Victorious Dead (The Asarlaí Wars Book 2)

by Marie Andreas

  VICTORIOUS DEAD

  BOOK TWO IN THE ASARLAÍ WARS TRILOGY

  MARIE ANDREAS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Dear Reader…

  Acknowledgments

  Books by Marie Andreas

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2017 by Marie Andreas

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereinafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9990811-0-5

  To all the people who dream—and keep dreaming. Never give up.

  1

  V as had been dribbling beer over herself and her chair for at least three minutes. She looked around for any sort of reaction, but no one even noticed. The nice, quiet diners ate their nice, polite meals, ignoring the surly and inebriated former mercenary captain in their midst.

  With a heavy sigh, she upended the remainder of her second beer over herself. Well, she made it look like she was aiming for her mouth, but ended up drenching the two Aletari behind her. That both were in ceremonial robes and the species was so fussy they rarely left their home world was just a bonus.

  The yells and screeches that followed were music to her ears. Vas had told Gosta she wasn’t sure she could pull this off. But Ragkor was a bit too prissy for a job like this, and they didn’t have any other choices. Her crew were skilled mercs, not great actors.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The security guard who appeared before her was so polite and well-dressed that she almost missed what he was.

  “I have a right to be here, jus’ like any of these peoples.” Vas stood, fell back to her seat, stood again, missed her seat by falling on it at an angle, and then pulled him down when he tried to help her. “Peoples need to eat.” She nodded sagely while manhandling the emerald-clad guard. Gosta promised her that the ident card she needed would be in an easy access pocket since it would be used often.

  The guard squirmed but it was more from trying to stay clear of her booze-soaked clothes than anything else. The Aletari pair were now hitting pitches unknown on most planets and the rest of the patrons were either paying and fleeing, or standing around trying to watch but not appear to be doing so. It was a skill the insanely wealthy learned at an early age. This type of behavior simply didn’t happen in the nicer places and The World Restaurant was the nicest place. She’d feel sorry for the owner, except that she knew he made more in an hour than she made in a year. He could suck up any losses.

  “I’m sorry, but you will have to leave.” The guard managed to pin her upper arms—after she’d found the ident card, imprinted it into the specially designed thin, clay tablet she held, and slid the card back into his pocket. She also moved her arms so that he could pin them—this needed to look convincing after all. It was a good thing the wealthy were rarely rowdy; this guy couldn’t stop an army of eight-year-olds armed with pillows.

  “What’s going on here?” The mountain of a man behind the voice blocked all light. Or at least it seemed so. He was about seven feet tall, with shoulders wide enough to carry a few singing cherubic children on them with room to spare, and a face that said he’d love doing that.

  At least normally. Ragkor was trying to scowl and look fierce and the only reason it worked was because he was huge and extremely muscled. The scowl he was now working so hard on looked more as if he’d eaten bad stewed beets. She might need to have Flarik work with him on scowling.

  Having a second-in-command with his brawn and brains was wonderful. But him preferring to help lost kittens and assist little old ladies across the park wasn’t great for their line of work. Even their new and non-improved line of work.

  “We’ve been looking for this woman for a while now.” Ragkor got enough of a snarl in the sentence that it sounded legit. Now if he would keep the brim of his hat down so no one could see his face, they could get moving. His short, dark blond hair fit the persona of military police—and matched the badge on his arm. His big, gentle dark brown eyes would have ruined the image.

  Vas had sharp hearing, and over the wails, cries, and yelling, she heard the unwelcome sound of police response. She wasn’t wanted on this planet yet, and she’d like to keep it that way.

  “I need to keep her here. She’s caused damage, and these patrons were displaced.” The guard got to his no longer shiny black shod feet, still holding her arms.

  The sirens were getting closer. Probably less than five minutes away. Ragkor wasn’t going to act fast enough. The plan was he would take her as his prisoner, and then they’d get off this rock, after a few minor side trips. Such as grabbing the item that was the entire reason they’d been down here for the past hour, and Vas had to go through all of this to get a copy of the damn ident card. Retrieval missions weren’t hard but they could sure as hell be annoying.

  With a few twists of her shoulders, Vas freed herself from the guard, feinted a kick at Ragkor, and bolted for the door. Only to slam into a well-dressed dandy who stepped back from his table at the exact second she jumped forward.

  The man was nearly as big as Ragkor, but with long sleek black hair. The tattoo on his neck where the hair was pulled back marked him as one of the gahan, the kept men of the Empress Wilthuny. Vas knew the empress wasn’t planet side. Gosta had checked all the important downsiders. Nevertheless, the empress’s people clearly were here.

  “Please, I beg your forgiveness.” The man turned as he spoke. Vas would have fallen over if Ragkor hadn’t run up, thrown her over his shoulder, and burst out the door right at that moment.

  The kept man had met her eyes with no recognition. But she almost fell over when she saw his face.

  It was Deven. He was alive. On this plane of existence. And had no idea who she was. Her heart stopped. She
knew he wasn’t dead—he’d told her so. How could he not know who she was?

  “Damn it, Ragkor, we need to go back.” Vas pounded on his broad back but she might as well be pounding on a bull. Ragkor hunkered down and kept running.

  Vas watched the man in the restaurant until they were out of sight. That didn’t take long. Ragkor had legs the size of small trees and could move them when he wanted. It was Deven. His handsome face even had faint scars from the explosion that should have killed him. That did kill him as far as Vas knew. It was the whole came-back-afterwards part that was confusing.

  It had been a little over six months since they’d saved the Warrior Wench from the insane Rillianian monk and whoever was behind those gray ships. That long since she’d almost died and seen her supposedly very dead second-in-command, Deven, in a fever dream. He’d convinced her he wasn’t dead, but wasn’t sure where he was. Then he forced her to go back to her own body to save her crew.

  Had he found a way back from the dead, but decided he was done with being a mercenary? She’d stopped taking merc work for herself and her crew over the last four months. The outer rim planets were getting wild and frightening—any fighting that she and her crew were receiving contracts for was brutal. And she still couldn’t risk trying any of the Commonwealth inner core planets. They’d been unhealthily interested in her and her ship before they went dark. The last news block she’d seen had reported an incident in the Commonwealth capital of Galacian and that it was temporarily locking down to deal with the problem internally.

  That had been two months ago. There had been no reports out of the capital since then.

  She doubted that, with whatever in the hell was going on, anyone from inside the Commonwealth was still looking for her, her crew, or her missing ship, the Victorious Dead, but she was not taking any chances.

  She had stopped pounding on Ragkor’s back when the restaurant was lost to view. She started again as a plasma shot cleared her head by less than two feet. “Faster, faster!”

  “Aye, Captain!” Ragkor leaned down a bit, grabbed her legs even tighter, and lit out.

  Vas kept one hand on her new second-in-command, and the other on her prize: a copy of an ident card for the secured storage facility of this very rich world. She and her people weren’t doing merc work anymore, but they were still doing some possession relocation. The current items they needed to find had been taken, illegally, from a mining patriarch on one of the distant outer rim planets. Vizier Ramoth’s world had been destroyed by the gray ships months before Vas even knew they existed, but he’d managed to keep most of his wealth off planet. Except for a few items stolen by the leaders of this planet.

  Hence her needing a security ident to break into their heavily guarded center, steal the items back, and get paid.

  First, they needed to lose their tail. Ragkor ducked down an alley, one with enough coverage that the highflying drone would be hard pressed to see them. More importantly, hard pressed to see them vanish.

  “Any time now, Mac. I’m being shaken apart.” Vas tapped her comm.

  “Captain, I’m only picking up one shape. And it keeps moving.” Mac’s voice went into what Vas liked to call the whiny, waiting-to-be-smacked range. “You know I’m still learning this machine. Hold still.”

  When Vas and her crew had taken over the Warrior Wench, initially as a temporary replacement for her stolen and ripped apart ship, the Victorious Dead, they’d found a lot of very questionable tech onboard. Including a particle mover, something unseen by anyone outside of the Commonwealth’s military.

  Her navigator, Gosta, had mostly figured out how to use it. It had been the hard way, having to save Vas, Deven, and the rest of a landing party during an ambush a few months ago. But he’d gotten better at it over the past six months.

  Unfortunately, Gosta had a family emergency and had to leave for a bit. Which left her pulling off this job with her pilot, Mac, at the controls of a machine that would dematerialize her and Ragkor, and hopefully put all the parts back in the right order on the ship.

  With a sigh, she replied, “Ragkor has me over his shoulder, and we’re being shot at. By drones armed with plasma rifles. We can’t separate, nor slow down, so you’d better figure out a way to make it work, flyboy. And fast.”

  “I can help him, Captain Tor Dain.” The cultured voice that cut in belonged to the company lawyer, Flarik. Flarik was a Wavian, an extremely predatory avian race that didn’t like most other species. But she and Mac had formed a weird friendship over the last six months, so something might be changing. She also had a brain as sharp as her talons and beak.

  Another plasma shot came far too close. “Now! Flarik, we need to get out of here—” Vas’s yell was cut off as the world turned to sparkles.

  2

  Everything around her went black, cold, and weightless. Vas couldn’t feel Ragkor even though she was sure he was still carrying her. She hoped this was a weird side effect from being pulled up through the particle mover on top of each other and not that she was actually dead. Her people had a surprisingly lively accounting of the afterlife, and while she didn’t think of their beliefs as hers much anymore—that had been something she’d been looking forward to.

  That thought had just cleared her mind, when the world came back in a blaze of light, sound, and pain.

  The entire world was sideways, and too damn bright. The particle mover should have brought them to the secret subdeck on the engineering level. Instead it looked like the med labs.

  “We’ve got them, Mac. Gun it,” Terel, Vas’s medical officer, best friend, and chief know-it-all, said. “We’re under attack, you know.”

  Vas tried to sit up, but ended up sliding back down. She couldn’t find any semblance of balance for a moment.

  “What in the hell is going on?” Vas slowly moved over on the bed as she realized she was lying on something a bit too firm and muscular to be a med lab bed. Ragkor was out cold, but he didn’t look injured, in fact he looked so relaxed there was drool coming out one corner of his mouth.

  “I told you, we’re under attack,” Terel said. “Did you hit your head when you landed?” She came closer and started lifting up Vas’s hair. “Did you get shot? And why the heck is this mess running loose?” Apparently satisfied that Vas’s mass of uncontrollable red hair wasn’t hiding a plasma burn, Terel nodded.

  Vas got off her second-in-command and gingerly regained her feet. “Start from the beginning. You were supposed to sit here. Not move, not attack anything, and not get in trouble.”

  Terel ran her hand through her hair in a move she’d copied from Vas. It looked more than a little odd with Terel’s dark orange feather-like hair.

  “We were sitting here. Doing nothing. When an Orelian skip cruiser came through.” Her wince told Vas all she needed to know. Mac had an issue with an Orelian woman a few months ago. An amorous one that went horribly sideways. She’d been hunting for him ever since.

  “Deithera found him.” Running her fingers through her own wild hair at the amount of trouble her pilot could get into reminded her of Terel’s comment about the hair. To look a little less like herself, Vas had forsworn her trademark long braid and gone for a single ponytail high on her head. Judging by the masses of hair around her shoulders, the band holding it had busted sometime during the transfer up to the ship.

  “So, she’s shooting at us, to get back at us for whatever in the hell Mac did to her?” That seemed a little extreme, even for the kind of drama girls Mac went for. Knowing Mac, he simply called the girl by the wrong name.

  “Well, it looks like the girl had brothers, and they’re not happy about the situation either, so they found us and are putting an electro net around the ship.” Terel was suspiciously at the other end of the room from Vas when she let that last bit out.

  “An electro net? On my ship?” Electro nets were high-end business, they were also illegal as hell. They could fry every bit of electronics on a ship, leaving it primed to be boarded or blown up.
Vas headed for the doors.

  “It’s not functioning yet, from what we could tell, but we thought it might be better to have the particle mover send you here instead of engineering. Our shielding operates a bit differently down here. If the power cut out we’d still be functioning for a little bit.”

  Vas paused at the doorway and pointed a finger at her sleeping second-in-command. “Why is he out cold, and is he okay?”