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“Adhirans,” Breck said with a sigh, crossing her thick arms over her chest. At seven feet tall with choppy black hair that just brushed her muscled shoulders, Breck was the most intimidating member of the crew. They all assumed she was a giantess from the planet New Veda, where Mirabel’s greatest warriors were born.
The only problem with that assumption?
Breck had no memories of her past. She had no idea who she was, or even where she’d come from. She’d been on the run when Andi picked her up, a bruised and beaten ten-year-old Gilly at her side.
Gilly, plucked from the market streets of her home planet Umbin, was struggling to escape from a couple of Xen Pterran slavers when Breck found her. The older girl had saved Gilly from a fate worse than death, and now the two girls were as close as kin. To them, it no longer mattered what life Breck couldn’t remember or what past Gilly tried to forget. All that mattered was that they had each other.
Breck tugged on one of Gilly’s red braids, then lifted her chin and sniffed the air. “I don’t smell breakfast. We need a cook, Andi.”
“And we’ll get one as soon as we have the funds to buy a culinary droid,” Andi said with a curt nod. The girls usually traded off on kitchen duty, but Breck was the only decent cook among them. “We’re down to less than three hundred Krevs. Someone spent a little too much on hair products on TZ-5.”
Breck’s cheeks reddened as she touched the new crimson streaks in her black hair.
“Speaking of Krevs,” Gilly added, her tiny hand grazing the golden double-triggered gun at her hip, “when’s our next job, Cap?”
Andi leaned back, arms crossed behind her head, and surveyed the girls.
They were a good crew, all three of them. Small, but mighty in the best of ways, and better than what Andi deserved. She stared at her blades once more before putting them back in their harness. If only she could put her memories away just as easily.
“I’ve got a tip for a possible job on Vacilis,” Andi said finally. It was a desert world where the wind blew as hot as the devil’s backside and the air was choked with the stench of sulfur, just a few planets over from ice-locked Solera. “But I’m not sure how many Krevs it’ll haul. And it’ll be messy, dealing with the desert nomads.”
Breck shrugged her broad shoulders. “Any money is good money if it brings us more food stores.”
“And ammo,” Gilly said, cracking her knuckles like the little warrior she was.
Andi inclined her head at Lira. “Thoughts?”
“We will see where the stars lead us,” Lira answered.
Andi nodded. “I’ll get in touch with my informant. Take us away, Lir.”
“As you wish.” Lira punched the destination into the control panel’s holoscreen. A diagram of Mirabel illuminated the room with blue light, stars floating around their heads and the little planets that made up each major system orbiting their suns. A bright line traced from their current location near an unnamed moon, too barren for habitation, to Vacilis, almost half a galaxy away.
Lira scrutinized the route, then minimized the map and readied the ship for hyperspace travel.
Andi turned in her seat. “Breck, Gilly, go to the vault and do a weapons check. Then make sure the Big Bang is fully loaded. I want you two ready in case we run into any trouble once we arrive in the Tavina System.”
“We’re always ready,” Breck said.
Gilly giggled, and the two gunners nodded at Andi in salute before exiting the bridge. Gilly skipped along behind Breck, her golden gun bobbing against her tiny frame.
“Engines are hot,” Lira said. “Time to fly.”
The Marauder rumbled beneath Andi as she slumped down in her chair, exhaustion worming its way in.
The expanse of space stretched out before them, and Andi’s eyelids began to droop against her will. With Lira by her side, she sank into the warm folds of sleep.
* * *
Smoke pooled into the ruined ship, unrelenting as Andi gasped for air. She glanced sideways, where Kalee’s bloody hand twitched once, then hung motionless over the armrest.
“Wake up,” Andi rasped. “You have to wake up!”
Andi awoke to a rough shake of her shoulder from Lira. Her heart hammered in her chest as her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the bridge. Starlight ahead, the glowing holoscreen on the dash.
She was here. She was safe.
But something was off. A light on the holo blinked red, a silent prox alarm beside the markers that showed not only the Marauder’s location, but three ships behind them, catching up fast. An unwelcome sight to any space pirate.
“We have a tail.” Lira curled her lip in annoyance. She tapped a blue fingertip on the holoscreen, changing it to the rear-cam, showing Andi a faraway look at the ships soaring behind them. “Two Explorers and one Tracker.”
“The stars be damned,” Andi said. “When did they show up?”
“Seconds before I woke you. We came out of light speed just outside the Tavina System, as planned, and the alarm activated not long after.”
Andi’s mind raced, calculating all the possible scenarios. Lira never let anyone get the drop on the Marauder. They had to have been cloaked with technology the likes of which Andi’s crew could only dream of getting their hands on. She told herself this was just like any other night, any other chase, but she couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that this time might be different.
“Do we know who they are? Black market, Mirabel Patrol?” Andi asked, staring at the radar as it blinked, the three hellish red dots slowly gaining on them.
Lira glowered. “With this tech, it has to be Patrol. They didn’t show up on our radar until they were practically on top of us.”
Andi chewed on her bottom lip. “Which branch?”
You know which branch, her mind whispered. She shoved the voice away.
“We won’t know until they’re in our close-range sights, and by then, it’ll be too late for us to escape,” Lira said.
“Then don’t let them get that close.”
The Patrolmen, those bastards. The government lackeys had been after Andi’s ship for years, but they’d never once come close enough to appear on the Marauder’s radar.
Their last job shouldn’t have been enough to capture the attention of the Patrolmen. It was a black-market operation, a simple grab and go. All they’d done was haul a few crates’ worth of meds for a drug lord, nothing significant enough to bring the Patrolmen down on them.
The girls had taken on more high-profile jobs than that—like the time they kidnapped a rich Soleran’s mistress and left her on a meteor, the job requested by the man’s furious wife. She paid a pretty penny for their services. It wasn’t until days later that they found out the woman was not only a mistress, but a prominent politician’s daughter from Tenebris. The politician tore the galaxy apart looking for his daughter. When he eventually found her withered corpse on that barren rock, word got back about who put her there.
Andi screened their jobs much more carefully now. Her crew was still on the run from that politician to this day.
It could be he’d finally caught their scent. She closed her eyes. Black holes ablaze, she was screwed. The ship rumbled beneath her, almost as if in agreement.
“Cloaking is useless at this point,” Lira said as she readied the gears, slamming buttons, tapping in codes. “Engines are still too hot to go back into hyperspace. Damn their tech.”
In the distance, Andi could just barely make out the ghostly forms of their pursuers. They were still far out, but heading closer with each passing breath. “Get us out of this, and I’ll see to it that we get devices of the same caliber.”
“And bigger guns?” Lira asked, her blue eyes wide. “We’ll barely scrape by if we have to turn and fire on them. We only have one Big Bang left.”
Andi nodded. “Much bigger guns.”
“Well, then,” Lira said, a dangerous grin spreading across her face. “I think the stars may align for us, Captain. Any last words?”
Someone else had said that to her once, long ago. Before she escaped Arcardius, never to see her home planet again.
Andi chewed on her lip, and the memory fizzled away. She could have given her Second a thousand words, but instead she simply strapped herself in, turned in her seat and said, “Fly true, Lir.”
Lira nodded and took the ship’s wheel, her grip steady and practiced. “Fly true.”
A humming vibration filled the bay before the ship shot forward, like the tip of a crystal spear hurtling through the black expanse.
Chapter Two (#u2c495123-a205-5bed-8b1b-b7611314f030)
ANDROMA
ON A GOOD DAY, the Marauder and her crew could lose a tail as fast as an Adhiran darowak could fly, but when Andi glanced at the radar, three little dots continued to blink back at her.
She suppressed a groan and tapped on the viewport in front of her. The glass melded, colors morphing to show a live image from their rear-cam.
Her stomach dropped to her toes.
The approaching ships were still behind them. Two black Explorers, angular and sharp, and in between, a giant Tracker ship. A monster in the sky that tore a memory from Andi’s mind.
A hundred pairs of polished Academy boots clacked on the ground of a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility in the sky. A rigid man in a royal blue suit stood before the crowd, announcing the specs of the new Tracker ship. Andi raised her hand, wincing as she disturbed a bruised rib from a fight, but she was hungry for knowledge, already in love with flying.
“I still can’t see a sigil on them,” Lira said, drawing Andi back to the present. The memory faded like mist. “We don’t know which planet they’ve hailed from yet.”
Andi leaned forward, sliding two fingers against her temple and linking with her crew’s channels. “We’ve got a tail, ladies.” She swallowed and cast a sideways glance at Lira, who sat calmly steering the ship. “Three of them, coming in from the rear. Get to your stations and prepare for immediate engagement. We’re going dark.” She switched the channel off and looked at Lira. “Ready?”
Lira nodded as Andi typed in the codes that would activate the Marauder’s outer shields.
The stars winked goodbye as the metal shields slid out from the belly of the glass ship, like hands wrapping them in darkness. Over and around, until only three viewports remained. One large for the pilot, and two small for the gunners, decks below.
“I warned you before the last job about leaving bodies behind,” Lira said suddenly, banking them left to avoid a cluster of space trash cartwheeling endlessly through the black. Her voice wasn’t harsh. And yet Andi still felt the painful truth of Lira’s words.
Blood trails were far easier to follow than any other. And after all these years of running, it was possible that the Patrolmen had finally caught up to them because of Andi.
“I had to kill him,” Andi said. “He almost shot Gilly. You know that, Lira.”
“The only thing I know for sure is that the ships behind us are closing in,” Lira said, glancing at the radar.
The patrol ships could have come from anywhere in the galaxy, but a nagging in Andi’s gut told her they hailed from Arcardius, the headquarters of the Unified Systems. A planet with cities made of glass and buildings towering on floating fragments of land in the sky, where military life reigned supreme and a pale-haired general ruled with an iron fist.
Home. Or at least it used to be.
After years of work, the Arcardian fleet had finally been rebuilt after the war against Xen Ptera, the capital planet of the Olen System.
These new ships were faster, better equipped.
Lira laughed. “It’s too bad we’ll have to miss their party.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re here,” Andi said. “To hand deliver our invitations.”
“They won’t catch us.” Lira dug her fingers into a metal cup soldered to the ship’s dash, the words I Visited Arcardius and All I Got Was This Stupid Cup inscribed on the side. Andi grimaced as Lira pulled out a hunk of Moon Chew and popped it into her mouth.
“That stuff can kill you, you know,” Andi said as the ship groaned and lurched. She was thrust sideways against her bindings as Lira quickly steered the ship to the right.
“I enjoy flirting with death.” Her Second smirked.
They fell silent as the Marauder soared on, Lira navigating the ship left and right, up and down, the tails trailing them as if this were a mere game of chase.
But this game they were playing rarely ended with laughter and fun. It would end with bodies burning in the sky, the air sucked from their lungs as they succumbed to the void of space.
Andi rapped her fingertips on the armrests. Her rouged nails looked tipped in blood, a playful nod to those who had given Andi her pirating name.
She was frustrated and hungry and, thanks to the nightmares, reaching a level of exhaustion that shouldn’t have been humanly possible to survive. Usually she would’ve been up for the challenge because, in Lira’s terms, she lived for the thrill of a life dangling on the edge of death.
But as she looked at Lira’s hands guiding the ship, a very different image took their place.
In her mind’s eye, Andi saw her old home’s moons, those beautiful orbs of red and blue beside Arcardius, the ice rings circling them like frozen guardians. She saw her younger, gloved hands, the Spectre sigil on them winking in the light as she clutched a traveler ship’s throttle. She felt the rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins. Then that fateful crash of fire and light, the screech of machinery and a girl’s piercing scream. And blood, rivers of it, drying on hot metal...
A voice buzzed into the pilot’s com system, and Andi flinched back into the present.
“What is it?” she barked.
Beside her, Lira punched the engine, the Marauder screaming as it rocketed forward.
“I got ’em comin’ in hot!” Breck shouted. Andi could imagine her gunner several decks below, lying flat before her massive hull gun. “Almost in my sights now. Can’t outrun ’em?”
“If we could, don’t you think we would have done so already?” Andi growled.
“Godstars, Andi.” Breck’s voice was deep and throaty. “I can see the sigil now. They’re Arcardian Patrol. We’re gonna be space bits.”
Andi tapped the rear-cam, zooming in as the ships gained speed. The exploding star of Arcardius stared back at her. Her insides turned to ice. There was only one reason they would have traveled so far from their domain.
So this was it, then. The enemy she’d run from all these years had finally found her.
Though dread threatened to freeze her insides, Andi straightened her spine and steeled herself. She wouldn’t go down without a fight.
Andi reached up and pressed her responder, ignoring Breck’s final words. “You girls in position?”
“Gilly’s on Harbinger, I’m on Calamity. Permission to engage?”
Andi smiled through her fear. “Granted.”
The channel fell silent, and then it was just the captain and her pilot, hearts racing in their throats, stars streaking past them like rips in the fabric of the universe.
And then Andi felt it.
The lurch.
The bump.
