ROGUE INTINCT

ROGUE STAR: BOOK THREE

ELIN WYN

AVA YORK

CONTENTS

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Epilogue - Maris

Letter from Elin

Rogue Sign

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Given: Star Breed Book One

Vrehx: Conquered World Book One

About the Author

ORRIN

“I suspect you may be the most intelligent member of our new crew mates,” I grumbled to the only other occupant of the engine room.

“Power transfer conduit is connected to the fold coil which is connected to output shaft coupling which is connected to…that doesn’t look right.” I was pouring over the engine, trying to keep my head clear.

The output shaft coupling was supposed to be connected to damper disc three that was connected to the output shaft, but for some reason, it had been moved and was now connected to damper disc two which had a more direct connection to the fold generator and the distributors.

We had been away from Katzul for days now, headed towards Qasar Station, and we couldn’t get there quickly enough.

We were forced to move slowly in order to avoid leaving behind a trail and to avoid leaving a big enough heat signature to be seen on a long-range scan.

That meant that when I was sleeping, it was in short bursts, so I could wake up once an hour to monitor the engine’s output.

And even if I was sleep deprived, I could see something wasn’t right.

I set down my tools, grabbed my tablet, and called up the AI to run a simulation on what the effect of this new connection was. I didn’t like anyone messing with my engine.

I had suffered that human, Maris, helping me rework things on my baby in order to change her output signature, but if she had messed with my output settings and made things worse, I was going to get her removed from my engineering bay.

Huh.

The AI came back with word that the new configuration was 8% more efficient than before and had been part of the signature rewrite process. I flipped the tablet off, set it down, and studied what had been done.

That was interesting, but I didn’t like it.

It was a more direct, and therefore, shorter connection, which meant that the engine didn’t have to work as hard. However, my concern was that damper disc two wasn’t built for that kind of connection and would short out faster. I took my notebook from my pocket, flipped to today’s page, and made note of what I had found and what I needed to do.

“I’d appreciate you telling Maris to keep her hands off my engine,” I grumbled.

Unfortunately, Persephone the cat wasn’t taking messages. Instead, she sauntered over, rubbed up against my back with a loud purr, then curled up in her little space in my tool box.

Maris was an intelligent woman, probably the only one other than their doctor that I respected, but she had been given permission from the Captain to mess with my engine.

Irritation at the thought still flared through me, like a rash, an itch I couldn’t reach.

I had built this engine, then rebuilt it several times. I knew this engine as if it were my own child, and this human woman, with no knowledge of the Shein NX-01-T type engine or our fold technology, was going to tell me how to rewire it, reroute it, and rebuild it.

Not likely.

Her ideas had worked, I’d admit that. But, then she had been assigned to work in my engineering bay.

Why?

I already had my own crew, and they all knew not to mess with my engine unless they could guarantee that their work was going to be correct. Then this human comes in and wants to do things that just can’t possibly work.

Every day, another idea, another fantasy that did nothing but reinforce how little she understood my baby.

You couldn’t reroute the post-stage fold tuner assembly back into the intake collector with a series of filters to filter out the impurities caused by the fold. It just wasn’t a feasible action. The heat alone would force the cooling units to work exceedingly hard, and we didn’t have enough spares to replace all of them.

Then, she wanted to rework my formula for dispensing the fuel. Really? How did that woman know anything about starship fuel?

Speaking of fuel, while we weren’t running low, we certainly weren’t in an area to refuel. There were three stations more or less along the way to Qasar Station, all of them Dominion-controlled.

Well, there was a chance that one of them was pirate-controlled, but no one knew for sure. It had changed hands at least three or four times a cycle in petty skirmishes.

However, if we were forced to run and use the engines at full for longer than a few minutes, we wouldn’t have enough fuel to make it to Qasar safely. Which meant we might have to risk refueling at one of those station.

It was a gamble.

We couldn’t fold there, which would guarantee our arrival, because it would leave too strong of a signature and anyone looking for us would know exactly where we’d gone.

“Every solution brings more problems.”

Persephone had moved to my lap and was now rubbing her head against the tablet, rousing me from my thoughts.

I blinked, realizing I’d been blanked out, staring at the screen, for nearly fifteen minutes.

Scro. It felt like metal filings had worked their way into my eyes, my brain wrapped in insulation foam.

And that couldn’t happen. I had to find a solution.

I shook my head and got to my feet to stretch, which sent Persephone running in annoyance, and yawned until I could feel it in my toes.

There had to be a way to give us speed without leaving behind a signature. I pulled up the blueprints of the engine and began cycling through different configurations, looking for efficiency, speed, and a negligible heat signature.

I had to find a way to fix this. I couldn’t continue working the way I was, the crew couldn’t continue sitting around doing nothing, and I couldn’t handle another request for work from Maris.

Not right now.

Not ever, if I could help it.

MARIS

I carefully balanced a tray piled high with some kind of smoked meat and vegetables. Aryn followed behind me with bread and something that resembled an Earth salad that’d been colored by a toddler. Parria brought up the rear, carrying a huge pot of steaming sauce.

I didn’t understand why we still brought meals to the alien women in the cargo hold. It wasn’t as if their door was locked. Shenna and Kalyn had repeatedly told them they were free to move around the ship.

It’d be nice if they felt free enough to take themselves to the dining hall.

Though, if I had the option to lounge in my room all day while someone brought me food, I’d take it, at least for a while.

Maybe they had some kind of complex? They’d been prisoners for ages, for all we knew. Maybe they forgot they had free will.

God, that would suck.

When we reached the cargo hold, I bumped the door open with my hip.

“You’re late,” one of the alien girls said as she attempted a smile.

She was joking. Probably. But she’d only just grasped the basics of Terran and it didn’t seem like she understand how tone affected the meaning of words.

I forced my face to stay neutral, remembered they were guests. But still, she sounded like a spoiled madam. Her smile was unsettling, the way her mouth was shaped made me think that smiling wasn’t a natural gesture among her people, whoever they were.

“Keep your pants on, we aren’t going to let you starve,” Aryn said when I didn’t say anything.

“I do not understand,” the alien girl spoke again. Her white hair shone in the perpetually dim light of the cargo bay.

Rescuing these alien girls was a great idea at the time. I mean, it was the right thing to do, but seriously, the consequences were a complicated pain.

They were about to be sold off to rich perverts one by one when the Captain, Chief Aavat and our very own Kalyn and Shenna stepped in and smuggled them onto the Rogue Star.

I wish I’d taken part in the rescue. I would’ve gladly smashed the face of anyone who tried to touch these women.

And, to be honest, that’s probably why I wasn’t included in the mission.

I still couldn’t believe it was Shenna, of all people, who’d found them. She and the first mate, Aavat, snuck off the ship a few times. I didn’t think she had the nerve to do something like that. In a weird way, I was proud of her. She always came off as innocent, maybe even a little naïve, but it turned out she has bigger balls than half the males on this ship.

“You don’t have to understand,” I assured the white-haired alien girl, my temper back in check. “Come get some food.”

The girls lined up as they always did, except for one. The same one that never moved from her spot in the back of the cargo hold. Her dark skin almost blended in completely with the dark steel of the hull, except she shimmered in the light, just a bit. Her eyes looked like amber pebbles. I swear, she never blinked.

She creeped me out, and honestly, I thought I’d been doing pretty well with the whole tossed into space, surrounded by aliens who thought I was the alien thing.

The ship’s doctor Lynna, who was more of a mother than my own mother ever was, used to worry about Amber-Eyes when she didn’t eat.

But it’d been nearly a week, so I guess Amber-Eyes belonged to a species that didn’t need to eat often.

Lynna still fretted, because that’s what she did. Maybe it was part of being a good doctor.

But with every step as I moved through the cargo hold, passing out food and putting on my nice face, I noticed Amber-Eyes following me with her unblinking gaze.

Every moment I felt her eyes on my neck and back as if she was pressing her fingers against my skin.

It didn’t take long for me to get fed up with it.

“Can you hold this for me?” I pushed my empty tray at Aryn.

She scrambled to take it without dropping her own. “What the hell, Maris?” she grumbled, but I’d already walked away. I crossed the cargo bay and stopped a few feet from Amber-Eyes.

“Is there something wrong?” I asked.

Her expression twisted into something fierce and ugly.

She rose to her feet faster than a human would’ve been able to do, hell, faster than I’d ever seen anyone move. She bent her arms inward, exposing the black talons that stuck out of her elbows.

She spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. Her language sounded like a hissing snake.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” I groaned. “There’s no need to be a hostile bitch!” I threw my hands up in exasperation.

Amber-Eyes hissed and swung at me with extended claws that looked like miniature versions of the talons on her elbows.

“Big mistake,” I snapped, blood rushing through my ears.

“Maris!” Aryn appeared at my side. “I don’t think Captain Dejar would like it if you battered one of our charity cases,” she muttered to me.

“She’s going to batter me!” I said in defense.

“She’s a nutter for sure, but be the bigger person,” Aryn insisted.

Aryn was the best friend I’ve ever had. We met on Persephone Station years ago when my temper was twenty times more explosive than it was now. She was good at talking me out of a rage, though she wasn’t known for her mellow disposition, either.

For some reason, people always thought the best way to get me to stop being angry was to say things like relax, calm down, or the dreaded take a deep breath.

Aryn figured out early on that a healthy dose of do you know how dumb you’re being? was the best way to take the fire out of me.

“Fine.” I stepped away from Amber-Eyes, who still looked like she was ready to kill me.

“She’s just psychotic because she went through hell,” Aryn reminded me.

“I know, I know,” I nodded. “But the others went through hell, too. You don’t see them glaring at everyone, putting the evil eye on anyone trying to help.”

“You know better than anyone that people cope in different ways,” Aryn reminded me.

“When did you get so wise?” I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a shining example of healthy coping mechanisms, I know.”

“She won’t be with us forever,” Aryn reminded me. “Just try not to punch her lights out while she’s here.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, the anger settling back down into a dull heat behind my breastbone. “Now, you need to mess something up, so I can lecture you.”

“It’s not even midday yet,” Aryn laughed.

“I know! You’re behind schedule,” I replied. I risked a glance at Amber-Eyes. She still stared at me, unblinking. Different types of alien behaviors or not, it wasn’t hard to guess she was seething with anger. “I think I’m going to go.”

“Smart choice.” Aryn patted my shoulder.

The other human woman, Parria, stared at me with wide eyes as I left the room.

I’d told Commander Kalyn that putting me on the care rotation wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t have those naturally nurturing tendencies women like Lynna had.

Though, aside from Amber-Eyes, I actually liked the other alien women well enough. They’d had it rough, even rougher than us human women. And we had been mere moments from being exposed to the vacuum of space, so that was saying something.

I wasn’t sad to leave Katzul. That place was weird, and my definition of weird had changed considerably over the last few weeks.

Aliens?

No, that wasn’t weird to me anymore.

Aliens putting on fancy clothes to go and buy other aliens?

Yes, extremely weird.

And disgusting. Even Amber-Eyes didn’t deserve a fate like that.

She was still a bitch, though.

I stomped through the halls. My sisters always told me I moved like a tornado. Everyone knew when I was coming. Everyone knew when I was going.

I tried my best not to destroy things as I moved. Sometimes it happened anyway.

Sometimes I felt bad about it.

But most of the time I had other things on my mind, projects, interesting, exciting things to build or take apart. I couldn’t ever figure out how to keep working on my puzzles and dance around delicately at the same time.

I made my way to the engineering workshop near the rear of the ship. A station had been set up as my workspace, but I was still settling in.

I had been the Head Engineer on Persephone Station. Technically, I was the only engineer, so the Head Engineering position was mine by default.

Humility be damned, I was one of the best engineers in the Terran System.

The best thing about the station being destroyed, being dragged into an alien universe, and probably never going home?

Brand new, interesting tech to learn.

I was immediately put to work on the Rogue Star, which was great. I loved my work.

It was fun getting to know the inner workings of an alien spaceship.

Unfortunately, the Head Engineer of the Rogue Star was not enthusiastic about sharing a workspace. Orrin was a talented engineer. We might not be the best of friends, but I could give credit where credit was due.

But as talented as Orrin was, he had a bit of a problem with sharing.

I felt qualified to comment on this, because I was honest enough to know I had one, too.

Since he was technically my superior, he decided who did what job.

And morning, noon, and night, he had me doing basic upkeep jobs I could do in my sleep. It was unbelievably dull. And frustrating. And annoying.

Though I hadn’t been aboard long, I already had so many ideas to make the ship operate more efficiently.

Orrin never listened, though. Clearly, he didn’t trust anyone else with his ship. One day, I’d prove to him that I could take on more complex jobs without blowing us into a black hole.

But, for now, I had to be content to tinker at the workbench.

I sat down at the workbench and picked up pieces of scrap.

Working with my hands melted the tension right off my bones.

I forgot about Amber-Eyes, grumpy-pants Orrin, and everything else immediately and entered my happy place.

ORRIN

Something was wrong.

Things were moved, put in different places, and other things were in my area that I knew, or at least thought I knew, I hadn’t put there.

I rubbed my eyes, whole body aching.

The lack of sleep was messing me up, I knew… but still. I knew my workbench.

Knew my tools.

And someone had been rearranging them.

I heard the footsteps coming and everything was immediately clear.

None of the rest of my crew was stupid enough to use my things, so that left Maris.

“Hey, Orrin.”

That was it.

That was all she said as she moved past me back to the workstation.

“Might I ask why you’re at my workstation?”

Her shoulders stiffened as she turned around. Her lips pressed together for a moment, then she forced a slight smile. “I was trying to finish building this small converter, so I could show you something, and I didn’t have enough room in my area. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and looked down at her. “Well, let’s see. You have your own area in which to work, yet you deliberately chose to use mine. My tools and components are out of place, and you’re acting as though what you did was simply nothing.” A small voice in the back of my head suggested I might be overreacting, but I was far, far too tired to listen to it.” Yes, it’s a problem.”

“First of all,” she said as her chin rose, eyes narrowed, and a single finger stabbed towards me. “Your stuff is all here. Yes, I moved it around, but I can move it back without issue. I remember where everything goes. Secondly,” she poked me in the chest with two fingers. “I’m not some random loser you can just order around. I have a brain and I’m one of the best engineers in the entire Terran System. I’d rather work with you than behind your back. Got it?”

When she poked me in the chest, I clenched my fists as I kept my arms crossed. The slight whine from my left hand reminded me it was time for a tune-up.

Reminded me that I’d done my own share of forcing people to “stand back, let me work”.

Years ago, while on a trip back home to care for my grandfather, my hand had gotten caught in a piece of farm equipment and was mangled beyond help.

The doctors and prosthetic manufacturers told me there was nothing they could do. The nerves in my hand, wrist, and half my forearm had been obliterated.

I told them all to go kout themselves and spent the next year and a half building and designing my own prosthetic. When I was finished, I went back to each of those doctors and manufacturers and showed them in a nonfriendly manner that they had been wrong.

So, this outburst of anger and insubordination from Maris was nothing new.

I understood her completely.

And it didn’t make a bit of difference.

It was my engine, this was my workstation, and she had violated my space without compunction.

“Very well, you say that you can put my things back where they belong because you remember where they go? Get your useless materials away from my station and put my workbench back the way it was. You have until I’ve completed my checks of the engine to finish.”

I walked away from her, on making sure I ran my engine checks as quickly and thoroughly as possible. At least my anger had burned through some of the haze from lack of sleep.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that,” I heard her say from behind me. She jogged to catch up, then stood in front of me, holding that piece of junk. “Will you stop for just a moment and let me show you this?”

“No.” I continued to the central engine computer and began running my checks on the system.

I heard her curse under her breath, then, with a huff, she slammed the converter down on the desk next to me. “Look at me,” she snapped.

Caught a bit by surprise by the force in her words, I turned. “What is it?”

“Look at this converter I’ve been working on.” She picked it up and handed it to me. “Go ahead. It’s not a complete working model because I’ve been forced to work with scraps, but the principle is there. With something like this, we can improve the efficiency of the engine, get better consumption, speed, and less heat. It’ll get us another couple of years out of the engine, as well as another ten to fifteen percent added to our speed.”

It was a bit crude looking, but the basic premise was there. I turned it over, examining it more closely. A few modifications, and she might be on to something.

Might.

“Theory is well and good, but in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re stretched to the limits. We can’t afford for our only engine to be your laboratory.”

“Are you serious?” she asked, her temper rising. “I’ve been working on this for years, trying to find a way to make Terran space travel safer. I had already proven that it works in small tests. I’m telling you, this will work. Why won’t you give me a chance to show you?”

“Can you guarantee its viability?” I handed the converter to her and turned back to the computer screen. My digital checks were nearly complete. “Can you guarantee that it will work for longer than a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours? Can you guarantee that it won’t destroy the engine, leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere with only a few hours of oxygen remaining before we all die?” I continued to monitor the readouts as she fumed next to me.

“Guarantee? No one can guarantee anything when it comes to innovations, not completely. There’s always a chance that something will go wrong, but I’m telling you that these converters will work. I can have four of them built in a matter of hours, then if we install them at…”

I held up a hand to silence her.

As she stopped talking, I looked again at the readouts. Something wasn’t right in the digital checks and I was going to have to go into the secondary engine compartment to look into it. According to the checks, one of the decompression lines was working at only fifty-percent capacity, and that meant that the cooling pumps were getting overtaxed.

Kout.

“My apologies, Maris. There is a problem that I must deal with and I don’t have time to speak with you about your attempts at playing with my engine. Excuse me.”

“What the hell did you just say? ‘Playing’ with your engine?”

I gave her a quick glance and her face was changing color, getting redder in hue. Not really the best look for her.

“You have got to be shitting me. I’m damn good at what I do and if you would just get off your goddamn pedestal for longer than half a second, you’d see that. I can help you with the issue you have with the decompression line, too” she said.

She must have looked at the screen.

“Then, if you let me, I can make four converters to install in the engine which will solve issues like this and allow the cooling units to completely block off our heat signature.”

The idea sounded good, and I might be honestly interested.

Someday.

Right now I just didn’t have the time.

“No. Now, I have work to do, and if I remember correctly, you do, as well. Aren’t you supposed to be working on replacing the thermostats in section six? Get it done.”

“Don’t forget to clean up my workstation. I don’t want to see that mess when I get finished,” I called out to her as I walked away.

I headed for the secondary engine compartment, two levels below us.

Her idea wasn’t a bad one, but it just wouldn’t work.

We didn’t have the proper materials on board to make the converters she recommended, and the fact that she couldn’t guarantee their effectiveness was enough reason to say no.

She just needed to do the work that was assigned to her and let me do the work that I needed to do.

If she wanted to work on an engine on her own, then maybe she needed to get off this ship. This engine was mine.

That fact was plain and simple.

And non-negotiable.

MARIS

“What an absolute idiot!” I exclaimed for the fourth time since I’d returned to the room I shared with Aryn roughly two minutes ago.

We were two of the lucky ones. Our room had a tiny porthole that looked out into the vast expanse of space. Aryn liked to pile whatever she could find into a precarious stack, so she could sit with her face right up near the window.

With a long sigh, she looked away from the window and stared at me. “You’re either going to have to tell me who you’re talking about or stuff a sock in it,” she said.

“Orrin,” I groaned. “He came into the workshop while I was tinkering,” I explained. “I thought it was the perfect time to show him my ideas for that converter I used to work on in my spare time on Persephone Station. Remember?”

“How could I forget? You were obsessed with that hunk of steel,” Aryn replied.

“They’ve got metal better than steel on this ship! Metal that’s perfect for the converter.” I spoke faster. A stranger wouldn’t understand a word I said, but Aryn was used to it. I got excited when I talked about work.

“Orrin didn’t want to try it,” Aryn guessed.

“No, he didn’t!” I exclaimed. “But now would be the perfect time! I could build it in a day, and we need every advantage we can get. I’ve already got the plans outlined. I just need materials.”

I could see the system in my mind, exactly where the pieces needed to go, what we’d need to rearrange.

It was all so clear.

Why couldn’t he see it?

“Why would he say no if you’ve got everything worked out?” Aryn asked.

“It’s too experimental,” I said with disgust. “We’re drifting slower than I could walk in an effort to save fuel. Wouldn’t a reasonable person want to try something that could help us make the most of the fuel we have left?”

“Have you talked to anyone else about it?” Aryn asked. I stopped pacing.

“No, I haven’t.” A brilliant idea struck me. “I’ll go to Captain Dejar. He’ll want to know that I thought of a way to conserve fuel.”

“Will he listen to you over Orrin, though?” Aryn pointed out.

“I doubt it,” I sighed. I started pacing again, more slowly and with less vigor than before. If this was like a problem down in Engineering, I’d work backwards, see what steps needed to happen first. “I could go to Commander Kalyn,” I started. “and get her to talk to Captain Dejar on my behalf. He’ll do anything she wants. She’s got him by the balls.”

“Does he even have them?” Aryn cocked her head to the side.

“What?” I sputtered, knocked out of my head by the question.

“Balls. Do Shein have them?”

I sputtered with laughter, trying to come up with an answer. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Aryn shrugged. “But Dejar’s got something that Kalyn likes and Shenna’s moony over Aavat. Whatever Shein males have, it must be good.”

A lot of women from the Terran System shied away from the subject of men. Now that the human male birth rate had dropped to nearly zero, men were essentially mythical creatures. The thought of coming into contact with one through a breeding contract rendered most women speechless. Some were incapacitated by the thrill of it. Others balked in fear.

Aryn and I took a different approach. We turned our species’ business-like way of creating future generations as a joke. Laughing at men and breeding contracts made them less intimidating. Not that we would have to worry about that again. From the look of it, we were never going back to the Terran System.

Who would’ve thought being pursued by the Dominion would’ve had such a great upside?

I wasn’t too crazy about the attempted kidnapping, though.

“Great,” I sighed, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Now I’m going to walk into the office thinking about what Shein males have in their pants.”

“You’re welcome!” Aryn called after me as I strode out of the room.

Commander Kalyn wasn’t in the office, but in the dining hall having a late lunch.

For once, she was alone.

A perfect opportunity.

“Hi, Commander.” I stopped in front of her table.

She looked up at me with a friendly, if slightly surprised, smile. “Maris, good to see you! You know you don’t have to call me Commander, right? It’s not like we’re exactly part of the Space Force anymore,” she laughed, gesturing to the empty chair across from her, which I took.

“I know,” I replied. “Old habits and all.”

“Did you come for a chat or do you need something?”

“I wanted to chat with you about something I need,” I grinned, crossing my fingers under the table. “Well, that we all need.”

“What’s that?” she tilted her head, waiting.

“I found a way to increase fuel efficiency,” I explained. “But Orrin isn’t willing to let me install it.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Kalyn replied.

“He’s scared,” I scoffed, chest tightening just a bit. This would be my only chance. Surely, I could make her see the possibilities. “He doesn’t want to take any risks. Though, if you ask me, trying to make our fuel supply stretch to the space station is really a bigger risk in the long term.” Her mouth tightened, and I knew she was worried too. “What I’ve come up with allows the ship to travel at greater speeds and use less fuel without increasing the heat we give off.”

“That sounds amazing!” Kalyn gasped. “We wouldn’t have to worry about managing supplies so carefully. We could get the girls from the auction house on their way to a new life quicker. It sounds like it’ll solve all our problems.”

“That’s what I’m saying.” So, maybe I didn’t mention that it was experimental tech that I’d only tested in theory, but she didn’t need to know that. Not exactly.

I was sure the converter would work. I’d make it work.

“Does Dejar know about this?” she asked.

“I haven’t told anyone about it except for you and Orrin.”

Well, and Aryn. But she didn’t count, not in the way Kalyn was thinking.

“Let’s go tell Dejar. I’m sure he’ll let you install it if it helps us as much as you say it does,” Kalyn said enthusiastically.

She dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin like a proper lady. Most of the time, I forgot that she was the daughter of one of the most powerful women on Mars. Then she did things like that, and I remembered she came from a more rarified life.

I used to hate her for it but over the past few weeks, she’d proven that she was nothing like her mother. She cared about us, all of us. Even if I’d been a bitch to her.

Maybe those kinds of assumptions were another old habit I should break.

Dejar sat at his desk frowning over a small stack of papers. If I had to guess, I’d say he was staring at our dwindling supply list. Aavat stood with his back to me, looking at a massive three-dimensional map of Dominion space, watching the progress of the Rogue Star.

“Maris thinks she can solve our problems.” Kalyn folded her arms across her chest and gave Dejar a knowing smile.

“Is that so?” Dejar said without looking up.

“She’s proposed a kind of converter for the ship that could increase fuel efficiency without giving off extra heat,” Kalyn explained.

“The Rogue Star already has one,” Aavat said over his shoulder.

“It could use an upgrade,” I jumped in. “It does its job well enough, but it could be so much better.”

“How so?” Now Dejar lifted his head to look at me.

“The metal used throughout the ship is superior to Terran steel in almost every way, but the Terran heating process gets more out of metal than whatever process you’re currently using,” I began. “If I use your metal, but heat it my way, I can create an engine modification that amplifies energy bursts by exposing the reactions happening within the engine to a greater heat threshold.”

“I thought the idea was to decrease heat?” Dejar lifted a brow.

“That’s the second part of the enhancements I’d make,” I carried on, hoping they’d follow along, that I’d prepared well enough to convince them. “I’ve been experimenting with scraps in the workshop. I’ve come up with an alloy that I can coat the metal with. It absorbs heat and cools it.”

“Not a bad idea,” Dejar nodded. “It would solve many of our problems until we can get to the space station. And it works?”

“Absolutely.” I forced a smile.

Theoretically, it worked perfectly. If my upgrades didn’t work, the risk would be minimal. The ship wouldn’t be worse off than it already was.

Probably.

“Aavat, call up Orrin, let’s see what he says,” Dejar ordered. Aavat tore himself away from the map and spoke rapidly into the intercom.

“Are you going to let me fix up the engines?” I asked.

“Yes,” Dejar scrubbed at his temples. “If it’ll help us get to the space station faster, I’ll try just about anything.”

“Thank you!” I beamed. “You won’t be disappointed. Neither will Orrin.”

And neither would I, when I could finally show him that I knew what I was doing.

Aavat returned with Orrin. Orrin looked at me with a confused expression then looked to Dejar.

I held my breath. This was where it could all go terribly, terribly wrong.

“Maris believes her enhancements will make everything easier on us,” Dejar explained. “I’ve given her my approval to carry them out.”

Orrin stole a glance at me, and I could tell he was annoyed. I’d had lots of practice, learning that particular expression.

I didn’t bother hiding my smug smile. I was going to lord this over him for days, but a teeny, tiny part of me might have felt badly. Just a bit.

“On the condition that you, Orrin, supervise her work.”

My smile dropped off my face in an instant. Shit.

ORRIN

“Are you sure you want to put that coupling there? It would be more efficient if you ran it through the damper instead of around it,” I grumbled two mornings later.

Her converter was coming along, and this time, with the right parts to work with, she was taking her time to make sure it was built properly.

With another huff, she put her tools down and turned to look at me. “Do you want to build this without any clue as to what I’m trying to do?” she snapped at me.

“I have a clue as to what you’re trying to do, that’s why I’m saying that the coupling should go through the damper instead of around it,” I shot back. This entire project was a waste of time. Waste of resources.

The fact that she wanted to bypass the damper and connect directly to the cooling interface made no sense. There was a reason the damper was there in the first place.

“Oh, really? Are you sure? Then maybe you would have heard me say that we’re bypassing the damper because the output will be too much for it to handle and it’ll explode.” Her tone of voice was that of an older child talking down to a much younger and dumber sibling.

I bristled. “Well,” I tried to keep my voice level and calm as I spoke to her. “Then why not add a second damper disc to it, or…”

I hesitated as a thought popped into my head. Her own expression changed as she caught on to the fact that I had a potentially brilliant idea. “What if…oh, ho ho, what if we, instead of using the damper discs, we wrap the coupling in a cooling line, fill the cooling line with some hyper-insulation, and then connect that to the main interface.”

I looked at her and watched as she went through the mechanics of my idea. Her head bobbed side to side a couple of times. I forced myself to sit patiently for nearly two minutes before she began nodding.

“Yeah, I think that could work. Yeah,” she was getting excited, as was I. “Let’s give it a try.” She flashed a smile, and for a moment I was struck by the sheer brilliance of it.

As she worked on getting the cooling line around the coupling, I headed over to the supply closet to get some of the hyper-insulation, a spray that set and hardened in two seconds after coming into contact with oxygen. We’d have to make sure that we had things in place exactly where we wanted them before we sprayed.

Luckily, while hyper-insulation hardened to nearly the strength of steel, it was easily dissipated by a solution that came with it when you bought it. That allowed you to fix mistakes easily. The problem? The stuff was ridiculously expensive, and not something you wanted to play with irresponsibly.

When I returned with the materials, Maris had already gotten things ready. The cooling line had been placed around the coupling and had already been connected to the main interface yet disconnected from the tertiary crankshaft.

Alright. I had to admit she was good. Talented. Quick to learn.

Still a pain in my hurg.

“Let’s hope this works,” I said as I put the nozzle for the hyper-insulation inside the cooling line. I sprayed and pulled the nozzle back quickly and watched as the insulation quickly expanded and set. “Hurry, connect it!”

She snapped it into the crankshaft assembly and pulled her hands away. “Let’s test this baby,” she smiled at me.

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I couldn’t resist smiling back. We connected two tablets to the engine diagnostic ports, then turned it on. The noise inside was intense and Maris tried yelling something at me, but I couldn’t hear her at all.

Squinting a bit from the loud noise, we monitored the tablets to see what the results would be. Within seconds, we both knew the converter was working, but we continued the test for another five minutes. After the five minutes were up, we disconnected the tablets, stepped out of the engine compartment, and then reconnected to the ports outside the door.

Maris’s smile spread from ear to ear and was filled with an I-told-you-so-stupid sense of smugness. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, but my own smile betrayed me.

We’d done it. She’d done it.

We monitored the converter’s progress every five minutes for the next hour, going inside the compartment every ten minutes to monitor the temperature.

It was working perfectly.

Her estimates earlier did her work no justice. She had claimed that with four converters installed, she’d be able to add another ten to fifteen percent speed and make the engine eight percent more efficient. By my calculations, her converter, this one solitary piece here, would give us six percent better efficiency all on its own.

The idea of four of them on at once? If they were wired correctly, we could increase our efficiency by nearly twenty-five percent.

“Take a nap,” she pressed her tiny hands against my chest. I blinked. I hadn’t even realized she’d moved closer to me.

“Can’t,” I muttered. “Need to monitor.”

She rolled her eyes again, but this time it felt different, friendly. Like we were a team. “We’ll take it in shifts. If it works, we’ll have a lot to do.”

I started to shake my head, but she just looked stern. “We can’t risk making a mistake, right?”

“You know it’s not fair to use my own words against me, right?”

A flash of that brilliant smile, and I stumbled back to my cot.

After waiting and monitoring for two hours, there was nothing wrong with her converter. With a new sense of purpose and a slightly clearer head after my nap, we began work on the other three. She showed me how to build the converter with the second one, then we each built one separately for numbers three and four.

Over the course of the next ten hours, we built, sealed, installed, tested, and fumed over the next three converters. Converter two was giving us fits, and after giving up on it, installing the other two and ensuring they were working, we went back to number two.

“What in the world is going wrong with this one? I just don’t understand it,” Maris said, voice tired and frustrated.

I was at a loss for words, as well. It was built exactly like the other three, connected just like the other three, and performed in tests like the other three. The issue was, when it was connected, it didn’t work at all.

“We have to take it off and take it apart,” Maris sighed.

I rubbed her slumped shoulders for just a moment. For such a small thing, she’d worked hard as any Shein.

“But it’s the only way to get this done,” I offered as I started the long process.

One of the components had stripped, which meant that it wasn’t turning. We found a replacement, rebuilt the converter, reinstalled it, and retested it. Things were finally working perfectly.

Maris hit me with a smug smile as I ran the tests on each converter again. The engine, with all four sections humming in concert, was producing twenty-two percent better than it had been, which fell within the given range for the margin of error.

“So? What did I say?”

I looked over to see Maris glowing with pride. As she should be. I glanced again at the tablet, the stack of tasks still waiting for me.

After the burst of energy at our success, all I wanted to do was sleep.

Which wasn’t going to happen.

“Your converters are working according to specifications. I need to continue monitoring them to ensure that they continue to perform without incident over the long-term. While I do that, why don’t you go about finishing up the projects that need to be done.” I rubbed my eyes, transferred a portion of the tasks to her own tablet.

She’d done well and should have some sort of reward, and I knew the perfect thing. “You can use my workstation if needed.”

Her smile vanished, and with a string of curses emanating from her lips, she stomped away.

Well, that wasn’t what I’d intended.

I watched her for a moment, then I turned back to my panels, continuing to monitor the changes.

She would get over it.

But as I pulled up the next set of diagnostics, a twinge of something far too similar to guilt ran through me.

MARIS

“Are you going to wear something nice to dinner?” Aryn asked.

“Is that a trick question?” I laughed, looking down at my coveralls. “I don’t have anything nice. None of us do.”

“There’s that storage room filled with skin dye and alien formalwear,” Aryn reminded me.

I’d completely forgotten. There wasn’t any reason for me to think about it. It’s not like I ever needed anything from it. Going out wasn’t really in my plans, and fancy clothing would just get torn working on the engine.

“You want to go to dinner dressed as a snooty alien?” I asked her.

“Kalyn, Lynna, and some of the other girls are dressing up, getting a little formal,” Aryn replied, a small twist to her lips.

I gave her a funny look. “When have you ever been interested in going all out when we’re staying in?” I asked.

“I’m not. I just wanted to see how long I could keep you going,” Aryn laughed, sticking out her tongue.

“Bitch,” I laughed.

We linked arms as we walked through the corridors of the Rogue Star. When we entered the dining hall, most of the women were already there. A long row of tables were pushed together, with as many chairs as possible squished up next to each other in an attempt to accommodate just under thirty women.

“When Kalyn said she wanted us to be closer to each other, I didn’t think she meant literally,” I muttered to Aryn, who clamped a hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh.

After the alien girls came aboard, Kalyn had watched the distrust between all of them and got the idea that the women from Persephone Station should have dinner together once a week.

If we ever got into a tough situation again, like when we were almost kidnapped by a Dominion official on Dominion Outpost Nine, she wanted to make sure we could always rely on the trust between us.

Which made a kind of sense, even if I hated the idea.

If someone had told me last month that I would be willing to participate in a bonding dinner on an alien spaceship, I would’ve told them they were crazy.

Honestly, the alien spaceship would’ve been the more believable part of that story.

When I first arrived at Persephone Station, I didn’t care about making friends. In fact, I was relieved I wouldn’t need to make friends.

The more people close to you just meant more chances to get stabbed in the back.

I’d had my fill of that at a young age.

For the first two years of my time on Persephone Station, not even Aryn and I were close. In fact, it had taken me until the beginning of last year to warm up to her at all.

She was still my only friend, though I was thawing out to some of the other women.

A little.

We found two seats next to each other and pushed them outward as far as we could, so we could have a little elbow room. Shenna sat directly across from me. The weird little fluffy thing she’d found sat on her shoulder, watching us with its massive eyes.

I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not. Technically it was cute. I supposed. But it was strange, and I wasn’t sure I believed she’d just found it in a closet. What if it had babies all over the ship and they got into the systems, mucking everything up with their fur?

I shook myself. That wasn’t really likely. Hopefully.

Shenna had lived with Aryn and me before Kalyn had moved into Captain Dejar’s cabin, making a bit more space. Having Shenna in our room hadn’t bothered me, though space was tight.

But the damn cat that she cared for bothered me a lot. I swear that cat was going to kill me in my sleep. I’m surprised it hadn’t eaten the fluffy thing yet.

“Aren’t we going to invite our honored guests?” Xyla, a girl who’d only been at Persephone Station for a few months before the station collapsed, sneered at Kalyn.

I didn’t know Xyla well at all. Based on her attitude, I was alright with that.

I might be a stand-offish, short-tempered bitch, but she seemed to genuinely hate everyone else, except for the two girls she bunked with.

And she didn’t seem to like them all that much, either.

“I wanted the first dinner to be just us.” Kalyn’s smile was obviously forced. “If they want to join us later, should they still be aboard, they’re more than welcome.”

“Will they already be gone by next week?” Manda asked. She was a naturally quiet person. Even though we were all contained on a finite amount of space, I didn’t see her very often. I didn’t even know who she bunked with.

Maybe Kalyn had a point with these dinners.

“Maybe not. We’ll be arriving at the space station sooner than expected,” Kalyn smiled. Now I could see how she resembled her mother. I’d never met Adastria Askvig, but I’d seen her on news reports, and her signature twice. It was on my discharge papers from the Space Force and on my contract for Persephone Station.

I felt a small pang of guilt as I remembered how I used that contract against Kalyn, used Kalyn’s mother to justify my dislike for Kalyn.

I still felt like Kalyn was only given the position of Commander because of her mother, which wasn’t right. But no matter how she got the position, Kalyn was actually suited for the job.

She just needed to be launched into another galaxy to figure that out.

“Really?” Shenna asked, her eyes shining. Out of all of us, she was most eager to explore the universe.

“Yes. You can thank Maris for that.” Kalyn nodded to me.

A few people laughed as if Kalyn had told a joke. I rolled my eyes.

“It’s true. I outsmarted the ship's engineer and gave the engines a tune-up,” I boasted, with just a faint tinge of guilt running through me.

It wasn’t entirely true.

I didn’t outsmart Orrin’s engineering. He was a genius, even though he was stubborn and unreasonably and I’d never tell him so.

I just tricked him…a little bit. Just enough to make him try something new.

I caught Xyla rolling her eyes at her end of the table.

“Careful, you might pull something,” I called down to her.

Aryn snorted and Xyla fixed me with a glare that would’ve been scary if I’d never seen anyone glare before.

“Forgive me.” Her voice dripped in sarcasm. “Am I supposed to be congratulating you for fixing up an alien’s ship? You could be using your skills to get us out of here.”

“You can’t be serious.” I wanted for her to laugh and tell me she was kidding. She didn’t. “You want me to focus on escaping…in the middle of space where we’re technically criminals? And to where? Empty space?”

“All of that stuff about the Dominion is a load of crap!” Xyla exclaimed. “They aren’t going to shoot us down for crossing back into the Terran System. The crew is just saying that to get free labor out of us.”

“You do remember the Dominion attempting to kidnap us, right?” Aryn said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“I remember the Dominion promising to take us home. And I remember her,” she pointed a finger at Kalyn, “doing everything she can to keep that from happening.”

“I told you,” Kalyn spoke through gritted teeth. “I heard someone talking about experiments and only needing females.”

“That doesn’t mean it was about us!” Xyla exclaimed.

“Did you really want to take that chance?” Kalyn replied.

“Maybe. But I didn’t get a choice. You were too busy scaring everyone so you could save them in the end. You wanted to make us forget that three of our women are dead because you decided that the rest of us should stay on this ship!” Xyla shrieked.

Kalyn’s mouth was a hard line. During our first few days aboard, the Rogue Star was attacked by a nameless dark ship that came out of nowhere. They were after the cargo we carried. None of us knew what was in the crates, but it didn’t matter. Three women died in the firefight that ensued. Captain Dejar lost some of his crew members, too.

It had been a terrible, awful day, and I’d been helpless, unable to do anything about it.

Like Kalyn.

“Tell me what else Kalyn could have done, what any of us could have done,” I demanded. “Xyla, you’re so convinced you never had a choice in the matter. What were the other options? What other choices do you think are available?” I stared at her expectantly.

Her eyes darted around the room as she tried to think of something. The other women watched her. Some looked annoyed, others disappointed.

“That’s what I thought.” My smile held no warmth. “There weren’t any other choices. We would’ve died if the Rogue Star wasn’t there. You’re just looking for someone to blame because you can’t cope.”

“Bitch,” Xyla hissed.

“Kind of,” I admitted. “But if I, of all people, am willing to accept living in fucking space with a bunch of aliens, that should tell you something.”

It was no secret that I had been stubbornly opposed to everything that happened after Persephone Station was destroyed by a shockwave. I had once felt what Xyla felt. I definitely took it out on Kalyn.

Then I’d realized that Kalyn cared about us. Captain Dejar cared about us, too, even if it was mostly for Kalyn’s sake.

I might not be the friendliest person around, but I was smart enough not to separate myself from the people I depended on for my survival.

“She still killed three of our own,” Xyla hissed.

“No, she didn’t,” I snapped, fed up with the stupidity. “The only people that killed Idensa, Daria, and Neera are the ones who fired the guns on that ship. Now, if you’d please be quiet, I’m trying to bond over here.”

Xyla stood up, pushing her chair back so hard that it clattered to the floor, then stormed out of the dining hall.

“Thanks,” Kalyn said to me. “It means a lot that you’d stand up for me.”

“No problem,” I nodded. “You showed us who you really are when you helped us escape from Outpost Nine.”

“I was in a blind panic most of that time,” Kalyn laughed.

“So were we,” Lynna chimed in.

“You’d all tell me if you hated it on the Rogue Star, right?” Kalyn asked the group.

“Would it matter if we did?” Manda asked. “It’s not like we can go anywhere.”

“True,” Kalyn nodded. “But I like knowing where everyone stands.”

“Free food, a place to sleep, and a chance at a decent life are all most of us want,” I told Kalyn. “We have that here.”

ORRIN

Yet another short rest, more tests, another nap.

And just to complicate things, my mind had begun to mess with me, draw me down mental paths I refused to explore.

The longer I worked on the engine, the more I felt badly that I hadn’t given Maris a chance earlier to show what she was capable of.

I never felt that way. I didn’t have regrets. Didn’t second guess myself. Certainly not about my engine.

I was exhausted, I knew I was.

I had to be if I was beginning to feel bad for running my engine bay the way I wanted to run it.

It had been nearly twenty hours since we had installed the first converter, and all tests had come back positive, but I had to make sure.

Too much depended on it.

I went to compartment one to check on converter one. After connecting my gear, I ran the diagnostic tests, and everything came back optimal. Things were working as they were supposed to be. Numbers two, three, and four all tested the same.

Bypassing the system, the way Maris had, through a hand-built converter made from spare parts and connecting it the way she had…the idea had never crossed my mind. When she had proposed it, I thought she was insane. I fully believed that her idea would fail miserably, and I would be able to kick her out of my engine bay, so I could work freely like I always had.

But she had proven me wrong. I still don’t know for certain how she managed to think of it, but her idea not only worked, it had surpassed expectations. The initial tests had shown a twenty-two percent increase in efficiency. The latest tests now had those numbers at twenty-nine percent. The converters had improved with use.

And I owed Maris an apology, not just for how I had treated her, but for how I had doubted her.

But first I needed some sleep, some real sleep. I headed back to my bunk and slept for hours, after messaging Qal that he could finally fly the ship normally.

While I couldn’t feel the increase in speed, I could hear the engine change from a low rumbling to a more natural purr.

I slept like a newborn babe.

When I woke up, I did a quick check on the engine, which was still working sensationally, then went and cleaned myself up. A fresh shower cleared up my senses and, combined with some real sleep, my mind was back to working clearly again.

I found Maris working at the little bench that I had assigned to her. I stayed back and watched for a few moments as she worked on a control unit for one of the small cranes in the hangar bay.

“Ahem,” I cleared my throat as I came up behind her. “Good morning, Maris.”

She shook her head only slightly. “It’s about lunch time. You were asleep for quite a while.” Her voice was cold, lacking the easy warmth we’d build up while working on the project.

I missed it.

“Really?” That was brilliant, I kicked myself. “I suppose I slept longer than anticipated.”

“Mm-hm. So, what can I do for you, Orrin?” She never took her eyes off her work as she cut some new wiring and soldered it into the control panel.

“You might want to go with a stronger gauge wiring there. These control units are notorious for burning out the standard wire,” I suggested as I made my way around her bench, wondering how to crack back through her shell.

“Huh. Should have thought of that. Thanks.” She quickly cut another bit of wiring from a different spool, removed the wire she had been working with, and put the new one in.

“Nice work. That should make the control unit work like it’s supposed to.” She finally looked up at me, a hint of a smile forming on her lips.

I might be getting addicted to those. And I had to go all the way, if I was going to ever have another one soon. “I wanted to talk with you, if you wouldn’t mind.”

She shrugged. “As we said back at home, it’s a free country. You can do what you want.”

I deserved that. “I wanted to apologize.” Her eyes went wide, then back to normal as she leaned back in her chair. I continued, feeling out the words as I spoke them, like testing the path of a problem. “I wanted to let you know that your converters are working as advertised, better, actually, and that your idea was brilliant. I was wrong in not giving you an opportunity to show me.”

“Go on,” she said, face still remote.

I sighed. She wasn’t going to make this easy, but I supposed she deserved it. “I was wrong in treating you how I did. You are a fantastic engineer, and instead of blowing you off just because you’re human, I should have given you a chance. You might not know this engine as well as I do, but you have proven that you are intelligent, intuitive, inventive, and that you are more than capable of being able to work, not just here, but nearly anywhere.”

“Nearly?” She cocked an eyebrow.

“Well, there are ships out there with technologies that even I don’t know,” I said hastily.

“Okay.”

I wasn’t sure what else I could say. Maybe the direct truth. “I’m sorry. I should have listened to you from the beginning.”

She sat there looking at me, and I was fully expecting her to snap at me, to berate me, to essentially tear my head off in order to yell at me better. And I’d be willing to work through that. Anything but this coldness. But she surprised me yet again.

“It’s okay. Well, it’s not really okay, because I am good at what I do and all I wanted to do was make myself useful and help out, but…” she took a deep breath, then leaned forward in her chair as she let the breath out. “I understand. I might have been a bit overprotective myself if our roles had been switched.”

She was right, again.

I had been overprotective. I trusted my team, but I also restricted what they were able to do without me. I didn’t want them messing with my engine without my being there to help fix mistakes or to see what they were doing. I had built this engine, so I was exceedingly proud of it. She truly was my baby.

Maris continued. “I had hoped that my helping to rework our output signature would have shown that I knew some things but, I do understand. I accept your apology, on one condition.”

“What’s that?” I asked, a tiny flicker of worry winding its way through my good intentions.

“Can I actually have some real work to do instead of all of these piddling little things?” she stood up and walked away from the workbench, then turned around. “I don’t mind doing the little stuff, but I would like to be able to work with you on other projects. I want to learn how the engine works and maybe offer some ideas without them being tossed aside just because. Can we do that?”

“So, allow me to understand what you’re asking.” I said as I rounded the workbench and approached her, examining her. I had always seen her, but never paid attention to her. Her dark black hair curled its way down to her shoulders, when it wasn’t tied back to stay out of her face. Her grease-smudged face, darker in complexion than some of the other humans, highlighted her gray-colored eyes. I’d seen those eyes burn with a fury even a Tutahn would respect when she was angry but blazed with a level of intelligence screaming to be used.

I wasn’t going to let that intelligence be held back anymore.

“You want to work, you want to learn, and you want to be more than a human disrespected simply because your boss is a perfectionist. Am I close?”

She didn’t even bother to hide the smile. “Yeah, seems about right.”

I made a show of thinking about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. You’ve earned it and more than deserve it. I would count it as an honor to be able to work together with you.”

She gave me a big nod. “Thank you.”

“You are most welcome. Now…I do have a small list of projects all over the ship that need to be worked on,” I said as I pulled my tablet from my pocket. “Would you care to help me?”

“Little jobs?” she asked.

“Some, but believe it or not, they’re all important. I’ll let you pick which one you want to work on and if you need any information, I’ll gladly share.”

With a shrug, she smiled and held out her hand. “Sounds like a plan.”

I matched her smile and handed over the pad.

MARIS

Orrin and I stayed up all night rewiring the registration chip, so the Rogue Star could get into the port of Qasar Station. We’d already created a set of fake chips when the ship docked in Katzul, however, scanning a registration chip in Katzul was more like a ceremony than an actual security check.

Not surprising after finding out that alien women were auctioned off to wealthy Katzul citizens. I bet we could’ve used our original flagged registration, linked to our criminal status, and we still would’ve been allowed in the port.

The Qasar Station was going to be more challenging. Yes, it was largely ignored by the Dominion due to its remote location, but it was a legitimate station. I didn’t get the sense this station frequented the same gray areas that Katzul seemed to live in.

Orrin and I checked, double checked, and triple checked that our fake chip would pass for a real one on the most sophisticated of systems. Well, any system as sophisticated as the one on the Rogue Star, at least. I hoped it would be enough, but until we were safely docked, I’d worry.

I pushed against the door to my room, nearly smacking into Aryn.

“What are you doing up?” I grumbled.

“What do you mean? It’s nearly time for the morning shift to start!” she replied, tugging on her work boots.

“What?” I demanded.

“Have you been in the workshop all this time?” Aryn asked. I nodded and tried to cover up a massive yawn with my hand.

“Orrin and I were working on a new registration chip.” My mind flickered for just a moment to his hands, strong and sure, reaching between mine for another tool as we worked side by side.

“Usually you’re in a foul mood after working alongside Orrin.” Aryn narrowed her eyes. “What happened?”

“Actually, we got along well,” I said, as surprised as she was now that I thought about it. “He’s calmed down after my engine modifications worked.”

“I knew he’d come around to your genius one day,” Aryn smirked.

“I didn’t think we’d work together as well as we did,” I admitted. “Now that he trusts me in the workshop, I expected him to leave me alone and let me work. Instead, he started working with me. As it turns out, we make a good team.”

“I think you need to sleep,” Aryn snorted. “You’re praising Orrin.”

“I know,” I laughed. “I’m more surprised than you are. I might’ve judged him too severely.”

“You? Never,” Aryn protested, and rolled her eyes.

“All hands prepare for arrival.” I heard Qal’s voice through the intercom speakers mounted on the walls in the corridors, even though the door was closed.

“We’re here!” Aryn exclaimed. “Finally! I’m going to lose my mind if I have to spend another day trapped on this ship.”

I crossed the room and put my face up to the window.

“Come here!” I waved to Aryn. “You can see everything through the window.”

Aryn and I peered through the porthole, cheek to cheek, to take in the sight of the space station.

I’d never given space stations much thought. Persephone Station was grounded to Pluto’s icy surface. Its structures were bulky, angular, primarily made of steel ten inches thick to handle the cold. Qasar Station was a work of architectural genius.

For one thing, it was massive. It looked like a city big enough to rival Katzul. Beautiful domes that looked like glazed amber protected the station from the vacuum of space. The domes were held up by a flat metal structure of interlocked circles. The underside of the disk-like metal structure had a stalactite-like appearance, constructed of all sorts of materials. I assumed it made up the working underbelly of the city.

“I wasn’t expecting anything like that,” Aryn breathed in awe.

“Me, either,” I replied, searching for clues. How did it all work? What kept it together? “I wonder what’s in the domes.”

“Captain said this was a mechanical station, didn’t he?” Aryn remarked. “That could be where they store all of the ships awaiting repair.”

“That’d be a lot of ships, then.” I stared at the domes, wide-eyed. “Let’s go get a better look from the observation deck.” Aryn and I pulled away from the window and rushed out the door. The exhaustion that had pressed on me minutes ago faded away into nothing.

Others had the same idea of gathering on the observation deck. Aryn and I joined Shenna, Lynna, and Kalyn as the Rogue Star drifted closer to the floating city.

“This isn’t going to be anything like Katzul, right?” Shenna asked. “Katzul was a fun adventure, but I’m not up for doing it all over again.” She laughed uneasily.

“It’s supposedly the polar opposite of Katzul,” Kalyn assured her. “Most of the residents are travelers, like us. They stay here when their ships are in need of repair.”

“Are they also wanted criminals, like us?” I snorted.

“I wish you wouldn’t call us that,” Lynna said in distress.

“It’s what we are here,” I shrugged. “It’s what most of us were on the Terran System, too.”

“I wasn’t,” Lynna replied. “I was a doctor.”

“You’re still a doctor. You’re just a criminal, too,” I replied.

“I haven’t done anything wrong. None of us have,” Lynna insisted. “We couldn’t help being nearly blown off our station. The planet’s crust shattered under us.”

“I never said it was fair,” I told her. “But we can’t change anything about it. The Dominion’s made it clear they aren't interested in negotiating.”

“It doesn’t make any sense!” Lynna exclaimed.

I hadn’t realized how much this bothered her. Then again, this was likely the first time Lynna and the word ‘criminal’ ever crossed paths.

“It never makes sense,” Aryn muttered. “It’s just how it is, and you’ve got to learn to live with it.”

“At least we have a safe place to live,” Kalyn jumped in to smooth things over. “We have friends who can protect us. We can protect each other.”

“That worked out fantastically when that damn ship attacked us,” Aryn replied.

“We weren’t prepared.” Kalyn’s voice wavered just slightly. “But we’re better prepared now.”

“Are we prepared to take on more alien women if we run into another auction ring?” I asked.

“The station is so remote. I can’t imagine that sort of business would be very lucrative,” Kalyn reasoned. “If everyone here is shelling out their savings to pay for ship repairs, they won’t have any extra to spend.”

“I did some reading up on the city,” Manda chimed in. She was so quiet, I hadn’t even heard her approach. “Only sixty percent of the residents are temporary. Forty percent live here full-time. Some of them have amassed enough wealth that they could probably live on Katzul if they wanted to.”

“So, they could be running auctions,” I reasoned.

“They won’t be running auctions,” Kalyn said sternly. “Dejar and Aavat are certain this place is up to scratch.”

“Enough about the that,” Lynna shuddered. “I hate to think about what those poor women in our cargo hold went through.”

We reached the entrance to the port, tucked up against the edge of the platform holding the domed city up. I chewed on my bottom lip as the ship came to a halt at the dockmaster’s station. After a few moments, the ship moved forward again. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. The false registration worked. Orrin and I were talented as hell. I’d have to track him down later and congratulate him on our good work.

The Rogue Star was a sweet ship, or so I’d decided. It wasn’t like I had any basis of comparison. Sure, she was a little rundown after a few rough weeks, but she blended in with the other ships docked at the space station.

“Are we renting space in town like everyone else who comes here for repairs?” Shenna asked.

“With what money?” Kalyn replied. “Most of what we earned in Katzul went to extra food and fuel. Even with the increased efficiency of the engines, if we rent rooms, we’ll be on thin ice until we get more work.”

“The Captain will let us explore this time, won’t he?” Aryn pleaded. “I was just telling Maris I’ll go mad if I have to stay confined on this ship any longer.”

“Dejar and Aavat have to assess the risks of this place first,” Kalyn replied. “If they think it’s safe enough, I don’t see why we all can’t stretch our legs…but only if you’ve passed the auto-tutor lessons on Shein and you get someone to help you with the stardust to disguise yourself. We’re not taking any chances of being recognized as human.”

“Thank the sky mother,” Aryn sighed. “I can do that. I’ve just got to get out.”

“And that’s enough sightseeing for now,” Kalyn declared. “Let’s get back to work, ladies.” Now that we’d entered the port, there wasn’t much to look at, really. We still dispersed slowly. Aside from the usual cleaning, upkeep, and looking after the alien women in the cargo hold, there wasn’t much else to be done.

I wandered away from the window and was surprised to see Orrin lingering in the doorway.

“Any issues with the registration chip?” I asked. Stupid question. I would have known if there had been. Probably, we’d all of known.

But seeing him had sent a jolt through me, like the spark from a faulty wire, scrambling my brain.

“It worked as if it were a real chip,” he replied.

“Good! We certainly spent enough time on it. Have you slept yet?” I asked.

“Nope,” he shook his head. “As soon as I got back to my room, I was called up to help get to the port. You?”

“I came here as soon as I heard we were arriving,” I replied, sneaking another glance out the window. “Worth it, though. I didn’t think Qasar Station would be so pretty.”

“You like pretty things, do you?”

I started to snap something back, then realized he was teasing me. Orrin, teasing. That was different.

I liked it.

“I can appreciate a decent aesthetic as long as it’s functional,” I replied with a smirk.

“Your pipe joints beg to differ,” Orrin replied.

I lifted my chin and laughed. “You got me there. I’m shit with pipe joints,” I admitted.

“You should go and get some sleep. If you’re laughing at my bad jokes, you must be suffering from exhaustion,” he said.

“You have a point,” I grinned, even though the exhaustion weighed down my bones. “You should sleep, too.”

“After we’ve both gotten some rest, would you like to go into the city with me?” he asked. “I need to pick up some supplies for the ship.”

“Sounds fun!” I grinned. “Count me in.”

ORRIN

Q asar Station—a massive station nearly as large as the city of Katzul itself. We’d be able to find everything on my increasingly lengthy list, once we hit the market.

Maris and I had already made plans to go aboard the station and find a parts dealer, or three, to replenish some of our missing inventory, as well as maybe find some components that we could use to make more modifications.

Unfortunately, I’d only had time for a brief nap before the captain and the chief called a crew meeting, so neither Maris nor I were likely at our best.

Dejar was the first to speak. “I want to start things off with by saying thank you to our engineering team, especially Maris and Orrin for not only keeping us off anyone’s sensors, but for finding a way to work together.” He cracked a smile. “This is going to make our lives a bit easier from here on.”

“Not to mention we can run from the Dominion without being found,” one of the men yelled out as the others started clapping. That brought about a round of laughter on top of the applause.

Maris acknowledged the applause with a small curtsey that I had to believe was a bit sarcastic.

I just nodded, too tired to get fancy.

Dejar continued once the noise settled down. “Very true, Labec. Although it might be nice if we didn’t need to run from trouble quite so much. Speaking of which, Qasar Station, as you’ve all seen, is a massive place where you can easily get lost or into trouble, or both.”

“I prefer the trouble, especially the female kind!” another of the men shouted out. Several men laughed at his joke, most of the women rolled their eyes.

I just dropped my head in disappointment.

“Yeah, about that,” Dejar said, a hand in the air to regain control. “Aavat and I will be working with the rescued women to get them new identification papers, so we’re going to be here for a few days. You are allowed to leave the ship to enjoy some shore leave, but do not, I repeat, do not get yourselves into a situation where we have to come to your assistance.”

Aavat stepped up to finish the statement. “Because we won’t. It’s as simple as that. If you do something stupid enough to get into trouble, that’s on you. If you jeopardize this ship, this crew, or what we’re doing, we’ll leave you here to deal with it on your own. Is that clear?”

No one questioned it.

Aavat had already proven, when he ran his own crew, that he would do exactly what he had just said.

It was rumored he’d even turned in his own lieutenant for crimes the idiot thought he could get away with just because the station they were visiting wasn’t very affluent.

I had no doubt that Aavat would do exactly as he said, and Dejar wouldn’t contradict him.

With no one arguing the point, Aavat continued. “The Dominion very rarely comes out here, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t. Qasar has their own fully-armed, fully-staffed security force that is big enough to take us all down without blinking, so don’t piss them off.”

His gaze searched over each member of the crew. “If you are a Terran female and you decide to explore, you must take a Shein member of the crew for backup, and you must ask permission from Kalyn. She’ll know if you have the language skills necessary to blend in and if you need help with your disguises. This isn’t to make you prisoners, we’re just trying to keep everyone safe.”

Murmurs passed through the women, but most seemed to understand, even if they weren’t happy about the restrictions.

“Finally, as I used to say with my own crew, if any of you are finished with what we’re doing and no longer wish to be part of the crew, this is your stop.” Aavat waved towards the door. “Pack up and leave. It’s been nice working with you, hope you do well, but if you’re done, get off my umbba ship quickly. Enjoy your leave.”

As everyone else made their way to do whatever they were going to do, Maris and I headed over.

“What’s the plan?” Aavat asked as we got close.

“We need to get some parts and supplies,” I answered. “I’d like Maris to come with me. It’ll make things easier if she can see the options we have herself.” I bumped her with a hip, unreasonably pleased by her exaggerated look of annoyance. “Otherwise I’ll have to return things until I come back with the exact piece of metal she’d been thinking of.”

She sighed, but I knew I was right. She’d want to see everything, figure out some crazy way to put it all together.

And it would probably work.

Dejar tilted his head. “I meant what I said, thank you. If it weren’t for the two of you finally figuring out how to work together, we would be having problems.” I heard the sarcasm in his voice.

What he really meant was, if he hadn’t given Maris permission to work on the converter, which was a subtle way of telling me to pull my head out of my hurg, we’d still be limping along, and I’d be trying to live off of thirty minutes of sleep at a time.

Not that things were much better yet, but soon there’d be a reasonable amount of rack time in my future.

He kept going. “Everyone’s nerves were getting too close to explosion for comfort, so thank you.”

Maris answered before I did. “No problem, sir. Just glad we were able to get the job done.”

“Good. Don’t go crazy with the money, but make sure we can fix her up if she gets broken,” he said as he shook our hands.

They walked away to deal with the rest of the women.

I turned to Maris. “Can you apply your makeup by yourself, or should you wait for someone to help?”

“I’ve got this,” she nodded. “Can’t be that hard, compared to what we’ve been doing.” With a quick turn, she headed back to the interior of the ship.

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, looking remarkably like a Shein woman.

“Ready?” I asked.

I held out my arm in what I hoped was a cross-species gesture of gentleman-like behavior and she took it cautiously, careful not to smudge her shimmery makeup.

“With pleasure, my good sir,” she answered in Shein, with just a trace of an accent. Her smile and exaggerated shrug of a shoulder made it funny. Possibly funnier than it should have been, but we were both punchy.

We exited the ship and our senses were immediately bombarded from all sides.

The dock that we had been directed to opened up directly into a massive market. The sounds of vendors calling out to prospective buyers, advertising their wares, and negotiating deals mixed with curses from dock workers, children screaming and laughing as they raced around, and an overhead announcement system calling out names, providing news, and announcing the latest changes to flights in and out of the station.

I looked around, then back at the Rogue Star.

She was a fairly decent-sized ship, but sitting in dock with other craft around her, she was miniscule to look at. The station itself seemed both a marvel of ingenuity, invention, and stupidity.

The station was covered in domes. In the long hours of the trip out, I’d done some research.

I liked to know what type of engineering was supposed to be keeping me and mine alive. Each dome was made up of honeycomb-shaped panels connected to one another with steel, hyper-insulation, and, surprisingly enough, a sealant made back on my homeworld.

Each panel, if done smartly, should be several meters thick in order to prevent breakage from common weapons fire. From this distance, I wasn’t so sure that the panels were that thick.

They looked exceedingly thin to me. That meant that the smallest crack in just one panel would result in that section breaking away and then the vacuum of space sucking everyone and everything out.

I found myself walking uneasily, unable to shake the thought. Each dome was a different size, connected to one another through a tunnel-like network of bridges. The smart move would be if each individual ‘tunnel’ could be sealed to prevent damage to that dome if another dome was compromised.

Nothing I’d read gave me an indication of how that safety system would work. I rubbed my eyes. More research time would have been nice.

Eight smaller domes surrounded one large dome, which held the primary hub of the city. The central dome was where most people lived and was definitely looking better than the outer docking dome we were in now. The buildings here, while well built, seemed to be more for function than aesthetics, while the buildings in the middle, at least from what I could see, looked to be designed more for aesthetics and comfort.

“Any particular direction you want to head in first?” I asked, but before I got the words out the smell of what seemed to be dozens of food booths struck me.

My stomach grumbled, and Maris laughed.

“Hungry?”

“A bit, but maybe we should try to get some work done before we eat. Earn our meal, so to speak.”

She nodded. “I like that. Uh,” she looked around, taking everything in. Then she pointed to the left. “Let’s go that way, get our bearings, see what we can see. If we don’t find anything soon, we’ll just ask someone for directions.”

“Very well,” I responded, happy to be stretching my legs. I could have gone with any of the other members of the engineering team, but it was nice to spend time with Maris without us both being elbow deep in parts.

“What could it hurt?”

MARIS

“You’re carrying an awful lot.” Orrin appraised the tools and other bits and pieces in the basket I held with both hands. “How much of that is on our list?”

“Most. Some,” I grinned, and shrugged a little sheepishly. “About half.”

The long hours with the auto-tutor were paying off. I’d been willing to put in the work to read Shein, so that I could devour the specs for the ship. Speaking Shein hadn’t seemed as important initially since everyone on board wore a subdermal translator, but if that was the key to my freedom to explore, I’d take it.

“And who’s going to pay for the other half?” Orrin teased.

“I am,” I declared, already eager to play with my new toys. “I’ve been saving my earnings from work.”

“You sure you don’t want to use it to buy something fun?” Orrin asked.

“What could be more fun than buying a bunch of stuff to experiment with?” I asked. “I hope you don’t mind sharing the workbench with me. I’ll be tinkering there for the next week.”

“I don’t mind,” Orrin offered me a kind smile that caught me off guard. I expected lots of things from him. Brilliance. Stubbornness. But not kindness. Something about it startled me.

Luckily, he didn’t notice. “In fact, I’d be interested to see what you come up with. I can’t count the number of upgrades and enhancements I want to implement on the Rogue Star now that I have an extra set of hands.”

“Good thing we’re on a space station specializing in ship repairs, right?” I nudged his arm.

“It’s fortunate,” Orrin agreed. “I thought about buying some parts on Katzul, but the chances of them being illegal or stolen were far too high.”

“Why would that be an issue?” I asked. “It’s not as if a few illegal parts are going to make the Dominion hate us more than they already do.”

“In theory, you’re right,” Orrin agreed. “But the Rogue Star deserves better than illegal parts from shops with no quality control.”

“You make a good point,” I nodded, amused. “You really care about the ship, don’t you?”

“Where would we be without the ship?” Orrin replied.

“Dead icicles floating through the void,” I replied. “What I meant was, you care about the Rogue Star beyond simply doing a good job.”

“I’ve served on a lot of ships in my life,” Orrin said. “The Rogue Star is by far the best.”

“In what way?” I asked. “She’s a fine ship, to be sure. It’s not like I know anything about alien spaceships, though.”

“It sounds strange, but the Rogue Star has a fantastic personality.” Orrin almost looked embarrassed by his answer. Seeing a giant alien look embarrassed was not something I’d ever thought I’d see. It was kind of…cute.

He was kind of cute, now that he wasn’t being an asshole.

Huh.

“It doesn’t sound strange,” I smiled. “We didn’t have ships or anything like that on Persephone Station, but we did have transport pods. I definitely had my favorites. Some were more cooperative than others, some were just a pain to work on. Some made me bleed every time I took a wrench to them.”

“I’ve always thought it has something to do with the person who built it.” There was an odd spark of enthusiasm in Orrin’s eyes. “I’ve worked on ships built by beings that cared for nothing but money, what the profit margin would be for every voyage. Those ships were never easy to work with. Always throwing temper tantrums.”

“I know just what you mean!” I groaned, remembering. “There was one transport pod that we never used because no matter what I did, it’s main hatch wouldn’t stay closed. I replaced the hatch at least eight times, replaced the hinges more times than I could count, and replaced the locking mechanism at least once a month, yet that fucker would spring open with a lot of force whenever it pleased. It almost broke my jaw once.”

Orrin tossed his head back and laughed. It was a great sound, unbridled and full-bellied. Hearing it was enough to make me smile.

I kinda liked it.

“I worked on a ship that had a tendency to launch cooling gel at random whenever the Captain pushed it past a certain speed threshold,” Orrin replied. “Got me right in the face one time. To this day, I have no idea why that happened.”

“Glad to know some things are universal,” I laughed at his scowl.

“I can’t think why the Dominion classified the Terran System as non-evolved. From what I’ve seen, you humans are just as intelligent as the majority of species in Dominion space.” Orrin’s brows drew together, lips twisting to one side.

“I thought the Dominion made that assessment based on the resources a system possesses,” I recalled what Kayln had explained.

“Intelligence counts as a resource,” Orrin replied. “Though, from what I’ve heard, your space travel tech leaves much to be desired.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I snorted. “A one in four chance of dying every time someone travels by Flosh drive isn’t anything to be proud of.”

“Didn’t you have to travel by Flosh drive to get to your station?”

“Yup. We all did.”

I felt a twist in my gut.

I wasn’t afraid of much, but I was afraid of traveling by Flosh drive. I still remembered the pure terror I felt when I was strapped into the transport pod.

“Despite the risks?”

“Most of us didn’t have the option to say no,” I replied softly. “The people who sent us to Persephone Station had already decided our lives weren’t worth much. They didn’t have to face the results of the gamble.”

“I’m sorry.” Orrin placed his hand on my shoulder. His hand was so big that his palm covered the space between the bottom of my neck and the downward slope of my shoulder. He was steady.

Safe.

“It’s fine. I got lucky.” I looked down at my basket filled with mechanical goodies, forcing myself to focus on them and not see the pod closing over me, sealing my fate. “Do we have everything we need?”

Thankfully, Orrin took the hint.

“Everything but a new shock absorber for the second bay. One of them is wearing a bit thin, and I’d prefer to replace it before it becomes a problem.”

“I have just the thing for you,” a watery voice spoke. I whirled around to find what looked like a large blue and green slug, tall enough to look Orrin in the eye.

Giant slugs. Not my favorite new species. I knew I’d promised I’d work on that whole snap judgement thing, but really.

Giant slugs.

A gelatinous arm materialized as the shopkeeper pulled a product off a shelf.

“This is the ShockEater Version Six,” the merchant declared proudly.

I tried not to snort at the terrible product name. Maybe it was the result of a far too literal translator device, but nothing else was coming out so badly.

Maybe that’s just what giant slugs thought was exciting branding.

In one shapeless hand, he held up what looked to be nothing more than a thin metal spring with large bases on either end. “State of the art in every way.”

“May I?” Orrin extended a hand. The shopkeeper hesitated for the briefest moment before passing Orrin the ShockEater.

“Seems light,” Orrin said, tossing the spring from hand to hand. The shopkeeper watched him like a hawk, unblinking. “I’m installing this in an older ship. Are you sure this will withstand that level of impact?”

“You could throw the entire Qasar Station against this thing and it could handle the impact,” the merchant bragged.

I smelled a rat.

Maybe a slug.

“It’s made from a rare metal harvested from Uptial, an uninhabited moon orbiting Ketlar Zel. Lucky for us no one lives there.” He drew his gelatinous form further upright. “We were able to discover the properties of this special metal before anyone else. You won’t find anything like this anywhere in the galaxy!”

“It feels like standard Starbarite to me,” Orrin commented.

Since I’d started working on the Rogue Star, I’d learned that Starbarite was the equivalent to Terran iron. Common and useful, but mostly unremarkable.

“It has similar properties to Starbarite,” the shopkeeper said quickly. “However, when heated correctly and mixed with the right alloys, it’s indestructible, unlike Starbarite.”

“What’s the heating process?” I asked.

The shopkeeper’s beady eyes jumped to me. He looked annoyed that I’d spoken at all, though that could’ve just been his face.

“I can’t divulge company secrets,” he tutted. “As I said, we are the only ones that have access to such a metal. Who’s to say you won’t try to get ahold of it yourself and steal our business?”

Orrin looked at me from the corner of his eye. He didn’t believe a word the shopkeeper said. Neither did I.

Sure, heating metal, mixing it, that was a standard way to make a new, stronger material.

But this just felt wrong.

“Orrin, pass it here,” I asked. He handed the ShockEater to me, and I ran my hands over it, tapped it. It felt exactly like Starbarite. Poorly treated Starbarite, at that. “What’s the asking price?”

“Seventeen thousand credits,” the shopkeeper replied.

“Wow,” I mused, running my hand along the spring. “For such a price, this must be an amazing product.”

“Oh! It is!” The merchant jiggled with excitement. “Unbreakable, indestructible, guaranteed!”

“If that’s true,” I gripped the ShockEater by both of its bases, “then how come I can do this?” I pulled the bases in opposite directions and the spring gave minimal resistance before it snapped with a loud crack.

The shopkeeper looked on in horror as I handed the pieces back to him.

“Indestructible, is it? Guaranteed?” Orrin folded his thick arms across his chest. “I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“You owe me seventeen thousand credits!” the shopkeeper sputtered in outrage.

“Do you have a price marker for your unbreakable, indestructible part? I’d love to take that,” he pointed to the broken spring, “and the price marker down to the security station. I’m sure they’d love to know all about your overpriced pieces of junk and your blatant lies.”

“Slander me and you’ll be in a world of trouble,” the shopkeeper threatened.

“I wonder what else I can break in here,” I mused. “I’ll bet it’s filled with things that are just as unbreakable.”

The shopkeeper shot me a nasty look.

“It looks like you have some options, friend,” Orrin gave the shopkeeper a smile that was anything but friendly. “We can report you, my assistant can look for more indestructible products to test, or you can fetch us a shock absorber that will actually do what it’s meant to at a reasonable price.”

“Assistant?” I glared at him, but he only smirked.

“I will do no such thing!” the giant slug insisted.

“Very well.” Orrin looked to me. “Why don’t you weed out the faulty products while I fetch security?”

“Sounds fun,” I grinned. I scanned the room, looking for anything low quality. The shelves were stuffed with junk, all ridiculously over-priced. A wave of anger passed over me. He was just preying on people, but surely there had to be actual parts somewhere in here, right?

“Now wait a minute!” The shopkeeper threw his blubbery arms up. Orrin, who was halfway out the door, paused.

“Is there something you want to say?” Orrin asked.

“I have a proper shock absorber in the back. Reputable brand. I’ll get them for you if you leave security out of this,” the shopkeeper surrendered.

“How much?” Orrin asked.

“Four hundred credits.”

“Knock that down to two hundred and you have a deal,” I grinned.

“Outrageous!” the shopkeeper exclaimed.

I grabbed an item priced at two hundred thousand credits and tossed it from hand to hand.

“This looks more fragile than I’d expect for that sort of price,” I mused. “Tell me, shopkeeper. Is this another indestructible item of yours?”

He sputtered in outrage before realizing he was trapped. Grumbling, he went to the back and fetched a proper shock absorber.

“Thank you,” I smiled sweetly. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement.”

Orrin placed the payment on the counter.

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

ORRIN

“Well, that was fun.”

Maris looked up at me as we walked, brow wrinkling at my comment.

“Watching you deal with that vendor was a pleasure. Not only did you save us money and keep us from purchasing terrible parts, you made me laugh and you embarrassed a thief. I count that as a win all around.”

She tossed her head back and laughed as we walked down the street. Several people looked at us and smiled as well. The streets in this part weren’t the cleanest, and a slight haze hung in the air. I couldn’t make out what the haze consisted of, but it smelled like a mixture of industrial lubricant and food.

Maybe I’d spent too much time with my engines, but I actually found it appealing.

As we weaved, and sometimes pushed, our way through the crowded street, we talked about what we could make out of some of the spare parts we’d picked up earlier.

“You know what I really want to make?” Maris asked as we passed by yet another food vendor trying to sell us some unusual looking seafood. “I want to make a slushy machine, so I can have some yummy fruity iciness with my meals.”

“What’s a slushy?” I asked. My stomach growled and turned at the sight of the seafood. Some of it smelled good, some of it smelled rotten, just like it looked. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, yes, I am.”

“Good, because I’m starving. You find us a place to eat and I’ll pay.” I shook my head at the vendor, turning down his offer for a sample. He frowned and turned his attention to someone else. “Now, what’s a slushy?”

“It’s basically a frozen fruit drink.” She pushed her way through the crowd and pulled me behind her. She turned left down another street that was less crowded. “Something down here smells good.”

She was right, it did.

“Anyway, it’s sort of hard to explain. Crushed ice mixed with a fruity drink. It’s really tasty as long as you get the right flavors.”

“Hmm. Maybe we can find one or find the parts we need for one after lunch.”

“Ooh, can we?” Her enthusiasm made me laugh.

Suddenly I realized she had stopped walking and that I had passed her.

“Huh?” I turned around to see her standing in front of a dilapidated-looking restaurant. “This place?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm. The best smells ever are coming from in here and I really wanna see what they belong to,” she answered before she walked in, leaving me to hurry to catch up.

I followed her into the place and was instantly bombarded by the smells of what was cooking inside, along with some cigar smoke, a little bit of cleaner, and some spilled alcohol. The lighting inside was shady, literally.

Most of the lights had small shades over them that muted the light and that created a dim atmosphere.

I hesitated in the doorway, stepped back out to look at the sign, translated it in my head, then stepped back in with a juvenile grin on my face.

This place was called the Shady Suspicion.

I groaned, enjoying the terrible play on words.

I found Maris already sitting at a little round table to the right of the door. The tables were all made of metal, some of them round, some square. There was a bar against the back wall, a massive mirror on the wall behind it with shelves loaded with alcohol in front of the mirror.

The floor was stained in places, making it difficult to tell the original color, while the dark green and gray walls looked as though they were in desperate need of a fresh coat.

And despite everything, I loved it. Blame the enticing smells that only made my stomach growl louder. Or the awful, awful pun.

But this was the perfect place for a meal.

And she was the perfect person to share it with.

I sat down across from Maris who was already looking at the menu. Blinking and flashing, it scrolled across the table in a variety of symbols until I tapped it, stopping it at Shein.

“Crap,” Maris muttered. “I can read it, but I don’t know what these things are.”

I guess the auto-tutor wasn’t really equipped for that. Something to bring up, when we weren’t short on time.

“Trust me to order for you?”

She paused, thought. “How do you know what I like?”

Which was a valid point. But I’d noticed what she ate, what she skipped in the dining hall. Come to think about it, I’d noticed quite a lot about her.

“If I’m wrong, you can tease me about it for two, no, three days.”

I took her eye-rolling as agreement.

Within minutes, our server, a disturbingly thin, unusually short, six-armed creature of unknown gender came over and waited.

“She’d like the…”

I stopped as it hit something in its apron pocket, then took out an old-fashioned translator and set it on the table.

“Stupid thing,” it warbled. “Try it again.”

I ordered slowly, hoping that a mechanical fault in the translator wasn’t going to have me ordering something inedible for Maris.

While we waited for our orders, we talked. I was intrigued to hear about the different things they used back on Earth and Mars. “So, a car is a vehicle that can transport people and almost everyone owns one, but a pickup is a bigger version with a bed instead of a trunk?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So, you sleep in a pickup while a car is used to carry your things?”

“Mmm, not quite. Sorry, let me try again. Here,” she grabbed a napkin and pulled a stylus from her pocket. She drew two rudimentary sketches of a car and a pickup, as well as something called a truck and a van. The van was a smaller version of a truck and was unable to separate itself from its cargo container, while the pickup, now that I saw the drawing, looked like what I used to drive before I got involved with Aavat and Dejar.

I drew my own rough sketches—which was funny, because I could draw the schematics for my engines with amazing detail, but my sketches looked like a child with the shivers drew them—of what we used back on my homeworld.

Most of the vehicles that were used in the city used magnetic technology to move around, while the vehicles out in the country still used wheels.

Our food was brought to us and we tore into it, neither of us having realized exactly how hungry we were.

The old tech in that translator must have worked well enough, because we ended up with what I’d ordered.

Maris dove into a meal she insisted resembled a cheeseburger—something resembling meat and cheese stuffed between two pieces of Andelirn bread—while I’d been craving Doophlecison spiced legs, a favorite of mine growing up.

Maris said they looked like chicken legs.

I’d ask what a chicken was later, when I wasn’t so ravenous.

The conversation moved on to how to modify the Skimmer, or maybe even make another vehicle that could be used for pickups, deliveries, or simply to just move around outside the ship.

“Ooh, if we move the rotors here instead of here, we can give it better maneuverability, especially if we find a way to make it airtight for use out of atmosphere,” Maris said as she pointed to one of the dozens of napkins we had sketched on.

“That sounds a good idea, but how do we go about making it space worthy?”

“Well,” she said, then stopped as she stared at the napkin. “Hold on.” As she started going through the other napkins, I looked around.

Not many people were inside with us, just a few patrons on the other side of the room, two people sitting at the bar, the waitress—or waiter, we still hadn’t figured that one out—and a newcomer that had just walked in.

Something about him made me pay attention.

It wasn’t just his size, even if he was as large as I am. Not too many species were as tall or broad as Shein. Those that were were usually easy to identify, either the horns, tail, or second head making it easy to place their species.

But he didn’t have any of those markers. Despite the deep hood pulled over his head and the respirator mask that covered his lower face, it would have been impossible to hide something so prominent.

He leaned on the bar with gloved hands, his movements oddly alternating between smooth and jerky.

Maybe he’d been in low gravity for a while. That would do it.

Maybe.

Unable to ignore the prickle in my gut, I listened to him talk to the bartender while Maris worked on her sketches.

“What do you want?” the bartender asked.

“Give me a Serkian beer, thick,” the newcomer answered as he leaned on one of the stools, scanning the room. Then he pulled out a large stack of credits and laid down a bill much larger than his beer would cost. “And some information.”

“Eh, if I have any,” the bartender growled as he pulled the beer out of the tap. “What you want to know?”

“I’m looking for some women.”

“Heh.” The bartender slapped down the drink. “You and half the males I know.”

“Not just any women, special women. Ones like you haven’t seen before. Ones like nobody has seen before.”

Scro.

I grabbed Maris’s hand, her wide eyes revealing she’d already heard.

“Any information on women from a species you’d never heard of,” he took another long drink as I pulled up the charge on the table menu, shoved credits into the payment opening, “I’m in the market for.”

We didn’t need to hear anything else.

Whether he was looking for the women rescued from the auction, or the human women we’d taken as crewmates, the Rogue Star needed to know, and I needed to get Maris out of there.

“Fuck me!” Maris whispered as we walked away quickly.

An entirely unsuitable image ran through my mind, setting a slow burn in my blood, but I shoved it away. That can’t have been what she meant.

“What’s the matter?”

“Look at me,” she said, stopping and holding her arms out wide.

Then it clicked.

Her makeup had come off in patches on her arms. Probably when we’d been at the last merchant’s.

Showing in broad swaths, her olive skin stood out against the shimmer of stardust.

“I’m not in disguise. I look like me.”

Which wasn’t a bad way to look, I thought to myself before I answered. “It was too dark for him to see you clearly, I’m sure.”

She took a shuddering breath.

“Really? I’ve dealt with several different vendors already, called that one out for his shenanigans, and we just sat in that bar for over an hour.” She wrapped her arms around her body, and all I wanted to do was hold her close. Tell her everything would be fine.

“Are you sure enough to risk everyone’s life?”

Scro.

MARIS

Orrin lent me his shirt to pull on over my clothes, the long sleeves spilling over my hands, the hem past my knees.

Not exactly the most fashionable look, I was sure, but no one would see my smeared skin.

My hand wrapped firmly in his, he led us back to the Rogue Star, bare chested. I kept my gaze fixed on his broad back, refusing to look to either side for fear of catching someone’s eye.

“Did anyone see us, pay too much attention to me?” I asked once we were safely on board.

“We got a few odd stares, but I’m sure no one could see you clearly,” Orrin replied, pulling his shirt back on. “If the bounty hunter were to ask them anything, they wouldn’t be able to definitively say you’re human, or anything other than Shein.” He grinned. “If anything, they would have thought we were a mated pair, anxious to get home.”

Oh. My cheeks heated, and my breath caught, but this wasn’t the time.

There was never going to be a time.

Not for that.

Alright brain, back in gear. “Well, that’s good,” I nodded even though I didn’t feel good at all.

“Let’s go talk to the captain now,” Orrin suggested. I nodded again and silently followed him down the corridor to the office. Orrin lifted a large fist to knock on the door.

“We have news,” Orrin said the moment Dejar opened the door to his office.

“What is it?”

Orrin offered me the chair, but I couldn’t make myself sit down.

“We heard a bounty hunter talking at one of the bars in town,” Orrin began.

“What were you doing at a bar?” Dejar asked. “I thought you were shopping for parts.”

“Maris beat a swindling shopkeeper at his own game. I wanted to reward her for her good work.” A hint of a smile appeared on his lips.

Despite the unease thrumming through my body, I was still proud of how we’d knocked that shopkeeper down a peg or two.

“Right,” Dejar said slowly. “So, a bounty hunter said what, exactly?”

“He was asking the barkeep if he’d seen any women around,” Orrin reported. “Women from species no one recognized.”

“What did the barkeep say?” Dejar demanded, face stern.

“They barkeep said he hadn’t seen anyone like that,” I said. “But Orrin and I were walking around for a while.” I stuck my arms out. “And the stardust rubbed off. If that bounty hunter asks any of the shopkeepers that might’ve seen us, we’ll be in deep shit.”

Dejar went silent as he processed the information.

“I don’t think we should panic just yet,” he said after a moment of silence. “No one here would’ve seen a human before until today. There are so many species coming and going through the station all the time, I think it’s a long shot they’d single you out as one of the ones the bounty hunter is searching for.”

“See, Maris? You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Orrin placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “You haven’t doomed us.”

“We’ll have to start taking better precautions,” Dejar said. “I should’ve insisted we do this from the beginning. It’s my fault more than anyone’s.”

“Aren’t the skin dyes and cosmetics really expensive?” I asked. “You already have to pay for the new identities for the alien women. And won’t they be traced back to us, as well?”

“We’ll make it work,” Dejar assured me with a smile. “Chances are good Kovor will be willing to dip into his personal finances to keep everyone safe, if it means his ship keeps running.”

“Is that my name I heard?” Kovor sauntered into the office with his usual easy smile in place.

“It was,” Dejar replied. “Those lovely cosmetics you purchased might need replenishing in the near future. If possible, we need more permanent dyes.”

“Oh?” Kovor asked.

“A bounty hunter has been overheard asking after the humans,” Orrin supplied, and I displayed my arms again to demonstrate the problem.

“Ah,” Kovor nodded. “That is indeed an issue. How’d he find out about them?”

“Who can say?” Dejar scowled. “But now we’ve got to be even more cautious.”

“Naturally,” Kovor agreed, leaning back against the bulkhead. “However, I might need one of the females to accompany me to test the dyes, make sure they won’t smear on human skin. I think the shopkeepers on Katzul took advantage of my cluelessness.”

It was hard to feel anxious around Kovor. His laid-back manner sucked away all the tension in the room, made our run-in with the bounty hunter something we could deal with, something the whole crew could handle, together.

I let my shoulders relax for the first time since we left the bar. Orrin’s hand was still on my shoulder and he gave me a gentle squeeze, sending warmth spiraling through me to battle the chill of my fears.

“That’s not surprising,” Dejar chuckled. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought Kovor was a little too easy going. “We’ll make sure you don’t shop without a support team.”

“Better disguises might help ensure the women’s safety off the ship, but what can we do to make sure no one comes after them here?” Kovor asked.

“The Rogue Star’s current security systems are designed to work most effectively in open space, when it’s less likely someone can just sneak on board,” Orrin answered. “However, the system is due for an upgrade.”

“Let’s upgrade it then,” Kovor declared. “I want every inch of the ship covered.”

“That’s going to be expensive,” Dejar shook his head. “We can’t work an entirely new security system into the budget, especially since we haven’t taken on any new jobs.”

“A completely new system might not be necessary,” Orrin replied. “Maris and I can rework the existing system as best we can. We’ll still have to buy some things, but it’ll cut down on the overall cost.”

“I’ll tap into my personal funds if need be,” Kovor offered. “I want no expense spared. Between this bounty hunter and that wretched ship that got the drop on us before, we can’t afford to take chances. If the Captain doesn’t object, that is.”

“No objections,” Dejar confirmed. “Your generosity is much appreciated.”

“It’s the least I can do. It’s not like I do any of the work around here,” Kovor laughed. “I just own the ship. The Rogue Star’s upkeep is my responsibility in the first place.”

“I won’t argue that,” Dejar nodded. “Either way, it’s time we start looking for delivery jobs once more.”

“Be very selective,” Kovor warned. “Remember, Qasar plays by Dominion rules. Even if we’re blacklisted now, it can always get worse.”

“Noted,” Dejar nodded.

“If you need nothing more from us, Maris and I should get to work on the security system,” Orrin suggested.

“Of course, the both of you are dismissed,” Dejar nodded. I followed Orrin out of the office.

“I’ve never seen you so quiet,” Orrin commented. “I figured you’d be bursting with ideas for the new system.”

“I have a few,” I replied, trying to pull myself back together. “The motion sensor needs a sensitivity upgrade, for sure.”

“I was thinking the same,” Orrin nodded. “Naturally, we’ll have to put surveillance cameras around the boarding door and rear hatch.”

“And one that can see down the dock,” I added.

“We should upgrade the scanners as well. Right now, they can detect shapes and heat levels,” Orrin explained. “That’s fine out in open space. There are only a few things out there that could be a threat to us.”

“Like that dark ship that somehow bypassed all of the Rogue Star’s security measures?” I asked.

“That’s exactly why I want to upgrade everything,” Orrin nodded gravely. “If that ship comes after us again, it won’t sneak up on us.”

“Good. I’d prefer not to lose any more crew members,” I replied. Orrin stopped walking suddenly. He reached out and grabbed my arm so that I wouldn’t pass him.

“Something’s not right with you,” he said. “Ordinarily, you’d be taunting me about coming up with a better security model. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said unconvincingly.

“Are you still beating yourself up?” Orrin asked. “The makeup failing isn’t your fault, you know? Dejar even said so.”

“It doesn’t matter what Dejar said.” My shoulders slumped. “I made a stupid decision. I should’ve had someone help me, check to make sure the makeup wouldn’t smear. Now, I’ve put us all in danger.”

“There’s no danger yet,” Orrin tried to assure me. “The bounty hunter hasn’t learned anything about us.”

“That we know of!” I argued. How could Orrin not see it? “He must’ve gone to the market by now. I was getting strange looks the entire time I was there. Someone’s going to remember me. Someone could lead the bounty hunter right to us.”

“I’ve probably put us in danger as well,” Orrin reasoned. “If the bounty hunter is looking for humans, he must know the humans are traveling with a group of Shein.”

“Shein are everywhere on the station,” I replied. “The only reason you stuck out to anyone is because you were walking with me. It’s my fault no matter how you slice it.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Orrin frowned. “Is there anything I can do to get you to stop punishing yourself for this?”

“Nothing I’m aware of,” I shrugged, trying to ignore the icy pit in my stomach.

“Doesn’t your species have a saying about this situation?” Orrin asked. “Kalyn mentioned it once. Something like ‘to error is human’?”

“To err is human,” I corrected.

“I don’t hear a difference,” Orrin replied.

“Terran is a notoriously tricky language,” I shrugged. “That is a common human saying but it’s not an excuse to continuously muck things up.”

“You haven’t mucked anything up, whatever that means!” Orrin insisted. “You don’t need to stress yourself over it.”

“I’m not stressed, I’m problem solving.” My jaw ached from clenching it so tightly.

I’d made the mistake.

It was my responsibility to find a way to fix it.

ORRIN

“Oh, no, don’t put that relay connection there, move it up to that second array of circuitry or it’ll end up burning out the sensor.” Maris and I had been working on the new sensor system that would alert the bridge, Dejar’s office, and our head of security—Valtic—that someone had either entered or left the ship without using a specific code, to be assigned to each crewmember.

We had spent the last two hours constructing the sensor system and were struggling to get it attached to the doors without it tripping every few seconds. “Oh, like that matters right now. We can’t get the damn sensors to work for longer than three seconds at a time, so who gives a damn if they burn out?”

Okay, Maris was frustrated, but at least she wasn’t worried and scared anymore.

That was progress, right?

“So,” I decided to risk asking, hoping the improved mood would help, “Why were you so hard on yourself back at the bar?”

“Seriously? I’m in a good mood again, and you want to bring that up?” The tone of her voice betrayed the words. As testy as her words were, her tone of voice wasn’t as venomous. I gave her a toothy grin. “Whatever, you gigantic mountain with arms.”

“So, are you going to tell me?”

She answered me, though not how I wanted her to. “I don’t like making mistakes.”

“You said that already,” I said as I reworked the wires in the door sensors. “Don’t forget to change out the wiring in the keypad, just in case. Now, are you going to elaborate?”

“I know what I’m doing with the keypad,” she shot back. “The wiring’s not the problem, it’s these damn connectors. They’re absolute shit. I told you that you needed to go out and get those gold ones. Why you didn’t listen is beyond me.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I answered back.

She couldn’t see my smile, but it stretched as far as it dared.

She had been right, however. I should have gone back out to get those better connectors. The ones we had were too old to do what we wanted them to do. “And you’re right. I’ll send Shar out to get the gold ones.”

“Good. As for whether or not I’ll elaborate…no. No, I won’t. Hand me those pliers, would ya?”

I tossed the pliers to her. She caught them easily and yanked the circuit board out. “Hey, careful with that,” I ridiculed her. “We don’t have many of those left and I don’t remember seeing anyone that sold those components where we looked.”

“Don’t be such a baby about it. If I break it, I’ll rebuild it. Waah,” she faked rubbing her eyes like a child.

“Funny. Do me a favor, please.”

“Fine, I’ll be careful with the equipment,” she said dejectedly.

“Not that,” I said. She looked at me, her eyes slightly squinted. “If you’re not going to elaborate on why you put yourself down all the time, then stop mentioning it. If you stop mentioning that it’s just something you do, then I’ll stop asking for you to expand on the idea, which means that I’ll stop imagining scenarios that have caused you to be so self-deprecating. Okay?”

“Really? So, either I have to elaborate and tell you why I am the way I am, or stop mentioning that I am the way I am because that’s how I am, so you won’t come up with crazy ideas about why I am the way I am?”

I blinked numerous times as I tried to figure out what it was that she had just said. “Hold on a minute,” I said as she opened her mouth to speak again.

I repeated—at least tried to—what she had said in order to ensure that I knew what it was she was trying to say. “Yes,” I finally said, thinking I had it right. “I think.”

“Really?” she repeated. “And what exactly are you imagining about my life that makes me the way I am?”

“That you were responsible for a small colony of people and because of an easily avoidable mistake you made, they all died horrible, terrible, disgusting deaths, especially the children, and that’s why you say terrible things about yourself when you make a tiny mistake.”

Her eyes fairly bugged out at my idea. “You…I…what…you come up with shit like that in your head?”

“I’ve never claimed to be a good boy with a clean mind,” I answered.

She stuck her tongue out at me. “And here I thought you were a well-behaved beast.”

“Ha. Ha,” I responded sarcastically. “Wait, you’re telling me that I’m not the most handsome, most intelligent, biggest piece of loveliness you’ve ever seen in your life?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, that hurt. You hurt my feelings,” I said in mock pain.

She smiled, not one of the blazing ones I craved, but it was a start.

“You know, the solution is easy. Instead of letting my imagination get the best of me while trying to figure you out, either tell me why or tell me to drop it.”

“I’ve always had to prove myself, show I could do the job. Making a mistake wasn’t acceptable then, and such a stupid one isn’t an option now,” she finally said. “You know the odds of our survival as well as I do.” She looked away. “You mind handing me that extra circuit board?”

I stared at her for a moment, then turned my attention back to work. I handed her the extra circuit board, then stood up to go talk to Shar. After giving Shar the instructions, directions, and credits needed to get the new connectors, I went back to the sensors.

It felt good to have Maris working next to me, something I wasn’t used to. I worked alone, most of the time.

I trusted my team, I truly did, but this was my ship. I wanted things to be done my way, and that usually meant I had to do things myself.

Maris was different. Not only had she proven herself, she had surpassed any and every expectation I had for anyone. Working next to her was a privilege that I enjoyed.

And if she’d always had to prove herself, no wonder she’d fought so hard to have me listen to her, hear her ideas.

“Are you sure you want to run those wires that way? They haven’t worked so far, so why not try a different pattern?”

I looked at the wiring of the sensors and her idea made sense. “Any particular suggestion?”

“Mmm, why not a rotating pattern? We try that until we find the one that works.”

“Alright. Have you gotten that keypad running yet?”

With a snap of the housing and a quick whir of the screwdriver, she answered me. “Yep. Just gotta plug it in.” As she did, the display lit up and ran through the startup sequence.

As I waited for the keypad to finish its startup, I quickly wired the sensors and loosely placed them on the door. “Here we go,” I said once the keypad was ready. I entered in my code, then opened the door. Nothing happened, just according to plan. I closed the door and waited for the beep that would indicate the sensor and keypad were ready for the next input.

It beeped.

“One more time?”

At her nod, I opened the door without utilizing a code, and the alarm blared loud and annoying, just like it was supposed to. I closed the door, Maris punched in a quick deactivation code, and we looked at one another in satisfaction.

“Nice work, Orrin.”

“To you as well, Maris. Without sounding too prideful, that is by far, the fastest I’ve gotten a project finished when I’ve only had random parts to work with.”

“Nice. To be honest, we’re not really done yet,” she said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Still need to replace the connections with the gold ones when Shar gets back, and we still need to get the other bay doors connected now.”

My elation died, just a little, swamped by the never-ending project list. “True, very true,” I said sullenly. “However, at least we know what we’re doing now. Let’s get these connected to the ship’s computer.”

Over the next hour, we worked side by side, running the wiring, running the tests, and hiding everything within new housing to avoid the wires getting tripped over, snagged, or outright cut by anything. “So, what would you be working on right now back at Persephone Station if none of this had happened?”

Maris shrugged. “Dunno. If I remember correctly, that week I’d been working on repairing and modifying some of the drills we were using to mine deeper into the core.” Her eyes grew a little soft, remembering. “I did have a side project, though.”

“Oh? Please, tell me.” I loved hearing about engineering projects, and anything that had kept her mind busy would be worth knowing.

“I was working on a new laser that, if I had my models figured correctly, could have been used in multiple applications like medical, defense, and mining.” Her voice was filled with loss. “I could redesign it, but without the numbers and my initial tests, I’d be starting from scratch.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, wishing there was something I could do to comfort her. She’d lost so much, and all I had to offer was an engine bay filled with tools and parts.

“If you could remember any of the calculations, any of the information, maybe we could work on it here,” I offered. “I’d be happy to help if you wanted me to.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’d like that. Ready to jump onto the next door?”

I closed the instrument panel on the computer, and nodded. “Let’s go.”

MARIS

I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Persephone Station crumble and my mind raced in an endless loop, struggling to understand the shockwave that nearly killed us all. I thought about it nearly every day.

When I was first brought aboard the Rogue Star, I lost night after night of sleep trying to work it out. Early on, I’d had my doubts, but now that I was familiar with the inner workings of the ship, I was absolutely certain.

The Rogue Star couldn’t have generated that shockwave.

Several of the other crew members knew my thoughts on the topic, but for some reason, it didn’t bother any of them the way it bothered me.

Perhaps they didn’t see it as that much of a threat.

It made sense, I guessed.

The shockwave already happened. It wasn’t an active threat like the Dominion was. Everyone believed the Dominion intended to kidnap us on Dominion Outpost Nine, not return us to the Terran System. Well, everyone except for a certain bitch. But she didn’t count.

Of course, we couldn’t prove it.

I’d always had the lingering suspicion that the two issues were connected, that the Dominion had something to do with the shockwave.

I’d never brought it up before because I didn’t have any proof, or even a solid theory. Just a feeling.

With a frustrated sigh, I kicked off my blanket. Aryn shifted in her sleep as I made my way across our room but didn’t wake. I was careful not to make a sound as I shut the door.

Once in the hallway, I hurried to the workshop. If Orrin was there, I’d ask him about the shockwave. I wanted his thoughts on it, have his angle.

If he wasn’t, well, I’d just find something to work on until I felt tired enough to sleep. Win-win.

I hadn’t asked him in the past because I didn’t trust him to truly listen to what I had to say. I worried that he’d give my theory the brush off or that he would think my theory a personal attack on his work as the ship’s engineer.

Now that I’d gotten comfortable around him, maybe even trusted him, I felt secure enough to share my theory.

Not surprisingly, he was in the workshop, bent over one of the motion sensor chips we had been working on earlier today. I knocked on the wall to alert him of my presence. He steadied his hand and looked up.

“Maris? What are you doing here?”

“Me? What are you doing here? You should be asleep,” I playfully scolded.

“I’m supposed to believe you walked all the way over here to tell me to go to bed?” he laughed.

“I’m going to tell you to go to bed after I ask you about something else first,” I admitted. My confidence seized up, froze inside me. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

His smile faded but his eyes didn’t lose their warmth. “What do you want to ask me?”

I walked over to the workbench and grabbed a pair of gloves. Next to him was a stack of unfinished motion sensor chips. I picked one up and started working on it. It felt too strange to be in the workshop and not work. It gave me something to do with my hands, a place to keep my gaze without risking too many looks in his direction.

“I wanted to ask you about the shockwave that destroyed Persephone Station,” I said at last.

“Ah,” Orrin sighed. “You want to know if there was a malfunction that could’ve caused it.”

“I already know the answer,” I replied. “I know this ship almost as well as you do by now. If anything malfunctioned, I don’t believe it could’ve caused that shockwave.”

“You’re right,” Orrin agreed. “It wasn’t caused by the ship.”

“Then what caused it?” I asked, unable to let this go. “It couldn’t have happened just randomly.”

“Why do I have the feeling you already have an idea?” Orrin asked with a hint of a smile.

“Because I stay up most nights thinking about this,” I admitted reluctantly. I could admit a weakness to Aryn. If I was hurt, I’d go to Lynna, no problem. But this, this suddently felt too vulnerable. Too open.

“That’s not good, Maris.” Orrin looked away from his chip to gaze at me full on. “I can’t have you working on projects if you’re always sleep deprived. It’s one thing when we’ve got a special project, but all the time? No. You could get hurt.”

I stayed my hand and tried not to let my astonishment show. I expected Orrin to say something along the lines of how I could ruin his engine if I worked on too little sleep, not for him to worry about my well-being.

That was... surprising.

“I haven’t gotten hurt yet.” I mustered my most reassuring smile. “And I’d sleep better if I didn’t have to wonder about the stupid shockwave every night.”

“How about you tell me your thoughts and I’ll tell you if they’re reasonable?” Orrin suggested.

“That’s exactly why I came to you,” I smiled, relieved that we were back to our normal problem-solving mode.

“Glad to be of service,” he grinned.

“We’re all convinced the shockwave didn’t happen on its own and that the Rogue Star didn’t cause it,” I began. “But I think that the Dominion planted some kind of device designed to trigger the shockwave when the Rogue Star appeared around Pluto. Weren’t you on an assignment to collect ice and water from further out?”

“We had the correct coordinates,” Orrin replied. “Qal checked later on. He thinks it was a rare autopilot malfunction. The coordinates got scrambled as we traveled through the folds of space.”

“Is the Dominion powerful enough to scramble the coordinates remotely?” I wondered.

“That kind of tech is illegal for that exact reason,” Orrin shook his head.

“But it exists,” I countered.

“Probably,” Orrin admitted. “If someone can think of a terrible thing to do, I usually assume it’s been done. But something like that, it’d be a weapon. The Dominion might rule with a heavy hand, but they’ve done well at keeping the peace between so many planets and species.”

“So there’s no chance the Dominion purposefully scrambled your coordinates to ensure you ended up at the wrong location?” I pressed. “And it’s absolutely impossible the Dominion planned this, so we humans would cross into their territory so that they would be able to collect us in the name of preserving peace?”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought, haven’t you?” Orrin asked.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Answer the question.”

“It’s possible,” he said hesitantly.

“They were way too prepared for us when we reached Dominion Outpost Nine,” I insisted. “Within minutes of Dejar dropping us off at the outpost, we were approached by an official who took us to a set of rooms with exactly enough space for all of us. Clothing. Food. I hadn’t been paying enough attention then.” I looked away. “Another mistake that could have turned out badly.”

“That would mean the dark ship that attacked us is part of it, too,” Orrin said, refusing to indulge my self-flagellation. “We only ended up at Dominion Outpost Nine because it pushed us in that direction.”

“Couldn’t that be possible?” I asked.

“Maybe. But if the Dominion controlled the dark ship, why wouldn’t they commandeer us and take you and the rest of the women by force? They could’ve done it,” Orrin reasoned.

“Unless the dark ship was hired by the Dominion to influence our route but disguise it as a robbery,” I countered.

“That seems a little far-fetched,” Orrin replied.

“It makes too much sense to be a coincidence,” I insisted.

“But that’s all it is. A coincidence based on circumstantial evidence,” Orrin said.

“The shockwave wasn’t a random accident!” I cried. “I know in my gut that the Dominion had something to do with it.”

“I believe you,” Orrin agreed. “The rest of the crew will believe you. But knowing that won’t change anything unless we can find concrete proof that the Dominion set us up.”

“How can we get it?” I demanded.

Orrin simply shook his head.

“The Dominion sets up a series of warning beacons to keep ships away from non-evolved worlds. It’s possible that the beacons around the Terran System triggered… something.” He held up one hand. “But it’s also theoretically possible we experienced a navigation error and an engine malfunction that we can’t reproduce, and managed to set off the shockwave ourselves.”

“So, now you’re saying I’m wrong?” I huffed. “You just said I was right.”

“I’m saying that’s what everyone outside of our ship is going to think if we tell someone about this,” Orrin said.

“I suppose,” I admitted begrudgingly.

“If someone didn’t know our ship, our engine, like we do, would it sound more reasonable to your theory?” Orrin asked.

“Yes,” I admitted after a long pause.

“So, imagine what everyone will think if we accuse the Dominion officials of sabotage and conspiracy and they dismiss us with that same explanation,” Orrin continued, “because if they did plant a device intended for us to trigger that shockwave, you can be sure they will have already found an excuse to shift the blame from their own crooked shoulders.”

I let my forehead rest on the cool metal of the workbench.

“I hate that you’re right,” I grumbled.

“Believe me, so do I.” Orrin rested his hand on my back, stroking in small, comforting circles.

“There’s nothing we can do then?” I asked. “We just have to roll over and accept the fact we can’t do anything to fight back against the Dominion?”

“Not exactly,” Orrin replied. “We just need to gather proof.”

“Without the Dominion catching us,” I sighed.

“I never said it would be easy,” Orrin shrugged.

“For a moment, let’s assume everything I just said is completely true. There’s one thing that still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.

“What’s that?” Orrin asked.

“What does the Dominion want with us in the first place?”

ORRIN

By the mother world, what was that noise?

Then it hit me.

The alarm was going off! Someone had either forgotten to use their code, or we had a problem. I got myself out of bed and rushed over to the hangar bay to find that Maris already there.

I looked at someone from the night crew, far too asleep still to put names together with faces. “Why haven’t you turned that off yet?” I yelled over the blaring alarm.

“I don’t…” he yelled back, then Maris turned off the alarm. “Have the code,” he finished in a normal voice.

“Okay, I’ll get you one,” I said as I moved on to Maris. “Hi.”

She yawned, which caused me to yawn, which made her chuckle. “Hi,” she said. “Hell of a way to wake up, huh?”

“Who’s awake?” I responded, a smile on my face. “Any idea why it went off?”

She shook her head, then looked at the night crew member I had spoken to. “How about you?”

“No, ma’am. I wasn’t even in the bay when the alarm went off,” he answered. Then his name hit me.

“What are you doing on the night crew, Maxel?” I asked.

He looked at me and shrugged. “Rotation change.”

“Ah. So, you didn’t see anything?”

He shook his head. “No, sir. I was running maintenance on the Skimmer, and decided I needed something to drink. Sorry.”

I waved it off, mind already running through our next steps. “Don’t be.” I turned back to Maris. “Looks like we need to look at the footage. Up for it?”

Another yawn, accompanied by a half-hearted nod, was my answer. “Why not? Sleep appears to be optional all around.”

I pulled up the security footage on the wall computer and set it to start from a few minutes before the alarm went off.

“Why that far back?” Maris asked.

I shrugged. “To see if anyone was messing with the sensors or keypad before the alarm went off.”

“Oh. Cool.”

I made a mental note to ask how a temperature of something played in to this, then forced my concentration to the screen.

We watched, and watched, and watched it again.

“Are you not seeing what I’m not seeing?” Maris asked me.

“I am. There’s nothing there,” I answered, not thrilled where the rest of my evening was going. We looked at one another, both of us knowing what that meant for us. “You want to get the tools, or should I?”

“Your turn,” Maris said. “I’ll start taking the panels off.” As I went for the tools, I tried to figure out what could have gone wrong with everything. Nothing was wired wrong, I was sure, and there was nothing on the security footage that showed anything.

Maris had the panels off the wall by the time I got back, and we went straight to work. We double checked, even triple checked everything, but found nothing that could explain why the sensors were tripped.

“This makes no sense,” Maris said. “There’s nothing wrong here.”

I didn’t have an answer. I was just as perplexed as she was. She looked at me, saw my own confusion, and nodded.

“Okay, then. Now what?” she asked.

“We head back to bed and hope it doesn’t go off again?” I suggested.

“You’re ready to go back to sleep, already?”

“Eh,” I said. We were both short on sleep, but after the rush of adrenaline of the alarm, I wasn’t going to be able to settle down anytime soon.

“Fine,” she said dejectedly. “Want to walk me to my room?” she asked.

“But, of course,” I answered with a slight bow. I brought my head up, making sure my best smile was on.

She shook her head and chuckled a bit. “You’re weird.” That was all she said as she turned away from me to start cleaning up our tools. As we cleaned up, I decided to strike up a conversation.

“What were you doing before you ended up at Persephone?” I asked as I took a sonic amplifier from her and placed it in the toolbox. She’d mentioned the bare facts before, when she’d talked her way into being allowed to modify our engine signature and registration chips.

But I wanted any bit of her past she was willing to share. I didn’t just want it, I needed it.

“Not much. I was military for a little bit, but as crazy as it sounds, I honestly had more fun at Persephone Station.” She handed me the roll of wire and wire-cutters, then got to her feet. I closed up the toolbox, stood up, and we started walking.

“You were military?” I asked, slightly taken aback by her confession.

“Yes, I was,” she said defensively. “Why, can’t Shein women be military?”

“No, no, of course they can. I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “I didn’t mean for it to upset you. I just never thought of you as the military type, not because you couldn’t do it, but because you’re…” How to put this. “More of an independent thinker.”

As we rounded a corner, she conceded my point. “You’re not wrong, but yes, I did join the military. I went into the Space Force versus any of the branches on Earth or the private force on Mars.”

“Space Force?” I asked. “That’s what you were called?”

She glared at me, then broke into a smile. “Yeah, it’s a stupid name for a military, that’s what we were.”

“Did you like it?”

She stopped, which brought me to a stop. I could see her thinking about it. I wanted to know what kind of memories she had, but I didn’t want to push it. Finally, she answered me. “No. I wasn’t a big fan.”

“So,” I started as I came back to her. “Why did you join?”

“Honestly? The money.” We started walking again. “They paid the best outside of the private district, and jobs the private district was extremely difficult to get into without the right connections.”

“Ah. How was the…sorry, it’s just funny to say…ahem, Space Force supposed to help you get into the private district?”

She matched my smile at the name, then got serious. “If I had been able to get into the engineering division, I would have been working on ships, engines, and space stations. That would have been a major thing to throw onto my resume.”

I nodded in agreement. Even out here, having knowledge of starships, their engines, and space stations was a boon for anyone that liked working with their hands and getting greasy. If I hadn’t joined up with a smuggling crew, I would have gone into the official Dominion Engineering Corps myself.

She continued. “The problem was that ended up I was posted as a mechanic. I wasn’t allowed to build anything, I was only allowed to fix.”

“That doesn’t seem to be too bad. You could have worked your way up,” I said.

“True,” she nodded. “Except I didn’t take well to orders. When you have complete idiots telling you how to do something that you know should be done a better way, it becomes very annoying.”

I put my hand to my chest and made a mock-surprise face. “You didn’t get along with others? Say it isn’t so.”

She laughed, a genuine laugh that seemed to come from her heart. “Ha, ha. Very funny, but true. I questioned everything and told a few of my commanders how to do things the right way. And not just in terms of engineering. It got me into a lot of trouble, and that meant my squad mates got into trouble as well.”

“Why?”

“We’re all judged together, rise or fall. It’s supposed to be good for morale.” She shrugged and looked away, and I wondered how hard it had been for her to give up what had seemed like a chance for a family.

“Once I got to Persephone Station, the money was a lot better thanks to the harsh conditions of the planet, and I was allowed to actually work.” She stopped walking. We were in front of her quarters. “I still had to answer to someone, but they let me do what I wanted and needed to do. I wasn’t there long before I improved things, so I enjoyed it.”

I thought about her words for a moment. “Are you sure you went to Persephone Station by choice?” I asked. “I only ask because many of you have said it was a punishment assignment.”

“It was the best of the choices I was offered.” She shrugged and flipped her hair from her face. “I got into trouble. That little incident I mentioned, altering the state official’s ship? That was the last straw.”

She smiled, her eyes lighting with excitement. “But now I’m flying out here in space with a bunch of smugglers going to planets no human ever dreamed of. So I guess I got the better end of the deal.”

“Why did you do it? You must have known you’d be caught.”

“The guy was the most corrupt petty government official I’d ever seen. He eventually got investigated and ended up in prison. But for me…rather than send me to jail, they kept my engine design and granted my request to go to Persephone faster than I could ask for it.”

“Why do I get the sense you were proud of that?” I asked slyly.

She winked at me. “I was. If the military is too stupid to recognize intelligence, that’s their problem. If they can’t reward me for coming up with better ways to do things, then they can go fuck themselves.”

“What were you doing with all that pay? I didn’t exactly see any markets or stores during our very brief stop at Persephone Station.”

“Not much. Sent most of it back to family.” She looked up at me and I saw something in her eyes. A silent request not to press for more.

I faked a yawn, wished her good night, and headed back to bed. I was determined to figure this woman out.

She’d given me more of the puzzle, and eventually I’d solve it all.

Eventually.

MARIS

The next morning, I spent thirty minutes pushing my breakfast around my plate wondering what in the hell had come over me last night.

Sharing personal details never came easily to me.

As fucked up as it might be, my personal belief was that the more people knew about me, the more they could hurt me. That belief rang true more often than not. Aryn had been the only exception.

And then I blabbed everything to Orrin.

Well, almost everything.

I hadn’t told Aryn everything, either. I trusted Aryn enough to tell her the rest of the story, but I liked the friendship dynamic between us. I didn’t want to risk changing that, and it was easy to tell she’d been keeping her own secrets. We were both good with that.

And Orrin?

I trusted him.

Maybe.

I wasn’t sure.

What I felt for him didn’t resemble what I felt for Aryn, my only other friend.

Somehow, they were different.

The concept of trust was relatively foreign to me. I wasn’t sure if what I felt for him was trust. It could’ve been, but it was complex, layered.

This is why I didn’t seek out genuine relationships with other people. I liked clean lines and clear definitions, that’s what made me so good at my job.

People were more complicated.

Complicated meant trouble.

And I’d had enough trouble to last me a lifetime.

However, something in me must have trusted him on some basic level if I felt secure enough to share that much of my story.

I didn’t know if I could ever tell him the entire truth.

It was true that I joined the Space Force for the money, but that wasn’t the only reason.

The day I turned eighteen, two doctors came to our tiny apartment.

Unbeknownst to me, my mother had signed me up for an experimental fertility treatment.

The treatment was one of many that had been tested over the years to increase the likelihood of conceiving male children. I was to start the next day. The doctors gave me pamphlets on the treatment before they left. Reading them turned my stomach. It was an invasive treatment, to say the least.

Nothing I would’ve consented to on my own.

Due to the nature of the treatment, I would be kept in a special room within the nearest breeding facility. The first round of treatment would take nearly six months to complete. After that, I would be matched with a suitable male.

In order to prove the effectiveness of the treatment, I was required to produce three sons consecutively.

A pipe dream if there ever was one.

No one cared what I had to say.

Since I had been too young have my own bank account, my compensation would be wired directly to my mother.

I knew I’d never see a cent of it.

I’d made a mistake, knowing she’d been secretive for months.

I hadn’t been paying attention to my mother, her plans. Hadn’t made my own plans for the future.

And that mistake had nearly cost me everything.

I didn’t fully remember leaving my home that day. But I knew that I stood up, walked out the door, and walked to the Space Force office four miles from my house. I don’t remember signing up, but I do remember brandishing my enlistment papers for the Space Force like a weapon.

There was some debate. The contract for the fertility treatment was signed first; however, the Space Force papers held my own signature. Eventually, it was ruled that the Space Force contract outweighed a contract signed by my mother on my behalf.

My mother was furious, told me never to come back.

I didn’t. I wasn’t so dense as to believe my mother’s betrayal had no effect on me.

I knew it fucked me up. I would deal with it one day.

Maybe not today, but eventually.

After I left my home for the last time, I set up secret accounts for my four younger sisters, created automatic messages that would tell them everything once they became legal adults.

I poured almost everything I earned in the Space Force and then at Persephone Station into those accounts.

When my sisters turned eighteen, they would have choices I didn’t have.

They would be able to escape.

I didn’t regret setting up those accounts. I might not have been close with my sisters, but they were still my sisters.

“Maris.” Someone called my name, pulling me from my memories. Kalyn stood at the end of my table looking concerned.

“Hi,” I said, only a little lamely. Surely not enough to be noticed. “Need something?”

“I came to ask a favor, but I noticed you’re looking a little sad,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Shit. She noticed. “Yeah.” I managed a weak smile. “I didn’t sleep well last night, is all.”

“Oh.” I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Well, if anything is ever wrong, you know you can talk to me, right?”

“Thanks.” My smile was less forced now. I wouldn’t ever take Kalyn up on her offer, but I appreciated the offer nonetheless. “What can I help you with?”

“We’ve got a job.” Kalyn took a seat at one of the empty chairs. “But it’s not exactly our normal delivery gig.”

“We have normal?” I laughed, then waved away my comment. “Never mind that. Any sort of job will help Dejar stop stressing about our finances, right?”

“Hopefully,” Kalyn frowned. “It’s a little unusual, and we’re going to need your help.”

“How so?”

“The package in need of delivery is a family.”

“A family…of people?” I asked.

“As opposed to a family of shipping containers?” Kalyn laughed.

“That was a stupid question,” I admitted. “But the Rogue Star isn’t a leisure vessel. Our current guests are sleeping on mats in the cargo hold.”

“The family has been made aware. They believe that it’s the perfect disguise. No one will suspect that a cargo ship is carrying a civilian family,” Kalyn pointed out.

“It sounds like they’re trying to hide.” I narrowed my eyes. “What are they on the run from?”

“They are,” Kalyn replied. “Like us, they’re being unjustly hunted by the Dominion.”

I pushed back from the table, alarmed. “How does this help us keep a low profile?”

She shoved her hair back, eyes closed. The dark smudges under her eyes made me wonder how much Kalyn was staying up, worrying about the figures with Dejar. “I know, trust me. But Dejar is convinced that this is just a personal matter between this family and a local official. And honestly, there’s not much else coming our way.”

“Alright.” I bit my lip and swallowed any other comments I might have about the advisability of the job. “How can I help?”

“They’re hiring us to take them to a small planet less than a day’s journey from here. There’s a small colony forming, and they’re sure no one would ever think to look for them there.”

“How many passengers are we talking about?” I asked.

“Four in total. A husband, his wife, and their two children,” Kalyn explained.

I relaxed a little when she mentioned children. “That must suck for the kids,” I said.

“It can’t be easy.” She shook her head. “They’re young. They probably don’t understand what’s happening.”

“I hope the colony is the right choice for them,” I frowned.

“If they’re safe from the Dominion, I think it is,” Kalyn replied.

“What does this have to do with me? Do they need my room or something?” I asked.

“No,” Kalyn laughed. “The father is concerned about our ship being tracked and scanned during the voyage. We told him that we’d ensure our stealth systems were up to date. That falls to you and Orrin.”

“Does he know about this?” I asked.

“Not yet. I don’t like to disturb him while he’s in the workshop,” Kalyn admitted. “I was hoping you’d break it to him.”

“I think disturbing him is fun,” I smirked.

“I’m sure you do.” Kalyn flashed a grin and waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“Don’t you make that face at me,” I warned her. “Just because you’re enjoying a taste of what a Shein male has to offer doesn’t mean the rest of us are following suit.” Her expression snapped to something halfway between outrage and amusement.

“Too far, Commander?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she laughed, cheeks a bright pink.

“I don’t always think before I speak,” I said by way of apology.

“No kidding,” Kalyn snorted. “Although, a little straightforwardnes is a commendable trait.”

“Maybe for people, but not for the ship, not on this run.” And, it was more than time for me to go. “I’ll go see what we can do to make the Rogue Star stealthier.”

ORRIN

I had the Skimmer sitting in pieces around me. I was cleaning, reboring, and replacing parts from the engine to make it run smoother, faster. With everything we’d been up against lately, I figured making the Skimmer stronger wasn’t a bad idea.

“Wow, you really meant it when you said you were gonna tear things apart.”

I looked up from a converter that I was contemplating throwing away to see Maris standing over me.

“Did you really think I was exaggerating?”

“No, not really. What are you going to do with your hand?” she asked as she knelt down next to me. She was staring at my prosthetic arm, but not in a pitying way.

Almost in an envious, wouldn’t-that-be-useful way.

I’d designed my prosthetic to include a few gadgets that I utilized frequently. Once I got used to it all, I quite liked the convenience – it was like having tools always at my fingertips.

No pun intended.

“I’m working on the converter,” I answered her.

“What are you doing with the converter?” she asked.

“Probably going to throw it away. Or try and exchange it for something else before we leave the station. I’ve rebuilt this Skimmer thing so many times, I don’t think I can do it again.”

She held out her hand and I handed it to her. “Yeah, looks like it’s about done. Wow, and you haven’t replaced it?”

“Replaced it? I built it. They don’t make the converter I need anymore, so I had to build this one to fit the Skimmer.”

“Hmm,” she said as she handed it back to me. “Impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you heard of the new job Captain Dejar took on?”

I set the converter down and grabbed a rag. “No. What are we doing?”

“Apparently, we’re picking up a family that’s looking to get somewhere in a hurry. Kalyn tells me the pay is decent, but we have some work to do.”

This piqued my interest. “What work?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to update the stealth systems again,” she answered.

The work we had already done on the engine in order to stay off sensors was mostly Maris’ work. She had also been the one that had been capable of changing our engine signature. “Okay. What did you have in mind?” I asked, wondering where this was going.

“We need to head back to the market and get a few things. I’ve got some ideas,” she said.

“Okay. While you get your disguise on, I’ll get this cleaned up.”

“You can put it back together while I’m getting my makeup on? You’re that fast?”

I snickered a bit as I got to my feet. “No, but I can order one of the others to put it back together. And you’re not that fast with the makeup, anyway.”

She stuck her tongue out, but remembering how upset she’d been about the smearing before, I knew she’d be extra careful.

“While we’re out, I’ll get what I need to build a new converter and finish it up when we’re done with your system.”

She headed off to get her makeup on while I went to find Dun, my second. I instructed him on what needed to be done with the Skimmer, then went back to the bay door to wait for Maris.

When she eventually appeared I could barely recognize her. She had gone with a light blue skin and had her hair tied back in a traditional Shein bun, purple lines swirling across her cheekbones.

I was at a loss for words.

“You might wanna close that up, you’re drooling,” she teased as she lightly tapped my chin.

“Uh, I…you…we…” I stammered as I followed her to the door.

“Aren’t you the articulate one?” she giggled as she entered her code to leave the ship. She teased me about my lack of speaking prowess for half the trip, as we headed into the market.

Even if the crooked shopkeeper wouldn’t recognize Maris, I didn’t feel like giving that thief any more of our money. There were plenty of other merchants happy to sell us the parts we needed, all without trying to overcharge us.

On the way back, Maris was in the middle of commenting on how nice our new merchant contacts were, when she suddenly stopped walking.

She got on her tiptoes and tried to see over the crowd.

I looked, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.

“What is it?”

With an impatient wave, she moved forward through the crowd. I followed.

“What is it?” I repeated.

She looked back at me, her eyes narrowed with concern and confusion. “I don’t know. Have you seen any of the other women on the ship? Not the humans. Do you know what they look like?”

“A bit,” I acknowledged. I’d seen them as they’d been brought on board but hadn’t wanted to be too close to them. I could imagine what they’d been through. They didn’t need another strange man in their space.

“Have you seen the one with the amber-colored eyes, doesn’t talk to anyone?”

“Oh, you mean the one you almost got into a fight with? Yes, I’ve seen her.”

She shot me a look, “You knew about that? Never mind,” she interrupted herself with a strong shake of her head. “I could have sworn I just saw her talking to some big, burly guy over there.” She pointed over by some textile vendors, their brightly colored wares bringing a desperate splash of color to their drab surroundings. I didn’t see who she was describing.

“I don’t see her,” I admitted, searching the area again.

Maris let out a muttered curse in surprisingly fluent Shein, which caused a mother to cover her son’s ears as they passed. Maris apologized and turned back to me. “Amber eyes. Claws for hands. Pissy attitude. Are you sure you didn’t see her?”

I nodded.

She threw her arms up, cursed again, and started walking towards the vendors. “What are you trying to do?” I asked as I caught up to her.

“Trying to find her, what else?”

“Well, do you see her?” We both looked around but saw no signs of the woman. “Because I don’t,” I said.

“No. I could have sworn I saw her here. What do you think?” She looked up at me and I could tell she was looking for validation.

“I think we need to get back to the ship and do what our three fearless leaders want us to do,” I said. I knew she was disappointed, but it didn’t last long.

“Three leaders?”

“Well, Dejar and Aavat run the ship, but Kalyn is starting to get some influence, so…”

“You forgot Kovor,” she shot at me good-naturedly as we headed back to the ship. “He’s going to have his feelings hurt. You’re such a meanie.”

In mock surprise, I shot back. “Me? I’m the soul of civility. A prince of kindness. The epitome of manners.”

We teased one another back and forth as we made it back to the ship.

But it all stopped when Shar and Dun met us at the door. “The alarm went off again,” Dun said. “We stopped it, but everyone is pretty riled up.

I apologized to him, then apologized again when they showed us the surveillance footage.

Again, there was nothing on the video.

“What the hell?” Maris was at a loss, as was I.

Dejar came down to ask about the alarm. “We’ve got nothing, sir. It’s making no sense and pissing me off,” Maris answered him.

“Understandable. Just do your best to figure it out. Thank you,” he said and walked away.

“That was short and sweet,” Maris said as she took the wall panels off again. Dun already had my tools ready for me, so I merely nodded as I connected the diagnostic cables to the wiring and to my tablet. Yet again, nothing showed up as wrong.

“Okay, now I’m getting upset,” I said as I showed Maris the tablet. “Could we be crossed with another ship’s system, or maybe somehow connected to another door within the ship that is causing the sensor to go off?”

“I don’t know. It makes zero sense to me. Everything is wired right, so either there’s a short in the system somewhere like you’re suggesting, or…” she didn’t finish the thought.

I couldn’t finish it either. Something wasn’t right, but we couldn’t figure it out.

“Do we take it apart, again?” I asked. There had to be something else, something we hadn’t looked at.

“We might have to. Wait,” she turned around to look at the keypad. “What if we’re doing something wrong with the codes or something? What if the keypad is programmed wrong?”

“It’s the only idea we have, so let’s use it.” We got to work on the keypad, the wiring, and the panels that the keypad was attached to. While working, Maris’s hand brushed against mine.

Heat ran through my skin at her touch, and I froze.

Maris, brilliant, beautiful Maris had taken my words away dressed as a Shein.

But it wasn’t the disguise, it was her, olive skin and stormy eyes, her fast temper and her quick mind.

Just for a moment, I leaned into her, breathing her sweet smell, the urge to kiss her almost overwhelming.

Then I forced myself to stop.

While we had been getting along very well lately, I still remembered how she was at first and how I had treated her.

What if she didn’t want a kiss?

What if she only saw me as someone that she could work with and a kiss would violate her trust in me?

I didn’t want to lose that trust, or the friendship that I felt we had created.

Nothing was worth risking that.

“Can you hand me that?” I asked, pointing to the laser drill at the other side of her, and keeping my eyes fixed on the panel in front of me.

I wasn’t sure what her expression was, but I knew in my own mind that I hated the missed opportunity. She nodded and turned away from me to grab the drill. “Thank you,” I said as she handed it to me.

“Welcome.”

We went back to work on the system, rerouting wiring and connections to make sure that the sensors and keypad weren’t connected to anything at all except the computer and each other. After two hours of that, we finally finished. Maris left to get out of her disguise while I went to finish building the converter for the Skimmer.

And for two long, painful hours, I’d been careful not to touch her again.

I could run calculations better than anyone on the ship.

Except maybe Maris.

It wasn’t worth the chance of losing her.

MARIS

After my mother struck her demented bargain with the fertility doctors, I swore I’d never have anything to do with a male for as long as I lived.

Naturally, I assumed my life would stay contained to the Terran System, where avoiding males was easy.

For the most part, all I had to do was not venture to any of the breeding facilities.

But now such an oath was impossible to stick to.

The original crew of the Rogue Star had been entirely male. Decent ones, too.

Aavat could be a bit of a dick sometimes, but all in all, he was still a good guy. Dejar occasionally acted like he had a stick rammed up his ass, but I was glad to have him as captain.

The rest of the Shein males had yet to give me a reason to think of them as anything less than good and decent beings.

Then there was Orrin.

I had been so sure he was going to kiss me last night…

And stupid me, actually felt disappointed that he didn’t.

My heartbeat quickened as I thought about Orrin wanting me.

As much as I didn’t like the idea of another person being able to arouse such feelings in me, I felt good when I thought about him.

That good feeling was swiftly shoved aside with the realization that there was always a chance I’d been mistaken.

Maybe he wasn’t going to kiss me at all. Maybe I’d turned into a giddy school girl over nothing. Maybe Orrin needed me to kiss him first.

Who knew? Not I!

I wasn’t even in love yet and I was already exhausted over it.

No wonder I thought it would be best to avoid all of this nonsense.

Engines. Engines were safe.

I forced myself to put vows, love, and Orrin out of my mind for now.

I had something else that needed to be taken care of, and unfortunately, it didn’t involve anything nice and simple that my toolkit could help with.

I opened the door to the cargo hold. It wasn’t a regular meal time, so I was met with a series of curious looks.

“Hi, ladies.” I waved awkwardly. Most of them waved back. Amber-Eyes sat in her usual corner, glaring at me.

One of the women, the one with three eyes and bone white skin, approached me with a friendly smile. Her name was Vixaine. She was the one who could speak every language.

“Is everything well?” she asked.

“I actually have a question for you,” I told her in a low voice. “Can we speak privately?” She nodded. I bid her to follow me into the hall. I closed the cargo bay door behind us.

“What do you want to ask me?” she asked, her middle eye blinking.

“The one who always sits in the corner, what’s her name?” I asked. Vixaine shook her head.

“She will not reveal it,” she explained. “She’s the only one of us who hasn’t.”

“Don’t you think that’s strange?” I asked.

She tilted her head elegantly. “After what we have been through, we have earned the right to our privacy.”

I lowered my gaze, feeling ashamed of my accusation.

“Of course,” I apologized. “You’re absolutely right. But can you tell me if she left the ship at all yesterday? I thought I saw her when I was out.”

“No, she has not,” Vixaine replied after a moment of silence. “She hardly moves at all.”

“I see. I must’ve been mistaken.” I opened the door to the cargo bay for her. “You know you don’t have to stay in there, right?”

“As I said,” Vixaine looked over her shoulder at me as she stepped back into the cargo hold, “we value our privacy.”

“Right,” I nodded stiffly. “See you at dinner.” I closed the cargo hold behind her. Well, at least I had an answer.

I hadn’t seen Amber-Eyes off the ship. Maybe I’d just been too worried. Heck, maybe there was someone from her system here, looking for her. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Either way, it was time for me to get on with my day.

I took a moment to watch Orrin work before he noticed I was there. A bomb could go off and I doubted that he’d blink, his focus was so intent.

His hands were massive, but that didn’t affect the deftness of his fingers as he worked with smaller tools. The low work lights made his skin look like a dying fire, rich tones of red, orange, and copper all blended together. His tattoos stood out in stark relief. They were the same style as all of the other Shein’s tattoos, but the details were different.

One day, when I knew him a little better, I’d ask him what the markings meant. Maybe trace over the bold swirls on his upper arm, the shoulder I’d seen when he lent me his shirt.

My heart started picking up speed again.

Oh yes, I wanted to kiss him.

Stupid heart.

“What are you doing down here again?” I asked him. Orrin turned his head slightly and smiled as if he’d known I was there the entire time.

“I’m going to start the rewiring for the stealth system today, but I want to make sure everything’s in good shape before I do,” he explained. “I found a few leaks.”

“Let me see.” I walked over to where he stood.

“Careful! There’s cooling gel all over the floor.” He spoke too late. Three steps in and I started slipping.

“Shit!” I wobbled like a baby deer to keep myself from falling. I lashed out and grabbed onto Orrin’s arm. With one large hand, he tried to steady me, but something felt wrong. His hand was covered in thick, slimy cooling gel. My entire forearm was thoroughly coated in the gunk.

“You okay?” He was trying not to laugh and failing.

“I didn’t want to fall because I didn’t want to get covered in goo!” I exclaimed. I held up my arm. “A moot point now, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s not that bad,” Orrin grinned. “It’s great for your skin.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.” My nose wrinkled as I took in the chemical smell of the cooling gel.

“What are you making that face for? It’s not that bad,” Orrin teased.

“Not that bad?” I replied. Struggling to keep my balance, I bent down and gathered a handful of cooling gel. Before Orrin realized my intentions, I launched the handful of cooling gel at him. “Tell me again how it’s not that bad!”

“You’re going to pay for that!” Orrin laughed. He scrounged up enough cooling gel to fling back at me. This time, the gel had only just dripped out of the piping. Icy cold gel splattered across my neck.

“Not fair!” I shrieked.

“Completely fair,” Orrin declared. “I got here first, I get the advantageous position.” I scooped up more gel and grabbed onto him, using his body as leverage to pull myself across the treacherous decking. My body collided with his. I forced my hand down the back of his shirt and smeared cooling gel all over his upper back.

“Now it’s fair,” I smirked. Orrin arched his back as if he could escape the slimy sensation trickling between his shoulders. “You look like a duck!” I cackled.

“I don’t know what that means!” Orrin exclaimed. I moved again, with the intention of putting more cooling gel down his shirt, but Orrin dodged my advance, throwing me off balance. I couldn’t right myself. My feet kept slipping around beneath me.

I was going down, and I knew it, but I’d be damned if I went down alone.

As I started falling, I grabbed at Orrin once more. He lost his footing, and we fell together. I landed hard on my backside. He pushed his hands out to avoid landing on top of me and crushing me. My sides ached from laughing so hard. I’d never laughed this much in my life, not even with Aryn.

“Are you proud of your handiwork?” Orrin chuckled.

“Very. I consider this battle won,” I declared.

“I’m the one who has you pinned. I think that makes me the winner,” Orrin challenged.

“Yes, but you’re immobilized. You can’t move without falling down on me,” I replied.

“I’ve been stuck in worse places,” he grinned. “And least the view is nice.”

I looked up at him, with his kind eyes and charming smile. My breath hitched in my chest. His eyes flickered to my slightly parted lips.

Looks like I’d be breaking that vow sooner than I thought. I lifted my head off the floor, fully aware of how much goo had seeped into my hair and pressed my lips to his. I felt his body go still with surprise for a split second before he started kissing me back.

His lips were like the rest of him, steady and sure. I wrapped one arm around his back, not caring about the mess I made. Keeping himself supported with one hand, he cupped the back of my head with the other, holding my lips to his.

His tongue slipped past my lips, eliciting a sensation unlike anything I’d ever felt before. Something I never knew resided within me sparked to life. I allowed myself to be overcome with desire. I allowed myself to get lost in him.

I felt something deep inside me push back against the kiss—or, more accurately, against what it meant. It shoved and struggled against surrender to the feelings that were rapidly swelling in my chest.

Just as quickly as it appeared, it faded. It wasn’t broken. It didn’t shatter. But it stood aside. It had no choice. Even the acrid scent of the engine room, made all the more intense by the leak, faded into the background as he pressed his body more tightly to mine.

I brought my hand up to the back of his head, urging him on.

Orrin huffed a hard breath through his nose and took another deep one, and I felt a slight shudder run down his form. His kiss became more eager, our tongues dancing and pressing in an increasingly frenzied dance. He pulled back to press the kiss to my lower lip, suckling at it for a fleeting moment before diving back in to reclaim my lips entirely.

The heat blossomed and grew between us, primal stirrings deep inside leading us toward something a lot more significant than a kiss.

Our hips began rocking in tandem, and the feeling of his rapidly hardening length pulled me suddenly from my reverie.

The catch in my chest returned, though it couldn’t have been more different. I wasn’t reluctant, or unwilling now. I was scared of how badly I wanted him in that moment, right there in the mess we’d made of the room and each other. Nothing mattered but that desire, and as desperately as I wanted to keep drifting in the slow, soft bliss of that kiss, I couldn’t.

It couldn’t go any further, either. I wouldn’t be able to keep myself in control. I pulled back from the kiss, bringing a hand down to his lower back to slow his hips even as I struggled to keep mine still.

I wanted so badly to say something, anything, to let him know how wonderful the kiss was, to explain why I couldn’t go on, but I didn’t have to.

Orrin just leaned down to give a soft, reassuring peck at my lips before working himself up to his feet. He extended a hand to me and, with a steady strength, pulled me up and steadied me.

He traced one gentle finger down the curve of my cheek, his steady gaze meeting my own, searching for something deep inside.

“Brilliant, beautiful lady.” Leaning forward, he breathed into the shell of my ear until I trembled at his touch. “Thank you.”

ORRIN

After we had cleaned ourselves up, Maris and I finished working on the stealth systems. The memory of the kiss we had shared still dazzled me. The touch of her lips on mine was exhilarating, and I wanted to feel that again.

To be honest, I wanted to feel that feeling every second of every day. I hadn’t realized how much I missed being around a female until the women had arrived and started proving themselves. Now I realized that I had also missed having a chance to spend time with a woman, especially romantically.

Having Maris in my arms had made my heart race and sent my nerves into overdrive. Every part of my body that hers touched had erupted in a sense of pleasure that I never knew I had desired. When we broke apart and stopped kissing, I felt as though part of my own body had been ripped away.

If anyone had asked me what we had done to finish the systems, I couldn’t tell them. The entire time we worked next to one another, all I could think about was touching her again, kissing her again, taking her to my quarters, claiming her.

However, when we were done, she only smiled at me, kissed me on the cheek, and left to speak with Kalyn.

Like a sane, responsible person.

That left me to go to Dejar and Aavat and tell them that we were ready to transport the family.

So, that’s what I did. “Captain?” I asked as I walked onto the bridge. Dejar stood at the gunner station with Valtic, the two of them scrutinizing the readout from a monitor. He looked up and motioned me over.

“What is it, Orrin?” he asked as I stepped close.

“Stealth systems and engine are ready to go, sir,” I responded. He looked at me, nodded, and turned his attention back to Valtic.

Valtic was running through a simulation of an attack. The opponent was the dark ship that had attacked us shortly after we had first rescued the women.

After the simulation of the Rogue Star was destroyed yet again, Valtic cursed. “I must express my deepest apologies, sir. According to the computer, that ship is far too advanced. It should have destroyed us before. My sincerest regrets, sir.”

Dejar put his hand on Valtic’s shoulder. “It’s okay. We’re already running under the assumption that the ship pushed us towards Outpost Nine, so destroying us was not in their plans. Keep working on it, see if there’s anything you can come up with that can give us an advantage if we meet them again.”

“Sir.”

Dejar turned back to me. “We’re ready, you said?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good,” he said as he walked by me. “Come with me.” We left the bridge and started down towards the hangar bay. “How’s the sensor system?”

“Should be good, sir. We’ve put the sensors and keypad on a totally independent system. If they’re tripped up again, then someone is messing with it.”

“Understood. Do you know what we’re doing?” he asked.

We rounded a corner and headed down the hall. “All I know is we’re transporting a family somewhere,” I answered. “I just asked Maris for the technical specs.”

“That’s right. A family has requested passage to Neo. We’re running a bit low on funds, so Aavat and I decided to take the job to get some of our accounts replenished.”

I was a bit taken aback. Neo was a small moon in orbit around Wera, an uninhabitable water planet. It was only a short trip from here, but Neo was not the type of place most people ran to, it was the type of place most ran from.

“Wow. They must really be desperate to get away,” I commented.

“They are, that’s why they’re paying twice our rate,” he responded. “From reading between the lines, it sounds like the mother has attracted the attention of a local Dominion official.”

I fought back a snarl. Of course.

A man would be willing to do anything to keep his mate safe, and if the family was lower caste and friendless, there’d be nothing to stop the official from harassing the poor woman, possibly even leaving the children motherless.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s a messed-up situation. Still, the enemy of our enemy isn’t necessarily our friend.” His lips twisted into a half-smile. “Kayln’s telling the women that they have to be in disguise for their work shifts or find a way to stay out of sight while the family is on board. Be careful with Maris. I know the two of you have projects that need to be seen to, but be cautious.”

“I understand, sir,” I said. It made sense, but I knew Maris would grumble. “When will they board?”

“In a few hours,” he answered as we came to the engineering bay. “We need to give the women enough time to apply their disguises. We’ll be leaving tonight and should hopefully arrive in the early morning.” He stopped and looked at me. “I hate to do this, but I’m going to need you to personally keep a close eye on the stealth system and the engines for the entire trip. We promised the family we’d be hard to track, and I want to make sure we deliver.”

“Understood, sir. I’ll keep on it until we return here. We are coming back, correct?”

“That’s the plan. We still need to get the refugee women off the ship and on their way back to their respective homes.” He clapped me on the shoulder and left.

I looked around, remembered that I still needed to install the converter on the Skimmer, and decided to quickly head there, get that project finished before we headed out.

I met Maris on the way, her disguise mimicking what she had used last time we went shopping.

“You look lovely,” I blurted before I could stop my tongue.

Although it was hard to tell, I think she blushed. “Thank you,” she said. “What did you want me to work on tonight?”

“I’m sorry to do this to you, but if you could run maintenance on compartments three and four, and when you’re confident that they’re working at optimal levels, there are a few minor repairs needed in the cooling chambers.”

She shrugged. “It’s okay. Little jobs need to be done, too.” She patted my arm and headed to our workstation.

I continued on to the cargo bay. It didn’t take long to install the converter and, as I started up the Skimmer so I could run another batch of diagnostics with Shar on the modifications, the family was escorted aboard the ship.

“Once you’ve been shown to your room, we ask, for your own safety and privacy, that you stay in the areas of the ship that we’ve discussed,” Aavat was saying to what I presumed to be the father.

His wife and their two children followed behind, the children looking around the ship in wide-eyed wonder while the woman kept her head down. The man made a show of paying attention to Aavat, but he looked around the bay, as well.

And the skin at the back of my neck prickled.

There was something odd.

If someone had been threatening Maris, I’d want to keep a hand on her at all times. She might be a tough, competent woman, but it would reassure me, and maybe her.

Dejar and Kalyn constantly touched against each other when they thought no one was looking. Aavat hated being more than an arm’s length away from Shenna, and that was on a good day.

But this man followed Aavat without even glancing behind him at his mate. The woman, much smaller framed than his form, kept her hands on the children’s shoulders as they goggled at everything.

Not focused on her mate.

Maybe it was different for mothers.

I could believe that, but there was still something about the man, how he stood, how he examined the ship with a gaze more strategic than curious.

As they left following Aavat I tried to put my finger on it, but couldn’t see it. What was wrong?

“Could you be any more obvious?” I looked down from the Skimmer to see Maris looking up at me, her hands on her hips. “Wanna turn that thing off and talk to me?”

I had forgotten that the Skimmer was still on. I turned it off, checked the diagnostic program on the tablet and, with a nod, climbed down. “What are you doing here?”

“I had come up to ask you a question when I saw you giving the family a death stare. What’s up?”

“Something about that guy makes me uncomfortable. I’m not sure what it is,” I said as I put my arm around her shoulder. “Now, what was that question?”

“Uh-uh. I want to hear from you. Why does he bother you?”

“I don’t know. I know there are a lot of species and males out there that are just as big, or bigger, than I am, there’s just something about him and the way he carries himself that bothers me.” I just hated the way that man moved. “He’s almost familiar, but I can’t place him.”

Maris was shaking under my arm. I looked at her in concern, then realized she was chuckling to herself. When she looked up at me, she nearly lost control and turned her head away from me.

“What?” I asked.

“Mm, nothing. Just,” she pulled away a bit and turned to look at me. “It’s just funny how protective you are. We take on one little family of passengers and you immediately think about how bad the father might be. You’re just precious.”

“Ha, ha. I just,” I stopped to think for a moment. “I guess I’m just uncomfortable having strangers on the ship. I don’t know anything about them.”

This elicited a loud bark of laughter. “Oh. My. God. You do realize what’s been happening on this ship, right? What happened here several months ago?”

I looked at her, wondering what she was talking about.

She looked at me and erupted into more laughter. “Really? We were the strangers here, remember?”

And even I had to admit, that had turned out well.

Better than well.

Rather fantastically.

I shook off my worries and let myself remember how Maris’s lips had felt under mine.

MARIS

After the Rogue Star left Qasar Station, Orrin stuck me back on boring upkeep tasks, but I understood why. On jobs like that, the chances of me running into any of the family members were slim.

The less they saw me, or any of the human women, the less of a chance they would realize we were in disguise.

At least they weren’t going to be a pain, because the rest of my shift was.

Getting underneath compartment two to check for possible leaks in the lines meant pulling on the eye protection and respirator, which just made the glittery skin job scratchy.

Pretty, yes.

Practical when crawling around in overalls and a full-face respirator?

Pain in my glittery butt.

We were about six hours out from Neo when I finally finished my work. My skin felt was crawling under layers of skin dye and I ached to scrub it off. There was no way in hell I was going to sleep with dye, oil, and other random gunk layered over me. Besides, I grumbled, it was all smeared up anyway. It’d need to be reapplied.

I was just following orders, right?

The shift schedule meant the corridor of cabins was often deserted, as most of the crew was either on shift, on call, or sometimes just hanging out in the rec room, instead of sleeping.

Not me, not tonight.

Painfully aware of my itchy skin, I returned to my room and grabbed a towel.

Aryn wasn’t in the room. She must’ve still been working.

Or trying to spy on the family, because she was incurably nosy, and just as paranoid as Orrin.

Either scenario was entirely too believable.

I took my soap and towel to the showers. On the way there, I bit back a shout when a long furry thing the color of coal darted past my feet.

A few moments later, Shenna came running around the corner.

“Please tell me you had nothing to do with the rope of fur that just ran by,” I groaned.

“I do not have anything to do with the rope of fur that just ran by,” she parroted.

“Liar,” I smirked.

“Its name is Slink,” Shenna said defensively, eyes wide.

“I don’t even want to know. I don’t want to know what it is, where you got it, or how it got on board.” I raised my hands in surrender. “Just grab it before anyone sees it.”

“I’m trying,” Shenna cried, and took off running again.

This place was going to become a damn zoo if Shenna had her way.

When I got there, I peeked into the showers.

“Hello?” I asked. My voice echoed through the empty room. I breathed a sigh of relief and quickly undressed. I ran the water as hot as possible, scrubbing away as the silver film slide off my skin and pool at my feet. I’d have to make sure it all went down the drain in case any family members decided to use the showers. It didn’t seem likely during such a short trip, but I couldn’t count on them staying nicely in their rooms.

I scrubbed my skin as best I could with soap and water. In the end, it wasn’t perfect, but I was too afraid of being discovered to linger. I shut off the water, wrapped myself in a towel, and sprinted back to quarters.

I didn’t encounter a single living thing, not even Slink, the fur rope.

Shudder.

Aryn still wasn’t back when I entered our room. I thought about scrawling a note asking her to bring me food and sticking it to the outside of the door.

Now that my disguise was washed away, and I was warm and sleepy from the shower, I had no intention of reapplying the dye immediately.

Which meant I was in for the night.

I kicked at my overalls. The respirator was still attached to the belt, but I hadn’t brought anything else up from the workshop to tinker with.

Boring.

I glared at the pots of dye, but just couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t want to read, didn’t want to go to the rec room…

I wouldn’t mind talking to Orrin, I realized.

Next time I had a project that was long and involved, but left lots of free brain space, I needed to do some serious thinking.

For a change not about engines, not about the shockwave.

About him.

He was smart and funny. Kind, when he didn’t have his head up his ass about ‘his’ engine.

Respected my work.

And me.

And hell… I flushed, just remembering his lips on mine, the touch of his broad hands… the man could kiss.

But what was I going to do about it?

As soon as I was flat on my back with my head on my pillow, I realized I was more tired than I thought.

I drifted off in minutes, all relationship worries cast aside.

I didn’t know how long had passed when I jolted awake.

Alarms blared so loud I had to press my hands over my ears.

But not the security alarm that had woken me twice before.

It was the emergency alarm. Something was terribly wrong.

“Orrin.”

My mind went to him first.

Emergency alarms indicated some kind of mechanical failure. No doubt he was charging headfirst into danger.

I had to find him and help him.

I scrambled for the door, half-aware that Aryn still wasn’t in her bed. That was strange.

I threw the door open but found I couldn’t see more than three feet in front of me. The entire corridor was filled with thick gray fumes. My nose twitched and my lungs burned as I breathed in some sort of toxic fumes.

“Shit!” Dizzy, I staggered back and slammed the door behind me as I scrambled for the respirator.

I strapped the mask to my face and opened the door once more. My breath was shaky even though I was protected from the toxins in the air.

What could be leaking? Where?

I ran to the workshop first. It was empty. Eyes burning, I slapped the controls to kick up the speed on the atmospheric recycler. The system was a resource hog, but now wasn’t the time to be stingy.

Flipping through the screens, I searched for the break in the lines.

Not in cargo, not in the main engines…

There!

But… It wasn’t registering as a leak, but something was filtering through vent 24-H.

Fine. It wouldn’t be the only strangeness with the ship’s systems lately.

I patted the control panel as I grabbed the necessary equipment to make a temporary patch. “We still love you, sweetie.”

No sense in letting the Rogue’s feelings get hurt.

When I pulled the problem vent panel, shock froze my hands for a moment before I kicked back into gear.

There was something foreign stuck behind the pipes and conduits.

Something that was leaking into my ship.

With a scream of frustration, I grabbed the cannister, slapped the patch over the nozzle, and spun around.

Who had been messing with our systems?

It’d take hours before the atmosphere was fully purged, even with the scrubbers on high. I’d need to do an entire crawl through the maintenance shafts, looking for any other surprises.

When had this been placed?

And by who?

I needed to talk to Orrin about this.

I eased the panel back into place, even more careful with our ship now that my temper was up and all I wanted to do was throw things.

Hoisting the offending canister onto my hip, I stomped through the corridors towards engineering, then stopped, my heart in my throat.

Where was everyone?

I’d been so focused on the alarm, on solving the problem, that I hadn’t noticed… but I hadn’t seen a single person.

I stood still as a stone, listening for any signs of life over the blaring emergency alarm.

“Orrin!” My cry was muffled by my respirator. “Shit, shit, shit!”

I took off for the bridge. There was always someone there, at least three crew members at all times.

But as the pounding of my feet echoed in my head, I knew there was a bigger problem, something else was going on.

They should have responded to the alarm before I got there, found the leaking gas.

Long before I did.

It didn’t make any sense. I’d ask them when I got there.

But the bridge was deserted.

Panels blinked, a screen waited for input.

And no one was there.

I ran to Dejar’s office, breath caught in my chest, steps in time with the blaring of the alarm.

Someone had to be here. Somewhere.

It was locked.

It was never locked.

Even when Dejar and Aavat were shouting and swearing at each other, they happily fought in full view of the crew.

Nearly panicking, fearing the worst, I opened the control panel next to the door and typed in a security override.

I fell into the room as the door slid open.

It was empty.

“Hello?” I cried out, even though I knew there was no one around to hear my voice.

Where the hell was everyone?

I ran out of the office to the control room at the other end of the corridor.

I had to get back to engineering.

I had to get to Orrin.

As I ran, I swore I heard the sound of footfalls behind me. I looked over my shoulder.

No one was there.

Just before I reached the door, I felt a deep stinging pain in my arm.

“What the fuck?” I hissed, flinging my body backward.

My arm wouldn’t follow my body.

One moment I was looking at my arm and a twirling mass of toxic fog, the next I was staring at Amber-Eyes as she materialized out of nowhere.

Her thin, needle-sharp claws dug into the skin of my forearm. She was smiling.

I kicked out, catching her in the leg. She wobbled off balance just enough for me to tear my arm from her maw. I felt my skin tear as I yanked away from her teeth. She hissed in outrage, but I was already moving, spinning with the heavy canister, slamming it into her.

With a grunt, she swatted it away.

Well, shit.

She grabbed me by my hair, yanking back so hard I lost my footing. She wrenched my head back and drove me to my knees, tearing off my respirator as I fell.

“Why have you done this?” I croaked. The gas filled my lungs. Amber-Eyes said nothing but crouched over me to drive her fist up into my jaw as hard as she could.

Blackness consumed me, and I couldn’t hear the alarm anymore.

ORRIN

“I did what you wanted. Now it's your turn.”

What the hell?

I didn't recognize the voice. Even with my head fuzzy and aching, it was nobody I knew.

And, where was I?

My eyes were heavy, hard to open. Whatever I was lying on was solid and uncomfortable, and my arms were twisted under me in an unnatural position.

“You'll get what's coming to you, don't worry. Just a few things to tie up here first.”

That second voice, male and raspy, that voice I had heard before.

But where?

The last thing I remembered was heading down to the workshop, when haze filled the corridor, choking me.

Then nothing.

I fought to open my eyes. A crack of light this time.

“What, what the kout is going on? Who are you people?”

No question about that voice.

That was Aavat.

If Aavat was here and in the same condition I was in, this couldn't be good.

And Maris?

What had happened to her?

I moved to push myself up, fear for her the final spark I needed to get my body moving, but with a jolt at my shoulder, I realized my hands were fastened behind my back.

The pain spurred my eyes open, then I quickly shut them again. Partly because the bright, blinding light of the cargo bay sent a spike through my brain, partly because it was time to think.

Across the floor was scattered the entire crew of the Rogue Star, as well as the refugee women. It looked like everyone, except our new passengers.

Everyone looked as if they were still unconscious. The ones whose hands I'd been able to see looked bound, just like I was.

Aavat had managed to struggle into a sitting position, swearing all the while.

Not unusual.

What was unusual was the bruising from his jaw to his temple.

When Aavat got into fights, unless it was with Dejar, he was usually the one doing the bruising.

None of this was good.

“What this is,” said the man's voice that I struggled to place, “is me getting paid for a job. I must say, you didn't make it very hard.”

Aavat groaned, a little deeper.

He was faking it, I realized. Buying time, getting information. “Your job? Our job was to transport you and your family. And that, that's not your wife.”

I risked a peek to see who Aavat was talking about, but apparently wasn’t as sneaky as I thought.

“Come on, big guy, no point hiding. I can see your eyes moving.”

Maybe it wasn't me. The whole crew was made up of pretty big Shein.

“You, the mechanic.”

Scro.

That's where I knew the voice from. The bar where Maris and I had heard the...

Oh, kopa. I opened my eyes and stared at the father of the little family we'd been hired to transport.

“You're a bounty hunter,” I croaked, throat still raw from whatever the hell they’d done to me, to all of us.

“Not as dumb as you look, then,” he shrugged. “I wondered, after placing you here, realizing you'd been running around with one of my little targets.”

His targets.

The bastard was talking about Maris.

My eyes fixed on Maris’s body, sprawled in a heap at his partner’s feet.

His partner, not the demure wife who'd shrunk away from our glances.

But the strange, silent woman we'd rescued back on Katzul. The one Maris called Amber-Eyes, when she wasn't calling her a bitch.

Right now, I’d just go with bitch.

“Where’s your wife? The children?” I growled.

He laughed. I really, really didn’t like this guy.

“Still asleep in that very nice cabin you provided us. Nothing to me, just some female desperate enough for the credits I paid her to even go to Neo.”

No help there, then. I focused on the woman. There had to be a crack, somewhere.

“Why are you helping him? We rescued you.”

She hissed. “You didn't rescue me, fool. You are all idiots.”

“A plant?” Aavat sighed. His head dropped. The late-night mission that he, Dejar, Kalyn, and Shenna had done that brought the refugees to us, it had all been a setup.

The father, no, the hunter, sneered.

“After your first performance at the auction on Katzul, whispers started. I wondered what was going on. It wasn't hard to talk to the newest crop of women, find our lovely Princess Tiatra here, and convince her she’d have a better deal working with me.”

I shook my head, trying not to stare at Maris's limp form. She was twisted, awkward and broken. Hair loose, covering her face, I couldn’t see how injured she was, couldn’t see her hands.

They’d pay. As soon as I got my hands on them.

Wait. My head cleared, just a bit more. Just enough.

Hands.

“So, the whole rescue was a setup?”

Slowly, carefully, I twisted open the hinge at my left wrist.

I tried not to flinch at the soft click, but the hunter didn’t notice.

He just shrugged. “The odds were in my favor. If nothing happened, the woman would be auctioned on schedule, and everything would go according to the original plan. If there was a new player involved, some do-gooder out to free the women, well, I had a back door to get them back,” he nodded his head towards the bitch, apparently named Tiatra.

No, Princess Tiatra.

Feeling blindly for the small blade embedded in my prosthetic, I got to work on the cords behind me while every word the hunter spat at us cut just as deeply.

“But, on the chance it was the same group that had taken the human women from Outpost Nine?” The hunter displayed sharp, jagged teeth, perfectly suited for tearing and ripping. “Well, that would be a payday worth the gamble.”

I felt kicked in the gut.

We’d never thought of disguising the human women from the refugees.

Instead, we’d thrown them together, thought it would help.

And it somehow gave them away.

“But why work with them, why even be in the auction?” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Why would anyone, even a bitch, do that?

Tiatra’s chin rose. “The Dominion offered us protection. In exchange for my people, I offered myself.”

Huh. I could understand that, could even respect it, I guess.

“And when this one came along, I saw a way to return home to the Xio system. He promised to take all of us home if I helped him.”

The Xio system.

I knew something about that, had heard rumors of skills, abilities.

But it would have to wait.

“What now?” I asked. The binding cord was cut, and my blade was back inside my pinky. All I needed was a chance, if I could somehow get them to turn away from me, or against each other.

“We go home,” she said. “All of us.” Her voice had been almost sympathetic, the bare bones of her story almost sorry enough for me to believe.

“Well,” the man said, with a sideways glance at Tiatra as he spoke. “About that.”

Tiatra turned towards him, her head tilted to the side as she tried to figure out what he was going to say.

“I,” he started, then hesitated. He brought his weapon up to scratch his cheek, then pointed it at her. “I lied.”

He pulled the trigger.

The loud blast echoed in the cargo bay, the reverberations of the sound hurting my ears. I nearly brought my hands up, then remembered I was supposed to be tied up. The man walked over to Tiatra’s body.

“Sorry, lady. You never once had a deal that was going to be paid off.”

With a shrug, he walked away from her body and back towards Aavat.

My heart stopped.

Not because of the murder of Tiatra.

Not because of the murdering asshole stalking towards Aavat.

But because Maris was awake, and it looked like her hands were unbound.

Tiatra had fallen just to her side and, with unfocused eyes, Maris ran her fingers quickly over the dead woman’s clothing, searching for something.

She pulled it back quickly, shielding what she’d found with her shoulder, but I’d seen enough that, for the first time in my life, terror ran through me.

Maris had found a small blaster on Tiatra’s body.

This man had already shown himself to be deadly, and a bit unstable. If he was willing to kill his partner, he’d have no compunctions about killing anyone else.

That meant he would kill me, or Aavat, or Dejar, any of us, in an instant if we made a move towards him.

Maris with a blaster had no chance.

But before I could shove my numb legs into motion, she took wobbly aim and fired.

And missed.

MARIS

Damn it!

I grasped the blaster, squinting, shaking my head to try to force the double vision away.

The sudden movements sent a wave of dizziness over me.

The blast fizzled to nothing against the insulated wall of the cargo hold.

And the bounty hunter turned back, black eyes narrowing as he watched me struggle, half rolling away from Tiatra’s corpse.

I didn’t know what species he was. Tall and broad like a Shein, but with skin the gray, rough texture of a peeling tree. His mouth was no more than a lipless slit, but his teeth… they’d give me nightmares later, I just knew it.

If we lived through this.

“Someone’s got a little fight in them, eh?” the bounty hunter growled. His footsteps reverberated through the metal floor beneath me. “Lucky for you, I’m in the mood to play a bit longer.”

He lunged at me. My reactions were sluggish, dull,

I dodged far too late.

He gripped my arm, the sharp pain drawing a yelp from me, forcefully hauling me off the floor. I heard the blaster skitter away as he kicked it into the darkness between a stack of crates, far out of my reach.

“I’ll kill you,” I tried to shout, but my voice was weak and crackly.

The vent fans were doing their job, but not fast enough.

The bounty hunter shoved me hard. I fell back onto the metal floor, my bones barking in protest. My legs turned to jelly, and I couldn’t right myself.

“Come on, little soft one,” the bounty hunter taunted. “Try to kill me. I’ll even stand still for you. Have a free shot on me.” He grinned, and I shuddered. “I’m sure they don’t need all of you.”

I struggled to my feet. I couldn’t take him, even if I hadn’t been exposed to the gas for as long as the rest of the crew. Instead of lunging for him, I ran to the door of the cargo hold and threw it open.

The scrubbers had done a better job in the corridors. Really needed to bump that up on the maintenance list.

I took a deep gulp of fresher air as the fumes dissipated even more.

“Don’t bother running,” the hunter said. “There’s no place you can go where I won’t track you down.”

“I’m not running,” I told him. “And I haven’t taken my free hit yet.”

Behind him, Orrin slowly got to his feet. His balance was unsteady, his eyes sliding in and out of focus.

Oh no.

The bounty hunter noticed I wasn’t staring at him. He started to turn his head to follow my gaze.

Oh no oh no oh no.

“Hey!” I shouted before he could see Orrin was on his feet.

The hunter looked back to me and I charged him, throwing myself against him with all the strength I could muster. I stumbled backward. I didn’t even make him lose his footing.

“That was a good effort,” the bounty hunter chuckled. “I’m feeling benevolent. Why don’t you go again?”

“She doesn’t need to.” Orrin clubbed the bastard on the back of the neck.

The bounty hunter stumbled forward as he whirled around. Orrin came at him again, this time knocking him off his feet. They struggled on the floor, equally matched in size and strength.

I rushed to the side of the person nearest to me. Kalyn. Good. I knelt beside her and tried to shake her awake. She groaned and coughed. Her wrists were unbound, and I wondered if the arrogant bastard hadn’t thought the soft little humans were a threat.

“Nod if you can hear me,” I urged. She dipped her chin. I draped her arm over my shoulders. “Use all of your strength. Help me get you to fresh air.” I lifted her off the ground. Her legs scrambled for purchase on the smooth floor of the cargo hold.

“Do your best,” I urged, already breathless and dizzy again. I dragged her out of the cargo hold and a few feet down the hall where most of the sleeping gas would’ve dispersed.

“Just breathe,” I urged her. “When you’re ready, help me get the others.” Kalyn nodded weakly.

Orrin held the bounty hunter in a headlock, his face looked the color of a beet. I started towards the corner where the blaster had gone, but the pair rolled across the floor, blocking my way.

Dammit. There’d be no finding it.

Get the women, so they could help me get the guys.

Focus on what I can do.

But still, I worried.

I grabbed Lynna next. She was a doctor. I needed her well and alert as soon as possible so she could get the med bay running. But she was even more out of it than Kalyn and I struggled to get her out the door.

I struggled even more, not looking over my shoulder to make sure Orrin was all right.

I placed Lynna beside Kalyn, who had more color in her cheeks now.

A loud crack sizzled through the corridor and my stomach twisted.

That was the unmistakable sound of a blaster.

I ran back to the cargo hold just in time to see Orrin sink to his knees with his hands clamped against his stomach. Blood dripped from his fingers, as shimmery as his skin.

“No!” I screamed.

The bounty hunter turned to face me with madness in his eyes.

He lifted his gun.

I felt no fear.

I closed my eyes and waited for the final blow, but it didn’t come.

Someone gave a shout. I opened my eyes. Dejar and Aavat were on their feet now, blood dripping from their wrists where they’d torn through their bonds. Kovor wasn’t far behind them. Qal’s eyes were open, alert and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Aavat lunged for the hunter. Dejar lunged for the gun.

And I ran to Orrin, the only one that mattered.

He was on his back now, laying in a pool of his own blood. His eyes were open, and he was still breathing.

“Maris,” he rasped.

“Don’t try to speak right now,” I urged him. I lifted my shirt overhead, not carrying that I was only in my undergarments from the waist up. I balled up my shirt and pressed it against his wound as tightly as I could.

He hissed in pain.

“I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “I know it hurts, but you have to stay with me.” The gas, combined with the physical exertion and emotional stress, began to take its toll on me. My vision blurred. I felt lightheaded once more.

“Get somewhere safe.” Orrin’s voice was barely louder than the sound of the struggle behind us.

“I am somewhere safe,” I insisted. “If I’m with you, then I’m somewhere safe. Stop trying to talk. Just focus on staying awake. I need you to stay awake.”

Another blaster shot rang out behind us. I turned, fearing that the hunter had struck down another one of the crew.

Instead, Aavat stood with the blaster in his hands and the bounty hunter dead at his feet.

I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“He’s dead,” I told Orrin. “We’re all safe now. He’s dead.”

“How is he?” Dejar asked, his usual composure in splinters. He knelt beside me, placing his hands over mine to add to the pressure on Orrin’s wound.

“Get Zayn or Lynna,” Dejar ordered over his shoulder. “Whoever is more alert, just get them!”

I slipped my hands out from under Dejar’s. They were stained with blood. I tucked them behind my back, so I wouldn’t look at them and Orrin wouldn’t see them. I moved to sit by his head.

“I’m well enough to prep the med bay,” Lynna called through the doorway of the cargo hold.

“Go as fast as you can,” Dejar urged.

“You’re going to be just fine,” I whispered to Orrin. “Everyone’s working together to save you.” I glanced up for a brief moment, long enough to see that most of the crew and alien women were coming out of their drugged sleep.

“Tend to the ones who haven’t woken yet,” I urged Vixaine. She nodded, paler than usual.

“Maris, his eyes are closing,” Dejar exclaimed.

I looked back to Orrin. Heavy lids drooped over his eyes.

“Hey,” I called to him. His eyelids flickered at the sounds of my voice. “You can’t die on me today. In fact, you can’t die on me, ever. We have a lot of work to do. I can’t do it alone. I won’t do it alone.” My voice grew thick with tears, but I refused to cry. Hearing me in distress wouldn’t do Orrin any good. “You haven’t finished that list of tasks,” I sniffled.

“Aavat, go help Lynna set up the med bay,” Dejar urged. Aavat ran out of the cargo bay, for once, not swearing.

“Be strong for me.” I leaned down to whisper in his ear. “I’m not as strong as you think I am. I need you with me.” I pressed a kiss into his forehead. His eyelids flickered again.

“Please don’t die. I’d be lost without you,” I whispered so quietly I couldn’t even hear myself.

“Med bay is ready,” Aavat announced, a little breathless.

“We’ve got to move him,” Dejar told me. Aavat, Dejar, Kovor, and Qal lifted Orrin off the floor, keeping him as level as they could. “Find the rest of the family, too!”

I couldn’t move. My limbs wouldn’t obey my commands. For a long while, all I could do was stare at the pool of blood on the floor.

And wait.

ORRIN

All I could hear were beeps.

Very annoying beeps.

Very annoying beeps that pounded in my head.

I wanted those beeps to stop.

I wanted the pounding to stop.

I wanted everything to stop.

Not just the pain and the beeps, but the sharp pain in my arm, the dreams of blood, the nightmares of Maris’s body hitting the floor as her insides spilled from her, the memories of…something.

I wanted all of it to stop, except one thing.

I heard Maris. I heard her voice.

That was the only thing that I wanted to continue. Her voice, her words, her emotion…those were the only things I wanted.

The rest of the world, the galaxy, even the universe, could blink out of existence as long as I could have her voice in my head.

The only thing better would have been her touch on my skin.

That was all I wanted.

Oh, would those damn beeps just stop, already!

I had to do something, anything, to get those beeps to stop. I started by trying to move my arms, but I found that I didn’t have the strength to move them. Next, I tried to move my head, but it weighed more than a Shein battle-cruiser.

I resorted to trying to open my eyes. I found that they were heavier than the Skimmer, but more receptive to the notion of movement. As my eyelids slowly, ever so slowly, opened, the light that flooded in was painful.

“Erngh.” I wasn’t sure what the noise was that escaped my lips, but the incoherence of it matched how I felt. I felt something on my hand—soft, gentle, positioned slightly wrong as it pressed down on whatever was causing my arm to hurt—but I didn’t want it to let me go.

I forced my eyes open and everything was bright, blurry, and painful.

“Hey, big man.” The voice sounded shaky, almost as if the owner of it had been nervous or scared. I still had no strength to move my head, but I had enough strength to flex a finger, so I did. Whoever was holding my hand leaned over me, blocking the light from blinding me.

My vision, still a bit blurry from my eyes being closed and then from being blinded, slowly worked itself out. The person standing over me began to materialize before me. Gray eyes looked down at me, concern evident within them. Then came the dark, curly hair. As I tried to say her name, Maris’s olive complexion slowly came into focus and I could see her beautiful face.

She looked haggard, her eyes were bloodshot, her curly hair was disheveled, and the worry on her face, while still beautiful, was something that my fuzzy mind knew was wrong.

I opened my mouth to talk, but she placed her finger on my lips and told me to ‘shh’.

“Just rest. You’ve been unconscious for nearly two days,” she said as she gently caressed my face.

The vision from my nightmares came, the battered, bloody face overlying this sweet, perfect one, and I reached to grab her, make sure she was real, but I only managed a twitch.

“Easy. Just take it easy,” Maris whispered as she shifted to my side, eyes shining over gray smudged hollows. “You need to take it slow.”

I opened my mouth to speak again, and as her finger came back to my lips, I kissed it. She smiled, and that made me feel better. “Where…” It was exhausting to talk, but I had to. “Where are we?” I had so many questions in my head, and that wasn’t the first one I wanted to ask, but it was the one that managed to escape.

“We made it back to Qasar Station. We’re docked on the far side, away from where we were before.” She sat down, and I found that I was able to move my head to follow her. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.

I patted the bed next to me. “Get in. Sleep.” My words didn’t have a lot of strength behind them as I felt my own mind drifting again.

She laughed, though it sounded forced. “Do I really look that bad?” She shook her head. “I’ll be fine, I promise. How are you?”

I forced my eyes open again. I didn’t know how I felt. I was tired, groggy, and all I wanted was to sleep away everything. “I’m okay,” I lied.

“Liar,” she said with a slight chuckle. “You got shot. I’m not an expert on Shein anatomy, but Lynna told me that another inch to the right and you would have bled to death before we got you in here.”

‘Here’ was the med bay. I finally realized that, and the infernal beeping was the machines I was connected to. Then the memories flooded back to me. Tiatra, the man with the blaster, our fight, and then the sudden explosion of pain as my stomach erupted.

“She’s right,” I heard a voice. Lynna came to stand behind Maris and put a hand on her shoulder. “You got lucky. Zayn knew your system better, I knew the surgery. Took us a few hours to get you off the table, then we still weren’t sure you were going to pull through. You nearly left us a few times.”

I raised an eyebrow, the extent of my strength at the time.

“It was a hell of a fight to keep you here,” Lynna explained. Then she turned to Maris. “You need some sleep, too. It won’t do either of you any good if you’re too tired to do anything.”

Maris nodded as she patted Lynna’s hand. “I will. I promise,” she added as Lynna fixed her with a ‘really?’ look. “In just a little bit, promise.”

“Okay.” Then Lynna looked at me and patted my leg. “Glad to have you back. Do me a favor and don’t get shot again, okay?”

“My best,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Always,” she said, then walked out of the room.

I turned my head, as best as I could, to Maris. “You need to sleep.”

“I will. I just need to make sure you’re okay first.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “I almost lost you.” She put her head in her hands and her shoulders shuddered. I had to make her feel better.

I summoned up every ounce of strength I had, then dipped into reserves I didn’t know I could tap into in my condition and rolled onto my side. I reached out for her and brushed my fingertips against her arm. She looked up, then jerked up to her feet.

“You’re not supposed to move,” she said, her voice breaking.

“And you need to stop worrying about me. I’m okay. I’m alive.”

The fear in her eyes scared me. “You almost weren’t. You actually weren’t. Your heart stopped, twice.”

“But it started back up…” I had to catch my breath. “For you.”

Her eyes widened, then she grabbed my hand and kissed it. “When you were lying on the bay floor, bleeding everywhere, I thought I couldn’t be more scared. But when they brought you in here and I had to watch them, I was terrified. The thought of losing you was unbearable. I don’t know what I would have done if you had died.”

Tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks and I felt a tear leave my own eyes. I moved a bit, using my weak strength to pull her so she would sit on the bed next to me. I held her hand and looked at her. “You are the reason I came back.”

We sat there, staring at one another for a few moments before I continued. “I heard your voice, talking to me, telling me that things weren’t finished yet, that we weren’t finished yet. It was your voice that made me want to wake up.” I squeezed her hand. “I’m here, for you. I’m not leaving. Apparently, not even a madman can take me away from you.”

She laughed, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smiled at me. “You’re so weird, trying to joke at a time like this.”

“Who’s joking?” I asked. “Look at what happened. I was shot, and I’m still here, with you. If that doesn’t mean something, I don’t know what does.” I was tired of lying in bed. I wanted to get up. I wanted to hold her in my arms and comfort her. “Help me sit up.”

With a shake of her head, she said, “Uh-uh. You need to rest. You’re not strong enough to sit up yet.”

“Yes, I am. Either help me up, or I’ll sit up on my own,” I shot back and started to sit up. The room, the world, the universe, everything swam in hundreds of different directions at the same time as I sat up. I felt Maris grab me and hold me. I wrapped my arms around her and brought my lips close to her ear. “I’m not leaving, ever. Promise.”

I did my best to squeeze her, and she did the same. I wasn’t sure how long we sat there, holding one another, but when she let me go and my head hit the pillow, I was asleep.

MARIS

“Are you sure I can’t convince you to take notes?” Orrin asked for the third time.

“Nope,” I rubbed my eyes. I was so thankful he was recovering, but there were moments…

Dejar had called a crew meeting that was due to start any minute. Lynna hadn’t given Orrin permission to leave his bed in the med bay yet.

Orrin, being Orrin, didn’t agree with that decision. He said he could run around the ship twice if he wanted to.

Personally, I thought he was just grumpy about being left out.

“How will I know that you listened to everything if you don’t take notes?” he asked.

“I’m going to listen,” I assured him.

“You barely pay attention to me as it is,” he rolled his eyes.

“That’s not true and you know it.” I playfully swatted his shoulder.

“It’s completely true,” Orrin objected. “Pass me that pad and paper, please.”

“I’m not taking notes!” I exclaimed.

“It’s not for you, it’s for me. I’m writing out all the things you need to get done today around the ship and in the workshop,” Orrin explained.

“You’ve told me everything already,” I laughed.

“What if you forget something?” he asked.

“Have I ever?” I replied.

“No, but there’s a first time for everything,” Orrin said.

“Not necessarily,” I shrugged.

“I was shot for the first time a few days ago. It’s plausible that you will experience a first time forgetting a task,” Orrin reasoned.

“Are you being difficult because you know I think it’s charming?” I lifted a brow.

“Possibly,” Orrin gave a single slow nod.

“Dork,” I snorted.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s a compliment,” I assured him as I planted a kiss on the top of his head.

“For some reason, I don’t believe you,” he teased. “Go on over to the meeting. You’re going to be late.”

“If I’m late, it’s because I took twenty minutes coddling you.” I stuck out my tongue. “I’ll come right back here and tell you everything, I promise.” He smiled at me and my whole body filled with a pleasant warmth.

It hadn’t taken long before we’d fallen back into our usual pattern of bickering. It meant things were returning to normal.

Or whatever our new normal would be.

Everyone, including the alien women, was gathered in the dining hall. It was cramped, but the only other space that could hold all of us at once would be the cargo bay, and more than a few of us were reluctant to head down there anytime soon.

Dejar stood in the center and everyone formed a loose circle around him.

“It is with great pleasure that I am now able to present every one of you rescued from the auction house with new identities. You are free to leave whenever you like, though I would appreciate your input on a few things that have weighed heavily on me,” Dejar said.

Vixaine translated for the women who didn’t understand Dejar.

One by one, their faces lit up. Some grasped hands or embraced each other. Others stood silent while happy tears rolled down their cheeks.

“After a small amount of research,” Dejar continued, “we were able to confirm that Tiatra was, indeed, the princess of Xio. It’s a system new to the Dominion.” He and Aavat shot each other significant looks, but then he continued. “We don’t know much about it, but there are rumors that her people can influence the minds and memories of others. The extent of their powers isn’t well researched, but it does seem like their skin throws light back at our cameras in an unusual way, makes them hard to catch.”

“That’s how she was able to sneak out,” I gasped.

“What was that, Maris?” Dejar asked.

“When Orrin and I were out getting supplies, I thought I spied her in the crowd. When I asked the others, they said she hadn’t moved in days. She must have altered their memories to sneak in and out,” I explained.

“It is true,” Vixaine added. “To us, she never left.”

“And that explains why the motion sensors for the security system kept going off, but we never saw anyone on the surveillance footage,” I added.

“Interesting,” Dejar nodded. “We’ve also speculated that the hunter, whoever he was, insisted on such a sophisticated stealth system when he made the contract, to prevent any attempt at rescue from locating us.” His jaw tightened. “If we’d been able to call for help before he finished his plan.”

“He really put a lot of planning into this,” Aryn shook her head.

“And a lot of money,” Kovor added, then cracked a small smile. “All of which we still have, by the way. I assume he planned to reclaim his funds once he handed us over to the Dominion.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about food,” Shenna grinned, Slink draped around her shoulders. I wondered if anyone else had noticed yet.

“We have other things to worry about, I’m afraid.” Aavat gave her a tender smile. “After examining the body of the bounty hunter, we discovered a small brand. It’s not quite the same as the mark at the bottom of the auction list, but the two marks are obviously related. Whoever he was, he was involved with selling these women.”

“One of them was lying,” I spoke up. Everyone turned to look at me. “Think about it. Tiatra claims she was an ally of the Dominion, yet she ended up in the auction. The attacker bears the sigil of the group that runs the auction, but worked with her, offering help from the Dominion. How can either of them be what they said they were?”

“Perhaps the Dominion didn’t know about his affiliation with the auctioneers,” Dejar suggested.

“The Dominion could’ve caught him in the act and forced him to come after us to avoid prosecution,” Kalyn suggested.

“That would explain how he and Tiatra met. If she was an agent of the Dominion, she could’ve been the one who caught him,” Aavat added.

“But they couldn’t have known we were going to rescue the exact group of women Tiatra was placed with,” I replied. “Tiatra might’ve been placed in the auctions as a spy, but she had no way of knowing she was going to meet us. If she was already allied with the hunter, she would’ve had to warn him in advance that she was hunting us.”

“When we found her with the others waiting to be sold off, she didn’t leave the group to pass a message to anyone,” Shenna offered. “She was one of the first I got out.”

“That’s what you think,” Dejar said. “Remember, she can influence memories. She might’ve slipped away and made it look like she was there all along.”

“This is suspiciously like everything else that’s been happening to us,” I huffed.

“What do you mean?” Aryn asked.

“Strange things that are too connected to be a coincidence, yet we don’t know enough of the story to say for certain.” I crossed my arms across my chest.

“She’s right,” Kovor nodded. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say everything that’s happened to us has been perfectly planned to look like a series of random, yet devastating, events.”

“I do know better and still I say that’s exactly what’s happening,” Aavat declared. “Someone is toying with us.”

“The Dominion’s been after us from the start of this,” Qal said.

“Why would they drag it out like this?” Kovor replied. “They have the resources to track us and commandeer us a hundred times over. If they’re so desperate to bring us down, why haven’t they?”

“The auctioneers then,” Aavat offered. “We stole their business. They could’ve gone to Itair and put the pieces together. We always knew it was a possibility.”

“They would’ve had to figure it out within a day or two.” Dejar rubbed his chin.

“Is that not possible?” Kalyn asked.

“It is,” Dejar nodded. “But then the next question is, how did they know we came here? Orrin and Maris crafted new registration chips that fooled the system here. We wouldn’t have come up on record as the same ship that was docked in Katzul.”

“That means the auctioneers had to have known it was us right away and followed us,” Kovor supplemented.

“That’s highly unlikely,” Qal said. “The window to trail us without being too close to detect yet not too far to lose us completely is very small.”

“Then how do they keep finding us?” Aavat shouted. “When this meeting is dismissed, all of us will search every inch of this ship for tracking devices, cameras, and transmitters.”

My head began to ache. I’d had enough to mysteries, conspiracy theories, and realizing we still don’t have every piece of the puzzle. I didn’t want to think about it anymore today.

“Excuse me,” I murmured to those around me. I backed out of the group and quietly slipped away. I’d only taken a few steps down the hall when Aryn called my name.

“Are you okay?” She jogged up to me to close the distance between us.

“I’m tired of fighting,” I sighed. “I feel like I’ve been at war since the moment I left home and I’m sick of it.”

“You and me both,” Aryn sighed. “But as long as we’re being hunted, we’ve got to keep fighting.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “However, just for today, I’d like to pretend I don’t have to fight anything.”

“You’ve earned that,” Aryn grinned. “You’re the one that really saved us.”

“Barely,” I replied. “Tell me what happens in the meeting, okay? I promised Orrin a full report.”

“Sure thing,” Aryn smiled before ducking back inside.

I dragged my feet wearily through the corridors until I reached the med bay. Orrin was asleep in his bed. The sight of him made me smile. I climbed into the bed beside him, carefully curled into his good side.

Within minutes, I was fast asleep, with my head on his chest.

ORRIN

“I bet you’re excited to get back to work,” Lynna said as she redressed my bandages.

“You have no idea,” I replied. “I feel useless lying here day after day when there’s so much to be done.”

“I’m sure Maris loves having full control of the workshop,” Lynna gave me wry smile.

“I’m sure she does,” I grinned, then stopped, an image of her rearranging my desk all too clear in my mind. “Have you told her I’m coming back today?”

“Not yet,” Lynna replied.

“Don’t,” I urged. “I want to surprise her.”

“Maris doesn’t seem like the type that enjoys surprises,” Lynna said slowly.

“Maybe so, but when she’s startled, that mask of hers tends to slip.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Lynna admitted. “What kind are you looking to see in her?”

“She said some things to me a few days back.” The memory of all that she’d said made me smile. “But, she was distressed and emotional. Human emotions seem to be greatly influenced by their environment.”

“Not Maris,” Lynna assured me. “I’ve never seen someone with a stronger handle on their feelings. I thought mild-to-severe irritability was her only mood, until the Rogue Star scooped us up. If Maris is displaying emotions, then I’d expect they are genuine.”

“That brings me comfort,” I smiled. “However, I’d still like to surprise her.”

“My lips are sealed,” Lynna grinned. I dropped my gaze down to her mouth.

“They don’t appear to be.” Lynna blinked and looked as confused as I felt, then burst into laughter.

“It’s a human expression,” she explained. “It means I won’t tell.”

“Why do you humans always find ways to complicate simple sayings,” I sighed.

“We’re a creative species,” she shrugged. “Don’t think on it too much. You’ll just give yourself a headache.”

“Fair enough,” I agreed. “Will you let me out of this bed now, gatekeeper?”

“You’re free to go,” Lynna said with a dismissive wave. “However, I don’t want you working too long your first day back. Eight hours max, and no heavy lifting or stretching.”

“Most of my job is lifting and stretching,” I protested.

“Then Maris will have to do it in the meantime,” Lynna replied. “And don’t think you get away with working more. I won’t tell Maris you’re coming back to work, but I will tell her, later on, to make you go off-shift once you’ve worked eight hours.”

“Fine,” I grumbled. “Thanks for not telling her and thanks for making sure I didn’t end up with a hole in my gut for the rest of my life.”

“You’re welcome!” Lynna said cheerfully. “I’ll expect you back here daily for checkups, but you’ve healed remarkably well.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I nodded and slowly walked out of the med bay. I wanted to run, but if I did, surely Lynna would give me the scolding of a lifetime.

Then she would call Maris in and she would give me another scolding.

I could force myself to walk.

Today.

When I reached the workshop, I peered through the window in the door. Maris sat at the workbench with her back to me, bent over something. I knocked softly to avoid scaring her. The last thing I wanted was for her to end up in the med bay, too.

She looked over her shoulder, eyes opening wide. Her face split into a huge grin as she set aside whatever she was working on, and she ran to the door and threw it open.

“Am I allowed to jump into your arms?” she asked.

“Just don’t tell Lynna.” I opened my arms for her. She jumped up, wrapping her arms around my neck. My gut ached from the exertion, but I didn’t mind. It was worth it to have her in my arms.

It was worth anything.

“Are you just visiting me or are you really back to work?” she asked.

“I’m allowed to work again,” I replied.

“Finally!” she sighed. “It’s been lonely in the workshop without someone to criticize.”

I laughed heartily. “Is that all you keep me around for?” I asked.

Maris pulled back to look me in the face.

“Yes. I spent days in the med bay making sure you’d live long enough to take more of my snark.” She rolled her eyes.

“I’m happy to take your snark if it means I’m alive,” I replied.

“Stay alive for a good long while and I’ll give you all the snark you desire,” she joked.

“Sounds like a plan,” I grinned. “Can I ask you something?” I set her down gently so that her feet touched the floor once more.

“Anything.”

“What the kopa does snark mean?”

She rolled her eyes and I ran one finger down the edge of her cheek, her soft skin intoxicating, even just the lightest touch.

And if I’d misunderstood, if I’d lost something in translation, I could lose her touch, her laugh… her.

Forever.

“Did you mean what you said in the med bay when I woke up?” I finally asked.

Her eyes went soft and warm as the sweetest smile played across her lips. “Of course I did,” she said. “If I lost you now, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Losing you would break me into a million pieces and I’d never be able to put myself back together correctly.” Her gaze flickered down, then back, her voice stronger with her conviction. “I’m in love with you, Orrin. I don’t know how you did it, but you got me to fall for you.”

“I’m in love with you, too, Maris. I don’t know how you did it, but you got me to look up from the workbench.”

She beamed at me and rose up on the tips of her toes. I lowered my head and pressed my lips to hers.

She wound her arms around my neck and pulled me closer to her. I deepened the kiss, urging her to open her mouth so I could taste her tongue. She moaned softly. Something about that little noise ignited a fire in me.

I pulled her in tighter. Her hands slid under my shirt, soft palms gliding over my chest and around to my back. I wanted to feel her skin too. I dipped my hands under the hem of her shirt. Her skin was soft and warm.

She took a half-step back and withdrew her hands from under my shirt. At first, I worried I’d made an error, but then she lifted her hands above her head in silent demand.

Slowly, I lifted her shirt over her head, relishing each new inch of exposed flesh. She reached behind her to undo the fastenings of her undergarment. She closed the distance between us, pulling me into another kiss. My blood pounded in my veins. The only thing I was aware of was the feeling of her bare skin against mine.

“I need you,” she moaned against my lips, her breasts pressed against my chest. I broke our kiss and looked around. I didn’t want to take her on the floor. It was stained with oil, cooling gel, and all manner of mechanical fluids.

My gaze settled on the workbench. Maris kept it immaculately clean. It seemed like a fitting place to take her for the first time. I lifted her off her feet, ignoring the slight strain on my wound. She was worth it, this was worth anything, even a few more days in sickbay, if necessary.

Maris locked her legs around my waist, pressing herself against me, driving all thoughts of pain or logic far, far away. I pressed myself against her hot core, so she could feel exactly how aroused she’d made me.

I stepped over to the workbench and set her down. When she realized where she was sitting, she gave me a delicious grin.

“Really?” she purred. “How fitting.”

“My thoughts exactly.” I quickly undid the fastenings of her pants. She lifted her hips up so I could tug them down. When she lowered herself down, she let out a sharp gasp.

“Are you okay?” I was down by her ankles, tugging the work boots off her feet so I could undress her completely.

“The workbench is cold,” she whimpered. I looked up at her with a hungry smile.

“Allow me to warm you up.” I straightened up to my full height. As I undid my belt, I took in the sight of her. For the first time since I’d met her, Maris looked small to me.

Obviously, I was a head taller and twice as broad as she was, but her strong presence always made her seem larger than she was.

Now she was tiny, fragile, the most delicate and precious thing in the universe, laid open before me.

She looked up at me, her eyes huge and glittering. I stepped up to her, leaning down to give her a tender kiss. Her legs fell open for me.

Maris seemed to acclimate to the temperature quickly enough, and when I placed a hand at her inner thigh, it became abundantly clear why. She was absolutely burning up, and the further in I trailed my fingers, the more intense the heat became. I was sure the metal was practically glowing white-hot beneath her.

I leaned forward and grasped one of those beautiful breasts of hers, giving a firm squeeze before wrapping my lips around the rosy bud. The feeling of her soft heat was exquisite, but I wasn’t quite expecting what hit me next.

Her scent. Her intoxicating, wild, incredible scent. It radiated along with her heat, complex and wonderful. It saturated my mind, dulling my thoughts, shifting something essential in the depths of my being.

I felt a deep hunger spark down in my chest and, despite my usual tight self-control, I growled and huffed hard against her like some beast. I only had a moment to be surprised before even that was erased utterly. I grasped her arms and pulled them up above her head, pinning them to the wall to keep her exactly where I needed her.

I covered every inch of her from the waist up in starving kisses and lavishing strokes of my tongue, the desperate need growing more frantic. Every time I caught a new component of that lovely scent, my hunger peaked anew. Each of her breathy moans drove me on, every little ticklish giggle giving way to the lustful vocalizations almost immediately.

My hunger drove me downward, so I released her hands so I could reach further, and the moment I began my descent, Maris pulled her legs up and back, resting her heels at the edge of the bench. The fact that she seemed to need it just as badly as I did drove me absolutely wild.

I bent at the waist and, after lingering for a moment to take in the gorgeous image of her waiting slickness, dove forward to lap at her gleaming folds. I wasn’t quite sure what she would like best, but even that basic question failed to breach the surface of the exhilaration I was feeling.

Her body would tell me everything I needed to know.

There, the tiny nub at the top of her slit. With every brush against it, I coaxed a soft enticing moan from her, only driving me harder against her.

Maris squirmed and whimpered, her hand shooting down to my hair, tightening a bit as she guided me. Before long, I wrapped my lips around the sensitive bud of her clit, and she bolted near upright with a deep gasp. I stopped, thinking I’d done something wrong, but almost as quickly as the feeling had arisen, it was erased.

She gave a hard, shuddering moan, pushing her hips forward hard. Hearing that sound, just as driven and desperate as my own, put even the potential for thought far away. I suckled and lapped wildly, cycling the pressure and stimulation in time with the rocking of her hips.

I reached up and grabbed her hips firmly, pulling her against me every time I intensified the stimulation. She wrapped her legs around my head, and I soon realized that she wasn't touching the workbench at all anymore. Her back was to the wall, the whole of her weight on my shoulders, one hand out to brace herself against the wall. Her head thrashed side to side as if she was trying to shake away the impending climax, wanting to keep it going as long as possible, just as I did.

I backed off on the stimulation, and the moment I did, she tightened her legs to hold me in place. I felt a hard tremble run down her form as she looked down at me. The exhilaration was clear on her features, her lips parted, chest heaving with excitement. There was something decidedly wild in her gaze, the impression driven home hard by a sudden swipe of her tongue over her lips.

Both hands now cupping her ass to support her, I began the slow rocking motions once more, and she surged right back to the edge. Over and over, I backed off and pushed forward, almost-imperceptible nods from her spurring me on.

Soon, she was so consistently at the edge that no pulling back seemed to bring her back from the brink, her hand gripping uselessly at the wall as if to hold on as the enormity of the orgasm dawned on her.

I lingered for a long moment there, my eyes locked on hers. Her lips moved in silent pleading, her hand tightening at my hair in a desperate attempt to get me to continue. I held exactly where I was, matching any forward press of her hips with a push backward to keep her clit just out of contact, though I know she could still feel my breath.

“Orrin, I...!” Her pink tongue darted out, wetting swollen lips. “Please!”

Only when she begged me aloud did I give her what she needed so badly that she was willing to toss any notion of pride away. She pleaded shamelessly, bucking her hips toward me, seemingly almost on the verge of tears with desperation.

I dove forward to take her sensitive nub between my lips, suckling and stroking wildly. She was driven over the moment my lips made contact, her breath suddenly hitching in her throat, her body going rigid. She seemed to vibrate with the enormity of it, her eyes rolling back in her head as her mouth dropped open.

Maris seemed to go somewhere else entirely for a long, unbelievably tense moment before suddenly crashing back to reality, her body thrashing and bucking so wildly I had to hold her in place. Her soft thighs squeezed tight around my head, absolutely burying me in her scent and heat.

Just as suddenly as she'd been driven over, she seemed to jerk back in the other direction, the stimulation too much for her to handle. She pulled her hips back and placed a hand at the crown of my head, though I couldn't help a few more laps of that sweet nectar before I allowed myself to be pushed back.

She fell back against the workbench, panting and spent. With a solid surface beneath her, she went totally slack, aside from her heaving breaths and the trembling of her fingers. She seemed equal parts exhausted and exhilarated, short little bursts of laughter coming in between the gasps.

“Come here, love,” I murmured, grabbing her by the wrists and pulling her up against my chest. “This is more comfortable than lying on the workbench, I bet.” All she could do was nod. I held her against me, stroking her hair and running my fingers over her glistening skin.

She looked up at me with a wicked grin.

“Let’s do that again.”

MARIS

I stretched my arms over my head as I walked out of the workshop. There was a pleasant ache throughout my body that was the result of more than just a good day’s work.

My backside was a little sore from being propped up on the workbench.

Hot in the moment, but not something I wanted to repeat.

At least, not for a few more hours.

Orrin had gone back to his room a few hours after he came by. Lynna wouldn’t let him work more than that, though Orrin wanted to stretch it.

As much as I adored working with him and was thrilled to have him back with me, I had to side with Lynna.

It would take anyone a while to bounce back from a shot to the stomach and Orrin was no exception despite how strong he was.

And I wouldn’t risk him.

I peeked into the dining hall, hoping for a late-night snack.

I didn’t see our long-suffering cook, but did see Lynna, Kalyn, and Shenna sitting at a table with a plate of fried dough between them.

Shenna said something that made Lynna and Kalyn throw their heads back in laughter. Through her laughter, Kalyn’s eyes found mine. She beckoned me to enter.

“Late night, Maris?” Kalyn asked.

“As always,” I replied. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m just looking for some food.”

“Pull up a chair,” Shenna urged. “Share with us.”

“It’s fine,” I stammered.

“Nonsense,” Lynna declared. “We’ve barely seen you since that last meeting.”

I didn’t see a way out of it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. I liked them all quite a bit. I considered them friends now.

But that’s the thing.

Aside from Aryn, I’ve never had many friends. I didn’t know how to be friends with other women.

“You’ve seen me with Orrin in the med bay,” I reminded her as I took a seat. Shenna pushed the plate of fried dough toward me. I tore a piece off and popped it in my mouth.

“Yeah, but you always looked so tired and so absorbed in him,” Lynna replied. “Which you should be, of course. I’m glad you were so attentive to him. It definitely sped up his healing process. But it didn’t leave much chance for conversation.”

“I guess.” I stuffed another piece of dough in my mouth. I always used Aryn as a shield when I was around the other women. If I didn’t want to talk to them or didn’t know how to join in the conversation, I could talk to Aryn and not look like a huge ass.

“I don’t think I thanked you for earlier,” Kalyn said suddenly. I looked at her in confusion.

“For what? You thanked me for pulling you out of the cargo hold,” I said.

“I mean way earlier. When Xyla gave me a hard time and you stood up for me,” Kalyn grinned. “I was never sure if you liked me or not.”

“I wasn’t sure either, for a long time,” I laughed uneasily. “But I meant what I said at that dinner.”

“I appreciate it,” she grinned.

“And thanks for not telling anyone about Slink,” Shenna spoke up.

“What’s a slink?” Lynna asked.

Shenna’s cheeks turned pink and I took another piece of dough to stop myself from laughing.

“It’s…a friend for Poof,” Shenna said.

“Another pet?” Lynna exclaimed. “Where do you keep finding these things?”

“What even is it?” Kalyn asked.

“It’s like a cross between a snake and a weasel,” I explained. “It’s pretty cute.”

“I found it in an alleyway,” Shenna explained. “It was hurt and Aavat said I could keep it!” Lynna and Kalyn dissolved into giggles.

“I didn’t think that through,” Shenna murmured.

“I haven’t laughed like that in a while,” Kalyn dabbed at the corner of her eye.

“We needed that,” Lynna agreed. “After everything, we deserve a good laugh.”

“I’ll say,” I sighed. “I check those vents eight or nine times a day now.” The other three women’s smiles slipped.

“It’s been secured, right?” Lynna asked.

“Yeah,” I assured her. “It’s better than new. Orrin and I are looking into upgrading all of the piping and surrounding shafts.”

“That makes me feel a little better,” Shenna replied. “I just can’t get my head around it. Kalyn and I risked our lives to save Tiatra. If she needed help getting home, we would’ve helped her. She didn’t have to betray us like she did.”

“We’ll never know for sure what happened between her and the bounty hunter, or her and the Dominion,” Kalyn shrugged. “All we have are the scraps of information he and Tiatra left behind.”

“I don’t like this,” I groaned.

“What? Socializing?” Lynna joked.

“No, that’s actually pretty fun. I meant sitting here clucking and guessing and clucking some more,” I clarified.

“You make us sound like fat hens,” Kalyn snorted.

“More like sitting ducks,” I amended. “Sitting ducks that can’t do anything but turn over the same pieces of evidence again and again hoping to find something new. Pretty sure the definition of insanity applies to this situation.”

“What are we supposed to do, then?” Shenna asked. “Talking things through, even if we don’t learn anything new, makes me feel better than trying to pretend nothing’s happening.”

“I don’t know,” I pressed my palm into my forehead. “But talking things through isn’t going to help us when something else happens to us.”

“Do you think something will?” Lynna asked.

“It would be foolish to assume we’re in the clear now that the bounty hunter, or whoever he really was, is dead,” Kalyn agreed with me. “But I’m hoping his death will buy us some time.”

“How?” Shenna asked.

“Regardless of if he really was working for the Dominion or working for the group of auctioneers, he would’ve told someone he’d boarded our ship,” Kalyn reasoned. “Thanks to that stealth system Maris and Orrin came up with, no one could’ve tracked his location.”

“Did Aavat find anything when he searched the ship?” I asked. I hadn’t been there when the search ensued. I was still asleep on Orrin’s bed in the med bay.

“Nothing,” Kalyn replied. “Whoever he was, he wasn’t being tracked by his organization.”

I got up and started pacing. I couldn’t help it. I was suddenly filled with nervous energy.

“You all right, Maris?” Shenna asked.

“I told you, I don’t like this,” I replied. “I think that we should talk to Dejar and Aavat about getting more weapons. Maybe Orrin and I could install some guns on the outside of the ship. We should focus on prevention and protection instead of playing detective.”

“Aavat feels the same way,” Kalyn assured me. “He and Kovor have been looking into the budget to make it happen.”

“Good,” I nodded.

“I’ve never seen you so worked up,” Lynna commented. “You should sit back down. Breathe.”

“I don’t like feeling as though someone could show up on our tails and attack us at any moment,” I explained.

“None of us do,” Shenna replied. “That’s why we're going to look after each other.”

“We did a fantastic job of looking after each other when Tiatra ambushed us,” I said sarcastically. I stopped my pacing and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I turned to the others, “I’m not used to feeling vulnerable like this. I don’t know how to cope.”

“Clearly,” Kalyn laughed. “None of us are fans of it.”

“You know what I think?” I offered. “I think this all started with the shockwave and everything that happened since is connected. I don’t think we’re fighting a few small monsters, I think we’re fighting against one big one.”

“Good luck proving that,” Shenna sighed. “We could be fighting one monster, we could be fighting twenty. Doesn’t matter much when we’re basically blindfolded.”

“Blindfolded or not, we can all agree we’re being targeted,” I said. “I’m not going to feel better about any of this until I know why.”

I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be damned before I let anything happen to someone I care about ever again.”

ORRIN

After all was said and done, I had been laid up in the med bay for nearly a week. Two days of unconsciousness, then another three days of rest in order to get my strength back and to make sure I didn’t rip my newly rebuilt guts out.

I hated resting. When I was finally able to escape the med bay, the only thing that made me happier than getting back to work was being with Maris.

I don’t think I had ever been happier.

I was in the workshop, working on some modifications to the internal sensors, when I received a call from Aavat to meet them in the conference room. I ambled my way up there, still not at full capacity, but close.

I came to the conference room and the door opened. The room was filled with several of the men—Dejar, Aavat, Kovor, Valtic, Qal, Zayn—and three of the women—Kalyn, Lynna, and Shenna. Maris must have still been working on finding a way to build improved filters on the ventilation system. She was obsessed with making sure we’d never be caught by surprise like we were with the gas, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Come in, take a seat,” Dejar said. “How are you feeling?”

I sat down. “Much better, sir. Glad to be moving around and back at work.”

“I bet. Lynna tells me that you’re following her instructions.”

I shrugged. “I figured it would be smarter to listen to the doctor than ignore her, sir.”

Dejar let a slight grin play on his lips before he spoke. “Glad to have you back, then. Now, there needs to be a conversation about what we’re doing from now on.”

“Sir?”

“Let me explain. While you’ve been temporarily incapacitated, Aavat, Kovor, and I have been discussing our next course of action.”

“What we’ve decided on,” Kovor picked up the stream of conversation, “is that we need to investigate this thing. I know we had already said we would, but this is obviously getting more involved than we had anticipated.”

Aavat spoke up next. “We’ve already started looking into Qasar, trying to see who else might have arrived with our guest. We’re essentially grasping at air, but we have to start somewhere, and since this is where he found us, we’re starting here. What we need is some sort of plan, program, or something that will help us figure this out before we get desperate and return to Katzul.”

It made sense to search here first, but the way they were going about it was futile. We didn’t know when the man arrived here, didn’t know who he spoke to, and if he was as good as he had claimed to be, he wouldn’t have worked with anyone other than the woman and the children.

From what Maris had told me, they were innocent bystanders the hunter had hired to pose as family. They had needed the money, so the mother agreed, no questions asked.

“Sir?” I said as a small spark of inspiration hit me.

“What have you got, Orrin?”

“If I were to be honest, I don’t believe we’ll find anything here. There are far too many variables, and if we try to dig too much into the man’s activities here, we may bring more suspicion upon ourselves.” That drew some nods from around the room. I went on. “While investigating here is smart, we’re going to be spinning our wheels for little to nothing.”

“So, you’re saying we’d be wasting our time, then?” Aavat asked.

“Possibly, sir,” I said quickly. It was not good to anger Aavat, even if he had mellowed since Shenna became part of his life. “If we want to continue looking into things here, then we’re going to need to do something that will either get us into trouble and close the station off to us if we’re caught or will give us a lead.”

“What’s that?”

I looked at Qal, then at Kovor. “The two of you are our computer specialists. You know the computers of the Rogue Star better than anyone, and you,” I pointed at Qal, “are more than a simple navigator and pilot. If you were able to hack into the station’s surveillance system and get into their archives, we can find footage of him arriving and see where he went, who he spoke to, what he did before boarding the ship. If that gives us nothing, like I’m afraid it will, then we move on. At least, that’s my humble opinion on the matter, sirs.”

Lynna put her hand on Dejar’s. “He has a good idea. It might work, if we don’t get caught.”

As Dejar nodded, Aavat shook his head. “I don’t like it. If we get caught, then we lose this station, and I don’t like the idea of losing another place for us to go.”

Kovor agreed with him while Qal shrugged. Valtic was the only one to have no real response, he just kept looking around the room. If I wasn’t terribly far off, it seemed to me that his looks lingered a bit longer on Lynna than the rest of us, but I wasn’t sure.

He had always been quiet, a hard read. But a good man, just a bit too hard on himself based on what I’d learned during our few interactions. Otherwise he wouldn’t be on this ship for long.

Maris slipped in, perched on the chair next to me, fingers drumming in agitation.

“I would have to agree with Aavat,” Dejar said. “However, we need more information. That brand the bounty hunter had on his wrist - not exactly the same design as the mark that was at the bottom of the list of rescued women, but close enough they have to be related. That list also had the altered Dominion sigil. There’s a connection somehow, but we don’t know what yet.”

Dejar continued. “While we were getting new identification papers for our refugees, I took note of their species. Each of their homeworlds has been recently brought into Dominion space.”

“So,” Aavat stepped in. “That means that either this group is promising to get the worlds included and then convincing the Dominion to look the other way, or the auctions are somehow being hidden from Dominion eyes and ears.”

“Then why the interest in us?” Shenna asked. “The Terran System hasn’t had contact with any other life outside our own. Not counting us, obviously.”

“She makes a good point,” Aavat said. “What is the Dominion’s interest in the women?”

“What if it’s less about our women and more about keeping knowledge of the rest of us away from the Terran public?” I asked.

“Oh, ‘our women’? Are we your property now?” Maris asked.

I looked at her in mortification. I hadn’t meant for it to sound like ownership when I said it, but I saw her face and the other women giving me mock-anger looks, and I dropped my head and chuckled.

“You know what I meant. You’re family to us now, so I’m hoping that, as much as you all are ‘our women,’ that we’re ‘your men’, as well.”

“I know that. I was messing with you,” she said with a playful slap to my arm. “But you might be right. What if they weren’t holding us at Nine to sell us off, what if they were holding us there because, if we went back home, we’d tell people what happened to us and that would ignite a hell of a search?”

“If anyone believed us,” Lynna said. “Remember, most of us were not at Persephone Station there because we wanted to be.”

“That does present us with another avenue of investigation,” Kovor said in response to Maris’s line of thinking. “If the Dominion isn’t looking for you ladies in order to sell you off, then this other group is manipulating things in their own favor, masquerading as the Dominion. That makes it even more imperative that we figure this out, and quickly. They know about us and know that we’ve changed the ship’s look and signature.”

“We need another change to our engine signature, our stealth systems, and our defenses,” Dejar interrupted. He looked at Maris and me. “Think you two are up for it?”

“Without question,” Maris and I answered simultaneously.

I’d meant it.

This crew was my family.

And Maris was much, much more.

Nothing was going to get near her again.

MARIS

I awoke in the middle of the night feeling as though my chest was in a vice grip. I writhed and thrashed. My lungs burned. The gas choked me. I wanted to scream for help but my voice wouldn’t cooperate.

That’s when I saw them.

Glowing amber eyes looking at me through the darkness, filled with hatred and the intent to kill. I heard his voice, the voice of the bounty hunter. There was a loud bang. The smell of blood washed over everything.

“Maris!” Someone yelled my name. I felt hands gripping my shoulders. “Maris, wake up!” It was Orrin. I had to get to him. He was going to bleed out! The hands on my shoulders jostled me roughly until my teeth clacked together.

I looked up and saw the ceiling of Orrin’s cabin. I sucked in a harsh breath. My throat and lungs ached. Violent coughs wracked through my body. Strong hands forced me to sit up.

“What happened?” I rasped.

“You had a bad dream.” Orrin’s voice was soft and sweet in my ear. “You scared the life out of me. You weren’t breathing for a moment.”

“I scared the life out of you?” I turned to look at him. “I scared the life out of myself.” My throat grew thick and tears welled up in my eyes before I could regain my composure. When the first tear fell, it was like a floodgate opened up inside me. Another tear followed the first, then another and another until I was sobbing uncontrollably.

Orrin wrapped his arms around me and pull me until I was settled in his lap. I’d never been held like this before. At first, it only made me cry harder.

“It was just a dream, love,” Orrin soothed.

“I don’t want you to die,” I gasped.

“I’m not going to die,” Orrin replied. “Lynna says I’m almost completely better.”

“No,” I sniffled, “I mean I don’t want to be put in a position where I could lose you. I don’t want to lose you because of someone else’s evil choice.”

“You’re not going to.” Orrin tightened his grip on me and started swaying back and forth.

“I hate this,” I cried. “I hate this so much.”

Orrin went still and relaxed his grip. “I can give you space, if that’s what you need,” he offered, voice low.

“That’s not what I meant,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense. Please don’t let go of me.” His arms tightened around me once more.

“Tiatra and that brute are dead now.” Orrin ran a hand along the back of my head. “They can’t do anything to us, or anyone else, ever again.”

“It doesn’t matter, the damage has already been done,” I insisted.

“What damage? Everyone’s fine. You saved all of us with your quick thinking,” Orrin assured me.

“They damaged me. I allowed them to damage me,” I explained.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Orrin said.

“This!” I pointed to my tear-soaked face. “I spent years making myself invincible, but they took that away from me. I feel scared and vulnerable and I hate it. It’s not my choice to feel this way.”

“Of course, it’s not,” Orrin nodded.

“No one is allowed to make me feel this way.” I clenched my teeth.

“I get the sense that this is about more than just what happened in the cargo bay,” Orrin said gently. “Am I right?”

I held myself as rigid as a rock as I figured out how I wanted to answer that question. After a moment, I nodded.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked. “It might make you feel better. Maybe I can help.”

“I don’t know.” I chewed my bottom lip. “I’ve never told anyone this. Not even Aryn.”

“You can tell me anything, I hope you know that. It won’t make me love you any less,” Orrin assured me. I nodded. After a few deep breaths, I stopped crying. Once I regained my composure, I pulled back enough so that I could look into his eyes as I talked.

“Remember when I told you about the Space Force?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he nodded.

“Well, there’s more to my story than that,” I said. “I didn’t join the Space Force out of a sense of duty or anything like that. I joined to escape my mother. When I turned eighteen, I found out she signed me up for an experimental fertility treatment to try to breed more living male children. It would’ve lasted as long as I was able to bear children.”

“Your mother did that to you?” Orrin asked, horrified. “How could she?”

“We were poor. Jobs were few and far between on Earth. Especially for a woman with four children, no education, and a criminal record. My mom used to steal baby supplies for us. She thought the breeding facilities would pay her more for having more children. She took it out on me and my sisters any chance she got. She swore that we’d repay her for all of her suffering. Signing me up for that treatment was part of that payment.”

“Do all human females have such faulty maternal instincts?” Orrin asked. Something about the way he asked made me crack a smile.

“No,” I shook my head, “I think most of them are decent at it. I won’t be, though. We learn from watching our mothers.”

“You might surprise yourself,” Orrin said. “When I was in the med bay, I found you to be very nurturing. Bossy, but nurturing.”

“Thanks,” I sniffled. “Anyway, I ran right to the Space Force office and signed up. Officials declared my Space Force contract more valid than the fertility treatment contract. I left home the next day for training. I haven’t seen or spoken to my mother since.” My throat grew thick again as tears I couldn’t control began to fall.

Orrin rubbed my back with one large hand.

“That was the day I decided no one was allowed to make me feel anything I didn’t want to feel,” I sucked in a shuddery breath, “and that no one had the right to make any of my choices for me. If my own mother wasn’t going to protect me, then I would protect myself.”

Another wave of overwhelming emotions crashed over me.

“The attack… I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.” I sniffed, throat tight. “I’ve lost.”

“No, you haven’t,” Orrin soothed. “They tried to take your choices. But you won.”

“How does this look like victory?” I wiped the stinging tears from my eyes.

“Easy,” Orrin said, and pressed a kiss into my forehead, “you’re sitting here with me.”

“What if it happens again?” I asked. “What if I can’t win a second time?”

“You don’t have to worry about that because you have a lot of people fighting by your side.” Orrin rubbed his hands up and down my arms. “You’re not used to that, are you?” I shook my head.

“Let me tell you one thing.” Orrin tipped my chin up so I could look at him. “You will always have a choice with me. I’ll never force anything from you. I’ll listen to everything you have to say, but you know what that means?”

“What?” I sniffled.

“It means you have to be honest with me about what you’re feeling. You can’t lock your emotions away because they’re frightening. But you don’t have to face those frightening feelings alone. You were there for me, and because of that, I pulled through. I’m going to do the same for you. Are you okay with that?”

I looked into Orrin’s eyes and saw his honesty laid bare. As I looked at him, I wondered how I’d managed to find someone so good.

“I’m more than okay with that,” I whispered. Orrin smiled and lowered his lips to mine. He kissed me softly, letting me set the pace.

“You should try to sleep,” he urged me. “We have a lot of work to do tomorrow and I can’t have you falling asleep at the workbench.” A smirk danced in the corner of his mouth.

“I’d never fall asleep at the workbench,” I replied. “If I did, you’d put me back on the boring jobs.”

“If threatening you with boring jobs is what it takes to make sure you get enough sleep, then that’s fine,” Orrin laid back against the pillows and shifted me so I was tucked up under his arm.

“Or I could wear you out.”

I laughed and looked up at him, leaning up a bit to give a little peck to the corner of his jaw. "Or that. Think you're up to the task? My stamina is pretty good, you know."

I wanted to tease him, but more than that, I wanted to show him just how much I meant all I'd said. He’d made me feel so incredible atop that workbench, and the need to do the same for him was growing quickly.

"Oh, absolutely." He leaned down and gave a long kiss to the tip of my ear.

"That right? Hm. You know, the more I think about it, the more I think it might be nice to get on top of that workbench again, sleeping or not."

Orrin gently nudged me onto my back and, without prompting, I slipped out of every stitch of clothing I wore. His expression shifted the moment I started, his eyes darting over my form with just as much excitement and wonder as it had the first time he'd seen it.

As I settled back in, he rolled toward me and placed a warm hand at my tummy. "Looks like someone's eager. I guess you really did have as good a time as you seemed to be having up there."

I shot him a dirty look. “You know damn well it was incredible. You did it to me.”

He laughed and leaned in, pressing his lips to the joining of my neck and shoulder, his hand slowly traveling up and down my side, fingertips barely brushing against my breast as if he was teasing himself.

“And I plan to do so much more.”

The warmth, the heat in his voice, sent a shudder through me—almost as much as the fact that I was lying so exposed. The workbench had been different, somehow. Maybe it was because of how sudden and visceral it all was. This was slow, gentle, loving.

A fleeting question of how different it might be this time passed through my mind but didn't hang around long.

A low, rumbling growl sounded in Orrin's chest, and he pulled back just enough to catch my gaze. "Your scent... drives me absolutely mad. Every time I'm close to you I can feel the tension, but it shoots through the exosphere when we're skin-on-skin like this. I don't know if it's just your scent, or maybe... taste too, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, it's completely irresistible."

It was so much more than base desire, but knowing that it was so visceral and physical turned me on like crazy. Knowing that my presence alone did such incredible things to him made me feel oddly powerful but, more importantly, it made me feel all the more connected to him. It was like we were meant for each other on every level there was, each facet a puzzle piece cut exclusively for the other.

He slid his hand down my side and over my tummy, lingering on my mons with faint, feather-light strokes of those dexterous fingers of his. I couldn’t help it—I was desperate to find out just how skilled those hands were.

The moment my thighs parted, he slid one hand down and began slowly stroking at my soaked slit, still barely in contact. I let my eyes drift closed, settling in at the crook of his shoulder, giving myself over to him completely.

Bit by bit, his touch became firmer and less exploratory. When I let my eyes flutter open a moment to take in the sight of him, I saw how intently he was watching my responses, gaze darting over me from top to bottom.

He slid a finger into me slowly, his growl rumbling much more clearly from where I’d laid my head. A second soon joined it, and he set to pumping in long, sliding strokes. The fingers curled then, and the sudden moan that passed my lips set him on course. The strokes became more insistent, fingertips pressed up and back hard.

As I rocked my hips against his attention, I felt the sudden stimulation of his thumb settling in at my clit. He rubbed in firm circles, once around every time those fingers plunged deep into me. I opened my eyes to look up at him once more and found his gaze on me. It was just as loving as it was lewd, equal parts excited and enamored.

I brought a hand up and pulled him down into a kiss. The stimulation picked up as my tongue met his, my body going suddenly still in yielding. I wanted exactly what he wanted to give me, what I’d be at least partly giving myself by the motion of my hips.

I could feel myself approaching the edge of orgasm quickly—way too quickly. I pulled back from the kiss and gave a little shake of my head. “Not… not yet.”

Orrin nodded and slid his hand back and away, bringing his fingers up to his lips to be licked and sucked clean, a low moan of pleasure joining the rumble that accompanied every breath out.

He turned onto his back and lifted his hips to slide out of his pants, baring that gorgeous skin of his just as quickly as I had. For the first time, I could see the effect I really had on him.

His cock was almost shockingly thick near the base and ridged along its length, but more surprising than that was the secondary appendage positioned just above it. It glistened just slightly in the low light, slick and smooth by comparison.

It was a little thinner and shorter than the main length, but so beautiful. I trailed my fingers along it from base to tip and was surprised when it seemed to flex up to meet the stimulation. Orrin's groan fell somewhere between pure bliss and some kind of relief, no doubt from waiting so long to feel this.

I wrapped my thumb and forefinger around it, gripping just slightly near the base before sliding up to the tip in one long, slow stroke. He shuddered hard, his hips jerking back suddenly near the end, apparently overwhelmed. I could feel the wicked grin pulling at my lips, and I repeated the motion just to watch the expression it drew from him.

He rocked his hips up against my grip, and I could feel the throbbing hardness of the primary length running along the tops of my fingers.

I released it just long enough to wrap all but my thumb and forefinger around the main length—or at least as much of it as I could—before returning them to the slender appendage, pumping them together. I focused more on slight pressure and stimulating the underside of the larger one, and he seemed to love it.

It was almost strange, seeing him devolve into the same sort of panting, writhing mess he’d made of me. My heart swelled at seeing him enjoy himself so much, especially because he always seemed to be carrying such a heavy weight in duty and determination. Seeing him lose himself was wonderful and drove me on.

Sitting up, I brought my other hand down to grasp his thick cock, the other focused on stimulating that slick appendage. After only a few pumps, I found I couldn’t help myself, and leaned down to take the latter between my lips, sucking lightly at the tip as I stroked him.

Orrin gave a near-roar of a moan, his hips jerking up hard against the sudden stimulation, pumping through my grip almost madly. The length between my lips pulsed and writhed ever-so-slightly, the lower one throbbing hard in my hand.

He reached down and grasped my wrist, slowing it to a stop. "I don't think I can take much more, and I... I have to be inside you."

I pulled my head and hand both back, grinning up at him, only responding with a nod. He moved to lay me down on my back, but I placed a hand at his shoulder to nudge him back into place. "Mm-mm. You just lie... right there."

His brow shot up in surprise, but he gave a slight nod of assent.

I brought one leg over him and settled just below the two lengths, my clit pressed tight to the underside of his cock. I began slowly rocking my hips, sliding up and down the gorgeous length, one hand coming down to grasp it along the top to press it more firmly against me. I couldn't help teasing just a little more.

Orrin brought his hands down to my hips, bodily lifting me up from where I'd settled, positioning me at the head of his thick, burning hot cock. My knees on the bed kept me barely high enough to keep only the tip pressed against my opening, but I quickly began working my way down.

The feeling was completely overwhelming, sending a hard pulse of ecstasy through me every time one of the ridges of his cock slid inside. Each one seemed to stretch me more than the last, and soon I could hardly ease myself down anymore.

He guided me down with a gentle pressure, taking a full half of the length before he urged me back up along it. I shuddered hard at the reversal, ridges quickly passing through me.

When he lifted his hips and pushed me down again, I couldn't help the half-startled cry that passed my lips, shocked at the suddenness of so much more pressing into me.

The next few moments passed in a whirlwind blur of intensity, and when my body finally came to rest, I was situated at the thick base of his cock. The sensation of being so utterly full was wonderful and altogether alien. I'd have never thought I could take something so massive, but my body seemed to accept him in, a perfect glove fit for him, even around the flared base.

I rocked my hips a bit, gasping and moaning at the wild feeling, bringing my hands down to his chest to steady myself. I tried to form words, but even the thoughts behind them were fleeting and fragmentary. Instead, I decided to let go of all of it and just experience him. Experience us.

I straightened back up and guided his hands to my hips once more, giving a shaking nod of encouragement. The moment I did, he gripped them tightly and began sliding me up and down along the huge length. My hands uselessly grasped at nothing beside me to try to steady myself, even though he had me firmly in his overwhelmingly strong grasp. Instead, almost unconsciously, I brought them up to my breasts and began to pinch and pull at my nipples, stopping only to squeeze hard at the sensitive flesh around them.

Orrin's eyes darted between my chest and the sight of us joining, his length so deep inside me. He brought one hand up to my lower back and urged me to lean forward. At the sudden lightning-strike of stimulation, I understood why. The secondary appendage writhed against my clit, its slickness sliding over me every time I bounced atop him, stimulating us both.

I could hardly keep myself from the growing storm inside, feeling the formation of a massive wave beneath me as I drew closer and closer to orgasm.

Releasing my breasts, I leaned down to place a hand at either side of Orrin's head, kissing him deeply as I slammed my hips up and down of my own accord.

The climax was sudden and simultaneous. I shot up the whole of the wave only a moment before being sent down the other side, my mind blanking for a long moment before the shattering rush of pleasure overcame me. My body went limp, useless in its locked-up, trembling state, my whole form collapsed atop Orrin's chest.

My release only spurred him on. He wrapped his arms around me, wildly pounding into my core, the movements of the secondary appendage growing even wilder. Just as the faintest beam of sense began to penetrate the fog of orgasm, he roared, and I was driven over once more by the feeling of his massive cock pulsing inside me, filling me, claiming me.

Wave after wave shot deep into me, and I clamped down hard around him, milking him for everything he had to give. I couldn't have possibly needed anything more than that feeling, the oneness of our bodies and beings in that moment.

“What if I have another nightmare?” I whispered when I could finally speak.

“Then I’ll be here to pull you out of it,” he assured me. “Close your eyes. I’ll stay awake until you fall asleep.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I mumbled but sleep had already started to drag me down. My eyes flew open every few minutes when images of glowing eyes and toxic clouds filled my brain. But every time I did, Orrin was right there, watching over me.

When I finally did fall back asleep, I felt safe.

ORRIN

Things were better.

Some things.

Over the last two days, Kovor and Qal had gone to speak with station authorities to see if they would be allowed to look at surveillance footage.

They had told the story of what had happened to us, well, a version of it. Sort of. They said that he told them he was looking to rob us, and we were interested in seeing if anyone else was involved in his group.

They had been denied, officially, but unofficially, a small data core was delivered to the ship. They didn’t find anything that could tell us more.

The woman and her children had returned to Qasar, lost in the crowd almost immediately. I didn’t know for certain, but I suspected Kovor had given her enough credits for a safer transit, somewhere she could start a new life.

During those two days, Maris and I had spent more time together. She had even moved into my room. She said it was because of the nightmares she had, but I think it was because she wanted to be around my massively muscular arms more.

To be honest, I was happy that she had moved in with me. My own dreams had been filled with visions of blood, the crew dead or dying, and my innards spewed all over the cargo bay floor as Maris sobbed over my body.

With her in the same bed as me, I could hold her when she had trouble sleeping and that made me feel better.

Qal took to teasing me about it whenever he saw me, but I didn’t care. I think he just teased me because he was a bit jealous.

When I wasn’t with Maris, I was working on what Dejar asked us to work on. Maris had taken on the project of redoing our engine signature, again. She had done such a good job on it before that I let her run point on it this time. Meanwhile, I made some changes to our internal sensors.

I added heat vision, what the women called infrared. If anyone like Tiatra came aboard, we would be able to track them even if we couldn’t see them.

It involved a lot of work because I wasn’t just changing things up at the bay doors, I was adding the cameras and heat sensors everywhere in the ship. I had the ship’s AI help me find blind spots within the ship. I didn’t want there to be any place that an intruder could hide without us seeing them.

Of course, some of the argument against that was that if we ever needed to hide, we wouldn’t be able to, but most of the crew agreed that if we were ever in a situation where we needed to hide on our own ship, things had already gotten to a really bad place anyway.

There were still the expected areas of privacy, obviously, but every public area was monitored.

I was in the middle of installing a camera when Maris took me by surprise. I was standing on a small ladder, my arms up in the air as I was wiring up the camera, when I felt something tickle my abdomen. I jerked my arms down and looked at Maris, a smile spread on her face from ear to ear.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she smiled. Her hands were behind her, and her eyes twinkled in the light.

“Like I believe that,” I said as I turned back to the camera. A few seconds later, and the camera was wired properly. “Want to help me line this up?” I asked.

“What do you need me to do?”

I pointed down to the tablet. “Just look in there and make sure the camera picks up the entire hallway,” I said.

“Okay.” She picked up the tablet, then stifled a laugh.

“What is it?”

She turned the tablet around, so I could see, and the picture was of my posterior.

“That’s a little immature, don’t you think?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Not when it’s such a nice ass.” She checked the angle again. “Come on, let’s move that camera.”

Once she said it was good, I finished mounting the camera to the ceiling and climbed down the ladder.

“Hey, handsome,” she said as she danced on her tiptoes.

“Hey, yourself, beautiful,” I answered. I leaned down and kissed her. I was never happier than when I kissed her, and she kissed me back.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Starving, actually,” I admitted.

“Good. I got a picnic set up for us back in our room. Let’s go eat,” she said as she grabbed my arm and tried to pull me.

“Okay, okay,” I laughed. “Give me a minute to clean up my mess here. Don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

She pushed her bottom lip out in mock disappointment, then smiled. She helped me clean up, and we went to enjoy our lunch together. She had, somehow, managed to scrounge up my favorite meal.

“You like?” she asked as we came into the room.

“Very much so. How did you…” I started.

She shrugged as she answered me. “The cook. I asked him what you liked to eat, and he told me. He volunteered to get everything together for me and helped me make it.”

She impressed me more and more, every day. Not only was she a mechanical genius, but she did magnificently amazing things to me physically.

And now she had cooked my favorite meal.

If I hadn’t already confessed my love for her, I would have done so right now.

So, I did anyway. “I love you,” I said as I brought her in for a hug.

“Love you, too,” she grunted. “Don’t squeeze me so hard.” I knew she was teasing, I had barely wrapped her in my arms, but I loosened my grip a bit anyway. She reached up, kissed me on the cheek, and told me to sit.

We ate our lunch, talked about what she was doing with the engines and what ideas I had for improving our defenses.

I wanted to make sure that we would be better capable of dealing with the dark ship if it ever found us again.

Running a cargo business, on either side of the law, had its own risks. I’d never thought that random attacks by pirates were the preferred option, but now I planned to make sure we’d be prepared.

And if we were going to be taking on this Dominion splinter cell, we would need some better defenses.

“I was working on a much larger version of the energy shielding used in the reactor core when we initiate the fold,” I told her as we finished our lunch. “I’m just struggling with the calculations. I can’t seem to get it to work properly when I try to stretch it over the ship, at least according to my simulations.”

“Want some help?”

“If you think you’re up for it,” I answered.

“Yeah. It’ll be fun working together. I hate working on the engines without you,” she said as she reached for my hands.

We kissed again, a short kiss that ended much too soon, but felt like magic.

“I know how you feel. I want to be working with you as well, but there are too many projects to finish. I’ve already added the infrared,” I stumbled a bit over the foreign word, but pushed through, “and I’m simply finishing up with the cameras throughout the ship. I’ll be finished before dinner, then I’ll turn my attention to our defenses, inside and out.”

“Inside?”

I nodded. “I was thinking that we should have some automated systems inside, under control of the bridge and the AI. That way, if we’re ever infiltrated, the ship can help protect us.”

“Don’t you think that’s going a little far?” she asked. There was a hint of worry in her voice.

“I don’t know. Part of me hates everything we’re being forced to do, but I understand it,” I pulled her in close. “I’m also doing it to make sure you, and the others, are safe. You told me that you didn’t know what you would do if anything happened to me. I feel the same way. When I saw you at Tiatra’s feet, I struggled to keep my mind right. Then, when he hit you, I almost lost control. I don’t want you hurt.”

“I don’t want you hurt, either,” she said. “Just, I’m not sure if we should have weapons falling from the ceiling and popping out of the walls. That would make me really uncomfortable. What if something went wrong?”

I thought about it for a minute. She was right. If something went wrong with the computer, the weapons could be turned on us instead. “Very well,” I conceded. “I won’t put automated defenses inside. But,” I said as I pulled away from her to stretch my back, “I would like something inside the ship to help with defenses.”

“Fair enough.” Our lunch was over, and we each headed back to work after cleaning up our dishes and depositing them in the kitchen. I finished up the cameras earlier than anticipated and went to work on the shielding calculations.

Maris joined me later that evening. We took a break to eat dinner with our friends in the dining hall, then went back to work on the calculations.

I don’t think I’ve ever smiled so much in my life. I was working on something I enjoyed with someone that made me happier than anything in the universe.

My life was good.

Better than good.

Perfect.

Except for that whole people trying to kill or kidnap us thing, of course.

But with Maris around, it was never going to be boring, anyway.

MARIS

Today, the alien women decided that it was time for them to start their new lives.

They stood on the bridge, new identities in hand.

Kovor insisted theytake whatever they wanted from the clothing pile he’d bought to help us disguise ourselves.

Vixaine stood at the front of the group, smiling up at Dejar.

“We cannot thank you enough for what you have done for us,” she said. “We apologize that one of our own betrayed you in such a dishonorable way. We are ashamed and heartbroken from her actions.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dejar assured her. “We don’t blame any of you for what happened.”

“What will you do with your freedom?” Kalyn asked.

“Some of us want to travel. Some of us want to get proper jobs. Every one of us has the intention of returning to our home planets and seeing our families someday,” Vixaine replied.

“I’m sure they’ll be happy to see you,” Dejar smiled. “But before you go, are you sure there’s nothing you can tell us about who put you into that auction house?”

Vixaine’s smile faltered.

“They put something in the meals we were given once a day,” she said. “They kept us in a daze. I never saw anyone’s face. They only wore black. The sigil on the piece of paper that bears our information, I’d never seen it before you tacked it up on the wall. It is the same for the others.”

“Forgive me,” Dejar bowed his head. “I know it’s tremendously painful. I apologize for asking again.”

“We understand.” Vixaine’s smile was serene again.

“When did Dejar interview them?” I whispered to Aryn.

“After the attack,” Aryn whispered back. “He’d been giving them space to heal, but after what happened…well, you can imagine.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Still, I wish I’d been around for it.”

“You were with Orrin. We didn’t want to disturb you,” Aryn explained. I nodded once. If anyone had come to me during the days I’d sequestered myself in the med bay by Orrin’s bedside, I probably would’ve hissed at them like a hellcat.

“I’ll give you all a chance to say goodbye,” Dejar said to Vixaine.

Vixaine translated to the others, who smiled and broke away from the group to talk to the crewmembers they’d bonded with. Lynna was surrounded in moments, crying and embracing each girl who came her way. I wondered what that would feel like, to have a whole group of people feel sad to leave me behind.

Sadness settled in my heart as I thought of my mother. Was she sad that I was gone? I never allowed myself to ask that question, even though I knew I’d never get an answer. I could survive if my mother didn’t miss me. I sure didn’t miss her.

But my sisters? I wasn’t good to them when we all lived under one roof, but I did my best to be good to them after I left. I wondered if they thought differently because of it.

I hoped they did. I’d never allowed myself to admit that before, but it was true. I hoped my sisters missed me.

A lump grew in my throat as I watched the bittersweet scene before me. What saddened me the most was that I had no one I needed to say goodbye to.

I hung at the outskirts of the sea of goodbyes and well-wishes. I’d never allowed myself to get close enough to any of those women to consider them friends. I regretted that decision now as I watched everyone weeping and embracing each other.

Orrin promised he’d be my shield whenever I felt vulnerable. Maybe now, I’d have the courage to place my trust in others and earn friendship in return. It worked for Lynna, Kalyn, and Shenna. When I thought about it, I considered them true friends now.

I locked eyes with one of the alien women, the blue one with white hair. She was one of the ones who’d grasped the basics of Terran and we’d exchanged a handful of words. I could’ve learned more about her, but I hadn’t taken the opportunity.

Now it was too late.

She lifted her hand and waved. Her mouth curved into a smile, unnatural to the shape of her face. I smiled back and waved.

There, I said one goodbye. It wasn’t so bad. My heart didn’t crumble into dust.

I spied Orrin on the other side of the room, talking with Aavat about something. I glided over to him.

“I’m going to go to the observation deck in case you need me,” I told him in a low voice.

“Why? Are you well?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just need a moment to process my emotions,” I told him.

Processing my emotions was one of the things I promised him I’d start doing, rather than shoving them down and ignoring them like I’d done in the past.

“Okay.” He smiled and planted a kiss on the top of my head. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

“Thanks.” I reached out and gave his hand a squeeze.

I slipped out the side door and took my time walking to the observation deck.

Thankfully, it was deserted. I walked to the corner farthest from the door and sat down with my back against the solid wall and my side pressed against the window. I could see through the amber domes that covered the different sections of the city, even the area with the shopkeeper that had tried to swindle Orrin and me over a crappy part.

God, that felt like years ago.

I watched the dockworkers shuffle back and forth as they went about their day, paying the Rogue Star no mind. I wondered what they would think if they knew we were criminals. If we told them the nature of our crimes, would they care? Surely, these hard-working dockmen had more to worry about than a handful of humans and a group of women rescued from slavery.

The observation deck was placed directly above the main way onto and off the ship. Below me, I saw Vixaine take her first tentative steps into the city. Her skin practically glowed under the lights of the city.

One by one, the others followed her. Some held hands. A few looked like they were ready to bolt.

Another round of goodbyes took place there on the dock. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me sooner. The alien women didn’t just have to say goodbye to the crew, they had to say goodbye to each other. They all came from different planets. For all I knew, their paths might never cross again after this party. They’d only met because tragedy threw them together.

Their stories bore a striking resemblance to the stories of the Persephone Station women. We never would’ve met if all our lives hadn’t gone to shit in the exact way that they did. If my mother loved me as a mother should, I wouldn’t have ended up on the station. Same could be said for Kalyn and her mother.

Watching the alien women make their emotional goodbyes below me, I wondered if a time would come for the Persephone women to do the same. The thought saddened me even more than the thought of never seeing any of the alien women again.

Somehow, I didn’t think the Persephone women would split up. For one, we had nowhere to go. The Rogue Star was our home now. But, more than that, none of us had anything to go back to in the Terran System. I hoped we’d never have to say a difficult goodbye.

I watched Vixaine walk away from the others. She didn’t look back as she strode into the city. I followed the glow of her bone-white skin until I couldn’t see her anymore.

I looked out to the city once more. Somewhere in the city was a den of bounty hunters. I still didn’t believe Tiatra knew the hunter before we arrived on the station. He had to have been here. And if he was here, there were others.

I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know how to find them. But I knew one thing. If any of them ever came near this ship, I would do everything in my power to protect my friends and protect the Shein I loved.

I would not stand for us to be hunted like prey any longer. Whoever was after us would be in for a rude awakening next time they tried to corner us. I had something to lose now.

“Hey, love,” Orrin’s voice drew me out of my thoughts. I looked up at him and smiled.

“Hello, darling,” I replied. I patted the floor next to me. “Come sit.” Orrin sat down beside me and pulled me onto his lap. I let my head rest against his chest as we watched the city.

“We’ll find a safe place one day,” Orrin said as if he’d read my mind.

“I won’t give up until we do,” I replied.

He tightened his grip on me.

For just a moment, I allowed myself to forget it all and simply be.

EPILOGUE - MARIS

“Everyone hush up or you’re going to ruin the surprise,” Lynna whisper-shouted.

“It’s pitch black in here, it’s going to be a surprise no matter how much noise we’re making,” Aryn replied.

“It can’t be a surprise if they have no idea what’s going on,” I insisted.

“That’s the definition of a surprise,” Aryn replied.

“Just shut up!” Lynna hissed. “I hear them coming. Don’t make a sound until Kalyn turns on the lights.”

“Yes, we get the core concept,” I replied.

“Obviously, you don’t.”

The double doors to the dining hall swung open. A great band of light from the illuminated hallway cut through the room.

“So much for pitch dark,” I muttered.

Kalyn hit the lights. All of us women who had gathered in the dining hall jumped up from our hiding places.

“Surprise!” We all yelled at various intervals. I knew we should’ve practiced the shout a few times.

The crew of the Rogue Star stared at us, their mouths open and their eyes unblinking, as they took in the state of the dining hall.

Pink, white and red paper hearts were strung together with string and hung from the ceiling. The tables were covered in every kind of sweet treat Sars knew how to make, including a few recipes Lynna taught him. Everything was covered in pink and white icing.

“What is this?” Dejar asked. Kalyn rushed to his side, bouncing on her heels like an excited child.

“According to the Terran calendar, it’s Valentine’s Day!” she squealed. “It’s a holiday dedicated to the celebration of love!”

“What are those up there?” Aavat pointed to the paper hearts.

“They’re hearts!” Shenna exclaimed.

“Hearts don’t look like that,” Aavat replied. “Unless yours do?”

“No, they don’t really look like that,” Shenna replied.

“So why do you call those shapes hearts?” he asked.

“Don’t think too much about it,” Shenna replied. She lifted herself up on the tips of her toes to kiss his cheek.

I caught Orrin’s eye as he stood at the back of the group. He flashed me a heart-melting smile, and I felt less stupid about this whole Valentine’s Day surprise.

“What about those of us who aren’t currently in love?” Kovor asked.

“Valentine’s Day isn’t just about romantic love. It’s about all kinds of love, like the love between friends and family. Or, in our case, love between friends that have become family!” Kalyn replied. She rushed over to one of the food tables and picked up something that looked like a lump of pink icing. She brought it back to Dejar.

“It’s a kind of cupcake!” she beamed. “Just a different flavor. Try it.” Dejar plucked it out of her hand and took a bite.

“Scro, that’s good!” he declared. That was the only encouragement the others needed to dive into the treats on the tables. Once they’d vacated the doorway, Orrin finally had enough room to enter the dining hall.

“What do you think?” I stretched my arms out.

“Impressive,” he laughed. “What part did you do?”

“I strung up the hearts,” I declared.

“I like those the best,” he smiled.

“Are you just saying that because I did it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he nodded. I laughed. “So, is this all Valentine’s Day is? Paper hearts and sweet food?”

“No.” My face turned a shade darker. “Sometimes couples go out to dinner or to a show. Sometimes they give each other gifts.”

“Was I supposed to get you a gift?” Orrin suddenly looked worried.

I laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Yes, you were supposed to get me a gift for the holiday you learned about five minutes ago. How dare you not shower me in diamonds and rose petals.”

“I can get diamonds if you want diamonds,” he played along. “There’s a rock in this very asteroid belt made of them.”

“Wait, seriously?” I asked.

“Yup. I can get you your weight in diamonds. But since I’m excused from gift-giving duties…” he trailed off and shrugged.

“I expect a mountain of diamonds for Christmas,” I replied.

“I don’t know what that is,” he grinned.

“I’ll be sure to explain it to you five minutes before it starts,” I promised.

“Perfect,” he teased. “May I offer you one of the pink things from the table?”

“Not yet,” I grinned. “There’s one more Valentine’s Day tradition I haven’t told you about yet.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a sheet of pink paper, folded in half.

“What’s this?” Orrin asked.

“People give each other cards on Valentine’s Day,” I explained. “You can buy them and sign your name, or you can make them yourself. I always thought it was better to hand make them. More personal.”

“Let me see.” Orrin plucked the card from my fingers. “What are these?”

On the front of the card, I’d written my name and his inside a heart made from small drawings of tools.

“Half of the tools are common things from your workshop. The other half are common tools from the Terran System,” I explained.

“Very clever,” he smiled. He opened the card to reveal the message I’d hidden inside.

“Am I supposed to read it out loud?” he asked. I felt my face blanch.

“Nope,” I said too quickly. A mischievous grin spread across Orrin’s mouth.

“‘To my dearest Orrin,’” he read, louder than he normally would, “‘you are the only tool that keeps my heart in working order.’” There was a collective coo from the other women. I rolled my eyes, trying to look unbothered.

“They’re supposed to be stupid like that,” I mumbled.

“Shouldn’t the maintenance of your heart be the territory of a medical professional?” Orrin asked. I laughed despite myself.

“I love you with my emotional heart, not my physical one. You’re the tool that keeps my emotional heart working,” I said.

“This is a strange tradition you humans have,” Orrin looked around the room before his gaze settled on me once more, “but if I get to hear you say that you love me, I’ll happily celebrate it every day.”

“It doesn’t have to be Valentine’s Day for me to say that to you. I’ll tell you every single day,” I declared.

“Good! It’s my favorite thing to hear.” Orrin placed his hand on my cheek and brought his lips to mine. I kissed him lightly.

“There’s one more tradition I’m sure you’ll want to hear about,” I said with a wicked grin.

“I know that smile.” Orrin’s gaze softened.

“Couples often spend Valentine’s day in bed pampering each other.” I rose up on my toes to whisper in his ear.

“Why the scro aren’t we doing that now?” he asked.

“Patience, my love. Patience,” I ran my hand along the planes of his chest. “Waiting is half the fun.”

“Not from where I’m standing!” Orrin exclaimed.

“That makes it extra fun from where I’m standing,” I laughed.

“You’re a cruel mistress,” Orrin winked. I linked my arms through his and let him lead me into the thick of conversation. Dejar and Kalyn stood talking to Aavat and Shenna. Lynna was busy passing out handmade cards to every single person. It had taken her almost all night, but the thought of someone not receiving one broke her heart.

When Lynna pushed mine into my hands, I didn’t know what to say. I just smiled.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” she trilled as she gave one to Orrin.

“Thanks, Lynna,” he grinned. He opened it and read its contents. “‘Thanks for making sure the ship doesn’t break down in open space.’ That’s very nice of her, but I like yours better. Maris, are you okay?”

I stared at my card with tears in my eyes. I blinked them away and looked up at Orrin.

“I’ve never gotten a Valentine’s Day card before,” I told him. Sadness filled his eyes, even though he’d only learned the meaning of the cards a moment ago.

“If I’d known that, I would’ve made you twenty,” he said.

“I know,” I smiled up at him. “But Lynna and Kalyn really wanted it to be a surprise. I don’t know why I feel like crying. I knew Lynna was making a card for everyone. They’re good tears, though.”

“Good.” Orrin rubbed my back in small circles.

“I’m becoming a sap and it’s all your fault,” I laughed.

“You know I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he sighed melodramatically.

“Overly sentimental,” I clarified. “Who would’ve thought I’d learn how to act like a proper human from an alien?”

“I didn’t teach you how to be a human,” Orrin laughed. “You’ve always been able to act like a human.”

“You’re right.” I looked up at him, unable to contain my smile. “You give me the sense of safety I need so that I can be who I am.”

“I’ll happily be your safe place until the end of time.” Orrin kissed the top of my head, then bent closer to whisper, his hot breath in my ear sending sparks through me. “As long as you know I love your fire as well.”

We filled a few plates with every kind of sweet and settled down into a pair of chairs in the corner of the dining hall. Together, we shared bites, licked icing from each other’s fingers, and watched all our friends enjoy the brief intermission from our uncertain lives.

I let my head rest on Orrin’s shoulder. He rested his cheek on the crown of my head.

Even if this was just a brief interlude in the mystery that threatened us all, the magic between us was the one thing I’d never want to tinker with.

Probably.

DON’T MISS the next episode of Rogue Star! For a free short story, opportunities for advance review copies, release news and the occasional cat picture, please join the newsletter!

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LETTER FROM ELIN

Things are getting hotter for our intrepid crew. And the obvious people to investigate a clue are Aryn and… Kovor?

Nothing about a charming, rich playboy like Kovor should interest a person like me.

I've spent my life in the shadows, in the darkest corners of the criminal underbelly of Mars.

I'm going to use those hard-won skills to track down whoever, whatever, is targeting me and my friends.

No alien, with his laid-back ways and handsome smile, is going to get in my way, even if his touch weakens the walls I've built to protect myself.

But when my mission turns deadly, I'll find out that Kovor is keeping secrets of his own.

Keep reading for a sneak peek of Rogue Sign, or grab your copy now!

XOXO,

Elin

P.S. I’ve just added the first chapter from Given, the first book of my Star Breed series, and Vrehx, the first of Conquered World.

Give them a try and let me know what you think! You can always reach me at elin@elinwynbooks.com

ROGUE SIGN

Aryn

FOR THE FIRST time in my life, I had a room to myself.

Maris still kept most of her things here but she hadn’t slept here since she and Orrin made things official or whatever.

Sleeping alone was weird for the first few nights. I was so used to the sounds of another person in the room that I’d been half tempted to ask Shenna if I could keep one of her pets in my room. The cat and I got along fine, except for the fact that she made me sneeze.

Tonight, however, I couldn’t sleep not because I was alone but because I was angry. Ever since that demented bounty hunter and his alien princess sidekick nearly killed us all, sleep evaded me. Deep down, I knew what happened wasn’t my fault but I couldn’t help but feel like I could’ve done something.

The bounty hunter, I could understand. He was paid to go after me and the other human women. Quite black and white, really. Tiatra the princess? I couldn’t figure out why she would’ve wanted a part in it.

I tried to put it out of my mind. Tiatra and the bounty hunter were dead now. The other alien girls were, hopefully, on their way back to their respective home planets.

However, there were two tiny scraps of information that I couldn’t let go of.

The bounty hunter had a brand on his wrist, and no one knew what it signified. Not a big deal, except a similar mark had been on the sheet that listed the women.

And that was worse. Not just that there was some group running auction selling rare women from newly accepted planets to the wealthy as playthings.

But that group used a symbol that was so close to the official sigil of the Dominion that my skin crawled.

Either they were part of the Dominion, or hoping that recently contacted planets wouldn’t know the difference, and think their depraved demands were par for the course.

Neither option was fantastic.

What made it twenty times worse was that this bounty hunter was part of that group.

And he’d managed to find us.

There was no reason to think another wouldn’t follow in his footsteps. And what were we, the crew of the Rogue Star, doing about it? Nothing. We returned to the same port, nearly the same spot on the dock, simply because we had nowhere else to go.

It’s not that I didn’t like Captain Dejar. He saved my life, after all. If our roles were reversed and he was the one launched into space to freeze to death, I probably wouldn’t have risked my life to save him. Then again, I’d never claimed to be a hero. My main goal was to survive.

Anything else was an added bonus.

Whether I liked it or not, my survival depended on Captain Dejar.

But if sitting in the port of Qasar Station waiting to be picked off like flies was his idea of ensuring my survival, then I needed to take matters into my own hands.

Luckily, I’d found a way to do exactly that.

Maris and Orrin created the most sophisticated security system the Rogue Star had ever seen and I knew a way around it.

The rewards of a misspent youth, I supposed.

The infrared system didn’t closely monitor the service vents. Why would it? The vents were too small for a serious threat to get through.

However, they weren’t too small for me.

Knowing sleep was not going to be an option for me tonight, I stood up from my sleeping mat and peeked out of the room.

It was late. The hallways were deserted.

Captain Dejar liked to have some crew members awake at all times, though the night shifts tended to be more relaxed and people tended to stay at their stations than doing business that had them walking the halls.

There wasn’t much reason to roam the halls.

Before I left my room, I grabbed my leather jacket and boots. My jacket was older than I was. It would’ve been destroyed if I hadn’t been wearing it the day the Persephone station exploded. I wasn’t materialistic in any way, but I would’ve been sad to lose that jacket.

Clutching my boots in one hand, I padded into the hallway, moving swiftly and quietly. I reached the storage room that the other human women had affectionately named The Makeover Room.

Inside were rows and rows of cosmetics purchased for us, and a tablet that showed a variety of aliens we humans were close enough to that we could alter our appearance enough to walk safely through the cities.

I selected a mint colored skin dye and rubbed it across my face and hands. The long sleeves of my black shirt would cover the rest of my skin. I didn’t like using too much of the cosmetics at once, since I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been here. I popped in red contacts, to match my hair and added a small pattern of false tattoos across my cheekbones. It wasn’t much but it would be enough to fool anyone who looked my way.

I’d already grabbed some cleaning solvent for later, stashed it in my room. I didn’t want to have to come back to The Makeover Room to get the necessary ingredients to clean myself off. The new dye was so strong that it stayed on your skin for over a day  - well, and old earth day, that I still couldn’t shake myself from thinking of as the default unit.

Two days was pushing it. But if you needed to get it off before a day, you’d need a cleaning agent that Kalyn had secured.

And anyone would have questions if they saw me made up like this.

I waited until I was at the entrance of the service vent before putting my boots on. This was the trickiest part. Once my upper body was in the vent, I wouldn’t be able to see if anyone was coming my way. I carefully lifted the vent cover and set it down on the floor.

The first time I planned this out, I’d immediately run into the issue of putting the vent cover back in place. My solution was to attach a length of thin rope to the gate and secure it inside the vent. As of right now, the rope was wedged between two loose slats of metal. As long as the slats didn’t move too far away from each other, the rope would stay in place. I didn’t expect that to last forever. I could probably weld a ring or something to the inside of the vent if I needed to keep using my escape hatch, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

I hauled myself into the vent and shimmed in as fast as I could. As soon as my legs were in, I grabbed the rope and pulled the vent cover up. It always took a little maneuvering to get it to slide back into its proper place, but I managed it.

I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I’d been doing this sort of thing since almost before I could speak, yet the chance of getting caught always put a knot of anxiety in my belly.

If someone walked by now, there was no way they’d be able to see me. Taking comfort in that fact, I started crawling through the vent.

It wasn’t fun. There were points where the vent was so narrow, I had to roll onto one side and flop like a fish to get through. Thankfully, the vent wasn’t long. I soon reached my exit point. I didn’t need a fancy rope mechanism for the vent cover. It was on the part of the ship that was constantly kept in shadow. If someone were to look at this side of the Rogue Star, they wouldn’t be able to see the vent opening.

I popped the cover off and placed it inside the vent, far enough away from the opening so that it had no chance of falling out. Climbing out head first was never enjoyable, especially since it was a seven-foot drop to the dock below.

Once my head and shoulders were out of the vent, I reached up to grab a natural handhold in the side of the ship. I hoisted myself up until I could slide my legs out of the vent. From there, it was a simple drop down to the dock. I had to push myself out from the ship’s side far enough so that I wouldn’t hit the railing of the dock, which I would climb to get back into the vent.

I landed silently. Years of practice trained me to make as little noise as possible as I moved about.

I’m sure the Space Force could’ve put a girl like me to work if I ever bothered to sign up.

And if they’d been willing to look over a few small things in my record.

Mostly small.

I knew that it was a glaring security risk that the vents weren’t monitored. Maris and Orrin had deemed them too small to be of any threat. They hadn’t thought that someone as diminutive as me would be able to access them. At first I had thought to tell Maris about this security flaw. But then I realized that it would effectively seal me onto the ship. In the end I decided it was worth the risk for now – I could inform Maris and Orrin once I had gotten what I needed.

I waited a moment, just to make sure no one on the Rogue Star caught on to what I was doing. At this hour, the docks were all but deserted. Satisfied that I’d made it out undetected, I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket and strode off toward the center of the Space Station.

Qasar Station wasn’t a glittering metropolis like Katzul. It was built for function but it still had an elegance to it. Sections of the Station were built within amber colored domes. I wasn’t sure what their primary function was.

Probably some kind of environmental stabilizing system.

Sort of interesting, maybe. Maris would be all over it.

But not useful to me, so I didn’t really care. I’d always been a practical girl. Why stop now?

The buildings in the dome closest to the dock were mostly repair shops. When ships took damage in deep space, Qasar was the only place they could go to get patched up.

Beyond that dome was the heart of the station. The markets, the restaurants, the lodgings, and every other comfort of a regular city could be found in the center dome. While the dome containing the repair shops had an expected grittiness to it, the center dome was pristine.

The buildings in the center were all constructed by a gleaming white material I didn’t recognize. It gave everything a uniform appearance. Looking at the city center, it was hard to believe that evil lurked beneath the surface.

Somewhere on this space station was a group prepared to do anything, even commit murder, to find the Persephone Station women.

I knew their sigil.

I knew where underground groups like this one liked to hide.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I found them but one thing was certain.

I sure as hell was going to stop them.

Kovor

“Why can’t you be a little more reserved in your expeditions?”

I looked at Dejar.  I knew he was simply trying to keep things safe and simple, but I couldn’t stay on the ship when there was an entire space station I could explore.

There were places to go, drinks to drink, and there were far too many women that had yet to be charmed.

And it wasn’t just the usual delights of a new, different place calling me.

I needed to be out there.

“I’m just trying to find information and make us some contacts.  What’s wrong with that?” I asked as I kicked my feet up on his desk.

He arched his eyebrow and tried for an overbearing, fatherly look. “Do you mind? This is still my office,” he said.

With an exasperated breath, I took my feet off his desk and did my best to get comfortable in the chair he had offered me.  “Look, all I’m trying to do is make sure we have everything we need for this noble mission of ours.”

“And we appreciate that,” he said as he indicated himself and Aavat.  I looked over and nodded to Aavat, his copper skin so much darker than my own hue.  Of course, my own golden skin wasn’t as deep as Dejar’s, but I liked having the paler skin.  It helped to emphasize my chiseled features and let my red hair be the center of attention it deserved to be.

Dejar was still talking.  “We would just appreciate it if you were a little more hesitant with your gallivanting, that’s all.  You know as well as us, we’re not exactly in favor with the Dominion right now, and if they’ve already sent…”

“Someone to chase us down, and they found us here, yada yada,” I interrupted.  “I know. But, how can I be something other than who I am? That’s how we have this ship,” I waved my hand around.  “And how we have as many contacts as we do.”

I could see Aavat shaking his head at me as he stood up from his chair and began pacing.  It was annoying, hearing his footsteps clump clump behind me.  Dejar let his head drop as he shook his head as well.  “You’re right,” he signed. “You have gotten us numerous contacts, and have helped us with many things, but this isn’t just a standard job here.”

I waved him off.  “I know that. Believe me, I do, and I support what we’re doing.  It’s not right what’s happening with the women around the cosmos,” I hesitated a second, unsure if I’d phrased that entirely correctly. With a shrug, I continued, “and I want to make sure that we do the right thing, especially with the female members of the crew.  That’s why I do what I do.”

“Is there any way,” Aavat started asking from behind me.  “That you could, maybe, possibly, at the very least tell us where you’re looking for information and what you’re finding?”

I shrugged, again.  I knew it aggravated the surly Chief Mate, but I couldn’t really help it.

Besides, it was too much fun to tweak him, just a bit.

“I’d love to fill you in, but I haven’t found anything yet.  The only information I’ve found so far is that some people claim to have heard a rumor or something of the like.  That’s it.”

“So, you’ve gone out every day and night since we returned, and you’ve learned…” Aavat started behind me.

I got to my feet and turned to face him, chest tight with worry at the entire situation, despite my light words.  “Nothing. Okay? I’ve found nothing so far. Then again, I’ve also been talking to people that either live off their parents’ money or are too busy to pay attention.  I’m trying not to look too obvious.”

Aavat threw his hands up and looked behind me to Dejar.  “I…you know what?” he asked as he pointed his finger at me.  “You do whatever you want to do. If you cause problems for us, we’ll leave your golden posterior behind, just like any other member of the crew.”  He looked back to Dejar. “He’s your problem. I’m done.” With that, he left.

I turned back, a bit surprised at Aavat’s outburst, only to be more surprised to see Dejar visibly angry.

And at me.

“If you screw this up, or cause trouble for us, we really will take the ship and leave you behind,” he started, face hard.  “You’ve always known that was our way. We won’t risk the women.” His lips twisted. “And with their skills, I’m not sure if anyone would realize you were the legal owner of the Rogue Star, anyway.”

“I’m not planning to cause problems.” I forced a smile, despite the growing ball of anger in my gut. “Look, the girls need some more stuff for their disguises, and since I can get the best deal from Madam Ora, I’ll go replenish their supplies.”  I headed towards the door, then stopped and turned back. “Unless you think that’s too much for me.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Dejar replied.  We had been around the women enough for me to know that being an ‘ass’ meant I was being troublesome, so I returned the favor with another gesture I had seen the women using.  Apparently, holding only the middle finger up to someone was basically saying that you wanted them to kout themselves.

I’d always thought cultural exchanges were useful.

“Go,” he said with a shake of his head.  I kept the smile pasted on as I left the office and made my way to the hangar bay.  I hated the door Orrin and Maris had installed but understood the necessity for it.

I hated the threat to the crew, to my new, makeshift family. And there wasn’t any cosmos that I wouldn’t be trying to solve it.

I punched in my code and headed into town.

Madam Ora was a beautiful woman that loved to give me discounts on things, as long as I was willing to give her a good time.  I didn’t mind, she was fun to be with. But first, I was hungry. While the food carts in the market had fantastic food without any of the refinement, after the dressing down by Dejar and Aavat, I was in the mood for something soothing.

Which usually meant something expensive.

I found a quaint little place, barely big enough to seat the crew, and made my way in.  I was only slightly under-dressed, wearing my red Genstad silk shirt with a gray Genstad silk vest, gray slacks, and my gray coat made from the softest materials found on the planet Dalu.  After I was seated, I ordered a meal the likes of which I hadn’t had in months and sat back with a glass of the finest liquor the establishment had to offer. The bottle wasn’t far away.

Sitting at the table next to me was a gorgeous complement of women. Five ladies, four species, and three of those species I’ve enjoyed numerous times in various levels of…well, everything.

I asked them to join me and the light-hearted conversation helped soothe the last of the sting of Dejar’s words.

What did he know, anyway?

One of the women, a voluptuous, blue-skinned vixen that I recognized as one of Madam Ora’s girls, had her hand on my leg, slowly making its way up.  I wasn’t complaining as I leaned in and whispered nonsense in her ear. She giggled, gave me a playful squeeze on my inner thigh, letter her fingers lightly brush against me.

I was having fun.  The other patrons weren’t entirely thrilled with me, but I didn’t care.  These ladies were sensational.

“Oh, Baiviel,” one of the girls cooed.

Despite Dejar’s thoughts about my competence, I did know better than to use my real name.  “I want to go dancing. Will you go dancing with us?”

The other girls chirped in, and the one squeezing my leg moved her hand and gave me another squeeze as she smiled at me, adding her own silent persuasion to the verbal pleas.

“I would be honored and thrilled to spend more time with you beautiful ladies,” I laughed as I flashed a promise to my squeeze-friend.  I called for the check, paid for the food and drinks—we had gone through three bottles?—and retrieved my coat as we left.

“So,” I asked.  “Where are…” I had to take a deep breath as the ground swam away from me for a quick moment.  “Where are we headed? I can’t wait to see how you ladies move.” I wrapped one arm around my little blue friend and the other around the Pronarian goddess that had been licking her lips and batting her eyes at me all evening.

Madam Ora’s establishment would wait. The idea of these two women, maybe three or all four of them—and the effects of the liquor—had me imagining so many things to do on this fine evening.

“I know a place,” the Pronarian answered.  “How about The White Hole? Z is working the music their tonight.”  The girls all squealed at that and started dragging me down the street.  After a block or so, we arrived and were waiting in line. As we waited, I felt two hands on my backside and returned the favor.  I leaned over to nibble on the Pronarian’s ear a bit when I saw something that snapped me entirely to attention.

At the end of the street was one of the women from the Rogue Star.

While the human women were good at disguising themselves, I could pick them out easily in a crowd.

And no matter how she dyed herself, I’d recognize Aryn.

She was doing her best to keep attention off of herself, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.

I’d watched her for far too long to not recognize her anywhere.

And she wasn’t supposed to be out here. It wasn’t safe.

“I’m so sorry, ladies.  I just remembered that I have an appointment that I must attend to.”

“Aww, are you sure?” the blue one asked as she grabbed my face and kissed me, hard. A quick wave of revulsion at myself passed through me as I gently detangled my limbs.

But I could see Aryn out of the corner of my eye. She was going to get into trouble. Or be trouble for someone.

Either way, she needed me.

Even if she didn’t know it.

“I’m sorry.  How about we get back together later?  Deal?”

At their sad nods, I left to go follow Aryn, shoving down the growing worry.

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GIVEN: STAR BREED BOOK ONE

Kara

It was all Juda’s fault.

I kicked him out of my bed three weeks ago for cheating on me, but apparently, he wasn’t done screwing me over.

I crouched low on the roof of the abandoned gambling den across the street from Sary’s “general store” and cursed the limp-dicked bastard all over again.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic at this time of day. Not that that meant much in Ghelfi; the thieves’ city never truly slept. There was no point in waiting for night, like in the old vids Mom used to watch over and over. Like all sealed cities on the surface of Neurea, lighting in Ghelfi varied throughout the day’s cycle, but never to a true night.

I saw real night, once. I stowed away on the back of a surface crawler that was heading to Lashell. I don’t know why, somehow I’d thought it would be better if I got out of Ghelfi, started over somewhere else.

The velvet sky, studded with stars, shone clean and cold. Perfect. Not like the barely organized chaos of the cities.

But halfway there, the crawler broke down, had to be towed back. I realized then that there was no way out. Not for me.

In the old vids, everything always turned out alright, something swooped in at the last minute to save the day.

That’s how you knew they were only lies.

So here I was, half-hidden among old wires and debris that had been kicked up to the top of the store years ago, long forgotten. Watching time slip away on the chrono, crossing my fingers to old gods I didn’t believe in.

“What’cha doing?”

I jumped, furious with myself.

Bani crouched next to me. His dark brown hair hung down in his face, but I could still see the twinkle in his eye. Snuck up on me and was proud of it, little bastard.

I socked him gently in the arm, just enough to let him know I cared.

“Everybody’s looking for you, Kara,” he said under his breath. He didn’t look at me but instead kept his eyes scanning across the street, trying to see what I was interested in. Smart kid.

I ran my hand through my own tangle of hair. It was past time to cut it, but things had been a little busy lately.

“How mad is Xavis?” I really didn’t want to know the answer.

Bani shrugged one bony shoulder. “He’s playing it down a little bit, but I think he’s pretty steamed. If you, of all people, don’t show up by the end of the tithe, he’s gonna lose a lot of face.”

A light crackled, the burnt smell of frying wires wafted by. But I wasn’t paying attention to the noise or to the stink of ozone that permeated the air of Ghelfi. If Xavis really was mad, I was in trouble.

I shoved the thought far to the back of my head. Nothing to do about it but keep moving.

A shuffling sound below surprised me, and I risked another glance over the ledge. A miner, wrapped in rags so filthy there was no telling the gender, half-staggered down the street. He, she, whatever, paused in front of Sary’s storefront, then stumbled inside.

Ice gripped my spine. Rings willing, he’d be quick. Claim whatever he came to trade, and get out. Not stay there, spinning stories of life in the Waste, screwing my timetable.

“Is that the job?” Bani’s wide eyes fixed me. “A snatch and grab on the miners after they bring in the dust?”

I rolled my eyes. “They’re just trying to get by, same as us.” Besides, credits were no good to me, not with so little time to clean them. But the antonium dust the miners brought in was untraceable. ‘Dust knows no provenance’ was the saying. I just needed to get enough of it.

Agonizing minutes passed until he left. I glanced at my chrono again. If she didn’t show up today, I didn’t have a backup plan. This was my backup plan. No more nets to catch my fall.

I closed my eyes to try to find the calm, cold center within that had kept me alive so far on the streets of Ghelfi, and waited. I didn’t need to see, didn’t need to check the time. I could only wait and listen.

Finally, the sound came. The sharp click of stiletto heels across the permasteel walkway. I opened my eyes and leaned forward ever so slightly to peer down the street.

There she was. Charro’s secret indulgence. Silver hair teased into a high fall down her back, her face paint marked her as one of Sary’s working girls. When I first found out about Charro’s extracurricular activities, I’d half thought of sending a note to Sary, stir up the nest a bit. Then I started thinking long term. That’d been almost two years ago.

Two years of planning and waiting brought to a crash by that bastard Juda. I should have gutted him like a fish instead of just kicking him out.

Bani glanced at her and then looked up at me, frowning.

“That’s your mark?” He risked another look but I pulled him back sharply by the collar of his jacket.

He glared at me, with all the scorn a preteen could manage. “I know her. She works the landing pad. Even if she did have the sort of money you’re going to need to get out of trouble with Xavis, she isn’t gonna be carrying it with her on a job.” His eyes narrowed. “So what are you really up to?”

I grinned. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t pleased to have to use this job to get out of the hole Juda left me in, but it was pretty brilliant.

“Just keep your eye on the alley, kid, okay?”

I checked my chrono again, but I didn’t need to. I’d timed this pattern so often. Like clockwork, the shadows of Charro’s two goons came into focus on the tinted plex of the storefront. Just like every other time I’d watched, they paced back and forth, no doubt joking about their boss and his hobby.

“They’re supposed to be guarding the back room, but he always kicks them out when she visits.” I checked the time again, stupid habit. Couldn’t help it. “He might be there, but he’s more than a little distracted right now.”

I worked my way across the roof, down to the collection of rubble in the back alley that had let me gain my vantage point.

Bani followed me and I glared at him.

“Stay up here,” I snarled. “I don’t know how this is going to turn out.”

“Then you’ll need a second pair of hands.”

The kid had a point, but I’d be damned if I was going to let him have it.

“No, I need a second pair of eyes.” His shoulders sagged a little. But I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t follow me anyway.

“Besides, I don't know if I can trust you on this job.” His white face told me my words hit their mark. Hated to do it, but I didn’t want to be worried about him. I was in enough trouble as it was.

His face slid out of sight as I worked my way down the trash heap.

Even before I crossed the street, the bitter stench of the acid bombs I’d planted clawed at my throat. The air recirculators only worked intermittently in this neighborhood, and in the alley, the smell almost forced me to my knees.

That the miner walked by without flinching, I could understand. I’d heard too much time in an environmental suit would have you smelling nothing but rubber. But the silver-haired doxy must have been high on something to not notice something was wrong.

No time to linger in the alley. Microcams swept every ninety seconds, watching, waiting for anything out of the ordinary.

I dashed to the hiding space I’d carved out of the fallen wall that backed up to Sary’s, and held my breath, trying to hear over the drumming of my heartbeat. The rushing in my ears slowed, and I poked my head out. Still all clear.

Nobody in their right mind would take on Sary, he ran half the games in town, and word in the pits said he wanted to take control of the city over from Xavis. Unlikely, but still, not someone I really wanted after me. But if the choice was Sary or Xavis himself….well, it was a sucky choice.

I counted, waiting for the next clear moment to check on the results of the clustered acid bombs, then ran back around the corner.

Ninety seconds is a long time.

Ninety seconds is long enough to make one chip in the wall a day until a section can be lifted away and replaced seamlessly.

Ninety seconds is long enough to plant one small acid bomb at a time, then wait for a few days for the smell to dissipate, for the interior wall that led to the vault to weaken, bit by bit, day by day.

Ninety seconds is long enough to die in the Waste, outside of the protection of the domes.

And if I didn’t get my tithe to Xavis by tonight, that’s where I’d end up.

Davien

Really, everything would be so much easier if I just snapped the fat fool’s neck. Only the endless lessons in control back on the ship kept my hands still at my sides, fingers barely flexing. The tips of my claws ran across my palms, bringing me back to focus.

“Davien, are you even listening to me?” Xavis rumbled.

And he wasn’t a fool, even if I despised him. Xavis had clawed his way to the top of the dirtiest pile to run Ghelfi. The trip to the top had been over the broken bodies of plenty of enemies. He’d stayed on his perch for over twenty Imperial years. I didn’t have to do much research to know his methods hadn’t changed.

Prime example: he’d hired me.

I focused on Xavis, only too aware I’d started to slip away into the hunt. Every moment here, stuck on this rock, was a delay I couldn’t afford. Xavis, bastard though he might be, was my fastest way out of here. Well, the fastest way without an unacceptably high casualty count.

Xavis lounged in his hover chair, fingers tapping in annoyance well away from the control pad. The chair was as much affectation as convenience - he could walk just fine. Just liked to be able to loom over people.

“She’s late,” he growled. “She’s never late.”

I didn’t need to ask who he meant. He’d been on a tear about his precious Kara for hours, first calling her his brightest find, then cursing her ingratitude.

The large room I’d come to think of as the receiving hall was mostly empty now, just the regular workers at their terminals around the edges, cleaning credits, shifting funds until they could be transferred into the most secure banks in the Empire. Repetitive, mind-numbing, but crucial to any modern criminal enterprise. The low drone as they worked filled the otherwise quiet room.

The last traces of the dark festivities of the last day had almost been erased. All day and night long, denizens of Ghelfi’s underworld had streamed in, bringing their tribute to the acknowledged boss of the city, doing their best, or worst, to please a capricious overlord. The whole affair had been boring, and stupidly inefficient.

But the archaic ritual soothed his ego and had been an opening to a job. At the last tithing, some idiot with more guts than brains had tried to take Xavis out. He’d failed to account for the force shield over the hover chair, but his explosives did thin out Xavis’ bodyguards considerably.

Bad luck for them, perfect timing for me. When Doc had commanded we all enter the escape pods, she’d made it clear we were to jump as randomly as possible. It should have worked, should have drawn the attackers away from the Daedalus, but it had been six standard weeks since I’d crashed here, and I hadn’t had a signal from her or any of my brothers.

If I was on my own, I needed credits. And I needed a lot of them.

Six weeks had been enough to battle my way up the ranks of Xavis’ enforcers. Not that they were slouches, but they didn’t have my, shall we say, advantages.

A commotion at the entrance to the room drew my attention, and I angled for a better position at the front of Xavis’s chair. The dais we stood on served as an excellent vantage point for the room, allowing me to take in any suspicious movements at a glance. I’d argued to get rid of the scarlet drapery behind us, observing it provided too obvious of a hiding place. He’d refused. Like the dais, it was all about show.

The scuffle at the doorway turned out to be two enforcers dragging a third man between them. Beneath the new scrapes and swelling around his eye, I recognized him. Marcus, Martin, something like that. A low-level hustler who worked the dive bars near the station. Rigged games of chance, targeting travelers who wouldn’t be around long enough to make a fuss.

Xavis waved me back into place, and I relaxed, just a tad. This wasn’t a threat to his authority, just another loser trapped here.

The enforcers tossed the poor sap onto the lowest level of the dais and stepped back, waiting for orders.

“Malik,” Xavis coaxed the hover chair to the edge of the dais, watching the human wreck below take shuddering breaths. “You didn’t appear for the tithing last night.” He floated down, a pale mass of malevolence, eyes narrowed.

I stepped behind him. I didn’t expect trouble from Malik, but there’d be hell to pay if I wasn’t where Xavis expected me, especially when he was in this mood.

“Well?” Xavis’s low voice was almost pleasant, but a thread of malice wound through it, unmistakable. “We’ve known each other for so long, I’m surprised that you’ve disappointed me.”

“I’m sorry, Lord Xavis,” the man mumbled. Probably had lost a few teeth. “My youngest has been down with the Batdu pox, the medicine was so much…” He gulped. “I thought I could make it up before the tithing.”

“Oh?” Xavis’s eyes glittered. “How is the poor thing doing now?”

“Better now, Lord Xavis. Thank you.”

“You should have told me, I would have lent you the money.”

Sure he would have. At rates that would mean he’d own the service of the entire family.

“But, as it is, we have a problem that needs to be sorted out.” Xavis made a show of tapping his fingers, as if considering, but that sharp brain had already decided on the punishment, I was sure. This was just to terrorize the hustler, and send a message to everyone else in the room.

“I’d forgotten about your lovely family,” he purred. “The oldest is twelve now, as I recall?”

The man shifted uneasily. “Yes, my lord. But she’s not very strong…”

“I’m sure a more active life will be good for her. She’ll have her own tithe to pay, starting next cycle.”

“What?” The man pushed himself to his feet, protesting.

Idiot.

Xavis flicked a finger, and I sprang to the front of the chair to grab the beaten hustler by the front of his jacket. I lifted him off the floor and shook him until his head snapped back.

He pushed feebly against my grip.

“I wouldn’t try it,” I growled, and he froze.

I’m not sure what it is about my voice. On the ship, with my brothers, no one had a problem with it. In all the training vids we watched, I never thought I sounded that different. But here, on this worthless rock at the fringe of the Empire, all I had to do was speak, and the humans cowered.

Weak.

Prey.

I snarled, and the acrid scent of urine assaulted me. The fucker had wet himself. Apparently, he hadn’t liked the points of my teeth, either.

“I suggest you comply, little man. What choice do you have?”

He stared at me, face pale beneath the marks of the beating, but finally nodded. It wasn’t much of a motivational speech, but it was the truth. No one on Neurea had a lot of choices.

“I think you can release him now, Davien.” The smug tone of Xavis’s voice told me he’d gotten what he wanted. He hadn’t had to send a usually reliable worker to the Wastes, and he’d picked up extra leverage at the same time.

I lowered the man back to his feet. His legs buckled, but he scrambled away from me on hands and knees. Idiot. I wasn’t the worst monster in the room.

The rest of the negotiations were predictably short and one-sided. The hustler left, and the business in the room resumed its quiet drone.

“I’ve decided.” Xavis’s voice cracked like a whip as he floated back to the top of the dais. “An example must be made.”

I waited below for orders.

“Find Kara Shimshi. Bring her to me.”

Despite my better instincts, I grinned.

The hunt was on.

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VREHX: CONQUERED WORLD BOOK ONE

Vrehx

Streaks of plasma lit the blackness as a squadron of Valorni fighters swooped in dizzying spirals, blasting at the massive Xathi ship that filled the screens of the Vengeance.

We were so close it was the size of a planet. Like two steel ziggurats smashed and welded together. Not practical for space flight, but efficient enough to tear through several worlds.

Designed to intimidate.

Designed to destroy.

And we were going to stop it.

We crept closer, waiting. I sucked in my breath, geared for the inevitable.

I gritted my teeth as the bridge shook, and Karzin let out an undignified whoop from his station on the far curve of the bridge. The purple stripes on his shoulders rippled, and his excited eyes darted back and forth as if cheering on his favorite sport.

Barbarian. His crude Valorni traits got on my last nerve—not that he gave a rat’s ass. Like the lot of them, he had no empathy for others. He barely listened to commands and forget anyone who didn’t at least match his rank.

“You green motherfuckers aren’t supposed to be hitting us, just laying cover for our approach,” I snarled. “They can remember that much, can’t they?”

They had only begun venturing into space when we took them into the alliance, but surely they weren’t that stupid.

I hoped not.

“Fuck you,” the Valorni drawled. The stretched-out sounds of his abominable accent were like bristles to my red Skotan scales. “Not their fault we’re cloaked all to hell.”

What an asshole. Valorni couldn’t even be bothered to speak accurately. Their drawl made it nearly impossible to understand them, and they had idiotic slang for everything.

“They were informed of our flight path before the battle.” The lights of Sk’lar’s implants flickered in the dim light of the bridge. “It should have been simple for them to avoid it.”

I smiled just a little, glad I wasn’t the only one with some common sense. Sk’lar wasn’t much better than Karzin, but he was more tolerable. My biggest problem was his implants.

His artificial augmentation was just creepy and wrong. You could see them light up in biohazard green against his shiny black skin. He looked like a fucking motherboard.

The strike team leaders were chosen for their specific talents and leadership, but Sk’lar’s was not stealth outside the ship.

Karzin made it a point to butt heads with all of us. That usually distracted the rest of us from being at each other’s throats.

Maybe that was his intention. Whatever. He was an asshole.

Karzin shrugged off the K’ver’s barely concealed criticism. “Not gonna matter in a few minutes, is it?”

The sarcasm warranted him a disapproving side-eye from Sk’lar, which he ignored. I hated to admit it, but the jackass was right. In a few minutes, we would probably all be dead.

“Gentlemen,” Rouhr’s quiet word from the command station silenced the chatter, “are you prepared?”

The scar that ran down the left side of his face rippled as he clenched his jaw. He was annoyed.

Of course, we were prepared.

We shut up anyway. Rouhr was very diplomatic. That’s why he was in charge.

We straightened ourselves and regained our concentration.

Tension and anger clogged the air, but there was no fear. Fear had died when our families did, when our worlds had burned under the Xathi attacks.

Around the half circle, each of us activated the new weapons panels, the long seconds drawing out as they lit up and hummed. Every battle had this moment—the waiting before the storm.

But this would be different.

We owned the storm.

“Let’s blow a hole in those bastards,” I growled, eyes fixed on the sickly green hull, thinking of the swarms inside.

They waited for the go ahead to surge through over the squadrons like locusts.

Nothing had been able to penetrate a Xathi hiveship before. They just plowed through and destroyed whatever they wanted, the swarms mopping up whatever the hiveship missed.

The Valorni, as annoying as they were, were inducted into the alliance for one reason. The Sugavians had worked with K’ver scientists using codialite, a mineral from the Valorni homeworld, to make one last attempt.

Just enough had been mined for this last-ditch effort—an experimental weapon that had a shot at penetrating that hull. It was rare, and we were on the losing end of this fight. We only had one shot.

We’d better make it count.

Every Skotan, K’ver, and Valorni warrior on the Vengeance had volunteered in the knowledge that it was a one-way trip. If this worked, the three strike teams below would board the Xathi and battle until there was nothing left.

If it didn’t, we’d all die—just sooner.

Either way, the recorder satellites would beam the results of the experiment back to the scientists and engineers. We’d succeed, or they’d build a better weapon next time. That was the most important part of the mission, and we all understood how expendable we were.

The three of us locked focus on our stations as we crept closer.

“We are now in firing range, Captain,” Sk’lar reported.

“Fire at will,” was the only response.

Karzin sent the signal to the Valorni ships, and I started a slow count.

One.

His comrades had fought stupidly but bravely. There was no discernable pattern to the attack.

I was worried more would take friendly fire than would hit the Xathi, but they somehow made sense of the chaos, dodging fire from their comrades. If any survived the battle, they deserved to escape.

Two.

More likely the crazy bastards would follow us into the breach, but they’d earned the choice.

Three.

I activated the launch panel and braced, eyes fixed on the monitors. The adrenaline rushed through me in anticipation of the blow.

Nothing.

Not a bang or a pop or a whine. Just the hum of the engines, and the wall of the Xathi ship growing larger on the screens.

The anticipation deflated as I looked at the panel in confusion. The damn thing was experimental, but it should at least fire. The engineers weren’t brain-dead.

With a snarl, I slapped it again.

And then the universe turned inside out.

JENEVA

I was in my element.

I was where I belonged.

Completely alone in the silence, except for the gigantic bipedal tree creature with an affinity for spewing poison.

Home sweet home.

A glob of the foul stuff hissed as it ate away the earth beneath me. It was only inches from my boot, but I didn’t flinch or try to move out of the way.

A rapid movement around a sorvuc was far more dangerous than its projectile poison. Its damn branches were covered in tiny neural fibers, capable of detecting incredibly small movements. The fibers were illuminated purple.

The sorvuc searched for me.

Under different circumstances, I would have found it beautiful, but at that moment, it was just a pain in my ass.

The humidity made my short hair damp and scratchy. It clung to the curve of my neck. I longed to brush it away, but a movement like that would be a death sentence.

The luminescent purple faded away to a tranquil pink. I realized I was holding my breath.

Slowly, so slowly, I crept closer to the wide trunk of the sorvuc. I had already made an incision in its trunk. That’s what pissed it off in the first place.

A necessary risk, but I only needed a few more drops of the thick scarlet fluid that seeped from the incision. The right person would pay a small fortune for its sap—or is it blood? Hell if I know.

As I slid my vial into place, ready to collect the liquid the sale of which would keep me comfortable for months, shouts erupted from somewhere nearby.

Damn it.

The sorvuc shrieked, its neural fibers flaring purple once again. It pivoted, razor-sharp leaves dangerously close to me. I rolled away, camouflaging my own movements in its rustling.

The hulking creature lumbered off in the direction the shouts came from—sort of. Its neural fibers must have picked up the sound vibrations, but with so many trees, it would have been difficult for the creature to determine the exact direction.

It’s a good thing sorvuc had those fibers. They were as deaf as, well, a tree—at least, the sort of trees our ancestors brought over on their generation ship. But those trees sure as hell didn’t fling poison or walk.

Walking plants were something the dense forest of Ankau had in excess. Even so, I’d take a hostile tree giant over people any day. At least they left me in peace.

Another round of shouts echoed through the trees. I clenched my teeth.

Speaking of peace.

I moved quickly and quietly through the dense forest, mindful not to disturb any of the thick vines that crisscrossed the forest floor. It was difficult to tell which ones were looking for a snack.

I spied a small herd of luurizi grazing between the roots of the docile Lenaus trees.

Their coats of lilac, sage, and pearl shimmered when they caught the mottled light bleeding through the canopy. Their silvery horns shone like jewels. It was easy to forget how deadly they were.

I was sure they could smell me.

Ordinarily, they would attack the moment they sensed an intruder. But this particular herd had become accustomed to my scent after so many years. It was an uneasy truce, but I still knew better than to take my eye off them.

Another bout of shouting brought me back to the present. It was louder this time. And stupider.

Clearly, whoever it was had a death wish, which was fine. I’d just prefer to be farther away when it happened.

The trees gave way to a small clearing. Two women, who I can only assume are the shouting morons, stood inches away from each other, their faces red with anger. They didn’t notice my intrusion.

“You’re not even trying anymore!” One woman, blonde and petite, hissed at the other. Her voice was tight, like she was trying to stay in control.

Sharp would have been the only way to describe her—sharp cheekbones, sharp chin, and sharp shoulders. Even her mouth was a sharp slash across her face.

I winced at her words, a headache throbbing at my temples. I almost wished something would come along and kill them.

“What more do you want me to do?” The other woman, dark-haired and softer than the other, answered wearily. “If I had known you were going to bring this up, I never would have agreed to meet you!”

Though they were different in coloring, they had the same nose and face shape. I guessed they were sisters—not that I cared.

“What other reason would there be to meet up?” the blonde snapped, her gray-green eyes narrowing. “What else do we have anymore?”

There was more poison in those words than there was in a fully grown sorvuc.

“I hate to interrupt,” I said, startling both women.

I wanted to sound as annoyed as I felt, but my voice was brittle and raspy with disuse. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had spoken aloud.

“But you really should shut up,” I continued.

The blonde pivoted to face me. I was at least a head taller than her, but she somehow seemed bigger than she actually was. And the glare on her face would have made a narrisiri hesitate.

“This is none of your business,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Nope, it isn’t. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t care about it. But you really should find somewhere else to finish your screaming match,” I replied.

“Do you think we’re idiots? We have a howler with us,” the blonde smugly fished a small black device from her pocket.

I hated those damn things. They emitted a high-pitched sound above the threshold of human hearing. It was meant to repel the creatures that stalked the forest, but I always thought it was a scam.

First of all, the people living in the cities and towns hardly knew anything about the creatures that lived out here in the forest. Second, how would anyone know for a fact that a howler was working? No one could hear it.

“Yes, I do think you’re idiots if you think that carrying a howler into the middle of aramirion territory during nesting season is a good idea,” I snapped, fighting the urge to give the blonde a smug smile. “If they can hear that thing, you’re screwed.”

The dark-haired woman paled as she put her hand on the blonde’s shoulder. The blonde stiffened at her touch.

“Leena, is that true?” the dark-haired woman whispered. Her eyes, the same color as the blonde’s, nervously scanned the surrounding forest.

“How the hell would I know, Mariella? You’re the one who moved all the way out to the middle of freaking nowhere!” the blonde, Leena, grumbled.

I turned to leave. Obviously, they had no intention of listening to me. Perhaps the dark-haired one, Mariella, might have seen reason, but Leena had some sort of chip on her shoulder—a chip the size of a damn ravine.

Fine. Whatever. They were adults.

I’d tried my best to warn them. It’s not my fault if they chose not to listen to me.

What would I know, right? I’ve only been living out here for fifteen years. They would come to their senses and leave, or they would keep at it until one beast or another silenced them.

Either way, I got my forest and my silence back.

I could still feel their flurries of emotion as I marched through the undergrowth. If I was going to find another sorvuc to fill my vial, I needed to concentrate, but I couldn’t do that with the feelings of two idiots in my head. I should turn back, try even harder to get them to leave.

A horrible screech unlike anything I had ever heard tore through the air. The sheer force of it drove me to my knees.

I tried to protect my ears with my hands, but it was useless. My vision blurred, stars danced behind my eyelids. I could practically feel my brain thrashing, desperate to escape that terrible sound.

Those idiots either did something to their howler, or the damn thing was malfunctioning. That had to be it.

As soon as I could get back on my feet, I staggered back to the clearing where I’d left the arguing pair. I would tear their stupid howler apart with my bare hands if I had to—anything to stop the noise.

“What the hell did you do?” I yelled.

Again, they didn’t notice me when I entered the clearing, but, this time, they weren’t distracted by an argument.

They stood side by side, looking up at the sky. Their faces were pale and their mouths were open in terror and confusion. I followed their gaze.

A jagged scar of pitch marred the once pristine stretch of endless blue.

The sky, my sky, had been torn open.

There was a beat of silence as if the whole planet had drawn in a collective breath of shock.

Then the forest erupted into chaos.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I love old movies – To Catch a Thief, Notorious, All About Eve — and anything with Katherine Hepburn in it. Clever, elegant people doing clever, elegant things.

I’m a hopeless romantic.

And I love science fiction and the promise of space.

So it makes perfect sense to me to try to merge all of those loves into a new science fiction world, where dashing heroes and lovely ladies have adventures, get into trouble, and find their true love in the stars!

Copyright © 2019 by Elin Wyn

All rights reserved. These books or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the Author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Orrin

Maris

Epilogue - Maris

Letter from Elin

Rogue Sign

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Given: Star Breed Book One

Vrehx: Conquered World Book One

About the Author

Copyright