Rogue Alien's Secret

by Kate Rudolph

  Laughter forgotten, the three women scrambled into place. They’d chosen their position since the two main hallways that led out of Nevys’s dock led right past them. They couldn’t guarantee that someone would come that way, but the odds were high.

  Keana grabbed her arm and shoved her towards an almost hidden pathway. “Cover us from down there. Chances are slim anyone will slip by, but we can’t be too careful.”

  Andie might have argued about being pushed out of the fight, but Keana was acting as first mate now, and this had nothing to do about personal feelings. Andie had been on only a handful of missions and had little fighting experience. She would be more of a hindrance than a help in hand to hand combat.

  It still rankled as she jogged down a darkened path and she cursed as she tripped over a pile of something she couldn’t quite make out in the darkness. Her eyes slowly adjusted, but all she saw were picked over construction materials and cobwebs. The station needed cleaning bots and better lights, but she doubted that was high on anyone’s priority list.

  She gripped her brand new blaster and pulled it out of its holster. She’d been practicing shooting on a simulator when she could find the time, but a simulator wasn’t real, and no matter how good the sim, she’d never felt as nervous as she did at this moment. She took a deep breath and let calm settle through her. She could do this. She just had to wait for the all clear and then all her nerves would be for nothing. Every successful mission, every mission where she wasn’t the one to fuck up, would go one step further to keeping her place on the Seventh, to proving to everyone that she belonged. Maybe someday the doubts would leave and she’d no longer feel like she was an impostor, but it wouldn’t be today.

  Those thoughts had so engulfed her that it took a minute to realize the pounding sound she was hearing were sprinting footsteps getting closer. No one had alerted her over the comms and when she clicked over to see what was going on, the line was dead. Something could have been blocking it or worse, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

  A person in a survival suit barreled around the corner, slamming into the wall and bouncing off of it and toward Andie. The suit obscured every detail except for the fact that the person coming towards her was tall and had enough muscles to crush her. That was all Andie needed to know. She raised her blaster, but the shot went wide and she cursed.

  Nevys’s crewman slowed down and titled their head as if trying to make sense of her. They lifted their hand and Andie fired off another shot before diving out of the way, but no blaster fire followed her. She poked her head up and saw the crewman aiming a device that looked like a camera at her. A camera? Why? She didn’t have time to ask questions.

  As the crewman continued to click, she aimed her blaster again and laid down a heavy wave of fire. It finally caught and the crewman stumbled back, but didn’t go down. The suit had to be absorbing some of the blows. Andie didn’t stop. The blaster could fire for a long while before it overheated and she wasn’t about to risk it.

  She missed her next shot, but it hit the camera and sent sparks shooting up. The crewman jerked where they stood before chucking the device straight at her. Andie dodged out of the way, but didn’t anticipate the crewman coming straight at her. They tackled her to the ground and she smacked against something hard and pain radiated down her side. She turned over, ready to see doom coming her way, but all she saw was the crewman retreating down another tunnel.

  She cursed and scrambled towards her feet, reaching for the blaster as she did it. She called up the comms again and this time they came online. “One came this way, but I lost him. I’m pursuing now.”

  “Negative,” Keana commanded. “He didn’t have the cargo. The team has it secure. Get back here now.”

  Andie strained to hear any disappointment in Keana’s voice, but if it was there, it was well hidden. If she’d failed badly, she’d deal with it later. She turned to head back, but her eye snagged on the broken camera before she could leave. She scooped it up and took it with her.

  Why had the crewman cared more about getting her picture than fighting her? That didn’t make any sense. The rest of the team had to know. Maybe it was nothing, but something told her there was more at play than she could imagine.

  HOURS LATER EVERYTHING was settled. Lansry had the jewels, Xandr and his crew had their payment, Nevys had a few more bruises, and the Seventh was jetting away from Station 163 as quickly as they could. The stunt they’d pulled had gained them more than a few enemies and they’d probably need to avoid the station for the near future. Lansry had said he’d keep his ears open for jobs, but Xandr would be looking in other quarters for the time being.

  He, Taryn, Keana, and Andie were sitting around the table examining the device that Andie had retrieved and listening to her story about the fight she’d been caught in.

  “I can’t tell you much about the person who came my way, other than that they were big and didn’t seem too interested in hurting me. I almost...” She shook her head and leaned back in her chair, her eyebrows scrunched down as she trailed off.

  “Almost what?” Keana asked before Xandr could.

  He wanted to reach out and comfort Andie. There was a smudge on her cheek that looked like it could bloom into a nasty bruise and he’d wanted Hayk to take a look at her, but Andie assured him she was fine. And when he’d almost insisted she’d glared, silently challenging him to force it. Xandr would have taken the another crew member at their word, so he let it drop, but he knew there was some regen gel stowed away in his room and he’d be tending to his lover as soon as they stole a moment alone together.

  Andie sighed and ran her fingers along the edge of the table. “I almost think he came looking for me. Is that weird? Maybe not me specifically, but one of the crew.”

  “There’s definitely image capture tech here,” Taryn said. She studied the device with an intent expression, poking at a control panel with a tool that Xandr couldn’t identify.

  “Thank god it wasn’t a blaster,” Andie muttered.

  Xandr counted to three before he responded, reminding himself once again that his woman hadn’t been shot, that she was sitting in front of him and okay except for a few bruises. And then the gravity of the situation crashed down on him. He shot a glance at Keana and found her looking at him, the question in her eyes. He looked back at Taryn and Andie, but they hadn’t caught the look.

  “Did any of the crew you fought have a similar device?” Taryn asked, hitting on what had just occurred to Xandr.

  “Possibly,” he conceded. “The fight went easier than it should have. It was like they gave up after only a few minutes. And Nevys looked less pissed off than he should have. He was actually a bit smug now that I think about it. That little bastard is always...” Now was not the time to get sidetracked ranting about Nevys. “So they might have suspected we’d be there. And they might have captured our images.”

  “And relayed them,” Taryn muttered, turning the device over once more.

  “What?” It came out harsh enough that Taryn’s head snapped up, looking towards him like he’d just slapped her. Xandr took a breath and got his tone under control. “How do you know?”

  “This camera isn’t exactly a spy gadget. It’s got a comm chip and as long as it had a signal, there’s no reason to think there’s not an automatic backup. If I was sending people into a fight with cameras instead of blasters, I’d want to make damn sure I was getting the images I was risking their lives for.” She set the camera down as if it had given up all the information she could pull from it for the moment.

  “So someone has pictures of the crew,” Keana said, glancing at Xandr again. “Lansry was the only one who knew we’d be there, and he didn’t have any qualms telling us about Nevys. You think?”

  “He might have sold us out. There could be a big payday associated with those pictures. Mebion loves his bounties.” The number of credits Mebion could offer was enough to fund a village for a year.

  “Why?” Andie was look
ing between the two of them, looking lost. “No offense to your skills, but you’re outlaws, surely there are some pics of you out there somewhere.”

  “We’re careful. And anything that’s out there isn’t associated with our real names or our crews.” Well, real names might have been a bit of a stretch, but Xandr Kasko was who he’d become a decade ago and it was who he planned to be until they day he died. “Ixilta has the most information about me, but they’re such a backwater that I doubt they’re feeding into Oscavian information systems. And they didn’t know my name. Nevys knows who we are, and if he has pictures he can sell that information for a lot of money.”

  “You must have pissed someone off,” Andie grinned. “Good for you.”

  “More than you know.” More than he could ever tell.

  “We’ll be careful,” Keana said, her eyes still showing the apprehension the news had given both of them. “Maybe go further away from the empire for the next little while, wait for things to die down.”

  That was smart, it was absolutely what they should do, but a part of Xandr was getting tired of running. He turned to Taryn. “Find out what you can about that. I want a full report.”

  She scooped the camera up as she stood. “You’ll have it, captain.”

  Then he turned to Andie, who was idly tracing over the blossoming bruise on her cheek. He reached for her hand and pulled her close so he could kiss her palm. “Go tend to that. There’s regen gel in our room.”

  Her eyes narrowed for a second but she nodded and left him with a kiss that encouraged him to follow along as soon as he could. That left him alone with Keana. It seemed dangerous to speak about the possible consequences in the kitchen, but the entire crew was busy, and he and his best friend would never been careless enough to speak in specifics.

  “He’s getting bolder,” Keana said when they were alone.

  Xandr pushed back from the table, the sudden need to move taking him. “He’s always been a relentless bastard.” Was there a hint of wistfulness in his voice? Some long conquered memory peeking through? Xandr hoped not.

  “And it’s only gotten worse since his... since the former duke died.” She said it gently, but there was no escaping that fact.

  “You’d think he would be too busy with everything going on back home.” He tapped his hand against the table several times, as if the tiny motions would be enough to expel the energy swirling within him. “We barely escaped him last time. If Andie wasn’t a hell of a liar he’d have me.”

  “She’s good, I’m glad to have her on the crew.” Keana seemed as surprised to say that as Xandr was to hear it. “It definitely improves the mood.”

  “You can say I was a bastard.” He hadn’t realized how cold he’d been until the spark in his heart was reignited. Or, perhaps, ignited for the first time by a human temptress he was never letting out of his bad.

  “No,” Keana shook her head. “Not a bastard. An asshole, but not a bastard.”

  “Flatterer.” They shared a grin that turned grim as they contemplated the consequences of the duke of Mebion getting incriminating pictures. “If Nevys has them, he’s secured them. There’s no point going after him again. We also know that Mebion got some form of image on the last job, I overheard him talking about facial recognition software. So if he gets what Nevys might have, he’ll know he came within meters of me and victory was snatched from his grasp. He won’t be happy.”

  “He’s incapable of happiness,” Keana reminded him.

  “There is that.”

  “Is there anything we could do but run?” It clearly pained her to ask the question. They’d been running for a decade and it had always worked before.

  “I don’t know,” was Xandr’s answer. “We might have to find out.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE REGEN GEL HAD WORKED quickly and it took less than an hour for the bruise on Andie’s cheek to fade. She barely noticed. At first she’d been thrilled by the fact that Xandr had called his quarters their room, too thrilled, if she was being honest. It could have just been a slip of the tongue, something that meant nothing. It didn’t have to be a big deal. Or it could have been him telling her that he wanted their lives even more entwined. The only way to find out was to actually talk about it, but that turned her thoughts to how he’d looked when she’d left.

  Yeah, he had bigger problems than worrying about his girlfriend’s feelings at the moment. Did she count as a girlfriend? She groaned in frustration and put the thought firmly in a box and locked it in the back of her mind. She could deal with that later.

  Who the fuck was the Duke of Mebion and what did he want with Xandr? Andie had actually met him, and at first he’d been a strange mix of charming and slimy. She’d about thrown up when Xandr literally shoved her in front of the man so he could escape without being seen, but they’d both gotten away clean from that mission. So what did the guy want with Xandr?

  Andie had learned a little about the Oscavian aristocratic system. The empire ruled over everything, but the holdings were so vast that one person couldn’t be expected to rule it all by themselves. Princes and princesses ruled individual planets and most of the royalty were somehow related to the emperor. Dukes ruled moons and sometimes smaller territories on other planets, and earls and any lower lords ruled domains on the princely planets. The Duke of Mebion was a rich and powerful motherfucker, she knew that much, but no one had told her anything else, and Andie was tired of being in the dark.

  She pulled out a tablet and fired it up while she waited for Xandr to come to her. The initial research told her nothing she couldn’t have already guessed. The duke ruled directly over three moons and indirectly over a lot of other land through various corporations. He wasn’t a close confidant of the emperor, but his father had been. He’d only been the duke for two years, but he’d been an important figure in Oscavian politics for nearly a decade. Gossipy articles talked about his unexpected marriage to his brother’s fiancé and speculated that the illicit romance was the reason his brother had retreated from society and lived an ascetic life on one of the family’s minor properties.

  What kind of ascetic lived in a mansion? That was Andie’s question. But interest in the unnamed brother had long since waned and what she’d gleaned was barely a line in an encyclopedia entry on ducal scandals. The duke had made plenty of statements about eliminating the threat that pirates and outlaws posed to the Oscavian Empire. Maybe that explained his crusade, but something about this whole thing felt more... personal.

  The door to the room slid open and Andie startled, her gaze snapping up to Xandr. She was sure she looked guilty, but she calmly shut the tablet off and put it aside as Xandr closed the door behind him. He looked at her for several beats without asking what she’d been looking at, and Andie wondered why she felt so guilty. Was it wrong to look up information on a man who seemed hell-bent on destroying them? Or she could just say she was looking at porn and this whole issue would go away.

  “Why does the duke have such a hard on for you?”

  Xandr sputtered and his eyes bugged out, the electric blue practically crackling with lightning. “Excuse me?”

  Okay, bad time to think about porn. Andie took a breath and tried again. “No offense to you or anything, but we’re not exactly running the most dangerous outlaw business out there. We’re a small crew who takes small jobs and stays away from some of the truly abhorrent stuff out there. I’d think if some Oscavian noble wanted to make an example of people he’d go after a massive slaver crew or something. Though I guess some Oscavians are into that sort of thing.” Slavery was illegal in the empire, technically. But the empire was large and the policing fell to the nobility who ruled their own lands, and some laws got overlooked for the sake of profit in the farthest outreaches.

  Xandr sank onto the bed beside her and propped his head up on his hand. It was so casual, so intimate that it took Andie’s breath away. She was the only one who got to see him like this, when some of his emotional barriers dropped and
he let go of the weight of being captain just for a little while, just when they were locked away. Here he could speak his worries and know that she wouldn’t spread them around. Here he could be Xandr the man, and she loved him for it.

  Loved? Her mind sputtered and tripped over that word and it caught her by such surprise that she almost didn’t hear Xandr speak.

  “It’s personal,” he confessed. “When Mebion sets his eyes on something, he gets it. And in the beginning of my career I might have been more concerned with proving things than surviving in the long term. Mebion was a good target.” He reached out and twined a curl of her hair around his finger, playing with it idly.

  Andie leaned in even closer, craving his warmth. “What did you want to prove?”

  He huffed out a laugh, his expression turning wry. “Everything? Anyone who knew what a useless piece of man was before I took my first ship wouldn’t believe that I’m who I am today.”

  “You? Useless? No, I don’t believe it.” She couldn’t even begin to imagine it. In her mind, Xandr had sprung fully formed as the capable outlaw he was today. He’d managed to singlehandedly escape from a high security prison with nothing but his wits and had rescued her from a tedious and terrible situation in the process without breaking a sweat. A decade was a long time, but Xandr seemed so confident as he was that it was impossible to think of him as anything but.

  “Perhaps useless isn’t the right word.” He flipped over so he was laying on his back and staring at the ceiling, and Andie turned, snuggling up beside him. “But I was fit for a certain kind of life and none other. I’d never done a day of hard labor and never thought I’d have to.”

  “Rich boy?” It was sounding more and more like he’d known Mebion in his life before becoming an outlaw. Perhaps Xandr’s family had worked for the duke, or been close friends. That would explain the strength of their rivalry.