“Sorry, I—”
Xander covered her mouth with a kiss that scorched her to her soul, burning through her with profound and merciless desire. She moaned beneath his lips and curled her hand against his sweatshirt before stroking downward and returning to the prize. He hardened beneath her touch, a few layers of cotton a poor shield for the arousal throbbing there.
Daring to take the risk, Thandie flicked the roof of his mouth with her tongue, encouraging what he’d already began.
He made a low, deep sound she could only describe as a growl and seized her, fingers tangling in her hair. Her wildest fantasies of kissing Xander Vargas hadn’t lived up to the delicious reality. Each expert stroke of his tongue sent her imagination into overdrive, wondering if it would be as skilled between her thighs.
If they’d been anywhere else, she might have tried to find out.
Maybe Xander came to the same realization. He pulled back the moment her fingers crept toward the waistband of his sweats and relocated her hand, while uneven breaths fell heavy and warm against her cheek. “Shit. Uh, guess we both got a little carried away.”
Her gaze dropped to his lap. The man had to be hung like an Astreyan stallion. The longer she stared, the more difficult it became to tear her attention away from it.
Chest still heaving, Thandie scooted to the edge of the couch. “I should probably get going. Armory watch in an hour.”
“Yeah, the time crept up.” Xander not-so-discreetly adjusted his sweats. It didn’t help.
Seconds ticked by and threatened to become minutes. The holovision started its next feature presentation, but they remained in their seats, each waiting for the other to move first. Thandie reluctantly stood.
“Will you be joining us for training this afternoon?”
“I’ll be there. Though I don’t imagine Viljoen will be doing his usual matches. I plan to fill in for him.”
Chuckling nervously and avoiding direct eye contact, Thandie glanced away and rubbed the back of her neck. “Yeah, I guess we’ll see. Catch you then, Xander.”
“Hey, Thandie,” he called out, catching her before she reached the door. “Thanks for the company.”
She twisted around to see the unmistakable lust in his eyes hadn’t faded. It lingered like an unspoken promise. “Same to you.”
That promise lingered with her for the remainder of the day.
Chapter Eight
Despite being one of the most crowded places on the ship, the Jemison’s bridge was also the quietest. Ethan’s command seat dominated a raised section at the back of the room, overlooking the various stations and personnel below, including the pilot.
Xander needed the distraction there. The past three days had been hell on him, because if he wasn’t slammed with frivolous medical requests, his mind was on Thandie and how much they didn’t belong together.
Didn’t she deserve better?
Hadn’t he vowed he would never throw himself into another romantic entanglement on board a ship after the massive shitstorm he’d endured while deployed on the Glenn?
He’d managed to keep from bumping into her since their kiss in the lounge, but it was only a matter of time.
“I owe a favor to Lieutenant Shahid for her help identifying our killer,” Gareth said, bringing Xander’s attention back to the present matter. An intergalactic identification file expanded on the holographic display, featuring the bearded features of a man in his sixties. “Jarvis Crane, leader of the Black Jackal Brotherhood.”
Ethan leaned forward in his seat and studied the report. “So you tracked him by the gun?”
“Yes, sir. As you can imagine, there aren’t many .40 caliber pistols on the open market equipped to fire combustion rounds. They’re old tech.”
“So what makes you think he’s our guy?” Viljoen asked.
“Lieutenant Shahid tapped some connections, so we know that he purchased a Smith and Wesson model 2040 Ignite off a black-market weapons dealer out of Astreya a year ago. It’s a pricey piece. About a half million quid, as there’s less than a dozen in working condition these days.”
Xander whistled. “So it’s only a possibility that he’s our man?”
“No, I’d say it’s about 98 percent.” The communications chief minimized the window and pulled up Crane’s list of crimes. “He’s wanted for countless violations, and the least of them are murder and burglary.”
“Unlawful trade of children…” Ethan read out loud.
“Forced prostitution,” Xander continued, swallowing heavily afterward.
Gareth nodded. “And he fits the forensic team’s profile. We’re looking for a big sonuvabitch about as tall as Commander Vargas. Crane is six-foot-six.”
“Contact United Command and tell them we’ve identified our man, Lockhart. If he’s still in this area of the galaxy, I want Crane and his ship found.”
“Yes, sir.”
In an effort to calm his troubled thoughts, Xander sucked in a deep breath and leaned against the side of Ethan’s chair without concern for what was proper or professional. He expected Ethan to complain or order him off, but he didn’t.
“Commodore?” A young woman at the communications terminal spoke up from her station. “We have an emergency transmission from Athena. You might want to hear this, sir.”
“Patch it through to my terminal.” A second later, he tapped his console. “This is Commodore Bishop of the HMS Jemison. What—”
“Oh, thank God!” A frazzled voice sounded over the comm. “Please, you must help us. We need immediate evacuation!”
Xander raised both brows and exchanged glances with Viljoen.
“What’s the nature of your problem?”
“I’ve spent bloody hours searching for someone, anyone. I’m an engineer, and I work for Hephaestus Tek, the manufacturing plant on Athena. Pirates landed about three days ago. Killed most of the technicians and took others off-world about an hour ago. God only knows where. There are wounded people everywhere. Pregnant women in labor. One popped during the attack, and I don’t think she can make it much longer. She’s real tired and weak.”
Ethan maintained an even voice but gestured for his navigator to input new coordinates. “I need you to remain as calm as possible. Tell me everything you know about your captors.”
“Pirates. Well-armed pirates, equipped with cybernetics unlike anything I’ve ever seen. They overwhelmed our security force—” A single gunshot rang out before the communication link went down.
“Shit,” Xander muttered.
“I’d put fifty quid on this bein’ him,” Gareth spoke up. “I’ll contact United Command and find out whether we’ve got more ships in the area.”
“You do that. Agosti, give me a time frame for arrival.”
“I can have us there in two hours, sir.”
“Get us there in one. Time to see what these Lexar engines can really do.” Ethan turned to Xander and Viljoen. “Get your team geared up. We’ll send you down in the shuttle and pursue Crane’s ship by radar if we can locate her in time.”
“Right away, Commodore.” Viljoen turned about face and strode off the bridge.
Ethan input a set of commands into his terminal and the ship went into alert. Red lights flashed overhead. “All hands to their stations. Alpha team, gear up and report to the shuttle bay.”
Xander waited until Ethan closed the ship’s comm line. “Did he say pregnant women? Plural?”
“You’re going to have your hands full, Xander. Good luck.”
Athena orbited a gas giant in a yellow star system. The barren moon held little of interest aside from a subterranean colony developed beneath its rocky surface for two purposes: mining and technical production.
Rich fields of liquid valerium beneath the moon’s surface provided a clean-burning fuel for manufacturing plants across the galaxy. In its solid state, valerium formed the basis for plasteel, the galaxy’s most profitable metal. Since it was as light as plastic and stronger than steel, it was favored
for cybernetics and space vehicles.
Unfortunately, Athena’s inhospitable atmosphere required masks for surface work and travel between civilization hubs.
“Masks on! Be prepared for gunfire when we exit the shuttle,” Viljoen called out to the squad. “If they expect our approach, they’ll flood the surface landing pad. Kruger, I want your gun on that door.”
“Will do, Commander.” Thandie rose from her seat and activated a button on her combat suit. The individual pieces of her helmet slid from the neck of her form-fitting combat suit and created a functional re-breather mask.
When the rockskipper’s side door opened, a shimmering energy barrier manifested in its place to maintain the interior atmosphere and pressure. Thandie clipped a line to her belt, placed her rifle to her shoulder, and then leaned out of the protective shielding.
Below them, rocky terrain rushed past the descending shuttle. Xander eyed her vulnerable position and moved closer. Then he remembered their surroundings.
Thandie didn’t need him to baby her. Instead, he tried to see her as his war Valkyrie, powerful and capable of defeating any foe who dared to oppose her, a true Royal Marine who needed no man’s coddling or protection.
The longer he mulled it through his thoughts, the more he liked it, until he was grinning with anticipation and his Lexar blood was hungry for the sight of seeing her in battle again. Had he ever seen a marine with an aim like hers? Some of it had to be her eyes, but the rest was pure skill and muscle memory, things which no amount of genetic therapy could help.
Xander didn’t know what disturbed him more, that he thought of Thandie as his Valkyrie or that, for the first time in his life, he was actually anxious for violence.
Head back in the game. Mentally chastising himself, he put his thoughts where they belonged, suppressing the Lexar hormones racing through his blood. Xander cleared his throat and raised a hand for the squad’s attention.
“There’s a fair chance that they have pain dampeners. Pirates and merc bands like them. That means that no matter where you shoot, they won’t feel it.” The devices were hot on the black market, desired for their ability to numb all sense of pain and discomfort.
“You heard the man. Let’s go for headshots,” Viljoen said.
An ear-splitting gunshot rang out before they touched down. Two more followed and a round sparked off the kinetic barrier a few inches from Thandie’s body. She returned fire, never once flinching from the shots aimed at her. Five feet above the surface, she unclipped and leapt down.
“Move out!” Viljoen ordered.
Xander led the support team. During firefights, he and the three field medics in his squad had a single task—to save as many lives as possible while supporting the primary assault squad. They had a difficult job, keeping their eyes on the hostiles while also maintaining constant vigilance for their teammates.
Six men emerged from the blast door leading into the facility. They had the advantage, despite being outnumbered, and utilized low walls for cover, as well as personal shields.
Viljoen deployed his team to positions with mobile bulwarks to defend against the onslaught from the facility, but for every three rounds fired from the marines, only two penetrated an assailant. Half of the incoming pirates didn’t even blink, despite the military rounds chipping into their armor and sinking into them.
Xander hated to be right.
“I said headshots, marines!” Viljoen yelled over the gunfire.
“Davis and Fairchild, switch to armor-shredding rounds!” Xander ordered.
“Shit,” Thandie swore over their communications channel. “Rogers, get out of the shuttle!”
Xander whirled to face the shuttle, but Thandie’s warning came too late. A rocket tore through the air and struck their transport, ripping through the kinetic barrier and disabling it. A column of fire and black smoke rose, then flames rushed over the portside wing.
Blown back by the resulting shockwave, Xander rolled across the ground. He pushed to his feet and maneuvered around to the shuttle door where automatic extinguishers sprayed the flames with foam particles.
Trusting his combat suit to protect him, Xander rushed in and knelt beside the motionless pilot before the metal even cooled. “Rogers is down but alive. But I don’t think we’re getting off this rock anytime soon.”
“Stay with him, Vargas, while we mop up this mess,” Viljoen relayed over the sound of gunfire.
“Acknowledged.” Like he needed to be told.
The kid was in pain, and his left leg resembled charred steak below the knee. He’d lose it for sure, and without a full medical laboratory on hand and a lot of grafts, there was nothing Xander could do. “Hang in there, Rogers. You’re going to be just fine. Can you hear me?”
Rogers groaned but continued to lie frightfully still as Xander worked over him. He dosed him with a premeasured shot of nanomorphone and applied antimicrobial ointment to the burns.
The rest of the battle faded to obscurity, adrenaline flooding Xander’s veins.
“They’re wearing stolen armor,” Thandie relayed from her position. “If their helmets deflect your rounds at this range, aim for their joints. The plating is weak there since it’s not made for them. Pain or no pain, they can’t stand on a shattered knee.”
A gunshot punctuated her point.
In the time it took for Xander to stabilize his patient, Viljoen and the others had secured the landing pad. No one else on the squad appeared to require his services. The pirates were another matter.
One crawled on bloodied arms toward the fallen missile launcher that had blown the rockskipper to shit. Before he reached it, Viljoen walked toward him and squeezed the trigger, executing the man with one round to the head.
“Bishop to ground squad, do you copy?”
Viljoen canted his head. “We hear ya, Commodore.”
“We’ve located the Jackals and are in pursuit. Do you require immediate assistance?”
The squad of marines all exchanged glances. Getting dumped in the middle of a warzone was nothing new for them, an expectation they’d taken on years ago when they all enlisted to serve their galaxy as part of the Nova Force.
Xander spoke up. “We have one injured man.”
“Stable?”
“He’ll live.”
There was a pause on the other end of the comm. Xander didn’t envy Ethan for having to make the difficult decisions that came with having command of the ship. “Keep him comfortable. Stay safe down there.”
Moments later, the Jemison left communication range. They may have been on their own, but nothing about their mission had changed.
“Jackson,” Xander spoke over the comm link. “Fall back and stay with Rogers in the shuttle. I can’t do anything else for him at this time.”
“Williams, you stay with them, too,” Viljoen added. “Hold this position and see if you can get this bird flying again.”
The brutal firefight continued inside the facility, where they encountered heavy resistance, a dozen well-armed men who eventually fell beneath military firepower. Once the last pirate fell, Viljoen took charge of his marines with the calm authority of a man accustomed to bloodshed.
“Kruger, get up on that catwalk. Abernathy, you maintain watch on our entrance. Chang, I want you on the door across the room. Lopez, accompany Commander Vargas and his medics on a sweep through the side rooms.”
Xander stole a side glance at Thandie’s retreating form. She swiftly scaled a utility ladder and took her position above them. Then he got his head back in the game and overcame the call of his Lexar blood urging him to claim his warrior bride.
Not now.
Defying the Lexar Mating Frenzy again, Xander quickly barked out orders to his men. The medics fanned out as commanded, sweeping from the entrance and tagging the deceased with prominent orange markers in passing on their way to the injured.
“I found a survivor over here! This man’s alive!” Davis called.
“You tend to him. Jef
ferson, come with me. We’ll sweep the next room.”
It didn’t take long to discover the whereabouts of the remaining colonists. They’d been herded like cattle into a dormitory bunker while pirates raided their homes and businesses. Because the pirates had destroyed all surface communication towers with their ship, the colonists couldn’t call for help until the engineer had rigged a signal to the Jemison.
As for the colony’s savior, they found his body in a communications lab next to a smashed console.
“Damn shame that this had to happen this way,” Xander said.
“We finished our headcount. Most recent census indicates this is a colony of 631. We have 182 survivors.” O’Malley pulled up the report on his holographic display.
“Christ. What of the others?” Xander’s stomach twisted in knots. So many lives extinguished for nothing.
“It’s like the transmission said, Doc, most colonists were taken off-world. Maybe the Jemison will find ’em on the ship if they catch them,” O’Malley replied.
Davis stepped into the room and cleared her throat. “Commander Viljoen and his people went to scout the rest of this facility. We’re getting the colonists fed and cleaned now with supplies we found. Jackson and Williams have brought Rogers inside. He’s still stable.”
“Good. Keep an eye on him and let me know if anything changes.”
Fairchild dashed up to him, her ivory face flushed pink and sweaty. “Sir, confirmation on the pregnant women. All three in labor.”
Xander tossed one of his kits to her. “Here’s the sterile gloves.”
“But—”
“You can do this, comm me with any pertinent information. Comfort them in the meantime. Unless they’re a minute apart or hemorrhaging on the floor, I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”
“Aye aye, Commander.” Fairchild bowed her head and stepped away to return to the laboring women. They were her patients now, and Xander became all the more thankful that he possessed the foresight to invite her to the medical squad.
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