Page 12 of The Captain's Bounty
Hitting the lock again once the science officer and engineer had retreated from the bridge, he wilted in his chair and rubbed his face again. What was he going to do?
Hunt his father down and kill him—slowly—for putting him in this position in the first place. Captain for fuck’s sake, first of a motley bunch of collectors and now of pirates, banished from Me’Kava for doing the right thing, for a change.
Him. Born into royalty. Born to rule on a council, just like his father, and his father before him, all the way back to the beginning.
Shaking his head, Bruwes picked up the tablet and glared at it. He needed money. He hated having to live like this, always with something breaking down.
In the words of his Earth co-pilot, working for a living sucked.
Also, in the words of his Earth co-pilot, Suck it up, buttercup.
Switching the tablet back on, he studied the picture of the archaeologist once more. Yeah, something was definitely wrong with this job. It was too much money for a simple snatch and grab. Especially on a remote mining moon.Especially, especially when he couldn’t pin a crime on her dark enough to warrant such a bounty. What kind of trouble could anarchaeologistget into that would make her hide worth six thousand chits?
No, something didn’t feel right at all.
And yet he needed the money, and she hardly looked capable of causing him too much trouble. After all, Cutirut I was incapable of supporting human life and this was the largest and relatively safest place for a fugitive to fetch up. Plenty of strangers drifting in and out, most of them also fugitives and used to keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. There were only six other ships in the docking compound capable of taking her off-world— five, if that poor bastard in Olex’s garage couldn’t convince his friends not to finish scrapping his ship. All he had to do was wait and odds were good she’d come to him. Put a couple men out around the docks to watch the other ships, and he might increase his chances of getting to her before she picked the wrong escape vessel.
She was a woman, and an Earth woman at that, on a virtually woman-less moon with only one small town in which to hide herself. How hard could finding her be?
Lissa hada bounty on her head? Surely, she had to.
Shit, the slaver pretending to work on his ship just noticed her. As if on signal, two more slavers came down the ramp, their long easy strides taking them to the dock where they started loading what few crates of supplies they’d left in the open as an excuse to look busy and legitimate.
Their game would be to let her come to them, but if she didn’t accept their grossly discounted offer of passage and tried to move on, they were going to grab her and muscle her into their hold.
Here came Doc, strolling up the dock not far behind her. Aldar and Vullum weren’t far behind him either, which he knew the slaver captain had just noticed. The captain glanced his way, and Bruwes made sure the slaver saw him staring back, one hand resting lightly on the hilt of his weapon.
The other captain smirked, pushing his coat back to show an ion cannon holstered across his chest. He wouldn’t be backing down, and he didn’t care how prepared Bruwes was to fight for this prize.
So be it.
The slavers gave up on subtlety. Dropping all pretense, the three turned and headed right for the woman, who stopped walking. There was no expression on her face as she shrugged the edges of her cloak out of the way, as if she were ready to fight now herself.
Aldar was right. She definitely had tits too perfect to be a man in padding. He could see her cleavage from the ramp.
Pulling his cannon, the slaver captain ordered her to the ground, although whether he was pointing at her or Doc, who had just quickened his pace, was hard to tell.
It didn’t matter. The captain never got a shot off, and neither did either of his crewmen—but she did.
She stretched out her empty hand in a futile warding gesture, screaming, “No!” and Bruwes really wasn’t sure what happened next, but there was a crackle and a flash and suddenly everything was flying at him—slavers, cargo, loose bits of scrap, and the whole damn slaver’s ship, which flipped and tumbled nose over tail engines to crash into the ship in the next dock. The power of that sonic blast hit Bruwes like the snap of a Correction Rod, striking the entire front of him all at once. His quills flattened in spite of his surprise, and his skin stung. It nearly knocked him off his feet, and he was damned lucky that was all it did. As the dust settled and his vision cleared, he could see the slaver’s ship and its unlucky neighbor seemed to have actually fused together from the unknown force that had struck them.
Suddenly, the six thousand chit price tag made sense.
Just as suddenly, he realized it wasn’t anywhere near enough.
The wisdom of breaking into a run and heading straight for her didn’t strike him as ridiculous until he did it. She snapped around to stare at him, the lingering horror of what she’d done to the slavers vanished in a blink, turning her facial features to stone. Had she raised her hand, he knew both he and his ship were every bit as likely to go flying, but she didn’t.
A twist of irritation tugging at her mouth, she turned and tried to run instead, stopping abruptly when she almost collided with Doc, who stumbled to a stop directly in front of her. An experienced collector, the gentle doctor was more accustomed todealing with unconscious victims, and that showed in his split-second of indecision before he grabbed her shoulders.
“You will come with us,” he told her sternly.
Small wonder Cory required constant correction.
The woman didn’t even bother raising her hand, but she did scream, a completely baffling, “Don’t kill him!” just before she blasted Doc, Aldar and Vullum, who were running up to help, all off their feet.
The power of that hit Bruwes like another rod strike, though not as intensely, as she sent them tumbling like weeds back up the dock. People in the street beyond were shouting and running, and still even from that distance, she knocked several of them down too.
Every fine quill on his scalp prickled, feeling the crackling rawness of the powerful energy that exuded from her as she turned to size him up. She could end this easily. He couldn’t afford to die, nor could he afford the repairs of having his ship flipped like a toy.
