Assassin's Hunger (24 page)

“We know,” the captain growled. “And in case we didn’t, they’re making that abundantly clear. So why are you here? To help protect the girls?”

Eril lifted his chin, exposing his throat. Might as well give the man a clean shot. “To kill them.”

Deynah snorted. “You think you could?” He flicked one finger dismissively. “I tell you, auxo, or whatever you are, they get under your skin in ways you can’t comprehend. You couldn’t kill them. You couldn’t even walk away.”

Eril’s spine sagged, as if the captain
had
severed it. “I had one job. Lust and wishful thinking can’t get in the way of that.”

“No. But love will.”

Eril flinched, unsure if it was the captain or Benedetta who had spoken. It seemed as if both their voices echoed in his head as the l’auralya continued, “The crystal is a powerful force, true, but it’s not
power
that it bestows. It is light and delight. It is love. It’s a power vast as the universe, but while the sheerways can displace and twist the great distances between stars,
nothing
lessens the power of love.” She tilted her head. “As I think you’ve discovered.”

He swallowed, his throat tight as if someone had clamped a fist around his neck. “I’ve gone too far,” he choked out. “The things I’ve done… Would have done…” He turned a demanding glare on Deynah. “You should shoot me.”

The captain shrugged. “Probably. But I don’t think you listened to my mistress. There is no place far enough for you to escape.”

Benedetta sniffed at him. “You make love sound like a relentless assassin.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard. “It brought me down, didn’t it?”

With the same motion, he unfurled her, placing her back in front of the screen. “Now get me a lock on that ship’s code. I want out of here.” He returned to the captain’s chair. “Evessa, take us higher.”

“Aye, Captain. But we’ll be coming up right into their gunsights.”

“Not if they’re struck blind.”

Eril ignored Deynah explaining their plan to the pilot and focused on the screen. “Shaxi had already identified the code from the noise, so the tuner should be able to pin down the encryption and break it.”

“Is she a spy as well?”

He shook his head. “She is just what she seems.”

“None of us are.”

“Shaxi is.” It was what had drawn him to her, made her seem a useful tool in his mission…and then so much more than that.

Benedetta stared at him. “Why did you let her leave?”

He stiffened. “We don’t have time for that.”

“Oh, we have the longest seconds in the worlds. All the time we need to talk about the bond between you.”

He almost wished the other ship would bury them. “There’s no bond.”

“But I felt it in you, linking you to her.”

“Well, she left anyway.”

“Did she know you felt it?”

“
I
didn’t know I felt it until now,” he snapped.

“See, that didn’t take long to figure out.” Benedetta patted his shoulder. “You a’lurily think the connection is so convoluted. And it is, but it’s perfectly simple too.”

He gritted his teeth. “We’re not like you. She is not my l’auralya.” Shaxi would never have the shimmering, elegant beauty of the l’auraly. And yet he knew she’d blaze in his mind forever.

Benedetta inclined her head. “You’re right, but still, you are her key. That’s what an a’lurilyo is: a key, the power that opens her.”

Shamed at the memory of the phase tuner’s sharp point against the soft flesh of Shaxi’s inner wrist, he bristled. “I don’t want that power.”

“But it’s yours. Just as she is the key who opens you.” Benedetta’s smile was soft and sly at the same time. “She brought you to this point, didn’t she?”

He was never so grateful to hear the chime of his illicit tech.

“We’re in,” he said. “Scanning the Moirai ship’s ident, log, schematics… Captain, we have access to their secondary systems. At least until they detect the hack. Engineering and weapons are behind a second firewall.”

“Shut down their viewers, auxo. We just need a second to jump out of this hole. Fariz, full power including life support to thrusters. Evessa, on the auxo’s mark.”

At their chorus of “aye, Captain”, Eril felt the camaraderie of the crew engulf him, something he’d never known in his days as a lone wolf assassin. He shuddered at the all-encompassing sensation, and Benedetta grinned at him, as if she knew the depth of his fear…and his desire.

Sending out a hail on the other ship’s own encrypted frequency, he issued a common subroutine order to refresh visual and auditory comms. With luck and a well-placed lie, the Moirai ship would be blind and deaf just long enough.

“Comms are down,” he snapped. “Go!”

The
Asphodel
surged under them, shooting upward between the canyon walls.

“Ionic interference is double previous levels,” Evessa reported, her voice cracking. “Fariz, watch the readings on the repaired thruster. The debris load is going to be intense, even without the EM static.”

“All thrusters are hot,” Fariz said. “We should be able to burn our way out.”

“Give what you can to the hazers,” the captain said. “I want to live to fight another day, but I wouldn’t mind leaving a mark.”

They cleared the rim of the canyon in a plume of dust that washed over their own screens. Between the blown-up sand and the static, visibility on all wavelengths was near zero.

Until one erratic moment between gusts where the dust seemed to hang suspended. The
Asphodel
’s scanners were still glitching, but their rear cams showed a real-time image of a sheership, huge and black, hovering at the canyon rim where they had first descended.

It was their hunter, big enough that it cast its own shadow through the storm where the wind died and the sand fell from the sky.

“What in all the sheerways is that, auxo?” the captain snapped. “The ident said it was a light cruiser with a regular crew. That’s a shipkiller.”

Eril’s hands flew over his screen, but the interference was terrible. Even the phase tuner couldn’t find a lock. “Stolen ident,” he said. “I can’t get through the second firewall. Ship like that, we’re not going to fool them long, and we can’t outrun them.”

Even as he spoke, the hovering behemoth was rotating its thrusters to pursue.

“They’ve spotted us!” Benedetta cried.

Eril cursed. The advantage of the tuner should’ve given them the minutes they needed to escape. Their enemy was stronger even than he’d guessed, and he’d already been prepared to do awful things in the name of stopping them.

“Fariz,” the captain said, his voice deadly calm. “I’m going to need you to send a little more kick to the rear hazers.”

The black ship issued a single precision pulse of plasma from its cannon. The
Asphodel
jolted in the air.

“Not even a courtesy warning shot?” Deynah fired off both hazers in reply.

“They’re aiming for the damaged thruster,” Benedetta said. “They know we’re injured.”

“They want the twins,” Eril said. “They won’t aim to kill.”

“I won’t be returning the favor.” The captain waited as the
Asphodel
fled toward the Rampakh valley where the smaller foothills might give them places to play hide and seek with the bigger ship. When the black ship closed the distance, he shot off their front cannon. The plasma backwashed in streamers of red and yellow, lighting up the darkness of the swirling sand.

“Interference is still rising,” Evessa said. “We’re heading into the heart of the storm.”

“At least the interference will equalize the disparity in tech,” Eril said.

Benedetta snorted. “Is that a nice way of saying we’ll all die together?”

Despite their desperate situation, he couldn’t help but think of Shaxi out there somewhere, alone. He should have been with her, and let the universe burn.

Regret seared him, more wounding than hazer or plasma.

“Corso!” Benedetta whirled around. “Second ship. Scanners caught it for just a second.”

“I don’t see— Ah, there it is. No wonder you lost it. Who is this mouse creeping up on us?”

The tiny blip glimmered then vanished from the screens, looking like nothing more than a glitch or large debris kicked up by the storm.

Except it was inbound on a direct trajectory toward the black ship, not swirling with the wind, its course straight and true.

The little ship was slow and never would have been able to catch either ship except it was coming at an interception angle. From Rampakh.

“It’s Shaxi.” The words burst from him without conscious thought.

He couldn’t know that, but he’d recognize that unfaltering flight anywhere.

But his exclamation was lost in a shout from Fariz. “Captain! Engine two is overheating. The repaired thruster isn’t burning out the dust, and backwash is clogging the engine. We’re going to lose it.”

“Can’t lose it. They’ll be on us before we can cry about it. Can you clear the backwash?”

“Need to shut it down. Just for a minute, and we’ll be back online. I could do it in freefall if we were high enough.”

“If we take her up, they’ll catch us on the straight away. They’re bigger and faster. If we had a distraction—”

“Captain,” Eril said. “I think you’re about to get one.”

The little ship arrowed out of the dark clouds of sand, its single engine setting fire to the dust as it screamed toward the Moirai shipkiller.

Eril flattened his palm next to the comm screen, as if he could stop her. There was no way her mining survey hopper, meant for sampling ore, could do more than annoy the bigger ship while it swatted at her.

He swung his gaze to Deynah. “Captain, if you take the
Asphodel
up, Shaxi won’t stand a chance alone against the shipkiller.”

The other man stared at him, gaze assessing. “You care?”

“I won’t live in a universe without her.”

The captain tilted his head in a solemn nod. “Evessa, put us down on high ground. Fariz, clear that engine. And while we’re down, put all power to the hazers.”

Eril’s heart wrenched as Shaxi’s hopper intercepted the shipkiller, and the two blips merged on the scanner. He switched frantically to the real-time cams, wishing he could wipe the sand away with his hand. Just in time to catch a bloom of brilliant light from the black ship’s starboard side.

“She’s using the hopper’s cutter on the thruster,” he reported.

Benedetta snorted. “They won’t be able to pick her off with their cannons without shooting themselves in the foot.”

“They’ll send an EVA team to take her out.” He bit out a fierce grin. “But unlike her, they won’t be crazy enough to do it while they are still flying.”

Sure enough, the black ship was descending. Apparently the survey ship’s cutter had done enough damage to their thruster that they dropped straight to the valley floor in a small explosion of sand that obliterated any view.

Eril gripped the viewer, longing to lift her out with his bare hands. “Come on,” he hissed. “Enough heroics for one day.”

The hopper sprang from the cloud, a tracking burst of hazer fire lighting the air behind it.

Benedetta gasped as the hazer line pursued the small ship across the sky. It pierced one stabilizer, and the hopper spun through the dust storm and caromed into the humped hills below the
Asphodel
, lost to sight except for a deep scar through the earth, quickly filling in with sand.

Deynah fired on the shipkiller. With all the power of the
Asphodel
’s over-spec engines behind it, the hazer was a thick white line of destruction burning through the clouds of sand. But the ionic interference scattered some of the beam, and although the black ship’s thick plysteel hull blazed, there was no satisfying explosion.

The captain glared over at Eril. “Well, man, go get her!”

Eril raced for the cargo bay, feeling as gutted as the earth behind the crashing hopper, his heart on fire.

This
was his last chance.

Chapter 18

Shaxi swiped the blood out of her eyes and held her breath against the noxious stench of burning plysteel. The hopper—mothballed in a sub-level of the observation dome—had been more airworthy than she could’ve hoped, and now it would fly no more.

She mourned its demise as only another machine could.

Pah. If she wanted to be a good machine, did she have to bleed so much?

Her forehead had slammed into the throttle when the hopper crashed, and the blow left her reeling as she staggered for the hatch.

But she’d seen the
Asphodel
land, one thruster sputtering. She still had time to warn them of the traitor in their midst.

She’d tried to message them, but the interference was too intense for her little hopper. So she’d have to do it in person. Which wasn’t so terrible since she had one message in particular she wanted to deliver face to face…