Atrophy (13 page)

Tannin at last looked down at her. “I think I’m hungry.”

She couldn’t help but smile, since he almost sounded surprised. “Well, is it any wonder? You’ve hardly eaten anything since you came onboard except what I’ve brought to you. Come on, we’ll go scrounge something up.”

Zahli started heading back up to the galley, hyper-aware of Tannin a step behind her all the way. For the moment, they were between calamities. But with Rian about to meet Arnon Rance, she could only wonder how long this lull would last.

Chapter Nine

R
ian stepped off the end of his rampway onto the hot, dusty ground, pushing his hair back as the dry wind whipped strands into his eyes. A skittering sensation rippled down his spine. The Erebus officers were out there somewhere, watching him. And while he’d never admit it to the crew, dealing with Rance after the last catastrophe made his trigger finger itch. As in, itch to blow the goddamn rat bastard’s head off.

But if Rance truly had managed to get his hands on some sort of cargo valuable to the Reidar, he would have done a deal with the devil himself to get access to whatever it was.

“I’ve got visual.” Lianna tapped him on the shoulder and handed over a long range Optical Caliber and Reconnoiter. He held the OCR up and looked north to where Rance was coming in on a four-wheeled land vehicle, three of his crew with him and no cargo in sight.

Rian swore, lowering the scope. “He’s got nothing with him that I can see. The damned bastard must be up to something. Both of you, weapons ready, stay alert.”

In a few moments, Rance came within range of the ship, the grating noise of the vehicle’s engine spluttering as it got closer. Rian stayed standing at the bottom of his hatch as Rance stopped a few meters away and hopped down, two of his crew doing the same while the fourth—fully covered from head to toe in coarse brown robes—stayed seated.

“Good hail, Captain Sherron. Nice weather we’re having here on Arleta.” Rance strode over, not hiding the fact he had his hand wrapped around the butt of his holstered nucleon gun.

“Where’s my cargo?” Rian folded his arms and glared down at the shorter man. If he wanted to draw on the guy, he could do it faster than Rance, even without palming his weapon.

Rance braced a foot against the bottom of the ramp, scratching at his short beard.

“No pleasantries for old trading buddies?”

“I generally only reserve pleasantries for people who haven’t ripped me off.”

Rance gave a grating laugh. “Come on, now, Sherron, look at it from my point of view. The credits were too good to pass up.”

His aggravation was starting to go the same way as the damned temperature on this rock. “I’d like to see things from your point of view, but I really don’t want to shove my head up your ass. Now where’s my cargo?”

“Fine. Business it is.” Rance turned and waved over his crew, who each took an arm of the remaining guy seated in the land vehicle, pulling him down and dragging him over. “You’ll get paid by the contactor, Baden Niels, when you reach Kasson Three.”

The trigger itch returned and Rian clenched his fingers, resisting the urge to reach for his gun. His patience had come to a rapid end. “Kasson Three is a derelict space station too close to the event horizon of a black hole. It was abandoned before the Assimilation Wars.”

“So I’ve heard.” Rance nodded with a bland smile, just asking to be smashed in the face.

“You expect me to take the cargo and my crew to an abandoned station that could be sucked into a black hole any time now?”

“You think he’s always this stupid, or is today a special occasion?” Lianna put in from behind him.

Rance shrugged, ignoring her. “Well, it hasn’t been sucked in yet, has it? That is where the
clients
are operating out of.”

Ignoring the insidious chill rippling under his skin, he speared Rance with a loathing glare. When Rance said
clients
, did he actually mean the Reidar? Could it be possible this cargo was being sent straight to the Reidar’s base of operations? The idea almost made sense. No one in their right minds would purposefully go to Kasson Three, and who would think to look for anyone there? “Where’s the cargo?”

“Here.” Rance grabbed the robed figure and thrust him forward. Rian caught the guy’s upper arms when he stumbled, putting him back on balance before releasing him.

“Whatever you do, don’t take the manacles off,” Rance finished.

Rance turned, but Rian grabbed his shoulder, shoving his gun into the man’s lower back. “What the frecking hell is this? I don’t deal in slaves.”

Holding his hands out to the sides, Rance shrugged again. “No longer my problem. I was paid to make the drop off, my part is done. Whether or not the cargo turns up at the destination is out of my hands and into yours. But, I wouldn’t want to put myself on the shite-list of those particular
clients
.”

When he got backed into a corner, that was when people started dying. Rian clenched his fist in the fabric of Rance’s dirty shirt, anger tightening toward fury. “I’m already on their shite-list—I couldn’t care less about that. But I am not freighting or trading in slaves. Not now, not ever.”

Rance inclined his head slightly to the side and unsurprisingly, Rian felt the business end of a plasma blaster pressing into his neck. That thing would blow his head clean off. From the corner of his eye, he saw Callan and Lianna pulling out their own weapons. This could get messy and personally, he liked the way his head attached to his shoulders. Yeah, maybe he could let loose and disarm every single one of Rance’s guys in under a minute flat, but he’d long ago learned giving into those murderous impulses usually caused more trouble than it solved. Like blood spatter. It was a bitch and a half to wash out of his hair, clothes, and out of his ship.

He slowly loosened his fingers from Rance’s shirt and lowered his gun, stepping back and making a big show of shoving his weapon back in the holster. The thug behind him moved away and returned to Rance’s side, but kept his blaster out.

“It’s been a pleasure doing business with you again, Sherron. Good journey.”

“I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers to let you know how I truly feel about you, Rance.”

Rance grinned, backing towards his land vehicle, his swagger leaving no doubt the guy thought he’d won yet another round. One of these days, Rance would be unlucky enough to catch Rian in a
really
bad mood. Or bump into him in the wrong station bar. And he’d enjoy wiping the guy’s shite-eating grin from his smarmy face.

“Goddamn dreg-sucker,” he muttered. If it weren’t for the IPC ship parked on his ass, he might have half considered blowing a decent sized hole in the
Dixie’s
hull.

Lianna cleared her throat loudly. “Ah, Captain?”

Rian turned to look back up the ramp where Lianna and Callan stood, Sen just behind them.

“Do you maybe want to do something about that?” Lianna nodded in the opposite direction of Rance’s retreating vehicle.

The small robed guy, who couldn’t have been much more than a boy considering his size, had run off into the desert.

“Frecking,
frecking
Christ!” He kicked the raised edge of the hatchway, frustration and fury smoldering in his limbs. Part of him wanted to let the kid go. But Arleta was a sparsely populated ore mining moon, and the closest settlement would be hundreds of land-miles away. The boy would die from heat exposure and dehydration before he got more than a few hours from the ship.

Unclipping his weapon’s belt, he let it fall to the ramp and took off after the kid, swearing with every breath of searing air that puffed in and out of his lungs.

The boy had a fair head start, but the extreme heat and scorching, dusty air was already getting to him, slowing his pace by gradual degrees. Rian ignored the burning in his chest and pushed harder, closing the distance between them in increasing strides.

He came within arm’s reach and leaped, wrapping his arms around the smaller guy. The kid half turned and tried to scratch his eyes out. As he aimed to grab the boy’s wrists, their legs got tangled, twisting him off balance. They went down, Rian taking most of the impact, including an elbow to the kidney, before he rolled on top of the squirming form.

“That’s enough, you frecking brat!”

Capturing two slender wrists at last, he forced his captive’s arms to the hot, hard ground, his body registering a couple of things before his mind could. One, the kid had soft, luscious curves where no boy should have curves. Two, the voluptuous form writhing against him had started causing a heat that had nothing to do with the sun beating down from above. And three, the subtle, exotic scent of moon jasmine on her skin speared straight to his groin.

Cursing, he wrapped one hand around both her wrists and pushed the hood off, ripping the top of the robe open. If he’d thought laying eyes on the woman he’d mistaken for a kid would help his current
hard
reaction, he’d been wrong.
So wrong
.

A wealth of thick, dark brown hair tumbled out, the sun catching fiery red highlights in the strands. The locks were held back from her face by a wide-set bronze headband. Her eyelashes were dense, dark, giving her a sultry, sleepy,
sexy
appearance. They framed rich, mossy hazel eyes that burned holes in him. Her full pink lips were fixed into an angry thin line, her flawless dark russet skin marred by dirt.

He levered himself off her, not wanting her to feel his obvious response. Where the robe had been ripped down to her stomach, it gaped open to expose a diaphanous garment, revealing the smoothness of her skin, apart from two embroidered sections covering her nipples.

“Don’t try to run from me again.” His voice came out sounding hoarse, but he wouldn’t add to this farce by trying to clear his throat. No amount of gurgling would fix the reason for it anyway.

She looked away from him, a dark colored blush staining her cheeks. Holding onto one wrist—which had a coarsely crafted manacle made of some type of blue metal around it—he stood and helped her to her feet. The brown robe slipped to puddle at her ankles and the rest of the dress wasn’t any better than the upper half he’d seen. Her womanhood was covered by another bit of embroidery, yet the entire length of her shapely legs was visible.

Her chin tilted up with the bearing of a queen as she stared him down. Though how she did that when he stood a whole head taller than her was a total mystery. Yet, that look made him feel like a bug she’d squished under her no doubt dainty foot.

He changed his grip to hold her upper arm, pulling her out of the tangled garment on the ground. “Come on.”

She wrenched out of his clasp and moved two paces ahead of him, walking with even, precise steps, her shoulders back and spine straight.

At the ship, Kira had appeared. One of the other idiots had probably called her down. All four of them stood watching his little procession with obvious amusement.

“And none of you thought I might need some help?” He stopped at the bottom of the ramp and bent to pick up his belt, strapping it back around his hips. His
cargo
stopped as well, luckily not seeming inclined to run off again.

“Maybe we should have, Cap’tin. She does look like more than a handful.” Callan cocked his head to the side, an assessing gleam in his eye as his gaze fixed on the girl.

A venomous, unpleasant sensation bubbled up within him and Rian stepped in front of her, fist clenching his sheathed knife.

“Didn’t your mama teach you any respect, Callan?” Lianna slapped Callan in the back of the head, saving Rian from doing something that would have likely included blood. A
lot
of blood. “She’s an Arynian priestess.”

“A what now?” Callan rubbed his head, glaring at Lianna.

“An Arynian priestess. From Aryn.”

Rian glanced down at the woman in question, looking for some sort of reaction. The priestess had fixed her rich, mossy gaze somewhere off in the distance, ignoring them.

No one else said anything, and Lianna sighed. “Over the past hundred years or so, some people have been born with a remarkable leap forward in their level of evolution. Their brains operate at a higher capacity than most people, so they can do things we everyday people can’t. They’re sent to live on Aryn to become priests and priestesses. When they get old enough, they go out in the galaxy to help inter-planet-negotiations, solve problems other people can’t, heal sicknesses that modern medicines haven’t and loads of other things. They’re impartial to politics, they don’t claim allegiance to any governments, and can’t be bought.”

Rian looked back at Lianna. “What do you mean they can do stuff normal people can’t?”

Lianna shrugged. “You’d have to ask her, but the most common are telekinetic abilities, telekinesis, the power of suggestion, healing abilities. Things like that.”

“You mean she can read our minds?” Callan took a large step back, as if that would put him out of mind reading range.

“Callan, I don’t know what makes you so stupid, but it works really well,” Lianna said, an exasperate expression crossing her features.

Rian shook his head. Callan was one of those smart people who could be totally stupid at random times. He turned to the priestess, moving into her line of sight so she would look at him. With Lianna’s explanation, he remembered bits and pieces of gossip he’d heard about Arynians. He’d assumed much of it had been superstition and based in fear, recalling the words
witch
and
sorceress
tossed around.

“What’s your name?”

Her lips pressed into a thin line and her eyes seemed to darken, making him think she didn’t plan on cooperating.

“Miriella Kinton.” She clasped her hands in front of her, shifting her weight a little.

“I’m Captain Rian Sherron. I’m sorry if it seems ignorant, but I haven’t met any Arynians before, and until I’d run you down, I didn’t even know you were a woman.”

She nodded, her gaze remaining steady on him, giving him a buzz in places he shouldn’t be having a buzz. Especially not for a damned priestess.

“Is what Lianna said true?” Callan demanded from behind him.

Miriella held up her hands, which had a crude kind of manacle on each wrist, though luckily, no chain connected the two. “These shackles are made from a specific fusion of metium and an alloy infused with sapphire and micro-crystals. They prevent me from using my abilities.”

Kira moved forward, closer to Miriella. “Rian, we should take them off her.”

“Hell no, we shouldn’t,” Callan scoffed.

Even with everything going on around him, Rian couldn’t get a handle on his awareness of the priestess. She’d said the manacles meant she couldn’t use her powers, but damned if he didn’t feel bewitched, his reactions to her unwanted and uncontrolled.