by Elsa Jade
With a sneer, Blackworm half turned aside again. “I stole that half-blood captain’s ship right out from under his nose, didn’t I? And as for the Duke of Azthronos… His father was the one who forbade me from marrying my consort. Said it reflected poorly on his noblemen.”
“So take it up with the old duke,” she urged. “He’s dead too.”
Armor boy yanked so hard on her arm she thought he might dislocate it. He frog-marched her toward the exit, and she only had one last chance to yell back. “When I find your consort, I’m going to tell her you’re a larfing monster and she’s better off without you—mff!”
She grunted in frustration when armor boy clamped his gloved hand over her mouth again and dragged her backward, her heels bumping helplessly over the deck.
Her last glimpse of Blackworm, he was standing again in the spectral maelstrom of the black hole, his whole body yearning toward the vortex, the ethereal lights caressing his black clothes and hair like ghostly fingers drawing him down.
She managed to get her feet underneath her before armor boy pulled her right over. The mantid alien clacked something that sounded annoyed, and to her surprise, armor boy answered in English, the metal mask making him sound as if he was talking into a tin can. “If you think she smells funny, I’ll get her ready while you go prep the pod.”
Trixie grimaced at the spindly alien. Oh sure, she smelled funny but at least she didn’t look like a bug. She twisted away from armor boy, swinging a kick at the mantid, but he caught her easily.
The mantid clattered another reply, but armor boy shook his head. “Nah,” he drawled. “I got her. She’s just excited about having me alone where she can see what’s in my pants besides this illegal blaster.” He laid his palm over the grip of the weapon at his thigh, and inadvertently she glanced down.
And froze.
The top buckle of the lower half of his armor wasn’t quite fastened, as if the heavy plating was just a little too small for him, not quite fitting. Her gaze slid to the blaster. Not the snub-nosed pistol that armor boy had shot her with on the space station. This weapon was larger, the kind of gun a swaggering pirate might carry.
Or an ex-pirate who wasn’t quite ready to forget where he’d come from.
She’d gone so still, armor boy took the opportunity to haul her down the corridor. The mantid made a creepy sibilant clash, like a garbage disposal chuckling, and armor boy called back over his shoulder, “Yeah, that’s me, just a pervy manwhore.”
She waited until they were halfway down the corridor from the other alien before she murmured, “Pervy manwhore?”
The masked face peered down at her. “Too obvious?”
The rush of giddy relief and inappropriate amusement and sheer joy at his presence nearly made her knees buckle. She clamped her hand over his forearm, holding herself up. “Nor…”
He shook his head in warning. “We’re not out of this yet.”
She nodded her understanding, but she wondered if he realized what his arrival meant to her. Not just hope for rescue, but hope for something more. A future.
A future with him.
She squelched the surge of yearning. He was duty-bound to rescue her, and he had a personal grudge at Blackworm for stealing the Grandy. And still…
Blackworm had been right about one thing. She wanted to find the love she’d always longed for, even if it meant facing the God of Death himself.
But Nor was also right—first they had to survive.
“I assume you have a plan,” she said as they hustled down the hallway.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Probably more than you. Unless you consider antagonizing Blackworm a plan.”
“While I waited for you, I was going to talk him to death.”
“He seemed to have that part covered all on his own.”
She grinned. “Right? Like he wanted my consent before killing me.”
“What a gentleman.”
She peered up at his expressionless mask. “Did he zing you with that half-blood remark?”
“Maybe.” Another shrug. “Although he was willing to go to prison for his desire to reunite with his commoner consort. While my father wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence.”
She touched the shoulder he hadn’t shrugged, feeling the tension even through the armor. “Oh, Nor. Never doubt you are a hundred times as noble as the high and mighty old duke or Blackworm.”
They skidded around a corner before he replied. “Plus, as you pointed out, one is dead and the other is crazy. So even the ir half of me comes out ahead.”
“Speaking of getting zinged, where’d you find that armor?”
“On the corpse I stole it from. It’s quite nice, really. Not the corpse, the armor. It’s internally powered and partially self-directed. It could almost run by itself. Not fast enough to get its original owner away from me, of course.”
An uneasy mixture of horror and relief sludged through her. “So the blood on the boot isn’t yours.”
“Oh, it’s mine. The med kit you left with me could only do so much. And about leaving me…” His accusation was hollow in the tin can armor, and when his mask angled down at her, she swore she could see the frown through it.
“I saved you,” she reminded him, to forestall a lecture. And a prayer in her own head that it was true.
“Don’t do it again.”
The gruff edge to his voice had nothing to do with the blunting effects of the mask, but she wanted to hug him anyway. They were alive, and they were together.
That was enough for this moment.
“Hopefully you stole a shuttle too,” she said as they raced along another corridor, one she knew didn’t lead to the landing bay.
He shook his head. “Lieutenant Linn took the shuttle out of harm’s way, as I ordered.” With a disgruntled huff, he added, “And I really need to have a talk with the crew about which orders they should listen to and which ones they should countermand.” He yanked her down a narrower hallway that wasn’t on her mental map. “There weren’t any emergency pods left on the station, thanks to Blackworm. No ships left.”
“So how did you get over here?”
“Took one of the station’s mech exosuits.”
She frowned. “You…strapped a rocket booster to your backside and just spacewalked over here?”
“Two. Two rocket boosters, strapped together and then strapped to my backside. Used to do it all the time when I had to scrub the fleet hulls. Meant I could stay out longer. And harder to accidentally leave me behind.”
Back when he was a slave boy on a pirate ship. She swallowed hard. Injured, alone, braving not just the perils of deep space but his own awful memories, he had come for her.
No wonder she loved him.
“Anyway,” he said, “it wasn’t that far.”
She almost laughed. How like him, to brag about nothing and then belittle the best parts of himself.
Except when he bragged about what was in his pants. None of that was little…
With a deep, ridiculous, abiding joy, she jolted to a halt, grabbed him, and kissed the cold, blank, un-Nor-like mask.
“No tongue,” he complained. “Might short out.”
She laughed. “I’m the short one.”
“Good thing, because it’s going to be a tight fit in the mech suit.”
As far as tight fits… She frowned as Nor guided them through a hatch to another hallway so narrow it was more a HVAC vent. Small, harsh pools of illumination automatically lit their way but couldn’t quite keep pace with them as they ran, so each step felt as if they were falling into darkness. “Where are we going?”
“We have to get to the hull access port where I left the mech suit. I disabled all the ship’s internal sensors so we can’t be tracked here—I couldn’t modify the external sensors since they would’ve noticed that immediately while we’re underway and might’ve been able to bypass—but even so, it won’t stop any of the crew from seeing us with their eyes.”
The pros
pect of their escape loomed so close she was afraid it was an illusion, like the navigation array. “Good thing you were able to make that change.”
He grunted. “First thing Blackworm did when he took control of the ship was change all the access codes. But the first thing I did when I bought the Grandy was add back doors around the access codes. He might be a pompous nobleman who thinks he can take whatever he wants, but I’m a pirate who takes whatever the nobleman wants.”
On the exhalation of that last word, his breath hung in the air until they raced through it. The temperature in the access corridor had dropped. With a shiver, she realized how close they were to the death of space.
And this was where Nor had been a child, living against the cold metal skin of a pirate ship.
A large humanoid lump loomed in the shadows right before the auto lights flicked on, and she couldn’t quite swallow back a scream.
“Easy,” Nor said. “It’s the suit.”
The bulky mechanized and reinforced suit slumped like a robot ogre had shed its skin. It was huge, but so was Nor, and though she knew the high-tech smart fabric could adjust to fit a variety of shapes—she’d been wearing Nor’s castoff fatigues this whole time—she couldn’t believe it would fit both of them at once.
But they were this close. By each and every one of those many-named Thorkon gods, they would make it.
Nor unlatched the mask of his stolen armor and flipped back the faceplate.
He grabbed her and hauled her close.
“Hey,” she murmured even as she melted against the hard immensity of his body. “We gotta get out of here.”
“I gotta kiss you,” he countered. “With tongue.”
And he did.
But whatever he plundered, she gave up enthusiastically and took back in equal measure, her hands framed around his face, half blocked by the cold armored helmet, half against his warm skin. She didn’t even need a single mech suit and double rocket boosters to get close to him, longing to meld her body to his, their desire a single, spiraling need.
“You taste like candy,” he murmured. “My favorite.”
The comm device on his armor beeped.
“Uh-oh.” She slid down his chest. “Don’t answer that.”
He grimaced, and a strident clacking rattled the device. Nor snapped back, not in English, and she held her breath. A few more lines and Nor’s expression hardened in a way she’d never seen, not when she’d shot at him outside her bedroom, not when he’d actually been bleeding out in the space station hangar. His last reply was more clipped than the mantid’s insectile tongue.
Though the thick outer hull of the Grandiloquence held the worst of the deadly cold of space at bay, she felt hope and life draining away. “What?” she whispered. “Did they find us?”
He shook his head. “They noticed they don’t have interior sensors but they think it’s because of the maintenance being done while the ship was docked. They want to know why I haven’t brought you to the launch bay yet.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you’re fighting me.”
She bit her lips, hard, but the words escaped. “If you need to take me to them—”
“No,” he snarled.
“If they send me in the pod, you can come around in the mech suit and get me,” she said over him. She swallowed back a sob. “I know you’d come—”
His mouth crashed down on hers again, silencing her, and she tasted the desperation like a bittersweet candy sealing their lips.
When he lifted his head, he stared down at her with a pure blue intensity that seared her to the soul. “You meant it, when you told Blackworm you knew I was coming.”
“Of course,” she said simply. “I know you.”
He ducked down to press his forehead to hers, and those simmering eyes closed. “You may be the only one who ever has.”
“Maybe if you took off some of these masks: the privateeer, the perv”—she touched his cheek—“the poor, unhappy little boy.”
“How about the pants? Can I take those off?” He lifted his head to look down at her, his lips curved gently.
“You’re incorrigible.”
“You’re just irresistible.” He let out a shuddering breath. “But I have to go back. After they take the scenic and homicidal tour along the event horizon, they’re going to swing around and return to Azthronos.”
She slid her hand down to his armored hand, holding fast. “I assume they aren’t planning to turn themselves in to transgalactic authorities.”
“Blackworm might say he wants his beloved, but he sounds more bent on revenge. He’s going to empty the Grandy’s guns into the ducal estate.”
Chapter 16
Until this very moment, Nor would’ve sworn on the most expensive bottle of ghost-mead—since he didn’t believe in gods, Thorkon or otherwise—that he could watch Azthronos burn with nothing more than a smirk.
He’d have been lying then, but now he couldn’t even pretend.
If he’d been able to keep his masks just a little longer, maybe he and Trixie would be safety tucked into the exosuit and rocketing through space, free. But she’d stripped him bare, in more ways than one, and now he was racing back through the access corridors with his little mishkeet right on his heels.
She’d refused to be left behind, even though he’d explained that she could stay hidden indefinitely in the dreadnaught’s empty halls.
“I’m not hiding anymore,” she said.
He had only one option: deactivate the ship’s incredibly powerful weapons systems the same way he’d done the internal sensors.
“Sadly,” he told her, “I didn’t trust the technician who created the countermanding options, and when I reprogrammed myself, I had to add a physical fail-safe. So I must disarm at either the weapons control room or the bridge.”
“Which is closer?” she asked.
Now they were sneaking through the ship’s service corridors. One nice thing about noblemen, even on their warships they liked tidy decorum—keeping the rabble out of sight, really—so junior crew used the smaller walkways. Blackworm’s crew might not even realize the passages existed, and they encountered no one in their frantic sprint back. He paused at a narrow access hatch and Trixie was only a few steps behind.
“Don’t get caught again,” he told her.
“Don’t get shot again.”
They both nodded, and he released the hatch.
In two steps, he cleared the doorway and dropped three of the intruders at their stations before they could do more than gape at him as he—seemingly to them—materialized through a wall. A fourth managed to squeeze off one answering blast of plasma fire before Trixie stunned him to the deck.
Nor blinked at her. He hadn’t thought to bring her a weapon…
She lifted a second pistol from the unconscious Thorkon mercenary she’d floored. When she caught his sidelong glance, she pocketed the second blaster and shrugged. “I’m not going to run out of charge again.”
He strode to the tactical station and hauled aside the body slumped over the controls. With swift fingers, he took the controls—
The comm beeped once at him, and he cursed.
Trixie stiffened. “What’s wrong?”
“This larf-licker”—he toed the unconscious mercenary irately—“found my lock-out. And locked me out. He must’ve noticed the countermand on the sensors.” Pushing away from the control, he hurried to the central comm station and quickly reviewed the log. “He already started disallowing any hijacking of the comm too…” At engineering, he found his secret bypass was disabled for the environmental systems too.
A cold, emptiness—as if space was leaking in—slowed his steps as he approached the captain’s chair. Blackworm, born noble, wouldn’t have let any of his minions sit here. Certainly not some for-hire mercenary. So maybe the clever merc hadn’t yet had his hands on these controls.
It was their last hope.
Nor settled into the seat. He stifle
d a sigh, although his beaten body wanted to collapse into the plush cushioning.
Even on his own ship, before the Grandy, he’d been a restless captain, rarely sitting, preferring to pace if he was on the bridge or be somewhere else entirely if there was nothing to do but pace. The command chair had never felt quite right.
And it was worse on the Grandiloquence, though the seat had been engineered and tailored specifically to his body when he’d bought his commission.
Maybe he’d never really believed it was his.
He ran his hands down the elegant design, the metal sleek under his palms, to the controls. He flicked through the menus and into the hidden sub-controllers…
He slumped, his guts clenching so hard he thought he might be sick for the first time since he’d been shoved out an airlock in his mech suit to scrub the hull and the whole universe had spun sickeningly around him. Grimly, he stared down at the smear of blood on his boot until he could control his voice. “The Grandy mustn’t make it back to Azthronos.”
Trixie stepped up beside him, a plasma rifle in her hip holster and a pistol in either hand. Clearly she was taking her re-arming very seriously. “The internal sensors are still down, right? We can find every one of Blackworm’s crew and end them.” Her voice was violent.
Ah, his little mishkeet. “There are too many of them and not enough of us. And we can’t risk the whole solar system.” He flicked through to the last, red-lined directive. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m locked out of the helm. And the course is already set to pass the event horizon and return to Azthronos.”
For a heartbeat, she was silent then she growled, “No. I refuse to let him win.”
Her ferocity a strange balm for the chill within him, Nor pushed back in his seat. “I can’t take back command of our course. But…I still have helm control for speed.”
With a frown, she shook her head uncertainly. “So Blackworm can get to Azthronos faster?”
“On our current course, if I lock in the speed, the Grandiloquence will approach the event horizon too fast to escape the singularity’s gravitational pull.”
She brought both hands together, a prayerful pose if not for the two pistols in the way. “We’d be…”