The Chase (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 1-3) Page 5

  A discrete mind becomes fluid and interconnection occurs when a conduit of touch is present. The scrap of ancient writing tweaked his memory just as he encountered the wall he’d found before. True to the wisdom, this time the wall was soluble. He was halfway through it, into the darkness of her mental landscape before he realized what he was doing. At once horrified and intrigued, he froze himself from penetrating any further into her consciousness. Even his worst enemy didn’t deserve to be so—violated. A wave of nausea rushed through him at the depth of his own unconscious depravity. But her hands were squeezing and his air was dwindling. His eyes focused on hers and what happened next could only be explained as a purely defensive move.

  Hints of green fire in her eyes flared, and found an answer in his, and suddenly, her mind opened wide to his. Curiosity, attraction, desire, the awareness of his breath mingling with hers. The thrill of the chase, and the elation of capture, but the emotions masked different, deeper ones that the mind laid bare. A need for touch, a craving for physical contact. Banked fires of sexuality waiting to flare into life—all they needed was a breath of air to fuel them.

  With an invitation like that, was it any wonder he couldn’t resist? Was it any wonder that the images readily came to his mind—her skin exposed, his hands a hue darker against her bare body. Images of her thighs wrapped around his, a catch of her breath and the speed of her pulse and the way he imagined her skin might taste all jumped from his mind to hers, even as he pulled his own focus back into himself.

  He looked back out of his own eyes to find her hands still around his throat, but her lips nearly brushing his. Her eyes met his again and a small, helpless sound came out of her throat. Her indrawn breath was enough for her body to make contact with his, tips of breasts brushing his chest even through layers of clothing starting heat in his belly and invoking an answering flicker in her eyes.

  In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the fire snuffed out.

  “Get out of my mind,” she hissed, shoving away from him.

  He lunged forward, ready to run again, but her turn away proved to be a feint. She twisted back towards him, her fist catching him square in the jaw. He went down like a rock and was out cold before he hit the ground.

  Even with repulsor cuffs, the son of a bitch was heavy. Treska hooked both arms underneath his and pulled him along the floor. His hands, cuffed in front of him, floated a dozen centimeters above his body, while his feet floated similarly above the floor. The rest of him, however, was dismally obedient of gravity. She hauled him along on his rump, the utility weatherall cloak he wore rasping along the flagstones.

  By the end of the hallway, she was out of breath, sucking in huge lungfuls of air that included the scent of him. Something woodsy and warm, with an undertone of something that made her whole body flush, and at the same time infuriated her, because it reminded her of his callous disregard for the privacy of her mind.

  And maybe the way he’d invaded that privacy, too. She jerked him perhaps a little unnecessarily hard over the threshold of the estate and called her perimeter balls to her hand. Their anti-gravity technology helped enough so that she could drag his unconscious form with one arm rather than both. Still, it was a hard walk up a long hill and by the time she reached the Needle, she was out of breath and a little sweaty.

  But good hard work had its rewards. Her charge was less than spotless, having been dragged through the dirt of the vineyard, and she felt at least partially vindicated. She’d had enough time to at least work up a good anger to burn through any…other feelings she might be having about what happened the moment she caught up to him.

  She used her remote to put the Needle in preflight check and drop the loading ramp. Her perimeter balls were about out of juice and his body was more of a dead weight with each step forward. Nobody’s this heavy. She grunted as she lifted his shoulders up onto the cargo ramp. He weighs more than a Treemian, I swear. She dragged him up the cargo ramp, her muscles straining with the effort. His cloak caught on the rim of the ramp, and the mighty shove she gave him made her feel a tiny bit guilty. Dead carcasses of herd animals were treated more gently than this. She turned to close the ramp and her legs tangled in the trailing edge of his cloak. Her muscles, spent as they were, couldn’t get her back on balance, and she crashed towards the floor, landing full on his body.

  The contact sent shocks through her. For a second, she just sprawled on top of him, stunned at the realization that sentient contact—the physical touch of another sentient being—felt so foreign to her. Something way down inside her, in a place she didn’t visit very often, wanted to know why that was, when contact was so natural and—and right. So right that it should be sought out and indulged in as often as possible.

  Her forehead prickled, and the moment passed. She rolled off him angrily, muttering under her breath. “Indulgence of vice brings danger to the Union. The virtuous citizen is the protected citizen. Peace comes through restraint.” It was enough. This time, thankfully, it was enough.

  She rolled to her feet and went to the storage panels along the inner wall. From the panels, she assembled the equipment she kept there. Two sets of heavy-duty repulsor cuffs—one set for the wrists and the other for the ankles. The anchor pads that converted the cuffs to floor and ceiling-mounted restraints. And the one tool that allowed her to do her job so very well.

  The neural disruption collar was specially designed to short-circuit psypath powers. She fitted the slender circlet around his neck and snapped it into place. A little LED light flashed from red to green indicating full power to the circuit. The tiny diodes pressed to the base of his skull sent feedback to his neural system any time an attempt at telepathy or telekinesis was attempted.

  Or at least, that was what the lab at Special Affairs HQ said. She’d be protected from psypath attempts to coerce or compromise her thoughts and actions. Although, truthfully, she preferred the old way of just knocking their psychic asses out for the ride back to the Capitol. But a recent discovery of a cache of hidden, secret psypath records showed that ancient psypaths had the documented ability to invade the dreams of others when unconscious. Psypaths were a menace, both awake and asleep.

  She used the last bits of energy in her perimeter balls to help hoist him vertically by the repulsor cuffs. Once he hung, immobilized, before her, she began patting him down for weapons. After all her precautions against his mental abilities, she’d feel really stupid if he managed to shiv her with a fruit-peeling knife or something. His thighs through the loose native pants felt lean, but not without muscle. Well-formed. She told herself it was purely an aesthetic observation. She removed a dagger from his boot and set it out of reach on the work table. “What other goodies are you hiding from me, hmm?” she muttered.

  As her hands made contact with his hips, she found her utility belt. “Ha!” she snatched it from around his waist. “I ought to slap you with this thing for stealing it from me.”

  Only it was she who got the shock when his pants slid down to his ankles with barely a whisper of fabric. She found herself almost nose-to-groin with his…groin and she jumped back, bumping into the work table and sending the items on top of it clattering to the floor. Oh, smooth, Treska, she thought. The man can rip your will from your mind with a thought and steal your sanity on a whim and you lose your cool over his body?

  Her forehead began to prickle. She rubbed it with one hand and closed her eyes. With her free hand and her eyes still closed, she secured his pants with a zipcord. The scent of male enveloped her and her heart sped up. Something about it made her think—treacherous thoughts. Thoughts she had no business thinking. Thoughts that cast him not as a dangerous, powerful being, but as just a man, whose body was as real and fragile as hers.

  ***

  Episode 2: Captivated

  Stripping Down

  Treska dropped into the piloting couch, guiltily relieved that she could avoid him for the next few hours, but afraid of putting the cowl over her head—every
time she closed her eyes, she could see him again, naked. His lean legs, dusted with dark gold hair that thickened the further up his thighs, into a nest that held—it.

  It. His—man-thing. Oh, for suns' sake, call it what it is, a little voice in her head insisted. A pe—

  Cock.

  Where did that come from? she wondered. Her education hadn't included the vernacular. Maybe it was the combat training, with the rough-tongued Special Forces soldiers. Or the Citizens' Deportment training that had created an aversion to swearing. It wasn't professional—even for a Vice Hunter—to refer to…body parts…by gutter nicknames.

  And yet…it didn't feel completely brazen to think of it as a cock. Maybe she'd learned it young, before the Marauder attack on the Capitol. Maybe it was one of those words from the Time Before.

  She had no memories of her life before the attack that had devastated the Capitol. The Marauders had come in their knifelike dreadnoughts without warning, from the furthest, oldest, largest Jumpgate in the system. The ancient one at the edge of the system itself. The Marauders emerged from the Jumpgate and rained fire upon the metropolis that covered the planet. Dreadnoughts had appeared in other orbits at the same time, a coordinated assault that ended just as quickly as it had begun, leaving several planets in ruins. At the Capitol, buildings a thousand stories high had collapsed, killing hundreds of thousands within their walls, and millions more in the aftermath of the destruction. Then, just as suddenly, they vanished back through the Jumpgate, leaving the system entirely, and no less of a mystery than when they appeared. But millions had died, and tens of millions were left wounded, or lost without trace to the depths of the under city.

  But a scant few had been born in that fire. Treska’s first memory was of flaming skies and crumbling buildings. Her life began in fire; from the ashes of the attack, she sprung fully-formed, but completely blank. Damaged, yes—medical nanites had stitched her broken body back together, while the provisional government of the New Union shaped her mind. The Time Before no longer mattered—it was a mystery that happened to someone else, somewhere else. And if the occasional flash of an object, a scent, or a taste at the back of her tongue seemed familiar, the maddening chase would only get in the way. I’ve never remembered a person before. And never so intimately…

  Her mind skittered away from the thought before the Voice could force it elsewhere. Time to move on, Treska, she told herself. Before your thoughts betray you.

  Back on Tenraye, a bare pair of fuschia legs hugged by soft leather boots that went up over the knee stepped over a pile of unconscious male bodies wearing the uniforms of the Tenrayan Provisional Force. Flakes of ash swirled around her voluptuous form, disturbed by the dust-up, only to settle lovingly on her naked skin. Dark berry lips curved up as she peered into the distance, waiting for a signal.

  She leaned against the battered ground craft, arching her back in a pose that displayed her impressive breasts to their best. Not that anyone could see beyond the odd field rodent, but it didn’t do to let bad habits creep in. Suppressing a sigh, she glanced over at the trio of deputies who’d promised they’d teach her a lesson about vice in the Civilized Worlds. With an offer like that, how could she refuse?

  Sadly enough, they proved to be serious. Two of the three were true believers, fully subscribed to the asceticism of the New Morality. The only “lesson” they wanted to teach her was legal apprehension with full respect of her civil rights as a sentient, until such time as she could be repatriated to her homeworld or remanded to a “care facility” for rehabilitation. She pursed her lips as a distant speck on the horizon became a shadow that stretched over the fertile, overgrown fields between the settlement and the mountains. Been there, done that, got the scars to show for it.

  The shadow grew as her lips curled up in a sneer and she tossed a pair of suppression cuffs in the air and caught them before hooking them onto her belt. The sweet moan of anti-grav engines sent the overgrown field grasses rippling across the sun-drenched prairie like great waves, coating her with a fine, tawny layer of particulate plant matter. The approaching hovercraft maneuvered its bulk into position above her, whipping her hair against her face.

  At her feet one of the true believers stirred. She kicked him in the jaw and he went down again, blood leaking out from the cut on his face in the shape of her boot heel, just as a retrieval cable descended from the ship. She caught the cable and placed one foot into the stirrup just in time for the cable to retract.

  She rose in a cloud of pollen. Once, worshipful lovers had dusted her body with gold, adoring her for the sacred pleasure she brought them. Now, the lovers were rushed and secretive, the sacrament unsanctioned and unsanctified. No one painted her with gold. Now, she painted them in blood, and the dark face of her goddess thirsted.

  Treska moved out of the planet’s gravity field, the atmospheric beacons chiming an arpeggio from the navigation system. At the high note, the green beacons activated, and she woke the ship’s ion drive. As the Needle’s Eye switched from atmospheric to extra-planetary nav, the sounds of the ship changed. She noted a distant hiss as the habitable cabin pressurized, the electronic hum of the radiation shielding and the power down of the atmospheric jets. A moment later, the ion drive hummed to life. She confirmed the navigation one last time, and activated the drive.

  Even at ion speeds, it would take her some time to make it to the Jumpgate station. Although the Jumps themselves took hardly any time at all, she was still at least a day out from the Capitol. Once the Needle’s Eye was properly pointed towards the station, she started in on the paperwork. She entered data for the Confirmation of Acquisition form, the Transactional Acceptance form, the legal forms identifying her bounty as having legitimate forfeiture of sentient rights, and finally, her time sheet and expense report.

  She scowled at the flagged entry for the atmo-plane that had been damaged in the chase. She didn’t like being challenged, and as a member of Special Affairs, she often wasn’t. But the flag was an automated one—nothing personal. It would simply trigger an investigation of the crash site. And probably a lot of damage to that house. She dismissed a twinge. Once upon a time, that estate had been somebody’s home. Even chasing a mindsnake hadn’t completely kept her from noticing the beauty of the architecture.

  The buildings that had gone up to replace what the Marauders had destroyed was of a much more utilitarian aesthetic. Synthetic materials with shielding and sensors of multiple kinds, built in pre-fabbed, modular sections that could be reconfigured to a variety of uses, albeit limited in style. According to the Prime Minister, it was a return to the solar system’s ancient roots, thousands of years ago.

  She logged the paperwork in a secure transmission and dismissed the sense of finality as her imagination.

  Intel said that this one was the last one. The last psypath to roam freely about the galaxy. After him, there were no more left to neutralize, and the galaxy would be safe from them. And I’ll be out of a job.

  Looking at him, hanging in the repulsor cuffs, one wouldn’t think a psypath would be much of a threat. But the mental powers psypaths commanded were awesome and terrifying.

  Her first assignment had been crewing a freighter laden with precious metals, destined for the treasury on the planet Collista. She and her fellow Vice Hunters had set a trap for the pirates planning to attack the freighter. They discovered the leader was a psypath who used his mental powers to coerce the pirates into doing his bidding. In the rout, the psypath targeted one of her squad members and the man turned on his own comrades, killing two other Vice Hunters before she took him down.

  Many of the psypaths she tracked weren’t as vicious as the pirate, however. Based on information from Special Affairs, they discovered and removed members of the Union parliament under psypath control, attempting to sabotage the gears of Union government. The poor souls were so well-controlled that they truly believed their protests of innocence, insisting until the end that they acted of their own free will.


  Before the raid on Ursis Amalia—the home of the monastic order that had formed around psypath talents—several vocal psypaths spoke out about their rogue brethren, insisting that the flaws were in the individual and not the talent. They were eloquent debaters, and public opinion briefly swung their way, until Prime Minister Vakess released evidence to the contrary, with coordination from Capitol scientists, in an eloquent speech before the leadership. “It is the talent that creates the flaws. This power corrupts those cursed with it and renders them a menace to the security of the Civilized Union.” The data presented by the Prime Minister demonstrated a clear correlation between the possession of psypath talents and their use for exploitative purposes.

  Ursis Amalia had responded by tightening their restrictions on trained psypaths. They actively sought out those born with psypath talents and brought them to the monastery to be trained to use their abilities responsibly. They even produced their own justice force to track and subdue rogues, which the Prime Minister used briefly, until a psypath enforcer made an attempt on his life. Vakess was gracious to Ursis Amalia, and allowed them to recall all their psypaths to the jungle planet, imposing restrictions on themselves with travel and activity outside the Ursis system. Psypaths voluntarily registered and carried permission documentation to travel anywhere in Union space, and the Union passed legislation giving planets and individuals the right to deny services or entrance to any psypath.

  Vakess encouraged people to see psypaths as tragic individuals who would unavoidably become dangerous, while the Director—that is, the Director of the Office of Special Affairs, and her boss—focused on the core truth. Tragic or not, like rabid animals, psypaths had to be taken down. Before or after they went bad, it didn’t matter. Or rather, it shouldn’t matter.