by Viki Storm
“Aren’t you and your sworn brothers a bunch of do-gooders?” Vela responds. She takes my hand into hers and gives it a squeeze. It feels like my soul is trying to leap out of my skin and into hers, the feeling is that electric and bright.
“Us?” I say. With my mate at my side, I feel like maybe I could be, that she could finally turn me from the darkness that’s consumed my thoughts and deeds since my exile. “Not hardly. We’re mercenaries. We take jobs. We get paid. That’s it.”
“That’s…” she says, standing in front of me so I have no choice but to stop and look her in the eye. “Bullshit.”
“It’s not,” I say. The quiet ruins are getting a little creepy. What if Kayera’s skinless spirit appeared right now and looked into my heart? What would she see? Would she let me pass or would I lose my skin?
“You stopped to help me when you saw my ship go down,” she insists.
“So I could see if there was anything valuable in the wreckage,” I counter.
“That’s so not true,” she says. “Your warrior code about helping those who can’t help themselves. You already told me about that.”
“So you wouldn’t think I was a jerk,” I say, then shake my head. I can’t sweep the truth under the rug, not when talking to Vela. And especially not when Kayera might hear me, the dark incantation on the tip of her tongue. “Truth is I don’t know why I stopped when I saw your ship go down. It wasn’t for salvage and it wasn’t some heroic deed either. I just got the feeling like I should. I don’t know what that makes me, but I’m no hero and neither are my sworn brothers.”
Instead of upsetting her, my answer seems to gladden her. Is it possible she feels the preordination of our meeting too? That the Fates have been working to sway her towards me, into my arms? She’s already been in my bed, but it might take a little more convincing to get her into my soul.
“And you’re going to destroy the jewel,” she says, smiling so broadly I know that this has been a trick—and I walked right into it.
“No,” I say. “I am not doing it. I don’t know where you got the idea. Taxuu can do it since he’s the one with the puckered butthole. But I don’t believe that jewel is going to turn into a mind-control ray—and even if I did, I still wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because it’s not my job. I was hired for a job, and that’s where my honor begins and ends.”
“That’s not what you really think,” she says. I sigh heavily.
I’m not sure what I think. When I was a named warrior, it was easy. Go on missions. Follow orders.
The time I listened to my heart—my conscience? Exile.
“I try to keep things simple,” I say. “Take a job. Complete a job. Get paid for a job. That’s it. I don’t trust myself to stray.”
“I trust you,” she says. “And…” She looks down, those long eyelashes hiding her beautiful icy eyes.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s pretty crazy. Stupid, actually.”
“It can’t be more stupid than walking around the pile of rubble,” I say.
“I think you’re supposed to destroy the jewel,” she says. “I think it’s Fate. And… I think it was Fate that made you follow my crashing ship. It’s Fate that’s in the middle of… pairing us together. Do you think that’s crazy?”
“I didn’t know humans believed in Fate,” I say.
“You’re not answering my question,” she says. Damn, this female doesn’t take any guff from anyone.
“I think you’re right,” I admit. “I was supposed to find you, supposed to save you. I’m supposed to claim you.” I pull her close and kiss her. Had it felt good to hold her hand? Dearest Void, our lips together are like a whole other level of joy I never knew existed.
“Then you’ll do it? Destroy the jewel?” she says, pulling back from our kiss. I’m pleased to find that she’s more than a little out of breath.
“It’s not so easy,” I say.
“Sure it is,” she says. “Throw the thing down the mineshaft.”
“No,” I say. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. I can’t just destroy the jewel. I need to find the mysterious client. I need to neutralize the real threat. Because it’s not about the weapon—it’s about the evil hand that wields it.”
And I know that I’ll do it. I’ll destroy the jewel. Not because I care about doing the right thing or stamping out evil. I’ll do it because it’s the only way Vela will be safe. She’s gotten herself mixed up in this thing, and there are many bad people who are looking for her. Until the jewel is destroyed, she’ll never be safe.
As her mate, it’s my solemn duty to protect her.
“Then we’ll find the guy and kick his ass,” she says.
“There is no we, not in this matter. It’s too dangerous. I don’t even want to put myself at risk, now that I’ve found you. And I’m absolutely not putting you in danger. If I go, I’ll go alone.”
She’s about to argue with me, but there’s no point. I will not put my mate in danger. I start to say as much, but my comm-panel beeps.
“Who is this?” I answer. I don’t recognize the IP address of the sender.
“Do you have the jewel?” I recognize the voice. It’s my client.
“Deal’s off,” I say. I don’t say anything else, don’t want him to know that I’ve figured out the true purpose of the artifact. “Sorry.”
“You are honor-bound,” he insists.
“In case you didn’t know, I’m an exiled warrior of Virix. I have no honor.”
“We had an agreement. I’m working behalf of a very important person; you would be wise not to cross him. I know about the female, know that she’s with you. The jewel was on her ship. Be careful, though. She’ll cross you, too, the second she gets a chance. She knows how much that jewel is worth. That’s her job. She’s a mercenary. A criminal. She has no honor. So you might as well sell it to me and collect your fee. Then the two of you can slink off to wherever disreputable snakepit you call home.”
I seethe with anger. Vela is not a criminal. She is a smuggler, but I know a little more about her operations than she thinks I do. Her jobs might be technically illegal, but they are in no way dishonorable.
I want to take down the bastard for the mere suggestion.
“No,” I say again. I’ve been trained to keep my feelings hidden from the enemy. It’s hard, but I manage.
“I didn’t want it to come to this, but I have planted an insurance policy inside your hangar.”
“What are you talking about?”
“An explosive device, set to go off in one hour. I’ve disabled the comm tower at your headquarters so you cannot contact your sworn brothers. Don’t think about going there. You don’t have the time. Get into your ship and meet me with the jewel. I’m sending you coordinates right now.”
“I don’t have the jewel,” I lie. “I need to go to the hangar to get it.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he says. How does the bastard know? “I have ways of knowing when someone is lying to me, so don’t try again. You’ve been warned. One hour or else say goodbye to all your sworn brothers.”
The comm disconnects.
“Get in the ship,” I tell Vela.
“Where—”
“Now,” I say. “We don’t have time.”
“Okay,” she says cautiously, but we turn and double-time it to the ship.
“It was the client, wasn’t it?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “But he’s not my client anymore. He’s insulted you and threatened my brothers. Now, he’s my mortal enemy.”
“Oh shit,” she says. “Is that rumor true too? About when a Virixian warrior names a mortal enemy?”
“I don’t know what you’ve heard about it,” I say. “But I guarantee, whatever you heard, the truth is much, much worse.”
Chapter 12
Vela
So far on this crazy journey, Auvok has always been a little… intense. Okay, a lot
intense. But now that his sworn brothers are in danger?
I’m starting to understand why a named Virixian warrior is the most feared fighter in all the Universe. I no shit feel sorry for his client—the poor bastard signed his own death warrant the second he set the explosive at the warriors’ hangar.
“Ship,” Auvok says. He’s in full-on attack mode and can only speak in monosyllabic commands. “Now.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’m hurrying.” I get on board as fast as I can, going straight inside to the copilot’s chair, buckling the harness and making sure the straps are tight.
He gets in and fires up the engines, igniting the supra-light right away. I don’t know a whole lot about ships, but I know the old ones like the Vulp, they need to warm up before you can send them into supra. This is serious business if he’s pushing his beloved ship to the brink.
“Fuel,” he says as he enters coordinates into the nav-panel.
I start to ask him something, but the ship lurches into supra and it feels like my stomach is going to prolapse out of my mouth.
But just as soon as we get into the air, we’re touching down on a nearby planet. It’s a fuel station planet where factories and refineries belch steely smoke into the foul atmosphere as far as the eye can see. The second Auvok opens the hatch, the stench of toxic chemicals and exhaust wafts over me.
“Stay,” he says.
“Um, no,” I say. “I am not a canine, and I need to get a few things inside the shop while you fuel up.”
“Quick,” he says.
“I hope this is over soon, because I miss sentences,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “My mind is elsewhere. I’m strategizing. Thinking of all possibilities and their outcomes.”
“By all means, strategize away,” I say. I exit the ship with Auvok and he hurries inside to purchase the fuel. The Vulp runs on solid-state aluminum fuel with ammonium perchlorate as the oxidizing agent. It’s common enough to get, but most new ships run on isotope cells or ion thrusters. They’re much cleaner and don’t require trips to outposts like this. The fuel for the supra-light catalyst is xorbanium crystals, but a speck of that stuff will run a ship for a year or longer.
He swipes his card at the payment kiosk and hurries back outside to begin fueling. I need a new spacesuit and boots. I’m still wearing the old thing that survived my fiery crash and I smell like a ball of molten, screaming steel. The soles of my boots got so hot they warped, too, and it feels like I’m walking on a balance beam.
I walk up and down the aisles, looking for the apparel. They sell anything you might need to stock up on during a voyage—at quite the markup too. I find the suits and grab the first one in my size that I see. I’m not picky. I’m walking to the payment kiosk when I catch a glimpse of myself in the polished glass storefront. The burn on the side of my head is grotesque. It looks like a slab of overcooked meat. Mostly because that’s exactly what it is.
I hurry back to the apparel section and grab a knit skull cap too. I scan my purchases and swipe my card, hoping that there’s enough credits in my account to cover it. The transaction is approved and I breathe a little sigh of relief. I’ll change clothes in the ship, but I slide the hat over my head. It chafes a little bit on the thick layer of ointment, but at least this way no one has to look at it.
I rush back to the ship, eager to get into clean clothes, but suddenly I’m on my back, staring at the smoky yellow sky. Damned boots, I think, must have fallen off balance running too fast. I whacked my head pretty hard on the ground too. I feel dizzy, like I just woke up in the middle of the night and can’t clear my head.
“The jewel!” someone hisses in my ear. Oh fuck. I didn’t trip running with my heat-warped boots. I turn to see a hooded figure—human I think—kneeling beside me. A small dagger protrudes from the billowy sleeve of his cloak.
“I don’t have it,” I say. Turning my head to the side like that sent a fresh wave of nausea down to my core. I clench my stomach and pull my knees up to my chest.
“Liar!” he says. I watch with numb limbs as he cocks back his arm, about to strike with the little dagger the way a cobra strikes at a passing rat.
His wrist, I think, and then as if I have magical mind control powers, a boot descends and steps on the asshole’s wrist with a sickening crunch.
The boot rears back and lands a kick to the sneak’s ribcage. The sound is anticlimactic, the sound your body makes when you plop down on your bed. A soft whoomp and then the howl of pain.
“Who sent you?” It’s Auvok. I don’t know how he knew, but he knew I was in trouble. And he saved me. Again.
Auvok stoops down and pulls the hood back. A pale human male with a gaunt face and smudges under his eyes. How embarrassing to have almost been killed by someone like him.
“Wrist,” I say, my tongue thick and requiring intense concentration to move. Auvok pulls the guy’s wrist and reveals what I’d briefly seen as he brandished the dagger. He’s got the same tattoo on his inner wrist as the pirate who downed my ship.
“What’s this?” Auvok says, pointing at the tattoo.
“The Eye of the Void,” he says. “The eye that sees all, that will control all.”
“Please spare me your nursery boogeyman stories,” Auvok says. “Who sent you?” Auvok’s gaze is fixed on the tattoo.
“I work for the greater good,” he says, “the new era—” He breaks off, coughing blood. My head feels a little steadier now and I manage to sit up without yarking in my lap.
“This man? Do you work for him?” Auvok holds up his comm-panel and there’s a screen-cap of a man sitting at a table in the hangar. He’s opposite Auvok and I can imagine the two of them sitting and discussing terms of the job.
The man on the floor actually looks at the screen for a moment. I watch his eyes and they don’t betray any hint of recognition.
“I serve no mortal master,” he says.
“Then I’ll send you to meet him,” Auvok says. For the first time, I notice that there’s a crystalline shrapnel fragment sticking out of the man’s neck. Auvok pulls it out and the poor bastard bleeds out almost immediately.
“Am I having a flashback?” I ask. “Or do you just love shooting people in the neck?”
“My aim is uncommonly good,” he says. “Let’s get out of here before we have to answer questions.”
He helps me up, and even though I’m able to walk, he scoops me up into his arms, like I’m a sleepy kid ready for bed.
“Do we have time?” I ask. “To get to your client before he detonates the bomb? That cost us a lot of time, I’m sorry.”
“We have time,” he says, but his voice is different. Cold. I don’t want to know what he’s planning.
He buckles me in and we take off again. I still didn’t get a chance to change clothes, and the smell of the smoke is imbedded in my nostrils.
“I’ll send a picture of the tattoo to Taxuu and ask him to research the symbol. I should have thought of that when we were at the hangar before, but I didn’t have a photo of the first pirate’s tattoo.”
“I don’t think they’re common pirates,” I say.
“Neither do I,” Auvok says. “There were seven eyelashes ringing the eye.”
“Seven? You mean the Seven Rent Souls? Those pirates are the Seven?”
“No,” he says. “One of the Seven wouldn’t have been so easy to kill. They’re just lackeys.”
Once we’re in the Black he reaches over to my seat and pulls off my hat. “Why are you wearing that thing?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, lamely. I don’t want to talk about it. Women are stereotypically supposed to be vain and obsessed with their looks, but not me. I usually wash my face and throw my hair in a ponytail in the morning and call it good. But I’m still not immune to the trappings of vanity.
“Vela,” he says, tilting my head towards him. “You’re beautiful. You were beautiful before and you’re even more beautiful now. Your burns are something we call Urlas
k Vix, Proof of Spirit.”
“But they’re not,” I say. “I didn’t rush into battle or anything. I just flew a sabotaged ship.”
“You were injured in the commission of a noble deed,” he says.
“You do know I was smuggling stolen goods off of a Federation planet, right?” I say. For all his talk about honor, I would have thought he’d scorn a lowly smuggler.
“I know more about your job than you think,” he says. I don’t think he means anything bad by that, but it still rubs me the wrong way. He doesn’t know anything about my jobs or why I do them—and my deeds are definitely not noble.
“If you say so,” I say, avoiding the topic. I can’t get into it with him because arguing about my smuggling jobs will only lead back to one thing: my past that I’m trying to forget.
The past that I’m trying to atone for.
“I do say so,” he says, taking my hand in his. It’s so warm, closes over mine so perfectly like they’re interlocking pieces of expertly made machinery.
I can almost believe him. Almost.
We get to the location very fast; only fifteen or so minutes elapse until we begin descent and reentry.
The planet we’ve been directed to is uninhabited as far as I can tell. Temperature read is cold, five-below Celsius. Now I have justification to wear my hat, at least while we’re outside. I put it back on and Auvok looks at me.
“It’s cold outside and I’m going with,” I say.
“Not a chance,” he says.
“Remember when you said that before boarding the pirate ship?”
“And you flagrantly disobeyed me? At the risk of great personal peril?”
“Yeah, the flagrant disobedience part,” I say. “I’m going to do that again.”
“What if I said that a disobedient female like you deserves to get taken over my knee and have a few firm swats to your bare bottom to teach you how to listen?” he says.
Holy hell, is he really going to do that? Images flash through my head, Auvok yanking down my pants and pulling me over his lap, spanking my bare bottom while I flail my legs and wince in mixed pain and pleasure.