Page 24 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)
“Think they’ll wait if we call a time out while we get our suits on?” Cory asked, her words dripping with sarcasm.
Bruwes hit the intership data-comm. “Keyls, Aldar, suit up, grab a gun and get to the airlock. They’re going to try and board us. Demin… Check that. Demin, you stay. Vullum, suit up?—”
“Grab a gun,” the man who considered himself such a charmer sighed, already heaving himself out of his chair.
“Get a patch kit and a welding gun too and be ready for a hull breach. Cory?—”
“Sealing the ship into sections,” Cory agreed, reaching above her head to punch a series of buttons.
No one noticed Lissa pulling her hands as far from one another as the link cuffs would allow, straining the fingers of each hand until she could touch the wrist locks of each link.
Power unfurled inside her like a snake, twisting out from her core with sleepy wakefulness to course down through her arms, into her rapidly warming hands.
The links heated beneath her burning fingertips.
Soon her skin was sizzling, the sound like bacon cooking in a pan, the searing hurt a distant thing, as if it were happening to someone else.
In a single abrupt motion, Cory stopped running and turned the ship around until the Soldri vessel filled the screen. At once, the comm lit up and chirped.
They were being hailed.
“Do we answer it?” Demin asked with a crooked smile and creased brow.
“Yes, with fire !” Cory added, shaking a fist at the screen. “On your order, Captain! Give it to me, hard and fast!”
“Woman,” warned Demin.
“Sorry, force of habit.”
“Everyone shut up.” Bruwes glanced at Lissa, and the corner of his mouth quirked. “Act like professionals,” he added, and ran a hand through his quills before tapping the comm.
The ship on the viewscreen blipped black and came back with a Soldri front and center.
Lissa had seen many in her short time. An ancient race, at least a hundred times older than humans, with astounding engineering skills considering their relatively primitive technology.
She had served six tours of the never-ending excavation of the Great Ziyaat Well, a deceptively humble name for the subterranean city as vast and as deep as Earth’s Marina Trench.
Desert beings, he (if ‘he’ even was a he) was cloaked in black, the features of his goggled face obscured by poor lighting and the hood he wore.
The lengths of his long, brown arms were painted in bright slaver yellow.
The jawbones of his most respected enemies hung from his belt, and he wore the pips ripped from the collars of many captains from many different governments.
There were even a few Corporate pins there.
“Speak,” Bruwes said, his tone the coldest Lissa had yet heard.
“Give up,” the slaver captain rasped. “Your ship is hobbled. There is no escape. Your options are to let us take her or force us to destroy you, which would be a pity since I don’t actually dislike you.”
“Nor do I dislike you,” Bruwes replied, though his tone suggested otherwise.
“Perhaps we can come to some agreement and depart this place as friends.”
“I’m listening.”
“You took a bounty on Cutirut I. Quickly. Efficiently, after others before you failed. I salute.” The Soldri captain lifted his veils, giving them all a glimpse of the crab-like structure of its mouth before it spat a sticky brown glob somewhere off-frame.
Bruwes and his crew on deck exchanged a group glance, united by bewilderment.
“He’s sharing his water,” Lissa whispered. Her voice sounded faint and broken, as if she heard it from the end of a long, echoing tunnel. “Out of respect.”
Bruwes nodded, then spat as well, his eyes hard and unblinking. “And I mean that,” he added in a cold voice. “With the utmost respect.”
The Soldri nodded back at him, mimicking a gesture that clearly was not natural to him. “Release your bounty to me and we shall call one another allies against future troubles.”
Bruwes pretended to think that over. He’d better be pretending, anyway.
Although even Lissa could see the advantage of such a truce.
To the Soldri, piracy was an honorable profession.
There was no crime in taking something from someone who could not hold onto it.
Likewise, one who adhered to their code of honor was welcome in their society, as much as any true Soldri.
He wasn’t just offering to maybe do business down the road, but offering the protection of a Fleet and haven on their home world, where even Corporate did not dare to go with impunity.
This might be worth even more than a jump coil.
Her fingers began to smoke, something that should have hurt like hell, but like with her wrists, when the power unfurled like this, it had a way of compartmentalizing… everything.
“There are more than enough bounties in this quadrant for both of us,” Bruwes decided, sounding bored. “This one is taken. Find another.”
A corner of the Soldri’s mouth curled. “I hear your words, my friend, but I see your ship. You cannot run. Your shields are no match for our plasma cannons and your, ah, charming hardlight blasters cannot penetrate our refractor field to even touch our shields.
“They’re helixblasters, actually,” Bruwes remarked. “The Supernova 6 model. But go on.”
The Soldri did not react in any way that could be seen through his thick veils and other wrappings, but even his dark goggles seemed a little concerned by that.
“Oh, are you done? Well, as much as I hate to correct a man I respect so, so much?—”
Cory leaned over and spat.
“—I should point out that we’ve also got a subspace scythe and a full payload of Void torpedoes, plus whatever’s in the armory,” Bruwes said, even less amused than before.
“And this is where you tell me you’ve got, I don’t know, an anti-star disintegrator ray.
I don’t care. What you’ve got doesn’t matter.
You might as well flush that shit into space for all you’re going to use it on me.
If you want my cargo, you’re going to have to come and get it, and, my friend, I will shoot you when you do. Respectfully. “
The Soldri nodded. “So, you’ve decided this needs to get ugly?”
“Looking at you makes it ugly enough,” Cory muttered, not quite under her breath.
The Soldri did not so much as glance at her. “I find myself genuinely disappointed. You seem an honorable man. I give you a second chance to see the sense of compromise. My contact tells me you are in need of a jump coil.”
Not a muscle on Bruwes’s body twitched, but his gaze turned very slightly murderous. “I don’t know who would have told you that?—”
“It wasn’t me, I swear,” Cory said swiftly.
“Might have been me,” admitted Vullum. “Those sisters’ friend? Was real chatty.”
“And you talked about jump coils?” Cory asked, looking pained.
“Hey, she said she was working her way through engineering school. Ah, the things she could do with a spanner…”
“—but I’ve got that taken care of,” Bruwes continued. “And my cargo’s worth three times the cost of a jump coil. Bad enough you try to steal my prize instead of getting your own, but that offer is an insult.”
The Soldri nodded a final time, deeply, almost a bow. “My apologies for the offense I have given. So. In my last breath as your friend, I say we will dock with you. Send the girl peaceably and we will take her and release your ship.”
Dear God, she’d been reduced to a chauvinistic overly-used non-descriptor like out of a bad 21st century action movie.
No one seemed to notice the soft ping as first one cufflink came apart under the steady pressure and heat of her hands, then the other.
She–the alien being–caught the cuffs silently before the metal dropped to the grated floor.
“Well, that’s not happening, so what’s option number two?”
“Are we enemies, then? Pity. Then we will pierce your hull. You will either die or be forced to come to me, if you wish to continue breathing, and you will all become our bounty.”
Bruwes lost that bored look in a heartbeat. “Your bounty? You’re not seriously going to fly us all the way back to Me’Kava for a lousy?—”“
The Soldri raised a tablet into the screen’s view and began to read. “Wanted: stolen vessel, The Raider, 2000 chits. Wanted: Captain Bruwes, son of Mayzon, 1000 chits. Ship’s doctor Demin, son of Ryant, 1000 chits. Science officer Vullum, son of Becktel, 1000 chits–”
“They know my father?” the doctor asked in surprise. “I don’t even know my father.”
“We’ve got dossiers on us ?” Vullum asked, even more surprised.
“They’ve got bounties on us,” Bruwes corrected.
“Well, shit, what did we ever do?” Cory asked indignantly, only to deflate under the collective stare of the others. “Except for all the… everything.”
“Aldar, son of Stinio, 500 chits,” the other captain went on.
Kelys, son of Zuzax, 500 chits. And your human woman, Cory 1500 chits, but that I will sacrifice.
It’s been a long voyage. My crew require diversion.
” The faceless stare of the goggled mask and veils added that extra touch of deadly intent as the pirate captain tipped his head.
“Now, once more and for the last time, I ask you as a friend, would you like to reconsider turning over the woman? She is a criminal, a thief of the dead, a robber of graves. She does not deserve your protection, captain.”
Grave robber? Thief? Lissa bristled, not alone.
“Says the dead man,” the being inside her replied through Lissa’s mouth.
Nobody even looked at her, not until she placed her hand on the side of the ship and shot all the power building inside her straight through the hull. The amber blast hit the Soldri ship full on.
The screen became nothing but static as other ship blew up. So did the control panel, erupting all around Bruwes and Cory in a shower of silver-blue sparks that made everyone jump.
“What the fuck!” Cory shouted, all but leaping straight out over the back of her chair. “My ship!”