Page 32 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)

And yet, those sentiments were not returned, obviously since Me’Kava had taken out bounties against them. That his own father was certainly at least one driving force behind that didn’t even sting anymore. It just pissed him off.

“I disagree,” Vullum said slowly.

Bruwes braced himself, stomach sinking. He already knew what the other was going to say.

He knew it, because he was thinking the same damn thing, but it was the captain’s job to say it, so he did.

“Me’Kava doesn’t have a defensive fleet.

We’ll be met by what? One ship, at most, wherever we do the exchange, and they’re far more likely to want to meet planet-side. ”

“Where they expect to ground and overtake us,” Aldar agreed. “After all, most bounty hunters have a bounty on their own heads, so why settle for just one when they can take us all?”

“No,” Bruwes agreed, rubbing his forehead once before searching the console for a long, frustrating moment before he figured out how to pull up the ship’s transmissions.

He found the dossier that had brought the scavs to their ship in the first place.

They didn’t even have Lissa’s file, but they did have The Raider and its crew.

“They’ve got our contact,” he mused, “but they haven’t pre-charted a route back to Me’Kava. Who were they planning to sell us to?”

“Bold of you to assume they had a plan,” Cory remarked, her voice crackling in time with some banging in the background.

The comm-lines needed to be recalibrated.

“You’re thinking like a bounty hunter, Captain.

Think like a scav. This might have only been the first time they ever tried to take a prisoner. They weren’t very good at it.”

True. Taking prisoners might have even been a last-second decision, with the acquisition of food, water and recyclers being their primary target.

So… think like a scav. You have prisoners you weren’t prepared for but were lucky enough to stumble on, and six bounties to collect. But how to go about it?

“Send word back to whoever put the bounty out,” Bruwes announced. “Literally just ride the signal back to source and say we’ve got their cargo and we want money.”

Cory let out a startled laugh. “Are you serious? We’ll have to send word that we have something they want before we know where we’re supposed to meet.”

“They’ll send a collector,” Demin said, just as grimly. “Who are we going to have talking to them? Cory? Lissa? They have bounties too. This is a terrible plan. We should salvage what we can of what debris we can find?—”

“And become scrappers?” Aldar’s voice interrupted over the top of his. “You think we’re broke now, just wait until you see how little space debris goes for.”

“We’ll be dealing with men like Olex,” Bruwes added. “He’d turn his own mother over to the authorities if she had a bounty on her, never mind us.”

“We need money, or we’re not running very far at all. We’ll be out of food in three days and we’re already out of water,” Vullum said bluntly. “How far away is the nearest relatively uninhabited planet with water?”

“That we can access without having to identify ourselves?” Bruwes pulled up the star chart. “A jump and ten days out. And we’d need filters. Do we know if those are working?”

“I think you guys are missing the obvious. This could be a pretty sweet pirate ship,” Cory suggested. “I mean, it’s not ideal?—”

“Ideal?” her mate shot back. “Putting good guns on a rust scow does not make a pirating vessel. It makes exactly what we’re in—a rust scow with a lot of guns that is one peppershot away from implosion.

And why is more pirating always the solution with you?

That will add to our reputations, not end them.

You have a bounty on your head now too. I am not risking you! ”

“Oh, but it’s okay for me to risk you?”

The channel fell into static as everyone began to talk at once, and Bruwes dropped his head back on the seat rest, casting his frown to the ceiling.

“We’ve already exceeded the average life expectancy of a pirate. How much longer do you really think we can keep doing this?”

“We’ll be hunted by everyone, including other pirates.”

“So what else is new?”

“This ship! We won’t last two months in this piece of shit.”

“If we don’t get water and food, we won’t last ten days.”

“It wouldn’t be a piece of shit if we could find even a halfway decent garage and hole up for a while.”

“Hole up where? For how long? I remind you we have no water! We have three days at most to figure this out.”

“So we go back to Cutirut I and resupply! Sell a gun, fix the leak and the recyclers, jump to the next place, fix something else, jump again.”

“That’s a lot of jumps.”

“We have a whatsis! A quantum scrubber! All we have to do is stay ahead of the hunters until?—”

“All we have to do, she says. Oh sure. That’s all.”

“What do you want to do, just give up?”

“No, I want to live! Not just today or tomorrow or until the next bounty hunter comes along! I want a life!”

He listened while they argued, but he already knew what he was going to have to do.

Demin didn’t want to risk Cory. He found himself in the awkward position of not wanting the same for Lissa.

He didn’t like the way just the thought of it made him feel.

He had no business feeling that way about her, especially when this all started because he wanted to sell her.

He didn’t like the way thinking about that made him feel either.

“Me,” he said darkly. He had to repeat himself twice to be heard over the top of everyone else. Eventually they did hear him though, and the arguing petered off to silence.

“You?” Demin echoed. “You, what?”

“I’m the one you’ll sell.”

The comm was dead silent for several long seconds, and then everyone erupted all at once.

“They’ll arrest all of us!”

“I will not risk my bondmate!”

“I’m not risking everybody else. I’d really rather not risk the captain either… shocker though that might be.”

“Cory and Lissa will turn me over to the Collectors,” Bruwes began.

“To be taken themselves?” Demin roared.

“They will wear the old crew’s suits,” Bruwes calmly explained over the top of his protests.

“The ones on the old crew’s bodies back on the Raider?” Vullum asked pointedly.

“There’s two spares. They won’t be recognized. They’ll just be scavs.”

“That won’t matter! You know that won’t!”

“The rest of you will be in hiding. They’ll want to do a down and dirty trade. Money for the prisoner, exchanged at the airlock.”

“Are you insane?”

“Prisoner? You’re talking about you!”

“If it goes wrong, this ship can go after the Collectors. No Me’Kavian vessel could possibly go up against a negacannon. Who would even suspect we’d have one? We have an advantage. We know where they’re going, how I’ll be offloaded.”

“Are we seriously considering this?” Demin demanded.

“One thousand chits will get us resupplied,” Vullum said hesitantly. “But this is the sort of trick that will only work once.”

“We only need it to work once,” Bruwes assured him.

After that, he was determined to make sure his father—and the Reformers, and every one of the archaic old councils on Me’kava—knew exactly what it felt like to have to run for their lives.

They thought he was dangerous now? They were about to find out just how dangerous he could be.

Bruwes turned off the comm, silencing the stunned argument now raging without him.

He had a lot of planning to do. Sadly, he knew exactly where to start.

“This is a horrible plan,” Demin said, his muffled voice barely heard through the cracked ceiling panel directly above Lissa’s head.

“For what it’s worth, I think so too but I can’t think of one that’s better.

” Lissa’s voice was just as muffled from the inside of her helmet.

A soft hiss of cool air kept her breath from fogging up the faceplate that hid her features.

Both she and Cory were dressed head to foot in the same black suits she’d seen the other bounty hunters wearing as they came through the tech bay doors, just before the entity jumped out of her and into them.

Funny how swiftly a person’s sense of what was normal could adjust to the impossible.

Her first instinct was to be ready for the second the hatch opened and use what power she had to destroy everyone she saw on the other side of it.

If she even could. The problem was, she didn’t have a lot of power let and she couldn’t use it as effectively as she could when the alien was guiding her actions—of course she couldn’t—and she was terrified that in the trying, she’d hurt the wrong ship and the wrong people.

Bruwes. How stupid of her. She didn’t mean anything to him. He shouldn’t mean a damn thing to her. They’d known each other, what? Four days now.

The heart knows what it wants.

Shut up. She felt stupid enough as it was for harboring these feelings. They weren’t real.

But, oh, they felt real. She felt like she was turning over a piece of her soul, never to be seen or heard from again.

“Relax,” Bruwes said, his wrists already in link cuffs. “Remember your roles.”

“All I can think about is the number of ways in which this can go bad,” Demin muttered.

The clang of metal docking clamps echoed through the ship, silencing everyone.

Lissa shivered with the reverberations. Her stomach went tight and cold.They were here.

“Breathers on,” Bruwes ordered.

He was the only one who didn’t have one.

He couldn’t. Scavs wouldn’t care if their prisoner was comfortable.

The moment whoever had come to collect him opened that hatch, they had to look like scavs exchanging a prisoner, and scavs didn’t care how well their prisoners could breathe.

That was just the sort of detail that caught a cautious man’s eye, and Me’Kavians had a well-earned reputation for their attention to detail.