Asarlai Wars 1: Warrior Wench

by Marie Andreas

  “Damn it all to hell,” she swore some more and wiped the wet marks away with her good hand.

  “You had another nightmare, didn’t you?”

  She finally turned around. Denial was useless. He already knew, and he was her best bet to try and keep the rest of the crew from finding out. And for helping her find out what was causing it.

  “Yes, but I couldn’t have been out for long.” She glanced at her clock. She’d been called down to engineering about four hours ago. “Not more than an hour.”

  Deven steered her back to her desk and her chair. “What do you remember?”

  “The wind.” She fussed with the wrap of ice around her knuckles. Terel was going to have to make sure there were no broken bones. “The sand. The terror. But no details. I have never, even when I ran away from that hellhole called home, felt that kind of terror.” She rubbed her arms, but the chill wasn’t external.

  “Do you remember anything else? Even the smallest thing might help.” He crouched down in front of her.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to make her mind go back there. But to go back where? It wasn’t a place. She couldn’t focus on a location or item. She finally opened her eyes. “I can’t remember it. The wind, a horrible wind, strong enough to shred flesh off bones. Sand, huge pieces of sand, stabbing and attacking.” She flexed the fingers of her injured hand slowly; at least they moved. “Something else. This time there was someone there. Or something there. A presence. I couldn’t tell who or what it was. Or if it was there to help or make things worse.”

  “Was the presence in your first dream?”

  She let out a breath. “No. At least I don’t think so. It felt different. I can’t remember anything more.”

  “I could try and see if I can find anything.”

  “No!” She jerked back and glanced down to make sure his bracelets were in place. “I’m sorry, Deven. Your offer is sound. But I’m not ready. There has to be another way.”

  He nodded, and then stood up. “Let’s first get you down to see Terel. Your hand is swelling up.”

  “If you didn’t have such a stubborn jaw, I wouldn’t have hurt myself punching it.” Vas fought off the lingering tendrils of fear. She didn’t have time to deal with this crap.

  “I’ll work on softening that for you.”

  “Please do.”

  ****

  Terel frowned as she moved Vas’s hand back and forth. “How in the stars did you do this? Punching walls?”

  “Beating up her second-in-command.” Deven stuck out his chin as he spoke so Terel could see the darkening mark. He rarely bruised. He’d be a bit darker there for a short while, and then it would vanish.

  “Why did you punch him?” Terel studied both of them, then unceremoniously pulled Vas over to the small synth scan machine. The looming pile of metal always gave Vas the willies. You stuck in perfectly good, but temporarily damaged, body parts and they came out packaged like someone’s freeze-dried meal.

  “Because his face got in the way of my fist when he woke me up.” Vas scowled at Deven. She had planned to make up a story about her fist. She didn’t want to tell Terel about the sleeping. Or the dreams. Damn Deven, he only kept his mouth shut when it was something she wanted to know.

  “Keep your hand still.” Terel positioned Vas’s hand then stepped back as the machine took readings. “Since when do you sleep in the middle of the day? And you,” she said as she turned toward Deven, walking over to examine the small mark on his jawline. “Why would you have thought it wise to wake Vas up? You’re smarter than that.”

  Vas glared at Deven behind Terel’s back. If he said anything about crying, she was going to space him. Hopefully that showed on her face.

  He smiled at Terel. “Not sure. A moment of insanity I guess.”

  Terel moved away from her work. A thin, flexible cast now covered Vas’s hand encompassing two inches past her wrist to her fingertips. She could move her hand, but not well. “I’d say you should be able to take it off in a week or so. The cast is a new poly. It’ll become more flexible as it adapts to your body.” She rocked back against a stool. “I suppose you want to know about our stowaway?”

  Vas helped herself to a seat and nodded for Deven to do the same. She held up her hand before Terel could start. “Please tell me it’s something cut and dried, not more mysteries, quandaries, or oddities.”

  “Sorry.” Terel said. “The mystery deepens with our friend or friends. I am still running a program to separate out the tissue. I believe it was two beings, but they are so conjoined that I can’t be sure.”

  Vas sighed and slumped backwards. “What do we know about it or them?”

  “They’re not human, or at least not completely. Which means they could be a member of any of dozens of species or cross-species.” Terel hit the screen button on the computer and a clear image appeared hovering in the air before them. The blob didn’t look any better on closer inspection. “They’ve been dead about six months. But the body mass was stored in some sort of liquid that both protected and disintegrated the tissue.” She clicked a new button, and the image showed the tissue’s decay. Terel moved closer. “As you can see here,” she said while she waved at a red section of the image in the air, “this is heavily decayed. However, this section is preserved well enough to last for years. Decades even.” Another section appeared.

  Deven moved forward. “Do we know what killed them?”

  “Or why in the hell they were in my ship?” Vas wanted answers. Weird treatment of the dead wasn’t going to give her any of those.

  Terel ignored Vas. “I think they, or it, was left in space. The tissue is similar to victims of hull breaches.” She called up another series of images. All were more of the tissues and all, to be honest, appeared the same to Vas.

  Not to Deven though. “I see what you mean. Those areas aren’t right at all.”

  “Before you go into intense, and boring I might add, comparisons, can you give me a simple answer? To any of it?”

  Terel pulled back from her study with regret. “Unfortunately, nothing beyond what I just told you. I have no idea how they got into engineering.”

  Vas rose to go. “We need to find out something, and soon. That floor had dust on it from at least a year. However they got in there, they weren’t brought in through the door.”

  Chapter Eleven

  They made much better time back to the Lucky Strike space station than they had heading out. The more Mac, Jakiin, and the two alternative pilots learned about the Warrior Wench, the more they were able to make her do. She might be a gilded tart on the outside, but inside she was pure fighter.

  Which made Vas question the ship and Skrankle’s possession of it even more.

  Almost better than the discovery of a sublight power booster in the hull, Vas hadn’t had any more nightmares during the trip back. Her sleep had been its normal sketchy self.

  If she could only get rid of the vague, nagging feeling dogging her. The nightmares might have fled, but they’d left a mark. She found herself avoiding empty corridors. Being around her crew chased the demons away.

  Unfortunately, they still didn’t know who, or what, had been in the engineering section but they now knew what the equipment was. High-grade Starchaser parts. Starchasers being the Commonwealth’s ultimate small gunship in a space fight. They made the Flits, single fighters that the Warrior Wench carried, seem like pop guns wielded by a five-year-old. The Starchaser ships themselves weren’t on the Warrior Wench; Mac and Jakiin had spent two days tearing around trying to find where they might be hidden. However, while the ships weren’t there, brand-new shiny parts were. Enough brand-new parts to make Vas and her crew very rich. That was, if it wasn’t illegal to trade in Starchasers unless you happened to be a contracted official working with the Commonwealth. They were so dangerous to have that Vas had been ready to space the lot of them, but the greedy side of her made her settle for hiding them in a formerly hollow wall chamber. A few wall chambers actually;
there had been quite a lot of them.

  She felt secure with their hiding space as they radioed the space station for a docking berth.

  “No one mention Lantaria. At this point we don’t know what the hell happened. We went there, saw something was going on, and hightailed it out of there. But we do not tell anyone we saw those ships,” she told her crew as they waited for the code to dock. It didn’t surprise her that the Commonwealth hadn’t contacted them after their reports, but their inaction did give her pause. Keeping their knowledge to themselves might be wiser for now. The events of the vid they had recorded of the slaughter joined the lurking tendrils of the nightmares. The low-level tension and fear lurking in her gut was something she hadn’t felt since she ran away from home. However, fear had become a constant creeping ghost in her mind the last two days. One she’d be damned if she admitted to anyone.

  Gosta glanced up from his nav screen. “Aye, Captain.” His dull tone echoed his long face. He enjoyed mysteries, primarily because he could solve them quickly. The fact that aside from securing the locations of the other parts of the Victorious Dead, he hadn’t been able to resolve anything didn’t make for a happy Syngerin.

  She leaned against his console. “You know, you could probably spend some time station side accessing the Commonwealth’s database. We can’t secure a line, but I know the space station has one in their library.” Tossing a key card at him, she smiled. “I reserved you a slot for this afternoon for a few hours. Will that help?”

  “Aye, Captain!” Gosta beaming was really more scary than reassuring, but it cheered her. Maybe he would find some useful information. Resolving some of these mysteries might allow her psyche to let go of the fear.

  Deven followed Vas as she left the docking area.

  “It’s going to be really hard for me to get anything done with a teke lurking behind me.” She tried to be insulting in a vain hope that he would get annoyed and shake off. No such luck.

  “I’ll leave the second you develop the ability to question people without them peeing their pants. Besides, they won’t know.” Deven held up his right wrist. His esper bracelets were covered nicely by a very ornate woven leather band. While still following the law by keeping his bracelets on, hiding them allowed him to function without attracting undue attention.

  “I can’t imagine that anyone at the pub put those trackers in me.” She kept her voice low as they walked across the loading zone and into the station proper.

  “Drinks, Captain? Your turn to buy, isn’t it?” Bathshea cut in as she and Mac sauntered past them. Bathie would remember it was her turn. That woman could drink almost anyone on the crew under the table.

  Vas glanced at Deven. Any chance she had at all of having some time to herself would only happen if she let him investigate that pub. Drinking would have to wait. “You might be right about that. However, I’ve got some errands to run. What say we meet back at four o’clock at the Hidden Cup? First round’s on me.”

  The crew still within hearing range yelled in agreement, before vanishing to deal with their own errands. Vas hadn’t given them time on the station when she’d picked them up. Gosta smiled and went down the long access way to the library. They needed to find a way for a complete library accessport to be put on her ship. Too bad only Commonwealth service vessels could have them. Legally anyway.

  “We might as well get it over with.” Vas ducked down a small corridor that led to an older portion of the station. A pleasant thought hit her. “Actually, I think I could do with some fish, being as we’re going there anyway. It’ll be less suspicious if we order something.”

  Deven marred his perfect face by wrinkling up his nose. “I hate fish.”

  “I know.” She whistled as she walked. Let him deal with it if he insisted on following her. Along with her recent case of nerves, her reactions to Deven were becoming disturbing. After over ten years of working together, she just now started imagining him in bed? She was actually worried about him when he took off on his own? In its own hellish way, the butterflies crawling around her stomach when he got too close were more cause for terror than the nightmares.

  Pushing the annoying emotions aside, she turned down a narrow corridor that led to the main thoroughfare. “It’s right here, looks like—”

  “Like it’s gone,” Deven said.

  An abandoned storefront sat where she knew the pub had been. All the other stores around it were exactly where she’d seen them. Or from what she recalled. To be honest she hadn’t been paying as much attention as she should have been. She’d been lost in thought until the smell had caught her. The smell.

  “Crap.”

  “You’re sure it had been here?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes and even worse I just realized they were cooking fish, a lot of it. To get my attention.”

  Deven walked up to the storefront and peered inside. “Isn’t that a little self-centered? They could have had other customers, you know.”

  “That’s it. They only had one other. And he had meat, not fish.” She walked up to the doors and pulled, but they were locked. Nothing of the pub remained. They must have taken over this storefront, did what they wanted to do, and then returned it exactly as it had been. “Damn it.”

  They could go around to the other storefronts and ask if anyone knew anything. However in this part of the station no one would admit to knowing their own mother if questioned by an outsider. “Your mysterious friend said the odds of someone using food to put those creepy things in my blood would be unlikely. What about the drell? Could that have been in the food?”

  “I don’t think the drell would work in food, but I don’t know enough about them to be sure,” Deven said as he dusted his hands off. “I don’t suppose you noticed anything about the other customer when you were here?”

  “No.” A thought hit her and she turned and retraced the path she had taken when she left the fake pub and gone to get clearance for her flight. “I wonder if my friend had something to do with it.”

  “Friend?” he asked.

  “My friend who did that nice body slam when I came out of the flight office.” She pointed up at a crusty camera lurking in a forgotten corner. By Commonwealth law all stations had to have security cams. Whether they worked or not was another issue. But this one whirled softly and pointed right at the intersection where the guy had collided with her. “I think we might want to go pay a visit to the security office.”

  The security office was the usual small, dank, and awful common to all space stations. The clerk was a bit different however.

  “What can we do for you, Captain Tor Dain?” The clerk sounded competent once Vas identified herself; his prone position on a small metal desk belied that. He hadn’t opened his eyes when they announced themselves, but gestured at some chairs.

  “Please make yourself comfortable. I’m a bit indisposed right now.”

  Vas and Deven remained standing. Much safer than the rusted mismatched chairs lined up against the wall.

  “I need to check some cam data from a section in Old Port,” Vas said.

  “So does everybody.” The human-looking security clerk rubbed the space between his eyes. “I can’t let folks peep willy-nilly at things. There has to be protocol, you know. Requests must be done in triplicate and presented to the council. Probably could get it to you in the next month, maybe two.” As he spoke, he let his left hand fling open.

  She refrained from blowing the hand off in annoyance. Should have expected it though. The entire Commonwealth ran off payoffs. Usually intimidation worked to get what she wanted, but that wouldn’t be a good idea in a station security office. Not if she ever wanted to set foot on another Commonwealth station.

  She nodded toward the outstretched hand. If Deven wanted to stick to her on this trip, then he could take care of payments.

  He rolled his eyes, but dug out some credit chips. The clerk didn’t curl back his fingers until his hand almost overflowed.

  “Co
uld you at least sit up?” The clerk’s prone position annoyed her.

  At first she thought the clerk started choking, but after a few seconds she realized it was laughter.

  “You wouldn’t want me to do that.” More gurgling. “The station keeps moving and my stomach with it. Still enough in me to do damage.”

  “Never mind.” Vas took a step backwards to be safe. “Just tell us where we can get the camera data we need.”

  The clerk reached down and hit a small buzzer, and a gate against the far wall opened up. “There. Find what you need, but don’t take anything. And remember, I didn’t see you.”

  Vas nodded, not caring that he didn’t see that either. Deven followed her in, pulling the gate shut behind him.

  It only took a few minutes to find the right date and camera. She guessed that the clerk out front wasn’t in charge of keeping things in order in here. As slovenly as the outer office appeared, the inner room practically gleamed.

  Settling into a chair in front of the viewer, she called up the approximate time she’d been at the station office. A few more minutes of fine-tuning the camera image brought her to watching herself come out. It showed the man running down the cross corridor. He was peering at something in his hand, so wasn’t looking up, and slammed into her. They couldn’t see his face though. A humanoid, most likely male, but nothing else. That didn’t provide any new information.

  Pushing her out of the seat, Deven sat and took over controls, trying to narrow down the image of the man and the impact between him and Vas.

  “Damn it.” He swore after a half hour of adjusting. “I can’t get a good look at his face.”

  She peered over his shoulder. “No, but what’s that?” There was a small patch on the man’s right upper arm. Blurred, like the rest of the image, but it had an odd shape, like an elongated diamond with wavy lines. Not a symbol she knew. However, something was familiar about it. “Can you pull in any tighter? I think I saw that somewhere, but larger.”