Soulless

by Kate Rudolph

  “Did Krend tell you about the buyer?” One asked. He had a raspy voice, like he’d taken damage to the throat at some point. He spoke IC with a strange accent that Raze couldn’t place, and his translator was no help.

  “Like the boss ever tells me anything,” was his surly companion’s reply. Raze’s translator had to translate this man’s words and identified his language of origin as an Oscavian dialect. “We shipping out? Or do we have visitors?”

  “You see any grunts getting this place into flying condition?” Raspy asked. “Rumor has it some big shot from out your way is coming by to see the merchandise.”

  The Oscavian sputtered out a laugh. “The meat is much better back home. Why would anyone waste their time with those scrawny nothings?”

  Slavery was illegal throughout most of the Oscavian Empire, Raze remembered. But the empire was huge with plenty of petty princes lording it over their own planets, and the emperor couldn’t police everything. The pirates wandered further down the hall and their conversation faded. He went in the other direction, further into the heart of the ship to his destination.

  The first thing that hit him was the smell. The slavers clearly didn’t care about the general state of their prisoner holding cells. Unwashed bodies and other, fouler scents assaulted his nose and Raze breathed through his mouth to avoid most of it. He tried to ignore the sounds coming from the center of the room where it was clear that several people were being kept. But his eyes were drawn that way with laser focus and they connected with the gem green eyes of one of the abducted women. Her blonde hair was a nest on her head and a bruise marred one of her pale cheeks.

  Every single slaver on this planet deserved to die painfully.

  Her mouth dropped open when she took in his shadowed form and she drew back from the bars of her cage, as if that would have saved her if he were a pirate. There weren’t any guards standing near the cages. Either they believed this area to be secure enough, or they’d all been called away to deal with the fire. No matter what, he didn’t have much time, and it would take too long to get the women freed.

  He turned away from the central pen and circled the room until he found what he was looking for.

  Kayde was slumped against the far wall, hands manacled above his head. He looked up and a shock went through Raze as their gazes locked. Kayde’s eyes were dead, no pain, no hope, nothing lurked in them. Was that what people saw when they looked at him? Toran was next to Kayde, his hands bound and chained to the wall, but with enough give that he could lower them by his side and walk a meter or so from where he sat to the corner where a little hole in the floor might have acted as a latrine. His eyes flashed red as he caught sight of Raze and he stiffened before looking around and realizing that no one was with him.

  Wasting no time, Toran jerked his head to the left. “That panel controls the cell. The code is 0041752.”

  “How—”

  “I heard one guy tell another when they brought us food.”

  At least they’d been fed. Good, they’d have the strength to run. He entered the code and a menu came up afterward. He selected to disengage the bars, chains, and manacles, freeing his teammates with the swipe of his hand. The computer processed his request and Raze found himself holding his breath as the request went through. When the door slid open and metal clanked to the floor, he looked up and saw Toran and Kayde standing, both stretching cramped muscles for a moment before moving out.

  Toran glanced at the pen in the center of the room while Kayde stood beside them, eyes on the exit. Toran turned back and studied Raze for a long moment, but whatever he was thinking, he let drop in favor of getting off the ship. “Weapons?”

  “Just my blaster. Most of the slavers are dealing with a fire on the other side of the settlement. We need to hurry.” He didn’t look at the pen in the center of the room, taking his cue from Kayde. Before he’d met Sierra, he wouldn’t have known he should look, should care. And until his men were out of harm’s way, he couldn’t afford to slip.

  “Please don’t go!” one of the women in the pen cried as they began to move. “Let us out.”

  Toran took a step closer to the pen, but Kayde put a hand on his arm. He shook his head slightly and Toran turned away from the central pen.

  Footsteps echoed in the metal interior of the ship, making it sound like they were surrounded by slavers ready to force them back into a cage and kill them or sell them, whichever was easiest. Raze grabbed his blaster and looked back at his team. It was time to get out of here and back on track.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As soon as the fire grew to a raging inferno, Sierra made her escape. She wanted to run to the center of town and either help Raze or make sure he’d survived, but she forced herself to leave the settlement and put some distance between her and the soon to be enraged pirates. Raze wasn’t her responsibility, and she couldn’t even really call him her friend. All he could ever be to her was a stranger that she’d never forget.

  Still, she found an out of the way place to gather her wits after leaving and waited in the shadows for movement headed out of town. It didn’t take long for her to spot the three men running like their lives depended on it. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding when she saw that they weren’t being followed.

  Have a nice life, Raze.

  She let them run off and stayed in place for another hour to make sure that no one followed, even if she couldn’t do much to help them if they did end up being pursued. But her hiding spot was nice and she still had to go back into town and determine exactly how much damage Raze’s little extraction mission had done to her own information gathering pursuit.

  “Mindy? Jo? You there?” she asked, engaging her comm.

  “Oh, so you’re talking to us again?” Mindy asked, ready for a fight, or as much of a fight as a person could have over comms.

  “We’re back on track now, just keeping you updated.” Sierra wasn’t going to do this now. She needed to get the job done, especially in light of what she’d heard those pirates talking about. “It sounds like they’re going to have the women on the move soon. There’s a buyer.”

  “Are they packing up shop?” Jo asked.

  “Don’t know. Let’s rendezvous back at the ship at 2300. Shit’s about to go down, and I don’t want to be here when it does.” It was something she could feel in the air, a sense of tension just waiting to be released.

  “We’re not going to have any trouble from your new… friend, are we?” Mindy asked, just when Sierra thought she’d get away with saying nothing about Raze.

  “That’s done. We’re good. See you tonight. Out.” Maybe it was cowardly, but she cut the comm back off and sank back against the rock she’d been hiding behind. She only had a few more hours that she could avoid talking about Raze. As soon as she was back with Mindy and Jo, they’d be on her like jackals, ready to tear the story out of her physically if they had to.

  Sierra took the path back to the settlement and found an abandoned hut to hide in. A fine layer of dust coated everything and a nest in one of the corners looked like something a wild animal had made. She doubted that anyone would be coming home anytime soon. She let the crawlers do most of the work, sending them out for a final scan of the area while she set up an audio enhancer in the window that allowed her to hear anything said within fifty meters of her hut. It took a bit of skill to filter, but she was up to the task, listening for more information about the mysterious buyer and what the slavers planned to do with their captives.

  The hours slipped by and in no time she was calling the crawlers back and heading out, ready for the rendezvous. After all the excitement of the first day, it was almost a letdown to exit the settlement with none of the pirates the wiser. She crossed the terrain back to her ship without coming anywhere close to the hostiles, though the raised eyebrow that Jo sent her when she climbed back aboard their ship almost sent Sierra running back out to find someone to bloody. Her partners were going to give her so much shit fo
r how this all went down.

  Mindy wasn’t far behind her, climbing in the hatch and sealing the door behind her. “Engage deflectors,” she told Jo as soon as she spotted Sierra. They wouldn’t be invisible, but it would be a lot harder to spot the ship on any tech or with the naked eye.

  “Engaging,” Jo confirmed, jogging back to the cockpit. The lights dimmed around them as the power was rerouted and Jo came back a few seconds later. “So what’s the news?” She grinned at Sierra and shared a look with Mindy that could almost pass for friendly. Had they really mended fences over a little gossip? Sierra would take that win.

  She dug into her pack and pulled out her crawlers and handed them to Jo. “Get these loaded up into the reader while I wash off some of this grime. We’ll do a scan of the data and make sure that we don’t need anything else.” She turned to Mindy. “Get us set up for takeoff, we need to get back home quick if we’re going to recover anyone.”

  “Did you confirm that the senator’s niece was there?” Jo asked, rolling the crawlers between her fingers like they were some kind of toy.

  “Not yet.” Sierra nodded at Jo’s hands. “I suppose we’ll see. Get facial recognition running so we can see if we can get ident on anyone.”

  Though a long soak in a giant, warm bathtub sounded like heaven, Sierra didn’t have time for more than a quick scrub down. She shot her hair a mournful look in the sliver of a mirror provided by the ship bathroom and promised herself to clean it as best she could once they were safely on their way home. As a stopgap, she covered it in a bit of cleaning powder to soak up some of the oil and dirt that had managed to accumulate during her days outside and sleeping on the ground. She’d been through worse, and she would have worse in the future, but after every mission she craved cleanliness like a woman stuck in a mud puddle for days.

  By the time she was in a clean set of clothes, Jo had the crawlers loaded and scanning and Mindy was busy working on a flightpath. Sierra picked up a tablet and started scanning through some of the data that had already been analyzed. There wasn’t a hit on the girl yet, but they’d only gone through fifteen percent of the data, she still had hope. That senator’s niece had to be out there, if not, none of those women were getting saved. She knew that there was no way that Sol Intelligence or Defense would authorize the expense of a second trip for a group of a dozen nobodies. The thought made her grit her teeth.

  “Proximity alert,” beeped the ship’s warning system.

  Sierra sat up straight in her chair and switched the tablet view over to the security feed, expecting to see a group of pirates coming their way.

  “Three hostiles,” Jo read out, scanning through the security reading. “On foot and armed. Two hundred meters away and closing. It appears they haven’t seen us.”

  Sierra’s heartbeat kicked up as she zoomed in on the feed, trying to get a better look, even as she already knew in her heart who it was. And when the picture on her viewer resolved, she was right. Standing two hundred meters away from her ship was the man—alien—she’d never planned to see again.

  Before she could even think to say anything, a second alert blared, this one much more urgent than the simple proximity monitor. Mindy cursed and docked her tablet before running behind Jo into the cockpit. Sierra put her own pad down and followed them, standing behind the navigator as she called up the complex view screen that could give them more data.

  “We’ve got a military grade ship breaking atmo with three scouts. They’re doing a scan for enemy ships and the deflector won’t hold up to it. We need to power down. It’s our only shot. The scan might read us as one of the junkers down there. But those guys outside will definitely spot us. We’ll need to take them out.”

  “Don’t worry about that right now. Power down.” Sierra put her hand on top of her blaster as she watched Mindy and Jo work in concert to take the systems offline one by one, every second ticking by like an eternity in her mind. She was praying whoever was coming in fast was the buyer she’d heard about and not some new hostile. Their ship wasn’t equipped for battle.

  And right now all she could do was wait while the two people on board with experience did their best to save their asses. She walked back to the exit hatch and waited. No way were Raze and his men going to ignore a ship appearing out of nowhere. Here was to hoping that they were still on the same side.

  ***

  Something tickled the back of Raze’s senses, like an electric charge in the air. They’d made it back to the shipyard in record time, even with a short stop to make sure that Toran and Kayde ate as well as a quick scan for injuries. They hadn’t been with the pirates long enough for symptoms of hunger or thirst to set in, and lucky for them, the pirates hadn’t been interested in much beyond a little rough treatment.

  Kayde seemed completely unaffected by the detour, as he should. Toran kept shooting glances at Raze like he didn’t expect him to notice. Only momentum had stopped the talk that was coming from happening, but Raze knew the second they made it to wherever they were bedding down for the night, he’d be subjected to some kind of test of his stability. And he didn’t know if he could pass.

  He’d always expected the fall to be more violent. Soulless soldiers who failed in the field usually went out under explosive blaster fire and screams of sorrow and rage. But while he couldn’t stop thinking of Sierra and how it felt to be in her presence, he’d never been more focused, more stable. But he didn’t know if he could make Toran believe that. A soul didn’t just grow back overnight.

  They came to the Lyrden just past midnight, the moon bright in the sky. “Scan for threats,” Toran told Kayde once they came to a halt.

  Raze took the opportunity to look around. Their intelligence had called this a shipyard, but there was so much space between the ships that it was hard to see the organization. And it made guarding the ships more difficult, which worked well for them.

  “There’s some static north of here,” Kayde reported, consulting his scanner, “but I think it’s just planetary feedback. Something in the atmosphere has been causing issues.”

  Toran nodded. “Remain here to guard while Raze and I find a way in.”

  Kayde nodded and took his position, scanning around them for threats. Raze followed Toran as he circled the ship, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t have to wait long.

  They’d made it twenty meters from Kayde when Toran spoke. “Did you have difficulty deviating from the set mission?”

  “Nothing significant.” That was a question he could answer honestly, at least.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Toran was using a density scanner to search for a place to cut through the ship if they couldn’t get a door open, he studied his device intently instead of looking at Raze. He knew something was up.

  “Want?” Raze asked. The soulless couldn’t want anything.

  Toran let out a frustrated sound. “I’m speaking colloquially.” He muttered something about Kayde that Raze couldn’t quite make out.

  “Is it strange to be around us?” It was suicide to ask something like that, but with the knowledge that he wouldn’t survive for long sinking in, Raze found many of his self-preservation instincts had abandoned him to curiosity.

  From the way Toran’s shoulders stiffened, he knew that something was wrong too. He looked over at Raze, eyes narrowed, studying him for a long time, the silence stretching out between them like a river. “What happened to you?” he asked, instead of answering Raze’s question.

  “I’m still not sure.” He couldn’t lie to Toran, even if he was willing to engage in a little bit of misdirection. The soulless had no reason to lie, were, in fact, forbidden from doing so unless ordered otherwise. Raze had forgotten how to make it believable to a man he should have considered his friend.

  “I’ll need to report any deterioration in your mental state. You know that.” Why that statement sounded like an accusation, Raze wasn’t sure.

  Before he could answer, Kayde let out a warning cry, se
nding Toran and Raze running back towards him, weapons in hand.

  “Report,” Toran demanded.

  Kayde nodded to the north of them. “That ship just appeared out of nowhere.”

  “It landed?” Toran asked.

  Raze looked over and saw a small craft whose origin he couldn’t identify. It looked like a small, long range craft and he spied an FTL engine not unlike the one on their own ship. That meant it was built for speed and stealth, not battle.

  “No,” said Kayde. “It appeared. Shields dropped.”

  A whizzing sound overhead caught Raze’s attention and he looked up to see a large craft in the distance flanked by three smaller vessels. One broke off and began flight in their direction. He touched Toran’s shoulder and pointed at the ship headed in their direction.

  Toran cursed. “I don’t like the look of that. We need to get out of sight.”

  They redoubled the effort to find an entrance to the ship and in a matter of minutes, Kayde called out that he’d found a hatch. Toran and Raze ran around to find him slamming the butt of his blaster against the age roughened metal, trying to weaken the seal. From where they were standing, it was impossible to see the ship headed their way, but the toxic anticipation tied Raze’s stomach in knots.

  A chunk of rust fell and Toran surged forward, grabbing onto the door handle and heaving. It creaked open slowly, but only a handful of centimeters.

  “It won’t seal shut again once we get it open,” Kayde warned.

  “I’ll worry about that later,” Toran panted as he pulled. Raze got next to him and found a grip, pulling alongside him. The gap widened, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, until with a sudden shudder, the door gave and swung out wide enough for all three of them to get inside. They pulled it shut behind them as best they could and made their way into the heart of the ship that could finally give them the information they needed to find out who destroyed their home.