Espinoza slammed his fist on the console. “Ethan?”
“Working on it.” He fumbled with something on the other side of the line. “This is one of those times when the beautiful pink-haired damsel is supposed to be saving the useless men in distress.”
Alanna continued to work her fingers through the airborne dial. “I’m trying!”
Dania’s cruiser bared down on them. Not to mention the smaller trapping vessels that would no doubt reach them first.
Espinoza’s ship needed better shields or they’d be ripped to pieces. Dania scanned the deck, and the walls. If she were free, she could protect the ship easily.
The bindings burned, almost like they were tightening on her wrists. She called up enough power to charge herself, and the icy sting of the Palian steel sliced up through her spinal column and exploded. Her blood boiled, searing and burning from within.
She gritted her teeth, unsuccessfully thwarting a whimper. Her hair stuck to her temples as she lifted her gaze to the screen, struggling to catch her breath.
For the first time she could remember, she was powerless. If the trapping vessels reached them, there’d be nothing she could do.
The ship rocked. A new spray of sparks shot from the ceiling.
Alanna shielded her eyes. “They’re getting too close.”
That, Dania had to agree with. The last blast was dead on. Someone had good aim, and when they got closer, that happy trigger finger might break through the airlock. Dania could live several hours floating in space. But that was without Palian steel leaching away her strength. Was it even possible to survive the vacuum of space without a shield around her?
The royal cruiser got larger on the screen.
Ty glanced at Dania, then to his captain. “Okay, boss, maybe taking an enforcer on board wasn’t such a good idea.”
Doc’s voice came over the speaker again. “I might be able to scramble their systems.”
“Do it.” Espinoza stared down Dania’s ship as Kile took out another one of the trapper crafts. “Ethan, even a little bit of power would be nice.”
“Tell me about it. I’m working with a flashlight down here.”
Five more trapper vessels flew past them, leaving Espinoza’s ship alone.
“Did they just go by us?” Alanna asked.
Ty looked into his console. “They’re turning around.”
The ships crossed back over them, attacking Dania’s cruiser head on. Blasts riddled the hull and a line of ice crystals streamed from her ship as the air escaped into space.
Dania’s lips parted. What was happening? Her ship was nearly impenetrable.
Ty pointed at the screen. “Are you all seeing what I’m seeing?”
“They’re venting air,” Alanna said.
She was right. That shouldn’t have been possible.
With Dania’s ship looking at least temporarily disabled, three of the trapper vessels turned and headed right for Espinoza’s ship.
Alanna spun the light dial again. “I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going.” She punched the center of her dial, and a white cloud filled the room. The floor beneath Dania’s feet trembled.
“What the blazes, Alanna?” Espinoza yelled through the fog.
“Sorry, hold on.”
The room shook. A screech filled the air like a million Entrogian scalpers screaming at the same time.
Then silence. They jolted to a stop. The fog sparkled and faded away.
Ty leaned over his console. “Where are we?”
“Scans?” Espinoza asked.
Ty gaped. “I think that’s the Trillian Cluster out there.”
Espinoza checked the readings. “I think you’re right.”
It wasn’t possible for them to be within a hundred parsecs of the Trillian Cluster. Not even the king was capable of bending that much space, as far as Dania knew. Then again, why would he even have a reason to try?
They both looked at Alanna, as did Dania.
The woman’s pale skin hinted at a greenish hue. “I think I’m going to puke.”
She stumbled, and Ty grabbed her, easing her to the floor.
Espinoza tapped the communication button. “Doc, Alanna passed out again.”
“On my way.”
Again? Interesting.
Dania slipped to the ground. She’d seen the high prince bend space half as far as this once before. However, he was one of the highest-ranking Banes on record. For a commoner to have that kind of power was unthinkable. Even Dania couldn’t manipulate space like that. She’d have to conjure a singularity of some kind.
Doc appeared and placed a cloth on the girl’s head.
Dania stretched, trying to look around them, but the blue circle of light was nowhere to be seen.
“Keep scanning,” Espinoza said. “Those trappers don’t know what happened to us, but they can probably at least figure out which way we went.”
Ty returned to his console. “If they had a jumper of their own, they would’ve been on top of us already.”
A jumper? Dania glanced back to the woman again.
“If they do have a jumper, the trail will only last three minutes. We need to be ready, just in case.”
Ty reached up and turned off the emergency lighting, casting them in darkness.
An interesting ploy. Most non-military scans would look for interior lights in the dark of space. Most enforcers would look for power signatures as well, though. Of course, it didn’t look like Dania’s ship would be searching for her for quite some time.
The doctor pulled out a small personal lamp and set it beside the woman, casting a reddish glow over her face.
Espinoza looked back to the sparking equipment. “Let’s make what repairs we can, as quickly as we can. I have a bad feeling they’re not going to give up that easily.”
Unless, of course, the damage to Dania’s ship was only minimal, and Kile was already rounding up all of the trappers. By now, he’d have sent out individual ships, and all of her pilots were more than capable of destroying multiple targets, even if the main cruiser had been disabled.
However, Kile’s actions had seemed odd, almost disjointed. Could he have panicked?
Dania knew Alexander would be concerned for her, especially if they’d figured out that she hadn’t been taken by her intended targets. Kile should be more in control of his emotions, though.
She wished she could get word to them both. If anything, so she could let Kile know to back off, at least for now.
Dania looked back at the woman, still pale and looking like she was asleep. There was something very interesting about this crew, and it only had a little bit to do with their murderous captain.
8
Cal
The floor to the bridge hummed lightly as Cal knelt down beside Alanna. The back of his neck itched, which had everything to do with the eyes of the enforcer still throwing daggers in his direction. She’d been blessedly silent, but that wasn’t enough to keep her presence from encompassing the room.
That didn’t matter, though. Cal had more important things to worry about.
He smoothed back Alanna’s hair as Doc placed a thin strip of metal onto her forehead. “Is she going to be okay?”
Doc nodded. “She knows better than to try to pull the ship that far, but she’ll be fine.”
Alanna blinked and smiled at them. “Stop looking at me like I’m dying. I just took a little nap.”
Cal pursed his lips. “Right here on the floor of the bridge?”
She sat up, rubbing her nose. “Well, it was here, and I was tired, so why not?”
Cal tucked back her pink-edged bangs. “You don’t have this jumping thing down pat yet. You need to be more careful.”
Alanna pushed his hand away. “And we also need to be alive. It’s nothing I can’t handle.” She shielded her eyes as sparks crackled over the co-pilot’s panel. “Stars, I go to sleep for a few minutes and the whole place goes to heck.”
“I’m handl
ing it.” Ty pinched off the sparking wire and flames ignited beside him. He cursed before smothering it with a rag.
Alanna pulled herself to her feet. “Let me help before you melt the whole system matrix.”
Cal grasped her shoulder. “Is she cleared for duty, Doc?”
Doc shrugged. “I guess. She looks good to me.” He nudged Alanna. “Take it easy, girl, or I’m going to have to start treating the captain for high blood pressure again.”
Cal glared at him. He’d never been treated for high blood pressure. Although this crew had driven him to drink on more than one occasion.
Doc placed his stuff back into his bag and headed toward the door. He took another look at the enforcer, shook his head again, and left the deck.
Cal certainly couldn’t blame him. He’d leave if he could, too.
He hit the communication button for the engine room. “Ethan, you okay down there? Any fires?”
“Fires. No. Do you have any fires up there?”
Another flame shot out from the panel. Alanna and Ty swatted it with towels.
“No fires up here,” Ty said.
Ethan snorted through the intercom. “Alanna, are you up there to help Ty?”
She chuckled. “Yeah, I’ll keep them from doing irreparable damage.”
The enforcer sighed, shaking her head like the crew were children, not worth her time.
The one who’d killed Cal’s father had acted the same way, stomping through the blood in the streets like they’d inconvenienced him.
It was like this woman couldn’t drop the attitude, even though she’d been chained to a wall.
She was far from incapacitated, though. That, he was sure of. Cal needed to remember to treat her like the caged animal she was.
Cal flipped a switch on his control panel. “Ethan, if you’re stable down there, would you please come up for a minute?”
“Be right there, boss.”
Cal took a deep breath. They all seemed so calm. Either they’d almost died so many times that this was no big deal, or they all had bigger balls than he did. Of course, they might all be insane for being part of his crew from the start. Unfortunately, that was the more likely scenario.
The enforcer pushed up onto her knees, her arms still bound behind her and wrenched at an odd angle. Death irradiated from her eyes.
He rubbed his forehead. Yesterday he would have given almost anything to keep as far away from the enforcers as he could, and now there was one tied up on his bridge. Cal didn’t know who was crazier…him, or his crew.
At this point, it really didn’t matter. They needed to deal with the problem at hand. He strode toward the enforcer. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
The girl blew a strand of that freaky opalescent silver hair from her face. “For what?”
“For saving your life.”
Her lips parted slightly as she stared at him. “Saving my life? You kidnapped me.”
His T-shirt stretched as he folded his arms. “For your own safety. Those guys back there would’ve sold you into slavery.”
She twisted, showing her cuffs. “You put these on me before they even got there. Without them, I could’ve handled myself.” She smiled as sweet as acid. “How about you take them off, and we can have a more proper conversation?”
Did she think he was a complete idiot? “Don’t hold your breath, sweetheart.”
Cal pushed through the door into the hallway, pacing atop the worn imprint in the flooring. He’d done the right thing. He couldn’t have left the enforcer back there. Now, though, he wasn’t sure what to do with her.
Ethan rounded the corner. His eyes widened. “Whoa. You look like you’re about ready to blow a gasket.”
Cal held up a finger, silencing him. “First of all, I saw you take a hit out on the station. Are you okay?”
Ethan’s mouth formed an ‘O’ before he turned, showing the burn-line seared into the back of his jacket. “Just a scratch. I didn’t feel a thing. Luck of the Irish, my friend.”
“Good. In that case…” He shoved Ethan against the wall. “What were you thinking? I expect this kind of idiocy from Ty, not you.”
The engineer stared at Cal for a moment. “Are we talking about the pretty platinum blonde in the handcuffs? Because I thought she was totally your type.”
“This is not funny.” He pointed in the direction of the bridge. “That is an enforcer.”
Ty stepped out into the hall. “And that’s exactly why she’s here. Think this over, boss. She has the ear of the royal family. She’s one of their own. They trust her.”
“This is not making me feel better.” Cal glanced at the closed door. “And did you actually leave Alanna alone in there with her?”
“Alanna can hold her own, and the enforcer is shackled to the wall, anyway.”
Hopefully, the energy-draining properties of those handcuffs were as strong as everyone said they were, because an enforcer didn’t need their hands to destroy everything in their immediate vicinity.
Ty looked at the door to the bridge. “I talked to this girl in a bar, of all places. She’s not a blank automaton like the others. I think I can get her to listen to reason.”
Was he daft? “She’s not going to listen to reason. She’s a cold-blooded executioner-in-training.”
“The key words there are in training.” Ty held up his hands. “I’m telling you. She still has feelings and she’ll listen. I saw her grant a criminal mercy and she admitted she’d do it again. Whatever they do to brainwash them into not caring or having any remorse hasn’t happened to her yet.”
Cal rubbed his face. He hoped so, for all their sakes. “Are all the fires out?”
Ty nodded. “Alanna is starting on the electrical work.”
“Good.” He turned to Ethan. “How long will your repairs take?”
“An extra few hours if we keep running dark, but I think five at the most.”
Five hours as sitting ducks, and a woman on board who was probably already planning all the possible ways to kill him and his crew.
Cal supposed this was just another day on the Star Renegade. “All right, let’s get to it. I’d rather be mobile in case anybody looking for us finds a way to track Alanna’s jump.”
Ethan gave a thumbs-up and headed back down the hall.
“And the girl?” Ty asked.
They really didn’t have much of a choice. “We’ll give your plan a try, but then we’ll drop her off at the nearest habitable planet and then we do what we do best.”
“Run like hell?”
Cal nodded. “Run like hell.”
9
Dania
The pink-haired woman glanced in Dania’s direction before she leaned over the control board, tucking a wire that she’d spliced together into the panel. She moved to the next set of wires and barely seemed to look at them before she’d twisted them together and moved to a third set.
There was more to this Alanna woman than maintenance skills, though. She’d pulled this ship through space, something no human should be able to do. She was a conundrum Dania very much wanted to figure out, but she needed to handle this delicately.
Extracting needed data without injuring someone was Alexander’s forte, but she’d seen him sweet talk information from people enough times. All she needed to do was pretend to be nice.
How hard could it be?
“You’re fast with repairs.” Dania did her best to keep her voice smooth and warm.
The woman glanced at her again. “Yeah, well, we get banged up a lot. I guess it’s the nature of the business.”
Dania shifted, hoping to look only partially interested. “And what is that business?”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Trading, of course. Nice, run-of-the-mill, legal trading.”
Dania held her expression steady, sure that their trading was anything but legal. On top of the murder charge, Espinoza was wanted in three systems for smuggling illegal foodstuffs and several types of contraband machinery.
/>
However, Espinoza wasn’t her chief concern at the moment, now that they’d left Dania alone with the most interesting member of their crew.
“Back there, when we were being attacked by those horrible men…” Dania cringed at the weak sound in her voice. “The ship suddenly went so fast.” She feigned a slight smile. “That was you who got us out of there, wasn’t it?”
The woman kept working. “Yeah.”
Dania considered the blue circle that had appeared in the air as if Alanna had willed it into being. When she’d seen the high prince skip a ship from one star system to the next, he’d drawn in the air, but she hadn’t seen anything like the blue dial of light this Alanna woman had used.
“How did you do it?” Dania asked. “It looked like magic.”
Alanna raised a brow. “This, coming from an enforcer who can make a bullet rise out of a man’s chest and then heal the skin over.”
Technically, Dania couldn’t do that. Healing wasn’t one of the gifts granted to her by her prince, which was fine, since he’d given Alexander enough healing power to care for her entire squadron of enforcers.
“Healing doesn’t seem like much compared to making a ship move so fast.”
Alanna continued to tinker. “It’s just something I’ve always been able to do. Cal says it’s called ‘jumping.’ It’s not common, and I’ve had to learn on my own.”
Interesting. If it wasn’t common, that meant there might be more like her. Dania wasn’t aware that humans had the capacity to harness that kind of power. Even on the Bane home world, only the most powerful of the royal family had such gifts. The high prince, the king, one of the princesses, but few others, at least on record. Alanna’s warm coloring showed no signs of the rich blue hue of the Banes, though.
This was an enigma indeed.
Too bad this woman could be tied to smugglers and at least one murderer. Dania would have liked to study her, but she doubted she’d have the time before Alanna would have to be executed with the rest.
Renegade Magic (Star Renegades Book 1) Page 6
