Fools Rush In (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 3)

by Donna S. Frelick

  She saw the pair turn right at the next corridor—definitely heading for Engineering now—and took it up to a light-footed run. She slowed at the turn, thinking to take a cautious peek before she followed her prey. As she eased around the corner, she was met with a hard punch to the head. Stunned, she fell back, but she recovered quickly, tribute to her training and the fact that her attacker had misjudged her height and struck her in the forehead rather than the nose. He cursed and bent over his right hand. She took advantage by delivering a savage kick to the inside of his knee. He went to the deck with a howl.

  His taller companion came at her with the skills and focus of a street fighter, and within seconds she was pinned against the bulkhead, trying without hope to block a hailstorm of blows with her forearms and elbows and knees. She felt her rib crack, then her cheekbone; she put an elbow in his sternum, but it only angered him. She got in a knee to his groin and smiled in grim satisfaction, figuring it would be the last time she smiled, with all her teeth, anyway. The taste of blood was thick in her mouth. Jesus Chris! That hurt, you fucker! She knew if she didn’t get away from this bulkhead, she’d be unconscious soon, but there was no room to duck or step or even breathe.

  Her vision was starting to flash black, and she could barely hold her arms up when the rain of abuse abruptly ended. “Javin . . .” she mumbled and slumped to the deck, vaguely aware that the big man had pulled her attacker off her and was busy beating him to a pulp. Just before the blackness swept up to carry her away, she managed to say one word.

  “Engineering.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Shalssiti pulak! What the fucking hell is happening on my ship!”

  Captain Murphy seldom lost his temper, but things seldom spiraled out of control the way they were spinning toward the horizon right now. His Security Chief responded with stoic silence. She hadn’t had any answers in some time.

  He strode toward the small stage that had been erected in the converted exercise space, looking for a voice amplification system to make his feelings known to his crew. The young crew chief in charge there made it happen fast.

  Murphy wasted no time trying to get his crew’s attention. He whistled into the mic, an action that was first met with whoops of protest, then a fall into silence as people began to realize who had shattered their eardrums. Those who were not actively involved in fighting turned to face their leader on the stage. And gradually, as Murphy waited, Security began to get a handle on the remaining knots of scuffling crew.

  “What the living hell is going on here?” He paused, letting his question sink in. “This is the Shadowhawk, the biggest, the proudest independent trader in the galaxy. We fight slavers. We fight mulaak Thrane thugs and Gray slimedogs and assholes wherever we find them. We don’t fight each other. Ever.”

  He walked from one end of the little stage to the other, staring each of his crew members in the face. None of them could meet his gaze. His comm unit buzzed at his waist, but he ignored it. He was on a roll.

  “People call us blackjacks, pirates, worse than murderers or thieves. They imagine our lives are just like the brawls I saw in here tonight. I know different. I expect different. And because of that there will be consequences for this.” The young girl directly in front of him—Laurie? No, Lainie—grew visibly paler.

  “Now we have another problem.” He looked toward a disturbance at one side of the room. “Shut the fuck up back there!” Whoever it was got quiet in a hurry. “There’s been a malfunction with the main exit hatches. It’s going to take Engineering a minute to get it fixed. Until that happens you’re going to sit quietly like nice boys and girls and wait. When the hatches open you’re going to get up and go back to your bunks and sleep this off. Give me any reason to notice your ass individually except for exceptional bravery or willingness to help in this emergency, and you will be scrubbing out the filter tanks for a month. Am I clear?”

  Several dozen voices answered, “Aye, Cap!” Most of them sat down where they were, too disheartened to speak with their neighbors. Lainie scowled at her fellow crew members like she would be the one to enforce his orders.

  He threw the mic at the startled crew chief and jumped down off the stage, where Chen met him with more bad news. “Engineering reports an attempt to take over the engine control room a few minutes ago. Kwan was there, says they were amateurs and he has it under control. I sent what I had left of my auxiliaries over anyway.”

  Murphy scrubbed a hand down his face. “Shit, what a night. Remind me never to allow a mash again.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “And did you remind me?” He suddenly had an urgent need to know the rest of his ship was in one piece. He pulled out his comm unit and called Mo on the bridge to demand a status report.

  “Cap. I’ve been trying to reach you. Chen tells me you’re trapped on the PT deck with most of the crew.”

  “Don’t sound so smug. And, yes, I ignored your buzz while I was dragging the crew over the thrusters for their rowdy behavior. Tell me my ship is intact.”

  “So far. But we do seem to be the target of a coordinated, if inept, attack by a faction of lucky ones from the Fleeflek. We have half a dozen in the brig from a genuinely comical assault on Engineering and two more that Javin Darto put in Sickbay after they had a run-in with your friend Rayna Carver. She apparently had been following them from the mash toward Engineering when they caught her. They, uh, they beat her up pretty badly before Javin stepped in.”

  “Bleeding gods!” A hole opened up in his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. “Is she okay?”

  “Doc says she’s got her under the light; you should be able to talk to her in a couple of hours.”

  Interviewing her hadn’t been his first concern, but he added it to the list. “You say these veers were going from here to Engineering? Then what was going on here at the mash could have been a staged distraction. Someone let at least a dozen LO’s in here despite my orders to the contrary. Any of those guys in the brig seem resistant to the mindwipe?”

  “Most, if not all of them. I don’t think the others are capable of following a plan.”

  “Agreed. Let’s start with the ones in the brig, see if we can identify a leader.” He suspected they’d end up in Sickbay, though. The man who came up with a plan usually liked to see how it was coming together. The men Rayna had been following had been positioned to see both aspects of the plan come to fruition. The question that soured in his gut like a batch of home brewed ’shroom ale was how Rayna could have known that. He intended to find out how this snippet of a female with an attitude the size of Malenga’s second moon could know more about what was going on around his ship than he did.

  Doc Berta was busy patching up half of his crew, but she spared a few minutes to give Sam a status report. “The light’s out of her face, so you can talk to her now for a minute. She’s tough, but she took a beating before Javin got there—hairline fractures in the ribs, cheekbone, forearms, multiple contusions. I don’t see any internal injuries. That was just plain lucky.”

  Heat rose in Sam’s chest, accelerating his heartbeat, strangling his breath. What kind of animal beat a female—beat anyone—so badly with so little provocation? He knew Rayna wouldn’t welcome his protectiveness, but he couldn’t help the images that came to mind, of the tiny woman trying to fend off the vicious blows from a much bigger attacker, and he wanted to finish the job Javin Darto had begun.

  “Cap? You okay?” His Chief MO laid a hand on his arm. The expression on her face said she saw too much.

  He scraped up a smile. “Yeah. It’s been a rough night. You said she’s under the healing light. She’s not going to need the regen tank?”

  “There’s someone with a broken leg and another with a cracked skull ahead of her.” Sam opened his mouth to ask for the details, but Berta, ever efficient, beat him to it. “Bentor and Axl. They’ll be fine. By the time they get done, she won’t need it.”

  “How long until she’s up and a
round?”

  Again, there was understanding behind Berta’s smile. “A few days. She’s in great shape; she’ll heal fast.”

  Sam nodded, breathed. He took the few steps to Rayna’s cubicle and peeked around the curtain. Seeing her there, shrunken and lost in the Sickbay bunk, her vibrant lifeforce reduced to a subdued rhythmic beeping of the monitors, would have been a shock in any case. But her face still showed the marks of her fight, the swelling and purplish-black bruising along one cheekbone, the cuts over the eyes, the blackened, puffed-up eyelids, the split lips. Within hours the swelling would be gone, the bruising beginning to fade, the result of the therapeutic action of the healing light. At this moment, though . . . looking at her made Sam tremble with the need to hold her, or to kill somebody, he wasn’t sure which.

  “That bad, huh?” The papery whisper emerged with some effort between lips that barely moved.

  Sam found a smile. “You look like one of us now. Very piratical.” He came all the way inside the cubicle and stood close by the bed.

  Rayna grunted. “Be popular . . . with the crew.”

  “You’re already popular with me. Thanks to you I have someone to question about what happened tonight. I won’t forget that.”

  Her eyes closed in denial. “Thank Javin.”

  “I did.” Out of sight below the healing bed, his fists clenched. “If he hadn’t already put those guys in Sickbay, I’d be looking to do it myself.”

  The eyes opened again and something crossed her face like sunshine on troubled water. “Why, Captain. I didn’t know you cared.”

  His chest tightened, equal parts irritation and embarrassment and . . . damn it! “My ship. My responsibility.”

  The teasing light went out of her eyes. “Ah.”

  He shook his head. “What made you follow those two anyway?”

  “Caught some talk . . . at the mash. Some crazy plan.” She moved as if to sit up, but got no further than the hunching of her shoulders before she fell back against her pillows with a grimace.

  Sam put a hand on her arm to hold her in place. “Not on your life, Little Bit. Doc just got you put back together. If you behave you might get out of here in a day or two.”

  Rayna shot him a glare. “Keep calling me that . . . you’ll be trading places with me.”

  “See? You’re feeling better already.” He didn’t want to, but he removed his hand from her arm.

  “Did . . . shit . . . did you talk to them?”

  “Not yet. So what was the plan? Besides inciting a riot among my crew?”

  “Dumbasses expected you to give them the Fleeflek.” Rayna closed her eyes, sighing with pain and exhaustion. “Don’t think they know you very well.”

  Sam gave in to the urge to touch her, knowing she was so close to unconscious she wouldn’t be aware of it. He reached out and covered her small, bruised hand with his large, calloused one.

  “No, honey, they don’t. But trust me, they’re about to find out.”

  “I’m Captain Murphy, and you’re going to be very sorry you met me.” Sam took every bit of the anger he felt as a man and the authority he held as ship’s captain and threw it at the man glaring up at him from the Sickbay bunk. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man shrugged one narrow shoulder at him. “You have the Fleeflek’s cargo manifest. You figure it out.”

  Sam placed a hand on the man’s other shoulder—the one bound in a sling—and squeezed ever so gently. “Your attitude is admirable, but misplaced. I’m an impatient man, and you might want to save the resistance for the important stuff. Tell me your name.”

  “Fuck! Okay! Falla. Ven Falla.”

  “Tell me why you tried to take over my ship, Ven Falla.”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the riot your people started at the mash tonight. And the attack in my engine room. All part of a coordinated plan to take over my ship. Not a very competent plan, mind you, but a plan nonetheless. Masterminded by you, Ven Falla.”

  Sweat beaded on Falla’s forehead and began to roll down his temples. “You’ve gone space-happy. I snuck into the mulaak party, sure. I hadn’t had a drink in months, that’s why. Maybe I got a little carried away with that sweet piece of ass, but she was willing enough until her boyfriend showed up—”

  Sam snapped, his hand coming up to close on Falla’s throat before he’d even thought about it. “Stop right there. I ought to cut your lying tongue out of your mouth.” His fingers tightened, and Falla struggled for breath until his face darkened. “You see, you’ve got it all wrong, Ven. That wasn’t the lady’s boyfriend who came to her rescue. She’s a particular friend of mine. Yeah. And I happen to know she was fighting for her life before my man Javin showed up.”

  The idea that he had a personal stake in the outcome of the conversation had the desired effect on Falla, who was staring at him in horror out of a face now purple from lack of oxygen. Sam released his hold on the man’s throat.

  Falla’s retching and coughing brought Doc Berta over to raise a disapproving eyebrow, but Sam waved her off. The doctor retreated, holding up a hand with fingers spread as she left. He nodded. Five minutes would be plenty for what he had in mind.

  “How can you even know her?” Falla sputtered at last. “She was on the slaver with us.”

  “I work fast. And what’s more important is that she was under my protection when you beat the crap out of her. Like my ship is under my protection, ptark. My protection—the guy who wants to rip your throat out. So, again. Tell me why you were trying to take over my ship.”

  Falla wouldn’t meet his eyes now; his gaze jittered from one side of the treatment cubicle to the other, seeking escape. “Not your ship we wanted.”

  “If not my ship, then what?”

  “The Fleeflek.”

  Sam held back a laugh. “One, if you wanted the mulaak wreck, it would have been a helluva lot easier to take her than the ’hawk. And, two, why would you want a broken-down old slaver in the first place?”

  “Most of us who were resistant to the mindwipe ended up here on the Shadowhawk. We needed to negotiate for what we wanted. As for why . . .” Falla looked up in defiance. “We deserve to set our own course.”

  “Oh. A freedom fighter, huh?” Sam sat back and considered his prisoner in silence. Falla’s expression had turned sullen, but there was something of a performance about it. There was more to this story, Sam could feel it.

  Before he could pursue it, his comm unit beeped at his waist with an urgent code from Engineering. “Kwan?”

  “Hey, Cap. Need you down here as soon as you can make it.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Your ears only, Cap.”

  “Be there in five.” He replaced the unit at his waist with a curse and turned on Falla. “We’re not done. You still owe me for what you did to my friend, and if you’ve so much as scratched a bulkhead on my ship you can plan on spending the rest of your life in the penal colony on Braga.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “One little processing unit. This whole fucking engine room and they picked the one that sabotages our jump drive.”

  The captain and his chief engineer stood staring at the offending unit, a cube of crystal nanoplex no bigger than a newbie’s locker. Acid had eaten away one side of the delicate matrix.

  “They knew what they were after, all right,” Kwan agreed. “And they were discreet about it. I might not have even noticed it if we hadn’t scheduled a maintenance check for today.”

  The unit did only one thing: It monitored and controlled the wild fluxes in power that overtook the engines during travel through the jump nodes. Without it, the ship risked violent explosion or endless limbo between nodes. Without it, attempting jump was suicide.

  Sam tried in vain to rub the tension out of his neck. “How long to regrow the matrix?”

  Kwan shrugged. “We might get lucky and be ready by the time we get to C4.”

  “So five da
ys.”

  “I said might. More likely we’ll have to hang out there a day or two until it firms up.”

  Sam refused to say out loud what was on his mind and instead sent a silent prayer to the universe to keep the Grays off his trail until his crippled ship got her wings back. “Okay. Coddle it. Sing to it. Feed it chocolate. I don’t care what you have to do, but get us back in shape to move, Engineer.”

  “Aye, Cap. I’m on it.”

  Sam left the engine room, blood in his eye for Ven Falla.

  Everything hurt. No. Every fucking thing hurt. And what didn’t hurt so much also itched, a function of the healing brought on by the light that was currently focused on Rayna’s battered torso. Where the light had already passed, over her face and neck, the itching was maddening as the cells regenerated and the circulatory and lymphatic systems operated at an accelerated pace. Rayna thought again of pressing the button near her hand for another shot of sedative, but denied herself a little longer. There was something on her mind.

  Captain Solomon Armstrong Murphy. She hadn’t imagined his visit earlier, though she was pretty sure she’d fallen asleep in the middle of it. And—she couldn’t really be remembering this right—he’d had a look in his eyes. Something . . . soft . . . and hard at the same time. One minute like she was a little broken bird that he wanted to pick up and hold in his hand, the next like she was down on some battlefield and he was fending off all attackers. What the hell? Twelve hours ago he wouldn’t have spit on her if her hair was on fire.

  Unwelcome warmth crept into her chest at the thought of Murphy’s protectiveness, making her squirm. Damn that mulaak slave anyway for putting her flat on her back in this Sickbay, where the hardass captain could play the magnanimous guardian. The only thing she wanted to owe Murphy for was a trip to LinHo.

  The life signs monitor beside her bunk noted the rise in her heartbeat and blood pressure with an alert tone and a change in the color of its display from green to yellow. Rayna took a deep breath and used her biofeedback training to calm herself, hoping to fend off an unnecessary visit from the medics. She’d had enough of their fussing already. By the time the monitor display had gone back to green she realized she was exhausted. She fumbled for the sedative button in the tangle of the blankets.