Page 65 of The Captain's Bounty
Above him, his own voice droned on. “Included with this message, you will find the coordinates of Me’Kava, a summary of the dying population of our planet, and the procedures we use when we collect our cargo…by which, of course, I mean your women. For decades, we have attacked whenever victory seemed certain, killed your men, used your male youth for menial labor, and enslaved your women and female youth to serve us sexually and bear our own offspring. Countless thousands, tens of tens of thousands, have died. Countless more live in fear and pain, imprisoned until death. In such a very short amount of time, our world’s entire economy has become dependent on slavery and we reproduce almost entirely with captives.”
Javan’s eyes bulged. “Are you insane?! Our fleet is away, we have no defenses?—”
“Away doing what?” Bruwes countered.
“If this sounds too incredible to believe and you find yourself tempted to consider this transmission as some terrible joke, please check the information I’ve provided. If you’ve ever suddenly lost a colony to a meteor or ion storm, you might check for unusually high levels of interphasic radiation, and if you find it, scan again. We use metaphasic particle fields to scramble your communications and wipe out your energy cells. It imitates a number of natural, if unlikely disasters nicely, but it also leaves a fine dusting of osmatic particles, which, having a half-life of something like thirty thousand units of interspace time, shouldbe easily found if Me’Kava was responsible. And I think it’s time Me’Kava took responsibility, don’t you?”
“We’ll be slaughtered,” Javan said in an oddly flat, small voice. “We’ll be exterminated.” He flinched, looking wildly up at the ship’s ceiling as, from somewhere beyond both of them, loud pops could be heard, underscored by a unique crackle that even Lissa recognized. If they were meeting outside, she could just look up and see the ships as they came out of sub-space. Pop-pop-pop. Some over here, some over there, some in close formation, others well distant and out of synch. Not one fleet. Several. And more every second. Pop.
Javan seemed frozen, until someone within his vessel shouted, “Multiple alerts! I can’t tell where they’re all coming from! We’re being scanned. We’re—Ship bearing down on our portside! It pinged us! It knows our identity and is arming!”
Javan shoved backwards out of the hatchway. “Disengage! Shields up! Full retreat!”
Aldar slapped the lockplate, getting the hatch shut and sealed a split-second before the Me’Kavian ship detached and flushed them all out into space.
“Status,” Bruwes barked.
“Ryovian vessel coming in sharp,” Kelys snapped over the comm. “The Black Fortune is running. The Ryovians are in full pursuit, and they are firing.”
“Cory, get us out of here before they realize we’re Me’Kavaian collectors too.”
Ripping her helmet off, Lissa fell into swift step behind Bruwes. If her heart had been falling before, it was flying now, and yet that cold spot was still knuckle-deep in her gut. She had to rush to keep pace with him, but he wasn’t heading to the bridge.
“Where are you going?”
Cory veered off toward the bridge. Aladar wasn’t behind them anymore. She hadn’t a clue where he’d gone. By the sounds coming down the corridor from the hatch, Demin was still trying to get down out of the ceiling. He was awfully big. She was still surprised they’d managed to stuff him up there to start with.
It was just her and Bruwes now, and she had no idea what he was thinking.
“Bruwes?”
He turned, grabbing her arm just as the ship rocked. The power fluctuated, that old familiar whine of engines powering up the shields humming through the rattling floor grates. The ship suddenly took sharp evasive action, sending her knocking straight into him and Bruwes into the door directly behind him.
The door opened. They fell into a closet of a room, cluttered with suits and supplies, old parts and what looked like someone’s taxidermized pet lizard. It was almost as big as she was. That it was dead and stuffed was not her first thought when it fell into her.
“Oh my God!” she shouted.
Bruwes muscled the thing off them both. “Are you all right?”
Yes, of course she was. She was fine. Falls when the ship went sideways was practically the norm. She wanted to nod. She burst into tears instead.
“Fine,” she sobbed. “I’m fine.”
It felt like a joke and the punchline was, compared to how her life had been going lately, shewasfine. She’d begun this whole mess alone and disgraced, humiliating herself to the Corporation in an effort to salvage her family’s reputation, and then, let’s see, she’d been sucked into a sinkhole, fallen into what she still stubbornly thought of as a temple, then killed by a transdimensional alien entity, who then brought her back to life only to possess her, use her to cause havoc across Cutirut I while trying to escape the Corporation, killing and almostgetting killed by a bunch of people before she was lucky enough to get captured by pirates and stay alive long enough for the alien inside her to possess someone else, leaving her just enough energy to keep her heart beating while they confronted the Me’Kavian collectors and started a quadrant-wide war. But she was fine. She still had a Corporate bounty on her head, and was in love with her bounty hunter, a fugitive in his own right.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she hiccupped, trying hard to get her breathing back under control.
Puzzled, Bruwes said, “You are clinging onto me with your eyes and nose both running. Why are you doing that?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were going to be taken.” She threw her hands up. “I have no idea what I would have done?—”
“I should hope you would have come after me.”
She almost laughed. “Well, yes. But what if we’d lost you? Or what if we couldn’t get you back again?”
“Then I left orders with Aldar and Kelys to run as far and as fast and as best they could.”
“For all of, what? Ten days? Because the way I figure it, that’s the absolute maximum we could possibly survive?—”
