Wyzak Read online

  Her tone spoke of many things other than watered-down liquor in a cheap bar. His hearts beat a little faster as he sensed a proposition in the offering. Wyzak didn’t jump on the bait, though, as something seemed just a touch off about the situation. He was handsome enough, as Xaravians went, but it had been some time since a female propositioned him. With his perpetual scowl and all the scars, he’d grown accustomed to females finding him too intimidating to approach.

  The Earther was an interesting conundrum, although a potentially dangerous one.

  He drummed his fingers on the bar and tried not to growl at her in anticipation. “Typically, no. I do not wait for things I want.”

  A slow smile spread across her face and her eyes slid away from his, until it felt like an invitation. An opportunity for mischief. He felt like he had as a young lad skipping away from his duties for an afternoon, chasing after Faros to find some trouble in the desert. The Sraibur was supposed to spend less than an hour or so in the spaceport, but unless the second-in-command was onboard, they wouldn’t leave—regardless of what Faros threatened. If he found a convenient room nearby, perhaps he could enjoy her for the rest of his time on the spaceport, and finally inconvenience Faros for a bit.

  The girl in front of him twirled a lock of hair around her fingers and peered at an ancient ordering panel as if she wanted something to eat, but glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “So that makes you particularly dangerous, hmm? Sounds like I should just head on out of here without looking back.”

  “A smart girl would.”

  She laughed, a cascade of pure joy that ricocheted through the dreary bar and stirred up the inhabitants. It set his scales rattling and sent a thrill of shivers down his back. He hadn’t heard anything like that in ages. Her eyes still danced with amusement even after she pressed her lips together in a thin line, holding back the mirth, and she shook a finger at him like he was a naughty child. “That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember it.”

  Wyzak pretended to bow from his stool and nearly toppled to the floor at her feet. He gripped the bar and frowned a bit as he studied his drink. Strange. But he pushed aside a hint of unease and arched an eyebrow at her. “There are many more where that came from, Gemma. Are you hungry? There is an excellent restaurant just—”

  “I shouldn’t,” she said. She reached out and touched his wrist, and all of Wyzak’s attention immediately snapped to the warm, soft pressure of her fingers against the hard scales on his arm. Gemma flushed slightly, that intriguing pink shade that Violet got when Faros embarrassed her, and didn’t meet his gaze. “I mean, that’s very kind of you. I’m just not sure I should...”

  The feeling that something was very wrong came roaring back through Wyzak, and he gripped the edge of the bar. Perhaps he’d misread the situation and her flirting quite badly. Was she meeting someone else? Would her mate come running through the bar door to attack him or demand some payment for engaging with her? His eyes narrowed as he studied her, and Wyzak leaned forward once more so he could lower his voice and draw her in. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re very large and kind of difficult to move,” she said under her breath, and tapped her fingers against her chin as if confronting an intractable problem.

  Wyzak frowned more. That didn’t make sense. “I can assure you, both of those things are true—but have very little to do with whether you’re interested in eating dinner with me.”

  Gemma blinked, eyebrows arched, and her cheeks reddened still more. “You heard that.”

  “Of course I did.” Wyzak started to slide to his feet but wobbled, barely holding onto the bar enough to keep his feet. His legs wanted to collapse under him in a sickly imitation of deep space sickness, though he hadn’t been prone to that since he’d first left Xarav. His head whirled as if he’d had far too much to drink; one and a half tanks of whiskey should not have done the job.

  His mouth moved but he couldn’t form words, and a terrible suspicion crept over him. Gemma eased to her feet and slid her arm around him, taking some of his weight, and chirped a feminine laugh that drew and dismissed attention at the same time. Everyone else interpreted what was happening as exactly what he’d been hoping for—a few drinks and a willing woman. The bartender smirked in irritation and made a rude gesture when he thought Wyzak wasn’t looking.

  He was forced to lean on her as none of his limbs wanted to cooperate, and Gemma kept up a crooning imitation of a half-drunk girl cajoling a guy into going back to her quarters for a quick tumble. Wyzak wanted to shout at the other barflies to help him, that something was going wrong, but his throat closed up and he could do little more than breathe and stumble along at her side.

  Gemma dragged him away from the bar and deeper into the dirty, empty alleys around the place. She didn’t speak, and she damn well didn’t laugh. Wyzak’s rage bubbled up until his scales rattled and flashed red, active despite the tranquilizers or whatever drug she’d managed to slip to him.

  She patted his shoulder but didn’t look at him. “Sorry, big guy. It’s not personal. It never is.”

  That didn’t help him any. He growled and tried to tighten his arm around her shoulders to squeeze her into submission. He’d have his vengeance, that was for damn certain. No matter what she thought was happening, Wyzak and his crew would find her and make her pay.

  The spaceport wobbled even more around him and the edges of his vision darkened. He slowed, barely able to lift his feet, and Gemma started swearing in earnest. She let him fall into a pile of garbage as she put her hand to her throat and murmured instructions to someone else at the end of a comms chain. He shouldn’t have taken off his own comms unit; he should have at least been able to signal to the Sraibur for assistance.

  No one would look for him until it was time for the Sraibur to depart, which wasn’t for another hour. He’d be long gone or long dead, depending on what the girl had planned for him. Wyzak bared his teeth in fury as she stood over him, her expression carefully indifferent. She looked like a completely different person, her warm hazel eyes suddenly cold and her face hardened against whatever he might have said. If he could damn well get his voice to work…

  She wasn’t there to just rob him, since she made no move to empty his pockets.

  Gemma sat on her heels next to him in the trash, frowning as she studied him. “Like I said, it’s not personal. There’s a massive bounty on your head and this is just the way the universe works, you know?”

  It sounded like she wanted to convince herself more than him. Wyzak didn’t care. She still intended to turn him over to someone who meant him harm—it could have been the rebels, the Tyboli, the Fleet... There was no lack of enemies with deep pockets.

  Something scuffled at the end of the alley and she straightened, smoothly drawing a stunner that he hadn’t sensed on her in the bar. His girl had layers of mystery, most of it dangerous.

  He wanted to shake his head to rid himself of the thought. She wasn’t his girl, that was for damn sure. He’d rather end up sharing a tent with a haugmawt for a winter than end up somewhere with the girl. The darkness crept closer in his vision and Wyzak struggled against the inevitable unconsciousness. If he were knocked all the way out, there was no way he could signal the Sraibur.

  His fingers twitched as he managed to loosen a ring from the smallest finger on his hand, letting it fall into the trash. Faros would find it. They would track him to the bar and then to the alley, and from there... There were only so many ways to get off the spaceport. The Sraibur would exhaust all of them, searching for him.

  It was just a matter of whether they were fast enough to find him before he ended up in the brig on some other ship, headed for death or exile. He exhaled and darkness closed around him.

  Chapter 3

  Gemma

  The Xaravian collapsed way too soon, and Gemma barely managed to get him into a hidden alley before his legs gave out completely. He’d resisted the tranqs far longer than she’d anticipated, which shortened how long
his ass stayed vertical. She sighed and called for Milo’s help with the hover transport, then had to wait for her partner to show up as the Xaravian groaned and seethed on the garbage in the alley.

  Her conscience tweaked as she looked down at him. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, and she’d been around more than her fair share of straight up awful beings. He’d even paid for her drink, which was a pretty rare display of chivalry in ungoverned space. He hadn’t groped her or spent much time staring at her chest. He hadn’t even noticed her arm, it seemed like. He hadn’t tried to rob her or drag her off by the hair.

  All of that meant he was up for sainthood in ungoverned space.

  She pushed away the thought and buried the sympathy she thought she’d lost years ago. There wasn’t room for sympathy in her world. There was just her and everyone else. She looked out for herself first, Milo second, and no one else. It was what the universe set her up for, and there wasn’t any use wishing that things were different. Life was hard and short, then you died. That was it.

  Gemma frowned as Milo finally appeared at the end of the alley with the hover dolly, wearing coveralls like a maintenance worker on the port. “Took you long enough.”

  “You’re welcome,” he muttered. He tossed floppy brown hair out of his eyes and parked the dolly next to the unconscious Xaravian. “Damn, he’s a big one.”

  “Most of them are,” she said. She glanced toward the alley, then gestured at the Xaravian’s shoulders. “Pick him up and help me get him on here. We have to move fast. No telling where the rest of his crew is.”

  “He left the ship by himself; no one else followed him,” Milo said. “And they’re still loading supplies. We’ve got a bit of time.”

  Gemma wasn’t so sure. She picked up the Xaravian’s boots, grunting under the effort of lifting the guy’s legs. “I don’t want to risk losing this payday, man. Let’s move.”

  Milo grumbled but finally went to Wyzak’s shoulders to haul him up. It took way more effort than Gemma wanted to admit to roll the Xaravian onto the dolly, and she stood there, panting and sweating, as Milo arranged a tarp and some bags of garbage on top of the alien to further conceal him.

  She checked the tracker panel on her metal arm and scanned for anything else in the vicinity. When she was convinced the coast was clear, she nodded to Milo. “I’ll meet you back at the ship.”

  He grunted as he floated the dolly and maneuvered out of the alley, for all the world just another maintenance guy trudging along with his too-heavy burden, and she went the other way as quick as she could. Gemma avoided the area around the bar where she’d met Wyzak, but she wanted to get a peek at the rest of the Sraibur crew so she could gauge how much time they had to make their escape. Despite Milo’s confidence that the pirates wouldn’t even start looking for their shipmate for another hour, she got the creeping feeling that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as they liked.

  They never did go smoothly, really. She didn’t know why Milo insisted on being such a damn optimist.

  Gemma’s metal arm tingled an alert as she rounded a corner, so she barely had enough time to avoid colliding with a massive blue scaled chest. She bounced off the male’s arm instead, and staggered back a few steps.

  The pair of Xaravians she’d run into frowned down at her from their superior heights, and one reached out to steady her. Gemma ducked her head, muttered an apology, and kept moving. She didn’t want to exchange words or give them anything to remember her by. She hadn’t gotten a good look at their faces, but there weren’t many Xaravians roaming around in ungoverned space, or on that particular spaceport, so chances were they were from the Sraibur. They might have been looking for Wyzak.

  She cursed under her breath and tapped the comms unit on her throat, ducking her chin as she murmured, “Gotta go faster. No time.”

  Milo didn’t answer. Gemma’s chest tightened as she prepared for the worst. What if the tranqs wore off and Wyzak regained consciousness and beat the shit out of her partner? Her ship could be gone and the Xaravians alerted to her presence on the spaceport. No doubt there would be a competition among the various pirates on the spaceport for who got to kill the bounty hunters first, since no one liked her kind.

  Gemma walked faster but didn’t want to run. She didn’t need the attention. Her mouth dried out and the Rrasul gin she’d indulged in sloshed around in her stomach, making the world tilt a little bit. It had been too good to pass up, even though she knew better than to drink on the job. She glanced over her shoulder just before she turned toward the docks, and caught a glimpse of a few more Xaravians congregating on a corner near the bar.

  Her heart beat faster and she broke into a jog as soon as they couldn’t see her. She and Milo had to get off the spaceport immediately, with or without Wyzak. Hopefully with Wyzak, so at least she could get a hefty chunk of change to start planning how to disappear again.

  Gemma ignored a shout behind her and instead moved faster, jumping over an obstacle and dodging around someone else with a slow-moving hover dolly, and finally fixed her sights on the sleek cruiser that she and Milo had stolen from an inattentive merchant. The Memphis had carried them for what felt like years, even if it was only a few months. She was a good ship—fast and nimble, well-armored but still maneuverable.

  Gemma just wished the Memphis had better weapons. Especially as the shouting behind her picked up in volume and proximity. She didn’t dare look behind her to see who it was or how close they were. Still, though, she eased a stunner out of her boot and held it loosely in her hand. Just in case.

  The next bounty was supposed to go mostly toward outfitting the Memphis with better shields and the most powerful weapons they could get from the Tyboli, although since the Xaravians were known to hold grudges and prioritize vengeance, new identities and passage on a multi-galaxy cruise might have been the better choice. She and Milo had argued back and forth for weeks over whether shields were better than weapons, and whether bounty hunters could afford to be only defensive or actually come out swinging. She’d been in favor of weapons and a straight-forward frontal assault to get their marks. For some reason, Milo preferred subterfuge and sneaking around.

  She shook her head and skidded to the ramp of the Memphis as something pinged against the hull of the ship. Panting for breath, she paused on the ramp and crouched to see what had fired at them. A trio of Xaravians moved in her direction, their faces set and determined, and she groaned in dismay. Damn it all to a fiery star. That damn bartender must have remembered her and Wyzak, and pointed them in the right direction. There weren’t many Earther females with mech arms wandering around the spaceport.

  “Milo!” she shouted up the ramp. “Are we ready?”

  Only silence answered her.

  Gemma’s heart sank and her chest tightened at the same time that dread crawled up her spine. What if the Xaravian woke up too soon and managed to surprise Milo? She jumped up the ramp and into the loading bay, searching for signs of a scuffle or the abandoned hover dolly.

  Nothing.

  She massaged her temples and slapped at the panel on her mostly-metal arm, scowling at the display as she whispered for it to show her Milo. He wasn’t entirely aware that she could track him so closely, but that was all right with Gemma. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, it was just... an insurance policy against her partner getting too interested in going solo. Just a security precaution, really.

  He wasn’t on the ship or in the vicinity, but the cascade of digits and dots showed him getting closer—still making his way through the maze of alleys. Gemma cursed and grabbed a rifle from the loading bay so she could confront the Xaravians with a little more firepower, and then moved back down the ramp to provide cover fire as Milo finally came into view.

  She didn’t want to shout at him, but a desperate squeak worked its way past her clenched teeth. Damn it, he needed to move.

  The trio of Xaravians got hemmed up with the same merchant who’d almost knocked her down, buying her precious s
econds, and the pirates shouted and growled threats at the thoroughly unimpressed dockworkers. She and Milo had a small window of opportunity to get the hover dolly up the ramp. Gemma slung the rifle across her back and jumped down so she could jog over and grab the hover dolly handle, lending her strength to Milo’s as he huffed and puffed toward the ramp.

  “Damn gravity balance malfunctioned,” he gasped, throwing all his weight into moving it, and Gemma dug her toes into the shiny metal surface of the dock.

  Of course. Nothing ever went as they planned.

  The Xaravians’ boots pounded on the dock. One snarled threats and threw another dockworker out of the way. The unconscious Wyzak’s weight and the malfunctioning hover dolly made it an epic task to move him into the ship, but Gemma and Milo barely managed it. She scrambled into the pilot’s seat as Milo closed up the ramp and engaged the shields, and she didn’t even bother to alert the traffic control tower as she powered up the engines and disengaged the anchors.

  Milo shouted from the loading bay. “They’re literally trying to climb on the wings. We have to go.”

  “Maybe if you’d purchased a quality hover dolly instead of cheaping out on it, we wouldn’t be in such a rush!” Gemma called back, but her heart pounded into her throat and nearly choked the words away.

  The ship lurched as she maneuvered the controls, and for a heart-stopping second Gemma wondered if maybe the Xaravians were somehow strong enough to keep the Memphis tethered to the dock. But no—one last anchor remained engaged, a little faulty. She hit the power harder and figured they’d deal with the damage later.

  The ship’s engines roared and the frame shuddered, then they tumbled end over end as the anchor finally gave out and threw them into space. Milo shrieked at her until she got the ship righted and the gravity engine engaged, but Gemma didn’t dare look back until they were beyond the edge of the spaceport and heading into truly ungoverned space.