he spoke.
“How long?”
“Twenty standard.” And how she’d manage, cooped up in here with him for that amount of time while her body did things her brain had told it precisely not to do, she couldn’t quite comprehend. Oh, well, one step at a time.
She got up from her seat, noting as she did so a slight wooziness. That pulse bolt must have done more of a number on her than she thought. All the more reason to tend to the necessities. And if she were concentrating on getting some food together, then maybe she could ignore her other, unwelcome appetites.
“Hungry?” she asked. “Because I know Gared Tomas has a pretty decent pantry on this boat.”
* * *
Most of the food Lira laid out was unfamiliar to Rast, but surprisingly it all tasted good…although it did seem to collect in a leaden lump in his belly every time he contemplated their destination.
Gaia. She hadn’t said anything, but it seemed as if this would be another instance where he would have to cower in the ship while she went out and handled business. He did not look forward to that at all. But the only thing more conspicuous than having one Stacian appear on Gaia’s surface would be to have two of them show up at the same time.
If Lira was concerned, she didn’t show it. She ate with good enough appetite, which relieved him somewhat; it meant she hadn’t suffered any lasting harm from that pulse bolt. And all the while he tried not to linger on her mouth, since that reminded him of other, more intimate places it had been, or on her slender fingers, which had shown him that they were skilled at much more than piloting a starship.
Easier said than done. His body wanted things that his mind knew were quite out of reach at the moment. It was a pleasant fantasy, to think that after they ate they might retire to the ship’s luxurious little bedchamber and make pleasant use of some of those twenty hours stretching ahead of them, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
If ever.
“And if this woman does agree to help us, what then?” he asked.
A lift of Lira’s slender shoulders. “I suppose it depends on what she can dig up. Are you willing to follow this through, even if it incriminates your commanding officer, possibly brings shame on the Stacian military or government?”
Perhaps before he had known her he might have answered differently, but he did not hesitate as he replied, “Of course. I want to know why you and I were maneuvered…whatever that truth might turn out to be.”
She didn’t say anything, but only nodded. In her sea-colored eyes he thought he saw approval, though. Or perhaps he was merely fooling himself.
The silence stretched between them as they regarded each other. He could actually feel the weight of it, feel the heaviness of her gaze on him, as if there were things she wanted to say but couldn’t, or would not allow herself to utter.
Then she gave a little shake of her head, and pushed her empty plate away. “We have some hours until we reach the Gaian system. Do you want to take first watch, or should I?”
And with that he knew the moment was gone; the chance to speak had evaporated. He cleared his throat and said, “I will. It’s probably better that you be the one on duty when we reach Gaian space.”
“Sounds good.” She picked up the dirty plates and put them in the sanitation unit, then disappeared into the corridor, presumably heading toward one of the empty cabins so she could get a few hours of sleep.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
* * *
A
heavy hand on her shoulder. “Lira.”
She opened her eyes, saw Rast staring down at her. At once she was awake, swinging her legs over the edge of the narrow cot. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in what had been Gared Tomas’s bed. Besides, Rast would have to take that one. There was no way he could possibly fit on this cot.
“Time?” she asked, and stood, then reached to retrieve her jacket from where she’d slung it over the back of the cabin’s single chair.
“Oh five hundred. We’re about eight hours out from the Gaian system.”
“Anything come up while I was alseep?”
A shake of the head. Several of the precious metal rings bound into Rast’s hair jingled slightly. “No. It is a good ship.”
“The best money can buy.” She moved past him, heading to the galley so she could get a cup of water to rinse the sleep taste out of her mouth. And after that, coffee. She knew Tomas stocked some of Gaia’s best in his pantry.
Rast hesitated at the door to Tomas’s cabin. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay up? I am not tired.”
“No, you should sleep.” She wasn’t about to tell him that it was easier for her when he wasn’t around. At least then she didn’t have to worry about the distractions his physical presence seemed to create for her unruly body. “Don’t worry — I’ll wake you before we come out of subspace.”
He nodded, and shifted as if to move into the cabin. She added,
“You’ll probably want to change the sheets on the bed. There should be some fresh ones in that black lacquer cabinet.”
“Thank you,” he said, his tone formal, but she could see him frown slightly, as if wondering how she could possibly know where Gared Tomas stored his clean sheets.
Not from any intimate knowledge, I assure you, she thought, but said nothing. If she explained that Tomas had expected her to perform certain housekeeping duties along with piloting the ship, it would only sound as if she were worried about what Rast might think of her and Tomas’s relationship, which was absurd.
Wasn’t it?
At least she was spared further conversation, since Rast disappeared into the cabin, shutting the door behind him. Relieved, she went into the galley, started up the coffee maker, drank some water and splashed some more on her face for good measure, and then went on into the cockpit.
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