by Eva Delaney
No wonder Orion had panicked. We were trapped in a closed space with Supremacy agents. We had to lie, hide, and fight to avoid being killed—just like in prison.
The comms started blinking. I sighed. Lady Lovey-Love.
“I guess she wants to see Castor no matter what,” Antares said.
“We’ll ignore her for now. But if she keeps this up…”
“If Castor doesn’t visit, she might not believe he’s here,” Po said.
Especially if the real Castor managed to contact her again. She could send an army to shoot their way into our ship at any moment.
Fuck. Not knowing what danger was coming was the worst feeling. We could play Lady Fancy Ass, but Castor was another matter, and he might not remain out of the picture.
“We might have to let her in…and throw up on her,” I said, thinking out loud.
Antares laughed.
“I’m sure Lady Fancy Ass will run like hell when faced with sickness,” I said. “Plus, it reinforces the quarantine lie and will discourage guards from entering the ship. Nobody wants to face an alien virus that nanos can’t immediately handle. It’s risky, unpredictable—”
“Gross,” Po added.
“We’ll make the sickness lie more believable…Rux, go to the kitchen and make more of your nutritional goo or whatever. If she doesn’t give up and we have to let her in, we’ll leave puddles of it around the ship—”
“Why?” Rux said offended.
“Because it looked like vomit. Antares, you’ll climb into bed—”
He raised his eyebrows at me, and I rolled my eyes.
“Pull the covers over your head, turn down the lights, and pretend to be a sick Castor. When the lady gets close, throw fake vomit at her. Rux, you’ll lie on the floor and pretend to be the sick gunner.”
He grumbled something under his breath.
“Don’t question my orders,” I warned him.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him,” Antares said, looking Rux over.
“This is the most inappropriate crew I’ve ever been a part of,” Rux said.
“Same here,” I said. “That’s why I demanded pants and locked doors.”
“You like it.”
“You’re the one showing off your assets to every man, woman, and pug,” I said. “Poor Mr. Pancake is too innocent for this.”
“Mr. Pancake is an expert in butts,” Antares said. “As am I—”
“Stop talking,” Rux said, and Antares snickered.
Well, at least Team Masculine Drama was entertaining sometimes. And at least they weren’t hitting on me for once. Though I wondered what Antares would do if I walked around in a thong like Rux…I shoved the thought away.
I stood from the pilot’s seat. “Watch Antares, Po. Make sure he doesn’t contact anyone.”
“I…ah…how?” Po said, blinking behind his goggle-like glasses. He was too sweet to be here, too unwilling to get dirty. “What do I do to stop him?”
“Lick his chin like Mr. Pancake. It’ll win him over.” I slipped past them into the corridor.
“Really?”
I sighed. “You’ll figure it out.”
With one problem temporarily solved—well, not solved at all, but there was nothing else I could do for the moment. It was time to face the next one. The one that tore at my heart.
Chapter 16
“Trix, hurry up,” Rux yelled from the corridor. “We need to get this food on the floor before the princess arrives.”
“Antares, help him,” I ordered.
I had planned to visit Orion, but instead had spent the last half hour scrambling to prepare for the princess’s arrival. Now, I was going to take a moment with my Ori in case this plan failed, and I never saw him again.
He curled in a ball and slept on the infirmary’s sole bed. Hamal must have given him something to calm him because Orion never slept when there was danger. All tension and worry had melted from his face. He looked peaceful, boyish, care-free like he had when I first met him.
He had never been truly care-free. None of us who grew up in the war were. But he had carried fewer worries and pains than he did now.
I stroked a loose lock of curly brown hair from his forehead. “I’m sorry I failed you, Ori.” He shifted toward me, answering my voice even when asleep.
Hamal cleared his throat behind me.
I dropped my hand from Orion. “Thank you for being there for him when I wasn’t.”
“We all need a family to take care of us,” Hamal said. “One person can’t do everything.”
But I should for Orion. He sacrificed everything for me. He spent 18 months looking for me. I should be able to pay him back by helping ease the pain I had caused.
Instead, I didn’t know how to help him.
“Both you and Rion think love is about strength and perfection,” Hamal continued. “But love is a balance between who you are and who you want to be, between your flaws and your assets. I hope I can prove to both of you that your vulnerabilities are reasons to love you.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinions on love, Doctor,” I said coldly as I turned on my heel. As much as I wanted to work this out with Orion now, I had to keep going to get us through this mission alive. “Stay here in the infirmary with him and Mr. Pancake. Keep the door locked no matter what.”
“She’s here!” Po shouted from the cockpit. “Camilla sent a written message that a tech team will hack the door if we don’t let her see the prince.”
“To your stations,” I ordered as I marched down the corridor, pausing to check on Antares in the dark bedroom and Rux lying on the corridor floor.
I stepped into the cockpit where Polaris waited and locked the door behind me. “Let her in.”
I was going to regret this. I knew it.
Through the viewport, I eyed Camilla, a squad of waiting guards, and a doctor in a lab coat. She was tall for a woman and dressed in a military flight suit with gold medals declaring her rank. She looked like a warrior princess. Castor and she would be a perfect match.
I hoped Antares fucked them up real good, rather than fucking us over.
Our ramp hit the deck and Camilla, the doctor and a guard marched forward toward our ship.
“She’s inside,” Polaris said a moment later.
Shit. All I could do now was wait and rely on Antares and Rux, of all people. I paced the width of the cockpit. Three steps to the navigation console, turn, three steps to the passenger’s seat. Turn…
I eyed the locked door, my heart in my throat. Hiding out of sight in the cockpit, I had no way of knowing what Antares was telling Camilla—or plotting with her.
He had sold us out once already. His argument about it saving the mission made sense, but that didn’t make it true. Sometimes lies made all the sense in the galaxy.
That was why I had abandoned Orion. The lie that he didn’t love me had made sense. Maybe I was making the same mistake with trusting Antares; thinking lies were truths.
I whirled to the viewport to check on the guards waiting outside the ship. They hadn’t moved, at least.
Polaris sat in the co-pilot’s chair. The lights on the dashboard cast his dark face in reds and blues as his hands moved across the controls. I didn’t want him to wait out the trick with me, but he had said something that felt true too.
Castor’s ship might have permission to access some of the jumpship’s systems. We needed our hacker to see if there was an easier way out of this mess.
“Well?” I said to him, keeping my tone short and rough. It was better if Polaris didn’t think he could get close to me again.
He shook his head. “Vinera had granted the Invictus full access to its systems. But Lady Camilla hasn’t given the ship any.”
“She doesn’t believe we’re Castor,” I said. I wished I could see what Antares was doing. If this plan went wrong, would he have the sense to take her hostage?
“Or she doesn’t trust Castor,” Po said. “Somebody doesn’t because
there was a lock on his ship to prevent him from fleeing.”
I laughed. “He’s the crown fucking prince.”
Po shrugged and said nothing.
“Most likely, Lady Lovey doesn’t want Castor grabbing some of her power,” I said. She had reacted with anger when Castor had given her a direct order, after all. “Can you hack into their systems?”
Polaris didn’t answer for a long moment.
So the answer was no and he was afraid to say it or to let me down. “Po,” I said in warning. “Whatever it is, tell me.”
“We’ve never been able to get past Supremacy firewalls, and the jumpship has the strongest ones I’ve seen. I can try…if you want…. But they’ll spot me…. I’ll do if you order it….”
“Po, it’s okay. You always sound like you think I’m going to bite your head off like a praying mantis.”
His dark blue eyes went wide as he spun his chair to face me. “They do that after mating,” he said in a husky whisper.
“Ah…yeah….” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“We haven’t mated, so I’m not scared,” he said with a small grin and a gleam in his eye.
“You’d be scared of me if we mated?”
“Maybe.” He ducked his head.
He was trying to flirt, I realized way too late. Polaris was so awkward and cute that it was hard to tell sometimes.
I had to change the subject and end this before he got ideas. Before something fluttered in my chest again.
Those feelings were all lies.
I glanced at the cockpit door, wishing yet again that I knew what was happening. What if Lady Camilla didn’t run from vomit and illness? What if she was tougher than that?
What if her medical teams saw through our ploy?
“It’s rare for med nanos to fail to treat a disease right away. I hope the doctors believe our lie,” I said to fill the silence with something that wouldn’t turn into another warm moment.
“Bots have to learn to fight a new virus that isn’t in their databanks. It’s believable. They fail. Everything does,” Polaris said.
A sad note in his voice made me glance sidelong at him as I paced. “You have experience with failing nanos?”
He looked down at his hands in his lap, tracing the lines on his palms, paler than the rest of his skin.
“I suffered from spinal inflammation when I was a kid. It was some kind of virus, and no bot knew how to destroy it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“The algorithms eventually figured out a way to beat it. Until they did, I stayed in bed and played with computers. I learned to hack. I practiced using direct brain-computer interfaces in case I became paralyzed. That helped me understand computers on a deeper level, in the way most people understand language.”
I realized I had stopped pacing and was watching Polaris. He stared at his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.
I had known him for three years, but this was the first time I learned anything about his past. Before now, he had always been the cute man in Mission Control who I flirted with for insider info.
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
Po shrugged. “My childhood all worked out. I got to join The Uprising and meet you,” he said with a cheerful smile.
“And I always had your voice to greet me at Star Keeper,” I said to make him feel a little better. He beamed at me like a star flaring to life.
I couldn’t help but smile back. I never could with Po, even when I knew better than to return his affections.
It made warmth spread through my chest, something different than when Orion smiled at me. Less like a salve on an old wound, as Orion was, and more like a flashlight flicked on in a dark ship.
Both warmed me through and through, both eased worry and pain, and both were so, so different from each other.
If what I had with Orion was love, then what was this with Polaris? It didn’t feel the same. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn’t betraying Orion after all.
I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t always trust my heart.
“Besides, my childhood is not who I am now,” Polaris continued, breaking me out of my thoughts. “Like how the Battle of Sule isn’t you anymore, even though it was a big deal.”
I gaped. Sule was the one battle no one let me forget—including myself. It had defined my entire life and all my relationships since.
Even when I didn’t want it to. I was always Commander Bellatrix of Sule. She was either a success or a failure, depending on whom you asked.
“Was that the wrong thing to say?” Po said, sounding worried.
Fuck, he was always so gentle. Was it the wrong thing to say? I hadn’t been able to shake off Sule, but I wasn’t the same person I was when it happened, the person everyone remembered.
Including Orion.
Polaris might be the first person who didn’t see me like that.
“I just meant…I thought things change, you know—”
“It was the right thing to say,” I admitted.
Polaris turned his twilight eyes to me and smiled.
Shit, I should have kept up the teasing. I was trying to keep him faraway, but we were drawing closer together, like stars that orbit each other until they collide.
It never ended well for the stars, either.
But I still wanted to take his hands so that they stopped fidgeting in his lap, ever nervous of me. I tensed my muscles so I wouldn’t move toward him.
“You get it,” he said softly. “What happened then doesn’t matter now. We learn and change.”
If he didn’t see the hero or failure of Sule, what did he see when he thought of me? I knew who Orion thought I was. But not Po.
“Cal,” he said. “I—”
“Wait,” I snapped.
A movement outside of the viewport caught my eye. Lady Camilla raced across the docking bay with two guards following her. Goo splatted the concrete floor behind her.
This crazy-ass plan actually worked. Relief flooded my veins, making my muscles relax for the first time in hours.
“Close the ship ramp,” I ordered Po and whirled to the cockpit door.
I hit the unlock button and it hissed open. In the corridor, a woman in a white lab coat crouched over Rux where he was pretending to be a sick gunner on the floor. Two guards in Rigel green and gold lingered nearby. One was a brawny man who flipped a plasma ax in the air, catching it by the handle.
I froze.
Shit. The lady left guards behind.
They froze and stared at me. The man’s eyes widened. “Bellatrix,” he hissed.
Chapter 17
I didn’t recognize the soldier, but somehow he knew me.
He spun, raising the plasma ax that glowed blue with its skin melting heat. He pulled his arm back and threw it.
I dodged to the side, hot air skimming my body as the ax flew past and embedded in the pilot’s chair. The seat back melted from the plasma’s heat, and the air filled with an acidic smell.
I leaped for the handle, but something slammed into my back. The breath went out of me as I hit the floor. The brawny guard yanked the ax from the chair and raised it over me.
I tensed, ready to roll and dodge the moment he so much as twitched. This asshole wasn’t taking me down.
Polaris grabbed the man’s arm, yanking it back. The guard jerked free and jabbed the ax handle backwards into Po’s gut. Polaris grunted and doubled over. The guard turned toward him.
My heart jumped into my throat and choked off my breath. Po stumbled back from the guard, hand wrapped around his stomach against the pain.
Not today, asshole, I thought and scrambled to my feet.
The guard’s gaze flickered to me, and he whirled, swinging the blade at my head. Polaris screamed. I ducked and aimed a punch for the nearest, dearest part of the guard.
His balls squished under my fist in a very satisfying way.
He made a choked guttural sound, then groaned, long and low and pained.
>
I jumped back as he doubled over, a hand going to his crotch.
I grabbed the handle of his plasma ax, wrestling it free from him as he dropped to his knees.
“Huh. I never thought Supremacy soldiers had balls,” I said.
Polaris hunched, breathing hard and stared wide-eyed at the downed man, then at me.
I shrugged and grinned.
“That was ball-listic,” he said, and I laughed.
In the corridor, the other guard lay unconscious. The doctor trembled against the wall with Rux and Antares standing over both.
Antares watched me with a smile and his eyes wide. “That was ballsy, Firebrand.”
My heart skipped a beat at his compliment, and I glanced away. I always felt like he could see when he made my pulse skip and flutter.
Rux was finally wearing pants with a t-shirt that left little to the imagination. I suspected it was one of Castor’s—whatever was in his closet was the only change of clothing we had—and Rux was a more muscular man than the prince.
“If we don’t check in every hour, the lady will come for us,” the medic said, her voice trembling.
“Good,” I said. I stood in the cockpit doorway where I could keep an eye on both the hall and the crying guard, holding his dick. “Do you want some privacy while you jerk off?” I said to him.
“Fuck you,” he groaned, and I laughed at him to piss him off more.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” I said to the medic and him. “We’re going to take your comms and hold onto them for safety. You wouldn’t want to lose them, of course. Every hour, you will check in and tell the lady that everything is fine. The prince is ill but holding up well. The gunners are resting off their fevered delusions.”
“Why would we help criminals like you?” the man growled, glaring at me from his knees. “You’re wanted across the Supremacy.”
“Hear that, boys? We’re wanted crooks.”
“Just the way I like it,” Antares said and smirked. Polaris trembled, poor guy.
The guard spat on the floor. “Either we don’t check in or you give us the comms and we tell the truth. In both cases, the lady will rush this ship. You’ll be dead.”