Soulless

by Kate Rudolph

  “I have visual on the information console,” Mindy said as they made their way further into the ship. They couldn’t risk a security alarm giving them away and calling the rest of the pirates back. Sierra hated to stop where they were and sweat beaded along her brow as her blood pumped too fast in her veins, but they had to take down as much of the security system as they could.

  “Say a prayer of thanks for me that this place looks retrofitted as hell,” Sierra muttered to her partner, who shot her a smile while she got to work. The ship itself was solid, but it hadn’t been built for containment or security. The lights flickered and Sierra looked at the screen, but it was still brightly lit with a glowing map of the ship. “Was that you?” she asked, tapping a foot to keep from bouncing with spare energy.

  “Give me a minute,” Mindy muttered around a piece of wire in her mouth. “Almost there.”

  Footsteps echoed ahead of them and Mindy pressed herself flat against the wall, making herself as small a target as she could. Sierra ran up to a thin pillar and used it for her own cover, waiting for the pirates to turn around the bend. Her blaster was warm and heavy in her hand, carrying the weight of salvation and pain in one compact package. Two heads came into view and she fired, blasting off shot after shot until they went down in a sad clatter of bodies.

  While Mindy worked, Sierra stripped them of weapons, disabling their modified blasters and confiscating enough knives to slay an elephant. There wasn’t a good place to hide the unconscious bodies, so she stashed them as best she could down a narrow hallway, angling a stack of crates to hide them from view.

  Coming back up to Mindy, Sierra peered over her shoulder. “Does that give us any idea of how many slavers are in here?” she asked.

  “Lights are powered down on most of the ship,” Mindy replied. “There’s a central command center and a mess hall that have activity. Based on our crawler count from earlier and the men we’ve already taken out, I estimate we’ve got ten more hostiles on board.”

  “Wonderful.” Some of the tech they had back home would have given them exactly the information they needed, but given the parameters of the mission, there’d been no reason to requisition it. Then. Now Sierra was kicking herself for not thinking ahead.

  Mindy let out a bark of laughter, startling Sierra. “Oh that’s just perfect,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her partner looked about ready to kiss the machine. “Someone forgot to disable the admin controls,” she practically sang. “I can lock the control room and mess halls down from here. The most likely override of that little trick is to completely power the ship down, which will take them a while to figure out. Especially since I can power down their admin terminals from here.” She cackled. “God, I love idiots.”

  “Get it fucking done.” Sierra’s feet itched to get on the move. They didn’t have much time.

  A minute later, Mindy stood. “We’re good. Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

  ***

  Ten minutes into the operation and every single one of Raze’s newly awakened nerves was on edge. He felt like a green recruit, scared of his own shadow and ready to fire his blaster at anything that moved, whether friend or foe. But neither Toran nor Kayde were paying attention to him at the moment, which gave him the time he needed to at least pretend he had something like composure.

  “Cloaking reserves at seventy percent,” he reported. “Dropping as expected.”

  Their ship had some of the best cloaking tech available, but the engine burned out fast, which didn’t give them much time to engage with the slavers and Oscavian soldiers who had come to join the party.

  “What’s your status?” Toran asked over the comm line they had with the humans.

  “We need more time.” Jo came back, cool as any Detyen. “Approaching position three.”

  “Get higher,” Toran told Kayde. “We can’t maintain fire for much longer.”

  If their cloaking reserves dropped below fifty percent, they wouldn’t be able to make it off the planet undetected. Instead, they’d need to find a place to hide, which had just become much more difficult between the Oscavian military vessel and its scout ships. Escaping at the same time as the humans was their best opportunity.

  Raze jolted in his seat as one of the ground to air blasts made contact with their ship. “Shields intact,” he reported, “glancing blow.” Unless the Oscavian ships got involved, their defensive shields would hold up to the slavers’ offense. But every second that ticked by made it more likely that the Oscavians would come out to play.

  A blaze of fire flashed at the edge of his peripheral vision. Raze changed his view and saw the roaring flames coming from the other side of the settlement. “Position three is lit up,” he told his team before switching his viewer back to the scene below them.

  Pirates had taken cover in the buildings at the farthest edge of the settlement and under the rocky outcroppings nearby. They used blasters and a few surface to air weapons to try and find their ship, but with the cloaking, it was almost impossible to score a hit. Their ship wasn’t built for war and their firing capability came from a modified tractor beam. Rather than pull things to the ship, they used it to blast a weak laser at the ground. It was useful for breaking through rocks on land and pushing space debris out of the way without damaging the ship, but it was no match against actual blasters or las fire.

  The minutes ticked by and Raze kept flipping between watching the forces on the ground and monitoring the sensors. He summoned all the discipline that he’d learned in his thirty-two years to keep thoughts of Sierra out of his mind. Being on this ship was helping her do her job, and he could not afford to worry about her status and keep his men safe at the same time.

  “Reserves at sixty-five,” he warned. The more they flew, the faster they burned through the cloaking engine. Evasive maneuvers like Kayde was pulling were the most taxing use for the cloaking drive, but they still had time. The humans just needed to hurry up.

  As the reserves dropped lower and Toran got a lucky shot, hitting some kind of fuel tank and sending fire spurting up in a blooming burst, Jo’s voice crackled over their comms. “The team is returned. All safe. Thank you for flying with us. Out.”

  “Best of luck, out,” Toran replied before cutting off the comms. He looked over at Kayde and said, “Get us out of here.”

  Kayde nodded and flicked several switches on the control panel. “Fasten restraints and brace,” he ordered before taking a hold of the controls and tilting back, shooting them straight up towards the atmosphere, leaving a blast of dust from the thrusters in their wake.

  Raze braced and watched the cloaking engine reserves steadily shrink. He switched views again to study the path ahead of them. “We’re clear, space is empty and open overhead.” As the last word left his mouth, a blast rocked the ship, sending them spinning. Something rattled around, a loose piece of equipment that Raze couldn’t see, focused as he was on his monitors.

  “What in all the hells was that?” Toran demanded as Kayde righted the ship.

  A yellow warning light flashed over his screen and Raze brought up the schematic. “Something hit a panel. Heat shielding is intact, FTL is intact. Defensive shields compromised, cloaking reserves at thirteen percent.”

  A second blast rocked them, but Kayde managed to avoid the spin this time. He kept his focus on steering the ship while Toran barked out orders.

  “Is something locked onto us?” he demanded.

  Though Toran held control of their reverse tractor beam, Raze had more detailed viewers. He checked every sensor he could and ran a report on the ship’s status again. “Sensors aren’t showing anything,” he reported.

  “Then check it again!”

  A second check had Raze biting back a curse. “One of the scouts is in the air. It’s shooting randomly. I don’t think it has us on its sensors yet.”

  “Fifteen seconds to atmo,” Kayde warned.

  “We need to take out the scout,” Toran said
. “Change course.”

  “We won’t have cloaking if we do that,” Raze warned.

  Toran took a deep breath and nodded once. “Get us out of here, Kayde.”

  Raze watched the rear sensors and stared at the scout ship as if he could attack it with his eyes. In the last seconds before the sensors blacked out, the scout veered off their course and headed west. “It’s off our tail,” he reported.

  Toran acknowledged him with a second nod and Kayde guided them off planet through the thick atmosphere of Fenryr 1 and into space.

  Raze thought they were safe and ready to hop to FTL to head home when the emergency lights flashed on. He brought up the ship schematic again and hissed as he watched their systems go offline one by one. “FTL offline,” he reported, “cloaking exhausted. Heat shielding compromised, defensive shields down, main life support system down, back up life support compromised. Fuel reserves at eight percent.”

  Toran stared at Raze for several seconds, processing the news. “How far can we get?” he asked.

  Kayde was the one who answered. “With no FTL, we’ll barely make it past the next moon.”

  “And,” Raze added, “our air will run out long before then. We have three hours.” And that was if the scout ship didn’t break atmo and find them first.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Settling a dozen women onto a tiny ship fleeing from a hostile planet in a matter of minutes was almost more difficult than extracting them from their prison in the first place. Sierra turned down the extra seating in the kitchen, folding down benches that normally laid flat against the wall. She guided the women to the seats, using her most comforting voice, but after the fight and the run to freedom, she was riding high on adrenaline and she knew she sounded more excited and high strung than competent.

  “Buckle in, buckle in,” she commanded a short blond woman and a woman with short, wiry black hair and brown skin who wouldn’t let go of the blond woman’s hand. “We need everyone secured before we break atmo.”

  “Who are you?” the black woman demanded. The other women around her all nodded.

  There hadn’t been any time to exchange pleasantries as she and Mindy ushered them out of the holding pens. “My name is Sierra Alvarez. I’m from Earth and we’re taking you home.” The women just stared at her, one a few seats away daring a small smile. Sierra reminded herself that these people had been held for months, maybe longer, and forced to endure great hardship and abuse. Of course they weren’t going to cheer the second a human showed up to take them away. Hell, most of the pirates out here were human, so there was no reason to trust her more than anyone else.

  She’d deal with winning them over later. She confirmed they were all secured safely and climbed up into the cockpit with Jo and Mindy, who were already completing the pre-flight checks.

  “Do we have any company?” Jo asked as she pressed several buttons on her control panel and slowly pulled back on one of the joystick controls.

  “We have clear skies,” Mindy replied. “Take us home.”

  Sierra strapped herself in and braced for takeoff. Their deflector shield wasn’t as good at cloaking as the one Raze and his men had, and the Detyens had agreed to draw the most fire while Jo snuck into the settlement to gather Sierra, Mindy, and the prisoners. That meant they had an easier escape path and Sierra would need to find a way to thank them, somehow. She’d have months to figure it out, months until she saw Raze again. Months until she’d find out if anything went wrong on their end.

  What would she do if he didn’t show up at Honora Station?

  “Are you with us, Sierra?” Mindy asked, jolting Sierra out of her spiraling thoughts.

  She was so out of it that she hadn’t realized they’d broken atmo. “The women are buckled up,” Sierra reported. “They aren’t happy, but I can’t blame them for that. We just need to prove that we actually did rescue them. It will be okay.”

  Mindy offered her a smile and then jerked her head back to her screen as a proximity warning blared. From where Sierra was sitting, she couldn’t see anything. The warning could be anything from a little space debris to another Oscavian warship. She bit her tongue to keep from barking out orders. This was Jo’s show now.

  “What have we got?” the pilot asked, steady and calm.

  “Looks like an abandoned craft. Might have been too damaged to reenter atmo,” Mindy speculated, scanning her screen intently.

  Sierra leaned forward as if that would give her a better view, heart hammering. “You’re sure it’s a pirate craft?” she couldn’t stop herself from asking.

  “Since everything they have is scavenged, there’s no way to be certain.” Mindy wasn’t any comfort.

  Jo glanced over her shoulder. “What are you thinking?”

  Raze. “The Detyen ship. If they were under fire while leaving…”

  “Are you willing to risk the women we just saved to check it out?” Jo’s eyebrow quirked up and her gaze held the weight of fourteen lives in the balance.

  “They didn’t have to help us. We just need to get close enough to scan for life forms. If there’s nothing, we move on.” It killed her to even think it, but she couldn’t risk the women on her ship if Raze and his men were already dead. She ignored the stab of pain in her chest and the bile in her throat, doing her best to tamp down her emotional reactions.

  “Wait!” Mindy held up a hand. “We patched in to their comms. If the line is still functioning, we should be able to hail them.”

  A wave of relief washed over Sierra and she let out a heavy breath. Though it was on the tip of her tongue to give the order, she looked at Jo and waited.

  “Do it,” the pilot commanded.

  She opened the line of communication and sent out a signal. Seconds ticked by and Sierra’s pulse beat hard enough for her to hear it in her eyes. She clasped her hands together and bit her lip. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping for, but as long as Raze was alright, she would call it a win.

  “This is Toran,” a voice finally crackled over the comms. “We could use some help.”

  ***

  Raze could see his breath in the dim light of the ship. He’d lost feeling in his fingers, but his arms pulsed with a pain that radiated out of his chest and had been getting worse since the moment he stood up from his chair. The systems had failed in a cascade and now the only thing keeping them alive was the ambient air and the human ship coming to their rescue. It would take a few minutes to set up the dock, and in that time, he, Toran, and Kayde packed as many of their belongings as they could. Though, in truth, the only thing that they needed to take with them was the copy of the hard drive from the Lyrden. As long as that tech made it back to the legion, they had done their duty.

  Coming back from his quarters, Raze slung his gear bag over his shoulder and watched Toran place the drive in a secret compartment in his own bag. “No one on that ship can know about this,” Toran said, and waited for Raze and Kayde to nod their understanding. “Unfortunately, this,” he gestured to the powerless ship around them, “will set back the mission by months or more. I don’t know when we will get this data back to the legion.”

  “If it weren’t for the humans, they’d never get the data,” Raze commented. “Dead men can’t deliver anything.”

  “True,” Toran agreed. He turned to Kayde. “Set the self-destruct sequence for thirty minutes.”

  The seconds ticked by slowly, but soon the welcome sound of grinding metal reached their ears as the human ship docked with them. The airlock engaged and in no time they were through the hatch and safe on a ship full of air, light, and too many humans. Sierra met them at the air lock, her smile as bright as the sun on the snowiest day back home. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling back while Toran was looking. Some of the pain he’d been feeling dissolved under the warmth of her gaze.

  “Welcome,” she said, giving them room to step completely onto the ship before shutting the seal behind them. Sierra hit a button on the wall beside it and the lo
ck unhitched from the other ship and began to retract. She touched her ear and spoke to her crew. “Our guests have arrived. We are clear.”

  “Prepare for jump,” crackled a voice over a loudspeaker. “Two minute warning.”

  Sierra glanced up at the ceiling where one of the speakers was installed and muttered something that Raze couldn’t make out. “We’ll get you set up with somewhere to sleep once we’ve made the jump to FTL. Right now, we need to get buckled up before we get thrown around like rag dolls. Please follow me.”

  They walked down a narrow hallway with Toran right behind Sierra and Raze taking up the rear. He didn’t trust himself not to try and touch his mate if he stood too close, but he wanted to surge forward and step between Toran and Sierra to keep the other man away from her. The need to claim boiled in his blood, the need to declare to all that Sierra was his and he was hers. But with the imminent jump to FTL and his crew all around, all he could do was bide his time.

  Sierra came to a sudden stop and Toran almost ran into her, making Kayde almost run into him, and Raze brushed the back of Kayde’s uniform before he realized what was going on. Sierra let out a curse under her breath.

  “One minute warning.”

  She turned around and looked past them before shaking her head and steeling her shoulders. “All of the women we rescued are in here. We have extra seats for you in there and I don’t have time to set up anything else. Please don’t scare them.” She stared for an extra second at Kayde and Toran, as if she trusted Raze to behave himself. He couldn’t stop the small smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. Sierra caught it and her eyes brightened for a second before they both got themselves under control.