Page 45 of The Captain's Bounty
Bruwes slapped off the safety bar and pulled the weapon’s release lever. The hum of rerouting power lit up the bridge and she felt it when the guns came out. “Turn this bitch around, Cory. I’ve got no problem blowing them back to atoms.”
“Thought you’d never ask,” the human woman in the pilot’s chair replied. She barely looked at Lissa, though Lissa couldn’t take her eyes off her. Her dark hair, her obvious humanity, the uniform she wore that matched the rest of the crew? For the first time, Lissa felt the sting of betrayal. Bad enough to be abducted by aliens intent on selling her for money, but for another human woman to take part in that with them and against her…
It’s a decision they will regret, and I don’t need guns.
Lissa took a step back into the shadows of the bridge, slipping behind both the doctor and Vullum, and she didn’t even realize she wasn’t in control of her own body until she felt the being inside her stirring. Its own power was just as reverberating, humming its way through her limbs, making her skin buzz as the alien took control, and no one else on the bridge knew it. They were too busy concentrating on Cory’s evasive maneuvers and the ship in hot pursuit of them, launching another hooked harpoon in an attempt to drag them in for boarding.
She’d never heard of anyone trying to harpoon a functioning vessel before. Usually, they were only used by salvagers, to draw in drifting space debris, or by pirates, after they’d peppered the hull and sucked the paste that used to be people out into space. No sane pirate boarded a manned ship. They’d lose all advantage, being bottlenecked in the airlock where anyone with a concussion grenade and a pocket knife could take them all out.
“They puncture us with that thing, we’re going to hemorrhage air,” the ship’s doctor said in the kind of calm voicethat meant high adrenaline. “Possibly faster than we can get into suits, and definitely faster than we can patch it.”
“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.”
