by Calinda B
“You recruited me for a reason,” she said. “I assume you wanted an ally.”
She didn’t need implants to catch his hesitation this time. She’d startled him.
He matched her relaxed pose in his chair, both of them lying. “You have more of your brain left than I’d’ve guessed Hermitaj would keep intact.”
“Oh, I’m broken,” she assured him. “Maybe you’re just not as clever as you think.”
For the first time she saw actual humor in his smile. “Now I am wounded.”
She took another handful of berries, deliberately digging her fingers into the bowl. “Since I lost Hermitaj…” She contemplated for a moment and then revised. “When I was taken into Hermitaj, I realized everyone is broken, somehow.” She flicked a berry into the air with one hand and plucked it delicately out of the air with her cyber-enhanced reflexes without crushing the delicate fruit. “We can pretend, but we are only disguising the cracks, not fixing them.”
He grunted. “Were you always a philosopher, or was that encoded?”
“I’ll never know.” She glanced past him to the twins who were crowding through the doorway. “Feed them something light, then send them down to the club room. Tell them it’s a surprise.”
“You are full of surprises,” he murmured.
She didn’t answer, only rose to greet the girls and told them to come find her after they ate.
She didn’t have long to catalog the equipment provided in the club room, but it was all quality gear. As she’d expected after noting the physiques of the captain and Jorr and especially Eril, who, for a supply clerk, was unusually well kept. When the girls arrived with Eril in tow, Shaxi had already lined up the equipment she wanted.
She glanced over at Eril. He really was well kept. For as tall and strong as he was, he moved with grace, letting the girls drift ahead of him as he lounged in the doorway, the missing parts of his tattoo hidden where his shoulder pressed into the bulkhead.
“You said it was a surprise,” he said to her. “I got curious.”
Alolis eyed the punch pads and body armor. “Am I going to become a mercenary too?”
“That’s to protect me,” Shaxi said, “while you try to defend yourselves.”
Torash sneered. “We have our own ways of ending an attack.” She angled away from her sister when Alolis touched her elbow to silence her.
Shaxi squelched her own curiosity. “Don’t tell me what you think you can do, let me see it in action. Because I don’t believe you could have stopped those men yesterday from taking you.”
Torash looked aside, her features twisted with dismay, while Alolis’s face paled.
Eril raised his hand, one long finger extended. “While I’m sure this would be interesting to watch, Benedetta might not approve of you attacking her sisters.”
Shaxi cut him off with a direct stare. “She hired me to keep her sisters safe, so I’ll do what I have to.”
Alolis let out a soft, whistling breath, almost a whine. “I just got up. I don’t want—”
Shaxi refocused her stare from Eril to the girl. “You think I wanted to be taken from my home when I was only a third your age? You have a chance here, and a choice. Or do you want to leave that in someone else’s hands? Mine? Your sister’s? Those men who wanted you so badly they shot at the fellows they’d been drinking with not a second before? You think they will give you a chance or a choice?”
Her own vehemence shocked her. Maybe it was just the memory of how vulnerable they’d been, their pretty pink robes flipped to gray as they’d been forced to flee, which was still better than the scarlet and char of a hazer burn. Or a brutal rape.
In the simmering silence, Eril stepped forward. “Shaxi, it’s not your place to frighten them.”
She faced him, her pulse rate ticking up at the confrontation. “I just made it mine.” Why would he argue? He had the body and moves of a fighter, even though he pretended to be something simpler. She lifted her chin. “Take your dissent to the captain.”
“No, don’t,” Torash said. “Corso has told us before that the Asphodel’s freedom comes at a price. I’d like to know the value of this coin. Let us change into proper clothes, and at least braid our hair.”
But Shaxi shook her head. “The attack, when it comes, won’t be fair. Maybe you’ll be in your night robes, or with a full belly, or already hurt.” She glanced at Alolis. “Or sleepy. You need to be ready, whatever happens.”
Though she kept her attention on the girls while she donned the safety gear and explained how they should come at her vulnerable points, she was perfectly aware of the hard set of Eril’s jaw. She hadn’t anticipated the depth of his displeasure. He’d seemed at ease with endorsing her to Benedetta after seeing her fight. Or did he think pretty, young girls shouldn’t sully themselves with violence?
As if the universe would give them a pass.
She went through one round with the surprisingly fierce Torash, who attacked with knees and hand chops and piercing screams. When she looked up again while Alolis stepped in front of her, Eril was gone.
Off to tattle to the captain? Fine, she’d set him straight too. And Benedetta as well, if the older sister complained. Who walked around a sheership barefoot anyway?
She lunged at Alolis with her hands in threatening claws. The girl shrieked, much less convincingly than her sister, and batted at Shaxi half-heartedly. Shaxi gritted her teeth in a cruel grin she knew the girl could see through the the thin, transparent molding of her protective faceplate and clamped her hands around the girl’s neck.
Alolis’s eyes widened and then slitted as she brought her fists up inside the circle of Shaxi’s arms, ready to break her hold.
Then the screen on the club room wall lit up in a white flare and the Asphodel rocked at the fiery blast.
Chapter 6
Eril abandoned his battle station without a second thought and raced for the club room. He was almost bowled off his feet by Shaxi, the girls in tow behind her.
She spared him a quick glance. “Get to your post!”
Of course she had everyone’s duties memorized already. He ignored her and followed them to the twins’ suite which was their assigned location when the ship was under threat of any sort.
Alolis stared around wildly. “What’s happening?”
Shaxi never slowed but she raised her voice over the squall of the ship’s alarm. “Plasma charge. Not of significant force to pierce the hull.”
No, it wouldn’t be, Eril thought grimly. Not when they’d want the twins alive.
“It felt significant,” Torash said. She slapped her hand over the lock plate on the suite, and the door slid open. Her sister slipped through before the door was fully open, but Torash lingered a moment.
Her gaze jumped between him and Shaxi, pupils blown wide in fear or excitement or both. “What can I do to help?”
He should break her neck now and then Alolis’s, quick and painless. Which was kinder than what their attackers would have in mind. According to the underwriters, reverse engineering the powers of the qva’avaq would demand brutally invasive testing, probably for years, before the remaining crystal was extracted from their bodies, with fatal results.
Chance or choice, Shaxi had said.
The poor girls had never had either. He flexed his hands, which felt strangely stiff.
“Stay out of the way,” Shaxi said.
For a second, he thought she was talking to him, and his heartbeat raced. How had she—?
But she was looking at Torash. “One bout doesn’t make you a fighter. Maybe next time. If you keep practicing.”
To his shock, she smiled. He doubted Hermitaj had ever given its conscripts reason to smile, but she did it as brightly as the double suns above Khamaseen’s endless dust. As if the light had been there the whole time, waiting to shine. It transformed the harsh angles of her face. Not pretty, by no stretch of the most imaginative simulation. But strangely captivating, nonetheless, and something in him yearned
to creep out of the shadows and bask in the reflected glow.
Torash smiled back and slipped into the suite without further argument. Another shock. The door hissed closed and snicked as the red lock engaged. It wouldn’t be opening again without an override from the captain or Benedetta.
He let out a harsh breath at the squandered opportunity. If the attackers took the ship…
“They won’t if you’d get to your thrice-tangled post,” Shaxi said.
He’d barely muttered the last words aloud, but of course her enhanced hearing had captured the comment. “The captain would want the girls to be safe.”
“They are, for the moment.”
So they were, damn it. “What next?”
She glared at him as if he should know. “My task is to secure the girls—which is done—and then neutralize the threat.”
He gestured. “After you.”
With a shake of her head, she reversed course, out of steerage and back toward the heart of the ship. The heart of the fight.
Though the situation was urgent and grim—and he could very well find himself removed from his covert mission if the underwriters deemed him incompetent or compromised—his gaze wandered down the sleek, powerful form ahead of him.
He’d done well choosing the uniform from ship’s stores. The smart fabric fit her like a second skin, supporting and yielding in all the right places. And the way it cupped her ass—
She spun, hazer at the ready, and he snapped his gaze up with guilty quickness.
She frowned at him, her eyes bright gold with her cyber-embeds at full alert as she scanned his body, lingering at his hip. “You aren’t armed?”
She must have seen his hazer during the scuffle at the cantina. It wasn’t a weapon he showed off. He’d have to be more careful around her. “When the charge hit, I ran to find you three.”
She let out a hissing breath. “I should have left you with the girls.”
He should have stayed there. Then this would all be so very unnecessary. But for the first time in years, his pulse sped of its own accord, the hot flow whispering swiftly through his veins and honing all his senses.
She touched her comm, her eyes unfocused as she listened. “Yes, Captain. They are locked in. On my way.” Without another glance at him, she raced on.
And without another glance at the locked door where his assigned targets lurked, he followed her.
The ship rocked again, the bulkhead groaning. It was more a sound of annoyance than real strain. The attackers had not engaged with a stronger second detonation.
“That charge was too weak to effectively breach the cargo bay hatch,” Shaxi said into her comm. “It’s a distraction.”
“They’ll try to disable the thrusters,” Eril warned. “They want to keep us here so they can crack us like a malac shell at their leisure.”
Her lips curled, not the same smile she’d given Torash, but the fierce delight of a warrior facing battle. “One easy way to take care of that.”
Even as she spoke, the thrusters fired. If anyone had been nearby, they’d gotten a sunburn worse than Khamaseen’s double stars.
But instead of the Asphodel’s usual effortless ascension, the ship lurched. Eril cursed and braced himself against the bulkhead. Shaxi swayed with the motion.
He swore again. “The crosswinds have gotten stronger. We won’t be able to rise through them.”
“Seems the captain believes otherwise.”
“There’s no way—”
A roar, louder than either explosion, ripped through the ship. Shaxi’s eyes widened as she was tossed into him. They both clutched for the exposed wall struts, steadying themselves and each other as the ship canted hard to one side.
“They got at least one thruster,” Eril said. He tightened his grip on her upper arm where the smooth curve of muscle met the bone of her shoulder as the ship pitched the other direction.
Shaxi shifted her jaw. “I’m not sure a light cruiser like this can maneuver with a thruster down.”
“Seems the captain believes otherwise,” he said back to her.
She slipped free of his grasp—his fingers clenched on the lingering heat of her body—and staggered down the tilting corridor, slamming into first one wall then the other as the Asphodel careened, seemingly on the verge of going down.
He followed her—again with the following; he needed to stop doing that—and they made their way to the corridor outside the bridge.
Jorr was there already along with Patter, another crew member. Both were armed to the teeth. Literally in Jorr’s case since he held an unsheathed nano knife in his mouth. A nano knife’s rudimentary AI interface made it a flashy but unpredictable weapon, most often used in scripted action vids where the blood was no more real than the heroes.
“We won’t be able to break atmo with a thruster down,” Patter said.
“Put us down and we’ll break something else,” Jorr growled around the knife blade. It growled back softly in response. He glanced at Shaxi. “You with me, robot girl?”
“Right ahead of you,” she said.
Eril stiffened against an unfamiliar twist of possessiveness. If anyone was going to be following her, it was him. “Can I borrow someone’s gun?”
They all looked at him, eyebrows raised in six identical disbelieving arcs.
He spread his hands. “If we’re going to charge out there, guns blazing, it’d be nice to have one.”
Jorr spit out the knife and tossed it to him, underhanded. “Maybe save the blazing for your kitchen pans, auxo, and leave the fighting to us.”
Eril caught the tossed knife competently enough, though not so competently that anyone might think it odd for an auxo, but Patter smirked. Shaxi just watched him, brows furrowed again, the gold rings around her pupils expanding and constricting. The Asphodel’s crew thought of him as nothing more than a simple supply clerk. But she’d doubted him from the moment she saw him.
Maybe it took one merciless killer to truly see another.
The haft of the knife quivered under his fingers as its component particles tasted his sweat. Some nano blades, usually the larger ceremonial sizes with more extensive colonies of nanotech, allegedly came to possess a primitive sentience. Most civilized societies along the sheerways objected to the blades because for all their cutting-edge science, the resultant AIs—created and nurtured in conflict and fed on their holders’ violence—tended toward instability. Those who carried them were even worse. No one trusted such an unnatural melding of man and machine.
He averted his gaze from Shaxi when she slapped her palm over the comm screen on the wall. She used her cyber-embeds to override the blinking alarm signal and patched through to the Asphodel’s forward cam. They had a glimpse of a dozen figures swarming into the otherwise empty hangar.
“That doesn’t look so good,” Patter muttered.
The ship abruptly tilted upward, showing them only the pitted gray surface of the hangar ceiling.
“That looks worse,” Jorr said.
The bridge door slid open, and the captain gripped the doorway when the ship tilted again. “Party out here and I wasn’t invited?”
Patter crossed the plasma cannon over his chest. The giant gun could blow a small sheership out of the sky and seriously destabilize even a larger ship. “We were just getting ready to hang the ‘surprise’ banner.”
“Save it for now. We’re only dealing with a ground incursion.”
Eril steadied himself against the wall. “Yet they seem to have gotten the drop on us.” He wondered why the underwriters hadn’t found a way to alert him their enemies were so close.
Or was this the work of a secondary team? Had the underwriters gotten impatient?
As if she didn’t notice Deynah’s imposing scowl wasn’t an invitation to opine, Shaxi said, “The fact they got so close and there’s been no response from port security means someone was paid off. We’re on our own.”
The captain nodded. “Figured that already.”
A low whine, more felt than heard, ripped through the bulkheads around them, as the Asphodel’s plasma canons fired. On the screen, the roof of the hangar above them disappeared in a shower of plyscrete rubble. If the thuds against the Asphodel’s hull bothered the captain, there was no sign of it in his eyes, cold and dark as the sheerways themselves.
Slewing once more as they cut through the crosswinds above the hangar, the Asphodel soared up into the cloud-choked sky.
“Now,” the captain said, “we need a place to lie low and patch up.”
“There’s only one port on this moon,” Jorr pointed out. “And we just put a hole in it.”
Shaxi cleared her throat. “Only one official port.”
Deynah turned his deepset eyes on her. “I take it you have an alternative.”
Eril trailed behind the captain and the commando—how fortunate he’d chosen a tight fit for her since he was seeing so much of her ass—to the navigation chamber. Sheership pilots needed complete sensory isolation while needling through the sheerways, so sightlines were diminished, sound dampened, even the sensation of air felt muted in the chamber. But at the moment, the viewport screens were activated, showing the murky sky of Khamaseen ahead of them.
Evessa, the pilot, already had a sim of the moon summoned up on the dais in the middle of the room. She’d clearly been listening to the captain. “Where is it?”
Shaxi pointed a finger and the ghostly orb of the moon spun in response to her implants’ orders. She zoomed into a mountainous region. “Rampakh. The city was going to be the center for mining in the area. Local outfits are extracting some ores, though at much lower rates than the original terraforming corporation intended. The secondary port serves their needs until they can get to Levare for off-world transport.”
“Isolated, hard to get to,” the captain murmured. “But it’ll be obvious where we’re headed.”
“With the storms right behind us, they won’t be able to follow,” Shaxi said.
