Abruptly, Califa remembered. It had been the talk of the system, the rumors spreading like a firestorm. She had heard so many versions of how he had pulled it off that she had doubted anyone would ever know the real truth. The only thing that never changed, story to next exaggerated story, was Dax. The bigger-than-life, dark-maned skypirate who fought his way through Coalition troops like an avenging fury, leaving the Legion’s best scattered like toy soldiers in his path.
He had become the scourge of the system—in Coalition eyes, at least. That he had become hero to many, and little short of godlike to some, she could no longer doubt. But she couldn’t help thinking if he persisted in the folly of this raid, he would be dead. And that disturbed her more than she cared to admit.
SHE HADN’T MEANT to spend the night in the crew lounge, wondering if any of the men were still alive on the planet below. It was no concern of hers, unless the Evening Star herself fell into the hands of the Coalition. And she had long ago decided on her course of action should that happen; she would never let herself be cast back into slavery alive.
No, she had no reason to be here, waiting, except perhaps to keep Rina company. The others left behind—far too many of them, Califa thought, although she could see the tactical advantage to a small, swift strike—were busily making room for the expected cargo; no one, it seemed, would admit the fact that Dax was leading his team into a death trap. Dax had always come through, and they refused to believe this time would be any different.
Rina had been pacing for an hour, clearly on edge. She had, Califa knew, apologized to Dax before the raiders had gone. Califa was glad, because although Rina had never even admitted the possibility of Dax never coming back, it would have been horrible if something happened and the girl had to live with the knowledge that their last words had been harsh ones. Califa knew too well that kind of pain; when Shaylah had gone, their parting had not been pleasant. But then, she hadn’t expected that she would never see her friend again.
She watched the girl pace, brushing her golden hair back in a gesture Califa had come to realize was habitual. Once again she saw a resemblance to Dax there; they had the same air of barely contained energy, although the girl’s came out in nervous gestures like that one, where the man’s was controlled, giving the impression of a tightly coiled strength, just waiting to be unleashed.
She had seen a lot of that coiled strength last night, when she had, after two days of internal debate, gone to Dax’s quarters. He’d looked startled at first, then rueful, and she wondered if there was any truth to the feeling she’d gotten that he’d been avoiding any contact with her; the Evening Star wasn’t that big, and she’d only seen him half a dozen times since she’d been aboard. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then moved aside to let her in.
The moment she’d stepped inside, she wanted to change her mind. There was danger for her here, in these close quarters. Every instinct she’d acquired in years of training and honed in Coalition service told her so. And the danger for her here was this man.
He was dressed as usual, minus the belt and its equipment. His shirt was unlaced, baring too much of the smooth, golden skin of his chest for her comfort. His pants clung faithfully to his lean hips and strong legs. His hair was tousled, falling forward over his shoulders, as if he’d been running his fingers through it in distraction.
She was seized with a sudden burning need to know what it would feel like, that thick mane of dark, gleaming hair, sliding over her own fingers. She clamped down on her spiraling senses. Perhaps she had been damaged in some way, she thought, when they implanted the collar. Or perhaps the collar was defective, the blue system active without any outward signal.
Eos, she thought suddenly, perhaps he had discovered how it worked, and was using it to lure her to him. But why would he bother with subtlety, when it wasn’t necessary? If he’d learned how to use it, he merely needed to increase the power and she would be what she was in fact, for as long as he held the controller: his slave. In any way he chose.
She couldn’t reconcile the idea of his using the controller on her with what she’d come to know about him. But what else could explain the way she felt, the way warmth seemed to flood her and her pulse seemed to speed up, just at the sight of this man? It had never happened to her before.
He held a glass of amber liquid, Carelian brandy, she guessed. He gestured at the heavy crystal decanter that sat on the table behind him, as if to offer her some. She shook her head; the last thing she needed around him was to have her mind clouded by alcohol.
“This raid, why are you doing it?” she’d blurted out, her cool, reasoned approach forgotten. Amazing how quickly she’d returned to the freedom of asking questions.
He raised a brow at her. “I’m a skypirate, remember? It’s what I do.”
“But why here? There are hundreds of other places, other targets.”
She knew she was treading a fine line, that one wrong word, one slip that betrayed too much knowledge, would expose her. And she knew what she was doing would be considered nothing less than treason to the system she’d once been a part of. She just wasn’t sure she cared anymore.
“What’s wrong with this target?”
She drew in a deep breath. “Rina told me about your raid here two years ago.”
He lifted the glass of brandy. He sipped, then slipped his tongue out to taste the drop that lingered on his lips. Califa felt something hot and tight knot up in her belly.
“So?” he said, his tone as cool as she was warm. She fought to keep her voice steady.
“Do you really think it will be that easy this time?”
His mouth quirked. “It wasn’t easy the first time.”
“Then it will be ten times worse this time! Do you really think they won’t have increased security, that they won’t have at least doubled the troops?”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“Then why? Think, Dax! The entire area around the annex is probably mined, and rigged with motion-triggered thermal cannon.”
“Probably.”
He was so unshaken, she wanted to shake him herself.
“You only have twenty men—”
“We won’t all be going. Fewer targets that way.”
Califa smothered a groan of frustration. She would have sworn this man was not a fool, but to take on nearly a hundred crack Coalition troops . . .
“But why Boreas? The most heavily guarded outpost in the system?”
“Is it?” he asked mildly, as if it was of no import.
“Of course it is. The crystal mines are the Coalition’s most valuable resource. Except for Trios, it’s their only source of crystal for the whole fleet.”
The now empty glass hit the table with a thud. He spun around, all mildness vanished. There was something fierce in his eyes, a savage fury that made her back up a step. This was the man who had cut a swath through the Coalition’s best. And he had turned on her, and she didn’t know why.
“How in Hades do you know so much, Coalition slave?” He spat it out, in a voice matching the wrath in his eyes.
“I . . .” She struggled to remember the answer she’d prepared, fearing this question. She didn’t understand; she’d fought in pitched battles, she’d looked at death time and again, yet this man daunted her like nothing—and in particular no man—ever had.
“People talk,” she said weakly. “In front of slaves . . . they are less careful with their words.”
“Perhaps you should be more careful with yours.”
His voice was as icy as the planet below them. He turned his back on her in an obvious gesture of dismissal, but she summoned up nerve she hadn’t been sure she possessed anymore.
“I was . . . concerned. For Rina.”
For a long moment he didn’t speak. Then, at last, “I told her she’s not going. Even if
I have to lock her up. She’ll be safe.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Califa said, fighting the trembling in her hands as she stared at his back; Eos, had she truly once been a warrior? In one year, had she been reduced to a woman who shook at a confrontation with one man? Or was it just this man?
Slowly, he looked back over his shoulder at her. The anger was still there, but it was banked now, controlled. She wondered how long it had taken him to learn to keep it in check. That had been a hard lesson for her, to harness her naturally short temper so that it didn’t interfere with her job. She sensed it had been even harder for him.
“What did you mean?”
“I meant what she will do if you don’t come back.”
He had stiffened. He’d turned away from her once more. And after a long silent moment he’d spoken, his voice low and rough. And tortured. “She wouldn’t be the first one.”
The Evening Star’s sudden surge shook Califa out of her memories with a start. They had accelerated suddenly, and Califa wondered what was going on. She wondered if the lights had come on in response to a manual command, or if the hours of the ship’s night had truly passed.
Rina leapt to her feet and ran for the far wall. She reached it just as the ship’s comlink crackled to life. It was Roxton’s voice; the first mate had reluctantly stayed aboard during the raid. Califa had wondered, when she’d learned it had been a last-minute and much-protested decision by Dax, if it had been a result of her visit. She thought perhaps it was. The choice of Roxton to stay was telling; he was the only other man Rina thoroughly trusted.
“I’m here, Rox,” the girl said anxiously into the comlink receiver. “Is there news?”
“They’re headed home, little one.”
Rina sagged against the wall in relief. Watching her, Califa felt an echo of the same sensation.
“No one hurt?” Rina asked.
“One little scratch, nothing serious.”
The girl’s mouth thinned. “Dax, I suppose,” she said resignedly.
“Now, don’t worry; Nelcar’ll fix him right as sunlight.”
“I’m going to the shuttle bay.” Rina flipped off the comlink, then looked at Califa. “Coming? Watching Dax dock a shuttle at full speed on a moving ship is quite a sight.”
Califa stared at her. Just the thought of the timing, finesse, skill, and sheer guts necessary for that kind of maneuver filled her with awe. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. He’s done it a dozen times. Nobody does it better.”
“If anybody else does it at all, I’d be amazed,” Califa observed dryly.
Rina grinned at her. “So come watch.”
“I can’t.”
Rina tilted her head. “Can’t?”
“It’s out of my range.”
The girl blinked. Dax, it seemed, had kept her secret. “Never mind. Go, you can tell me about it later.”
Rina didn’t have to tell her. After their escape was assured, the entire crew did, including the four men who had gone down with Dax, who were telling their tale with the greatest of glee. Only Rina and Nelcar, who were with Dax in his quarters, and Roxton, who was busy on the bridge, making sure of their escape, were absent.
“Talk about a clean getaway,” Hurcon chortled, rubbing a hand over his chronically bristly chin. “Dax disabled all six of their ships, and they never even knew he was there! I can just see them, trying to get those birds going while we flew right past them. By the time they can even start after us, we’ll be in the next sector.”
“That shuttle was so loaded down we barely got her off the ground,” Larcos put in. “I had to use one of the portable thrusters we picked up just to get us airborne.”
“And how about that on-the-fly shuttle docking?” Hurcon asked, sounding awed. “He never even had the ‘Star slow down on that pass, just opened the shuttle bay and in we went. Then Roxton hit the throttle and we were gone before they could blink. I tell you, that man can fly loops around any pilot in the system.”
“You encountered no resistance?” Califa asked in astonishment. She supposed it was a measure of how accustomed they had become to her presence—and perhaps a measure of their affection for Rina, who had made it clear Califa was in her good graces—that they answered her at all.
“Sure,” Larcos said. “There was a squad of guards, but Dax kept them occupied while we loaded up.” A frown flickered over the engineer’s face. “That’s when he got hurt.”
She’d already heard from Rina that Dax had taken a blast from a disrupter to the left shoulder, but it had been at the extreme limits of the weapon’s range, and so wasn’t nearly as serious as it could have been.
“Anyway, that was about it,” Larcos went on, grinning now. “Especially after Dax took that laser torch and welded the doors of the barracks shut.”
Califa drew back a little. “He what?”
“I wondered why he took the thing,” another man said. “But that’s Dax. He thinks of everything. By the time they realized what was going on, they couldn’t get out.”
Califa had to smother the smile that threatened. Eos, that was the work of a true tactical brain, she thought. She had always admired the ability to improvise under pressure. I was right, the Coalition should have recruited him. Except that he’d never do it, never sign on to fight for a system he so hated. And the Coalition had little use for independent improvisation these days. Perhaps that’s why it defeated them.
“Did you see him make that jump from the barracks roof to the supply annex?” Hurcon asked Larcos.
Larcos nodded, leaning his lanky frame forward, bony elbows resting on the table before him. “That was demented. That gap must have been fifteen feet.”
“But it saved us ten minutes getting over that bedamned electrowall,” the other man who’d spoken said.
Larcos gave an expressive shudder. “If he’d missed . . .”
“Ah, you know Dax never sets a foot wrong,” Hurcon said with expansive pride.
“But the chances he takes—”
“He’s blessed. Why, this is the worst he’s been hurt since that whipping on Daxelia, and you know that was different, so it doesn’t count.”
“Invincible,” the other man said.
They believed it, Califa thought. They believed that Dax was invulnerable, indomitable. A valuable reputation for a skypirate to have, no doubt. But Califa knew, perhaps better than any of these men did, that that kind of luck didn’t last. No warrior went forever unscathed. Sooner or later, fate would catch up with him, and Dax would pay the price for this long run of fortune. And when he did, Califa thought grimly, who else would pay with him?
Chapter 6
CALIFA HEARD THE sound drifting gently down the passageway. She followed it instinctively, the soft, sweet music an inexorable draw to her.
The ship was dark, most of the crew sleeping after the tension of the raid and the relief of escaping Coalition pursuit. She herself was far too restless to sleep, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t been in on the raid, so could not blame that for her disquiet. She was, apparently, in no danger from the people aboard the Evening Star. She had even, amazingly, found a friend in Rina. For all her youth, the girl’s life had made her wise beyond her years, and their difference in age only occasionally interfered in their growing friendship. She treasured the feeling; she did not have enough friends to take acquiring a new one lightly.
She should be at ease, she thought, or as much so as it was possible for an escaped slave to be. Yet here she was, walking the passageways, too edgy to sleep. For a person who had spent most of her adult life keeping her emotions tightly under wraps, as befitted a trained Coalition officer, she was certainly in a muddle now, Califa thought. It amazed her that she could still feel any emotion at all.
The past year had stretched her control, had
tested her discipline to the limit. Sheer determination to survive had often been the only thing that had gotten her through the humiliation, the degradation, the pain. Day after day, night after night, whether obeying commands that made her shiver with repugnance, or sitting alone in her slave’s cell, she had fought not to lose that determination, knowing that if she did, it would all be over for her, that she would never, ever, be free again.
She couldn’t give up, she had told herself. She wouldn’t give up. Others had—those hollow, empty shells that had once been people. Those slaves who had died, yet still breathed, whose spirits had surrendered to their masters. She would never surrender. She would not be one of them, broken, beaten. She would be different. She would resist, no matter what they did to her. She would be, not like them, the quiet wraiths, she would be like—
Like Wolf.
An image had come to her then, of a golden, magnificent man. A Triotian, as dazzling as all of his people, chained yet not bound, enslaved yet not broken. The Coalition had done its worst to him, and yet he had never surrendered. She had held a grudging respect for him then; now, truly understanding what he’d done, she felt nothing less than an awed, nearly reverent admiration. And a growing dislike for herself, for she had been instrumental in the effort to break that proud strength.
She came out of the memory to find her fingers rubbing the golden collar, twin to the collar worn by the man she’d been thinking of. For the first time, she faced the wish she’d been suppressing for a time now, be it traitorous to the almighty Coalition or not: she hoped he had truly escaped. And Shaylah with him.
Be all right, Shaylah, she thought prayerfully, please be all right.
She tried to shake off the moment of softness, of tender feeling for the woman she should hate. Yet it lingered, wistfully, until she forced it out of her mind by turning her attention to tracking down the source of the haunting melody that was giving rise to a strange tightness in her chest.
Her footsteps began to slow as the slight increase in volume told her she was nearing the source of the music. Doubt warred with a sudden sense of inevitability; it didn’t seem possible, yet she instinctively knew it was true. The delicate strains, the flowing, flutelike sounds, were coming from Dax’s quarters.
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