Chapter 3 #2
The captain’s expression darkened, his nubbed brow ridges lowering over his golden eyes.
Not good, but I had the rest of this meeting to come up with answers.
I would, because there was no way I was going to let the Strewn Engineers or this yucky black thing get the better of me. Not on my ship, damn it.
***
Thatcher
Ysa showing up at the briefing was a blessing and a curse.
I had wanted a moment to get away from her and center myself.
Secure the raging obsession back in its cage before it could slip from my control.
Unfortunately, my pretty blue-skinned engineer never did what anyone expected of her.
She was an agent of chaos and sunshine, of misplaced attempts to cheer up the crew, earnest care, and general mayhem.
I still recalled that time she’d tried to teach a handful of temporary hires some kind of ball game.
It was, I suspected, meant to be entirely peaceful, considering it was a Ulinial game, but it had resulted in three broken bones and one misaligned nose.
Mine, I remembered wryly, because I’d waded into the chaos to stop the fight and ended up finishing the brawl with my fists instead.
Come to think of it, not a single one of those grunts signed up with us again after that mission was over.
“I’ve picked up a bounty for us to hunt,” Asmoded announced when Ysa seemed to have zipped her mouth.
That was interesting, and I perked up. I wasn’t alone in that either; Aramon and Solear finally stopped staring at the star charts on the table to lean in and listen.
So far, the meeting had been incredibly boring, a standard staff meeting to discuss the status of the ship.
Usually, I wasn’t part of those, but Asmoded had wanted me there to discuss the incident with Ysa during that blackout.
It was unfortunate that even my nanobot-enhanced senses could not give me much detail.
I’d heard, rather than seen, the attack on Ysa and caught the sludgy creature in my hand at the last moment.
It would have slithered away without a trace if not for the rapid shaping of claws to rake up a sample and do some damage.
My hand, still a little tender but no longer raw, flexed against my thigh beneath the table.
I wondered if Ysa had realized that I’d gone all action hero on that goo.
Had she seen the metal fused with my bones or not?
“What kind of bounty are we talking about?” Jaxin asked.
His hands caressed the laser cannon he had cradled in his lap, and his shoulders were relaxed and low.
His black armor hid the scars that marked his chest, but to my eyes, the bloody hole that had cracked open his sternum was still visible.
I shoved the waking nightmare away, my eyes slipping from him back to Ysa.
To her blatant sign of disrespect, which was tolerated anyhow.
Her clunky boots leaned on the table, and despite their thick soles and shiny skull-and-bones emblem, they still made her look dainty.
I cocked my head so I could listen to what the others said, but my mind kept latching back onto Ysa.
Her long braid hung over her shoulder, slid around the side of her breast, and then was curled twice around her slender waist. That’s how long her blue hair was, and I wanted to feel that rope in my fists, test its strength.
Hell, I wanted her to wrap that thing around my throat and tie us together. Make me hers.
I shifted uneasily in my seat, but it was impossible to yank my eyes away from her.
She was like the alien version of a spunky goth girl: blue skin, blue hair, and only dark, edgy clothes.
Like she was trying to be both cute and warn people off at the same time.
She was simply all her, boldly confident, entirely happy to express herself through her appearance. Unique.
“Gladiators,” Asmoded said. There was such a loud, universal groan around the table that I finally jerked my attention from Ysa to the rest of the room.
Aramon was grinning like it was good news, but the rest were swearing and shaking their heads.
I wasn’t quite sure what the history was here, though I knew there was one.
It was thanks to gladiators, sort of, that I’d been rescued and ended up here with this crew.
“Seriously?” Mitnick said. “You do recall the massive trouble our last escaped gladiator hunt gave us? And we didn’t even get paid in the end.
” He flicked his hand, and images jumped onto the holo display of a sleek Starclass Cruiser.
It was silver and definitely not new, but clearly well maintained.
On its side, the name Vagabond had been painted in both the universal traders’ language and, much to my surprise, UAR English.
Aramon sounded gleeful when he began recounting how this ship had narrowly escaped the Varakartoom on numerous occasions: at Strewn, at the Yengar Space Station, and even in the Sune solar system.
That last mention had Flack swear loudly, as if it had been a particularly painful incident for him.
Perhaps that was simply because our Sune Quartermaster disliked his homeworld with a vehemence he had never bothered to explain, not even when drunk on terrible Rummicaron Ale.
“This time will be different,” Asmoded said, silencing the room at once with a glare.
“This is a pair of gladiators without a ship of their own. The bounty isn’t from their owner either, because they killed him when they escaped.
This is a bounty from the Rummicaron government.
The pair has gone on a murder rampage that’s left over a hundred dead thus far, that we know of.
” He let those words sink in, perhaps because he thought he needed to assure his crew that we were doing the quadrant a service by eliminating these guys.
I didn’t care one way or another, and judging from the expressions on the faces of the twins, they didn’t either.
A hunt would be good, though, something to distract from Ysa and the growing strength of my fascination with her.
She shouldn’t be here, because I definitely needed to step away from her if I wanted to stay in control.
Soon, I’d be so deep into this there would be no turning back.
Keeping her safe from a distance wouldn’t be good enough.
“Fine, these bastards need hunting,” Mitnick said.
“Why us? And what does it pay? This has nothing to do with Jalima, does it?” A fair question, because lately all our missions had appeared to center around thwarting Jalima one way or another.
Except the last one, but that had destabilized the crimelords’ current balance, so, in a way, it still connected.
We tended not to care what the other crimelords were up to; they could hire us the same as any government.
“It was Ziame’s idea,” Asmoded said. It was not a name I was familiar with, but I saw Ysa begin to grin while the others all groaned or cursed.
Except the Sineater, of course; he just sat there smirking like he was enjoying the chaos.
Perhaps he was just soaking up the dismay like a sponge and feeding his symbiont.
My eyes measured the size of the opaque black Gracka hound at his side, but she didn’t appear to have grown suddenly.
“Enough of that. Just because we don’t always win doesn’t mean we hold grudges, does it?
” Aramon snarled. He leaned across the table to glare at Flack, then wagged a warning finger at Mitnick and Jaxin.
I muffled a laugh, tempted to say something rude just to rile the Asrai pilot, but managed to keep my mouth shut.
“Ziame, the captain of the Vagabond, might have eluded us last time, but he is very concerned about these escaped males. He has proposed that we work together and split the bounty when we catch them.” Asmoded’s eyes went to me, though I did not know why. “We’re meeting up at Strewn. Dismissed.”