by Amanda Milo
“WHAT?” Beth shouts as our ship attaches to the mark’s ship again—even softer than she managed to do so very carefully by herself. “You’re kidding! You can do that without even trying? That’s so unfair.”
I drag her chair closer to mine. “Tell me all about it, narra,” I bemoan.
When I steal her hand, she doesn’t startle or protest. She just looks at Ekan. “Why don’t you take this job then?” Beth’s clearly confused.
Ekan starts to answer, but I beat him to it. I give her a droll smile. “If only there was a reliable way to keep him in front of the command monitors. Have you ever seen him sit still?”
“Sure—” Beth starts. Then her chin dimples, and she blinks. “Wow.”
Ekan stumbles—but doesn’t fall—as he throws his head back, melodramatically groaning, “Inaction is overrated!”
Beth smiles in reaction to his clowning.
“Besides,” he adds with a roll of his shoulders, “I’m at my best in the middle of the fray.”
Beth’s lids lower, unimpressed. “Would this happen to be because you tend to be the direct cause of the mayhem?”
Ekan uses his fingers to simulate a pair of laser pistols. He keeps them pointed at the ceiling. “I’m the front line. I need to be directly involved.”
I shake my head. “In other words, we don’t get shot if we can push him ahead of us instead. Putting him front and center during missions makes the most sense.”
“Sure it does,” Beth agrees, one side of her mouth tugging up in a reluctant show of humor. “How many of you guys are going on this particular smash-and-grab?”
Ekan seems to mull the term over. “Sounds too crude for our delicate operations.”
“I’m staying with you, narra,” I say with a satisfied sigh, taking advantage of Beth’s chair’s nearness and drawing her effortlessly onto my lap. Hitting the recline lever, I lean us back, kicking up my feet and getting almost horizontal under her. It’s a real nice position.
Ekan doesn’t look like he agrees. He’s suddenly scowling at me.
“We about ready?” Qolt calls, tromping into the command center and moving right to the wall to grab grip tape for the base pad of his pistol.
I raise my brows at Ekan. Taking Qolt? This is news to me.
Ekan sucks on his teeth, gaze moving to his brother.
I’m going to postulate that Tiernan or Oquilion is behind Qolt’s participation so soon after his injury. They probably want to put him to the test, since he’s so insistent that he’s fine.
Qolt pauses his movements, brings his wrist up to peer at it, and bites himself.
Nope, I decide—can’t be Oquilion. It disturbs him too much to spend time in Qolt’s company lately. Makes him think of his koundreth who was never the same after his head injury.
Qolt finishes fastening his weapon grips, and promptly stomps out. Beth stares after him, chewing her lip.
He didn’t acknowledge her.
It’s like he didn’t even realize she was here.
“You sure about him?” I murmur to Ekan. Because if the man doesn’t notice Beth in the room—Beth—then he’s not fit to rely on in any sort of altercation or firefight.
“Got outvoted,” Ekan says flatly, confirming my suspicion about who’s behind Qolt’s involvement.
We all have equal pull on this ship—and then there’s Tiernan.
Eyes on his brother’s back, Ekan follows after Qolt, with Oquilion and Tiernan tromping out soon after. Beth’s other hand finds mine as our team heads off to make our ship a little heavier, and our pockets a lot richer.
CHAPTER 32—PROW
PROW
“Keep me occupied,” Beth tells me as we watch our band board the mark’s craft. They covertly pass a serving queue forming outside the mark’s mess hall, stretching all the way through their scullery. Hungry men holding plates stare straight ahead, each one closer to a meal, each one focused on that goal.
No one is the wiser to our presence.
Beth shifts until she’s less laying atop me and more sitting on my lap as I recline behind her. Gazing up at the sleek line of her smooth back, I figure I better ask for suggestions on how she’d like to be kept occupied. I’m suddenly not in the frame of mind to come up with a large variety of propositions—I can however recommend several positions. In lurid, high-definition detail. “How?”
“Talk to me,” she says.
I can do that. It will however cancel out one of the activities I was happy to offer my services for. A mouth can only be busy doing one thing for her at a time, after all. “About what?”
I don’t expect her to ask, “What was your life like when you were growing up?”
My hands are splayed over her the bared skin of her stomach, and my thumbs are covertly stretching up to brush at the undersides of her breasts. I’m sort of mostly past the ability to form coherent sentences. “Hrmuh?”
Onscreen, our team is using their Beth-programmed passcode to gain entry into the craft’s vault. Beth brings her hands up in a silent cheer before she rocks to the side a little, finally tearing her eyes from our crew. She twists enough to make direct eye contact with me, perhaps in an effort to better engage my brain.
Ridiculous. If she’s moving on me, the only thing she’s engaging is—well, it’s not my brain, let’s just admit that.
I clear my throat. “Uhhh…” Think Prow. Use words. “You… want my life story? Not very exciting.” Not as exciting as Beth is. Nothing in my entire lifespan feels as if it’s been as exciting as having Beth sitting on my club—which is starting to thicken, thrilled at her nearness.
She looks skeptical. “Didn’t you grow up on a pirate ship?”
I run my hands up her thighs, until my fingers tap the edge of her skirt. “That does have a sort of daring cachet doesn’t it? But it’s not as if they let me join in on runs until I was… maybe twelve solars?”
She ignores my hands, which are wandering slightly, teasing closer to her knees now. If she’s interested in more, she’s going to have to help me out and give me some sign. Any sign. “You were a baby!” she cries.
I stop feeling her up to give her a horrified look. “I was twelve!”
“Something’s very wrong about this place.” Oquilion’s words fills the command center, even though his voice is hushed. “The vault’s empty, and the men aboard look half starved. Some look like crewman, but most look dressed in civvie garb.”
“From where?” I ask, sitting up behind Beth, catching her hips to keep her secure.
“All locales. It’s like men from every sector of this quadrant have been drawn to this ship.”
“What are we even hunting?” Beth asks.
“Treasure!” Oquilion croons excitedly. (Since this is also his pet name for Beth, I get to feel her shifting on my lap in reaction to this simple word.) “Specifically, gemstones. The mark’s log has entries for zoisite, anyolite, thulite and so on. That’s all we needed to see. This haul is ours.”
“Oooh, shiny things. I love stealing shiny things,” Ekan hums.
“Smells like a pungent stew in here,” Tiernan mutters. “A noxious brew.” To the others, he offers, “System check reads no cellular signatures in the next three chambers ahead.”
Ekan scoffs. “You, my friend, have not been visiting the wonders of brothels.”
Screen one belongs to Tiernan’s headset, and it pans to Ekan, tilting ever so slightly. Tiernan must be cocking his head in consternation. “That was random, even for you.”
Screen three is Ekan’s, and the view jigs to the side as he gives his head a sharp shake. “Not random; this smell—it’s a floating brothel.”
“Are you certain?” asks Oquilion.
“More than you’d be,” Ekan replies, keeping his voice low. “You haven’t been a patron to paid women’s houses in how many solars? But good call! Last I heard, a new viral strain of crotch itch is making its rounds.”
Oquilion hasn’t caroused and ventured into doxy halls
in a very long time—long before Beth arrived in our lives. His system has been intent on finding his mate, and only his mate— therefore, visiting a pleasure house, let alone any random female, became a waste of his time.
Oquilion’s camera is staring at Ekan until it almost collides into a wall. “What?”
Ekan glances over at him. “Crotch itch. Doxy halls are turning into ghost ships, and you know what that means? We’ll be selling out of Vera models, and fast. Better hit a manufacturing ship and get us a bayfull. Like I was saying—truly, you dodged a bullet when your body went mate-locked on you all those solars ago. There’s no protection against the new itch until someone develops a vaccine to hit it.”
Oquilion adjusts his earpiece. “I’m going to hit you. You’re saying you can tell if a ship’s selling pleasures by the smell? Ekan, we’re six chambers away from the mess hall. Don’t you think it’s more likely that the cook’s been simmering something sour in the soup cauldron?”
Qolt’s baring his teeth, looking antsy. “He’s right. This is a whoreship. The sour scent is the sweat of desperate men and cheap perfume.”
“That’s not a polite word,” Tiernan rumbles, but not censoriously.
“It’s not a polite business,” Qolt fires back, no heat, just rapid conversation as their heads sweep, scanning the room before they advance to the next chamber.
Beth’s work with their doorpasses is getting them entrance into every room without a hitch. Qolt continues speaking, downright loquacious for him. “Ask one of the ladies what they call their ship, or themselves for that matter. They have no illusions left if they ever had any to begin with, and they don’t pretty up their language.”
“Picking up life patterns, next chamber ahead,” Tiernan warns. “Fifteen, no, sixteen, seventeen—hells, they’re one right atop the other, messing up the count’s results.”
“Told you,” Qolt grunts.
The moment they enter the next chamber, a chorus of breathily cried, “NA’RITHS, ooooooh!” greets them.
Beth’s body goes rigid in my lap.
What a very interesting sensation, if I may say.
The condition of the females is sickening. Dirty faces, arms, stained clothing, matted hair. All thin—too, too thin.
The women look legitimately excited to see our crew, but then again, Na’riths are known all over the galaxy for giving as good as we get—performance as well as payment-wise. It helps that we’re known for tipping lavishly when we feel we’ve received good service—such as a good rut—and sharing generously when we have something worth sharing—such as good food. For these females, the latter is something they could desperately use.
“Aren’t we glad our Beth just heard a room full of doxies greet us like we’re long lost friends?” jokes Oquilion nervously, sounding ill.
Ekan doesn’t seem bothered. “Nah—ignore that, Beth. The rest of us may not be mate-locked like our poor Oquilion here, but we’re loyal to you. And to Vera, if you’re in the mood to play Assistant.”
“What?” Oquilion asks, camera showing he narrowly misses running into a wall—again.
Qolt snaps a near-silent “Shush!” at them—more sound than word—and at the bottom edge of our screen, we see him shove his locked arms forward, pistol at the ready between his palms.
Feminine whispers begin, but otherwise the females have fallen mostly quiet. This allows us to hear muffled screams coming from a room off to the group’s right.
Ekan bares his teeth at the roomful of women in an unusual-for-him not-smile. “Do you happen to know if that,” his camera tilts towards the room emitting the screams, “Is the way the lady likes to please her clients?”
The women grow somber, and shake their heads.
“Right,” Ekan says, before his camera is suddenly in front of the door. There’s a flash of his big boot, and the door explodes.
“Called it: smash and grab,” Beth whispers. I think she’s trying for levity, but she’s not laughing.
Neither is Ekan.
Mere moments after Ekan kicks in the door, I’m snuggling Beth under my throat. The reason for the screams coming from the bed is as ghastly a scene as you’d imagine.
In no time though, the screams change from the woman on the bottom to the male who was on top of her, and Ekan may laugh it up and be cheery of heart almost all of the time, but he does wicked things with a knife that are not funny in the least.
Tiernan warns, “We’re about to have company.”
Heavy boots thudding in the corridor signal a single male’s approach—but Tiernan silently holds up the cellular scanner to show there’s a second body moving in our crew’s direction, and this one’s going slower; therefore, quieter.
When the first male makes it through the doorway, Oquilion punches him in the face then catches him by the collar of his shirt, hauling him up. “Keep him or kill him?” he asks the ladies.
“Kill him,” they say in accord, the unity of their voices almost making the answer a song note.
Qolt jerks his thumb to indicate the male still creeping along the corridor. “Got another one coming. Want him down or dead?”
“Dead!” one blue skinned female whisper-shouts. “That’ll be Yurl. He’s worse than the Captain.”
Ekan emerges from the servicing room, wiping the blade of his knife with the dead man’s shirt before he drops the lifeless body in a heap on the floor. “Where’s the Captain?”
One of the women gestures to the corpse.
Ekan sheathes his blade, his face a mask of disgusted disbelief. “This is the vessel’s Captain?”
One woman shrugs, a move not unlike Beth’s human one, though she is far from human with her silvery feathers and tentacle hair. “Was.”
CHAPTER 33—PROW
PROW
I almost suggest that Beth find a less upsetting pastime than watching the monitors as our crew cleans house on the pleasureship.
She’s having none of it though, sitting stiff-backed and tense as the doxies direct us to who gets to live, and who gets to die. There are a few of the vessel’s crewmen who have shown enough kindness to the women to earn a spared life.
But Nebulas far and wide—it’s downright sad how few of the spared there are in comparison to those who the women feel deserve killing.
When it’s safe for the women to walk free, our crew leads them to the mess hall—but without warning, they block the ladies before they can begin eating, drawing everyone back.
“This is swill,” Tiernan declares, outraged.
“Is that a skull?” Oquilion asks faintly, peering into the giant cooking cauldron, and his monitor should turn green for how sick he suddenly sounds. “With… a long mane of hair?”
Qolt finds the cook hiding in the kitchen. When the male’s shrieks end, Qolt, jaw tight, confirms for everyone that yes, the vessel serves whatever meat is available, even if it’s one of the workers who succumb from illness or misuse.
Or starvation.
Beth yarks into a waste receptacle.
“Well, this has been a clustertevek,” Ekan says wearily, his fingers bumping the top of his camera when he wipes a hand over his face. “And not at all what we came looking for.”
A group of the ladies makes their way to him, and a leader emerges when the others look to her. She says to Ekan, “And what did you come looking for? You Na’rith came loaded for thieving, not whoring—what brought you to the pleasure house?” She flashes a winsome (if battered) smile at him—and then at Oquilion, who nearly startles up to the ceiling.
Even Beth snickers a little at this. She’s come back from rinsing her mouth and washing her hands and face, and she curls into my lap this time when she joins me.
My arms wrap around her and I’m thinking that, while this mission can’t be called a success, this right here—her seeking out the comfort of my arms—can’t be considered any sort of failure either.
Ekan answers the women’s question. “We came looking for treasure ladies, sorry to disa
ppoint.” He inclines his head and gives them a dashing smile. “But not too sorry; we’re a crew happily matched with our mate.”
“Awwww,” comes a collective, disappointed sigh. “Another Na’rith crew bites the dust.”
“Dust is definitely not what we’re biting,” Ekan says with a roguish grin that earns him double the number of wistful sighs.
“We found two recessed safes besides the vault room,” Tiernan narrates for Beth and me, I assume, “But whatever the manifest shows for gems, they must be long gone, because we couldn’t find them.”
Qolt’s facing Tiernan, so Beth and I are treated to the view of his blade-grey eyes narrowing in thought. He cuts a look at the women.
Oquilion follows his gaze. “Rut me,” he suddenly groans. He turns to one of the women. “Who’s Thulite?”
Slowly, a woman raises her hand.
“Those scumtube trawlers died too soon,” Qolt mutters darkly.
“Zoisite? Anyolite?” Oquilion calls.
Two more hands go up.
“Here’s the ship’s treasure in every way, and this is how they cared for them?” Tiernan observes. His voice is stiff with anger.
The women shy back from him, and Tiernan’s camera ducks before he takes his own step back. He doesn’t mean to frighten females, but just like Beth, these women have learned to be wary of imposing men, especially those who look as if they might lose their temper.
We’re staring not at a room full of sparkling gemstones, but a fortune of another kind. Or, at least they could be, if they’d been offered even the bare minimum of consideration.
Qolt braces his shoulder against the wall, and crosses his arms over his chest. His teeth clamp and roll an Iechydmaw chewing stick. “None of them look like they were locked in rooms and servicing males because it was the career of their dreams.” He scans the females. “How’d you get here? Where do you call home?”
Turns out, most of the girls were lured here with the tales and promises that hardworking men were in need of good wives on a mining planet. Some of them went on to be wives all right, but the traders kept back the rest of them as payment for the starry-eyed hopeful group’s air fare, saying costs were higher than expected, and the kept girls could pay off the debt on their backs.