Page 2 of Chased By the Alien Mercenary
Chapter 2
Solear
“You got this, bro,” Aramon said cheerfully. He bounced on the toes of his boots, unable to stand still as we waited. I pressed my back more firmly against the wall behind me and crossed my arms over my chest, eyes darting over those gathering in the ready room just off the bridge. Got this? If it were just a simple navigating job aboard the Varakartoom, I’d have no doubt. Navigating was the only place where I could be myself, lose myself to the beautiful streams of data, the endless expanse of the universe unfolding inside my brain. Plugged into a nav console, I was never trapped—and free to go wherever my heart desired.
“I got this?”I hissed telepathically at my always-moving twin, and even though his back was to me, I knew he could see me snap my teeth at him. I made sure he sensed that through our telepathic bond. Of course, Aramon never feared anything, and he just laughed, flicking me his middle finger over his shoulder—a gesture he’d picked up from his human mate. I knew what it meant, and I rattled from the growl that rose in my chest.
It was stupid, but I liked how that just made my brother laugh and settle against the wall next to me. Nothing I did—not even at my worst—pushed him away, and I needed that reassurance. Telepathically, I spoke along the worn path between our minds. “Fighting is one thing, navigating another, but combine the two? Are they crazy?” The last thing I wanted was to put myself in such a vulnerable position in a hostile location. Plug myself into a computer in the middle of a firefight to retrieve data?Sure, I’d done a quick patch or steal once or twice in the past, but never one in such a risky location as this. And they weren’t asking me to smooth over a little bit of data or steal a single location. No, they were after something big—but very specific. It would take a while. It was dangerous.
Unlike Aramon, I wasn’t nearly as much of a risk-taker. For him? Yeah, I’d go to the ends of the universe to keep my brother safe. Not a small task, considering the mischief he got into on a regular basis. I might have thought that too loudly, because my twin began laughing, chortling with glee, and elbowing me, heedless of my hiss of warning. “Good one, bro, good one! Likewise, you know?” Likewise? Definitely not, but I keptthatthought to myself. Not that I doubted Aramon would do anything to help me—he had, more than once—but the mischief? That was all him.
My eyes darted around the room, nervously taking in the growing crowd of people. Mitnick, with his big wings, was taking up far too much space at one side of the table, his prototype implant hard at work, the glowing visor over his eye. Jaxin was sprawled next to him, his portable laser cannon lying deconstructed on the table in front of him, while he polished each piece to a shine. He called that thing Bex, talked to it as if it was a person with feelings and everything. And they called me the crazy one.
When Tass came in, I drew in a relieved breath that I hoped Aramon didn’t see, but his sharp eyes darted my way. Busted. He didn’t say anything, didn’t mock, that wasn’t how we treated each other. Everyone else was fair game to him. I felthisrelief keenly, his happiness that I’d made a “friend” with someone other than him. I’d resented the need for it at first, and I stillwasn’t quite sure if Tass even liked my presence, but I liked his, and I hated being alone.
The green-skinned Viridara male glanced around the room, his eyes locking with each male present and offering a greeting with a cheerful smile. His odd companion was perched on his shoulder, all green vines and pink flowers. Nelly. She gave me this beatific smile—at least, I thought it was a smile—and shivers shot down my spine, unease roiling in my gut. Not because I thought tiny Nelly was a threat or anything; I just didn’t know how to respond to something like that—how to deal with something that small and fragile.
Tass hadn’t seen me yet, but Nelly kept staring at me, and I began trembling from how tightly my muscles had clenched in response. If I could, I’d bolt from the room right now, but that would feel like abandoning Aramon, so I stayed. Even worse, bolting would disappoint the captain, and that was an unbearable thought. I owed that male everything. So even if Nelly unnerved me and even if the mission sounded like a nightmare, I stayed.
I twitched when Tass and Jaxin laughed uproariously over some shared joke. The sound made my head ache, and my fists were up before I could control the reflex. Everyone ignored that, everyone except Thatcher, who glared at me from across the room. That guy had a death wish, and if he kept glaring at me like that, I was going to leap across the table and wring his skinny neck. I bared my teeth and growled, but that only made him glare back and do the same. At least his teeth were all blunt and straight, nothing impressive.
Vibrating with even more tension, I fought to hold myself back. Then, abruptly, Tass stepped into my line of sight, blocking my view of our lone human crew member. “Morning, Solear,” he said cheerfully, and one of the vines sprouting from his shoulders flicked forward. I blocked it as if he were going to strike me, though part of me knew all he wanted to do was nudge my shoulder, the way I let Aramon do. At least Tass kept smiling, as if the strike didn’t bother him. “One day,” he remarked. Then he turned and came to stand on my other side. Now I was flanked by two of my favorite people. If only Nelly would stop staring at me from between Tass’s green hair, I might actually enjoy this. A little.
When Asmoded arrived, everyone straightened and moved to sit in their designated seats. While our Naga captain never insisted on following protocol—and Aramon certainly never did—most of the others had held on to old military habits, like Jaxin, Thatcher, and at least a dozen more of us. I couldn’t stand sitting down, pinned in one place, so while everyone found their seat, I paced behind mine. Everyone was used to that, but some of the newer crew members flinched each time I passed behind their backs. I knew why, and still, it infuriated me, causing a growl to permanently rumble in the back of my throat.
Asmoded detailed the mission then, but I couldn’t keep my attention on his words, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried very hard. I respected my captain, I wanted him to be proud of me, and I knew I failed him at every turn. Broken as I was—my mind shattered and reshaped after that endless time beneath the rubble—I could never live up to what I wanted to be. Listening to mission briefings was one of those things that seemed impossible, but at least I could always count on my brother to tell me what I needed to know later.
By the time the meeting wound down, I was buzzing, literally and figuratively. My head felt hazy, stuffed with clouds; my mouth was dry, and my fingers were shaking. Not tension, something else. Cold sweat dripped down my spine, and as soon as the Captain said “Dismiss,” I charged out the door. Too much, it was all too much. Why did I crave company, fear being alone, and yet...a crowd like that wrecked me? Furious—not with them, but with myself—I went to do the only thing that helped: fight.
The gym had a few people in it, working out, some friendly, competitive banter still hanging in the air. They scattered when they saw me, leaving silence in their wake, but silence wasn’t any better than the noisy meeting from before. With a furious snarl, I attacked the biggest punching bag, sending it swinging to and fro. When the weight abruptly changed, becoming heavy and dense, it was because Aramon had gotten to the controls. He said nothing, just offered quiet company as he waited for the rage to leave my system. Aramon was good like that, and he didn’t comment on my bloody knuckles either, when my fury had exhausted itself and I’d sunk to my knees on the mat. He just came over to sprawl on his back at my side, one foot nudging roughly against my knee in affection.
“I love you, bro,” he muttered, his arm tossed over his face but his red eyes glowing at me from the shadows beneath. “You can’t keep doing this,” he added, flapping a free hand around aimlessly. “Dravion can help.” I snarled at him, furious at the thought, and told him so in no uncertain terms, though most of what I sent him through our telepathic bond were graphically violent images of what he could do with that idea. It made him laugh, but I felt the sadness underneath it.
“Fine,” he agreed amicably. “No Dravion. Just… try something different next time, yeah? Go sit in Tass’s hydroponics bay or something—lie on the grass for a minute.” I cocked my head, then shifted my eyes around the utilitarian gym, all gray and black. A spray of color brightened the area by the door, where lines of every shade began, guides to all the important places on the ship. It was probably one of the darkest rooms aboard the ship, well, not dark so much as gloomy, because of the lack of color. Tass’s plant room, on the other hand, made you feel like you were outside. If Nelly wasn’t always there, staring, that would have felt like a great solution. Now, I just shrugged helplessly.
Aramon didn’t need my words to understand the mess of tangled thoughts inside my head. “I’ll talk to Tass about Nelly, but I think she’s just curious. Maybe she has a crush on you, bro.” He nudged my knee again with his boot, and I snarled, but it wasn’t in anger. I’d pummeled that out of me, for now, when I fought with the punching bag. Mostly, I felt drained, a little amused, and a little more settled—unless I thought of the coming mission.
Aramon began explaining the finer details to me then, neatly recapped, chaotically told. But I was used to how his brain jumped all over the place, and I could read between the lines—quite literally—in the form of deciphering his thoughts. It helped when you knew what strange connections he saw that others didn’t. My nerves ramped back up as he explained it to me, and while I appreciated that he tried to make it sound easy, I knew it wasn’t. There was always something bound to go wrong, something big, something unpredictable.
I had not forgotten how our chef, Brace, had gotten captured and nearly killed by one of Jalima’s right-hand men on his last mission. Or how Tass had been shot out of the sky and nearly killed on the mission before that. Maybe I was being pessimistic, maybe I was superstitious, but I was convinced something was going to go wrong with this mission, too.
“Not all our missions of late have gone bad,” Aramon said, reading my thoughts, as usual. It wasn’t like I bothered shielding them the way he kept some of his inner thoughts private; I didn’t feel like I needed to. He raised a hand and began ticking off missions, and suddenly it didn’t seem quite so dark. “We pirated all those ships of Jalima’s, that was good fun, wasn’t it?” He was right. I’d had a blast chasing them down, some of them giving us a fight that had tested my navigator skills and Aramon’s piloting. It had been exhilarating. When he moved to point out that even the failed missions had turned out okay, with mates and everything, my thoughts turned sour again.
Yeah, mates, the thing I’d never have, because I was too broken. Not that I begrudged Aramon his Evie, or Tass his Elyssa. Not at all. But it did make me feel lonely. Even if Evie insisted on having me over all the time, it wasn’t the same as having Aramon in the bunk bed above me, hearing his breathing as he slept.
The heavy thoughts made Aramon twitch against the mat, abruptly rising so he could pace around me. “Don’t think that,” he snarled, eyes flashing. “You’ll find your mate. She’s out there.” Then he left, even though he knew I hated being alone, but it was his guilt weighing on him now. I knew where he’d go: to see Evie, probably fuck her senseless so he wouldn’t have to think about me for a bit. I was okay with that; at least one of us was happy.
I got to my feet too, finally kicked off my boots, because I had a feeling Sin would be around soon—and he frowned on that sort of thing. The Sineater was the only one who could usually make me remember to follow the rules. Then I went back to punching the weighted bag, now at its densest setting so it couldn’t swing wildly back and forth. Each blow reverberated up my arms and made my bones ache and my knuckles bleed, but that felt good, so I kept going. And when the Sineater came and stood in the open doorway, not looking at me but somehow sucking up all the darkness that clung to my brain, I felt a little bit of peace.
Chapter 3
Lyra
I sang as I dusted the shelves inside the beautiful library. I had always loved books, but I’d never seen so many physical tomes together before. One brand-new view under my belt, thanks to this new life I’d been thrust into. It wasn’t even so bad, all things considered, even if I wasn’t free, and the thought of being sold into slavery made my skin break out in hives.
Outside the grand, pristine windows, an even more pristine landscape beckoned. It felt like I’d gotten trapped in the nightmarish version ofThe Sound of Music: rolling green hills dotted with flowers; beautiful, snow-capped mountains rising tall and proud in the distance; and a mansion straight out of a fairy tale. I could easily imagine myself in Switzerland, if not for the ever-so-alien cast that surrounded me and the lack of song wherever I went. Too bad, that would have lightened the mood.
In the past week, I’d learned that the ugly, wart-faced guy was a Krektar, and there were a dozen of them, plus some other big aliens that served as guards for this place. Whoever the mansion belonged to, he was a very rich—and probably very bad—guy. This was like his summer home or something, a retreat he came to when he felt like it. Right now, it was uninhabited except for its guards and its staff. And the staff was just three blue alien women—and me.
