Terel nodded, and Pela went to find contamination suits. Vas grabbed Terel before she followed. “There’s another body I need you to look at.”
Terel nodded. “The man who looks like you that’s in a pile near the brig doors? I already planned to unless you gave me express orders to leave him alone.” The look on her narrow face indicated that she dearly wanted to know who the body was.
“He’s a relative I didn’t know was alive. But I have a lot of questions about him.”
Terel nodded. “Understood. I’ll keep Gosta back with me to help with the poisoned bodies. Be careful up there, Vas. They aren’t playing a war you’re used to.”
Vas shook her head. “Tell me about it.”
After catching up to the rest of her people, she crouched next to Flarik. “Anyone between us and the bridge?”
“Nothing.” Flarik’s eyes narrowed. “This is most unusual, Captain. They must know we are out here by now.”
Vas peered down the empty corridors that led to the command deck. “Actually, they may not. Mac said Gosta destroyed the ship’s communication systems, all of them. When the main comms go down they cause havoc with personal comm systems as well. We can’t talk to our people, but they can’t talk to their people either.”
“That is probably true, although their tactics in such a case are inferior. We shall destroy them without complication.”
Vas hid her grin behind her hand. Flarik was so matter of fact. There was simply no way in her worldview that inferiors could get the best of her. Having seen enough lag-rats take down prey fifty times their size on her home world, Vas didn’t share the sentiment.
“Let’s just be prepared for the worst, shall we? We have no idea how close Bhotia is to a gate.”
Flarik nodded, then motioned that she would take half the fighters to the other side of the command deck.
Vas waited until she figured Flarik would be in place, and then stormed the deck. There was no way to sneak onto the command deck, and one glance at a nearby screen told her they were out of time. They were approaching a hypergate. The warnings flashing on the main screen told her the codes weren’t in yet, but Bhotia was minutes away from taking her ship and crew to hell.
Bhotia had taken over her command chair, but appeared calm as his people rushed forward to defend him. Gon was almost to the pirate nearest Bhotia. Vas wasn’t sure how the big man had outsprinted the rest of the crew, but he somehow had. Bhotia ignored his own man then tilted his head and gazed steadily at Gon.
“You cannot stop the march of our Gods.” Gon’s feet no longer moved and he crashed to the decking. His face contorted in pain as his body slowly froze from the feet up. His breathing became ragged and harsh.
Divee ran through the pirate he had engaged, and then rushed forward as well. Vas saw him look up at Bhotia only for a second, and then he too crashed to the ground.
Within moments six of her people lay on the decking, their lives slowly being taken from them as their systems shut down.
“What in the hell?” Vas tried calling her people back. “Don’t look in his eyes. Don’t even look at him. Back off, all of you!” Obviously whatever special talent Bhotia had, his flunkies didn’t. Vas ran her sword through another fighter and leapt forward to reach Bhotia. She made it but stumbled and landed on the ground. Her eyes met his accidentally as she scrambled to her feet.
His eyes were a flat gray-green, not at all like the ice blue ones found in the average Graylian. An instant later all thoughts of any color fled Vas’s mind as the whirlwind of her nightmares slammed into her head. The sandstorm in her mind came from Bhotia, but whether he was the source or just the carrier she wasn’t sure. The force of the wind and sand dropped her to her knees, and she fought to stay conscious.
“My masters and I do thank you.” As Bhotia spoke, a roaring filled the command deck and everyone but Vas was dropped to the ground. “I had been cautious before. We were not sure of the force they were seeking, but you have presented yourself to me. I see you are the one they wanted. I no longer need to be careful with the others.”
Vas fought to look to the sides to see if anyone was alive, but no one, not even the remaining pirates, moved. Klaxons echoed throughout the ship as life support crashed everywhere but the command deck.
“Yes, I’m afraid the others are dead. My masters wanted them sacrificed and I have done so. I will absorb their energy to give to the ones who rule all.” His eyes had become red and no longer even the least bit Graylian. He was somehow channeling his Asarlaí masters and they were drawing out the life force of her crew through him.
Vas fought to move, but the sandstorm in her head locked her into place. If she could just get to her secret control button, the one that would set off a chain explosion in the landing bay…
“Dear, dear.” Bhotia spoke as his mind smacked her to the ground. “That won’t do. You can’t blow up my pretty ship. And I need time to drain the sacrifices properly.” He reached under the arm of the command chair and pressed her secret code for destroying the fighters. Vas almost collapsed when nothing happened.
“If it’s in your mind, I will take it. You can’t hide anything from me. I control you. In fact,” he smiled and motioned her to the navigator’s chair, “you will be the one who enters the code for the hypergate.”
Vas fought, willing her broken body to just die before it completed its task. But as if it was someone else, she watched as her hands entered the gate code and the hypergate to hell opened before her.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Vas couldn’t even cry as she heard the horrific gasps as her crew’s lives were pulled from their bodies. Entry into the hypergate hadn’t affected Bhotia’s slow destruction of the people left on the ship, but it had freed part of her mind. He must not have enough power to maintain his killing of the crew, controlling the hypergate through her, and keeping control of her mind.
A small corner of the storm inside her skull cleared and Vas pushed at it. There was one person who could have stood up to Bhotia’s mind attacks. Her mind grabbed hold of the memory of Deven and held on tight.
Slowly, the sandstorm in her mind died. She cancelled the hypergate command codes, not caring that to do so mid-entry could rip the ship apart.
Somehow Deven’s strength was in her memories of him, like a voice in the back of her mind guiding her. It allowed her to push Bhotia back. Well, Deven and something else. A power flowed through her like a windstorm from her home world, filling the spaces the sandstorm had scoured. With a focused thought, she regained control of life support and the klaxons silenced. Terror threatened to engulf her anew at what she was doing. How she was doing it was something she’d deal with later…much later. Never, if she had her way.
Bhotia realized he’d lost control of her and the ship and ran forward to physically stop her, but he froze when he got a good look at her face.
His mouth twisted in a silent scream, and the red coloring drained from his eyes.
“What are you doing? You can’t exist!”
His words made no sense to her, but his terror emboldened her and chased away some of her own fear at the power flowing through her. There was still some sort of telepathic link between the two of them, so she grabbed the connection and forced her way into his head. All those years around Deven had taught her more than she knew. Her power wasn’t coming from Deven, but how to use it was.
However, where Deven had been a calm green sea, Bhotia was a storm-wrecked swamp. It took a few seconds to get past the crazed ramblings of an insane mind, but she finally started picking out a few coherent bits.
Long streams of Commonwealth ident and shipping codes, and worse, ways to break them, fled past her mind’s eye before she could take hold of them. However, there was no mistaking what they were. And where they came from—the inner circle of the Commonwealth itself.
From another mental stream, the orders to take the Victorious Dead came through. It was granted to the monks as the spoils of a war to c
ome. A brief image of Skrankle, drooling as he signed the contract to disassemble her beloved ship, flitted through her mind. These images were lightning clear, focused by Bhotia’s complete terror at her being in his mind.
There was something else, something bigger. While he hadn’t kidnapped her, he had been directly responsible for poisoning her with the drell. The self-proclaimed God of Biscuits, Jeof’s clearvac-ravaged face appeared as Vas saw him through Bhotia’s eyes as he telepathically planted the seeds of her destruction, and gave Jeof a small hypospray. Throughout all of the images stood the being they’d seen in the holosuite, the Asarlaí, and behind him an armada of gray ships.
She tried to push deeper, but he was slipping away. Suddenly, the image of the sandstorm reappeared and not from Bhotia’s mind.
He was trying to overwhelm her consciousness and fight back, but the sandstorm was coming from her own mind in retaliation. That was the final snap of any sanity the man had left.
The sandstorm was somehow connected to her childhood. Whatever it was, it literally scared the wits out of him. Even the thought of his master’s wrath wasn’t strong enough to hold up against this.
Babbling incoherently, Bhotia shoved himself away from her, finally breaking the connection with Vas and pushing her to the floor. He was across the command deck in an instant.
Vas knew she had no chance to get him. She had nothing left; just breathing right now took all of her will. And none of her people had moved yet. She had no idea if they were alive or dead.
With an unintelligible scream, Bhotia dove for the emergency hatch. Normally there would be an escape pod there, but it had been destroyed in the battle at the supergate and Vas hadn’t had it fixed yet.
Out of the corner of her eye Vas saw Gosta in a contamination suit run onto the deck and make a frantic leap, not to the hatch, but to his console.
The world slowed as Bhotia forced open the emergency hatch. Vacuum sucked him out along with the air in the command deck. Only for an eighth of a second. Too short to count. One instant Vas felt the air slam out of her lungs, the next it was back and a clear shield held the darkness of space at bay.
Gosta folded over his console, shaking so badly that Vas was afraid he’d been hurt. He’d managed to get the shield up in time.
“Vas?” Terel and Pela came on deck slowly, both also had suits on, but they’d already released their helmets. “Can you move?”
“You’re alive.” Vas felt a tear come from her eye, then another.
“And doing better than you, I’d say.” Pela had gone to Gon and was helping him sit up. The crew was alive.
“Um, I don’t want to ruin things, the captain crying, people being alive and everything, but we’re currently drifting out of control in a hyper stream?” By the sound of his voice, Gosta had recovered from his race to the command deck.
Vas tried to turn, but the power she’d had before vanished.
“Damn it, I cancelled the code mid-stream. Where’s Mac?”
“Dead.”
Vas would have been more concerned if it hadn’t been Mac’s voice she heard. Moments later, Terel and Gosta lifted the pilot up.
“Can you move at all?”
Mac winced as he tried to shake his head. “That would be no.”
“Okay, Gosta, take the pilot seat, Mac, talk him through this. I don’t care where we come out, as long as it’s not what was originally coded in.” Everything they’d just been through would be for nothing if they still ended up in the hands of the Asarlaí. Bhotia wasn’t the danger, his masters were.
It took a few tense moments of swearing on both sides, but eventually Gosta stabilized the ship and the welcoming sight of a small hypergate appeared. Vas recognized the system it fed into. A nicely populated star system, marginally part of the Commonwealth. Big enough that there hopefully weren’t any gray ships there. More importantly, it was not the gate Bhotia had made her enter the command for.
“What do we do now, Captain?”
Vas studied the mess and her recovering crew. The Warrior Wench was seriously damaged, her crew looked like they all needed about a month in a recovery lab, and her brains felt as if someone had flung them around the galaxy in a soup strainer. Nevertheless, they survived.
She nodded to where Gon had already begun stacking the dead pirates in a corner. “We fix this ship, we heal, then we get my second-in-command back, we get my real ship back, and then we go after the bastards who started all of this. Oh, and we may have to destroy the Commonwealth to do it.”
The End
Dear Reader,
Thank you for joining Vaslisha and her crew on their maiden voyage.
I really appreciate each and every one of you so please keep in touch. You can find me at www.marieandreas.com.
And please feel free to email me directly at [email protected] as well, I love to hear from readers!
If you enjoyed this book (or any book for that matter ;)) please spread the word! Positive reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and blogs are like emotional gold to any writer and mean more than you know.
Thank you again, and we all hope to see you back here for the VICTORIOUS DEAD! Vas will be back, and she wants her ship and her second-in-command.
Marie
Acknowledgements
Writing is a solitary process, but it can’t be done alone. I couldn’t have gotten this far without the love and support of all of my family and friends.
I’d like to thank Jessa Slade for editing magic—she continues to keep me from falling into plot holes. For my most awesome team of beta readers who plowed through the entire book and helped tighten it up: Lisa Andreas, Patti Huber, Lynne Mayfield, Sharon Rivest, Ilana Schoonover, and Tami Vahalik. Any remaining errors are mine alone.
My cover artist, Aleta Rafton, creating yet another awesome work of art. And to The Killion Group for formatting of the entire book and print cover.
Books by Marie Andreas
The Lost Ancients
Book One: The Glass Gargoyle
Book Two: The Obsidian Chimera
Book Three: The Emerald Dragon
Book Four: The Sapphire Manticore
The Asarlaí Wars
Book One: Warrior Wench
About The Author
Marie is a fantasy and science fiction reader with a serious writing addiction. If she wasn’t writing about all of the people in her head, she’d be lurking about coffee shops annoying innocent passer-by with her stories. So really, writing is a way of saving the masses. She lives in Southern California and is currently owned by two very faery-minded cats. And yes, sometimes they race.
When not saving the general populace from coffee shop shenanigans, Marie likes to visit the UK and keeps hoping someone will give her a nice summer home in the Forest of Dean.
Copyright © 2016 Marie Andreas
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
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Asarlai Wars 1: Warrior Wench Page 33
