Genetic Purge (The Galactic Outlaws Book 2)

by Bradford Bates

  The rest of the trip back to the ship had gone smoothly. Outside of a few wayward looks, we didn’t draw too much attention. It was a good thing we were in the pleasure capital of the midrim. People came here to forget about their lives and to escape reality for a bit. That made us about the least interesting thing on this station. That and most of the people here weren’t trying to be noticed and cared even less about what other people were doing. This was a 'keep your head down' kind of place. What happened on Serenity stayed on Serenity.

  As soon as we were onboard, I realized that I hadn’t even thought of using my comm to call anyone when I had been pinned down. Too busy staying alive I guess. That was sloppy and totally unlike me. The last forty-eight hours had dumped a shit ton of problems in my lap, and I was feeling a little overwhelmed. It made me wonder how my little angel had known to show up, but that was a question for another time. I sealed the hatch behind us and used my comm to call Ice.

  “Please tell me you are back, and that we can get the hell out of here.”

  Ice’s laughter filled the comm. “Well, it’s nice to hear from you too, Captain.”

  I felt the growl escape my lips before I could stop it. “Damn it, Ice.” She didn’t wait for me to finish talking before jumping right back into the conversation.

  “Let, me guess? You had something to do with that dust up on the station.”

  “It’s possible, but all I really care about now is getting us back in the black and away from here.”

  “Sure thing, Captain.” She mumbled something I couldn’t catch to someone else on the bridge. “Kyra wants you to know she secured the parts to fix the hot water.”

  “I knew my favorite girl wouldn’t let me down.”

  “Hey there, Captain. You’re starting to make me think you are moving in on my woman.” Ice’s voice took on a jealous tone, but could almost hear the mocking smirk hidden jest below the surface.

  I laughed, and it felt good to let it out. “I think we both know Kyra’s more woman than I can handle.”

  “Damn right I am,” Kyra shouted into Ice’s comm.

  “Any particular destination, Captain?” Ice brought the conversation back on track.

  “Just away from here and don’t cross into Earth Republic space yet.”

  “You got it, Cap.”

  The comm line closed and I turned to Samantha. “Why don’t you head back to your quarters and get cleaned up? I’m going to head down to medical and check in with Doc.”

  She looked me over, and it took me a moment to realize she was wondering how badly I was hurt. She could probably sense my discomfort but not the extent of my injuries. I just waved her off as if they shouldn’t be a concern. “I’m fine. I just need to follow up with him on a few things.”

  “You will let me know if you are hurt, correct.” It came out as more of command than a question.

  I held up both hands in front of me and made the universal gesture for a peaceful surrender. “Of course I will.” Samantha didn’t look convinced, but she turned and headed into the ship. I felt the engines fire as we detached from the station and headed out into space. I felt better knowing we were away from the station and the kill squad that Samantha had ripped apart. I lived to fight another day, that’s all I could ask for.

  I opened a private channel to Ice. “Hey, I’m going to load something into my personal terminal. I need to make sure the files are unlocked and able to be viewed. For now, this is for my eyes only.”

  “Ummm,” was all she said.

  I took that to mean she was there with Kyra and didn’t want her to hear. Either that or they were befouling my bridge again. Maybe I was just jealous they got to enjoy themselves somewhere besides their cabins. A couple somewheres if I wasn’t mistaken. With that thought in mind, I decided I needed to find Maze before heading to medical.

  I opened a direct line to her comm. “Maze, I’m home.”

  “Funny.” I could tell by the tone of her voice she thought it was anything but. “I take you made it back in one piece.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty interesting story really.”

  “Why don’t you join us in medical, and fill us in on the details.”

  She sounded a little angry and I wasn’t sure what I was walking into. It was always better to just face the music. If you let an angry woman stew in her own thoughts it only made it worse. Now I just had to try and figure out why she mad in the thirty seconds it would take me to get to the medbay. “I’m on my way.”

  Maze was just climbing off the doctor’s exam table when I walked in. She moved to the tray next to it and started putting her diagnostic kit away. She kept her back towards me while she finished and then turned towards the doctor. “Thank you for your help, Richard.”

  “It was my pleasure.” Doc looked between us and then spoke again. “I think I’ll go see if they brought any fresh food back.”

  “After you’re done, Doc, you might want to check on Samantha.”

  “Oh, was she injured.”

  “Yes, but with her that seems to be a very temporary thing.”

  “I’ll just drop by and make sure she doesn’t need anything. If you need me just shout.”

  Richard left the room leaving me with Maze. She still wasn’t looking at me, I saw a little anger there, but most of what I was reading in her body language was shame. She didn’t have anything to be ashamed about, especially not her cybernetics. Maze’s enhancements had saved my bacon more times than I could count. Without her by my side, the legend of Captain Drake would have ended a decade ago, and it would have been too short of a story to be called anything close to legend.

  Maze turned away again and finished placing the last few items in her kit. I moved up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist. I hugged her close against me. She fought my embrace for a moment and then sagged against me. I felt her body shudder, and I tried to turn her around, but she didn’t want to face me. Resisting the urge to force her to look at me, I pulled her tight against me again and nuzzled my head in against her neck.

  “Tell me what’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  I pulled away from her. The soft approach obviously wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know if she was looking for a fight or not, but I walked over to the door and closed it. “That’s obviously not true. You know I suck at this stuff, just tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s just that I know you get weirded out by my implants, and then on top of it all when you needed me today, I couldn’t be there for you because of them.” She finally turned to face me, and her cheeks were stained with tears.

  I rushed towards her, and when she looked down, I tilted her head up and forced her to look into my eyes. “Maze, how many times have you saved my life?”

  A tiny little laugh escaped her. “That number is higher than I can count, and you know it.”

  “And did your implants help get us out of all of those situations?”

  “Of course they did?”

  “Then what’s the problem?” I watched her face searching it for something I was missing.

  “I’m not just a tool, you know.”

  There was the anger, I knew it was coming. “Maze, I’ve never thought of you as anything but a person. Not just any person, someone that I care about deeply.”

  “Yeah, because I save your ass all the time.” Her eyes burned with fire.

  It was true Maze had pulled me out of more than a few fights that should have been the end of me. I was grateful for that but this wasn’t just about her saving my ass. This was about my feelings for her as a woman. “No. No one else cares about me the way you do. You’ve been by my side through the thick of it, and I wouldn’t want anyone else there ever.”

  “Are you sure about that? Your new crew member seems ready to fulfill that need.” She picked up her case and tried to brush past me. “And probably whatever other needs you have.”

  Finally, we got to what this was really about. Maze was jealous. For
the first time in our relationship, she was on the other end of things. I’d been jealous of just about every guy she gave the time of day to for the last ten years, and for the first time, she was jealous of a woman that showed maybe just the tiniest hint of interest in me.

  “Maze, you can’t seriously think anything happened between us?”

  She turned towards me dropping her case to the ground. She moved forward getting right up into my face. “Oh yeah, then why can she sense you half way around the goddamned station?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it’s the blood swapping thing. I can sense her emotions sometimes.” Maze’s eyes reached a level of fury that I hadn’t seen before, and I realized I had stepped deeper into the hole I had been digging myself. I needed a life vest, I was drowning in stupidity.

  “And you wonder how I know she likes you.”

  That’s right, Maze had been healed by her blood as well. If she was picking up on what Samantha was feeling she might have caught a little bit of what I had been feeling as well. That wasn’t going to be easy to talk my way out of, but I had to try. “Maze, it’s not like that. Nothing happened between us and nothing will.” I hoped I was telling her the truth. “Without Samantha, I wouldn’t have you anymore. That thing we pulled out of her nearly killed you.”

  “Sure and now you don’t need a woman built out of the military’s spare parts.”

  Jesus, she wasn’t spare parts. She was the woman I loved. “Please, we all know you’re made out of the best hardware the military could buy.” I tried to make it sound light, but by the look on her face, I had completely failed.

  “Fuck you!” She turned and started storming out of the room.

  Here I was again making a bad joke at the wrong time. I should have known better, but apparently I just continued to miss the mark. Maze had her hand on the door and pressed it closed. She didn’t fight me, which was good because I wasn’t sure if I could win if she really started to pull on the door with all of her strength.

  “Maze, I’m sorry. You know I have a mouth that writes credit vouchers that I could never cover.”

  “That’s for damn sure.” She kept her eyes locked on the door.

  Fuck, how was I going to get this back on track? “Maze, you are not a fucking machine.”

  She turned back towards me her eyes softening just a bit. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  “Then you’re my fucking machine.” I bent in to kiss her, and to my surprise, she kissed me back.

  “And you’re not going to leave me for a younger, hotter model.”

  “She's younger looking, sure, but if what Doc tells me is true, she's probably older than me and you combined. As for her being hotter…well, that’s debatable.” I held my hand out and tilted it back and forth as if trying to decide who was hotter.

  “Screw you, Drake.”

  At least now she knew I was joking around. “I intend to take you up on that offer.” I kissed her again and then took the case from her hands and followed her out of the door. I knew whatever happened in there wasn’t done by a long shot. The fact was, part of me felt drawn to our dangerous new crew member was a problem I wasn’t even ready to think about yet, let alone address. The part that should have been telling me to run was telling me to get closer and stay there forever. I was just going to have to find a way to squash that part of me deep inside and never talk about it.

  CHAPTER 15

  CAPTAIN DRAKE

  I crawled out of the bed I was sharing with Maze and moved towards my data terminal. It was time to see what was on the stick Max had given his life for. Pulling up the files was easy, making sense of all the information wasn’t. Finally, after an hour of reading and digging, I checked a file called summary explanation. I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t I start with that one. I have no fucking idea.

  It was worse than I feared. I silently thanked Max for drawing together all of the information and laying it out in a simple format. The good news, well there wasn’t any good news. The bad news was that an N.E.A. kill squad was the least of our worries. The men that ran the program that created Samantha were powerful, like controlled the Alliance powerful. If you controlled the Alliance, you damn near controlled a universe and half the midrim. That meant they had unlimited resources at their disposal to track us down. If my face showed up on any of the vids, we were fucked.

  It would be even worse for us if they happened to spot Samantha on any of the vids. She was supposed to be asleep in that damn box, not out walking around on Serenity. Shit, we needed to get that part of it resolved and quickly if we were going to have any kind of future. It was time to try and put my haphazard plan into action. I guess it didn’t really matter if it didn’t work. If we did nothing, the outcome was the exact same. We were all dead.

  I looked at Maze as she slept in the bed. I could see the scars on her arms from the surgeries Doc had done while I was on the station. All of her old scars, the ones I used to trail with my fingers after we finished making love, were gone. All she had now was the reminder of the implants inside of her. She might have hated what the military had done to her, but it didn’t matter to me. I loved the woman in my bed.

  It bothered me that when I thought of love, I thought about Maze, but I also thought about Samantha. She was deadly, sure, but she was damned good looking and one hell of a fighter. That and her blood had brought me back from the brink more than once already. Wasn’t a factor, at least I didn’t think it was. There was always the possibility she was able to control me through our bond, but I hadn’t felt anything like that yet. Would I even know it if she tried? I was in the deep end here treading water. My fucked up sense of love was spinning all over the map, and I had no way to stop it.

  There was no way to be sure without digging into it, and I wasn’t the kind of guy that was interested in that. I hadn’t really grown up in a house full of emotions. We didn’t talk about that stuff. My folks were always focused on work, and I was focused on making life hard for them. If they hadn’t needed me for the business, I doubt that they would have even noticed that I left to join the military. I thought I’d show them. Well, I’ll just add that to the long list of bad decisions that I liked to make. My dad always told me that one day I’d push things too far and end up dead. Well here I was teetering on the edge of the black and oxygen was running low.

  I moved back towards the bed and gently woke Maze up. I had told her most of the plan before we fell asleep. I knew she was tired. Having her implants replaced must have been painful, and any kind of surgery left you dog tired. She stirred under my hand, and her eyes met mine. Damn, I was one lucky man.

  “I’m about to round up the crew and tell them the plan. You can stay here and get some rest if you want to since you already know what I’m going to say.”

  “No, I’ll come with you.” She tried to get up and winced in pain.

  I eased her back into the bed and moved towards my cabinet. I still had one of Doc’s little pink miracle pills. I grabbed the container and tossed it towards Maze. She grabbed it out of the air but not without me seeing how much it cost her. The hiss of air that escaped through her lips confirmed it for me. “Take that and lay back down. Captain’s orders.”

  Maze swallowed the pill and curled back up in the bed. I wished that I could join her but time was running short. We had to get the package delivered if we were going to keep up appearances. I waved goodbye to Maze and hit my comm.

  “Crew meeting in five.” I closed the line before I could hear any of their responses. I wasn’t looking for a debate, I just needed everyone together. Moving into the galley, I helped myself to a glass of juice and an apple from the fridge. A little fresh fruit would go a long way towards washing the awful taste of an Everything Bar out of my mouth. I sat down and started to munch while I waited for the rest of the crew to file into the room. Fifteen minutes later, everyone was there. Some of them didn’t look exactly thrilled, but they were there.

  “Alright team, it’s time I filled you in on ou
r next steps.”

  I spent the next hour outlining the scheme I came up with to try and get us out of this crazy mess. There was no way to tell if it would work without trying it. At this point, there really wasn’t a downside if we failed. The vamp was out of the box, and she wouldn’t go back in. At least not in the way those N.E.A. bastards were expecting. All we had to do now was get her to Mars and let the chips fall where they would.

  Everyone seemed to have bought into the plan, and really that was all I could ask for. Ice headed back to the bridge to get us back into FTL and on the way. We would be there soon enough. If everything worked out, we would be all set with enough money in our pockets, and our membership with the mercenaries guild reinstated. That would keep us flying for the foreseeable future. Being in the black is what I lived for, the stars were the only home I had.

  We were eight hours out from Mars, and it was time to get the first step of our plan in motion. This was the worst part for one of us, and I didn’t envy what she was about to do. Samantha strolled into the cargobay looking like she didn’t have a care in the world. Her nonchalant exterior did nothing to hide the emotions I felt through the bond we were sharing. She was nervous, and rightfully so. This entire plan was based off putting her trust in people she had only known for a few days. I hoped she could feel the resolve I was trying to pump through the bond. I wouldn’t leave her behind, it wasn’t in my nature.

  Samantha walked over to the box she had jumped out of not so long ago. She ran a finger against its edge almost longingly. I knew what she was doing. When something scared you, it was always better to confront it. The fear would drive you insane if you let it. Crawling into a box was too much like crawling into a coffin for my tastes, but if what the doc said was true, he should be able to put her back under.

  “You ready to go for a ride?” I said pointing at the open box.

  She ignore the fact that I had pointed towards the box. “That’s very forward of you, Captain. You haven’t even bought me dinner yet.”