The Snare (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 4-6)

by Athena Grayson

  Contents

  About The Series

  Episode 4: Hard Landing

  Head Trip

  Traveling With Baggage

  Unfamiliar Territory

  Roadblock

  Episode 5: Crystal Dreams

  Reality Distortion

  Assumptions Challenged

  Role Reversal

  Out Of Luck

  Episode 6: Unknown Horizons

  Wandering In The Wilderness

  Enlightenment

  Reconnection

  The Complete Season One

  About The Huntress

  She always gets her man…

  Ever since she was found in the aftermath of alien attacks, Treska Sivekka has been trained to one purpose--to hunt down threats to the security of the Union that gave her an identity. But when the Union's biggest threat inspires desire, and not fear, it’s going to take all her training to protect her principles against his persuasive onslaught.

  The Huntress's neuro-collar and repulsor cuffs may keep Micah bound to her mercy, but they can't stop him from challenging her convictions, and the lies she's been told about his people. But when the secrets surrounding her own missing memories begin to reveal themselves, he may be the only one she can trust.

  Pursued across the star system by the Huntress, helpless as his psionically-talented brethren were brought down one by one, Micah Ariesis must sacrifice himself in a sketchy revolutionary plot aimed at the Union’s heart, but the mystery surrounding his pursuer's mysterious origins puts danger to a much closer heart—his own.

  Huntress of the Star Empire is a sci-fi romance serial adventure. For more about the series, visit www.athenagrayson.com/huntress or sign up for the newsletter at bit.ly/AthenaNews and receive notification of new releases right to your inbox.

  Find Athena: athenagrayson.com | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

  Copyright Notice

  © 2015 Jen Sokoloski. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published by Uncharted Worlds Media. unchartedworldsmedia.com

  Cover Artwork: © Jennette Marie Powell Heikes. All images licensed and used with permission

  Huntress of the Star Empire

  The Complete Season One

  Binge-read with the Bundles:

  The Chase (Episodes 1-3) | The Snare (Episodes 4-6) | The Catch (Episodes 7-9) | The Release (Episodes 10-12)

  Episode 4: Hard Landing

  Head Trip

  In the midst of a black pit, a pinpoint of light appeared, focusing into a glowing oil candle. As he drifted closer to it, the circle of light widened to reveal a shadowy bower. Silken pillows in dark, rich hues tumbled in piles up to the elaborately carved head and foot boards of a huge four-poster bed. He recognized the bed as one in his family’s old estate that he’d liked to jump on as a child. The repulsors beneath the frame had a peculiar instability that caused the bed—and the jumper on top of it—to bounce high enough to brush the barrel-vaulted ceilings.

  This time, though, he wasn’t thinking of jumping on it. She waited for him, her lithe blue-skinned form enrobed in starsilk so translucent, it may as well have been vapor. Indigo nipples peeked enticingly between the whispering folds of fabric as he joined her on the bed. “Zara.”

  Her eyes fluttered open, aqua jewels gleaming out from sapphire-shaded lashes. “I’m going in blind,” she said. Her fingers trailed down his cheek, her touch liquid-cool. Her other hand pushed him down to the bed with more force than her slender frame appeared to have.

  He was content to submit to her direction, but turned his head to catch her fingers lightly with his teeth. “I keep thinking about you. I know Hathori don’t fall in love.”

  “It defies every rule, I know!”

  He rained light kisses across her fingertips against her protest. “I know that, too! The Order forbade us affairs with non-psypaths.” Her gaze saddened. He wanted to smooth the distress from her features, but found his hands oddly heavy against the bed. “My House placed me up for auction in an alliance match.”

  “We’re locked into our fate.” She leaned down and pressed her lips against his. The taste of her arrowed a path straight to his groin, and he wanted to surge up, to deepen the kiss and feel her body against his.

  She held him down and read his mind without psypath gifts, covering him with her warm weight. The scent of her pheromones surrounded him, driving out concerns about the future, of the dissolution of the Order and his own unfinished education, or the expectations of his House which saw not a lost son returned, but a new tool acquired in the pursuit of power. Her hands bunched in his robes, shoving them aside as she trailed wet, burning kisses down the side of his face to his neck where she bit playfully, and maybe a bit too hard. His body strained upward. Her enticing presence left him breathless. “I don’t know how—don’t know what—to do next.”

  She rose off him, her movement stupefyingly fast as he suddenly found it unusually hard to breathe. Her pheromones were searing his throat, but he couldn’t help sucking in deep lungfuls of her. “We have to jump now!”

  “Jump now?” Her diaphanous robe billowed around him like smoke as she leapt upward and came down, her bare azure feet landing on either side of his body. The bed shook—that broken repulsor.

  She did it again and this time her landing crashed the furniture to the ground with a great boom. “Jump now!” She jumped up and down, each landing making the whole room shake. Perhaps the whole building. The world. Her laugh became a scream and his breath suddenly turned to fire in his lungs.

  “Juuuummmmppp nnnnnooooowww!”

  Treska knew entering Jumpspace without warning was a good way to play fast and loose with your molecules. But so were torpedoes. As the Jumpgate swallowed the Needle’s Eye she opened the comm system. “I’m doing this blind.” She wanted to give her passenger a little warning, and maybe leave a last transmission in case they did end up space dust. “It defies every rule, I know!”

  She juked the ship away from the pirate, realized she’d clip the gate itself, and over-corrected again. This is bad. She felt the Jumpgate fighting for control of the ship as gravity gathered in its rings. A laser from the pirate ship knocked out her aft shields, sending alarms screeching. “We’re locked into our fate.” Her entire body rebelled against the pull of Jumpspace as she struggled to right the ship. Even worse than an unscheduled Jump was a Jump sideways—the last thing anyone sane wanted to do was go through a Jumpgate out of control. Of course, that’s what I’m doing.

  “We have to—” Space warped around her, and reality came unmoored from its anchors. “Jump now!”

  Should have taken my chances with the Riktorians. The thought stretched out along with her molecules and just as suddenly, she was in the hospital recovery ward back in Government Plaza.

  The window before her looked out over the western slice of the massive city. In the distance, she could see the jagged edges of destroyed stratoscrapers poking up like broken teeth. “The fires burned for a whole standard month,” said a voice behind her.

  She turned to see the Director standing in the doorway. In the silence, the click-whirr of the servos operating his temporary cybernetics echoed through the room.

  The assisted-breath of her own ventilation unit hissed in prelude to her own words. “Has—anyone—come for—me?”

  The Director shook his head. “The Garden District finished clearing this week.”

  She turned back towards the vista. Already, the brok
en buildings had sprouted scaffolding. Repair bots hovered like tiny insects around the fractured spires. In the distance, something exploded and a controlled demolition collapsed a broken stratoscraper into a neat fall that sent up a column of dust, back-lit by the setting sun. “The—Capitol—rebuilds itself.”

  “No. We rebuild it.” The Director moved into her room. “We make it stronger. We cut away that which is not necessary.”

  She glanced down at her chest, where the vent unit rested in its harness like some many-limbed parasite. Inside the hole in her chest, bio-mimetic nanites were reconstructing her ribcage and growing her a new set of lungs.

  “Have you considered my offer?”

  It had been almost six months since they’d found her, healed her. Why hadn’t she jumped at the chance the Director offered her to rebuild her life with purpose? Her memories weren’t coming back, and no one was coming for her. She may as well resign herself to assumptions rather than memories, and leave the past in favor of the future.

  She felt the Director approach. “Join us in rebuilding.” She closed her eyes and saw what it could be. The shining city whose order rose from the ashes of chaos, with a vision of a clear future in all directions, against which the random cruelties of life had no chance.

  “I’m too broken.”

  “We have already begun to rebuild you. Do you remember when you first awakened?”

  She couldn’t tell him that she’d first awakened to smoke and fire and an incredible, pressing weight stealing the very air from her, of opening her eyes and mouth each time to a darker world and less air to breathe in the choking swirls of dust. She couldn’t tell him of turning her eyes upward and hoping. Because she couldn’t remember what she hoped for, or why she thought hope came from the sky when it rained fire and death. “I remember the trauma center.”

  “We gave you life. Help us give life to this New Union. Vakess Azymus has a vision. A unity of purpose under whose protection this entire star system can truly flourish.”

  She didn’t have hope anymore. It vanished, ephemeral as smoke and her missing memories, a thing to be pursued, but never caught.

  But purpose? In the absence of hope, purpose would do.

  She lay in the trauma pod, trapped by the weight of the thick, pressurized air. Only brief flashes of cool blue light, the murmuring sound of voices above her, and the hiss of ventilators.

  “—perfect candidate…excellent recovery from extensive reconstruction—”

  “—genetic obstacles…chemical therapy—”

  “—closely monitored, but…it could be—”

  “—no guaranteed…success chances—”

  “—contingency—”

  “—risk of psychosis—”

  “—me worry about that. It’s manageable.”

  Sudden panic ripped through her. My body is perfectly healthy! She struggled against the restraints, but the tubes and the fluid lines became a spider-webbed prison and her limbs felt a hundred tons each.

  Jumpspace. It’s Jumpspace. This is a Jump-dream. Time and space snapped back together and she returned to the piloting couch and a HUD full of redlined systems. She registered just in time to jerk her body to the right and avoid an auto-freighter, its pre-recorded proximity warning echoing through the cabin.

  “Jumpgate Station, this is the Needle’s Eye, requesting aid!”

  The response chime thundered in her ear. “Welcome to the Guerre Orbit automated Jumpgate station. Sentients are reminded that Guerre is an automated station only. Application for Jump queue must be made six standard hours in advance. Unscheduled Jumps will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of Union law…Welcome to the Guerre—”

  She cut the comm and avoided another auto-freighter. Under her hand, the ship shuddered and the systems returned to redline. That drive is running hot. She checked the chrono and understood why. The Needle’s Eye wasn’t equipped to handle Jumpspace for that long, and that wasn’t according to the false specs transmitted to stations, but the ship’s actual, top-secret specifications.

  She focused on clearing the traffic around the Jumpgate while she called up information on the Guerre orbit. The HUD flickered as it showed her location relative to the planet—rather, the single habitable moon orbiting the gas giant—along with basic Union information. Crystal mines, small population in scattered settlements, native sentient life forms. Provisional member of the New Union. “What’s that mean, ‘provisional’?”

  A resource alarm sounded. Another one joined in harmony, and the distance between the Jumpgate and the moon suddenly felt very long. She glanced at her position and did some quick figuring in her head. I’ve got to get to that moon before this whole ship turns into a puddle of melted slag.

  She turned the ship towards the gas giant and gunned the ion drive. The piloting couch grew warm with the engine burn and the ship gave a great shudder as it shot forward. The alarms arpeggioed into urgency and the ship started a shimmy that shook her bones. “You okay back there?”

  She got no response. Worry about him later. You get the bounty whether he makes it or not.

  The gas giant filled the screen, its small moon a mere speck of darkness against its stormy light. She pushed for the moon, pausing in acceleration every time the redlines climbed into critical. For a brief few seconds, she eased up, letting the Jovian’s gravity pull her in, but her angle of acceleration soon became a battle against the massive planet’s grip, and the redlines stayed high.

  The cabin heated. “Hang on back there,” she called out over the comm system as she pushed the engines to their last, flinging them into the moon’s orbit.

  But she didn’t have enough juice, and she entered orbit on the Jovian side of the moon. Structural warnings rang out as she searched for something—anything—that would knock them just that much closer to the moon and away from the gravitational imperative of the gas giant. Just…a little…more—

  Heat shrieked out a failure warning. The ship bucked, and not even the piloting couch kept her insulated enough. Her body smashed into the sides and top of the cowling. Alarms wailed. The drag of the atmosphere scraped against the ship’s hull and scoured her own skin. Something snapped free in the aft end and fire suppression reached empty.

  She swung her arms and hands wildly, fighting the ship for control as they breached the atmospheric envelope. Her teeth rattled in her head and she tasted coppery blood when her tongue got in the way. She could see mountains now, a wide plain that looked promising, until she realized the cracked earth was actually deep canyons channeled between the rock.

  She aimed towards a cloudy smudge on the horizon. Water vapor meant water, and maybe a softer landing. Meter by meter, the landscape grew in the viewscreen. She drew up as best as she could as the canyons emptied out into a true plain this time, and—even better than water, vegetation. Not the lush jungles of Dyskaya, but scrubland was better than nothing. She pulled up as hard as she could as the ground rose up to meet her, and braced for impact.

  “I promise. I will take good care of her. I will treat her as my guide to oneness. It is the most significance a Vultron can confer on an inanimate object.”

  “She’s not an object! She’s the Delta Rose. She is my home, my shield, and the best damn lover I ever had.” Xenna’s wine-dark lips folded tight against her teeth, and her flush turned her skin so deep in places, she ran the risk of attracting attention with a glow. The Cetares Orbit planetary transport hub roared white noise around them. The main terminal was large and cylindrical, with long, narrow viewports showing the orbital traffic docking and departing from the snakelike arms of the boarding tunnels poking out from the hub’s body.

  Inside, groups and clusters of civilian travelers shuffled around the large space, making their ways on foot or strolling alongside embarrassingly slow repulsor pallets full of luggage. Most were inexperienced travelers, waiting for the passenger ships to take them through the Jumpgate, while others queued for local transport down to the planet or over to t
he moons. Xenna and Ahveen had docked the Delta Rose under an assumed identity seeking a short layover at the travelers’ rest. The two of them were loitering in a hallway near the public necessaries while the Treemian aboard the Delta Rose hacked into the non-commercial traffic logs to keep tabs on the Huntress’s journey towards the Capitol. The hallway, like nearly every part of this hub, was brightly-lit and so sanitized it could have been used as a medical facility. The brilliant lights hurt Xenna’s eyes.

  “You had best mind your temper, priestess. And don your cloaking garb, before we test the New Morality’s grip on one of its strongholds.”

  Xenna pulled the heavy robe and a veil disc out of her pack. “I hate this thing.” She swung the cloak around and fastened it at the neck. It self-sealed the rest of the way down. She breathed on the disc and the compressed fabric swelled with the moisture of her breath. “Do you remember Westgate’s Jump station?”

  “I remember the makeshift casino causing such a power drain on the station that every time someone won at Fortune Rings, we all played a secondary chance game with life support.” Ahveen twitched at the hem of Xenna’s cloak, shaking nonexistent lint from the fabric. As if something like lint would be permitted in this place.

  “Yes! The place was dark, and smelly, and lit with red paper lanterns. A sentient didn’t feel like she was under a slagging micro-magnifier every minute.”

  Ahveen took the crumpled veil, shook it out and settled it over her head. “You are not using the mask?”

  Xenna glanced around. “I think here, it’ll just stand out more than the travelers’ veil. Any word?”

  Ahveen’s luminous golden eyes dimmed as she checked her padd. “No. Calivon still seeks the Huntress. She didn’t arrive at Eston as expected.”

  Xenna’s fists clenched. She didn’t approve of her Schoolboy’s rash involvement with the plan, but she understood his desire. She understood most of his desires, except for that ridiculous romantic streak of his. “Tell him to widen the Jump possibilities. That ship of hers can probably Jump further than advertised.” Xenna licked her lips at the thought of that sweet, sleek ship. “If she didn’t Jump to Eston from Tenraye, she probably went somewhere further.”