Nell Thorn (13 page)

* * * *

“The ship is secured, Captain. Commander Lomax is escorting all personnel on board.”

Kate Thorn gave the briefest nod in acknowledgement.

“Clarke, take the bridge. Start accessing their ship’s logs and data using the standard protocols.”

Kate could not help the slight smile of triumph as she surveyed the crippled Rim Class ship from the controls of her craft. They had been fighting for almost three days straight, and when all had seemed lost, she had made a last audacious bid to outmanoeuvre her opponents. Her daring attack had trapped the privateers within the orbit of a remote rock mass.

The crew had surrendered without a fight, their ship a mess.

“Captain Thorn…I would have a word with you in private.” Lieutenant Clarke appeared at her elbow before even a minute of her victory had passed. Her third in command was ambitious and lacked Kate’s family connections. It made him an unreliable and resentful subordinate that was better handled promptly and publicly.

“Problem, Clarke?” Kate replied curtly. As one of the youngest, toughest Captains of the Inner Galaxies Elite Fleet, she stuck doggedly to a code of cool professionalism. She kept her distance and maintained an expectation of unquestioning respect from her crew.

“You should not have engaged the Rim pirate ship. It would have been enough to have driven them out of the border zone, away from GEF space.”

“Are you questioning my judgement, Lieutenant Clarke?”
Again
, rang through Kate’s head but thankfully never made it to her lips. Clarke was becoming more than just annoying. He was becoming a liability.

“The rules are quite clear. We are not to waste time on Rim dogs and pirates,” Clarke insisted. “The GEF directives in this situation clearly state that firepower is to be saved for direct engagement with Rim insurgents.”

Kate resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Clarke lived by the damned rulebook.

“This particular craft was well inside the boundaries of the ISS Star’s jurisdiction.” But it had been quick enough to dodge out of their legal engagement area when it had become obvious that Kate’s ship was prepared to attempt to capture a privateer ship. “They were blatantly entering GEF protected territories. You do not have to explain Galaxy Elite Fleet rules to me, Clarke, I was brought up on them,” Kate replied, ruthlessly using an oblique reference to her influential family to silence him. “I am going down to inspect our prisoners. Keep your full attention on the salvage dogs that have been circling since our engagement with the privateer vessel. The rulebook is quite clear about the responsibilities of being on watch.”

* * * *

Kate ran her eyes along the line of fifteen captured men. All of them looked like the archetypical Rim pirate—some had obviously been injured as a result of her attack on their ship and worse was to come for them if she did not act quickly. Lomax stalked on the periphery of her vision as she walked down the line.

“Welcome aboard the ISS Star, gentlemen. The people I need to speak to now are your commanding officers.”

There was silence. Kate stared at the prisoners, and the prisoners stared back. Some openly defiant, others blank-faced or resentful. “Oh, come on now, gentlemen, who is in charge?” she asked again, wearily.

Kate sighed at the lack of response and fingered the cuffs she held loosely in her right hand. “Do I need to remind you of the GEF habit of executing random individuals until a commanding officer steps up?”

Kate needed no reminders. It had turned her stomach as a cadet. She had other methods to secure cooperation, but first she needed to get her hands on whoever was in control of that ship.

“You have two minutes, time starts…”

Two men stepped forward, breaking rank.

The first of the two men was slightly taller than his companion, broad shouldered with dark hair that just brushed the collar of his tight-fitting black shirt. With a single look he communicated an air of superiority that annoyed Kate instantly, exuding a confidence that the GEF—and more particularly, Kate—were no threat to either himself or whatever business had brought him to the borders of ISS space despite the fact she had just shot his ship to pieces. The second man was lean and only an inch or so shorter than his arrogant shipmate, but with a shock of mocha coloured hair cut close to his head apart from one preposterous lock that flopped over one eyebrow. He had bright blue eyes that roamed the room continuously, and although he seemed to lack the supreme assurance of his colleague, Kate could not miss the intelligent calculation in his gaze. These two were clearly trouble.

“So, Captain Thorn, I wish I could say it was a pleasure.” The dark-haired one smiled politely but the smile fell short of his incredibly green eyes. Kate observed the expression on his face with a studied measure of detachment, aware that even this sanitised smile had an unwelcome effect on her pulse. “Your reputation precedes you in these parts.”

Kate ignored his words. She knew she had a reputation. She had spent years fostering it.

“And you are?”

“Dom…and”—he turned to his companion—“Ren. We would like to be returned to our ship immediately.”

Kate found herself irritated by the fact he did not even give her a full name, even though he must know she was the commander of the vessel that had just captured his ship. He had also given no rank.

“Our ship’s systems indicate several salvage dogs are already starting to circle our location, Mr Dom. I would not be so keen to return to a crippled ship without the means to repair it if I were you.”

She considered prompting him for a first name but decided against it. Kate was not about to give him further opportunities to be clever at her expense. “Of course you can return to your ship shortly if you tell us your business in the area, and provide us with the relevant key codes so we can check your story against your ship’s logs,” Kate replied crisply. “You may even find us generous enough to offer repairs and assistance.”

The one called Ren gave an unmistakeable snort of disbelief but Dom simply gave a small, humourless smile.

“Both you and I know, Captain Thorn, that I am in no way obliged to comply. I was not in GEF controlled space when
you
attacked us, so I am perfectly within my rights to refuse you.”

“I pursued you from a controlled zone and have arrested you here because you were in controlled space,” Kate insisted, resisting the urge to raise her voice as she felt a flicker of annoyance lick at his calm intransigence. “Why had you crossed to that position within the border zone at all if not to cross into GEF space directly?”

Dom simply stood with folded arms.

“If you have nothing to hide then you should have no problem with answering any questions we put to you,” Kate persisted.

No answer.

“Mr Ren, have you anything to add to your colleague’s explanation?”

A slow, lazy smile spread across the man’s handsome face as he simply added, “No. Dom’s in charge.”

Kate took a deep breath. Perhaps it was too much to expect to capture a hardened privateer Rim vessel and to gain a full confession from the crew all in one day.

“Then I am sorry to say our conversation ends now unless you are prepared to cooperate with us.” Kate smiled her best professional GEF smile at Dom and looked into his green eyes with what was supposed to be deep and complete sincerity. “We will of course return you to your ship immediately and then signal our intention to leave very clearly to every ship in the immediate area. I give it ten minutes before the salvage dogs are alongside, cutting the metal from your ship as you and your crew sit cowering inside.”

A muscle worked in Dom’s jaw and Kate felt a thrill of triumph. He knew she was telling the truth and if he wanted to save his crew, he was going to have to give her what she wanted. Or so he thought.

“I’ll talk to you in private,” he finally replied.

“Of course you will. You, and your second, will come with me now.”

“No, I do this alone.” His eyes flashed.

How sweet. Captain Dom obviously did not want his second in command to get into trouble.

“No,” Kate refused promptly. “I need you both. Come.”

Both looked every inch the Rim pirate—lean, handsome and dangerously angry. Ironically, Rim privateers were far less of a problem than the individuals that Kate was actually hunting for in this sector because they operated in small groups and lacked the powerful backup of her true quarry. The really dangerous adversaries in this part of GEF space were the Rim political insurgents, operating with the full backup of the incredibly powerful Rim collectives. Kate’s commanders were fighting a losing battle to prevent Prime Worlds on the edge of the GEF-controlled areas from forging political relations with the predatory Rim. Not every resident within the inner galaxy was happy with the old autocratic methods of planetary government, particularly when it was brutally backed up by the more committed members of the Galaxy Elite Fleet. As a member of the Thorn family, Kate was one of the few considered a safe choice to be patrolling such a sensitive part of space.

Kate had managed to find her own way of delivering what the GEF wanted of her, whilst still being able to sleep at night. What she did not do was to return fifteen people, even if they were outside GEF law, to a crippled ship to be butchered by salvage dogs. It was what the GEF expected her to do—indeed, it was an unwritten rule that anyone who crossed the fleet should be made an example of.

“Go in.”

Kate arrived in her cabin after the escort, and signalled the guards to leave, shaking her head when they indicated that the restraints around the prisoner’s wrists be removed. She took the restraint control from the head guard as he left, then leaned against the door once it had shut behind the three of them.

“Alone at last,” she said finally. Truth be told, she always felt a little queasy at this point, although Kate could not tell if it was due to a fear of being found out or a warped sense of anticipation.

It was important that she do what needed to be done without it being seen as altruistic. Kate also needed to ensure the commanding officers never spoke about what happened in her cabin. She had a fleet-wide reputation for being able to somehow secure the most sensitive and useful data yet only she knew for sure how she did it.

“Strip,” Kate instructed them in an offhand manner. She walked over to a chair in the middle of the room, only to look back and see neither man had budged. “Strip!” she told them again, this time with raised eyebrows.

“And what if we say no?” It was Dom who spoke.

Kate tweaked the restraint control in her pocket briefly.

“Shit!” Dom glared at her, his green eyes blazing. “That hurt, lady!”

“It was meant to.”

“Now look here…”

“Captain,” she reminded him. “Captain Kate Thorn. Now do be good, and strip.”

Kate found her unique approach to be effective. Such was the machismo of the Rim, so precious was a tough man’s reputation that Kate had found the ideal method to ensure silence from the ship’s commanders she’d encountered so far. Her methods also secured enough time to allow the discreet download of as much information as possible from whatever was left of the crippled ship’s servers before the crew were returned. The precious information was then stored on Kate’s own private systems.

“You have a choice.” Would Dom and his second in command be the first to refuse? For a brief moment it wasn’t part of her job. The part she liked least where she had to make sure outlaws would be wary enough of her or the fleet to not cross them again. “Think of it as your only choice today…your chance to save your colleagues, your crew. You choose whether or not you wish to cooperate.” Normally she had very little argument or resistance. Previous participants in her game of risk had been quick to realise they were being presented with an unlikely chance to get into space again without being murdered by Rim scavengers, or imprisoned by the Fleet.

“So you want us to give you information?” Dom asked her. Kate didn’t need them to tell her anything—she had known the moment she returned to her cabin that her own scavenger code was at a critical point in clearing down their abandoned server. One look at the red-green lights flickering on the combox by her chair had told her that. What she needed was time. Kate glanced at the timepiece on the wall. The longer she delayed their eventual departure, the longer her programmes had to dump what looked like the entire contents of their servers onto her own systems. “And if we don’t cooperate?” asked Dom.

“I’ll further incapacitate your ship and leave you and your crew for the salvage dogs,” she lied.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from a Thorn,” he said. “But I still find it hard to believe you’d do it.”

Kate gave a humourless laugh. “Believe it.” But she didn’t like the look Dom gave her—an almost knowing look. Like he knew what she was up to and was about to blow her secret wide open.

“What are you expecting me to tell you?”

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About the Author

I’m British and live by the sea just outside Brighton in West Sussex. I’ve been lucky enough to have a huge range of occupations ranging from being a top European IT consultant through to mother of three. My jobs in the past have invariably involved a lot of travel and thinking up long involved plots, along with feisty heroines and controlling heroes, has always been a favourite way of mine to make time pass when I have been sitting at the wheel of a car or on a train.

I’ve a soft spot for happy endings, with characters who get what they deserve and with lots of sauciness on the way.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the same things I do.

Email:
[email protected]

Sophie loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at
http://www.total-e-bound.com
.