Explode: Team Supernova (The Great Space Race)

by Teresa Noelle Roberts

  “You can’t win. His uncle owns one of the few companies that trades with the Yestrian Republic. Eno got him to alert the Republic about spies from another human-led corporation scouting for remote planets where they could set up illicit mining operations. If you try to enter that system, they’re going to kill you. And the uncle has a small army guarding all his warehouses and so do all his competitors, so you can’t get a crystal that way. You have to drop out of the race.”

  The last meal he’d eaten (a protein bar in place of lunch) tried to escape. He fought it down. “I can’t leave you with him!”

  “It’s not like he’ll honor the agreement. What part of trying to kill you don’t you get?”

  “I…I love you, kid.” Real articulate.

  A noise he couldn’t make out came through the com. Panic transformed his sister’s face. “I have to go. Be safe. Keep away from Yestria!” She broke the connection. At least he hoped she did it herself.

  “I love you,” he said helplessly into the sudden, ominous silence.

  Zel, of course, but also Sarr’ma.

  Just his luck to realize he was in love with his teammate when he had to explain how the black hole of his life had sucked her in too and she might get killed because someone wanted him dead.

  *

  Sarr’ma shredded a pillow with her claws, then began pacing frantically around the bedroom.

  What kind of com tore a man away from a blowjob—and a fine one, if she said so herself?

  Either that com-alert was one that signaled a desperate emergency or…well, she couldn’t think of anything other than an emergency. Even a cheating driftdwell wouldn’t take a call from one lover in the middle of sex with another. Maybe a stupid cheating driftdwell, but Tripp wasn’t stupid.

  Another partner, one she wasn’t supposed to know about, would explain the way he withdrew to his room on a regular schedule; they could have set up times to com.

  No, that didn’t make sense. There were plenty of cheating creeps in the universe (some of them were even on Mrrwr, where poly and open relationships were as common as monogamous ones so there was absolutely no reason to lie about other lovers). But Tripp was her mate, even if he didn’t know it yet. That bond wouldn’t form if he were lying about something that important, would it?

  You heard stories of people finding out they were mated to murderers.

  It had to be some kind of emergency. Which meant she should stop fuming like a character in a bad romance holo and see if she could help.

  She ran her hand over her tail to make sure it wasn’t puffed out, and went to knock on the sanitation chamber door.

  Her keen ears caught the words “I love you.”

  She was not going to make assumptions. She’d remain calm…

  She threw herself against the door—and stumbled inside because Tripp hadn’t locked it. Tripp perched on the built-in seat in the sonic cleanser, staring at the floor as if he didn’t register her presence.

  All the things she’d been about to spew out despite her resolve to remain calm flew out of her brain when she saw Tripp’s face. If she had gotten herself into some kind of sordid love triangle, it was one that was tearing Tripp apart.

  But based on his appearance—bleak eyes, tight mouth, bowed head, hunched posture—and the reek of shock-sweat filling the small sanitation chamber, she leaned toward the “horrible emergency” assumption.

  She took two steps forward and crouched in front of him. “Something bad’s happened, hasn’t it? Talk to me.”

  *

  He took her hands and immediately felt better. Not good, but centered and able to think more clearly. “The truth is, I’m here because someone blackmailed me into it.”

  Sarr’ma stiffened. “What the stars could someone else have on you that you’d need to keep secret that badly? You’re a stand-up guy. Unless your culture has some strict taboos you haven’t mentioned, I can’t imagine…”

  He took a deep breath. “Maybe blackmail’s the wrong word. Someone kidnapped my sister. When I tried to get her back, I was more or less delivered to Primaera by his thugs and told to do the race—to win the race. If I turned over my winnings, I’d get her back. Only it looks like it’s an entertaining and deniable way to get me killed so the kidnapper can keep using Zel like a sex ’bot without interference.”

  Sarr’ma sprang to her feet and stared at him. Her tail lashed back and forth, an angry pendulum, but the rest of her was predator-still. “This guy need to die. Tell me how to find him and I swear I’ll kill him for you.” She paused, then added, “Once I figure out how. If he was an average thug, you wouldn’t be in this mess because you’d have killed him yourself. But he can’t get away with this.”

  He wanted to pull her close, cuddle her, stroke her hair, because she looked too small and fragile to be saying such things. But he respected her too much to give into that patronizing urge. The set of her spine, the staccato movement of her tail, the stiff extension of her claws, all reminded him that her vow wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed.

  Not from an apex predator with a protective streak.

  “There may be ways you can help—stars, you already are, by being here—but let’s skip the slaughter, satisfying though it would be.” He didn’t want her to get more involved in the black hole his life had become, but he couldn’t deny that with her knack for finding solutions to intractable problems, she might be able to help. Not by killing his enemies, though he liked imagining the look on Eno’s face when he felt the slash across his belly and realized he’d been disemboweled by a flirty female who weighed less than forty-five kilos wringing wet. But by seeing a solution he couldn’t because he was too close to the situation.

  “Maybe we should go back to the bed,” she suggested. “Or the lounge, with that comfy couch. This conversation is going to be hard enough without being crammed into a sonic cleanser unit.”

  They ended up on the bed, Tripp in his shorts again, Sarr’ma in the oversized shirt, her head on his thighs.

  It was good having that contact. Good knowing she was an ally, even if he wasn’t sure what she could do.

  “You know I’m from the Meridian Corporation Sector. Do you know much about it?”

  “I looked it up when I found out I was paired with you, but didn’t get beyond the overview. The whole system’s run by Meridian Corporation and resolves around the trinium mines. Your home planet’s one where you’re either a miner, a miner’s mate…perma-partner, that is…or providing some kind of support service for miners. Some of the planets are dedicated to the businesses offices and the people who work there, and one, Arias, is where the human mine-owners live like something out of an over-the-top holo-drama about billionaires because they are billionaires. The other owners are Ortiz and they live on their own warmer fancy-pants planet.”

  “Remember when I said something about mining being hard, dangerous, and still boring? It’s true, and Meridian doesn’t do anything to make it better. They’re practically the only employer in the system—the only one on a lot of planets—so they get away with paying crap. Because they pay crap, it’s tough to save enough to go look for a better job somewhere else. They run everything from the clinics to the banks to the bars, so if you need credit, you end up owing money to them, which makes it even harder to get away.”

  “Let me guess. Because the wages are low, a lot of people end up needing credit.”

  He nodded, his face grim. “A group of us on Nieves were working to unionize, but we hadn’t gotten far. Management couldn’t decide if we were threatening or pathetic; they alternated between arresting people and holding them just long enough to scare them into backing off and ignoring us completely. Some of the young men and women from Arias, rich kids who didn’t have much useful to do, even came to our rallies like they were slumming in a dive bar. And that’s where Eno Kallrydis spotted my sister Zel.”

  He sucked in a deep breath, wishing there was a simpler way to tell the story, one that involved fewer words.
“We always had music at rallies, to suck in people who weren’t sure about the cause but weren’t going to pass up free entertainment. This time, Zel was singing. She’s a nurse’s aide in the mine clinic, but she has a great voice.

  “She caught Eno’s attention. But she’d gotten perma-partnered to this great woman a few months before and she wasn’t interested in anyone else, not even someone as rich and powerful as the Kallrydis heir. So Eno and his thugs grabbed her and took her home anyway.”

  Sarr’ma stiffened against him. “What the marling stars? You can’t do that!”

  “You can if your family owns the system. I was already on a watch-list because of union organizing, so when I started raising a ruckus, letting management know what had happened and demanding my sister back, I found myself on the way to Primaera before I knew what was happening. They could have killed me outright, but I guess this amused Eno.”

  Sarr’ma’s claws extended, retracted, and then extended again. “What made you think a zelacxi like that will honor his word?”

  “Desperation. It was the only hope I had. Only Zel just commed me. She found out he has someone on the inside at Octiron who’s been giving us tougher and tougher challenges. I guess when you’re rich, bored, and twisted, you do convoluted shit like this. Or maybe he figured murdering me in an obvious way would finally push Zel to kill him in his sleep.”

  He explained the situation with a growing sense of unreality. This was like the plot of an action holo, nothing that could happen to an ordinary miner from Nieves.

  Falling for a cat-girl from another galaxy didn’t happen to an ordinary miner either. And now he’d have to crush her dreams—and possibly trap her in Paragon Galaxy.

  “So we’re screwed. The crystal challenge is a trap meant to kill us. If we somehow manage to win and I try to make him honor the agreement, he’ll kill me anyway. If we drop out of the race, you have no way home and Zel stays a prisoner.”

  “And you still have a super-rich sociopath after your ass. And I’m guessing,” she said, her usually perky voice sounding more like a growl, “that the black bar on your tattoo has something to do with this mess.”

  He nodded. “It’s for Erin, my sister’s perma-partner. The official story is she killed herself after Zel ran away with a rich guy, but no one who knows either of them believes it.” He sighed. “I have no idea what to do. Every scenario ends in doom. We could try to convince Octiron the race has been interfered with, but without evidence…”

  “So we get the evidence.” Sarr’ma slashed at the air with the claws. “And then we get Zel.”

  Despite a weight pressing on him that he thought might be four months’ worth of angry tears, Tripp started to laugh. “Right,” he sputtered. “You and me with our borrowed laser weapons blazing.”

  “Sounds great. When do we start?” Her body was vibrating. He thought she might be crying or trembling from fury, but realized she was purring. Rage-purring, apparently, was a thing.

  “Sounds like a great way to die young.” He hung his head. “He lives on Arias, with the best security money can buy. You’d need a small army of well-armed trained operatives, not one angry miner and one cat-girl engineer, even if she does have impressive claws.”

  “Marl. For a second I was so furious I literally forgot which galaxy I was in.” She sat up, put one hand—claws now retracted—over his heart and looked up at him. Like this, she looked absolutely harmless, a beautiful woman with catlike ears and tail. But he’d seen a similar expression in her eyes on Altaria. She was ready to kill. “At home, I could get you those trained operatives, and they’d work cheap. But they’re a long way away and we don’t have access to a long-distance transporter.”

  “Right… You know a bunch of kick-ass mercenaries.” He could never tell when she was joking.

  “Actually, yeah, I do. One of my brother Rahal’s spouses—infiltration and rescue is her family business. That and cargo hauling, which pays for the daring rescues they do for free. But since they’re in a different galaxy, we need Plan B.”

  Sarr’ma put both arms around him. Her tail curled around his back and into his lap. “We’ll get her out of there, Tripp. Between the two of us, we’ll think of something. If we survived Altaria—not to mention each other—and came up with two plans for Yestria that could have worked if it had been an honest challenge, we can solve this one. But I think the best thing we can do right now is to stop thinking. Get physical. Clear our mind to make room for new ideas. And there’s nothing here to hunt, so…”

  She leaned into him, pushing him back onto the bed.

  He didn’t resist.

  *

  They lay sated in each other’s arms. Tripp, half-asleep, was stroking Sarr’ma’s back, marveling how, as long as he was touching her, everything felt right in the universe.

  Suddenly she exclaimed, “I got it!” and sat up. “We’re celebrities at the moment. The Great Space Race is the kind of show people follow even if racing’s not their thing, so they don’t sound clueless at the next party. Right?”

  “Sure. I guess so.” He wasn’t following her, but he’d hear her out.

  “At the moment, camera-drones follow us wherever we go. Sparky is on our side as much as the programming allows. So…we crash a party or something—we’ll work that part out once I get more information—I’ll flirt with Mr. Creepy Rapist, he’ll play for the camera whether he’s into me or not because it’s going to get him on holo-vision.

  “And then we’ll bring you on camera so you can accuse him of what he’s done to Zel and you.”

  “Except he’ll deny it and people will believe him, or at least figure it’s smarter to act like they believe him. We’re celebrities at the moment, but he’s part owner of a solar system.”

  Her left ear twitched. She batted at it with the back of her hand. “Right. So that leaves us with Plan C: we crash a party at his palatial abode and we walk out with your sister.”

  “And we can do that because…”

  “Because we have a flight of camera-drones and Octiron’s backing. You can get away with kidnapping one woman when you’re that rich. But you can’t get away with interfering with The Great Space Race. Octiron may set things up for maximum drama and force people to participate if they can get away with it, but they won’t like someone else doing so—no one gets to game their system but them. And they’ll hate someone using their race as a cover for murder. The prospect of blood and guts is part of the reason people watch the show. But an outsider fixing the race so people are deliberately killed could cost them sponsors. They’re not going to stand for it. This zelacxi may be part owner of a solar system, but Octiron, as far as I can figure out, owns a good chunk of this marling galaxy and has deals with the rest of it. Which is creepy, but we might as well use it to our advantage.”

  “That might actually work. How did you come up with that?”

  “Ask me,” Sarr’ma said, “about the time my brother started a revolution using basic marketing techniques—and then started a counter-revolution when he realized the first one had been a bad idea. I didn’t know I’d picked up so much from his stories.”

  “Why are you willing to take this risk for me? If this doesn’t work, we’ll probably die on the spot.”

  She placed one finger across his lips. He got the point and shut up. “Because I love you, you big, stupid lug of a male.”

  He blinked. Did he actually hear that?

  Yes, he had. Best and yet scariest three words he’d ever heard in his life

  “I…” Stars, how could he say this without sounding like he was manipulating her? He probably couldn’t but that was a chance he needed to take. “Zel cut off the com abruptly. I was scared for her, hoping no one overheard her warning me. Praying she was as safe as she could be in that place. But at the same time, I was thinking how much I love you, and how terrible I felt that you were in danger because of me.”

  “I chose to be here, to take risks. This is different level of peril than I
bargained for—I was figuring on possible accidental death and dismemberment, not convoluted attempted murder—but that’s not because of you. It’s because some psycho decided that kidnapping, rape, and homicide would be a good time and you and your poor sister were in the way. Lucky for you, he got me in the package.” She rolled out of the bed and stood, feet planted wide. “I am Sarr’ma Settazz, the daughter of two of the best con artists in the galaxy, sister of the former warlord of Cibari, and an actual-factual genius. And no one gets away with hurting my mate and his family.” She punched the air, much as she had done with her bloody hand after killing the beast on Altaria.

  The whole thing seemed like a magical incantation from a fantasy holo, as if the determined words would alter reality.

  Maybe they could—at least one important word that took a few seconds to sink in. “Mate?”

  “Mate.” She sounded like her perky self again, and she managed to make that one short word sing in ways a human couldn’t. “My mate. Mine. And I’m yours.”

  Part of him loved the sound of that, even if he didn’t know what it entailed. Part of him choked on panic. “What does that even mean?” he managed to ask. As soon as he said it, he realized it wasn’t the right question. But he wasn’t sure what the right question was.

  She practically skipped back to the bed and curled up against him. Her slim body vibrated with the force of her purr. “It means everything and nothing. We’ll want to spend the rest of our lives together, but if we can’t for some reason, we’ll always know where the other one is and if they’re all right. I’ll kill for you. I’ll share my kills with you.”

  An image from Altaria filled his mind. Sarr’ma drenched in green blood, holding her fist to the sky in triumph, and gazing at him as if she’d never seen anything like him before. As if she didn’t recognize him.

  No, as if she recognized him as something new. Someone new.

  Her strange behavior that day…the way she said she’d felt compelled to kill the creature with her claws. The blood. “On Altaria…” His voice trailed off. He saw where this was going and was horrified—but horrifyingly intrigued.