Zenith (2 page)

Hyperspace could bring anyone to their knees.

Thousands of lightyears streamed past in seconds as millions of stars stretched into streaks of light around the ship. On a good day, the
Marauder
and her crew could lose a tail as fast as a Xen Pterran Darowak could fly, but as Andi glanced at the radar, and three little dots blinked back at her, she suppressed a groan. Today was not a good day.

She tapped on the viewport in front of her, and the glass melded, colors morphing to show a live image from their rear-cam.

The approaching ships were just behind them. Two black seekers, angular and sharp, and in between, a giant tracker ship. A monster in the sky.

They’d outrun worse before, but something in Andi’s gut told her this wouldn’t be easy.

Andi leaned forward and spoke into the com. “We’ve got a tail, ladies.” She swallowed, and cast a sideways glance at Lira, who sat blue-knuckled at the wheel. “Three of them, coming in from the south. Get to your stations, and prepare for immediate engagement. We’re going dark.” She switched the com off and looked at Lira. “Ready?”

Lira nodded as Andi typed in the codes that activated the ship's metal shields.

The stars winked goodbye as the
Marauder
shuddered, and the shields slid out from the belly of the glass ship, great metal hands enclosing them in darkness. They moved over and around, until only three viewports remained. One large for the pilot, two small for the gunners, decks below.

“What gave us away?” Lira asked, banking them left to avoid a cluster of space trash cartwheeling endlessly through the black.

“Hell if I know,” Andi said.

The Patrol ships could have come from anywhere in the galaxy, but Andi guessed they’d come from Arcardius, the government headquarters, a planet with cities made of glass and buildings towering on floating fragments of land in the sky. After years of work, the Arcardian fleet had finally been rebuilt following the war against Xen Ptera.

These new ships were faster, better equipped, and a complete pain in Andi’s ass.

“They’ve had us in their sights for years,” she said, envisioning the overlapping triangle sigil of the Patrolmen.

Lira laughed. “It’s too bad we’ll have to miss the party.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re here,” Andi said. “To hand-deliver us 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 removed a black 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, and she was thrust forward against her bindings.

“I enjoy flirting with death,” Lira said, smirking.

They fell silent, soaring on, Lir 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 wouldn’t end 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 the great mother of space.

Andi rapped her fingertips on the armrests.

She was frustrated and hungry, and reaching a level of exhaustion that shouldn’t have been humanly possible to survive, thanks to the nightmares. 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.

In her mind’s eye, Andi saw her old home moons, those beautiful orbs of blue beside Arcardius, the ice rings circling a single one like frozen guardians. She saw her younger hands clutching a traveler ship’s wheel, felt the rush of adrenaline coursing through her veins. 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
groaning 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 already would have done so?” Andi growled, her fingertips clutching the armrests.

“Fike, Andi.” Breck’s voice was deep and throaty. “You didn’t say they were Patrolmen. Godstars, we’re gonna be space bits.”

Andi 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. “Granted.”

The com 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.

A knife of rage sliced through her. “Those bastards just shot at my ship.”

“Test fire?” Lira asked, but she cursed and suddenly they were spiraling to dodge blasts, as the sensors screamed warnings. “On second thought…”

Andi gritted her teeth. Too many shots.

“Boss, they’re turning up the heat.”

This time the voice was Gilly’s. In the background, Andi could hear the familiar
tick, tick, tick
of Gilly’s gun, the
BOOM
of Breck’s right after, one shot after another at the oncoming ships. “They’re closing in, starboard side.”

“Faster, Lira,” Andi growled. She pulled up the tracking system again, and zoomed in on those blinking red dots, ignoring her shaking hands. They were growing ever closer, and now the
Marauder
’s prox alarms were blaring. What in the blazes were the Patrolmen using to run their ships?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Boom.

Shots blasted, piercing whines that shook Andi down to her bones.

It was all she could hear, all she could
feel
, louder and louder with each blast that set the
Marauder
off-course. She pulled up the ship’s rear cam again.

Two ships flying directly behind a third, the first one a sleek black triangle with a massive gun on its nose. The other flanking it, crisp and silver with smoke stains from Breck’s ammo. The third was birdlike in its wingspan, large enough to swallow Andi’s ship twice over.

The tracker.

“Take them down!” Andi commanded. “Go
faster,
Lira.” She clenched the armrests, leaning forward as if her body could help her ship pick up speed.

“I’m trying,” Lira said. “We haven’t refueled in weeks, Andi. At this rate, we’ll burn out. We’ll have to lose them instead of outrun them.”

“But without the cloaking system, we’re flying loose as a…”

Lira stopped her with a grin fit for a murderess. “I wasn’t talking about cloaking.”

She straightened the ship and gave the engines a final push. The Patrolmen ships fell back as the darkness heightened, like something monstrous was blotting out the stars.

It was then that the ship’s mapping system came on, a cool female voice who guided their path, a comfort in the darkness. But today, the system’s words filled Andi with a cold, trembling dread.

Now approaching Gollanta.

“Starshine, Lir,” Andi said, the darkness approaching. She remembered the last time they’d come through Gollanta. “You can’t be serious.”

Lir raised a bare brow. “Have you no faith?”

It was death behind bars or death by the sweet black sky.

Andi loosed a breath, and ran her fingers through the ends of her purple and white braid. It had been months since they’d made a good purse and their stores were depleting. If they were going to escape, things would have to get a little dirty before the Marauders got away clean.

“You’re insane,” Andi said.

“You always did know how to make a girl blush.” Lir grinned, sharp canines flashing in the red lights of the prox alarm. “You should see the last ship I piloted.”

“Do it before I change my mind.” Andi tightened her harness, silenced the prox alarms, and settled back as Lira pushed the
Marauder
toward the Gollanta Asteroid Belt. The Graveyard of the Galaxy.

The place where ships came to die.

It was a massive expanse full of millions of giant space rocks, tumbling endlessly, just waiting for a target to obliterate. The
Marauder
hurtled past an asteroid double its size, an ugly bastard full of deep impact holes. Beside it, spinning slowly on its side, was a hunk of burned and blackened metal that looked like the hull of an old ship.

“Lir?” Andi asked. “What was it that happened to your last ship?”

Lira grimaced, and popped her Moon Chew. “We may have just passed it.”

“Godstars guide us,” Andi prayed.

Lira gunned the engine, and they slipped into the tumbling dark.

Girls shouldn’t be space pirates.

Those were the last words Dex had said to his ex, and, well, look how that turned out. He was eating those words now.

Fike, the irony stung.

A female captain was one thing. But a whole rutting
ship
full of girls?

They flew like demons sprung from a pit of fire. Whoever the pilot was, she had one hell of a handle on the
Marauder
. Leave it to the Bloody Baroness, the most ruthless space pirate in the galaxy, to get the best of the best.

“Androma Racella.” Dex tested her name on his tongue. “I’ve been searching for you for quite some time.”

He sat in the pilot bay of the Mirabel tracker ship, the flashes from shots fired illuminating his face as green as his Tenebris blood. Beside the tracker, spanned out like birds in a flock, flew two triangular seeker ships.

Also leave it to the Bloody Baroness
, Dex thought, as he stared at her photograph,
to get me to work with the Patrolmen.

In his hands sat a manifest that included all the information about the
Marauder’s
captain, including a snapshot of her face. The photograph was taken by Dex himself when he’d
almost
approached Androma on Tenebris last month. But the timing wasn’t right.

She was standing in the shadows of a Pleasure Palace, a Holo dancing in the window behind her. Androma’s pale, ghostlike hair was streaked with purple, which was new, and peeked out from beneath a black hood, pulled low over her face. He could barely make out her glowing grey eyes. But he could make out the rest of her: perfect curves beneath a sleek, skintight leather bodysuit; the hilt of a knife sticking out from her black boots. And of course, outside of the hooded cape, her trademark glowing katanas strapped across her back like an X of death.

The ship rumbled from a weapon blast, and the screen flew from Dex’s fingertips.

“Fike!” he cursed, as the ground seemed to fall out from underneath him, shifting sideways until he was practically dangling from his harness. “Settle her!” he shouted to the pilot.

His borrowed crew scrambled to control the ship as Dex clutched the armrests, gritting his teeth. What good was being the captain of this mission when he couldn’t get his crew to do anything worthwhile? And don’t even get him started on the tracker. Dex swallowed his revulsion.

Here I am,
the ship seemed to say.
Large and in charge and as slow as a rhinoceratops.

They’d never catch the
Marauder
. Not like this.

He stared out the viewport, past the laughable pilot and copilot, their heads pressed together as they tried in vain to discover a way to outsmart their prey.

The Marauder.

Dex could see her tail up ahead. Each blast of gunfire illuminated her outline.

A sleek, beautiful beast that looked to be made of the stars in which it swam. Deadly and delicious, all Varillium glass in the shape of an arrowhead, now concealed by metal shields to protect it during the chase.

He’d catch that damned ship and finally claim it for his own. And when he captured Androma, he’d play his part right. He’d say all the right words, get her to agree to his terms...

“Sir.” A trembling voice pulled Dex from his thoughts. He looked up at the youngest Patrolman on his dedicated crew, a boy just barely of age, who’d never seen battle. Who didn’t know the feeling of blood on scarred hands. The whites of his eyes were wide as he spoke. “They’re making an interesting move.”

Dex sighed. “Use your words, boy.”

“We aren’t able to catch up to them, as we’d previously hoped.”

“As I said,” Dex growled.

This tracker was slow as death, and the
seasoned
pilot
Cyprian had provided for this mission had no style. A starship was meant to fly weightless, limitless and free.

Just like the one they were pursuing now, with its belly full of lying, cheating lady thieves.

“So what should we do?” the boy asked, his brown eyes wide as he took a step back, sensing Dex’s oncoming explosion of outrage.

The ship rumbled.

The pilot cursed.

Dex pressed a hand to the bridge of his nose. “
You
,” he said, glaring at the youngling between his fingers, “will do yourself a favor, and get out of my sight, and go to the passenger bay so you can crap your pants in private. I can smell your fear from here.”

The boy tripped over his own feet as he raced from Dex’s view.

“The rest of you,” Dex said, standing up from his seat, voice rising to a roar, “will
catch me that fiking ship!
”

The glory of his rage was lost in another explosion.

This time it was so bright, so loud that it lit up the skies. A lurch resonated all around him, and the ship went sideways.

“Engine one has been hit!” the pilot yelped.

Dex tumbled into the metal siding, his anger tumbling with him.

This job was the answer. It was
everything.
It could make or break his career.

And if Dex lost this opportunity now, when it was so fiking close, Cyprian would pulverize him when they docked back at the Bay. He’d shatter his
loose jaw
just like he’d promised, and then Dex would be sipping from a straw for the rest of his life.

Enough was enough.

Dex raced forward, boots clacking on the grated floor.

The pilot looked up as Dex hovered over him, leather gloves squealing with each clench of his fists.

“Move,” he commanded.

“Sir, I am under direct orders from Cyprian to…”

Dex squeezed his fists. The pilot flinched back as a triangular blade sprung out of each of Dex’s gloves, just over his knuckles. “Move the fike over.”

The pilot stumbled as he leapt from his chair.

Dex took the wheel, his bladed knuckles shining as another streak of gunfire shot past. He could hear commotion in the background, the sound of the pilot’s whining voice as he phoned Cyprian, a glorious tattle-tale. Dex drowned it all out as he squeezed the wheel.

This was where he belonged, in the pilot’s chair.

The co-pilot, a green-skinned man from Adhira, stared at Dex open-mouthed. “You were right,” he said. “They’re heading for the Asteroid Belt.”

Of course I’m right,
Dex wanted to say.
Androma always runs until she finds a place to hide.

Through the viewport, Dex caught a perfect, shining glimpse of the
Marauder
, its jagged, dagger-like shape heading right into the mouth of hell.

The Gollanta Asteroid Belt was just ahead.

“Alert the fleet on Solera,” Dex said, as he angled the tracker towards Gollanta.

“Alert them of what, sir?” the copilot asked.

Dex sighed. “They need to meet us in the center of the Belt. Cloaked.” If he was wrong, well, he was already under Cyprian’s control. He might as well use it to his advantage. “Tell them the
Marauder
is heading their way.”

Dex closed his eyes and allowed himself to
hope.
Then he begged the Godstars that his last-minute plan would fall into place.

Androma was good at what she did. But so was Dex.

And besides, a prodigy could only outrun her master for so long.