by Layla Nash
Faros
The Sraibur Crew
Layla Nash
Juno Wells
Copyright © 2019 by Layla Nash
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Kasmit Covers.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Connect with Juno
Also by Juno Wells
Also by Layla Nash
Chapter 1
Faros
Forty-two. Forty-two points united the shields that lined the ceiling and easternmost wall in the jail cell.
Faros frowned as he studied the smooth walls. There must have been a reason the points were visible and the matrix itself hadn’t imploded. The rebels should have had a much better brig.
He laced his hands behind his head as he surveyed the ceiling. He’d counted those damn points over and over and over, wondering why there weren’t more or less, and pondered whether he could ask his smart-ass brother. Frrar would have known the answer without having to think about it. Faros’s upper lip curled instinctively, though he forced his expression to smooth before the observation points picked up on agitation and alerted the guards.
The Xaravian spaceship captain—and part-time pirate—sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot to face the entry as the shield wavered and rippled. It opened enough to admit his second-in-command and a tall Earther with an expression like she’d smelled haugmawt shit on a hot day in the desert. Faros swallowed back a grin as he got up to shake his second’s arm.
“Aren’t I a lucky son of a bitch. You were just here two days ago. What’s with this visit?”
Wyzak didn’t blink as he tilted his head toward the sour-faced Earther. “Something the judge decided about your trial. The lawyer is supposed to talk to you.”
Faros smiled as widely as he could at the dark-haired lawyer, showing as many teeth as he could, and kept speaking Low Xarav so she wouldn’t understand a damn word. “You’d think they’d have given me someone who looks halfway decent if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement. At least give me something to remember and enjoy when I can’t see the light of the suns again.”
The lawyer didn’t blink, looking bored as she flicked through a tablet, but Wyzak’s expression never changed. They’d played the game before, trying to needle the Earther into responding, but Faros was starting to think she really didn’t speak Xarav at all. Such a disappointment. Although perhaps he could use that as an appeal—if his lawyer didn’t speak his language or bother to get a universal translator, how could she possibly mount a sufficient defense?
“If you’re done grab-assing,” the Earther said, each dainty syllable bouncing like music in his ears. She stepped forward to offer the tablet. “The judges will be convening in three days to pass your sentence. They’ve determined the crew followed your orders, but they are considering charges against the officers.” She nodded at Wyzak, who still looked as grim as the moment Faros had been arrested, and flicked her hand over the tablet’s screen to show the charges. “We’ll know shortly after they decide whether to exile you to one of the uninhabited planets or put you to work on an out-station breaking rocks.”
“So you’re not optimistic about me going free?” He smiled as charmingly as he could. Faros scratched his jaw and along the line of scales on his shoulder where scars caused them to buckle and fold unnaturally. “And here I had such confidence in the Alliance’s legal academy.”
The Earther’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Going free is generally contingent on the defendant being not guilty.”
“Generally,” he said. “Not always. I have plenty of money. Maybe that would make a difference.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her and pretended to look at the tablet, though it didn’t really matter. She was a good lawyer from what he heard, and she’d certainly looked like she worked hard on his case, such as it was.
“Do not try to bribe the judges,” she said. Her eyes narrowed to match her thinned lips until all of her looked as prickly and irritated as a mother sandsnake laying eggs. “Again. You nearly earned yourself and everyone else exile with that. If you do it again—”
“I’ll offer a hell of a lot more so they can’t refuse.” He handed the tablet back with a wink. He’d miss being able to irritate the pretty Earther. She’d been a good distraction from the featureless walls of his jail cell.
He stretched and glanced at her. “Thought my defense attorney would need to, well, believe that I’m not guilty?”
“Except you are guilty,” she said. “You already admitted it, there’s at least three dozen witnesses, and the security system on your ship recorded you giving the order to strand your brother—your own blood—in space.”
Faros looked at Wyzak and raised an eyebrow. “These Earthers love my brother. Little arsehole has got all of them worried about him. Poor little shiplit, abandoned by his mama.”
“You stranded your brother. In space. That’s attempted murder and a direct violation of the astronautical code.”
“You don’t know much about Xaravians,” Faros said. He feigned a yawn and checked the status of the observation bots in the hall. “I wouldn’t be a good older brother if I didn’t try to kill him a couple of times. It makes him stronger. Tougher.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Besides, he wasn’t really in any danger. I had homing beacons on the damn capsule and could have recalled it if his heroic friends hadn’t showed up in time.” He was so damn tired of hearing about Frrar’s near-death experience and fragile damn feelings.
The lawyer, Violet, didn’t blink as her nails clicked against the tablet’s screen. She painted some kind of lacquer on her nails, turning them a bright red like freshly-spilled blood, and the color drew his hunting instincts as her fingers moved faster. Such strange creatures, the Earthers. Faros caught his second’s eye and inclined his chin just enough to send the message. He couldn’t waste any more time.
The Earther sighed. “I can file an appeal, but really, you’re going to have to stop admitting to crimes and proposing new ones.”
“I’m a pirate.” Faros couldn’t control his exasperation, even as alarms went off along the hallway. Wyzak moved to the ent
ry and frowned into the open doorway as he searched for the rest of their crew. The captain ducked to retrieve a makeshift bag, made from one of the cot’s sheets, from under the frame before he moved to follow the other Xaravian. “That’s kind of what we do.”
“And here I thought you claimed to be a privateer,” she said under her breath.
The lawyer rolled her eyes and tossed her head, the end of her long ponytail flying over her shoulder, and it stopped Faros dead in his tracks. Something about that look, that dismissive expression and sheer irritation... It had been entertaining before, but the Earther’s dedication to law and order and generally prim nature started to develop some other, baser appeal. Corrupting her presented all kinds of interesting challenges.
He sighed internally and sent a mental apology to Wyzak, who hated when plans changed at the last minute. Faros grabbed the other sheet from the bed and smiled disarmingly as he approached her. “Well, here’s the thing about privateers.”
Her expression turned guarded and the lawyer retreated a step. Wyzak groaned when he caught sight of Faros and leaned into the hallway to shout orders as the crew disabled the alarms as well as all the gates and locks. Faros couldn’t stay in jail another night; it had already taken too long to arrange the breakout as it was. He had work to do and none of it was getting easier with time.
Faros tossed the sheet over Violet’s head. “Privateers are really just pirates pretending to go straight.”
Only one of her arms ended up wrapped in the sheet; she hurled the tablet at his head with impressive accuracy. Faros barely ducked in time and used the momentum to catch her around the waist and toss her over his shoulder so he could follow Wyzak out of the jail cell.
His second-in-command muttered, “Care to explain why you want to add kidnapping to your list of charges?”
“I think you mean our list of charges,” Faros said. He strode along the halls he’d only traversed a few times, certain he could find his ship and crew before the rebels figured out he’d actually found a way to escape. Fools. They’d underestimated him all along. “And you don’t want to know.”
Wyzak sighed but ducked a guard’s punch and knocked the five-armed alien out with a flick of his wrist. Faros concentrated on the empty halls ahead and the pull of his ship and the freedom of open space. Then Violet flung herself around and nearly kneed him in the face and flipped over his shoulder at the same time.
No one had ever accused him of having good impulse control.
Chapter 2
Violet
Violet hated criminals. Detested them. She meant to be a prosecutor after studying law, but the Alliance’s Fleet offered her a job that paid off all of her tuition and a lucrative paycheck for a limited contract. She only had to serve a handful of years in order to set herself up for life so she could open her own practice and even the score on behalf of all of the voiceless victims who still existed on the margins of society.
But the Fleet hadn’t needed prosecutors, apparently, or even defense attorneys. They wanted someone who specialized in contract and treaty law, negotiating all those intergalactic and multilateral agreements, and that was the only choice they gave her. Violet had tried to study anything else, but once she’d signed the papers with the Fleet... that was it.
Treaties became her life.
Her boring, boring life. Even with extensive travel and making some good friends among the crew of the Argo, her last Fleet assignment, Violet wanted to get back to her first love: making sure the guilty paid for their crimes.
And then they’d all been sold by their so-called captain to the Xaravians, run through the gauntlet of ridiculously dangerous missions, and ended up supporting the absolutely, one-hundred-percent illegal rebellion against the agreed legal framework of the Alliance. She’d been made a criminal by those Xaravians and her fellow crewmates.
She seethed, grinding her teeth, as the pirate ship lurched around her and the shields vibrated from the rebellion’s efforts to shoot it down. Violet paced the confines of the quarters that Newton-damned pirate dropped her in like a stack of old notebooks. He’d just thrown a sheet over her head, picked her up, and marched out of the jail as if he’d been checking out of a hotel. Unbelievable.
And there was no one to stop him. Not even her crewmates.
Violet massaged her temples and attempted once more to use the comms unit she carried with her. Someone from the Galaxos—like one of her so-called friends—had to know the pirates escaped. But there was no telling how long it would take them to figure out she was missing, too.
She stopped in her tracks. What if the rebellion thought she helped the pirates escape? She could end up charged with a few dozen crimes, some of which carried a terminal penalty of exile. It was bad enough being stuck in the backwaters of unclaimed space and rebellion-dominated quadrants, but to be sent to a planet that even the rebels viewed as an exile...
She shuddered.
The comms unit vibrated but didn’t connect. Violet pressed the tips of her fingers to her eyes. She just needed to breathe. It was the same kind of nightmare as when the female crewmembers from the Argo were sold to the Xaravians, and she’d survived that. The rest of the crew survived bigger adventures as well, chasing across galaxies with bounty hunters and slave traders on their heels, though she’d managed to stay mostly in the background. Griggs and Jess both seemed to enjoy that kind of thing, so Violet was only too happy to let them forge into danger without a thought for their own safety.
The door slid open behind her and she turned, ready to fight. Her eyes narrowed despite trying to swallow her irritation. That arrogant pirate captain stood in the doorway, studying her with an odd flare of color in his scales. Violet folded her arms over her chest. “Take me to a neutral port immediately.”
“Can’t do that,” he said. He didn’t move from the doorway, effectively blocking it with his broad shoulders, but at least he didn’t loom into the small but well-appointed quarters.
“What could possibly have motivated you to commit more crimes? What is wrong with you?”
His dark eyebrow rose and when his head tilted, his long hair moved. She saw he’d tied the typical Xaravian bones and scales in the long twists. “They can only exile me once, sweetheart.”
For a barbarian, he had a remarkable command of Earther idioms and slang. Even though she hated every syllable that dropped from his piratical face. “Do not call me that.”
The Xaravian didn’t even blink as he studied her, and a flash of orange-red—irritation, if she remembered correctly—sifted across his scales. He’d found his old clothes and changed out of the prison uniform into traditional Xaravian robes. His teeth flashed white and a little pointy as he smiled. “Just calm down. I’ve got a few errands to take care of, and then we’ll figure out a way to get you back to your books.”
Errands. Violet didn’t believe him for a second. “You left your son behind. Perhaps they’ll add child abandonment to your charges.”
A flash of pain crossed his expression but disappeared before she could be certain she’d seen it. The pirate tapped something into the control panel on the wall and ignored her comment about his son. “You’ll be staying here for a while. Relax and use that time for studying up on how to get me out of this little fugitive adventure.”
“If you’re planning to argue you escaped for a reason and a legitimate excuse, then—”
“The rebellion leadership knows why I escaped,” the pirate said sharply. His temper faded just as quickly as it had appeared, and he did something else with the super-fancy controls. “You can select Earther cuisine or Xaravian according to your preferences for the midday meal. I expect you to join me for dinner.”
“I’ll certainly never—”
Before she could choose from the many curses she wanted to use, the bastard disappeared and the door shut behind him. Violet frowned at the blank door and the flashing control panel, and wished she’d had some of the technical acumen that Rowan and Maisy had. The engine
er and the doctor could both do impressive things with the technology stacked up on the Galaxos and the sister ships, despite how young the women were. Violet turned on her heel and started pacing again.
She really, really hated criminals. And pirates went to the very top of the list.
Chapter 3
Faros
Faros could finally breathe when he stood on the bridge of his ship, the Sraibur shuddering away the dust and stagnation of being docked for an extended amount of time. He felt the same, all stiff and rusty. He and the ship both needed to stretch their wings and test their endurance. The crew knew better than to celebrate too soon, though, and stood by for orders as Faros surveyed his domain and exhaled the tension of the previous few months.
He’d bribed as many of the rebellion’s officers and guards as he could, and because the overall advisory council had to know his purpose already—since they’d hired him to patrol the uncontrolled zones themselves—he figured there wouldn’t be any ships following too closely. If the rebellion’s ships caught the Sraibur too quickly, they would all miss important opportunities—which the leadership knew, even if the average rebel didn’t. He’d tried to explain to his brother and the crew of self-righteous warriors he worked with, but Frrar hadn’t been inclined to believe anything he said. And even if the rebels or bounty hunters caught him, Faros knew he wouldn’t face more charges. Despite what that lawyer thought.