Matt & Michelle 1: The Fugitive Heir (25 page)

“That’s enough, both of you.”

As Aunt Tess spoke, I felt something hard and dark slide over her emotions. I’d never felt anything like it, but recognized it immediately. It was a mental fortress, a wall to guard her emotions while she did unspeakable things.

“Matthew, you have one chance to stop acting like a spoiled child. You cannot provoke me into doing something foolish.” Her eyes narrowed. “But you can convince me that saving you isn’t worth my time and trouble. In which case I’ll let Hector have his way with you.”

Some of my surprise must have leaked through my expression, because Aunt Tess smiled sharply and said, “Of course I love you, child, but this is a harsh business. I must weigh the benefits of my love against the benefits of sacrificing that love. I did the same thing with your parents. Cooperate with me and I can promise you’ll be comfortable. You may even come to enjoy our life.”

“I could never enjoy such a life.”

“Really? I think two or three beautiful young women at your beck and call, ready to satisfy your every desire—and young men have so
many
desires—might change your mind.” My aunt regarded me thoughtfully. “If you behave yourself, we might even let you go along on raids and claim any young woman who catches your fancy.”

I didn’t even try to keep the revulsion off my face. “You’re trying to bribe me with slave girls? Are there no depths to which you won’t sink? Why would any sane man want a harem of terrified, unwilling women when he could find his soulmate and spend his life with her?”

“Oh dear, have you become infatuated with that little blonde girl you ran off with?” Aunt Tess tutted and shook her head in disapproval. “She’s not good enough for you, Matt. After all, you’re a Connaught. She’s just a bodyguard, hardly better than a servant.”

It was my turn to smile sharply. “No, Aunt Tess, she’s my wife.”

Aunt Tess’s eyes widened. “Your wife? What-”

As if on cue, Michelle’s voice echoed down the hallway, interrupting my aunt. “Matt, turn on Nancy’s gift to you.”

Nancy’s gift? What did Michelle mean? Then I remember Flight Commander Nancy Martin tossing two vacuum harnesses to us. I’d completely forgotten I still wore the thing. Once on board the shuttle, I turned it off but was too busy holding Michelle to take it off.

Aunt Tess frowned at Hector. “I told you to lock the hatch after Matt came aboard.”

Hector growled, “I had other stuff to do. Don’t sweat it, though. I’ll go get the girl.”

The deck beneath our feet gave a lurch. All three of us recognized it as a docking tractor beam reversing to push a ship free of its berth. Immediately, a klaxon sounded, followed by a dispassionate voice.

“
Warning. Airlock open. Warning. Vacuum conditions imminent.”

Hector spat a curse and started down the corridor toward the airlock. I flipped on my vacuum harness. Aunt Tess, eyes wide, stared at me. I expected her to ask for help, for me to hold her and let my harness’s atmosphere shield extend to envelope her, too.

“What do you mean, that girl is your
wife
?” She spoke sharply, disbelief warring with surprise as she voiced the comment Michelle interrupted. Her rising voice carried, even over the klaxon. “Matthew Bernard Connaught, how could you do something so stupid?”

I wrapped my right arm around a permanent wall fixture. “Oh, that’s not the half of it, auntie dear.” I leaned toward her, my face mere centimeters from hers. “We did
not
sign a prenuptial agreement.”

Aunt Tess’s hand flew to her mouth as a truly shocked expression settled over her face. “You young idiot-”

Then the ship drifted clear of the docking bay’s atmosphere shield. With the roar of wind, the ship’s air supply rushed out of the airlock. The rushing wind caught Aunt Tess in mid-protest and swept her toward the airlock. She flailed for a handhold, bounced off the far wall, and was sucked into the corridor. Pulled horizontal by the depressurization, I wrapped my left hand around the fixture and held on.

In seconds, the roaring eased and then vanished entirely. I dropped from horizontal back to the deck, banging my knees against the bulkhead. I rose to my feet slowly and turned toward the exit—just in time to catch Michelle as she ran into my arms.

“I was so afraid Hector would just shoot you!” Her lips pressed against mine before I could answer.

I finished the kiss and pulled back a bit. “What happened to Hector and Aunt Tess?”

“They went out the airlock.” Something must have shown on my face, because Michelle hastened to add, “Don’t worry, they got blown back inside the station’s atmosphere shield. Unless they do something stupid, they’ll be fine.”

“Have I told you that you are the most amazing woman ever? How did you get inside the ship? Hector said he locked the hatch.”

Michelle ducked her head, her cheeks coloring slightly. “I snuck in behind you and hid in the compartment across from the airlock. I had to be close enough to help if anything went wrong.”

“You mean like Hector coming up behind me with a blaster?”

“Yeah, something exactly like that.”

“Well, that’s okay then.” I smiled and kissed Michelle again. “Should we dock this ship before it becomes a navigation hazard?”

Arms around each other, we went to the bridge. By the time I figured out the necessary controls, security had picked up Hector and Aunt Tess. I gently nudged the ship back to the dock, letting the docking tractor beams handle everything once the ship was in range.

I took Michelle’s hand and we walked off the ship and into the arms of our waiting family.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Epilogue

You know what the problem is with adventures? The boring wrap-up—including all the annoying paperwork—takes far longer than the exciting part. In a properly run galaxy, the Federation Navy would show up just in time to catch the pirates, Michelle and I would thank everyone who helped us, and then my family would return home to live happily ever after.

If only…

A Federation Navy squadron arrived an hour and a half after the two pirate ships jumped out of the system through the wormhole near the sun. According to reports, ten hours after leaving the Pegasus system, the two ships took the charted wormhole away from Rockville Station. From there, they blended into regular traffic patterns and vanished. No doubt they’ll set up shop somewhere else, but I’ll let the navy worry about that. Pirate hunting never was my goal.

The pirates left behind in the Pegasus Station pirate base, finding the elevator room exit blocked by one of Jonas’s teams, grabbed vacuum harnesses and swarmed through the spaceship exit. They fought their way to a freight docking bay, grabbed one of the docked freighters, and made a hard burn after their fellow pirates. In their desperation, the pirates forgot that all three of Pegasus Station’s starfighter wings harried the two Q-ships all the way to the wormhole. The starfighters intercepted the stolen freighter near the sun. Unlike the heavily armed Q-ships, the stolen ship only mounted light weapons. In minutes, the starfighters reduced the freighter to a drifting wreck. The wreck plunged into the sun long before rescue ships could reach it.

Once on the scene, the Feds fired off high-speed messenger drones with an arrest warrant and Psi Corps interrogation orders for Uncle Gunther. The pirate messenger drones must have gotten there faster. Uncle Gunther vanished hours before Federation agents came to arrest him, cleaning out quite a few bank accounts along the way. The Feds assume he’s returned to the pirates, but I’m not so sure. Uncle Gunther does love Aunt Tess and I believe he’s concocting a plan to spring her from Federation custody. But, again, that’s a problem for the Feds.

Aunt Tess refused to talk, of course, but such a high profile prisoner in such a high profile case warranted special attention. The Feds brought in their top telepath to drag the information out of her—and verify the stories the rest of us gave. How could a telepath fail to discover my powers? How could I face involuntary induction into Psi Corps right after marrying the woman I love and reuniting with my parents?

Once again, Mom was there for us. She did a lot of research into empathic powers after I was born. Apparently, empaths and telepaths mix about as well and oil and water. Telepathy is all about conscious thoughts while empathy is all about unconscious emotions. Each tends to muddle the other. In practical terms, a telepath can only tell if an empath’s statements are true or false.
And
an empath can ‘cover’ someone he truly cares about if he’s touching them during the interrogation. As Michelle’s husband, I had the right to be present during her questioning, as did Mom with Dad. With Mom and me masking Michelle’s and Dad’s stray thoughts, the telepath could only verify the truth of their statements. Since that was the only thing expected of the telepath, we simply told the truth and passed with flying colors.

Aunt Tess, on the other hand, fought the telepath every step of the way. But the telepath dragged the whole story—including our family history with the pirates—out of her. The procedure is agonizing. It took all of my concentration to block Aunt Tess’s suffering out of my mind. Painful as that was, it paled compared to the story dragged from her mind.

In the early days of Pegasus Station, my great grandfather struggled to keep the station operating while waiting for traffic to grow. Desperate for funds, he and Hector’s grandfather, Pedro, who faced a similar problem with his Redshift Mining Company, formed the pirate company. Using the wormholes Pedro discovered, their pirates robbed miners—including Redshift miners. Pedro collected insurance money for the lost ore
and
split the profits when Great Granddad fenced the ore through Pegasus Station.

The two of them ran a tidy little business, right up until my grandfather was born. By then, both companies were on firm footing and growing. Great Granddad proposed disbanding the gang. Pedro didn’t like that idea. Then Great Granddad was killed in an accident, leaving Pedro in complete control of the gang. None of Great Granddad’s children ever even knew about the pirates. Aunt Tess suspects Pedro had Great Granddad murdered, which is why she insisted the pirates keep Mom and Dad prisoner rather than kill them. I guess Aunt Tess told the truth when she called the kidnapping a horrible decision taken instead of worse choices. Of course, telling my parents the truth about the pirates never occurred to her.

When Dad and Aunt Tess were in college, my grandfather put them into low level company jobs for a few months. They lived under assumed names and had to support themselves entirely on their salary. The plan was to give them an idea of the life of the average worker in the company. Dad ended up in a factory on Mars and thrived. Tess got stuck in an office on Pegasus Station, where she badly mismanaged her money. Granddad sent Tess some money—the amount you’d expect a middle class father to send to his cash-strapped daughter—but Tess always had expensive tastes. She found her way to a loan shark and used her real name to try to land a big loan. That’s when Gunther stepped in. The real irony is that Granddad was proud of his daughter for finding such an intelligent, ambitious young man and proud of his new son-in-law for his work ethic. I expect the truth will crush my grandfather when he hears it.

On behalf of those who helped on Pegasus Station, I submitted a claim for the reward for rescuing my parents. The company holding the reward policy granted them partial credit for the rescue and a share of the reward. Greg and Nora each got ten percent and assured me they could live quite comfortably on twenty-five million credits. To their astonishment, Nancy and her team were awarded one percent each, with smaller awards going to the other two flights and all the dock workers who rallied to Michelle’s aid when Hector’s men threatened us.

GenCo stock tanked when the pirate story broke. More than a few fortunes crumbled as a result. My family lost half of our wealth and my parents dedicated half of what was left to making some kind of restitution to the victims of the pirates. That still leaves us with over twenty billion credits, so we aren’t exactly destitute. The rest of the GenCo board isn’t happy with us—and me in particular—for screwing up the status quo. On the other hand, our desire to make things right struck a chord with the general public. Dad says GenCo will survive the scandal and emerge stronger in the end.

When we finally returned to Draconis, our parents insisted Michelle and I have what Mom called a Real Wedding. Being a guy, I didn’t see the point, but Michelle embraced the idea. It’s amazing how quickly a wedding can come together if you throw enough money at it. Just six weeks after our first wedding, I stood in the same cathedral which held my parents’ premature memorial service and watched Jonas escort Michelle down the aisle. In that moment, seeing Michelle’s bright eyes and dazzling smile, I understood why our parents wanted this.

Before, on Pegasus Station, Michelle and I proclaimed our love before God and each other. Now, we proclaimed our love before our family and friends. Before, we gave our vows in private. Now, we presented them for the galaxy to witness. Then we had our kiss at the end of the ceremony.

Just as our lips touched, Michelle breathed, “Read me now.”