Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,47
right now. Swarm pirate stuff. Aristocrat stuff. It’s all kind of blending together and blowing up.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“You’re doing great, Cat. Only a few weeks in this crazy new world, and you’re taking it like a champ.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m not a baby.”
“But,” I say.
“Of course there’s a but.”
“You don’t have a full grasp on everything right now. I need to make a call real quick, and this whole mess will be over by tomorrow night. We’ll be on the way back to the swarm rich and happy. A few weeks after that, and we’ll have a brand new ship to call home. I just need to get through these next few hours, and I don’t have time to brief you and bring you up to speed. You got it?”
I don’t even know if I’m telling the truth to her anymore. The job. It’s all about the job. The big payoff. I get chills thinking about it. Cat is distracting me, and every time I think about being with her, I feel weak. I doubt my ability to pull this all off.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just go then.”
I go. I know it’s the passive aggressive women version of “just go.” The one that means you aren’t supposed to go, but I can run damage control on that later.
I go for a walk. I loop around a lot to make sure I’m not being followed. I sit down on a bench in a park, and when I’m sure I’m safe, I open a comms channel--voice only--to Thraxa.
“We got a huge problem,” I whisper.
“What is it?”
“There’s a swarm pirate here. Name is THESIUS. I think he’s one of the popsicles that didn’t reintegrate. Can you check?”
I give her a description of him. THESIUS isn’t going to be his real name.
Popsicles are what we call swarm pirates who go into cryo sleep for too long. The longer they stay frozen, the harder it gets for them to reintegrate. If you’re gone for more than two or three generations, it’s nearly impossible to get back in.
“Yeah,” she says. “Is this him?”
She sends an image to my tablet. It’s him.
“Heriodus,” she says. She whistles. “Was frozen for two hundred years. Didn’t even try to reintegrate.”
“Any living relatives?”
“Yeah,” she says. “But I mean...two hundred years. I doubt they’ll give a shit about him.”
“Well, he’s blackmailing us,” I say. “I need to tell him what I’m willing to pay him by midnight, or he says he’s going to fuck our job up.”
“How did he catch you?”
“He’s a dueling coach. He must have recognized my fighting style. Guess our dueling methods haven’t changed much since he was frozen.”
“I’ll deal with him,” Thraxa says. “I’m on my way down.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Catherine barely speaks to me. She’s still worried I’m going to die. I’m not worried about that. Mi Treton is as good as dead. I’m more worried about whether Thraxa handled things and whether the heist will go off smoothly or not.
What Cat doesn’t get is that I’m having to follow through. When you punch someone in the face, you don’t stop punching when your fist hits their nose. You punch as if you are trying to hit the wall behind their head. Mi Treton is the nose of the guy I’m punching, and getting off this planet without anyone dying or captured--especially Cat--is the wall. I’m trying to punch the wall, and I can’t worry about the fucking nose right now, but the nose is all that Cat can see.
I make a tactical decision. Tactical, but partial, honesty.
“I threw the fight against THESIUS,” I tell her.
She scoffs at me. “You think I believe that?”
“I did. Maya was there. I don’t trust the Mi Kioras. What if there was some scheme where they were going to get Mi Treton to back out if I was too strong?”
“What would the advantage of that be?”
“I’m not an aristocrat. I can’t play four-dimensional chess as well as them, but I can play Poker, and I can hold a Poker face and keep my cards close to my chest. Denying them information is the best I can do. The biggest advantage I have is that they think I want the wine distribution rights. They think I’m playing a much longer game than I really am. We’re off this habitat by tonight, Cat.”
“So you let that guy thwack you over the head? Like five times? Over and over?”
“Yeah,” I say.
I can still feel the bruises.
“I feel like you’re still lying. Just telling me what you think