by Layla Nash
Adhz, the tough but wide-eyed comms officer, shook his head as he responded to a roared question from Vaant. “Sir, they won’t open hailing frequencies. We can’t identify them. No other ships in the vicinity.”
Jess swallowed hard. She didn’t want to reveal anything about her various skills, but she sure as fuck didn’t want to die in space. The Galaxos systems were older than what she was used to, but there were some basic commands common to all communications processes, so that any ship could speak to other ships. She dug through her memory for the mind-numbingly boring class on frequencies and bypasses from training, and a few practice sessions. Jess started tapping buttons and flipping through screens on the comms station until she got to the master screen, then pulled out a few old tricks to bypass that user interface to the deeper, developer level.
In a few quick swipes and commands, the system reached out and broke through the frequencies that the cutter utilized. Jess cleared her throat and held the headset tight to her ears. Her Xerxh was rusty, but it was better than the Xaravian crewmembers. “This is the rebel ship Galaxos. Cease attacking us immediately or we will destroy you.”
Adhz sat bolt upright and covered the full length of the bridge in two steps, so he skidded into her comms station at a full run. Jess blinked, not liking that Trazzak roared at him. “Get her out of here immediately.”
“How did you do that?” Adhz demanded, staring at her system. “It’s not — it’s not possible.”
“We can talk about theory later,” Jess said under her breath, listening for a response from the cutter. Another strike from the enemy ship rocked the Galaxos, nearly throwing her out of her seat, and Adhz barely stayed standing. She repeated her warning to the cutter again, using more emphatic verbs in the Xerxh language, but still there was no response.
“Who are they?” Vaant asked, maneuvering the Galaxos to get the cutter back in their sites. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s a Xerxh cutter,” she said. Jess couldn’t look at Trazzak at all, and she didn’t like the way Vrix started paying a hell of a lot more attention.
The security officer’s scales flashed orange as he fielded a call down to the engineering room, getting an update on the shields and engines, but paused long enough to say to the captain, “Pirates use them, mostly.”
“And bounty hunters,” Jess said, not thinking. When she realized the connection, she deflated. Of course. Those bounty hunters on the spaceport must have had more colleagues waiting to help them. They could have tracked the Galaxos from a distance and waited until no other rebel ships were in the vicinity to help, and the Heisenberg was still being refit and resupplied.
Trazzak’s eyes flashed as he glared at her. “Is this your doing? The favor they asked you for?”
The Xaravians looked between them, and Vaant’s scales swirled a slow purple-red. “What the fuck is going on?”
“We’re still being attacked,” Jess said. She didn’t want to beg them to ignore her and deal with those questions later, but none of them would have a chance to condemn her if the cutter managed a fatal hit. “This isn’t my fault, I swear.”
Isla stormed onto the bridge, already ticking off the damaged sectors for Vaant, but stopped short when she caught sight of Jess at the comms station. “What the hell are you doing out of sick bay?”
Jess didn’t dignify that with a response, particularly as the cutter managed to get another small hit through the Galaxos’s failing shields. She focused on the comms and distracting the Xerxh long enough for the Galaxos to strike back. She hit a few more commands on the system and created options for altering her voice, using another alien language to mimic an approaching ship. She issued commands to fake ships as Adhz stared at her and the rest of the crew kept glancing back as if she were some kind of trick pony.
But some of it worked, at least — the cutter backed off long enough for the Galaxos to reinforce the shields and maneuver into a slightly better position. But the concentration required to keep it up drained Jess of whatever energy she had left. The bright lights and alarms and moving people grew overwhelming, her head spinning, and every part of her shook. She had to focus incredibly hard just to keep a finger steady so she could tap another command into the comms system.
The fight returned, though, as the cutter figured out that her messages were fake, and it attacked again with a vengeance. Everything whirled slowly around Jess as she kept up her part of the fight, disrupting their communications and trying to create as much confusion and chaos onboard the cutter as possible. She hoped to slow them down enough for the Galaxos to take over and the Heisenberg to arrive to save their bacon — if the larger warship could get out of port soon enough.
She didn’t see Trazzak surrendering the weapons controls to Vrix, but she felt the air move when the big Xaravian got closer. When Jess finally looked up, dazed, she found Maisy scowling at her and Trazzak with his arms folded over his chest and a fierce expression. Jess frowned. “I’m busy.”
“No, you’re not.” Trazzak jerked his chin at Adhz and the younger Xaravian carefully took the headset and controls from Jess. “You’re going back to sick bay.”
“But I —”
“It’s not a request.” His scowl deepened, but Jess thought she saw traces of silvery-green in his scales — a sign of worry and concern. Her thoughts ticked too slowly to come up with why he’d be worried, unless he still thought she’d somehow summoned the bounty hunters to attack the Galaxos. Maybe she had, accidentally, since she left the Xerxh bounty hunter alive on the spaceport.
Maisy gave him a dirty look and reached for Jess’s arm. “Let’s go, superstar. I’m sure Adhz can handle whatever it is you’re doing.”
Which just made Adhz look alarmed. Jess sighed and started pointing out how the Xaravian could mimic other ships and disrupt the internal communications on the cutter, but she didn’t get far before the Galaxos jolted and it dumped her right out of the seat.
“That’s it,” Trazzak said. He snapped his fingers at some of the crewmembers, and a split second later, one of the ensigns appeared, scooped her up, and started walking.
Maisy followed along, trying to do something to Jess’s arm as the Xaravian strode along twice as fast as the Earther could walk, and Jess didn’t even have it in her to struggle. Her head flopped back, her neck too weak to support it, and she caught sight of Trazzak watching the ensign carry her away. The doors whooshed shut and all she saw was an empty hallway and traces of smoke.
Trazzak
The fight lasted far longer than it should have. The cutter fled when it became clear the Galaxos wasn’t quite as easy prey as they thought, and it became a chase more than a fight as the smaller ship attempted to outrun and outmaneuver the much older Galaxos. With the Heisenberg’s limping appearance and much stronger shields to distract the cutter, the Galaxos managed to disable the small ship and prevent any of the escape pods from activating.
Trazzak led the boarding party that took over the cutter, though it was a long, slow fight from one sector to the next as the pirates refused to surrender quietly. Several of the Xaravians were injured, and Trazzak himself was wounded when he grappled with the cutter’s Xerxh captain, but in the end, they managed to get the half dozen crew subdued and restrained.
Trazzak finally took the bridge of the cutter, impressed with the ship despite its small size and the pirate crew who’d failed to maintain the ship to his high standards. He briefly debated keeping Frrar away from the engine room, since the engineer would just get dangerous ideas for “improvements” to the Galaxos, but if the Xaravians were to keep the cutter as part of their growing fleet, it had to be in top shape.
Adhz’s voice crackled over the communication system on the cutter, which was still fucked up from whatever Jessalyn managed to do, and provided the coordinates back to the nearest rebel base so they could all dock and come up with a plan. And to offload the pirates.
Or bounty hunters. None of the sandsnakes were talking, though, so
he had no way of knowing if they were opportunists or hunting down the Earthers. Trazzak eased into the captain’s chair on the bridge and glanced back at his brand new navigator, one of the ensigns. “All right, Kolzz. Set in the coordinates and let’s go.”
It took quite a bit of patience to not get up and do it himself as Kolzz fumbled and struggled to get the ship moving smoothly, but Trazzak just gripped the arms of the captain’s chair. The kid had to learn, and it wouldn’t help if Trazzak got up and yelled at him. As the cutter followed both the Heisenberg and the Galaxos back to the safety of the port, Trazzak could finally see all the damage done to the Galaxos. The ship was still battered from the fight to leave the spaceport, and with the damage done by the cutter, getting the ship repaired would cut into the crew’s limited savings. They didn’t have the funds to keep recovering from this bullshit.
He had a lot of time to think it over as the ships limped back to the rebel base and took over several of the docks. Trazzak summoned the dodgy security service from the base and let them take over the pirates, though he requested any readouts from their interrogation so the Galaxos crew could at least understand why they were attacked. From the looks on the security team’s faces, though, there wouldn’t be much left of the pirates to question.
The rebels didn’t tolerate pirates attacking rebel ships, and any who dared such an ill-advised mission paid a heavy price as a lesson to others. Trazzak had enough information from the cutter itself to figure out the crew had been pirates through and through — though they’d been tempted by a hefty bounty. The cutter’s mission screens contained a description and identifiers for the Galaxos, and the giant bounty notice for Jessalyn Barnes. Just her. Not the other Earthers.
He’d spent half of the trip back to the base staring at the bounty listing and the unflattering picture of Jessalyn in a severe braid and grim expression. She looked like another of the Information Ministry’s anonymous drones, collecting information and sowing disinformation throughout the universe. That picture made his scales shiver with distress.
Not being safe even in rebel territory didn’t bode well for their future as rebels or even their survival another month or two. With the amount of Jessalyn’s bounty, more pirates would no doubt be willing to risk rebel territory for the payday, and the Galaxos couldn’t take more surprise attacks.
After he watched the security team take away the pirate crew, Trazzak cleared the ship and directed the engineers to the internal engines before he strode across the docks to where the Galaxos smoked and clanked. It looked even more like a bucket of bolts held together by shit and hope than it had the first time Trazzak saw it.
He shook his head as the Earther engineer, Rowan, bounced around with a pack full of tools around the hull of the Galaxos. She shouted orders at some of the puzzled port workers, and practically rubbed her hands with glee as she suited up in a flight suit and hover pack so she could examine the damage to the ship up close. Trazzak avoided a falling wrench and strode back onto the Galaxos.
He met Vaant on the bridge, and didn’t waste time on small talk. “They were pirates but hunting down a bounty on Barnes this time around. That’s why they attacked us.”
“Just Barnes?” Vaant frowned, leaning back against the back of the navigation station. “Not the rest of the crew?”
“It might have been a bonus to get the rest of them, but the only sheet they had was on Barnes.” Trazzak didn’t quite look at Isla as her face paled; clearly Vaant’s mate knew why the Alliance wanted Jessalyn dead or captured more than the rest of the women. He wondered whether she’d already told Vaant, or would do so without any prodding. Not likely, from the look on her face.
Isla cleared her throat. “The Alliance won’t let us go, will they?”
Vaant put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her tight to his side in a protective embrace. “We’ll figure it out.”
“It won’t stop until we do something to dissuade the Alliance from coming after us,” Trazzak said. “I don’t know what that is, because it’s not entirely clear why the Alliance is so hell-bent on getting the women back, or silencing them forever.”
“I don’t think they’ll stop,” Vaant said. His scales rattled and swirled with red and orange and hints of fire. “But our ship isn’t going to last through much more of this.”
Trazzak slowly sat behind the comms station that Jessalyn had taken over, and tried to ignore the hint of her scent that still lingered on the controls. “It won’t matter if we put the Earthers on the Heisenberg. Part of the bounty includes the Galaxos and all of her crew. So they won’t stop until they get us as well, for aiding the Earthers.”
Isla rubbed her face, sighing. “What if we hunkered down on a distant planet? Things might cool off if we disappeared from view for a while.”
“I don’t think the Alliance is going to forget about this,” Trazzak said. “You can ask Barnes about that.”
“Why’s that?” Vaant asked, and Isla flushed.
She didn’t quite glare at Trazzak, but if she’d had scales, they would have been red. Isla cleared her throat. “We can talk about that later.”
“The only safe place would be Xarav,” Vaant said, though he gave his mate a sideways look. “And I’m not going to fool myself by thinking you Earthers would go quietly into exile. So we need another plan, Trazzak.”
Trazzak leaned back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Our fleet just grew by one ship. Maybe we can figure out a way to use the cutter against the Alliance, maybe distract them with something they want more than the Earthers.”
“What did you mean when you asked Jessalyn to explain the attack?” Vaant frowned. “During the attack, you looked at her and accused her of knowing what was going on. What the hell did you mean?”
Trazzak shoved to his feet. “You should ask her that. Or your mate. And then we need to figure out where all of this leaves us — we’re not going to surrender the Earthers, and the Alliance is going to keep coming after us. We don’t have the money or the time to keep limping back into a base to get repaired, and this is getting in the way of our real mission for the rebellion. Something has to change, Vaant. When you figure out what that is, let me know.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed in a grim look. “We’ll discuss it. Go oversee the repair and resupply of the cutter, and get whatever information off it you can. We’re going to need all the help we can get to end this.”
Trazzak nodded and turned on his heel, not waiting for Isla to curse him for outing Jessalyn and her questionable loyalties. It had to be done, and if Isla had had that conversation already, the Galaxos wouldn’t be in such bad condition. He hesitated in the hall outside the bridge, staring off into the interior of the ship. The sick bay wasn’t terribly out of the way; he could just peek in and see how Jessalyn was doing before he went back to the cutter. But the bridge doors opened and another ensign hurried out, so Trazzak turned his feet to the exit so he could get back to work. Maybe once things were under control, he could get back to fiddling with that relay, if Jessalyn hadn’t destroyed it already.
Jess
Jess hated being trapped in the sick bay, but with the hulking ensign sitting outside the door, and both Maisy and Mrax guarding her inside, she didn’t stand a chance of escaping again. Maisy fumed and muttered, a clear sign of the normally unflappable doctor’s irritation, and tied Jess back up to the machines.
At least they didn’t ask what the hell had happened on the bridge. Jess wanted to pull the sheets over her head and hide, but part of her wanted to tap back into the cutter’s communications so she could figure out if they were run-of-the-mill bounty hunters or if they were Ministry hitmen disguised as regular pirates. Opportunists could be defeated and dissuaded with enough firepower, but if the Ministry sent them... They might as well surrender Jess and get on with their lives. The Ministry wouldn’t stop.
The relay still weighed heavy in her pocket after she swiped it from the library in the chaos of the first attack. Desperation f
ueled the urge to send Nathan a message, although Jess didn’t like the idea of communicating with him without giving Isla and Griggs a chance to weigh in. Although she hadn’t before.
Maisy poked her side. “What the hell is wrong with you? You could have done serious injury to yourself. From what they said, you nearly passed out right there on the bridge.”
“We were under attack,” she said. Einstein’s mustache, she was tired. Yet her thoughts whirled too fast and confusing for her to get any sleep. “I knew I could help. I wasn’t going to just hang out and watch as the Galaxos got pummeled to a dented soup can.”
“The Galaxos is a fine ship...” Mrax started, but Jess and Maisy both gave him dirty looks, and the Xaravian laughed as he turned away. “Dented soup can is probably more accurate. I’m sure Vaant and Trazzak had things under control.”
Jess covered her eyes with her good hand. “There was a lot going on, and they didn’t have the time or skillset to handle the comms channels like I could. So I did what I had to do.”
“And why, exactly, were you so close to the bridge anyway? You left sick bay well before the attack. What were you off doing?”
Jess cleared her throat and didn’t look at either of the doctors. “I had to explain some things to someone. That’s it.”
“Someone? Which someone?” From the grin on Maisy’s face, Jess knew the doc suspected who it was.
Which only made Jess’s cheeks heat more than they should have. There was no reason to blush just because someone mentioned Trazzak. Even with the dirty dream she’d had of him, it shouldn’t have flustered her so much. Jess shook her head. “It’s not worth mentioning. Just a small misunderstanding.”