Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

  “That’s right,” I said. “One push of a button, and you’re out in space with the rest of the trash.”

  “Qole,” he said, his voice piped through a comm speaker. “Don’t.”

  “You do not get to call me Qole,” I spat. “And why the hell shouldn’t I?”

  “Because, whoever you think I am, whatever you think I’m doing, you’re wrong.”

  My finger hovered over the button. “Prove it.”

  He started probing at his eye, as if he had something in it. An odd time to be checking for damage, I thought. And then I realized he did have something in it. He flicked a thin, transparent film off the tip of his finger, and then removed the same from his other eye.

  Contact lenses.

  He also pressed parts of his cheek and wiggled his jaw as if cracking it into a different place, squeezed the bridge of his nose and inhaled. I’d heard of disguise capabilities like this, but only rumors. The advanced drugs they required were way too expensive for anyone on Alaxak. When he dropped his hand, the lump was gone, and his jaw was subtly different, and yet the overall difference was drastic.

  He’d looked handsomely out of place before, but this was just absurd. His eyes were a pale silver-gray that nearly shone, and his face was perfectly shaped, with smooth planes and edges that met in exactly the right places, not just some, more like it had been mat-printed from an engineer’s design. In short, he was stunning, in spite of the blood trickling from one of his too-straight eyebrows.

  Only years of careful selection, pure bloodlines, gave someone a face like that. And even I, who was about as far from royal as a person could get, knew what the color of his eyes meant.

  “My name is Nevarian…Dracorte,” he said.

  It sounded like he’d been leaving something out. But it was enough, his name.

  Ancestors. He was a Dracorte.

  “Great Collapse!” Telu nearly shouted, while Arjan gaped with his jaw fully dropped. Eton was staring as much as he could through swelling eyes.

  “Unifier help us,” Basra murmured.

  Whatever divinity it came from, I’d take all the help we could get. A member of the Dracorte family, one of the most powerful royal families in the known universe—if not the most—was worse than a bomb on board. He was a target for every missile in the galaxy. I thought he might have come from one of the royal planets, but I never would have guessed he was a royal himself. If I’d had even the slightest hint, I would have run as far and fast as possible.

  “What…?” I began, then had to begin again as I steadied myself against the wall. “What are you doing on my ship?”

  His mouth quirked into an odd smile. “Looking for you.”

  My stomach felt like it did a full turn. “The second ticket. On the cruiser. That was…”

  “For you, yes.” His smile twisted further. “I wish you could have let me explain…and that you would let me explain now,” he added more softly, as he saw my finger twitch closer to the button.

  All I could do was shake my head. “No. No, I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I took a deep breath and steeled myself. “I want you off my ship. I want no one to ever know you were even on my ship. I want you to disappear.”

  Before my finger could so much as twitch again, Nev whipped out a gun, sleek and shiny with a white glow, from somewhere in the crisp folds of his jacket. So not only was he himself a weapon, he also carried them on his person. But he didn’t point it at me.

  He pointed it, no doubt accurately, at the junction between the hull and the first set of doors. “Tell them, Eton,” he said. “They won’t believe me.”

  “That’s an XR-25 Molten-Force.” Eton’s shock was audible through his wet, bloody grimace on the floor. “A plasma pistol that makes most others look like toys. It’s worth about half of this ship, and it has the power to blow through all of it. We’ll all die.”

  Of course a Dracorte would be able to afford one of those…or a dozen of them. I’d taken him for just another rich boy, but he was much, much richer than that.

  “Eton, always ready to state the obvious,” Telu said, but her sarcasm was only a mask for her fear.

  “Now, let me out,” Nev said.

  I didn’t move.

  Basra’s sharp voice cut through my hesitation. “Captain, you should open the doors.”

  I cast a glance at him. “But he might be bluffing.”

  His eyes never left Nev’s face over his folded arms. “If he’s not bluffing, we have to let him out, and if he is bluffing…we have to let him out. Dracortes don’t just disappear, not even their bodies.” He murmured under his breath, “And something tells me this Dracorte especially won’t.”

  Eton didn’t seem to hear the last bit. “I know plenty of ways to make a body disappear in space. A few shots of the mass driver—”

  “Captain,” Basra said, in what was nearly a warning tone. I’d never heard anything like it from him.

  My finger shifted an inch…and hit a different button. The inner doors of the airlock, not the outer, slid open with a gasp.

  Nev stepped out—if not with haste, with efficiency. He does seem to love efficiency, I thought with something bordering on hysteria.

  It didn’t feel as if I’d just released one young man into our ship. It felt like I’d released a cataclysm. Looking at him, I felt more afraid than if staring down a clogged asteroid belt I had to fly through with a sputtering engine, or at half a dozen drones, or at the darkness inside me blackening my own vision. The floor of the bridge seemed to drop out from under me, even though it remained firmly welded in place.

  “Thank you, Qole,” he said, as if I’d had any choice in the matter. “Now, if you’ll let me finish…”

  He moved toward me, half smiling as if in entreaty. So much of it made sense now: his arrogance, his knowledge, his combat training—he could afford all of it, along with the pistol. He still didn’t point the gun at me, but he kept it ready at his side.

  His mistake. When he got close enough, I hit him as hard as I could in his perfect nose.

  Ow.

  Ow, ow, ow. Ow to the hours of slinging about frozen containers of volatile fuel, ow to getting knocked out, ow to Eton using me for his anger therapy, and ow to feral captains hitting me right on the soft bits of my face.

  But the worst pain, and what had really left me unprepared for that punch, was the sick look on Qole’s face. She was trying to present it as fury, but I could see misery there, misery from the realization at just how much her life might be changing.

  If only she knew.

  The lesson here being: save the sympathy for the pain you are causing until after someone punches you in the face and the entirety of their crew comes tumbling on top of you.

  Because tumble on top of me they did. As I stumbled back from Qole’s punch, clutching my bleeding nose, Telu latched onto the arm that held the pistol, and Arjan launched himself straight for me.

  After the match with Eton, however, this was child’s play. I planted one boot firmly in Arjan’s chest, let go of the pistol, and snatched it with my other hand as it dropped. I twisted my arm while rotating to pry Telu clean off, and then finished the spin facing the three of them again, this time training the gun on Qole.

  There was no helping my nose, but my actions had the desired effect. They all froze.

  Not that I would actually shoot her, and they might know it. I hoped that in the next few seconds they wouldn’t force us to go through a repeat of what I’d had to endure with Eton. I’d been lucky there, on a number of levels. One, while I’d been busy trying to hide my skill in hand-to-hand combat since I met this crew, he’d been telegraphing his at every opportunity to make sure I kept a respectful distance. As a result, I’d been prepared for his formidable abilities. Two, Eton had definitely trained in Dracorva, and I would have been willing to hazard a guess that I knew exactly who’d taught him. I also knew that had been several years ago, because he’d used at least one tec
hnique that had fallen out of favor thanks to the development of a counter.

  I didn’t have to be lucky with the rest of the crew; they would have to get lucky with me. Unfortunately, that was always a possibility in a fight, so a full-on brawl would end up either with me trying to beat everyone senseless, or with them beating me dead. Neither was an attractive option.

  I raised my hands, still holding the pistol but pointing it at the ceiling, and opened my mouth to yell for sanity.

  The entire ship tilted sharply, and while the gravity compensator did its best to keep up, the jolt was so violent we all stumbled and went crashing.

  Qole turned on me in a rage. “What was that?” she demanded. “What did you do?”

  Her eyes were going black again, the discoloration creeping in around the edges, and that alarmed me more than whatever had just rocked the ship and sent off the warning klaxon with a resounding whoop.

  We all paused as everyone recognized the sound at the same time. That had been the alert for a weapons systems lock, the kind of sound everyone knew but most lucky people living in the central subsystems never had to hear.

  I shrugged and raised my eyebrows. “Not me. Really, not me.”

  Basra was giving me a strange look from his crouch on the ground, his curly-crested head cocked, as if asking, Really?

  Then it dawned on me. “I think that was a tractor beam,” I said. “We’re still trapped in it, and not only that, they’ve targeted us.” It was as good as having a gun held to our heads.

  “No one has tractor beams,” Eton scoffed thickly. “That would take a destroyer. And not just any destroyer, either.”

  Indeed. This was the “company” Rubion had warned me about, exactly what I had been trying to avoid. I pinched the bridge of my nose as hard as I could to stanch the blood and sighed, slumping farther down the wall into a sitting position. I draped my other hand, the one with the gun, over my knees. It didn’t really matter if Arjan or anyone else got the upper hand now, because things had just gotten much worse for all of us.

  The inter-ship comm gave a tone, and a hard voice filtered onto the bridge, confirming what I already knew. “Attention, crew of the Kaitan Heritage. This is a destroyer-class vessel. We have you in our beam, a plasma rocket locked onto your bridge, and two photon turrets standing by. If we fire, you will be dead before you can scream. Allow us to board, or we will destroy you.” The comm went dead.

  Much, much worse.

  With a percussion that reverberated throughout the bridge, the ships docked. You could dock politely, but the grating vibrations of hull on hull made it abundantly clear that our company wasn’t being polite about it. In fact, it was positively hostile.

  Telu voiced my doubts. “I think these guys might be dicks.”

  “Just what we need,” Eton grumbled, “some more of those on board.” He glowered at me from underneath the dual layer of his eyebrows and a compress that Basra had fetched for him out of an emergency medi-kit.

  Qole, tense as a kite string, stared out at the ship that dominated the viewport.

  Made of smooth composites with no visible seams, its hull split toward the stern into three fins that were faintly visible from our position. Big, deadly, this was a full-on destroyer that could only be afforded by one of the royal families. There weren’t any identifying marks, but I knew one of them had to be pulling the strings.

  Speaking of which, my family was going to be distinctly unhappy. I was most likely going to get taken hostage. At least I wouldn’t be killed—just ransomed for an astronomical amount of money. It would be a huge embarrassment, but the Dracortes could afford it. Far, far worse was the fact that Qole and I would be late getting back, and that my family couldn’t afford. I wasn’t sure how I’d bear failing everyone so completely, but none of the alternatives I could conjure seemed remotely sane.

  “Well, then what do they want?” Arjan demanded.

  “Me, I would imagine.” I gestured vaguely.

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “He was born wealthy,” Basra replied for me. “A Dracorte by himself is too valuable an asset to pass up. If they’ve been following him, they know he’s with us.”

  I found the willpower to raise one eyebrow. “Before you all say this is what happens when you have people like me onboard, I’ll point out that had you just given me the chance to talk, oh, maybe twenty hours ago, or simply let me go like I suggested quite recently, then I would probably be well on my way.”

  “Yeah, with Qole,” Eton growled.

  “Quiet,” Qole ordered, her voice going husky with strain, knuckles whitening as she tightened her fists. She glared at me. “Don’t expect people to listen to you after you lie to them.”

  Any reply I could have mustered was cut off by the docking hatch hissing open. Masked by the noise and distraction, I hooked the strap of my bag with a foot and quickly slid it closer, setting the plasma pistol on the floor nearby to make it more noticeable. My captors would never leave a gun that valuable behind, and I wagered they’d take the bag with it, in the hopes of finding something more.

  Something more was what they would definitely find, if they opened it. Having it with me would give me only a slight advantage, which I might not even get the opportunity to use, but just in case…

  Woven body armor and military-grade plasma rifles, all in gray, adorned the first two people on board. “Everyone on their knees with their hands in the air!” one of them barked as they ducked in, keeping their rifles trained on us and taking up positions on either side of the hatch. We all knelt obligingly. They couldn’t have been more generic security personnel, and I was just about to roll my eyes when a third person entered.

  It wasn’t the oblong mirrored visor that masked the front of his helmet or the white rigid armor that added to the worry trickling through me. It wasn’t even the quiet, relaxed way he took his position next to one of the security guards and simply clasped his hands together in front of himself, waiting. No, it was the gleaming blade strapped to his hip—a Disruption Blade. Tapered and long, with a single line of white energy gleaming in the very center, it made it clear just how serious these people were.

  So much for any advantage I might have had.

  “Blast it, what’s a Bladeguard doing here?” Eton asked the question on my mind. They were typically found only as the bodyguards of the powerful or in elite commando teams; this really seemed like overkill. Flattering, but overkill.

  “Shut your mouth.” This came from the final entrant to the bridge. He sported a simple gray uniform and an annoying bristly goatee. Everything about him screamed of a child who had decided that the thrill of ordering others around was what he wanted to pursue for the rest of his life. “Now, which one of you is the captain?”

  “That’s me.” Qole didn’t hesitate, and almost stood up from where she was kneeling on the floor. “What the blazes are you doing on my ship?”

  Instead of responding, he walked up to her and backhanded her across the face. Eton snarled, Arjan yelled, and Telu called him a degrading name. Basra and I were silent, watching. The man grabbed Qole’s chin and forced her to look up.

  Her eyes were near black. She didn’t say anything, but I saw her hands flex open and shut as though grasping at something invisible.

  The man was watching Qole’s eyes. “Perfect,” he said with a smile. “She’s the one we want.”

  For the first time, a fear aside from failure began to gnaw at me. Why were they so interested in Qole? My family was, as far as I knew, the ones who had done the king’s share of research into Shadow’s potentially widespread applications. Key words being: as far as I knew. Maybe they were after more than just my ransom. Maybe they knew what I’d been after, what my uncle was after. Not only would that mean a rival family was behind this, but that our boarding party was most likely sent by one in particular, the one that stood to gain the most from stealing my family’s glory and watching us sink into disgrace.

  Treznor-Nirmana. If
this was a move to gain political, financial, and military power on their part, then Qole and her crew were in more danger than I’d imagined. Even if they only wanted me and Qole, it meant the rest of the crews’ lives were inconsequential—or even happily lost, if the Treznor-Nirmanas didn’t want any witnesses.

  The man turned to me, and his face flickered with worry for a second, but I had to commend him—he went back to being an idiot almost immediately. “And won’t you be a pretty prize as well, princeling.” He turned on his heel, ignoring the rest of the room as everyone’s incredulous stares found me. “Bind the two of them and bring them onboard. If any of the rest resist, kill them all.”

  It was an effective order. No one resisted.

  I glanced at Qole as we were marched along the featureless hallways of the destroyer. She was wearing the same mag-linked restraints I was, and for the first time since she found me crushed under Eton’s boot, her expression started to register something other than pure fury. The set of her jaw was softening, but her full mouth was still pressed in a firm line, either in thought or in a stern mask for our captors, I wasn’t sure which. She was glaring straight ahead with a focus I admired, her eyes clearer now, and I was beginning to guess what that blackness meant for her. Rage.

  A trickle of blood ran down her nose, and seeing it with her defiant expression made me realize how arrogant I’d been. I no longer even knew how kidnapping her would have been possible. She might have killed me in the attempt. A near-hysterical urge to laugh bubbled up in me, then popped with something like regret. As if Qole’s life weren’t dangerous enough already with its drones, asteroids, and Shadow, I’d somehow managed to introduce her to destroyers.

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” I whispered to her, hoping our guards wouldn’t notice.

  “None of this would have happened if you’d been honest with me…Prince Nevarian. So, you’re not only royal, but a prince. How many lies can someone tell in one day, anyway? Are you trying to set a record?”