Page 63 of The Captain's Bounty
“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.
“Please don’t let it be someone we know,” Aldar said, shouldering his plasma rifle and trying to make himself as small as possible in the corner behind the hatch door.
“Please let them be honest,” Demin added.
“There is no such thing as honesty where our people are concerned.” Bruwes squared his shoulders. “Try to get me back, if you can. If you can’t, run like hell.” He didn’t look at Lissa, but she knew he was talking to her when he added, “Go with them.”
It wasn’t a grand proclamation of love or affection, but it lit some of the cold fear in the pit of her belly, softening it, warming her. She didn’t want him to go through the hatch. She absolutely didn’t want to be the one handing him over to the enemy.
“What prison are they likely to put you in?” Not that she would know it if she heard it, but if things went wrong, then at least she’d have a destination to shoot for.
“There are no prisons on Me’Kava,” Bruwes said, his jaw clenching once. “Supposedly, we don’t execute criminals either.”
“But look beneath the well-polished veneer and you will find disappearances,” came the doctor’s grim voice from the ceiling.
“I hate hearing about your world,” Cory said with a slight shudder.
“So do I,” Bruwes said, and there was something in his tone that made Lissa freeze up and go cold all over again.
“Here they come,” Kelys said over the data-comm.
“Do you have sights on them?” Bruwes asked.
“No. They’ve blocked the eye outside the hatch.”
