The Eminence raced by. Boyd looked at its dark hull. A huge ship, so powerful. A symbol of the Union and its dominance of the Scorpio System.
“You wish you’d stayed on the Resolute?” she asked. She ran her fingers through Boyd’s hair.
Boyd looked at the direction they were tumbling in. The belt was only a short distance away, and hopefully, he could find somewhere to set down. He looked at Thresh, the backdrop moving as they fell through space.
This was dangerous. This was thrilling. He looked at Thresh and couldn’t help but feel her body as it pressed against his. He told himself to focus, but it was difficult when he could feel her, smell her. When he spoke, his voice was deep and heavy. His own voice gave away his feelings for her. But still, he tried to push them aside.
“Let’s try and find somewhere to set down. This respirator was not built for this, and we don’t have much time.”
But Boyd could spend an eternity out here in the black if he could be next to Thresh.
She locked eyes with him, and he could hear her breath changing. It slowed but deepened at the same time. He saw Thresh glance at his lips, and his own breath quickened. She pressed her body even closer to his. What little focus he had on the outside world disappeared. The world out there didn’t matter. All that mattered was right here, right now.
Thresh moved her face forward and let her lips brush against his. They felt soft and warm. How long had it been since he had felt the delicate features of a woman? He didn’t know, but he knew he had never felt the way he felt when he was with Thresh. She let her lips brush up against his again and he knew she was teasing him. While he felt wildly out of control, she was the complete opposite, enjoying her power over him, and that just drove him even more crazy. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He reached up and gently, but firmly, put his hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her hair. He pressed his mouth to hers and heat flashed through his body. Thresh must have felt it too, because she let out a moan and kissed him like she was devouring her favorite meal. And she was hungry. So hungry.
Finally, she pulled away, leaving Boyd breathless. Thresh just smiled at him. She was still in control while he barely had his wits about him, and he knew she was enjoying it. He had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time she’d have him in this position—at least, he hoped it wouldn’t be.
She smiled and snuggled against him.
Boyd looked toward the belt, dark objects glinting in space. Still a long way to go, and no certainty that they would make it. It was risky, and it made him feel great.
16
The asteroids of the belt swarmed around Boyd and Thresh as they floated in their bubble. The atmosphere was running low, and their speed was running high.
Boyd showed Thresh his holo-stage. A Faction settlement was within range. He pointed, not talking, conserving what little atmosphere remained in the bubble.
Boyd pointed to the settlement, hidden in the dark and distance, and indicated to Thresh that he would put them down there.
“We need to slow down,” Thresh said quietly, trying not to use air unnecessarily.
Boyd nodded. He pushed the muzzle of the pulse pistol through the field. It was like pushing through a thick, viscous liquid. With the muzzle outside of the bubble, he fired a wide beam. The pulse acted like a reverse thrust and slowed the bubble.
“That’s a Faction settlement. Be careful what you fire at or they might take offense.”
Boyd nodded. But there was nothing he could do except fire again.
The asteroid came into view, a huge asteroid that had a small asteroid moon of its own. The weak gravity just about held the dust on the surface in place and the tiny rock of a moon in a slow orbit. Buried in the surface of the asteroid was a small mining town with a docking bay for small ships—a couple of Faction raiders at most.
Boyd fired again and slowed their movement. They were no longer flying through space but falling toward the slowly spinning asteroid.
“We’re running out of air,” Thresh said. She was looking pale. Boyd was feeling dizzy as the effect of carbon dioxide poisoning became apparent. In a few minutes, they would both be asleep before finally dying.
“It is going to be a hard landing.” Boyd watched the docking bay coming closer. A deflection shield covered the opening. “We’ll have to deactivate the bubble before we reach the docking bay or we’ll be repelled and flung back out into space.”
“I’ll do it,” Thresh said. “But not until the last minute. Once the deflection field bubble is down, we’ll be exposed to space. I’ll give us a few seconds before the cold and the vacuum gets us.”
Boyd judged the distance and the speed. They were going to fly into the docking bay at a painful twenty meters-per-second, but they should survive the landing with little more than some minor cuts and bruises.
“Drop the field when I pat you on the shoulder,” he said. He looked Thresh in the eye. She was looking nervous. He’d never seen her nervous, not even when he was pointing a pulse pistol at her heart. “Breathe out, expel all the air from your lungs or it’ll expand in the vacuum and you’ll bust a lung.”
Thresh started to breathe out.
“And hold me close. It’ll get real cold real quick.” Boyd let out his breath and wrapped his arms around her. He held her tight, enjoying the closeness of her body but also to squeeze out any air still in her.
He looked over her shoulder to the docking bay. A group of docking technicians were staring up at them, pointing and wondering what they were looking at. As he came closer, they started to see but not yet believe. He tapped her shoulder.
The field vanished, and the cold hit hard. He felt his eyes swell almost to bursting. His lungs burned. His flesh began to burn as the gas and liquid in the upper layers of skin began to boil.
Then they passed through the deflection field holding the atmosphere in the docking bay. They came in at a low trajectory and skidded along the ground. Boyd felt Thresh being ripped from his arms, and he tumbled over the smooth composite deck. He rolled until he hit the rear wall, scorched with blast marks from a hundred Faction ship takeoffs.
Boyd felt the air in his lungs, and his skin stopped burning. He heard footsteps running toward him. He looked around to find Thresh. A huddle of Faction docking bay crew were gathered around her. Then his view was obscured by a pair of Faction troopers pointing ancient pulse rifles at him.
“A Blue Star Marine,” one said. “You chose the wrong town to invade, Union boy.”
“He’s with me,” Thresh was calling, her voice harsh and weak.
Thresh pushed through the gathering crowd and over to Boyd, who was being prevented from getting to his feet by two serious and confused Faction troopers.
She pushed them aside and sat next to Boyd.
“I’m Enke Thresh. Tell your communication room to send out a message for Kitzov that Thresh is alive.” She pushed the muzzle of a pulse rifle out of Boyd’s face. “He’s with me. He’s not Union. He’s Faction.”
Boyd looked around at the nervous faces. He stood up, weapons still aimed at him, and laughed. This was so dangerous. It was the most excitement he’d had since being discovered as a spy. He could have been killed. They still might shoot him, kill him where he sat, happy to put a few holes in his Blue Star Marine jacket. He laughed again, and his lungs hurt.
Thresh wrapped her arms around Boyd’s neck and buried her head in his shoulder. “We made it. I thought we were dead. We made it.”
Boyd looked around. The Faction civilians staring at him and Thresh, the pair who fell from space with not even an environment suit between them.
“Any of you know where we can get a shower?” Boyd asked, helping Thresh to her feet. “Falling through space is not as easy as it looks, and I could do with a good shower.”
One open-mouthed civilian pointed Boyd toward a doorway at the edge of the landing bay. Beyond lay a small mining town. A small-town street built into the interior of the mined-out a
steroid. A bar, small residential pods, and a shower block.
“Do they have men’s and women’s showers?” Boyd said.
Thresh slipped her arm through his. “You’ll want separate showers for Union and Faction next.”
A trooper ran up alongside Boyd. “The town governor wants to talk to you right away.”
“The governor can wait.” Boyd walked arm in arm with Thresh to the shower block.
The trooper jabbed a pulse rifle in Boyd’s side. “No. Now.”
“Not out of danger yet,” Boyd said to Thresh. “You go shower. I’ll see you soon.”
As Boyd walked away, he wondered how much he could trust Thresh. He’d risked everything to help her escape, and she might know that he was still determined to bring Kitzov to Union justice. She could stab him in the back at any moment. He looked down at the rifle at his side.
So much danger on all sides. Boyd wasn’t sure if he’d survive the day. At last, he was happy again. It might not last, but then again, he wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t. He walked into the governor’s office and the door slammed shut behind him.
No Union Blue Star had ever gone this deep undercover. Will Boyd was so deep that not even he knew if he was still a Blue Star or if he was a rogue. He hoped he would live long enough to work it out.
Rogue
Blue Star Marine, Book 5
1
Will Boyd sat in a small alcove outside a café in the asteroid’s central chamber and looked up to the rock ceiling high above him. A haze blurred the view, but Boyd could still see street transports dashing along and people walking around overhead. It was disorienting at first, but he had been here for a few weeks and was starting to get used to it.
The Faction mining asteroid was much like any other of its age and size. The asteroid had been hollowed out to create a central chamber almost a kilometer across. The inside edge of the asteroid was lined with grav plates, creating a near spherical hollow, and it was protected from the void of space by a rock wall almost three hundred meters thick. Streets and buildings lay wrapped around the inner chamber. The tallest towers reached toward the central point of the chamber where ‘up’ meant toward the center.
“This must be why Faction people are so crazy,” Boyd said, looking across the small table to Thresh sitting opposite him. She was wearing a simple dress, her hair tied up with a strip of dull material. She was dressed in the colors worn by so many of the off-duty miners eating at the street-side café.
“Crazy? Why do you say that?” She smiled at him and reached out to take his hand in hers.
“This.” Boyd waved around him, showing the people walking upside-down overhead and the people walking up the sides of the hollow chamber. “Having people walking overhead like this. Upside-down buildings. It’s what drives all you Faction types crazy.”
“You are upside-down to them,” Thresh said. She picked up Boyd’s hand and kissed it. “You Union types are the strange ones. You can’t just let people live their own way. You need to see things only from your point of view. Everything needs to be under your control.”
Thresh’s hands were soft, not calloused like the miners of the settlement. Only a few clerical staff and some storekeepers had soft hands here. Most were rough hands, formed in the dark, hot mines that were still being worked at this facility.
Beyond a certain size, settlements could no longer avoid the attention of the Union and were brought under the Union’s control. Taxed and policed by the Union, regular visits from Union cruisers helped maintain their authority, helped ward off pirates, helped keep the black ice or other mineral wealth flowing to the Union capital on Terra.
Boyd stood up out of his chair a little to lean across the table. He took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and gently pulled her to him. They kissed deeply and passionately, drawing glances from the breakfast crowd outside the café.
Boyd sat back down, smiling at her.
“I don’t think I am Union anymore.” He picked up his cup and took a sip of the strange root brew all the Faction people seemed to enjoy. Even though they poured sugar into the dark brew, it still tasted bitter, but it gave a kick like a stim shot. Boyd put the cup down with a shake of his head. What he wouldn’t give for a boiling hot cup of leaf tea from Terra right now.
Thresh watched Boyd struggle with his drink and smiled. “You can take the boy out of the Union, but you can’t take the Union out of the boy.” She sat back in her chair, holding her hands behind her head and stretching. She looked up at the people overhead, tiny dots moving a kilometer away on streets between composite residential towers, stores, and bars. Every facility necessary for life was here, deep in the Scorpio System’s asteroid belt, far away from planetary civilization.
Boyd had totally fallen for Thresh. She had captivated him from the first moment he had seen her. He had been undercover in the Faction aboard the ship of a notorious pirate and she had joined the crew as a replacement engineer. They had been destined to meet, but it had been impossible for them to be together. She was a Faction member, and he was a Union Blue Star Marine—an elite soldier trained to hunt and kill Faction pirates. They were enemies. But somehow, now they were lovers.
A distant horn sounded, echoing around the massive hollow asteroid. There was movement from all around as miners began their shift. The chamber was busy as people streamed out of residences and shops to the mine entrance tunnels cut all around the edge of the central chamber. Even though the chamber had been mined out to create the town, the asteroid still had many years’ worth of mineral resources ripe for extraction and several mine tunnels led away from the central chamber to the series of connected working mine faces.
Soon the streets were quiet, with only a few Faction kids running truant from classes. Off-duty miners moved about in a determined but relaxed manner. The waitress from the street-side café came and cleared tables left cluttered with half-finished mugs of brew. She gratefully scooped up the tips left under mugs on the messy tables.
“Can I get you folks anything more?” she asked as she came to Boyd and Thresh.
Boyd held up his mug. “Do you have tea?”
Thresh snatched the mug from his hand and placed it heavily on the table. She laughed and looked up at the waitress. “Tea? He’s such a joker.” She turned to him with a fierce expression. “You are such a joker, Will. I swear I could cut your kravin head off sometimes.” She laughed again.
The waitress walked off and cleared another table.
“Tea?” Thresh said in a harsh whisper and rolled her eyes. “Try not to look like a Union gent all the time. You were a spy once, so you know how to act like you’re really Faction. Just try and fit in like you did before.”
“Union? Faction? What’s the difference? These are just people, living out here in the belt. They don’t care who is taxing them, Union or Faction. They just want to stack up some credits and get out of this stinking hole of a mine.”
“Faction doesn’t tax,” Thresh said. She picked up her mug and drained the tepid bitter brew.
“The Faction doesn’t call it tax,” Boyd said. “But if a Faction raider came by, they would soon find out this settlement wasn’t under Union control and would offer their own protection. Whatever way you cut it, the miners end up handing over part of their credits to someone.”
Thresh slammed her mug down. “Can’t you just stay off politics for one day?”
“Politics affects everything, every day.”
“What about the Skarak? They don’t seem interested in our politics.”
Boyd looked into his mug. The liquid looked thick and cold. “We don’t know what they want, but I bet they have some form of politics. A bee’s hive doesn’t look very political, but there is some point where the queen is suddenly not the queen anymore and a new one is accepted. It doesn’t look like politics to us, but maybe that’s how the Skarak operate.”
“So you think the Skarak just want to invade the system so they can make more honey? Do
you need some Skarak honey to sweeten your root brew?”
Boyd looked up at Thresh. She was mocking him with her cheeky smile. Her eyes sparkled and her lips glistened with the sheen of bitter drink. Boyd kissed her then pulled away.
“Yuck,” he said, wiping his mouth. “You taste of that root crap.”
Boyd felt his chair lurch suddenly, and he sensed the presence of three large men crowding him.
“Breakfast is over,” one of the men said. “So you can get up and get the krav out of here if it’s such a stinking hole of a mine.”
Boyd didn’t turn around, but he was able to fix the positions of all three. He judged their size, and all were bigger than him. He had lost a little weight in the last couple of weeks and knew he was a little light of his fighting weight that he liked to keep at about eighty kilos.
Boyd picked up his mug and sipped the bitter brew.
“I’m just getting started,” Boyd said.
“Come on, Will,” Thresh said. She took his hand. “We can’t sit here all morning.”
“Yes, Will,” one of the men said. “Listen to your little lady and get gone.”
Thresh stood up. “Little lady?” she said, sharp and cold.
Boyd smiled. He knew that tone. Thresh wasn’t going to take any insolence from some thug.
Boyd felt a hand on his shoulder, fingers gripping the cloth of his shirt. He was pulled up and out of his chair, the table tumbling as he was pulled backward.
As Boyd was released, he turned to face the three men. One had a full dark beard, while the second had no hair at all, his skin charred and scarred as if from some mining accident. The third was smaller, covered in a million freckles, but he looked the meanest of the three by far. By the way he stood, Boyd knew instantly he was the trained fighter of the three.
Blue Star Marine Boxed Set Page 49
