Starbreaker

by Amanda Bouchet

  The silver-haired man stopped beside my table and peered down at me with a pointed look. “It should be a fine night for stargazing.”

  Considering I could barely breathe, the required response slid surprisingly easily from my tongue. “The city lights are too bright. You’d have better luck at the Mercury Tides Planetarium. I hear they have a great show.”

  He nodded and pulled out a chair. “I’ll try that,” he said, sitting down across from me. “Thanks.”

  I exhaled slowly and unclenched my fists, flexing my fingers under the table. I can do this.

  The waitress appeared, flashing a welcoming smile at Ahern as she brought up the menu on a lightweight portable screen. He ordered a coffee, and she left with a frown. The corner table in the back wouldn’t be a profitable one for her this afternoon.

  “Are you who I think you are?” Ahern asked.

  That depended. Who did he think I was? “Tess Bailey,” I answered. I’d been using the name for eighteen years. I certainly wasn’t going to say Quintessa Novalight and open that whole can of worms.

  Sitting back, Ahern folded his arms across his chest. “Captain of the Endeavor, right?”

  He’d heard of me? And my ship? I might have blushed.

  “She’s old and beat up but gets us where we need to go,” I confirmed with a nod.

  The corners of his mouth lifted, a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I understand the Demeter Terre refugees can thank you for feeding them.”

  In our four-and-a-half-minute briefing with the rebel leaders, we’d learned that Daniel Ahern and his wife, Reena, were DT natives. There weren’t that many left. Ahern and his wife had gone farther afield and risen in the rebel ranks, but most survivors of the Demeter Terre massacre had stuck close to their ruined home and colonized its nearby moons.

  “We’re not the only ones,” I said. Plenty of Nightchasers brought food and supplies to the barely inhabitable rocks orbiting the ex-agricultural giant of Sector 18. From what I understood, Reena Ahern was the only scientist in the galaxy who’d come anywhere close to figuring out how to decontaminate Demeter Terre after the Overseer poisoned the atmosphere.

  “Did you know that Sector 18 lost ninety percent of its population?” Ahern asked.

  I nodded. I was too young to have lived through the final Sambian War, but I knew my history. When the imperial hammer pounded down with extreme violence and a total disregard for human life, it obliterated the strongest resistance to military rule. Sectors 17 and 18 finally fell, and the Overseer—a.k.a. thank-the-Powers-that-man-wasn’t-my-father-after-all—only stopped when my mother bargained her future and her body away for the safety of what was left of the Outer Zones.

  Ahern wasn’t the only one who wanted his wife back. If Demeter Terre could produce again, Sector 18 could repopulate.

  The waitress arrived with Ahern’s coffee, and we kept silent while she set it in front of him with a couple of compacted sugar disks and a self-heating tube of milk—luxuries we couldn’t afford aboard the Endeavor.

  Well, maybe Shade could, but sweetening and creaming my coffee with Dark Watch earnings might ruin my favorite drink.

  Ahern picked up a spoon and stirred in a bit of both milk and sugar.

  He smiled at me again, seeming to sense my anxiety and wanting to put me at ease, but a bleakness remained in his features, somehow etched in. I knew enough about the DT survivors to know they didn’t sing lullabies to their children. They sang songs of revenge. But while I relished the idea of the Overseer toppling from his imperial throne probably more than just about anyone in the galaxy, I hated the idea of another generation drowning in bloodshed. That reservation had made it very hard to turn over the lab full of enhancers to the rebel leaders, despite wanting to give my friends and allies an edge in this seemingly endless fight.

  “How’s the soup?” Ahern asked.

  I frowned at the bowl of congealing food. What a mundane question. It seemed out of place. “Cold.”

  He chuckled, erasing a decade from his face. “I apologize for being late.”

  “It’s fine.” It totally wasn’t. I was a nervous wreck.

  He tipped his head to one side, studying me. “My sister has three children. They’re alive thanks to you.”

  My brows drew together in question. “I’m sorry… I don’t know what you mean.”

  Ahern leaned forward, lowering his voice until the din of the restaurant nearly swallowed up his words. “That first haul you brought in? About five years ago? You had a few dozen cure-alls, too. You passed them over to the food coordinator on Mooncamp 1 along with a huge supply of canned goods. Said to give the shots to whoever needed them most. Said you were sorry you didn’t have more.”

  I nodded. I remembered. Who forgot their first heist? It was a big one. The DT Mooncampers couldn’t believe their eyes when the never-before-seen Endeavor suddenly showed up with three cargo holds’ worth of food. With that delivery, we became Nightchasers in more than just name. I had a ship, a crew, and a purpose—everything I’d dreamed about while hacking unstable minerals from the disgusting bowels of a prison mine.

  “The kids were in bad shape. My sister, too. Some kind of lung infection had gone around the DT moons and hit their household harder than most. Those vaccines saved them. Four people are still in my life thanks to you.”

  The shock of heat that seared my eyes from behind took me by surprise. I blinked away the burn. I didn’t know what to say, but I was glad Jax and Fiona could hear this. “I’ve got a great crew. It’s a team effort—every time.”

  Ahern acknowledged my words with a slight dip of his chin. “Then you can thank them for me also.”

  A white-hot stab of grief speared me. If only I could. Half my crew was gone. Miko and Shiori weren’t listening in from the ship. Miko would never hear anything again, and we had no idea where the Overseer had locked up Shiori, or if she even lived.

  I inhaled and exhaled with deliberate evenness. Emotion in. Carbon dioxide out. We needed to get to the point of all this. “I hear I can maybe help you again.”

  Ahern’s cautious green gaze darted around the restaurant. No one was paying attention to us, but his voice stayed barely audible in pitch. “It’s not a transfer, like I thought. That already happened days ago, and I just found out. That’s why I was late. But I know where she’s being held. I’ve got someone on the inside who can help.”

  A bad feeling sank through me. Interrupting a transfer would be easier than breaking into a prison. There was potential chaos in movement. It didn’t require sneaking into a lion’s den. “Where?”

  His features tensed. Lines bracketed his mouth. “Starbase 12. Somewhere on the lower prison levels.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. He couldn’t be serious.

  In my ear, the tiny com transmitted someone’s soft curse. Jax’s maybe. Shade’s eyes met mine for a startled split second. Both of us looked away fast. Reena Ahern was in the most secure place in the known universe. This was an impossible task. A death sentence. No one broke into Imperial Headquarters and lived.

  I’d been there before. Of course I had. It orbited my birth planet, and the Overseer had shuttled us back and forth between Alpha Sambian and Starbase 12 all the time. Mom had hated it—said the place stank like doom. At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. I’d liked the trips up. They got me out of our prison of a home with the basement lab where the man who was supposed to love and protect me strapped me down and stole my blood.

  A boulder of sheer dread pinned me to my chair. For the first time in about eighty minutes, I stopped fidgeting and stared. “We’re supposed to break her out. How?”

  Ahern drifted closer, his crisp white shirt nearly hitting the rim of his untouched coffee mug. He drummed long fingers against the table—a sound that went straight to my nervous system and exploded there. “Ten days from n
ow, my contact will deactivate the plasma shield alarm on Landing Platform 7 at nineteen hundred hours, universal time. Slip in, slip out. The alarm will reactivate three hours later. Be out, or you’re done for.”

  I gaped at him. We ran stolen food around the Dark. We pilfered cure-all vaccines from the military to give to children. Sometimes, I stole books. We’d rescued a few rebel prisoners from the Dark Watch, but that had mostly been dumb luck!

  Panic surged up with an acid burn of half-digested soup. I’d made the decision to bring the enhancers to the Fold. I’d spouted off about free will and choices, trying to make sure the rebel leaders didn’t force the body-altering serum on anyone like the Overseer had. A few days later, they handed us a suicide mission. What the fuck?

  My voice shook. “There must be a crew more qualified for this.”

  “You’re here. I’m here.” Daniel Ahern dropped a few coins on the table for his coffee and stood. “Someone chose you, and I’m counting on you to get my wife back.”

  I stared at him in utter shock. Had I condemned us all? Were the people I’d believed shared my values and ideals really no better than Simon Novalight? Ready to flatten any bump in their road without a second thought?

  Ahern adjusted his suit jacket, his back to the room, his voice hushed, and his grass-green eyes cutting into me like chips of glass. “Break into Starbase 12. Bring Reena back to me. She’ll save Demeter Terre, and the Outer Zones will be free again.”

  With that bold statement, he turned and strode out the door while I choked on my own dry throat and my heart pounded like the drums of war.

  Chapter 2

  SHADE

  I walked across the crowded restaurant toward a shell-shocked Tess. Her pale face reflected the stiff, cold panic echoing in my chest. Could Nightchasers say no to missions, or was the rebellion like the Dark Watch—you took your orders and shut up?

  When I reached her side, I held out my hand. Tess slipped her fingers into mine. “Time to go.”

  She gave a jerky nod as I drew her up, her blue eyes huge and haunted. From day one, everything about her had struck me as younger than her twenty-six years—her faint freckles, her heart-shaped face, her stubborn hope that justice still existed—except for those eyes. They’d seen too much to stay innocent.

  The restaurant staff threw us confused looks as we left. My almost-too-friendly waitress narrowed her eyes at me over the top of her menu tablet, and the women still sitting at the table next to mine glared at Tess.

  A quick pause at the door revealed no obvious danger outside the restaurant. Jax and Fiona were already on their way back to the Endeavor. Their presence had been a precaution, just in case the meeting with Ahern turned into something we weren’t expecting. We headed out a little behind them.

  The moment we hit the street, sunlight beat down on us from two stars, one redder than the other. Tess squinted and angled her face away from the heat. Not me. I liked it. Air as thick and heavy as the inside of a steam sauna clung to my skin, making perspiration pop out and bead along my hairline. The sweltering humidity reminded me of the full-blown summer I’d left behind for the Dark, although Albion City rarely got this hot.

  My nostrils flared on a breath that smelled of baked pavement and mild pollution. The atmosphere back home was better. It didn’t leave this chalky aftertaste.

  Images of Albion 5 flashed through my head, so vivid and intense I could almost reach out and touch them. A hollow feeling spread through me, and I bit down hard, stopping it. Missing a place I could never return to didn’t help me any more than thinking about my dead parents, or regretting the questionable choices I’d made over the last ten years—all for nothing.

  My docking towers were gone. I’d lost them, and now there was no buying them back. I’d wanted Tess safe and hopefully with me more than I’d wanted the urban empire my family had built from the ground up. People were more important than buildings. The sorry state of the whole fucking galaxy was more important than buildings. Once I figured that out, there was no going back. Now, I was a rebel, an outlaw. The only thing I truly had left was universal currency, and sometimes, when Tess looked at me with wary eyes that couldn’t quite let go of the past, I wished I didn’t even have that.

  She glanced at me, no smile on her lips.

  “Relax, starshine. We’re almost done.” The empty words left a bad taste in my mouth.

  “Almost done?” Tess let out a soft snort, keeping her voice low. Her gaze cut to mine, bright blue and sharp. “This is the easy part. How can we possibly do what he asked?”

  I squeezed her hand. “One thing at a time.” We had to take care of Bridgebane and the blood exchange first. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Her Yeah, right expression told me I could shove my platitudes up my ass. At least her annoyance was better than her wide-eyed trust and misplaced faith in me that had torn me up day and night on Albion 5.

  Tess remained on edge, gripping my hand harder than she probably realized. Our palms sweated. Our fingers stuck. But I’d take any contact that bound us together. I’d had her underneath me last night. She’d been on top this morning. She was trusting me with her body again, but I couldn’t tell if her head and her heart were really following.

  I looked over at the woman who’d turned my life upside down in the best way possible. The worried crinkle between her eyebrows was deeper than usual. I increased the pressure on her fingers, hoping the weight of my hand would show her she wasn’t in this alone—unless she chose to be. So far, I’d been lucky. She’d kept me around despite my bounty-hunting past and decade-long ties to the Dark Watch.

  I scanned the neighborhood as we walked, my eyes peeled for danger and my ears cocked for the sound of a military patrol. We’d paid for a platform on a docking tower near the meeting point with Ahern, trying to avoid using the crowded, tubelike shuttles racing all over the place. The multilevel network ran both above and below ground and was huge and complex. A twenty-minute walk through the grid-patterned city center had seemed easier, but now I was thinking it might’ve been a mistake. The walk to the restaurant had already seemed strangely quiet, and from what we were seeing again now, Koralight Crowners didn’t stay on the streets. They either went inside or got in a tube, funneling toward the frequent shuttle stops at a quick pace.

  We’d only had a few daylight hours to observe the city, and things had looked different from two hundred and fifty-two levels up. If I’d had more time to prepare, I would’ve known the people here didn’t go anywhere on foot; they took the damn shuttles. The fact that Tess and I had just walked by two stops was already suspicious.

  Seeing a cross street that looked mainly residential, I guided us off the main avenue toward a neighborhood I hoped had fewer obvious transportation hubs.

  While they’d been acting as lookouts and watching over us, Jax and Fiona had instinctively headed inside, rotating between the several shops and large food emporium in the area around the restaurant. I increasingly understood their urge to take cover as we made our way back to the Endeavor. Outside just didn’t feel right.

  They hadn’t checked in for a few minutes, which meant they were on track to get back to the ship soon. We’d all gone mostly silent after Ahern dropped his bomb, blasting to smithereens what little safety we thought we’d gained after passing off the enhancers to the rebel leaders in the Fold.

  The Fold. I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around that place. Untraceable except for a big, dark gravity field. Constantly moving around the Outer Zones. Expanding to fit whatever was inside it—right now, an entire rebel base. It hurt like hell going in and just as badly on the way out. Somehow, it knew friend from foe. Unfortunately, the Overseer’s serum made any enhanced soldier able to cross the barrier without suffering from the aneurysm that usually took out enemies on their way into the rebel stronghold.

  They’d have to find it first, though. As far as I could tell,
the Fold was the best-kept secret in the galaxy. Being inexplicable probably helped. If you weren’t born there or brought there, the human mind just wouldn’t conjure up an alternate pocket in space like that.

  I lifted Tess’s hand and brushed my lips against her knuckles. It was only partly an excuse to talk into my piece-of-shit wristband. I kissed her every chance I got.

  “Coms still on?” I asked quietly. The silence was eerie when we were supposed to be connected.

  Two masculine voices immediately answered with “Check.” Jax and Merrick.

  “Fungi!” Fiona said, her tone enthusiastic but hushed.

  A small laugh bubbled out of Tess. It was just a little huff, but it loosened her shoulders. Her stride lengthened, less tense. The Endeavor’s botanist had accomplished what I hadn’t all day: a real smile from Tess.

  Moments like this drove home how new I was to this group, still finding my place. Merrick was new, too, but it was different. He’d been a rebel all along, and he’d never set out to deceive the crew of the Endeavor. Lies, subterfuge, and near-betrayal—that was all me. They hadn’t kicked me out on my ass, but real trust didn’t come back fast, if ever.

  “Where are you guys?” Tess’s softly spoken question echoed through my earpiece a fraction of a second after I heard it in real time. I frowned, wanting to bury this material back in the dark ages where it belonged.

  “We veered off to blend in with some people,” Jax answered. “They all stopped at the first shuttle entrance, though. Now, we’re alone.”

  “Us too.” Tess freed her hand from mine and pushed a tiny hinge on her bracelet. The polished green stone slid aside, revealing a flat, dark surface. She pressed another button, and a gridgram linked to our coms sprang up in front of us.