The Chase (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 1-3) Page 7

  Xenna folded her arms and stayed near the door as the assembled humans, most from the Noble Houses, engaged in some self-congratulatory vrax-crap. The Treemian noted her expression and cleared his throat.

  The sonorous tones of his voice interrupted the polite and unfocused murmurs of the group. “Priestess, you have some information to share?”

  Xenna stepped forward. Finally! She touched the spot on her earlobe that resembled the base of an ear ornament, and was designed to be mistaken for just that. The tiny disc came loose and rested on her finger. She balanced it carefully on her fingertip until she found the input node on the comm station.

  The station stuttered, then fluttered to life. “Apologies for the state of the feed,” she said. “I didn’t find myself in the most advantageous of angles.”

  The visual feed shook, then turned sideways, flipped upside down for a few seconds, righted itself, and finally stabilized at an oblique angle. The audio cut in and cut out, sometimes degenerating into static and sometimes returning to slashes of conversation. Or rather, barked-out orders, interspersed with chants of the New Morality.

  “I told you. True believers.” She met Ahveen’s gleaming gold gaze, which flashed with dark amusement.

  A pale human cleared her throat. “What are we looking at?” She tilted her head. “Priestess, if you mean to show us the indignity you suffered—”

  Xenna grit her teeth. “If I’d wanted to do that, it would take more than a debriefing and a single vid-feed. I didn’t just happen to be apprehended in the spaceport.” She stabbed into the holographic video feed. “Look at what’s parked in the landing bay.”

  Several of the members tilted their heads in puzzlement. Xenna closed her eyes and shook her head. She should have volunteered to be bait. Schoolboy was so much better at handling these debriefings. “The ship,” she said finally. “Look at that hull. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. The shape doesn’t match anything I know of.”

  “Cross-referencing with known databases now.” The Treemian glanced down, then back up. “No matches.”

  “There’s been some question as to how the Union’s Vice Hunters have been so quick to track down our agents.” Lord Bran pressed a closed hand to his mouth. “I’ve, ah, had my doubts as to the security of our communications between cells.”

  They were doubts shared by Micah, but Xenna wouldn’t let that on. The bigger a mystery he remained, the safer her Schoolboy would be. “What do they need with advance intel when they can outrun us and be there waiting?” As she spoke over the murmured protests of the group, her hand passed through the sleek outline of the strangely-shaped ship. “That’s the Huntress’s craft. A day ago, we weren’t even sure Tenraye was our rendezvous point. We barely had an hour before they were onto us.”

  Another woman spoke up, her cultured, inner-orbit accent unsuited to her words. “So the Huntress has captured her prisoner? She’s taken the psypath?”

  Xenna had to bite her tongue. People like Lady Bes-Alluran bankrolled the Restoration. For their own selfish reasons, but the money didn’t care. “Yes. There’s a good chance she’s apprehended Ariesis.”

  The Lady’s nostrils flared slightly. Good. She’d remember by the surname that Micah was one of her own. One her kind had shunned, once. Now their last hope of returning to any semblance of the lives they’d once lived.

  The Treemian spoke. “Local law enforcement reports a stolen atmospheric craft and pursuit, followed by reports of an altercation at an abandoned estate south of the settlement. No word on the resolution.” The Treemian looked up, his heavy features shifting into a slight frown. “Reports are already being scrubbed from the newsfeed.”

  Lord Bran clapped his hands together. “I’d say this calls for celebration.”

  “Only from a certain point of view,” Ahveen murmured. “It takes me entirely too close to the Union mind to wish to celebrate the capture of the last psypath.”

  Ahveen’s opinion wasn’t a lone one. Another lord cleared his throat. “No call to celebrate just yet.” She recognized his skin tone as native Tenrayan. The scar slicing across his face gave him a rakish, dangerous look that Xenna might find appealing in half an hour or so. “The Huntress is still at large. The Union is still exporting that ridiculous asceticism masquerading as security. My ancestral lands, right here on Tenraye—”

  Lord Bran cut him off. “Yes, Lord D’Arno. Most of us have suffered grave losses. Some irreversible.” Bran’s features shuttered. “This begins the remedy of that. It’s taken us years to grow the Restoration past the losses we’ve suffered.”

  “And we’re no closer to freeing ourselves from the Union’s stranglehold than we were ten years ago!” D’Arno thumped a fist on the table. “I have assassins! Trained assassins—”

  Xenna pushed away from the wall, cutting him off with her body and her words. “Who will fall against the anti-corruption forces before they even reach the inner orbits. Don’t you think we’ve tried?” With her anger, her body temperature heated, and even the Treemian began to scowl. It was times like these when she wondered at the Restoration’s motives. What was the use of bringing back the old star empire if the Noble families were just going to go right back to murdering each other for power plays?

  Ahveen put a restraining hand on her arm, and when she glanced at the Vultron woman, she saw her lips had pulled back from her needle-like teeth. “Now is not the time to do the Union’s work for them.” To the lord, Ahveen rippled her folded wings. “Ten years of analysis and means testing by the best pattern-shapers still left on Vultary have shown, at best, a seven percent chance of an assassination attempt altering the trajectory of behavior. Even the death of the Prime Minister himself would, at best, alter the momentum but briefly. The assassination of a Vice Hunter—a target trained to expect and defend against such things, would simply be a waste of a good assassin. Best to save your assassins for use against other Noble houses.”

  “Why I never—”

  Xenna snorted. “No, you’ve just never been caught.”

  Being in the piloting cowl gave the illusion of floating in vast, empty space. Immense, and very, very dark. Most of the time, Treska welcomed the sensory deprivation. It gave her some peace and quiet. Only once had she ever experienced something outside accepted norms inside the cowl.

  Forget it, she told herself sternly. It was only the one time. A single dream, and her physicians upped her med dosage right away, citing an imbalanced combination of the biochemicals that made up the inhibs. Stronger inhibs, no more dreams, no more problems. Nothing to set her outside being an exemplary Vice Hunter. She’d just drop the cowl over her head and close her eyes to see the afterimages of the lights and switches of the manual cockpit controls.

  The images burned on the backs of her eyelids weren’t, however, the ones from the cockpit. No, her mind wanted to go back to the cargo hold, to the pale-eyed mindsnake back there, sleeping off her dreamy cocktail.

  Double suns, can I stop thinking of cock for just one second? she thought. Focus on his face—anything else! Or better still, fly the damn ship.

  But Jumpgate calculations were standardized; she executed them with a flick of her eyes. Her hands, on the couch’s arm controls, smoothed over the sensory hide with practiced ease. She used small movements of her legs to control the drive differentials and felt the slightest shiver from the ship as she slipped into the rhythm of Jumpspace.

  It’s like making love, she’d thought once, during her pilot training. Just before the Voice hammered down on her. She shifted her legs, making tiny corrections in the flight path. She tried not to think that way, and had mostly been successful, the one erotic dream an exception. She had no memory of making love. I don’t make things.

  But this time, with the image of a naked man burning the backs of her eyelids, it was hard not to imagine that her fingers stroked over the naked flesh of a lover and not a machine. That the soft embrace cradling her was that of a great beast of a man, rather than sensory skin
, beneath which pulsed tactile receptors and delicate, intricate technology hooked up to a great beast of a machine. That the pressure feedback from the couch was the response of pleasure.

  As she settled more deeply into the couch, and her body took over where her mind wasn’t needed, the unoccupied part returned once again to nag at her experience in the cargo hold. In the darkness, she wondered now if she hadn’t hesitated, just a bit, when his pants dropped too far—did she stop for half a heartbeat and just breathe him in?

  Something low curled in her belly as she remembered that strange set of images that flashed in her mind at that moment. Of taking him in her hands. Of stroking him, feeling heat and hard flesh underneath satiny skin. Of seeing his pale eyes turn smoky. He jumped in my hand when I touched it.

  But—she didn’t touch it! Did she? No. Of course not. The Voice would have punished her for excess. It was just curiosity. Curiosity invites learning, and education opens the way to knowledge. She could almost hear a voice speaking those words—his voice.

  Just curiosity. She drifted even deeper, deep breath and deep darkness slipping her barriers away. “I would very much like to learn the ways of love with you.” Herself, speaking those words. Heh, she thought. Doesn’t even sound like me. But her mind wasn’t deterred by commentary, and the scene unfolded.

  She sat on soft pillows upholstered in sumptuous fabrics. He looked up at her, amusement pulling his lips upward in a slight smile while a look of open curiosity shone from his eyes. In a fluid move for someone so—gangly, really—he rose up on his knees in front of her. The sides of his silken robe slipped apart, revealing a long, narrow stretch of his bare body that she wanted to touch. She reached out a hand, but he shifted around behind her to cradle her between his thighs. “What—”

  “Hush,” he murmured, his voice close in her ear, the breath from his lips tickling stray hairs on her neck. Her stomach curled, the sensation somehow familiar, as if she’d done it before. Like she knew exactly how his lips felt on the nape of her neck. His hands, at her shoulders, made her realize she was as naked as he was and she glanced down.

  Relief flooded her. Her skin wasn’t its usual space-tan white, but rather a soft sky blue. Just a dream, some small part of her realized. A dream with a wrong-colored dream-body.

  She braced herself for the Voice. In the early years, she’d had erotic dreams like this one. Dreams of a place with luxurious furnishings, sumptuous food, and intoxicating scents of incense and perfumes. Then came the doctors, and then the inhibs, and the dreams left. Her heart sealed up and quit making so much trouble for her head, and that was the end of that.

  Heat seeped from her dream lover’s thighs to her hips, from his chest to her back. He wrapped his arms around her and palmed her breasts lightly. Tiny shocks of pleasure arrowed from her nipples to deep in her abdomen. He followed their trail with his hands, fingertips sliding downward to cup her breasts, teasing with flutter-touches the sensitive undersides before moving downward. Pleasure coiled low in her belly, alongside the taut fear of the Voice.

  But her mind was quiet while his hands continued to move lower until he reached the crease between her hip and thigh. She twitched at the light touch on ticklish flesh. Maybe not quiet, she thought. Would he touch her there? Between her legs? Between the plump and naked folds both foreign and familiar to her? Suns, I hope so!

  She could feel the rigid line of his cock pressing against the small of her back, the heat of it sending warm, liquid sensation pooling through her entire midsection. She spread her bent legs a little wider, hoping against hope he’d take the hint. Part of her wondered why she didn’t feel horrified, ashamed at the way she felt. What her body was doing when it opened like a dew-kissed moonflower under his fingers.

  Her hips swiveled upwards as his finger stroked downwards, parting the slick, wet petals of her slit. Yes, just there, she thought, lifting herself just so. The question of how she knew just where she wanted his finger became irrelevant as he found the sweet spot. “Oh!”

  Shimmering waves of melting pleasure raced along her nerve endings in time to the slow and rhythmic invasion of her body. She was tight and wet around his fingers at first, but as her hips moved faster, her channel slicked even further. Her head dropped back against his shoulder and his fingers moved faster in and out of her.

  “More,” she gasped, thrusting her hips up to meet his touch. He added another finger to the one thrusting inside her, and twisted them just so. He flicked his thumb over her clitoris.

  Her hips shot upward almost violently as the waves turned to a maelstrom. Heat rushed through her body, from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair as a pulsing, hard climax seized her limbs. The rush of blood turned to roaring in her ears, as her inner walls throbbed in time to the hammer of her heart.

  The roar turned to a—screech. She came back to herself with a start at the screeching, just in time to note the heads-up display’s hyperdrive readings slipping into the red. Her hands fumbled for the controls to recalibrate the coolant system. Sweat trickled down her forehead and the small HUD bars indicating her vitals jumped for several minutes before minimizing, and the drive readings shifted down into amber, then green.

  She pulled the ship out of jumpspace with shaking commands. As soon as the subtle hum of the jumpdrive downshifted, she flung the piloting cowl off her head and took several deep breaths of the cold, recirculated cockpit air. “What the nine hells was that?” she asked aloud.

  Another dream, her mind answered. And a really good one, too. With shaking hands, she fumbled at her belt for the small pouch containing the cylinder that held her inhibs. She popped one and bit hard down on the bitter-tasting capsule, and took several deep breaths to clear her head.

  A subtly familiar, musky scent permeated the small room. As she sat up, she realized it came from her. She moved, and little shocks zipped through her, starting and ending between her legs. She reached down and felt the dampness that had leaked through her thin skinsuit. She pulled her fingers away, shaking again.

  Why now, after all this time? After she believed she truly had herself under control? And why so vivid? She even remembered the way he smelled, like cool water and male musk. The pale, wiry hairs dusting his legs as he cradled her. The squarish, blunt tips of his fingers circling her nipples, and the way his cock curved slightly to the left, even when erect, pressing into her back.

  Steady, girl, she told herself harshly. It was just a dream, dammit!

  Over The Line

  Lord Bran held his hands up for order. “Lord D’Arno, your objection is noted, along with your…alternate suggestion.” He paced the circle of the room, going behind the chairs of each of the assembled resistance members, pausing behind the chairs of the Nobles in unspoken emphasis. “If your house resources are still plentiful enough that you can waste them on an effort, or make an attempt to break the Union government without the aid of the Hathori underground, then by all means, build your own resistance movement.” He finished as he passed by Xenna, and she heard him, sotto voce. “Ancestors know, I’ve had enough of running this one.”

  Xenna spoke. “The Union’s nano-spy technology is spreading. Orbits as far out as Guerre’s have garrisons equipped with Union tech. It didn’t take long for the Tenrayan militia to detect my presence.”

  “And worse, the cult has a foothold within its ranks.” Ahveen’s deeper feminine voice put a punctuation mark on the statement that Xenna’s Hathori tones couldn’t have.

  Lord Bran nodded. “Information is what’s needed now. We must understand why the New Morality has such a firm grip on so many diverse peoples and cultures in the solar system. Up to now, we’ve had safe haven across the frontier orbits.”

  “This far out, the cult’s grasp should be weakening, not growing. Even with evangelization, the cult should have changed.” Ahveen’s expression grew serene as Xenna calmed down. Unlike the humans, she wore no filter, as she preferred to experience the Hathori pheromones undiluted. Her own connec
tion to her hive gave her some resistance to Xenna’s physiological influence, enough for her to detect Xenna’s effects often before she did. The talent made her invaluable in analyzing the Union’s resistance technology. “It has not evolved in its nature nor its goals, and that is troubling.”

  “More to the point,” Xenna snapped, “None of us can evade all the checks and sensors required to get into the heart of the Capitol’s government center. But a high-profile prisoner? They’ll let him in the front doors.”

  Lady Bes-Alluran raised a hand. “There is a plan for extraction?” Her expression shifted into a cautious mask.

  Xenna felt her pheromones actively kick in. “Do you think—” She began, fists curling at her sides. Let the bitch feel fear and cower at the world without a psypath in it.

  Ahveen stepped between her and the lady. “The details of that are of no concern to this cell, and it’s best we don’t discuss further.” She steered Xenna towards the anteroom, past the Treemian and into privacy. Lord Bran and the Treemian followed, sealing both the electro-mesh curtain and the wooden door.

  The small cellar still held the heavy scent of Tenrayan wood and Tenrayan wine, but the casks were empty. Save for one, whose contents were not the liquid wealth that required aging. Lord Bran gestured to the Treemian. “My personal aide, Calivon.”

  For the first time, the large, thick-limbed alien spoke with inflection. “D’Arno’s bluster is motivated by opportunity; he still believes the New Union can be corrupted. He aggravates for surgical strikes that leave most of the system in place and envisions himself one day commanding the tentacles of the New Morality’s reach.”

  Ahveen outright laughed at that. “D’Arno hasn’t yet encountered real Union forces out there orbiting that gas giant as his moon does.”

  “Do not underestimate him,” Lord Bran cautioned. “D’Arno’s kept the peace in the shadow of that jovian. Most of that orbit’s swimming with pirates of one clan or another. He keeps them in check by keeping them just on the edge of all-out war with each other.”