Hidden Treasure [Pirates of the Galaxy 1] (Siren Publishing Allure)

by K. D. Austin

  Hanna grabbed Salvor and broke the hack. She kicked furiously to keep the larger man and herself above water.

  Lance sputtered. Hanna imagined he was horribly disoriented by the sudden end of the hack. But true to form, he recovered quickly and helped her with Salvor. They swam no more than a few meters from the sinking Nebula before it exploded as a shell slammed into it. The concussion from the explosion, and the wave it kicked up, buffeted the trio toward the shore and drove Hanna under the water.

  Hanna tumbled under the surface, unsure of which way was up. She was tangled in Salvor’s legs and couldn’t find the surface. She fought down a rising panic. Then a hand grabbed her collar and yanked her in the direction Hanna would’ve sworn was down but was obviously up because she broke the surface. Hanna gasped for air. Lance pulled her to him.

  “Are you okay?”

  Hanna nodded and was shocked to see that she was covered in blood, but a quick check of herself through the HUD showed no injuries.

  “Can you swim?” he asked her.

  Hanna couldn’t spare the air to speak, but nodded again. With Lance’s help she struggled to the riverbank. Where was Salvor?

  “Salvor?” she said between gasps of air.

  Lance looked at her and shook her head. “The last explosion ripped him in half.” His voice sounded hollow. Suddenly, she understood all too well where all the blood had come from. A hard knot formed in her stomach, almost causing her to retch.

  After several minutes of silence, Lance rolled over on his side and propped himself up on his elbow so he could look in Hanna’s face. “How did we do that, Hanna?”

  Hanna didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth to answer, but Lance wasn’t done.

  “You knew my system better than I do. How? What we just did shouldn’t have been possible, but you knew it would work.”

  “I didn’t know it would work,” she said, looking up at the sky, not wanting to see his face at the moment. “But I was pretty sure.”

  Hanna sighed and rolled over to look Lance in the eyes. She could discern their green hue even in the shadow of the riverside bushes in which they were hiding. She remembered the first time she’d noticed his eye color and how scared she was of him then. He had tried to kill her that time. She also recalled staring into those eyes again as she changed the GalMar’s life. Hanna had convinced herself it was the right thing to do at the time and had told herself that she didn’t have a choice. It was Lance or her. But in this moment on this riverbank, Hanna realized she hadn’t done it only to save her own ass, but because she wanted to know that she could do it. She wanted to know that she could mind-hack someone into a new person. She had simply been fascinated by the possibilities.

  However, looking into Lance’s eyes now, she realized this was something much different than manipulating a willing partner during sex to increase both parties’ pleasure. Sure, the methods were similar, but she had taken a person and changed him into someone else. For the first time, Hanna realized that it wasn’t right. It was the very thing she hated the GalMars and the Galactic Council for—dictating how people should be, who people should be.

  She had to do something about this, even if it killed her.

  “Lance, I have to tell you something. And you’re not going to like it.”

  The former GalMar stared at her, not speaking, simply waiting.

  Hanna told him the truth, all about what she and Arden had done to him and why. She was right. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t kill her or even attack her. Of course, he couldn’t. They had made sure of that.

  “I’ll restore your true life to you as soon as we recover Arden.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I’ve learned that it takes two people to manipulate a living system to that level. If I try it myself, I might mess it up and turn you into a vegetable or worse.”

  Lance locked his eyes with hers. As hard as it was, Hanna kept her gaze steady with his, willing him to understand her sorrow over what she had done and the truth of her fear of undoing the hack alone. Of course, she also wanted to have some protection around when she returned the dangerous man’s true self.

  Chapter 32

  After Hanna’s revelation, Lance felt a mix of emotions, disbelief, anger, and even an odd sense of relief. He thought he should be angrier but assumed that what Hanna had done to him prevented that somehow. Part of him wanted to just walk away, but a larger portion understood that he couldn’t for multiple reasons. He felt he was part of this band, even if he knew it wasn’t real. The reality, though, was that if he wanted his real life back, he’d have to go find Arden and hope he could overcome the hack enough to force the man to fix him. With his decision made, he stood up.

  “We’ve got to go back to The Hairy Hand.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Hanna asked. Her eyes searched his.

  “No. But we need to rescue Arden and recover the stolen treasure, and this may be our only chance. Also, we aren’t going to get out of here without a ship since those tanks blew the bridge. That means going back to The Hairy Hand. Besides, I feel like I have to help you.”

  Hanna looked down at the ground. “You know that’s just the programming, right?”

  “Yeah, I know. And it really angers me, but I also know it’s what I need to do. I’m not doing this for you and Arden. I’m going back into that place because it’s the right thing to do for the galaxy. If there really is a Khsharayan artifact left, it shouldn’t be held by pirates.”

  Hanna just stared at him. He thought she wanted to argue that point with him but was smart enough not to at the moment.

  “Right now, I’m this Lance—the undercover Galactic Marine working with the Scourge. You can tell me it’s not who I really am, but it’s who I am at this moment. It’s the only me I know. So let’s quit talking about it, and go.”

  Hanna nodded. “Okay. I’m with you.”

  “We can’t waste any more time. Our chances of finding Arden or the artifact are dropping every second.”

  The things Hanna had snagged from the wreckage were indeed hover packs. Lance assessed them and was impressed by their design. “These are high-end hover packs, which means they’re even waterproof, luckily. Glad you grabbed them. Here’s how we’ll use them.”

  Lance laid out his plan for attacking The Hairy Hand. They moved down the riverbank until they were at a spot that Lance assessed was below the pirate base, and strapped the hover packs on their backs.

  Lance looked over at Hanna. “Follow me.”

  He adjusted the blue velocity dial on the side of the pack. Hanna watched him. “Eight? Can these packs handle that?”

  Lance looked at her for a second. He hadn’t seen the woman appear afraid of anything, except when she told him about what she had done, but she seemed a bit nervous now for some reason. “The longer we’re out in the open on that cliff face, the greater the odds are of us being seen. Our best bet is to get up there and get inside fast. Anyway, these packs are quality. Your suit will compensate for the speed.”

  Hanna nodded and dialed her velocity up. Lance pushed the throttle on his pack and shot into the air. In a heartbeat he reached the small alcove he had noted from the ground. He heard Hanna coming up behind him and reached out to help her in, but she glided easily to a landing beside him.

  Lance surveyed the cave and smiled. His assessment had been correct. This was part of the complex’s ventilation system, venting excess heat from the powerful engines that ran the computers and HVAC. This building was constructed very much like a ship, as he’d suspected from the layout that Hanna had sent him earlier. He moved to the back of the alcove and grabbed the metal grate that blocked off the vent.

  “The grill covering the airway is too thick to cut through quietly,” he said, moving away.

  “Let me see it.”

  Chapter 33

  Hanna found the back side of a large lock that secured the grill to the cliff. Next to it was a tiny access panel. Hanna brough
t up her HUD and sent out a code scan from her personal net to the lock. After a little bit of searching, numbers started scrolling across her display. In a few seconds, they stopped at a particular code sequence that Hanna sent back through the access panel.

  The grill swung open, and Lance and Hanna quickly ducked through it. Behind it was a narrow shaft that sloped gently up into darkness.

  “Keep an eye out. Let’s go,” Lance said, whispering into Hanna’s ear.

  After crawling up the slope in the near-total darkness for several minutes and crossing multiple side shafts, which Lance passed, they finally arrived at a service door. Lance opened it without any problems and stepped through it slowly. He motioned Hanna in after a few seconds. She quickly took stock of the area. Metal crates and discarded robots littered what was clearly a storage room. She was looking for another way out of this room when a sharp report echoed through the nearly empty space. Hanna jumped, but Lance dropped to a crouch. Hanna didn’t breathe for the next several seconds.

  “I think that was down the hall a bit,” Lance said after cocking his ear different directions.

  “Wonder what it was. Is there still some resistance? Or are they just destroying things?”

  “I don’t know if it matters. We just need to focus on finding Arden and the artifact.”

  Hanna looked around at the crates of junk in the room again. The stacked rows reminded her of the locker area of the transit hub where everything had begun to go south, but it did set an idea in motion.

  “Lance, I’m going to try logging into the local net from here. With any luck, I can still use the hacked link I opened earlier.”

  “Anything’s better than standing here waiting for someone to find us,” he said, moving toward a door located to their left.

  “Since our trackers aren’t working anymore, I’m going to try to make my own. I’ll pinpoint Arden’s location. Then we can pick him up and get out of here.”

  “Can you really do that?”

  “Sure. At least in theory. And assuming he’s still here and alive.”

  Lance just nodded. Hanna popped her HUD and initiated contact with the local net.

  “First step down. The hack’s still active.” Making sense of the current state of the local net wasn’t as easy, though. “This could take a few seconds. It’s almost as if The Hairy Hand’s net has been split in two. Half of it is what I was working with earlier, but the rest of it is completely new and completely foreign.”

  And though Hanna didn’t share it with Lance, it appeared that the foreign part was invading the rest of the net. It was a type of hacking she’d never seen before, if it was hacking at all. Whoever these GrayMars were, they were more dangerous than they’d even suspected, which was saying a lot since they had tried to kill Hanna and Lance and had killed Salvor.

  Hanna turned and looked at Lance, realizing that someone had given these people one of Arden’s trackers. Hanna had initially suspected Lance, but clearly she’d been wrong about that. If it was Salvor, he could have been an accidental casualty, or they were willing to sacrifice him. She still had her money on Venus, though. Whoever it was, the fact that the traitor would’ve been able to tell the GrayMars that Lance was mind-hacked only reaffirmed her earlier decision to come clean with him. Now it couldn’t be leveraged against her or him.

  “This net’s a mess. Finding anyone is going to be tricky,” Hanna said after a minute of trying to sort the distressed network while her thoughts returned to the immediate need.

  “You can’t do it?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said it would be tricky. Keep an eye out. This may take a few minutes.”

  Hanna hoped it would only take a few minutes. What she was doing was theoretically impossible. But most everything she did on the net was, and with what Arden had shown her, she was no longer sure impossible existed.

  Robots. People. Computers. They all seemed the same in the Galactic Net, at least at first glance. But with a little ingenuity…

  “Found him!” Hanna said, surprising even herself.

  Chapter 34

  “Which way is he again?” Lance asked as he slipped into the corridor outside the storage room and motioned her to join him after determining the coast was clear.

  “Here.” A modified version of the map of the complex popped up on Lance’s HUD. “The flashing red dot is where we are now. The green dot is Arden. The green dashes are my best guess as to how to get to him.”

  Lance looked it over and frowned. “Seems a bit out of the way.”

  “I can’t tell where the GrayMars are, but I can tell there is no recent activity with doors, robots, or computers in the areas I’ve mapped us through.”

  Lance nodded. “That’s not a lot to go on, but it’s a smart deduction.”

  “Well, it’s at least the best I’ve got.”

  “Let’s hope it’s enough,” Lance said as he headed in the direction of the green dashes.

  He led them slowly down the corridor. They hadn’t gone more than twenty meters before they came to a bend. Lance peered around and then slammed his hand back into Hanna’s chest. Hanna grunted but stopped.

  “Shh! There’s two guards up ahead.”

  Absently, he realized his hand was cupping her breast. From the slight hitch in her breathing, Hanna was very aware of his touch. It bothered him that he didn’t know if his attraction to her was real or just programming. Either way, he didn’t remove his hand. For her part, Hanna tried to peer around the corner over his head. Lance pushed her farther back. Then they could hear voices coming closer.

  “I can’t understand them,” Hanna said with a puzzled look on her face. “Can you?”

  “Must be a code,” Lance said. “Though if it is, it’s the most complicated one I’ve ever heard.” Lance was puzzled too. The code, if that’s what it was, sounded like an entire language unto itself, but one of the basic functions of everyone’s implants was to translate all languages heard and spoken. Everyone in the galaxy now officially spoke the same language in practicality, though whether they did in actuality or not was something of debate among people who had a lot more free time than Lance ever did. The only way to avoid the instant translation was to make up a code language. However, due to the ever-evolving, ever-learning nature of the Galactic Net, once a code was created, it was stored and quickly processed and translated. So any code language had to be re-created constantly. The GalMars used new code phrases every three days. So theoretically, creating a fully evolved code language was impossible. But that’s what this sounded like. It was definitely more than a handful of phrases.

  “We’ve got to hide!” Hanna said.

  Lance nodded calmly and then bounded into action, grabbing Hanna’s wrist and yanking her through a door that, from the look on her face, Hanna hadn’t even noticed.

  “Lock it,” he told her.

  Hanna flipped the lock panel. Lance shook his head. He thought she’d use her hack into the net to override the lock or something more permanent. The voices were right outside the door now. They paused. Hanna looked over at Lance, a mix of fear and confusion written on her face.

  Lance held up a finger to his lips, and Hanna nodded back at him. He moved her behind him and readied himself to attack if the door began opening.

  The voices receded down the hall. Lance relaxed a fraction. Hanna reached up and kissed him quick and hard, her lips wet, her tongue darting into his shocked mouth. The action was so unexpected Lance didn’t even react. She had come clean with him; she didn’t have to maintain the illusion of casual lovers.

  “You’re amazing,” she said, stepping back.

  Still unsure whether his desire was real or just made up by Hanna, Lance smiled at her and slapped her butt. “I know. Let’s get out of here.”

  Hanna unlocked the door, and they darted back down the hall, following the dashed green line. Through a bit of what Hanna called “pirate’s luck,” they made it to Arden’s location on the map without encountering anyone
else.

  “He hasn’t moved. He’s still in this room,” Hanna said, pointing at the closed door in front of them.

  Lance had noted that the dot representing Arden hadn’t shifted the entire time. He didn’t believe that to be anything good. “He may be a prisoner then. You get the door open, and I’ll take care of the guards,” Lance said flatly.

  Hanna nodded, but before she had even started to do anything, it whisked open.

  “Hanna? Lance? What are you doing here?”

  Arden stood in the doorway. And he was holding what Lance immediately knew, from having seen it briefly in the spaceport, was the Khsharayan artifact preserved in a formfitting stasis field. Lance couldn’t help but think that Arden looked like he was just going out for a walk. Nothing about the man conveyed the fear or urgency that Lance would’ve expected from someone abandoned among an enemy force. He did look shocked, though. Maybe he was too shocked to be scared. Or maybe Arden didn’t scare easily. He was a pirate captain after all. One who’d stolen a Galactic Marine space station and mind-hacked one of its soldiers for his own purposes.

  “We came to rescue you,” Hanna said.

  “And the treasure,” Lance said, indicating the artifact in Arden’s hands.

  “Oh!” Arden exclaimed. His expression changed in a flash, and he pulled Lance and Hanna into the room and shut the door.

  Chapter 35

  “You shouldn’t have come back. It’s too dangerous!”

  “We couldn’t leave you and the treasure to whoever these people are,” Hanna said.

  “Where’s Salvor?”

  Hanna looked at Lance, who nodded back at her. “Salvor’s dead.”

  Arden grunted and shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good pirate.”

  Hanna felt tears pop into her eyes again but blinked them away. They didn’t have time to mourn now, a fact that Arden clearly knew.