Asarlai Wars 1: Warrior Wench

by Marie Andreas

  “Thank you, Captain.” Xsit chirped to herself as she contacted the lead ship. Bathie went ahead and contacted the guard at Home to let them know they were bringing folks in. Flarik had obviously just come up for the information about the ships, so with a nod, she left to go do whatever it was she did.

  Vas let herself get lost in the field of stars on the main screen. She wasn’t used to bringing non-crewmembers to her planet. Hell, she wasn’t used to helping people. She made a living out of other people’s disagreements, wars, and stupidity. Helping wasn’t part of her life.

  Yet here she was, helping two full ships of total strangers and offering them a chunk of her very private home. With all that had happened to her in the last month, helping these two ships was more disturbing.

  The fact that there were refugees from Lantaria was also upsetting. She really should interview them and find out what they knew. The Commonwealth had blown her off about her concerns of what had happened to the planet; they wouldn’t have sent any support for the survivors.

  She tapped open the comm. “Flarik? I need to borrow you for a bit.”

  “What is it, Captain?” She couldn’t have been that involved yet; she would have just gotten down to her rooms a few minutes ago. However, the terse tone was still there. Clearly she wasn’t finding anything useful, or rather wasn’t finding what she needed to get the Wavian Empire to attack the Rillianians. Vas knew that Flarik had her own motives at this point for helping. Hopefully the two goals would follow the same path for a while yet.

  “I know you’re busy, but I need you to go interview some of the survivors on those ships. Bathie is running a full manifest on everyone who is on board. You can pick the most likely candidates from the list.”

  An audible sigh escaped over the comm. “Aye. Is there anything specific you want to know?”

  “Yes, what they saw when those ships attacked.” Vas paused; Flarik had been asleep during the entire episode. “You have seen the vids, correct?”

  “Of course.”

  Vas didn’t let her laugh creep out over the comm. The two words sounded like she’d tossed a mortal insult at Flarik. Of course, being both a Wavian and a lawyer perhaps she did. Both prided themselves on being prepared and informed to the point of obsession.

  “Find out what they remember, how many ships escaped, and if they have an idea of who did it. Anything would help at this point. We have to assume the slaughter of that world is tied into the rest of this mess somehow.” She tapped her finger on her teeth in thought. “I’m going to try and contact the council again. I can’t believe the Commonwealth would just walk away like this.”

  “Very well, Captain. Flarik out.”

  Vas got up to head for her ready room, then turned back to Bathie. “Can you check on the rest of the folks in the med lab for me? Let me know once they’ve regained consciousness.”

  She nodded. “Oh, and Grosslyn says you’ll owe him a vat of ale for dropping these folks on him like this. At first he couldn’t understand why we’re adding more troops.” She laughed. “Took him almost a full ten minutes to understand that these weren’t fighters, and another five to figure out that we were giving them land.”

  “Eh, he’ll survive. He’s too set in his ways.” Grosslyn managed her planet when she wasn’t there. Which was about ninety-nine percent of the time.

  Vas went to her ready room and slid the door shut. The stims were starting to wear off and the searing pain in her joints and muscles was being replaced by a rock-like stiffness.

  Settling into her chair, Vas connected to the inner worlds system that would eventually get her to a Commonwealth flunkie.

  After making the connection request, she went over to the food processor and ordered up a sandwich. Those stims had played hell with her adrenaline system. Knowing the lovely bureaucracy behind the heart of the Commonwealth, she figured she had at least a half hour before they’d pick up her call.

  She almost dropped her sandwich when her computer beeped that the call was being answered. Holding the pieces of her sandwich together, she ran for her desk.

  “Captain Tor Dain?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Expeliar Curellen here. You had an urgent matter?”

  Vas swore. They responded in less than five minutes, and with an Expeliar? She’d expected a low-level clerk, not a high-ranking official. “Thank you, Your Excellency. I was concerned about the attack on Lantaria last week. My ship has recently come to the assistance of some of the refugees.”

  “Lantaria? I wasn’t aware of anything wrong there.” He paused as he glanced down at a screen. “We have on schedule that you were involved in a job there with three other mercenary companies. According to this you should still be fighting.”

  She’d wondered if they had done anything with her previous very long report. Obviously not.

  “Expeliar Curellen, unknown ships attacked the merc companies with us. I believe all were lost. I didn’t see any of their ships get off the ground.” She paused, waiting for him to say something, when he didn’t she added, “And we just found about two hundred refugees. They claim Lantaria was destroyed.”

  “I see.” His tone grew cooler. “Do you have any proof, Captain Tor Dain?”

  What the hell was he getting at? She’d said she’d seen the attack.

  “I was there, Your Excellency. The ships that attacked were planet killers, huge, unmarked, but they knew their business. We only got away because we weren’t in the fight zone when they started.” She wasn’t sure what was happening, but something was very wrong. “We tried to contact Lantaria after we escaped. There was no response.”

  The silence on the other end was chilling. Finally a click indicated that the Expeliar had muted her call, someone else had to be in the room with him. Another click brought him back.

  “Where is the Victorious Dead, Captain Tor Dain? We do not show your ship on the grid.” His voice dropped. “Where are you currently?”

  Vas’s heart rate jumped without the extra boost from the stims. She had reported the full change of ownership of the Warrior Wench before she’d even picked up her crew. She’d reported the Victorious Dead as inactive at the same time. How in the hell could someone as high up as an Expeliar not have that information?

  While she was trying to figure out what was happening, he added another question. “And where did you say you saw those refugees? We’ll want to find them and make sure they’re safe.”

  Vas took a steadying breath and backed away from the comm. Something was very, very wrong. A quick check of the line confirmed that it was connected to an inner Commonwealth call. But that didn’t calm her any. Warnings in her mind all but demanded she sever the call immediately.

  “They were heading in-system. They said something about the Novia system.” She picked something plausible, difficult to search, and in the exact opposite direction of where they were heading. She knew she didn’t want the person on the other end to know where the refugees or her own ship were, even if she had no real reason why. “They were in trader ships, about four or five, slow moving.”

  Again the click as she realized he was conferring with someone near him. They didn’t know where she was, and they didn’t know she was in the Warrior Wench. If she bounced the line when she cut it they couldn’t reconnect. At least not easily. Vas swore as she realized Gosta was most likely still unconscious. Divee might be able to do a good enough block to keep them from being traced.

  She cut the call.

  “Xsit? Get me Divee, stat. And do not, under any circumstances, accept any calls from the Commonwealth.”

  “Captain?”

  “Don’t ask, just don’t. And I need Divee now.”

  Vas cut the comm and paced her small ready room. She’d never spoken to an Expeliar in her life. They were a cadre of the ruling elite, third tier from the top. There was no reason her general call would have been routed to one such as him.

  Unless they were waiting for her.

&nbs
p; Wishing she had recorded the conversation, she frantically grabbed a stylus and pad and wrote down everything she could remember. There may have been things she missed. However, far worse than the recent goings on was the thought that someone in the Commonwealth’s upper tiers knew who she was, and was looking for her, her ship, and those refugees.

  The door chime rang. Hopefully it was Divee; right now she needed a shield around her ship and those refugees. Crap, what if someone else knew who was in those generational ships?

  “Come in,” she yelled then waved at Divee to sit as she called Flarik.

  “Flarik, I need you to make sure no one on those ships contacted anyone, especially anyone in the Commonwealth. And you need to find out who they’ve been in contact with since they left Lantaria. And tell them no outgoing messages to anyone until I say otherwise.”

  The pause before she answered told Vas that Flarik really wanted to ask questions. However, the lawyer was too smart to do so on an open comm. “I will come find you when I get back on board.” The closest she would get to, “you’d better tell me what’s going on” that Vas had ever heard.

  “Thank you.” Vas said, then turned to the thin man waiting for her. “Divee, I need you to hide us from the Commonwealth.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Divee’s gray eyes grew large and his mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. A silent mind of its own. He finally broke free. “Might I ask why?”

  “No. You may not.” She softened her tone at the look on his face. “Not yet anyway. I just had a very odd conversation with a Commonwealth bureaucrat, and I think it’s best we lay low.”

  “Are we….” The look on his thin face was almost painful. He was loyal to the end to her and the company, but he was also possibly the most law-abiding citizen of the Commonwealth that Vas had ever met.

  “No, we are not going rogue.” She knew what he was afraid to ask. She shuddered. Rogue mercs had been becoming rarer over the last five years. Rumors were that the Commonwealth had been silently removing them, preferring to control all mercenary companies, however indirectly. However, no proof had ever been found.

  “We are simply avoiding them for now. I believe there may have been something compromised with the clerk I just spoke to,” she lied quickly. Looking at the thin lines of concern that marred his face, she came to a decision; Divee might need to be transferred back to Home for a while. She didn’t doubt his loyalty to her, but she couldn’t take a chance on his loyalty to the Commonwealth interfering.

  He looked like he decided it was best not to think about things too much. “I believe I can shield us. Do you want us off the grid completely?”

  The Expeliar had said he couldn’t find them on the grid, but that was because he still believed she and her crew were in the Victorious Dead. She contemplated just having Divee leave things as they were on the grid. She shook her head at that thought. It was the council of the Commonwealth she was dealing with, not some backwater rubes. It wouldn’t be difficult for that bureaucrat to find out where she was.

  “Yes. I know it’s dangerous, but we need to be off-grid completely at this point. We don’t know who was behind those gray ships at Lantaria, or who they were aiming for. We have to protect ourselves,” she paused, “and the poor people in those ships.”

  For a team of mercs, her crew was a huge bunch of softies. Divee’s face crumpled at the mention of the refugees. She might not have to bench him after all.

  “You’re right, Captain. If there is any question, we must protect those people.” He rose to his feet, every inch the former aristocrat he was rumored to be. “I will have all of us completely blocked immediately. No one shall be able to find us.”

  He quickly left to go about his business, leaving Vas to marvel about her choice in crew. Maybe it wasn’t them who were going soft, but her.

  They could start heading toward Home the instant Divee said they were blocked from the grid. Well, once they were blocked, and Flarik and Bathie gave a clean bill for those refugees, that was.

  She ate half of her pathetic sandwich in two bites, and then opened the comm.

  “Terel? How are they?” She’d asked Xsit to keep her updated but it had been her experience that her version of ready and her doctor’s version of ready were two different things.

  “Still not ready to return to duty, Captain.” If the tone of her voice hadn’t let Vas know Terel was annoyed, the use of her title would have. So be it.

  “That’s not what I asked. I need to talk to some of them.”

  Terel’s sigh was loud through the comm. “Which ones?”

  Vas grinned. “Depends. Who’s awake?”

  “Jakiin is probably in the best condition. In fact,” Terel paused as she muttered to someone in the med lab, “you could have him. He’s beginning to annoy me.” The last was said lower, but Vas was certain Jakiin heard it.

  “I was hoping for my second-in-command.”

  “He’s still out. Vas, there’s no way I’m letting him regain consciousness until I’m certain everything is out of his system. You’ll need to be without him for a little while yet.”

  Vas wolfed down the rest of her sandwich. “Send me Jakiin then. I have some things to ask him.” She almost signed off, and then flicked the comm open again. “How’s Mac?”

  “He’s almost ready, not completely conscious, but I can send him up in a few.” Terel signed out and Vas went to the deck. With nothing really going on she didn’t mind leaving Xsit in charge. Too long would be bad. Xithinals as a whole didn’t like being in charge of anything. They were flock creatures and vastly preferred that others lead the flock.

  Xsit had been slumping over her console, staring forlornly out at the stars when Vas came onto the deck. She perked up immediately.

  “Captain, good to see you. Nothing to report.”

  “Thank you. Has Flarik returned from those ships yet?”

  Xsit pulled up a small screen with the internal information. “Not yet. Bathie should be back up on deck soon though.”

  “Captain?” Divee’s voice cut in over the comm. “I believe it is done.” There was a hesitance in his voice that Vas didn’t like to hear. He was talented enough to be Gosta’s equal, but his constant self-doubt weakened him.

  “It either is or it isn’t, Divee,” she said. “Which is it?”

  The pause on the other end told her he was still far too unsure of himself. Finally he came back on with a cough. “It is. We, and the refugee ships, are blocked from the grid.”

  Vas settled into her command chair with a smile. “Thank you, Divee. You can return to cleaning out the smuggling space.”

  She turned at the sound of steps, expecting her missing pilot. There had been more than enough time for Jakiin to make his way up here. But it was only Bathie.

  “I checked and cross checked them all. The refugees are safe, and they’re what they say they are.” Bathie settled into Gosta’s chair with ease. One advantage of so many smart crewmembers is that they weren’t relegated to only one position.

  “Thank you. You didn’t happen to see Jakiin wandering the corridors, did you?”

  Bathie shook her head, blond hair staying in perfect place. “Nope. Ya want me to go get him?”

  “No.” Jakiin was probably hiding from her hoping something else would pop up to take her focus off him. The way things had been over the last two weeks she’d bet he wouldn’t have had to wait long. Vas sighed and opened a ship-wide comm.

  “Jakiin, get up to the command deck immediately.” She shut it without waiting for a response. Even though Flarik was working on their lineup of mysteries, she figured she could work on one end of them.

  Those damn crates.

  She had no way of knowing if the crates were a deliberate plant, meant to do something to her and her ship, or simply property of stupid drug runners. A month ago she would have chocked it up to stupid drug runners. Now, she couldn’t let anything go by without questioning it.

  Come to think of i
t, how did she know that things hadn’t been this messed up before and she didn’t see it? Maybe her missing time and the taking of the Victorious Dead hadn’t been the start of it, but a part of a longer pattern.

  “Oh, my head.” She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair. The backlash from the stims was fading, but the pounding in her head seemed to be getting worse.

  “Are you all right?” Bathshea asked as she ended yet another communication with the folks on Home. Grosslyn really wasn’t taking the addition of two hundred refugees well and continued to harangue Bathie.

  “No.” Vas waved off the engineer as she saw the look of concern. “Ah, there’s one of the problems now.”

  Jakiin came slowly down the corridor leading into the command deck. He looked like a man taking that long final trek to an airlock funeral.

  As well he should.

  “Come on, boy, I don’t have all day. I’m still recovering from that shipment of yours.”

  Jakiin winced, and the gills on the side of his neck, normally not visible, fluttered briefly. A sure sign he was seriously distressed.

  “Tell me how you and your partner found out about this shipment. Considering that you wouldn’t have known we were going back to the station so soon, I’m thinking it was a lucky thing you found something so quickly.”

  Jakiin slowed down to a stopping point just outside the reach of the command chair.

  As if that would protect him.

  “I could still shoot you from here, you know.” Vas folded her arms and glared at the unlucky pilot. Well, self-inflicted unlucky anyway.

  “What?” He jumped a foot back, the veins in his pale face standing out like green roads on a map.

  “I’m just saying that staying out of physical striking range of someone with a blaster at her side is fairly stupid.” She motioned for him to come closer. “And might piss off the person holding the blaster.”