Victorious Dead (The Asarlaí Wars Book 2)

by Marie Andreas

  Terel smiled but Marli shrugged. Her human glamour was a lot easier to read than her real face. And she looked exhausted.

  Vas waved to Gon. “Can you escort our guest to one of the extra crew rooms? I think she’s going to collapse.”

  “I’m fine,” Marli said but there wasn’t much power behind it. She staggered a bit as she took off her med suit.

  “You’re on my ship, I’m the captain, and what I say goes. Go eat something and rest. When your ship comes back, it will probably notify you before us anyway.”

  Gon looked down at Marli. In her current appearance, Vas was sure he was wondering if it might be easier to pick her up.

  Marli saw that too. “None of that, boyo. I can still walk.” She slipped her arm through his and spun them toward the door. “We don’t want a cranky captain, so how about we go visit the galley and grab me some food, then a nice place to rest my head?” She looked down at her clothes. “Maybe some spare clothing as well? And a bath, I do hope your guest quarters have a lovely tub.”

  They walked out the door and earshot as Marli continued to add more things. Apparently, once she’d agreed to rest, there were plenty of items that were involved.

  Vas waited a moment, then looked down at Deven again. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I’d say that anyone who can do what he did, and be lying there breathing and alive, is going to be okay.” Terel squeezed Vas’s shoulder. “When was the last time you slept? And no, being knocked out in a broken Fury doesn’t count.”

  Vas laughed. “I have too many things to look into right now. Sleep is for the dead.” That quote was part of a much longer one that was a favorite of Aithnea. But it was true in this case. There were shadow ships, attack ships claiming to be from the Commonwealth, and whatever was going on with the planet below them. Also that damn job. All hanging over her head.

  “Dying is what I’m supposed to keep from happening. You need rest, Vas. Not to mention whatever went on between you and sleeping beauty took a lot out of you. You’re as pale as our guest.”

  Vas finished taking off her med suit, then leaned over to one of the reflective machines for a look. She did look a bit on the pale side.

  “How about a compromise,” Vas said as she pushed Terel out of the door. Pela and a few other med tech support staff were waiting outside and swarmed in the minute the door was open. Terel looked ready to complain about being removed from her patient, but Vas shook her head.

  “Pela has this. Everything they need to know about the situation is in those machines. I have an idea that will get our minds off all of this.” Vas turned toward a different lift. “We can grab some food, then go do some scans on the buoy.”

  Terel wasn’t a technology kind of person, but she nodded. “If you promise to get some sleep afterwards.”

  Vas smiled and dragged Terel to the galley. “Agreed.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, Vas was beginning to think Terel might have been right. She was seriously leaning over the monitor she was working on. Of course, the fact she’d eaten enough food to feed a small band of marauders wasn’t helping her stay awake.

  And, to make matters worse, so far they hadn’t been able to find any way to break the seal on the damn buoy. It sat there on the other side of the most powerful clear decon paneling they had, mocking her. And Vas knew the mocking was in Aithnea’s voice.

  “I have to say, Aithnea was an impressive woman,” Terel said as she tweaked the scan they’d been using by the tiniest of margins. “I have never even heard of something this well sealed.” That was one benefit; Terel was now more interested in the thing than she’d been before. Give her a puzzle and she’d be content for days.

  Vas jerked herself awake again and shook her head. There was something they were missing—something she was missing. Aithnea would have been damn sure Vas could get into the buoy.

  Vas flicked open her comm. “Gosta? Any sign of anything interesting from the markers left at the explosion?”

  “Hrrru here, Captain. The third shift is on now. But I have been checking the feed, and as of now there has been nothing of interest. Not even any scavengers.”

  Now that was interesting. And concerning. Yes, the radiation would be massive, but if any word had gotten out about this explosion, there would have been ships swarming the area. Lack of gossip was more of a worry than a comfort. People didn’t gossip when they were afraid. Vas added that to her growing list of ‘worry about it later’ problems. “Thanks—keep me updated.” She clicked off then turned to see Terel glaring at her. “What?”

  “Bed. Now. You.” Terel folded her arms.

  Vas glared back at her, but the image was destroyed when a yawn snuck past her defenses. “Fine.” She clicked open her comm again. “Belay that last order. I’m going to my quarters. Contact Terel if you find anything. I’m sure she will get me.”

  At Hrrru’s agreement she cut off the comm and turned for the door. “You’d better contact me if anything, and I mean anything, changes.”

  Terel was already drifting back to her scans. “I will, but if you don’t go to sleep now, I will drug you and dump you in the brig.” She flashed a grin, then went back to her scans.

  Vas rubbed her head and managed to make her way back to her quarters. She wished she’d had time to say goodbye properly to Aithnea. But she also wished she could figure out what Aithnea had left for her, what information she had been protecting, and what in the hell Vas and her people were going to do that would be important enough to destroy an entire system to protect.

  She’d gotten her boots off when another avenue hit her. She tapped her comm. “Terel? How’s Ragkor doing?” He had said his pre-cog wasn’t reliable, and a level three wasn’t considered a high functioning pre-cog anyway, but maybe he could tell something of what was supposed to happen.

  “No,” Terel said. “He is sleeping, a medically induced sleep that I put him in. I will do the same to you if you don’t drop this.” Her voice was still distracted and Vas was sure micro changes were being made to the shield of the buoy.

  “But I think—”

  “Sleep. Now.” Terel didn’t even say goodbye, just cut the comm.

  Vas stewed for a few moments. But she was sitting on the edge of an impossibly comfortable bed. She could lie back for a moment.

  THE WORLD WAS hazy and gray, the planet before her dead and lifeless. Had it been red, Vas would have thought it was her home world. The planet that crumbled to dust years ago. This one wasn’t that place though. The ground was red, but it was blood, not dirt. Huge buildings lay in ruins around her. A wind howled across the land and tore through her. She walked forward, but her feet weren’t touching the ground. A torn and battered tin sign, a symbol probably from one of the shattered buildings, tumbled to a stop at her feet.

  The Commonwealth.

  Vas looked up, suddenly recognizing the planet, even though she’d only been there once in her life. The day she signed her official licensed mercenary papers. Galacian. The core of the Commonwealth. The hub of the government that ruled one of the largest empires in history.

  In dust at her feet.

  22

  V as woke with a start. Her heart pounded so loudly she heard it in her ears like a death drum. There was no light and for a few moments, she couldn’t recall where she was. The images in her head were still trying to strand her on a grave of a planet. That reaction was worse than the nightmare—Vas always woke up knowing where she was.

  She finally focused enough to push the nightmare aside. “Lights.” The lights on the edges of her room came on first, enough to not kill herself as she got off the bed. “Full lights.” She walked to her bathroom, stripping her clothes off as she did. A chilly shower got her awake and chased away the feeling of the wind tearing through her and the horrible silence of a dead world.

  She’d never been one for dreams or nightmares. That was until a few months ago when they began stalking her with images of her former home world. Vas had chalked it up to somet
hing from that damn Rillianian monk, Bhotia—he’d been an unregistered telepath of some strength and she’d seen the same images from her dreams in his head when he’d attacked her.

  She knew that bastard was space dust now.

  As far as she knew, Marli had been successful in wiping out any ships the Rillianians had had—with the exception of that one the Scurrilous Monk was chasing—if they were Rillianians. Yet something caused that dream, and Vas didn’t believe in coincidences. Which left another possible source—Deven.

  She found a comb and worked her way through the knots in her hair as she followed that thought through. Deven had known how upset she’d been about suddenly having dreams. He’d helped talk her down from some of the worst. If he had consciously been the cause, Vas would have known. Which meant he’d had no clue what he was doing, if he was the one behind this, either. Right now Deven was a mess; who knew what was going on with his mind or his abilities?

  Vas clicked her comm open. “Terel?” She happened to glance at her timepiece as she spoke, then quickly cut the comm. It was early in the first shift, or very late in the third, depending on how you looked at it. Even if Terel had stayed up fussing with the shields on the buoy for a few more hours, she’d be in bed by now.

  Vas quickly dressed, then left her room, re-braiding her hair as she went. She didn’t go for the deck though. At the current time the crew would be minimal, and none of them would have been made aware of Deven.

  He was the focus of her jog down the hall.

  The med labs were eerily dark, which made sense since no one would have been assigned to them this shift. Anthling, Pela’s own assistant, would be monitoring any calls from the command deck.

  The outer lab lights flicked on at night level as she came in the door, and Vas didn’t see the need to raise them.

  She went through to the inner lab. A puff of mist hovered at her feet, it was a cooling and calming element Terel flooded her sleeping rooms with. The two extra beds had been removed. Since as far as she knew Marli’s ship hadn’t come back, they must have found another way to move them out. Vas was glad. She didn’t feel the loss as heavily as Terel did—Vas was far more comfortable with taking lives than the doctor was—but she’d still felt the deaths of the two Devens. Even if they, and all their skills and knowledge, were hopefully inside this one.

  In the low light, with tendrils of mist wafting around it, the remaining bio-bed looked like something out of a fairy tale. The princess waiting to be found. Or prince, in this case.

  The case was still sealed tight, and should be blocking any telepathic energies. Should. Vas looked down at his face and shook her head. She wasn’t going to admit this to anyone—but the man before her scared the hell out of her. Part of it was her very un-Vas-like feelings for him. They’d been friends and partners for fifteen years and she’d managed to never even slightly think of him sexually or romantically in any way.

  Then all of a sudden, she’d become aware of him. It was probably tied to the mental shields that had been put on her when she’d been kidnapped by the telepaths as a child. Or rather, the destruction of those shields. Even her mind-doc hadn’t been completely sure of their impact—but they’d been blocking many of Vas’s emotions since they’d been put on.

  That wasn’t the only thing scaring her though—what in the hell was he?

  Marli, a creature of insane age and power, wasn’t sure what and how he did what he did. There was no way that could be good.

  She watched him in silence for a few more moments, but no answers to any of her problems lay there. She stretched her neck. What she needed was a workout. Since that was something Deven would do if he needed to figure things out, maybe he did help her.

  She swung back by her quarters before going to the holosuite. The programs could create any weapon she wanted, and they felt and interacted like real weapons.

  But Vas could never get them to feel right in her head. She was always aware that they were fortified specks of light. Luckily, with her personal stash of assorted weapons, she usually had the option to use something real in the holosuite. Even though they weren’t mercs for the moment, Vas enjoyed working out with edged weapons to keep in practice. There were planets in the Commonwealth and beyond that banned any blaster type weapons. Maintaining skills in non-tech weaponry meant when they did return to the merc life, Vas and her crew would still be valuable to many people.

  She’d been working on mastering the Zalith blades. A pair of slightly curved, matched swords without guard pieces. They were far more difficult to master than most edged weapons, but when they were used correctly they were a violent thing of beauty.

  Deven had been a master of them.

  With her blades in hand, she silently padded down to the holosuite. She often got up early for the peace of the ship when most of the crew were still asleep. Vas wasn’t a meditative sort, but there were times when silence spoke to her.

  The holosuite was a six meter square room with softly glowing white walls and thousands of tiny green lines. She had a feeling, based on finding a secret watching room when they first took this ship, that it had been used for sexual voyeurs in the ship’s previous life as a brothel cruiser. While not as unheard of as some of the things on the Warrior Wench, a holosuite was rare. And welcome.

  They’d converted the spy room to another smuggling storage area and blocked it from viewing the holosuite.

  “Battle sim, forest, three warriors, level nine.” Vas stood in the center of the room and called out the program. Three combatants would be a good warm-up, level nine would make it interesting.

  A moment later, the white room changed into a deep forest. Large trees surrounded her, and an odd orange sun dappled the dirt path in front of her. Vas had been raised on a desert world, so anything of the forest or sea enraptured her. Her own private home on Home was on a forested cliff, overlooking a lavender sea. She made a point to visit it at least once a year.

  The first warrior was on her immediately and she used both blades to disarm him of his pike and heavy sword. Then she removed his head. The other two warriors appeared together before the first one’s holo body hit the ground.

  Vas had taken them both out as well, when she stumbled as the ship lurched to the right. There were no klaxons, but something had hit the ship. She smacked her comm. “Pholin, what the hell is going on up there?” The third shift should still have the deck, and Pholin was anti-social, but extremely competent.

  Silence from him was not good.

  Vas had her blaster with her, so she dropped one blade inside the holosuite but kept the other and ran for the lift, sending an open comm to anyone on the command deck. Nothing.

  With all her complaining about that damn klaxon, the irony was heavy as Vas opened the command panel in the lift and pressed the alarm. Next time she needed to do that, she’d wait until she was out of the lift. The noise was so loud the walls of the lift shook on their way up.

  Then she realized it hadn’t been the klaxon making the lift shake, someone had shot at the lift itself—rather at one of the sets of lift doors along the route.

  With her snub blaster ready in one hand and her Zalith blade in the other, Vas dropped into a spinning tumble as the lift doors opened. She flung herself behind a console, waited a second, and peeked over.

  To see Pholin being held in the air, his feet still kicking, by a seven-foot Asarlaí. Who wasn’t Marli.

  “I will snap his neck if you don’t show yourself.” The voice was rusty and ancient.

  23

  The rest of this shift’s command crew stood off to the side. Anthling held a blaster that had been aimed at the lift, but there was no sign he was aware of his actions. His eyes were wide and unblinking. A closer look revealed that all of crew on deck appeared to be in a trance.

  Vas knew that if the creature before her was a real Asarlaí, they were all dead. She also knew Marli kept insisting her people were long dead. Although recent evidence was beginning to put a dent in th
at theory.

  The blaster went off again, once more aimed at the lift.

  The doors opened, but no one was there.

  “Did you think I’d fall for that?” Marli was beside the other Asarlaí with her gun at his head before Vas was even aware she was there. “Now, drop your glamour.” Marli hadn’t dropped hers, so she was a good foot and a half shorter than the creature holding Pholin. “And him. Drop him gently.” She nudged the Asarlaí’s neck with her blaster.

  “I am an Asarlaí. I can destroy all of you.” But the hand holding Pholin was starting to shake. The movements were strong enough that Vas had to assume it was fatigue more so than fear. Vas came out from behind the console, her blaster aimed at the creature’s heart—if he wasn’t an Asarlaí, he might not be as tall, and a head shot would go right over his head.

  She also held out her sword and walked close enough to lift his chin with it. “You heard the lady. While I’d prefer folks didn’t blow a hole in my ship’s hull, I know we’d recover from it. You wouldn’t.”

  There was a jolt, and the three other crewmembers tumbled to the ground. But they looked fine and were all shaking their heads. The Asarlaí wanna-be still held Pholin though. Vas motioned for the rest of her people to stay on the ground. If this thing had really been Asarlaí, it would have snapped Pholin’s neck by now and gone after Marli.

  “Let go of my crewmember and drop your glamour. Or I will kill you where you stand,” Vas said.

  Marli kept her blaster next to the Asarlaí’s neck but nodded to Vas in agreement.

  “I will...I will….” The creature let go of Pholin. Pholin rolled out of reach and rubbed his neck. But like the rest of the deck crew, he stayed on the floor.

  The Asarlaí tilted his head oddly, as if he’d broken his own neck. “I will. I will.”

  “Crap,” Vas yelled as she fell back away from it. “It’s an automon. Get behind something.” Smoke was leaking out from the body where it joined the neck. Even Marli dove for cover at that.