The Bounty Hunter's Honour (Renegades Book 5)

by L P Peace

  The Bounty Hunter’s Honour

  Renegades: Book Five

  L. P. Peace

  © 2021 L.P. Peace

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  lucyppeace@gmail.com

  www.lucypeace.com

  Cover by Sam Muraski

  Editing by Ly Publishing

  Contents

  Blurb

  Glossary of terms

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Universal Menagerie

  Author Note

  Also by L. P. Peace

  Reading Order

  About the Author

  A criminal looking for a quick payday. An officer trying to survive her cruel master. They must work together to change their fates.

  When Tara is sent to the prison moon of Vadan and abandoned on the surface with no supplies and no plan, all she can think about is putting distance between her and the moons criminal inhabitants. When she stumbles into the irrepressibly flirtatious Danithor, he promises her a way off the planet; all she has to do is trust an alien, one she can see is keeping things from her.

  When Danithor finds an attractive human female days before he's rescued from Vadan, he sees an opportunity for a payday that could make up for terrible wrongs he committed against his family six solars ago. But Tara evokes things in him he's never felt, and awakened ancient instincts he didn't know existed.

  Can Danithor admit the truth before he makes a terrible mistake?

  And can he save Tara from the cruel Hinari tracking her every step?

  Glossary of terms

  Standard IGC measurements

  Hacri - Hour

  Metri - Minutes

  Scira - Seconds

  Madith - Miles

  Fenth - Foot/feet

  Inith/iniths - Inch/inches

  Rote - Day

  Cycle – month

  Solar - Year

  Common Amaran insults

  Vrok - Fuck

  Vrokking - Fucking

  Durv - Shit

  Durev - Shithead

  Vashni - Idiot

  Keth - Scum

  Temerin Insults

  White Cock – Ignorant of sex

  Uncut – Never had sex

  Korosh – inexperienced boy

  Vojan - Fucker

  To Kitty, Ann, Julia, Rhonda, Raquel, Karyn and Jennifer for Beta reading this book for me.

  To Whitney, Janet, Marianne and Jasmine for being amazing ARC’s.

  To those among you who have been here since the very beginning of this series or joined me for the journey, your words of support mean the world to me.

  Thank you. Xxx

  The ground shook. Sophia sat up in her seat and stared out of her fighter’s canopy to the desolate world beyond. She watched the terrain outside crack and shake. Lava bubbled up from the ground and swamped a patch of land several hundred feet away. The crack grew longer and headed in her direction.

  Sophia held her breath and watched. Was this it? Was this the earthquake that would force her to leave? Force her to find a new spot with an engine that wouldn't work and only backup power? She watched as it spread, one hundred feet, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and forty. Smaller fractures broke away, filling with the same lava. She backed away inside the shuttle as though that action would save her if the crack managed to reach her.

  Two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty, two hundred and eighty.

  'Fuck! Fuck! Stop! Please stop!'

  At three hundred and seventy feet and change, the crack drew to a halt.

  Mustafar was barely habitable and covered in lava. But unlike the lair world of the dark Sith lord, there were zero cool structures. Nor were Jedi Knights having epic battles down the many rivers of lava covering the planet.

  It rained, and there was air, but there were also places where the mantle was so thin even the slightest tectonic activity broke it apart. Sophia had the misfortune of landing on the edge of one such area.

  She waited for a few minutes more, her breath shallow, sweat running down her back despite the conditioned air within her Raptor. The shaking didn't restart; the ground beyond the immense plateau she'd landed on didn't give way to the bubbling lava sea beneath.

  'Well, good morning to you too,' Sophia said to the patch of ground. She dumped the thermal blanket to the floor at her side. She'd been on Mustafar for around two weeks, though if she went with the fast spin of this moon, it was more like three months.

  Mustafar was cool in its own way. Not temperature-wise. Being outside of the temperature-controlled fighter was the worst. She felt like she was slowly melting into the planet one drip of sweat at a time. Sophia was an aficionado of the Jedi and Sith. She loved pop culture from the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, so there was a novelty to being on a planet like this.

  That novelty always wore off about two minutes after she unhooked the canopy and stepped out onto the planet.

  Taking in a deep breath, Sophia released it in a silent bid for a good day. It wasn't really morning. Well, for the planet it was, but for her, she'd already been up for hours. This was her third sunrise in the roughly fifteen hours since her day began. Mustafar was on a fast spin as it orbited a larger and even less habitable planet. It had been her only choice after her raptor was hit in battle and her engines failed to work correctly. It was a miracle she'd been able to jump out at all, let alone get as far as she did.

  Accessing one of the fighter's hidden panels, Sophia pulled out another ration bar and unwrapped it. She looked at it squarely in, what she'd decided was, its eye.

  'This is not a ration bar. This is Mamma's breakfast casserole with eggs and bacon!' With that, she bit into the bar. 'Thank you, Mamma!' she said, her eyes squeezed shut as she chewed.

  It wasn't that the ration bar was flavourless. There were whole kitchen techs who worked tirelessly to make this stuff taste good. It's just that the flavour combinations were limited and she'd been living on them for almost two weeks.

  Popping the last of the bar into her mouth, Sophia growled. No matter how much she tried to kid herself, the damn bar still tasted the same. 'As soon as I get home, I'm going to get Mamma to cook her breakfast casserole!' she grumbled.

  Her words were followed by a wave of nostalgia. Sophia sat around the breakfast table with her parents, her four brothers, her two sisters.

  Sitting u
p, she looked at the growing light. It was bright enough to begin, and she would only have this light for three hours before the setting sun dimmed it too much to see by. Worse, tonight the planetary conjunction would begin, and she'd be forced to sit inside her fighter for over twenty-seven hours until the sun rose on a shortened day of a little over an hour. If she didn’t find the problem this time, it would be over thirty hours before she'd be able to get back to work.

  Zipping her flight suit up, Sophia placed the filter over her nose and mouth and hit the canopy release. As it opened, she reached under the floor and opened another of the hidden compartments, pulling out several tools. Moving about the fighter's interior, she pulled out equipment that was still utterly alien on Earth. Equipment and tools that had been provided by the Tessans and which she'd been trained to use by Kenian during the six months she spent on Makios Desares's ship.

  She pulled off three of the panels and twisted the metal around the way it had been designed to move. A few moments later, it was a toolbox. She filled it with the tools and equipment and stood. Placing the toolbox on the wing, she stepped out and moved over to the broader wing at the back of the fuselage. She used the wing to slide to the ground then took a few steps back and surveyed her ship.

  She inspected the double prongs at the front of the fighter. She'd taken apart almost every inch of the Raptor so far, several times, and put it back together each time. Because of the short days on Mustafar and the tectonic activity, she couldn't afford to leave stuff lying about the fighter during the nights. She might have to go at a moment's notice. There was enough hazard without the added and unnecessary danger of a partially disassembled ship.

  Her eyes moved over the fuselage and on to the tail assembly. She'd worked on the engine several times, stripping, examining, testing, and reassembling before daylight fell to dusk. Each time, she got a little further into it. Today, she was examining the casing surrounding the Dynexium core. If she couldn't find anything there, she'd have to wait the full thirty hours to go back and remove the vacuum casing to get to the core beneath.

  Grabbing the toolbox, Sophia marched to the back of the ship. She set to work immediately, removing the panels to get into the engine itself. The engine was large enough, and she was small enough to get further inside than any of her comrades could. It was this, her intelligence, her ability to adapt and, more importantly, endure that had seen her recruited for this position long before she left the academy. Even when Tara took her first position on Dauntless and Zoe was brought aboard Endeavour, Sophia's training never stopped; it just changed location. She'd been working towards this for the last four and a half years, ever since they got the comm call telling them Rosie was in the second lot of returnees.

  Humans had been kidnapped from Earth and Mars orbit for three hundred years. But now aliens were helping some of them return home. Among them, Makios Desares, a Kathen, and his human mate Rhona.

  Immediately, the family left for Mars. Rosie was in a Persephone city facility where she'd spent two years not believing she was home. That her Essen master was playing a new, cruel game with her. Mental torture turned him on.

  Sophia gritted her teeth against her rising anger. She had three worst moments in her life. When she was ten years old and her adored older sister was taken in a slaving raid while visiting Mars with friends, the day they were told Rosie would never recover, and now, the day Endurance was attacked.

  Sophia placed the tool she was using to disassemble a power exchange and wiped at her face angrily. When she retrieved the tool, the tears were still there, blurring her vision. Worse, the screws holding the exchange in place wouldn't budge. Pushing aside all thought of the ship and her crewmates, Sophia growled as she pushed the screwdriver, twisting it with both hands and all her strength. When it finally gave, her hands slipped. The back of Sophia's right hand slapped against the sharp edge of the power exchange. She felt tender skin give against hard metal.

  'GODDAMMIT!'

  Blood splattered over her face and neck and into her hairline. 'Son of a fucking bitch!'

  Sophia crawled out of the engine and back onto the rock of Mustafar. In the orangey-red light, she turned her hand over to look at it.

  'Fuck! Bollocks!' The cut was deep, and the pain radiated out through her fingers and down her wrist into her arm.

  'GOD FUCKING SHIT!' She stared down at her hand, focused on the anger. Anger was good. Better than grief. The grief was beginning to cripple her. Anger would drive her.

  Teeth gritted, she walked over to the cockpit and grabbed the med kit just inside. She quickly bandaged up her hand, focusing on the roiling, seething mass of anger inside her.

  'God, I'm sorry. It was in the heat of the moment.' She looked up at the orangey-brown sky and the dim yellow sun beyond. 'As soon as I can get to the priest back on Endurance, I'll go to confession. I promise.'

  Sophia took in several heated breaths through her filter. She had a ritual back on Earth, on the rare occasions that her anger got the better of her. Taking in a breath, imagining that it was blue and the rage inside her was red. On the long exhales, she would imagine the blue was now purple as it slowly bled her anger away. It was a little harder to do in the excessive heat of the lava planet. Still, when she finally stopped, the heat of her anger was gone, leaving the drive and determination behind.

  Turning back to the engine and aware she'd lost time, Sophia worked to disassemble as little of the engine as she needed to access the core casing. She turned the headlamp towards the shell and inspected it with her eyes.

  'Fuck!' Nothing. There was nothing there. If there was nothing there, Sophia would have to reassemble the engine and wait out the twenty-seven hours, hoping the tectonic activity would remain stable enough…

  Something silver glinted off the lamplight, surrounded by the black of the amot casing.

  It was small, barely there, hidden around one edge. Sophia reached up and felt energy prickle her fingers before she came close to it. Something powerful had latched onto the amot casing surrounding the Dynexium.

  But how?

  Feeling out from the engine, she groped around the casing until she felt the beginning of the funnel for the thruster exhaust.

  Somehow, this alien do-hickey had been shot through the exhaust funnel without leaving a single mark. Sophia shook her head in disbelief. What were the chances?

  But this was much better news. While the engine was difficult to disassemble and reassemble, the exhaust was a piece of piss.

  Sophia shimmied out of the engine and walked over to the exhaust funnel. In a few minutes, she had the funnel off and was hanging awkwardly from the rear assembly, in the engine space, with an alien tablet device in her hands.

  The alien device was small and silver, and it had several nasty sharp prongs coming from the surface, one of which had managed to barely pierce the casing. The energy readings coming from it had destabilised her engine when she jumped out of battle. It caused her to go off course and land on this godforsaken and utterly cool planet.

  The vacuum chamber was also compromised. That accounted for the engine failure on entry to the planet. It was only the emergency backup power source and her skill as a pilot that had seen her land.

  Sophia used the tablet to access the controls of the device. According to the specs that flowed across the screen a moment later, its job was to disrupt the power exchanger. Sophia looked down at the slot where the power exchange plugged into the amot casing and the radiant beyond. Four inches to the left and she wouldn't have been able to jump from the battle at all.

  'Well, you're just a little son of a bitch, aren't you?' she said in a cheery voice. 'Let's turn you off.'

  She felt the energy dissipate as soon as the device powered down. She removed it, digging it out of the casing, and used a spool of pure amot and one of the tools she'd been provided to patch up the small hole.

  The sun was nearing the planet's horizon as she shimmied back into the engine and reassembled it. By the t
ime she was done, the sun kissed the lava flows and added a yellow shimmer to the planet’s red and orange molten landscape.

  Running to the cockpit, she jumped inside and set the casing to expel the air, restoring the core vacuum before—fingers crossed and a prayer on her lips—she turned the engine on.

  It thundered to life with the roar of a lion.

  'Woohoo!' Sophia stood. 'Thank you, Lord!' she screamed up into the desolate Mustafar sky. 'Time to go!'

  With that, she took the wing back to the ground and gathered up her tools, dumping them back into the cockpit. She grabbed the water filter bottle and ran over to the small stream that had been her one source of water on the planet and the only reason she'd stayed so close to the threat of the lava.

  The water was warm here, but not too hot. Still, Sophia filled the canteen carefully. She quickly took care of business. Standing, she was ready to go.

  She took a step back towards the ship, then stopped and turned back to the water.

  She'd been careful about not touching the water while here, letting the filter take care of any issues. But now that she was leaving, there was something she'd wanted to do since arriving.

  Sophia put her index finger in her mouth and scrubbed her cheeks, the roof of her mouth, her tongue, and gums to dislodge as much cellular matter as possible. When she was done, she moved her tongue, her mouth creating saliva, then leaning over the water, she spat into it.