Looking even more like a dead man walking, Jakiin stepped forward but kept his head down.
“Where did you and Mac find out about that shipment?”
“Mac found it when we were leaving the docking bay. A woman came and asked us if we wanted a quick job. She said she knew of Mac by reputation and only wanted to hire the best.”
Should have known. The only thing worse than Mac’s love of schemes was his weakness for the female flesh. Any female flesh. Vas motioned for Jakiin to go on. She didn’t trust herself to say anything.
“Mac asked her if it was dangerous, or drugs, or any of the other things you don’t allow on the ship.” His red-brown eyes were earnest as he finally glanced up. “She said it wasn’t.”
Vas wrapped her hands around each other so she didn’t grab his throat. “And what was to stop her from lying? Crap, Jakiin. You two took on a job without checking, without clearing, and based on the client’s say so? I don’t know what to do with you two, seriously.” Her fingers flexed with the need to smash his head into the arm of her chair. Finally she shook it off. “I don’t suppose you got anything worthwhile in terms of who she was?”
Jakiin took an involuntary step back, shaking his head. “We have the contract…but Mac didn’t know if it was real or not. He tried looking her up after we left the space station and he couldn’t find her.”
Vas closed her eyes and counted to ten. Deven kept insisting that trick would work to calm her down. Peeking open an eye, she realized she still wanted to strangle Jakiin. She tightly shut the eye and resumed counting.
She’d reached one hundred and fifty when a coughing interrupted her.
“Captain?” Jakiin’s voice was little more than a squeak.
She didn’t bother opening her eyes. “Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
“A better question would be if I can keep from blasting you out an airlock long enough for Mac to get up here.” She couldn’t believe this. If the two of them were brighter, and hadn’t been with her for the last eight years, she would have thought they were agents for whichever deity was trying to ruin her life.
Still keeping her eyes closed, she flipped open a comm channel. “Terel? Is Mac on his way?”
“I’m shoving his ass out the door as we speak.” From the tone of her voice Terel was almost as pissed off with the pilots as Vas was.
“Send flyboy to my ready room. He needs to be up here before my ass hits my ready room chair.” With a deep breath she opened her eyes and nodded to Jakiin.
“You heard that. I’d think you’d be waiting for me outside of my door.”
Jakiin’s eyes went huge, the red coloring overpowering the brown. With a nod he all but ran for the door in question.
Vas really didn’t take joy in terrifying her crew. Well, okay, to some degree she did. But only the ones who deserved it. After the pranks they’d pulled recently, Jakiin and Mac deserved it. But they’d always just been opportunistic, not criminally stupid. Until now.
She was just sitting down, glaring at Jakiin for the hell of it, when a loud thump hit her door. Amazing, for once Mac almost made it on time.
“Come in.”
The door slid open as Mac was straightening his strawberry blond hair. He flashed a grin that suffered a quick death. Ducking his head, he slunk into the empty chair next to Jakiin. The door slid shut before he made it all the way into his seat.
“Okay, I’ll make this simple. I’m asking myself why I haven’t spaced you both right now. But I’ll give you two a chance to get out of this.” She steepled her fingers in front of her face. “Someone played you both for idiots and almost caused untold havoc and possible death for most of this crew. You both massively disobeyed orders. You took a smuggling job on your own, without checking it.”
She paused, as Mac looked ready to argue. She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head. He wisely folded his lips as if biting them and shrugged.
“As I was saying, you boys screwed up big time. Mac, Jakiin said you tried to track the woman down who hired you. How far did you go?”
Mac appeared as if he was still waiting for permission to talk. Finally he decided it was better to respond. “I tracked down the name she gave us, and the name of the company she said she was working for. Well, I almost tracked down the company she said she worked for. By the time I realized she was a dead end, we were being chased by that ore ship.” He took a deep swallow. “And I forgot.”
Vas stared up at the ceiling, willing the thin metal tiles to give her the wisdom to deal with morons. “Lucky you, you get to continue that search now. I want you to find out….” Her conversation faded as Mac stared at something behind her.
The image from the screen capture of the man who’d slammed into her on the space station was still up on her back screen and had captured Mac’s attention. Deven hadn’t sent the rest of the data disk up, but he had forwarded her that image in case she knew him. She hadn’t, but had left it up in case it jogged something.
Mac still hadn’t said anything, but hit Jakiin’s arm to get his attention. Both sat there staring for a few moments.
“How did you get his picture?” Mac said and kept his eyes on the image.
“If you have him on camera, don’t you have the woman as well?” Jakiin blurted at the same time.
“You two know him?” Vas watched them both carefully.
“Aye, Captain. The image is grainy, but I remember him. He was with the lady who hired us. The woman with the dust. I’d recognize that uniform, even if I didn’t know the face.” Mac spoke with a certainty he had been lacking moments before.
Vas clicked the image to make it a bit clearer. “What else did you notice about the uniform?” She didn’t want to lead them into recalling something that really hadn’t been there.
“That thing on his arm.” Jakiin finally found his voice as he waved at the still image. “You can’t see it very well there. But it was this weird long diamond shape.”
Mac nodded slowly. “Yeah, I remember that. I know most ship patches, never seen that one before. And the lady had the same symbol on her necklace. Real expensive too, something definitely upper tier.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Vas swore. The man who slammed into her was tied into the gang who’d gotten those drugs on her ship. Which meant it wasn’t a gang at all but yet another tie to the Rillianians and possibly the Graylian monks. She still wasn’t sure what was going on, but the knots were all starting to point one direction.
So much for sloppy drug smugglers. When they’d seen the Rillianian stamp on the inside of the box, she’d pretty much figured that theory was dead. However, she’d still held a sliver of hope for it, one that just died.
She needed to get the rest of the vid from Deven once he was clean and conscious. Maybe there would be something else to jog her two pilots’ memories.
“I don’t suppose you have any other information?” She spun around and fixed them both with her best glare. Jakiin flushed his gills after a few moments and Mac just looked like he was going to be ill.
“No, but we could continue to see if we can find anything about that company she said she worked for?” Mac said with a pathetic attempt at a smile.
Jakiin nodded.
It wasn’t lost on Vas that neither of them had asked again about how she had that image.
“Yes, you’d better.” She glanced from one to the other. Their mistake had been just that, a mistake. Potentially catastrophic in scope, but not one they came to completely on their own. They were set up. Someone was looking for them because they were on the Warrior Wench.
“I want you both to find this woman, somehow, somewhere, find her. And write down everything you remember of your encounter, starting with the instant your feet hit the gang plank.” She raised a hand as both started to rise.
“Separately. I need you two to work apart. No, it’s not a punishment,” she added as both pairs of eyes went wide. Although separating them more often might c
ut down on problems. “I need to see what each one of you remembers. If you’re together one might influence the other’s memory. It’s vital we know everything.”
“Aye,” both said in unison, but neither rose to their feet this time.
“Dismissed.” Vas held back her grin; she might have actually gotten through to them.
With an almost military nod to her, both turned and left.
Vas turned back to the still image. “So what secrets are you hiding, my friend?” When no more tidbits of information came forth, she got up for some mint tea. The herb was soothing and cleared her head. She also swore it could heal. One of the few traditions from her home planet, mint tea was used for everything from curing sick children to ending droughts. She’d never had the nerve to ask Terel if it really worked. She didn’t think she’d be happy if the answer was no.
Sipping her tea, she tried to sketch out the series of events. Until she knew different, she had to stick with her missing time as the start point. Try as she might she couldn’t get past the blocks in her head to find out what had really happened. She really needed to let Deven try, but she couldn’t. It was completely illogical, especially considering the stakes, but she couldn’t let him prowl in her head. Not again.
Whoever took her felt she wasn’t going to come back, so that was party one. She drew a line on a huge pad and labeled it. Party two was whoever had tried to poison her, she marked off that cluster. Party three was whoever put the trackers in her blood. The groups could have overlapped; there didn’t have to be three. Something big was happening. Something that she felt she could just see the edge of. Her mind was putting pieces together, when her door buzzed and almost sent her through the roof.
“Damn it! Come in!” she yelled as she sorted out her papers.
Flarik entered and silently slid into one of the chairs. She watched as Vas gathered her scattered things. “Is everything under control, Captain?”
“Not yet, but it will be.” She toyed with how much to involve Flarik. The Wavian was a member of her crew, granted, but she was also a Wavian lawyer. Her reaction to the Rillianian threat had been disconcerting and eye opening. How much of a help she would be to Vas and the crew if she found a way to go after the Rillianians herself was a good question.
“We need to retrieve the Victorious Dead pieces.” Flarik said.
Vas studied Flarik over the rim of her mug, waiting for the insightful portion of her comment to arrive.
When nothing more followed, Vas sat her mug down.
“Yes, I was aware of that actually. However a few things have popped up to distract us from our goal.” Had they not let Flarik sleep enough? Usually the lawyer was the brightest of the bunch.
“Now. I believe we must start immediately. Once we have captured the first piece, we can take our time collecting the rest.” Flarik rose to her feet and paced within the small room. “The monks are working with the Rillianians. They are using our ship in a training ritual.”
Vas watched for a few moments. She’d never seen Flarik distressed enough to pace. Then Flarik’s words sunk in.
“Training ritual? As in they are going to blow up my ship?” She’d heard of the Graylian monks’ rituals. They were obsessive and often very bloody.
“I believe so. Maybe not right now, but eventually. However, if we can capture the first piece, it will slow them down extensively. They cannot complete whatever ritual they are trying to do without the first piece.” Her grin was one her brutal ancestors would have admired. “And if we refrain from going after the other pieces for a while, it will drive them mad. Utter chaos.”
“I like the sound of that.” Vas knew that sometimes a full frontal assault wouldn’t work in a battle. The one she apparently was fighting against the monks and the Rillianians was such a one. “While I don’t understand their obsession with ritual and order, I understand being able to use it against them. If this will throw them off a bit, we might be able to figure out what it is they are training for. And stop them. Do you know how far the first piece is?”
Flarik nodded. “I have cracked their puzzle, at least the first part. It’s not more than a short hypergate hop from here. Down in the Solaris system. We can be there in a day.”
Vas knew they needed to keep moving and get another job. Both of which were being compromised by having to stay hidden from the Commonwealth until they figured out what was going on.
However, not having retrieved any of her ship—Gosta still hadn’t been able to break through to the core yet—was chapping her hide. That it would throw her enemies into chaos was just a bonus.
“Agreed. Tell Bathie to lay in the course, and let’s go get part of our ship back.”
After a few hours of flight, Vas wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. But it wasn’t the ugly lump of plaststeel hanging in space before her.
“What did they do to my ship?” She sank deeper into her command chair as they closed in on the mass. If Gosta’s readings rang true, this blob was part of her ship. Of course she really hadn’t counted on them destroying the pieces, and then hanging them out in space.
“That’s not the piece.” Deven peered up from the console he’d commandeered once they came out of the hypergate. “The piece of our ship is inside that.”
Terel had finally given him a medical release after some more badgering from Vas. There was no evidence of what happened on the planet on his handsome face, but he didn’t look like he wanted to talk about it either. Which was fine with her.
The fact that part of her ship was inside the mess before her made Vas a little happier, but she was still confused. And pissed.
“Why? Did they really steal my ship, chop it up, coat it in refuse, just to leave it out in space in some twisted puzzle?”
“Yes.” Hrrru nodded as if she’d asked a genuine question.
The earnestness on his face kept her sarcasm in check. “Thank you, Hrrru. I suppose what I meant to say was, why me? Why my damn ship? But that’s not going to be answered today.” She spun toward the rest of her crew.
“Ladies and gentlemen, and I use those terms loosely, how do we get our ship piece out of that?” Part of her had to admit the monks had been amazingly creative in their use of space junk. The thing before her looked like a trash ball. Anyone who accidentally came across it wouldn’t even scan it for salvage.
Gosta squinted at the main screen as his fingers flew across his console keypad. “I think we’ll have to take the entire thing with us.” His frown and squint both deepened as he typed commands even faster.
“There is most likely a clean way to get the pieces out, but with what we have to work with out here, I can’t see how.” He stopped typing. “We need to send it to Home and let them try to pry it out on land.”
Vas stared at the piece of melted and warped refuse before them for a few minutes then finally sighed. She did have plenty of people stuck at Home without anything to do. This would keep them busy until she found a job for them.
“Xsit, call Home and have a team come get this. Tell them to bring heavy haulers and a few of the smaller fighters. We’ll stay here until it’s loaded, but I don’t want them to be unprotected in case someone comes after them.” She wasn’t sure how closely these monks were watching their training exercise. However, if they were behind the ore hauler, she had to figure they were watching something.
The mini-armada from Home appeared with remarkable swiftness. Obviously boredom was getting to her fighters.
She also had the ship’s complement of Flits out patrolling, and kept all of the weapons ports open. But no one tried to stop them.
The captain from the Home armada wanted to know if they should go after the rest of the pieces in the puzzle, but Vas told him no. While her instinct would be to get all of the pieces as soon as possible, she was willing to bow to Flarik’s expertise in this. If she felt just taking one and leaving the others for now would cause more mayhem, so be it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
T
he next day started with no answers to any of her growing pile of questions, but at least they had a job. Deven barged into her quarters at some hideous hour to tell her they’d received a rescue job. Family cluster group, not more than a few hours away. Vas thanked him, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
She should have realized something was up when he never called her as they got closer.
***
“Damn it, Deven, you said this was a job. Not a mercy mission.” Vas swore a few hours later as she stared out over the ten raggedy-looking population ships below her as they came out of the hypergate. She should have checked his data, the bastard.
“This is a job.” He folded his arms and looked down at her. Quite a feat when she was only a few inches shorter than him and she currently had her flight boots on. “I’m paying us.”
“You don’t have enough to pay for what I think you’re asking.” She ran her hands over her face. “We need real work, not guard duty. You can’t come up with—”
“Captain, we just received a transaction. Non-traceable, but it’s for eighty million credits.” Xsit’s voice went into the upper register with the amount. That was more than they pulled in during an entire year. Where the hell had he come up with that money? No place he’d tell her, of that she was certain.
She stared at him in silence for a good three minutes, and then finally shrugged. “Since you’re hiring us, what’s the job?” She wasn’t going to fight about this here, but she was going to find out what the hell was going on before they did anything with those ships.
“They are our job. And the folks still on the planet. There’s a war going on, but many of the people are refugees from outlying worlds who came here to hide.” He pulled up a map of the largest continent. “The fighting should be here.” He pointed to an area not far outside a densely populated area. “But it’s here.” He tapped another area further down near the equator.
Vas studied the screen. There was no way a professional mercenary company could have mistaken the two areas. Which meant someone was after the refugees.
Asarlai Wars 1: Warrior Wench Page 23