by Bianca D'Arc
Jit’Suku Chronicles ~ Arcana
King of Stars
by
Bianca D’Arc
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright © 2015 Bianca D’Arc
Cover Art by Valerie Tibbs
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
A mysterious man with murder on his mind meets a woman who sees more than meets the eye…
On a remote space station near the galactic rim, a retired soldier-turned-mercenary must make a decision that will alter the course of two galaxies and billions of lives. Guided by a gorgeous woman with a mysterious gift, will he make the right choice not only for himself, but for the woman who is quickly becoming more important to him than life itself? And will his decision condemn two races to everlasting war, or offer a glimmer of hope in the ongoing intergalactic conflict?
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About the Author
Other Books by Bianca D’Arc
Prologue
A long time ago on Pacifica Station…
Matilda sat in the comm chair, blood dripping down her limbs. She would be dead soon, she knew, but she had hope that a small part of her would live on—the part she had sent to what she hoped was a safe depository on a planet far enough away to escape the jit’suku attack.
The space station where she had lived for the past several decades, raising her family and being free of the politics that had ruined her childhood, was nearly destroyed. It wouldn’t be long now. Ship mounted artillery was pounding away at what was left of the structure, pulverizing it along with the hundreds of thousands of people who had lived and worked there.
Her beloved husband was already dead, killed by the structural beam that had crashed down on his head only a few feet away. Her grown children, likewise were gone already. The first wave of the attack had blown a huge hole in the station in exactly the spot where she and her family lived. The children, their spouses and the grandbabies had all been blown to bits and sucked into space.
Dead. All dead.
All except one. Matilda thanked the Goddess that at least one of her children would survive this massacre. She hadn’t spoken to Julian in months, but she was so proud of him.
He was a soldier. A gifted pilot. He was flying what she could only assume were covert missions for the human military, fighting jit’suku incursions into the Milky Way galaxy. He was far away and out of touch.
But he would learn soon of this destruction. He would be devastated, she knew, but she hoped he would carry on.
It was all his now. What little was left of the family fortunes—which wouldn’t be much if the station was completely destroyed—and the legacy she had never revealed to him. She prayed he never discovered the secret that had sent her running here all those years ago. She prayed it would stay a secret, and that her problems wouldn’t become her son’s.
But her time was over. She’d had a good run. A good life with a wonderful man and beautiful children. They would meet her in the afterlife. She could almost see them now…
* * *
Pacifica Station was blown. Gone. Destroyed utterly. Nothing left.
The news hit Julian like a sonic blast. His family was dead. All of them. He was the only one left and he had to go in person to a bank on a faraway planet to retrieve what was left of the family’s assets. It wasn’t much, they warned him. The vast fortunes of his family’s business had been lost with the station. But for some reason, there were data transmissions he had to retrieve in person, according to his mother’s final instructions.
Julian was granted leave from his position with the military. He had just enough money to get where he needed to go and retrieve the mysterious data.
Though he would have preferred to fly himself, he boarded a civilian liner and holed up in his cabin for the entire voyage. He was numb from the pain of losing his family.
He hadn’t been home in a long time, but he had loved his siblings and his parents. He missed them sorely. And as he grieved, anger at the jits who had killed everyone on Pacifica Station so indiscriminately took root in his heart. Anger and a raging desire for vengeance.
Chapter One
Years later…
Julian was now retired. Supposedly. As a retired military ace pilot, he ran his own operation now. He owned and piloted a small cargo ship that had the reputation of not minding doing runs that might be considered on the shady side of the law. He wasn’t a smuggler…precisely. He had his own code of honor. He drew the line at human cargo, but most kinds of goods were okay with him.
Why should he care if some shady entrepreneurs wanted to seek profit in smuggling med tech or luxury food items to compatriots in less developed parts of the Milky Way? As long as nobody got hurt and Julian got paid, he didn’t really care if the cargo he was contracted to haul was one hundred percent legit.
And then there were the secret missions he still did for the military. He had a contact on Madhatter Station, and had been involved in some actions against jits and human pirates alike there a few times. As a result, Madhatter had become a base of sorts for him. He cycled through there regularly, and if he had downtime, he spent it there among people who had become friends and comrades through their shared experiences.
His contact was a bar owner, and the bar in question was called The Rabbit Hole. Apparently the designers of this civilian station had based a lot of the names on an old Earth book they liked. Julian didn’t get it, but he didn’t care much either way.
He sat in the bar, among others of his kind. There were plenty of civs at the tables and booths, but the bar itself was populated by old soldiers. They congregated around the bartender, who was like them—a retired soldier.
Only, the retired part wasn’t exactly true. The barkeep was Julian’s contact. He passed intel and missions along from higher up the chain of command.
Julian was between assignments at the moment, which gave him time to do some civilian runs purely for profit, and to cement his reputation as a pilot for hire. He didn’t have any runs scheduled yet, but he had feelers out. He’d put his ship up on the boards at the cargo hauler’s union, but the Cargo Master there had said pickings were slim right now. So Julian spent a lot of quality time at The Rabbit Hole, waiting for word of possible work.
He was there, in fact, when a small woman wandered into the bar. His eyes followed her unconsciously. There was something so…magnetic…about her. She was gorgeous, but it was more than that. She intrigued him, and stirred an interest he hadn’t felt in far too long. Was it a fluke? Probably.
The decimation of Julian’s family had killed something inside him. He
didn’t feel anymore. Not like before. Not like normal people. Sometimes he felt like a robot, just going through the motions of life, not really caring about anything—except his plan for revenge.
The newcomer walked right up to the bartender and spoke a few words. Chip, the barkeep, frowned a bit, but went in back to summon his lady. Chip and Lila had been married in a small ceremony here in the bar, soon after they had successfully repelled a pirate takeover of the station.
Julian had attended the ceremony, along with most of the other vets at the bar. Lila was special, and if there was a female in the galaxy that Chip admired for her courage and skills, it was her.
She was spooky though. She saw the future. It still weirded Julian out a bit. But it had been Lila who told Chip to commandeer the pirate cargo ship that had become his legally, after all was said and done. It was a spoil of war—a prize for his part in the action—or so the courts decided. Without that judgment, Chip would never have been able to afford his own ship, much less the heavy armament on the little cargo ship that had become his. He owed Lila a lot for that.
Chip watched as Lila came out from behind the bar to sweep the new arrival into a big hug. The two women apparently knew each other, and now that Chip looked more closely, he could see a bit of family resemblance. Maybe they were sisters? Or perhaps cousins?
It didn’t seem possible that yet another Senna woman would choose to come to The Rabbit Hole. The place had already seen Lila’s sister and daughter come through in the past year, each of them ending up involved with one of the vets, and taking off for greener pastures as couples. And if scuttlebutt was to be believed, both of those ladies had also had the gift of foresight.
Julian looked at the new woman more closely. She was about Lila’s age, which put her around his age as well. She was petite, like Lila, but she had golden blonde hair that was much lighter than any of the other Senna women he’d met. Still, there was something about her that made Julian think the two women were related. He couldn’t put his finger on it…
And then the both turned to look at him. Whoa. Why were they looking at him? Julian felt a shiver go down his spine. Something was up. A moment later, the two ladies walked in his direction, many in the bar following their progress.
They stopped directly in front of him.
“Julian,” Lila began, a bright smile on her face. “Let me introduce my cousin, Star.” Lila turned to the woman. “Star, this is Julian. He’s a pilot with a small cargo ship that might suit your needs.” Lila turned back to him. “You haven’t taken any jobs yet, right? Star here might be the answer to your problem. She needs a ride, but I think you’d better discuss the particulars privately.” Lila winked at him and smiled, but he felt a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach. If a Senna woman was involved, things could be tricky.
“I don’t take passengers, ma’am,” Julian tried to weasel out, but knew it was a weak gambit.
“Just hear her out, Julian,” Lila said quietly, with a secretive smile that made him worry even more. “I think the two of you have something in common and this trip might be just the thing to kill two birds with one stone. Talk,” she ordered. “Then see what you think.”
Given a directive like that from Lila Senna, Julian didn’t have much choice. Like he’d thought before, the woman was just spooky.
He turned to look at Star as Lila left them. She seemed not the least bit uncomfortable, but she wore a knowing smile that unnerved him a bit. She was a lot like her cousin. He stood, taking his mug of ale with him. Star was short, but devastatingly gorgeous—and she probably knew the power she held over men, and used it mercilessly.
Julian felt a shiver of dread—and anticipation—go down his spine. Fate had brought this beautiful woman to him, but he was trying hard to run the other way. It was one thing to talk to her, maybe take her to dinner and try his best to seduce her into his bed. It was another thing entirely to commit to taking her across the stars in the small quarters of his ship.
He was attracted to her. There was no denying it. But Julian wasn’t a man to get involved, and this woman had involvement written all over her. Tangling with her on anything other than a casual basis felt like a disaster waiting to happen. Julian had plans—vengeance plans—and they would not be derailed by a beautiful woman. No way. No how.
“Shall we sit in one of the booths? It’s a bit more private,” he asked politely, gesturing for her to precede him with his mug. She nodded and moved smoothly in front of him, heading for the darkened booths to the side of the bar. He tried not to watch her curvy form as she sashayed in front of him, but it was a losing battle. The woman was a knockout.
He followed her to the booth closest to the bar that was somewhat segregated from the others. They could talk privately there and he knew for a fact it had its own security screen that he could switch on to ensure nobody in the bar overheard what they discussed.
Chip and Lila could probably access their conversation, but he trusted them implicitly—and it was Lila who had brought Star over to Julian in the first place. She had to know already what her cousin had in mind.
Star sat in the half-circle of the booth, scooting around to the middle so she was positioned next to him rather than across from him as he took his seat, facing the front of the bar. He would be able to see anyone approaching from the front of the house and everyone behind him was a vet—a known quantity. He slid his fingers over the tabletop controls, activating the privacy screen and checking to make sure no listening devices had been added to the area since the bots did their last sweep of the entire place the night before.
Finding nothing suspicious, he turned to Star and was surprised to see she had a deck of cards in her hand. Right. She was a Senna. She was probably as familiar with dealing cards as the rest of the women of that family he’d met. It remained to be seen if she had the same prophetic way as the others though. He watched carefully as she began to shuffle the deck.
She dealt a strange pattern and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Yeah, he’d seen this before from some of her relatives. And then she began to flip the cards over and he realized they weren’t the normal playing deck. No, these cards were from the ancient tarot deck he’d seen the other Senna women use on occasion.
Dear Lord in heaven, she was doing her fortune-telling routine, and Julian was almost afraid of what she was going to say. He watched her with wary eyes as she perused the cards. She had a kind of adorable way of biting the side of her lower lip that was incredibly distracting, but he schooled himself not to react.
And then she looked up at him. Her wide hazel eyes blinked at him innocently and he was lost. Yeah, he was a goner, all right.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said with a soft smile that changed her plain face from ordinary to lovely. “I always consult the cards when it comes to important decisions. You’ve probably seen Lila read them a time or two, right?” She looked so hopeful, he couldn’t disappoint her.
“Yeah, I know what those cards are. Question is, what do they tell you?” He lobbed the conversational ball back to her court. He was definitely not comfortable talking about her family’s eerie ability to see the future.
She smiled again and he was just as enchanted by the change in her features a second time. He’d thought her plain, but in reality, she was beautiful.
“Right now, they’re telling me I’m in the right place. See this card? She pointed to the card at the top of her arrangement. He looked closer. It was a guy wearing a crown and there was a big star in a circle behind him.
“King of something?”
“King of Pentacles, using the old names. Nowadays, he’s known as the King of Stars. Tradition has it that each of the four kings in the deck are modeled after famous leaders from old Earth. This one…” she tapped the card, “…is Caesar. Julius Caesar of the Roman Empire.” She held up the card next to him and looked at his face, then at the card and back again. “It’s a good likeness. Julius. Or, as you prefer, Julian. Yeah, th
at’s definitely you.” She put the card back down on the table. “You’re the man I’ve been looking for.”
He wanted to protest, but Julian was cautious by nature. And the woman intrigued him just a little too much. He would hear her out—even if she was spacey—and then send her on her way.
“What is it, exactly, that you’re looking for, ma’am?” he asked patiently.
She put the card down and looked directly at him. He felt the impact of her gaze sizzle down his spine like an electric jolt.
“I want passage to Solaris Prime,” she declared in a no-nonsense tone. Just like that. She wanted to go to one of the most dangerous places in the universe for a human.
Julian tried not to react, but he knew his eyes widened a bit before he could control it. Damn. Of all the things this gorgeous creature could have asked for, this had to take the cake. He was glad he’d activated the privacy screen. It just wasn’t safe to talk about traveling into the enemy jit’suku galaxy, much less to the sovereign planet of the entire jit’suku empire.
Julian shot a look toward Lila who was watching from the bar. He wondered if she knew what her cousin was planning. Lila nodded at him, her expression serious and Julian had to hide his reaction a second time.
Dammit all to hell and back. These crazy women were in cahoots.
“You do realize that’s a restricted zone? Few humans who have ventured into the jit galaxy have ever been heard from again. I don’t know of anyone who has ever been to their homeworld and lived to tell the tale. It’s a suicide mission.” He sat back in the booth and just looked at her, daring her to argue.
“And yet, you’ve been planning just such a mission.” Her knowing look made him want to scream. How in the world did she—? He cut off his own thoughts as realization dawned.
There was no way anybody could know his secret plans. Unless.... Maybe she really was psychic.
