Star Brigade: Resurgent (Star Brigade Book 1) (49 page)

With the osvowraith clutching her throat, Ella couldn’t scream, even if she had the motivation to. Doing that seemed so…meaningless. As she stared upward at the shiny tentacles slithering toward her face, Ella’s last thought was,
God, I should’ve let that fucking Korvie die.

And then…Ella felt a whistling wind as the tentacles whipped away from her face and into the air. She heard the crackle of electricity on flesh, followed by the most horrendous shriek ever issued from a living creature.

Suddenly Ella could move again, the icy draft scorched away by Bimnorii’s evening furnace. She gasped at the vitality rushing back into her limbs and mind. Not questioning what happened, Ella heaved the osvowraith off with a sharp twist of her hips.

The osvowraith tumbled aside in a heap, the smoke of charred flesh trailing off its upper back. Ella sat bolt upright, and immediately regretted it. Blinding pain in her abdomen made the world spin. But what stood before her made the human forget that pain momentarily.

A hooded, elfin humanoid stood in battle stance and twirled a golden shock pike almost as tall as her five-foot-one-inch frame. Her obsidian black eyes gleamed intently, fixated on the fallen osvowraith with the callousness of a hunter moving in for the kill. Jaellyn.

Their eyes met. The Tarkathian’s eyes told a story of anger at Ella’s recklessness and relief to find the human still alive. Ella afforded Jaellyn a quick smile in return and gestured at their target.

The dazed beast stumbled to its feet and found itself outnumbered. The osvowraith quickly sobered up and jerked its head back and forth, mutely assessing its new circumstances.

Choosing the newer threat, the osvowraith lunged at Jaellyn.

Ella yelped. The beast’s wild slash should’ve skewered Jaellyn through the belly.

But she was ready, ducking under the swipe with practiced grace, spinning about like a dancer and jamming the sparking end of her shock pike up in a vicious arc—right into the osvowraith’s throat.

The beast’s limbs splayed in all directions, sparks shooting out from under its chin in cascading showers. Its eyes wider than saucers, the osvowraith shuddered so violently, Ella feared the beast might explode into a million pieces. Finally, Jaellyn yanked the staff away and the beast sank to its knees without a sound. It was barely conscious, eyes dulled, swaying back and forth.

Jaellyn and Ella exchanged a look of disbelief. Then the Tarkathian picked up the pulse pistol from the ground. “Make an end,” she stated flatly, tossing it to her human partner. The girl’s fierce tone sounded more nasally and youthful when not on a comlink.

Ella caught her pulse pistol. Pointing it at the osvowraith’s temple, she fired.
BZZAARK!
The osvowraith fell forward, kicking up clouds of red dust. Jaellyn drew back her hood, revealing a bald head with a scaly, grey-green complexion. Her triangular face sported several tiny, chalk-white bumps on each cheek. The Tarkathian’s dark indigo eyes, with baby-blue star-shaped pupils, fixed on their prey in that grim fashion Ella had become used to.

“Too bad we need it alive,” she said as casually as a being discussing a sports team’s loss. Her button nose wrinkled at the stink of charred osvowraith flesh.

Ella stared down at the fallen beast, looking so frail and pathetic. She had lost count of how many times she’d dodged death since taking up the bounty hunter trade. Still, Ella couldn’t stop trembling. Whatever weird psychic shit that creature did to her…she had never felt so utterly hopeless in her life. So naturally, Ella covered by lashing out. “Took your little ass long enough.”

Jaellyn shrugged and kneeled next to the osvowraith. “Wouldn’t have been an issue if you stuck to the plan.” The Tarkathian pulled a glob of greyish goo out of her left boot pocket and slapped it over the osvowraith’s mouth. Immediately, the grey goo wreathed around the beast’s face and solidified into a smooth-surfaced muzzle.

“Well, I didn’t,” Ella spat petulantly, pulling a flat six-inch rod from her own boot.

“Clearly,” Jaellyn shot back, unfazed. “We’ll look at those ribs later.” Ella made a rude noise and kneeled down to hold the rod over the beast’s body. The rod took on a fiery glow, extending from the osvowraith’s upper torso to its feet. Several beams of shimmering energy shot out of either end of the rod, wrapping around and binding the beast’s body securely.

With the muzzle and EM restraints in place, Ella looked up at her partner. “Short-range teleporter?” Jaellyn nodded quickly. “Good.” Ella rose to her feet and grimaced, needles of pain stabbing her midsection. “Let’s go before our audience gets too nosy.” Already, the beggars and alley vendors she had passed earlier were spilling into the passageway to see about all the commotion.

Jaellyn brought up her wrist and tapped a few buttons on what looked like a common chronometer. A half-sphere of gleaming blue surrounded them and their quarry. As the grimy Rimhara alleyway and its nosy crowd faded into a shimmering white nothingness, Ella realized how that could have been her grave.

Dying in an alley on Bimnorii.
God, how fucking sad.
Ella turned to Jaellyn to say “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” the Tarkathian cut her off with tolerant expectation. Ella rolled her eyes and smiled. Rimhara was replaced by the familiar surroundings of their ship, the
Aurora,
parked just outside of Rimhara’s borders.

The
Kyrior
-class stealth cruiser was small, but still large enough for Ella and Jaellyn’s needs—mainly home and fast transportation. Most importantly, the
Aurora
—originally owned by a despicable and now-dead Tarkathian hunter—was where the pair first had begun their improbable partnership.

Now safely aboard, the bounty hunters carried their subdued prey to the ship’s chaotic cargo hold—Jaellyn taking the osvowraith’s shoulders while Ella struggled with the feet. Once inside the cargo hold, they reached the floating containment tube—over six feet long—and dropped the beast inside. Despite how startlingly light the osvowraith was, Ella’s ribs shrieked with such protest she almost cried. The bounty hunters quickly secured the beast inside the tube with a series of passcodes and activated the sleep stasis function to keep it unconscious. Then, Jaellyn contacted Xubes to confirm the capture of the quarry.

“Superluminal!” the Xyobian exclaimed via 3D projection in the ship’s helm, more surprised than delighted that they succeeded. He stood not much taller than Jaellyn. “You sure you got the correct species—Okay, I believe you!” he squealed after Jaellyn snarled at him. “I’ll tell the client, and get back to you with a meet time and location.”

Only then did Ella let Jaellyn evaluate her injuries: two ribs cracked, another three bruised, a mild concussion, and dark choke marks all around her neck.
Nothing that an injection of mendonanocytes and five shots of black dwarf couldn’t cure…

“Is this a good idea?” Ella slurred out, tipsy from pounding down liquor shots one after another. She currently lay on her stomach in bed, topless. Jaellyn, meanwhile, used a slim hypo-injector to infuse a payload of mendonanocytes into her partner’s injured ribs. Ella winced. The uncomfortable tingling rippled through her body, signaling the start of the healing process.

“Is
what
a good idea?” the Tarkathian answered idly, packing up the medical supplies in a pouch.

“Delivering something so dangerous,” she whispered, almost as if afraid that someone was eavesdropping.

Jaellyn scoffed. “Silly human. It’s just a job. What the client does with the bounty is their business.”

Ella knew the Tarkathian was correct. “Right.” Yet that didn’t ease her conscience.

“And the pay is good,” Jaellyn added gently as she stood up. “We will be set for near six months!”

“It’ll be nice to pick and choose our next jobs,” Ella admitted and smiled, stretching her arms out cat-like.

The Tarkathian stood at the exit, casting a long shadow against the light from outside. “Get sleep. We need to be ready for our client meet tomorrow.”

Once the door closed, Ella pulled out a thin strip of lightspeed from her stash under the pillows. She pressed it to her nose and inhaled greedily. The hit shot up into her brain and through her body like a comet. Suddenly, a million sparkly dots of silver light danced before Ella’s eyes, the good kind of sparkly dots. Then came a flood of tranquility that washed away all pain, leaving Ella delightfully numb as always. She sagged and fell face down onto her pillows. The twinkly dots blurred into infinite trails of light, shooting off into a distant direction, pulling Ella into a fathomless void….

The human came to several orvs later, sporting a mild hangover and slightly sore ribs. Jaellyn informed Ella that while she was sleeping, Xubes had gotten a time and a meet location— midday today at the furthest edge of the Sandstone Sea. The massive valley of high sand dunes and bizarrely-weathered rock formations was east of Orabesq, a remote settlement. After getting a look of the site on their 3D holomap, the Tarkathian thoroughly hated it. “Too easy for ambushes,” she bristled.

Ella had felt her blood run cold as she scrutinized the location as well. It appeared far too similar to an earlier job months ago that had gone way south. That client had double-crossed and nearly killed both her and Jaellyn. She sucked in a calming breath, “We’ll ‘port in, keep our ship about a mile out and make sure the containment tube is rigged.”

Jaellyn noticeably relaxed upon hearing this. Rigged meant syncing the tube to their heartbeats. If anything happened to either Jaellyn or Ella within a mile of their bounty, the tube self-destructed. This precaution was expected, given their profession’s duplicitous nature.

Ella donned an ensemble similar to yesterday, the only variance was a white tank top, a reddish-brown armorweave vest, and letting her thick, black hair down. And unlike yesterday, she was beyond thankful to carry more weaponry on her person—her cherished RR-5 rifle which she hefted in her right hand, and an ArmoryTek DraCross 530 long pulse pistol slung on her hip. Jaellyn cast aside the hooded cloak, going with a navy blue, ribbed catsuit of oiled nanoclothe. She carried two long knives in her boots and two DraCross long pulse pistols.

After soaring for half an orv over a seemingly infinite stretch of rolling crimson dunes, the
Aurora
reached the coordinates Xubes specified for the meetup: a series of distorted, arching rock formations at the end of the rolling dunes, a precursor into a longer stretch of craggy, cracked desert.

“They’re already here,” Jaellyn stated grimly once they were a mile out, reading their ship’s scans. “We should have gotten here first.”

“But we didn’t,” Ella scoffed. “Let’s just do this and get paid.” With their captured quarry, Ella and Jaellyn transmatted in just under a far-jutting shelf of gnarled rock. It provided the perfect shade from the ball of bright cherry flame hanging in the clear sky. But the shelf provided no protection from the suffocating dry heat…or the half-dozen intimidating humans that surrounded the pair the moment they materialized onto the site. Jaellyn whirled around, always cagey as she took in their company.

Ella never flinched, even when seeing how exposed she and Jaellyn were in the middle of this rock structure. The Tarkathian gave her an
I told you so
glare to hammer home the obvious. Shafts of light pierced through holes in the rock shelf, giving a solid illumination of their grim-faced clients.

Ella recognized the Children of Earth at a glance.

The humans had sense enough to dress in dusty, tattered clothing, befitting of Bimnorii smugglers and prospectors. But the heavy-duty firearms they carried—ArmoryTek and Vega-Millum, to name a few—were definitely UComm military-grade. Their speakers introduced themselves: a lean, dark youth named Chidi, and Priyanka, a petite, dusky-skinned woman with a large hooked nose. Both stepped forward to authenticate the osvowraith in the containment tube.

Priyanka looked fascinated, waving a medical datapad across the tube’s pane that displayed the beast’s face and upper torso. Ella and Jaellyn backed away to give them space. Chidi, however, kept sneaking in nasty looks at the Tarkathian teenager, who returned them in kind.

Dios Mio
, Ella swore, her nervousness contained beneath a blasé façade. The bounty hunter slipped into survival mode again, taking in her potential opponents with a quick glance. The Children of Earth had the edge in terms of cover behind the bulbous rocks, and superior firepower. Even if Ella and Jaellyn took out Chidi and Priyanka, they would never make it to the other side of this formation before getting cut down. Ella could at least console herself with the fact that if their client took them out, the quarry would self-destruct.

“Is there a problem?” she finally asked.

For a long, charged moment, Chidi locked eyes with Ella, his contempt obvious. The whole scene became loaded with an ugly, taut energy—Jaellyn looked ready to explode into action, her hands reaching for both pulse pistols. The other four gunmen behind Chidi seemed to coil with an alertness born from countless skirmishes. Ella let the hand at her side with the pulse pistol slip down gradually for a possible fast draw…

The moment passed, and Chidi shrugged with an easygoing smile. “Nope. Just admiring the pistols you two are carrying.” Jaellyn remained rigid, keeping a wary eye on the Children of Earth operatives.