In Enemy Territory - Shannon West Page 0,36
Earthan cigarettes, which were Rasc’s particular poison. Soon, other unaffiliated men were drawn to the gang and their numbers began to grow.
It hadn’t taken Rasc long to realize that Setin had been right when he said the most powerful group in the colony, other than the guards, were the Drex. They didn’t seem to be terribly well-organized, but they occupied the newer buildings—the ones with the heat in the winter—and they always looked fat and well-supplied with clothing, shoes, coats, or whatever else they needed. Rasc needed to enlist their aid, and he happened to know a way to do it.
The underlying order in the prisons came from precisely what most people would assume was the source of disorder—the criminals on the outside. The ones on the inside of the prisons were able to keep in touch with their cronies on the outside with their communicators and visitors, and the Drex were no exception. So even though it seemed the individual gang leaders were in charge, in reality it was their outside bosses still directing things and making sure everything flowed and any snitches got what was coming to them on the inside.
Rasc knew a way to get in with the Drex through Prince Larz himself, whose brother Derrick was mated to a half-Lycan pirate who styled himself the pirate king—Rhaegar Barbosa. Rhaegar was definitely in charge of the Drex, both in and out of prison.
Rasc passed a message to Gerta-sek to be delivered to Larz and then sat back and waited. Setin had acquired a communicator for trading purposes, but Rasc had no plans for keeping one up his own ass whenever he left the relative safety of his cell and no desire to touch Setin’s, considering where it had been. So he was content to sit back and wait to see just how efficient their communication network was with Gerta-sek. The answer turned out to be, very.
Within three days of sending his message, Rasc was approached by one of the pirates as he sunned himself in the yard while Setin kept watch. The weather had been warming up a little and this was his first chance to get any sun at all. He used to pride himself on keeping a nice, all-over tan, in fact, but those days were long gone. He had his shirt off though and was lying stretched out on his back on top of a picnic table when Setin called softly to him.
“Hey, Rasc. Incoming.”
Lazily, Rasc swung his feet around and sat up. In front of him, about six feet away, stood a short dark man with deeply set, obsidian colored eyes.
“I heard you wanted to see me,” the man said softly, taking himself a seat on the bench and lighting up an Earthan cigarette with his contraband lighter. Rasc glanced over at the guards, whose glances flickered their way and then back out at the yard.
Rasc recognized the Drex pirate as Selinias Pax, a notorious man who was once a trusted cohort of the pirate king, Rhaegar Barbosa. The man had been pointed out to him one day in the dining hall. Pax had tried, or so the rumor went, to go straight after he got married to a human. He lived then on one of the Nilanium ships, but he was still such a badass that even the Nilaniums were afraid of him. The captain, it was rumored, had thought he might take over the ship for the Drex pirates, but in reality, Pax had only wanted to live in peace with his new husband.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
He was actually in prison for killing said husband. According to the strange story Rasc heard, Pax had been totally in lust with the human boy, and considering the fact that the human had murdered his entire family in an altercation over who had consumed the last of the breakfast cereal, Pax’s interest in the beautiful boy had been a little surprising. But Pax had married him anyway and had tried hard to rehabilitate him. He lived with him for five cycles before the boy tried to cut Pax’s throat with a knife one night, and in the ensuing struggle the human had fallen and hit his head. Pax was heartbroken, but the authorities used the unfortunate event to get rid of him by giving him a farce of a trial, dealing him a life sentence, and then sending him away to this far distant penal colony.
The ex-pirate was covered in tattoos, many