Chapter Three

Scanning the twisted corridor she suspected led to the bridge and the rest of the survivors, Edie jerked her chin at a door beneath their feet. “Your survivor is down there.”

“Open it.”

Edie knelt and put her weight against the override lever.

It creaked, the noise ragged data on her SEM. The handle gave. She landed on her butt, and sat, waiting for her heat-elevated pulse to settle. It didn’t. She hauled herself to her knees and pried the door open a few centimeters at a time.

The mad captain set a boot against the edge and shoved.

Edie marked it as the first sign of rationality she’d seen in him. Possible tactical advantage to playing on concern for his crew.

The stench of death pummeled her. Holding her breath, she peered into the shadowed compartment. Edie didn’t need more fuel for her nightmares, but she needed light unless she wanted to fry her gray matter with extra SEM processing. “Need light.”

Without looking, she shoved a hand into the thigh storage pocket of her suit.

“If anything other than a light bar comes out of there…” He left the threat hanging. But not his H7 pistol. Standard Claugh military issue. Short range. High power. Tended to lose accuracy at distance. Like that would matter with it pointed right between her eyes when she glanced up at him.

“What? You’ll leave my brains splattered all over your ship? Don’t you have enough of a mess without having to sift my DNA out of your crew’s remains?”

The muscles in his jaw worked. From the pallor outlining his lips, she guessed the reek of the compartment was making him queasy. Bad enough for her, but those were his crew smeared all over the bulkheads.

He eased back.

Edie brought her hand, clutching her light bar, out of her pocket.

With a jerk of the gun, he indicated that she should resume rescue efforts. She amused herself calculating how much explosive would be required to reduce him to constituent particles. She lowered the activated light bar into the gloom.

A pile of something rested against the far wall. Her eyes refused to resolve the image. Logic did it for her. Bodies. That’s how space battles and decompressed ships played out.

Except for the young man huddled in one corner. He sported a shock of bright blue hair. Bruises covered the right side of his face. The bars on his collar made him an ensign.

He squinted into the light. He blinked rapidly, repeatedly, as if trying to erase an internal visual buffer. Sweat stood out on the kid’s forehead and upper lip. He shivered.

Edie’s chest tightened.

The kid was slipping into shock.

She set the light bar to one side and looked for her captor.

He crouched across from her, gun propped on one knee while he stared into the compartment, gaze locked on the carnage. Shadows pared the flesh from his face, leaving him looking haunted. Almost human. Almost sane.

A twinge of sympathy rose. Rubbing her bruised, aching throat, she stomped on the tendril of empathy.

“He’s in the corner,” she snapped, hoping to break him out of counting the dead.

She edged farther into the hole, head down, almost within reach of the young man. “Hey. Are you hurt? Do you speak Tagrethian?”

No response.

“Whose blood you wearing, kid?” Not that she wanted to know, but she couldn’t suppress the murmur.

“The chief’s,” he whispered as if the tally played over and over in his unfocused vision. “Kalvie’s, and Juspil’s. The captain ordered engineering evacuated. I couldn’t leave them, but I—I don’t think I got all the pieces.”

Edie squeezed her eyes shut and choked back the memories of her first space battle against this boy’s people. It didn’t work. The ghosts of mangled friends and fellow revolutionaries wrapped clammy fingers around the back of her neck.

He was in for a lifetime of nightmares. She would know.

“No,” she croaked, opening her eyes to fish through another pocket. “You couldn’t leave them. You did the right thing. Here.”

Head pounding, she shoved a wrapped bit of candy into his line of sight. “Go on. You’ll feel better.”

He took the sweet with a grimy, trembling hand. He stuck the candy in his mouth and the first hint of color returned to his cheeks.

She’d wasted precious survival calories on a Claugh soldier. Out of sympathy. Sympathy. Her parents must be weeping in their graves.

No.

They’d always preached the virtue of service to others and of forgiving ones’ enemies. Not to mention that he’d have been in diapers while she’d wasted her youth fighting his people. He didn’t deserve her hatred. Not like his captain.

His captain. The Claugh madman dangled next to her reaching for his ensign. “Ensign. Stand up.”

She returned her attention to the baby-faced young man.

He shuddered.

“Come on,” Edie urged. “Won’t be long before the bad guys come to clean up the mess they made. You going to able to evac?”

His gaze found her and came into focus. “Ma’am?”

“Name’s Edie. We’re going to get out of here so we can look at the hand we’ve been dealt. You in?”

He flushed, glanced at his captain, and straightened against the bulkhead. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, sir. I’m in.”

“Got a name?”

“Ensign Scalte Fuller, ma’am.”

“We’re getting you out of there, Ensign,” the captain said. “Give me your hand.”

“Left arm’s broken, sir,” Fuller said, reaching with his right.

“Hang on. Anti-grav,” Edie said. She shifted out of the hole, taking a second to let the pounding pressure in her skull dissipate, then dug a tiny anti-grav unit from a pack pocket.

When she turned back, the madman lay across the reeking, open doorway, gun pointed at her head, his gaze prying.

For a breathless second, she imagined he saw into her, hunting for parts of her she didn’t want anyone to have.

He scowled.

The impression vanished.

She flattened herself face down on the edge of the doorway and said, “Catch. Hook it to your belt.”

Edie switched on the anti-grav. Fuller’s feet left the floor, and he started to tip. His captain steadied the ensign out of the compartment. Edie climbed to her feet and followed as the captain guided the younger man to a nearby bulkhead. She set the kid down.

On her handheld, Edie tagged his speech pattern with his name. She didn’t have a name to attach to the captain. She itched to tag him as ‘madman’. It would amuse her, but it could get her killed if he got a hold of her SEM or handheld. She hated it, but the wisdom of tagging him as ‘Captain’ won.

“Edie.” The captain.

She glanced at him.

Again, that green gaze bored into her. Dizziness swept her.

He paled and swayed.

For a split second, agony shot through her head. Then it was gone. She gulped in a breath. Indication of the atmosphere turning toxic? Or had she exceeded her SEM limit in some critical fashion? Sure, it fed visual and tactical data to the screens before her eyes, but the extra boost of nerve stimulation that came from Sensory Enhancement was addictive. She would know.

It was insidious and attractive because of the heady, nerve-buzzing high that came from so much information getting dumped through merely mortal neural networks.

Blinking away a fading headache, she arched an eyebrow while her nerves arced at his proximity. She frowned.

“I owe you an apology,” he said, “but my coping mechanisms are offline, and I find I don’t have one to offer. Thank you for getting my ensign out of that horror chamber.”

She stared at him, unable to make an apology coming from a Claugh make sense.

“I’m going to have cause to apologize again. You can’t keep that handheld.” He plucked her little computer out of her hands and shut it down.

“Hey,” she yelped. “I need…” Her SEM went dark. The buzz of sensory stimulation died. She shuddered and glanced at Fuller. The kid sat against the hull, knees drawn up, elbows propped on them, and his forehead on his clenched hands.

The captain gestured with the gun, reclaiming her attention. His lips moved.

Without the SEM to translate, she turned her gaze to his mouth. She could read lips, but it took time. She needed to see someone speaking over time to catalog their mannerisms, their unique way of forming sounds and words. With a nonnative Tagrethian speaker, it took even longer as she parsed out accent.

He was saying something angry. She couldn’t tell what, but the pissy nature? That was clear. He hurled rapid-fire demands in her face.

Frowning, she concentrated, trying to work out what words he expected her to catch. It struck her that he’d switched from Claughwyth, which her SEM could translate, to Tagrethian, which he’d heard her speak.

She began to catch familiar sound formations as he spoke.

He said them oddly. Claughwyth was a tonal language. Was that what lent such a sensuous curve to his speech?

Her pulse picked up speed.

He closed a fist in the shoulder of her enviro-suit.

Edie started and lifted her gaze to his.

Ire burned in his icy green eyes. His jaw muscles clenched, but the skin over his cheekbones darkened. Blushing?

He spoke again, demanding, angry. “…answer…”

She caught that word and choked back a laugh. “I’m deaf, you Orhait’s ass.”

He froze. His eyes widened, then flicked back and forth as if he scanned a mental file marked recent past. The fight drained out of him. He closed his eyes and let her go, giving her an opening, kilometers wide, to ambush him. Caught by the recrimination pressing lines into the corners of his eyes, she hesitated.

Rubbing his forehead with one hand, the captain opened eyes filled with chagrin. “…sorry…”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Cue pity for the poor deaf woman. “I should wear a sign. Give me my gear so I can turn on my SEM.”

He studied her, his gaze probing. He said something else.

“You’re wasting your breath until I get this turned on,” she replied, tapping the frame at her temple.

His gaze flicked to the slender frames supporting ballistic-glass lenses. He didn’t extend her handheld. For a second, the shadows under his eyes deepened. He twisted his head one way then the other and winced before straightening.

At least two injured, traumatized Claugh. Edie frowned, her illusions of a quick rescue and quicker getaway flashing off.

He powered up her handheld. She’d packed the thing with customizations. Most of them not legal. His lips puckered in a whistle.

Of course he couldn’t return the unit. She wouldn’t in his shoes, and no way could she let him keep it.

“Sorry,” he said again. He poked around the main screen.

Her SEM lenses lit.

“Better?”

She shot him a wary glance. “I understand what you’re saying. Leave it at that.”

He grimaced.

Edie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “You took me hostage. What’d you expect? To win me over with charm and good looks after crashing a dead ship?”

“A guy can hope,” he retorted.

He surprised an unwilling laugh from her. She managed to squash it into a snort. Probably not at all attractive. As if she cared.

Her SEM indicated footsteps incoming from behind her. One set steady, a second set that stepped and dragged.

The madman’s gaze slid past her. He holstered his gun.

Edie turned.

A young blocky woman with short black curls and a gash on her forehead favored one leg as she dragged a stretcher full of body condensers. Her eyes widened.

“Fuller,” she gasped, released the stretcher, burst into tears, and hobbled to embrace the ensign.

The young man, expression slack, climbed to his feet and patted the lieutenant’s shoulder with his one good hand.

In the young woman’s wake, covered head to toe in gray dust, a tall, wiry woman trudged. Even her short-cropped hair had been turned blue-gray. A bright red burn slashed through the dirt on the left side of her face and neck. She caught sight of Edie. Her weapon came up. The woman’s lip curled.

“Status,” the captain said.

“One working handheld,” the gray woman said. “Twenty-three other survivors. We don’t know the extent of their injuries.”

“We’ll search as we exit,” he said. “This is Edie. Edie, Commander Parqe, and Lt. Chavolgen. You’ve met Ensign Fuller. My name’s V’kyrri. Commander? Cover me.”

The short-haired uniform rack gave the handheld to the lieutenant and turned her gun on Edie.

“Stand down,” Edie said. “I don’t have a gun on me.”

“Which isn’t the same as being unarmed,” V’kyrri noted. He holstered his pistol and patted her down.

Edie sneered. “And here I thought we were friends already.”

“Stow it,” he commanded. He ripped open the seal on one of her thigh pockets. “My wounded don’t have time.”

“Neither do you. That pocket’s the first aid kit,” she said. “Take it. Put the regen unit on the lieutenant’s leg.”

“Fuller,” the captain said, snagging and pocketing her supply of stim doses, “requisition Edie’s medical supplies. Parqe. Get me locations on those survivors and a plan for extraction. Move, people.”

Edie shook her head. “You have four mostly mobile survivors. If you intend to make it off world, you have to move fast.”

“And wounded will slow us down,” he said. “No one gets left. Alive.”

She’d sucked in a breath to argue, but his final word pulled the plug on her protest. She firmed her lips. Beige lines at the corners of his mouth and the haunted light in his eyes stuck a knife of sympathy into her gut and twisted.

Fuller, his expression still dull, crawled to her side. He rummaged for the release tabs on Edie’s first aid kit, while her pulse hammered at her. Get out, get out, get out.

Edie forced her expression blank. “You have your survivors and a plan. You don’t need me. Let me go.”

“No.” The damned madman didn’t bother to look up from his useless extraction plan.

She clenched her teeth. “Then give me my handheld so I can tag speech patterns enough to know who’s speaking and when.”

Fuller took the first aid kit and went to the dark-haired lieutenant standing on one leg. Parqe joined them.

V’kyrri handed over Edie’s unit while Parqe found and downed an analgesic packet from Edie’s supplies. The commander’s shoulders settled lower. She blotted tears from her eyes with one filthy sleeve that left muddy smears on her face.

Edie added names, including the captain’s, and auto-holstered her handheld.

He tugged it free and put it back on his belt without comment. The weight pulling his features lightened, suggesting he wanted her as an ally.

She could play on his wishful thinking. Should. Never mind that she’d kill to have someone she could trust at her back. Especially on this rock.

They were Claugh. They couldn’t be that. Not ever.

“Fuller!” Parqe barked. “With me, now.”

The ensign jerked upright, terror in his too-wide eyes.

“Belay that,” V’kyrri commanded. He laid a hand on his commander’s wrist.

Edie’s gut twisted.

“It’s over,” V’kyrri said. The visual readout of his speech pattern broke. “Four crumpled decks between us. We won’t get to save these people. We can’t get to them.”

Fuller buried his face in his hands.

“Our overriding duty is to get at least one of us to the Empire to report,” V’kyrri went on, his vocal quality rasping a wide and spiky visual signal on her SEM. “Edie. What are we up against out there?” He tipped his head to indicate outside.

“Killing heat. Atmosphere being sheared away by the dying, expanding star,” she said. “Your biggest problem begins and ends with the UMOPG. They’re the ones who shot you down.”

Parqe sucked in a breath and turned a hope-lit face upon her captain.

“They aren’t going to take prisoners, much less treat your injured,” Edie said.

The commander scowled at her. “They signed the same treaties we did.”

“Right,” Edie shot. “That’s why you know the name of this world. Because surely, per the treaty you cite, the UMOPG filed all the appropriate claim documents.”

The commander sputtered, “We have to try.”

V’kyrri rubbed his forehead. The faint lines around his lips reminded Edie they were walking wounded. In shock. And in mourning. She had to jolt them into doing the one thing she couldn’t afford to have them doing: Thinking like Claugh soldiers.

She strangled a sense of misgiving. If any of them were going to live through this, she couldn’t be the only one thinking rationally. Or ruthlessly.

“This is a UMOPG military operation,” Edie said as if her mouth had made a decision her brain hadn’t yet been let in on. “The world is crawling with miners hopped up on their own importance.”

V’kyrri reared back. “They don’t have a military.”

Right. End tactical briefing.

“Didn’t have,” he amended. He studied her with a gaze that peeled her back layer by layer. “Based on a previous mission and a couple of unanswered questions, it makes sense. Even if the UMOPG have militarized, their essential nature remains the same.”

“They’ll come looking for profit,” Parqe said, resignation in her voice. “We can’t be here when they do. If we can’t afford to be captured—”

“We have to go on the offensive and avenge our crewmates,” V’kyrri concluded. “Or we have to escape.”

Edie started. “Go on the offensive?”

“Baxt’k,” Parqe whispered.

“Where are they holed up?” he growled. His weight moved forward, and his shoulders hunched like one of the bukkim, fierce, heavy-hooved ungulates from Edie’s home world. The flash of white teeth against dark skin as he snarled set her back.

“Revenge?” Edie prodded.

He met her eye, madness and determination glittering in his. As if his madness were contagious, his crew’s gazes went flat and hard. If he intended to go after an entire military with three wounded soldiers, those soldiers had his back.

Edie spread her fingers wide. “I am a firm believer in taking the hurt back to its roost, with the application of overwhelming force. You don’t have that. You have a traumatized, injured crew whose odds for survival plummet with every minute’s delay. You want out of here and a map to the base where you can sow chaos? I’ve got you. But this ship has to be destroyed.”

Along with the wounded you cannot reach, she didn’t say aloud.

The commander snarled.

“Edie’s right,” the captain said. “The Queen’s Rhapsody can’t fall into enemy hands.”

“The ship is destroyed,” his commander argued. “There’s nothing left—”

“Automatic locator beacon for your data core going off,” Edie said.

The captain cut her a look that made her clench her fists, but he said, “I lost self-destruct when I jettisoned the core.”

“Properly motivated, your trigger charges will blow and burn hot enough to destroy everything,” Edie said. “Quick. Clean.”

Blanching, all four stared at her.

The captain’s eyes narrowed.

Edie stayed very, very still. You didn’t imply you could blow up a ship and then make sudden moves.

“A bounty hunter who’s a demolitions expert?” V’kyrri surmised.

With a shrug, she glanced around the semi-circle. Hope, pain, and weariness in the kids’ faces. Hostility and contempt in Parqe’s. That bone-chilling watchful thing V’kyrri did.

She swallowed hard. Twelve Gods. She was considering allying with the enemy. An enemy. One of a growing number. Edie sighed.

“Look. It’s a religious thing for me, keeping people out of enemy hands. If it matters to you, I can help.”

There went her mouth before her brain. Again.

She had to be insane.