The Chase (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 1-3) Page 8

  “His position in the Iolian orbit has afforded him some protection.” Calivon’s bass rumble was accompanied by an airy counterpoint as his reinforced lungs—evolved for high-gravity Treemia’s unique atmospheric blend of gases and particulates—processed the lighter Tenrayan air.

  “The Union interdicts my homeworld and my people, while D’Arno gets a pass?” Xenna’s lip curled up.

  Ahveen laid a restraining hand on her arm. “He is a useful fool to them. I am most concerned about that lady in there.”

  Lord Bran cleared his throat. “Bes-Alluran has been sheltered from the worst of the interdictions. She is only now engaged in the resistance because of the Union’s interest in the heavy waters of her house’s homeworld.”

  Xenna snorted. “Union cut her out of the deal, didn’t they?”

  Ahveen grinned. “Bes-Alluran sent some cousins from a minor branch of the family to the Capitol to be trained as Enforcers. She has only recently learned that their training has overridden their familial loyalty.”

  Lord Bran nodded. “The usual spy networking of the Noble houses cannot compete against the New Morality’s training. Whatever they’re doing in Government Plaza, they’re doing it exceedingly well. This plan is our best hope of discovering how the cult keeps such a grip on its adherents. If your psypath—”

  “He’s not my psypath. He’s my partner, my friend, my student, and my initiate.” And I’m worried about him.

  “Micah Ariesis is the last psypath for a very good reason.” Ahveen’s voice became soothing. “He is capable. None know more about the ways of the psypaths than he.”

  “That’s because no others are left.” Xenna’s bitter edge accompanied the tang of her pheromones. She pressed her lips together. “Apologies.”

  Lord Bran adjusted his nasal filter. “Priestess, if there were another way, we would have taken it. For now, we must trust in Micah’s abilities to allow him to do his part.”

  “And we must part company now, to do ours.” Calivon the Treemian motioned to the door. He and Ahveen filed out.

  Lord Bran held her back. “I bid you the luck of the smile of the goddess.” He took her in his powerful arms and stared down at her, his broad features showing concern. “You will have to venture uncomfortably close to the inner orbits. They’re no place for a Hathori priestess. I wish—”

  She held one fuschia finger up against his sensual lips. “Then I will not be a Hathori priestess. But for now—” She kissed him deeply. Her inner core, the part of her that touched the goddess through pleasure and sensation, reached out.

  She pulled it back. There was a time for benediction, and a time for action, and this was a time for action. She followed him out of the anteroom.

  The Treemian and Ahveen were discussing travel plans. “We will rendezvous next at Rumaru. There’s a garrison there, but the Rumaru Jumpgate is one of the largest in the system. We can get almost all the way to the Capitol in two jumps.”

  “It’ll be a hard burn, but we can make it in the Delta Rose.” Ahveen showed teeth at the prospect of the excitement of a long jump.

  Xenna strode out of the anteroom, a wry smile twisting her lips. “There’s just one problem. Those moralistic assholes have my ship.”

  Just a dream…just a dream…

  The inhibs burned bitter on her tongue. A small spot, just to the left of her tailbone burned where she thought—knew—that his cock had rested, pulsing and erect, while he pleasured her. Her skin remembered. But how could her body remember what never happened?

  She stalked out of the cockpit, gulping in lungfuls of the cooler air in the corridor. Air scented with the chilly chemical tang of the atmo-scrubbers, rather than the heated musk of her own body. She stopped herself from slamming open the sliding door to the cargo hold—if he was still out, she didn’t want to wake him up. The only time a mindsnake wasn’t dangerous was when he was dead. But asleep would do, in this case.

  Sure enough, he hung on the wall, sagging against the repulsor cuffs that held his wrists. His head drooped. Golden locks of hair fell down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes. He looked so peaceful. Harmless, really.

  Before she could lose her nerve, she strode up to him and pulled the zipcord she’d used to secure his pants after the unfortunate accident. She’d prove to herself it was just a fevered imagining, brought on by a glimpse of something forbidden. And there it hung, sleeping peacefully, in a thatch of dark gold, wiry hair, nestled against his stones. Such a big deal to her imagination and such a…not-big deal up close. It was just a penis.

  “A man’s penis is a tool for the transmission of seed to a fertile female womb.” The health video in her head began, displaying a holographic facsimile.

  “This is the sceptre of the pleasure goddess, directing her will.” The feminine voice overrode the canned audio of the health vid.

  She shook her head. Wherever that came from, she didn’t want to know. It’s just a penis. A body part. That’s all. It’s just…there. And limp.

  And…leaning to the left.

  A touch, almost like a fingertip-brush, shivered down the skin of her back. She whirled, but there was nothing there. Shaking her head, she turned back around to pull his pants back up. I don’t care if it is eight jumps. I’m getting back to Prime, collecting my bounty, and getting the hell away from—things that leaned to the left.

  Reaching around put her in close contact with his legs, and she couldn’t help but notice the scent of cool, fresh water that seemed to cling to him. Maybe I’ll visit a water world, she thought. Swim in an ocean somewhere. She paused as she imagined a warm sea cradling her, tiny waves lapping at her skin.

  “Like what you see?”

  She started so violently at the quiet words that she flew backwards, landing on her ass with a rattle of the deckplates. A guilty glance upwards and she saw his eyes, bright blue-gray and gleaming from behind the fringe of hair that hung over his forehead. “You’re awake!” It came out like she was accusing him.

  Her skin could have been on fire for the blush that burned her from inside out, all the way from toes to the roots of her hair. She was already warm from the cockpit—oh suns, don’t think of that!—and trying to return his pants to their proper state. This just made things that much worse all around.

  “I usually prefer to be conscious when a lovely woman is that close to my private parts.”

  She scowled. “You have no respect for the vice laws, do you?”

  He met her glare with one of his own. “Why should I?”

  “It’s virtue that keeps people safe,” she said, speaking along with the Voice that supplied the immediate answer in her head. “A prudent society is a secure society. Vice and temptation make citizens unsafe. Peace comes through restraint.” How much more simple did it have to be?

  “So I shouldn’t be at all worried that you had something pleasurable in mind when you divested me of my pants.”

  She blushed even harder, and fell back on her original reason for cutting his belt. “I was checking you for weapons.”

  He threw his head back and laughed, exposing the long lines of his throat and jaw, and for one wild moment, she wanted very badly to kiss along the line of it, and maybe nip at the flutter where his pulse beat. He’d like that.

  “I can assure you that my fiercest weapon is only that which you see before you,” he said, glancing down to meet her eyes. “And it brings only pleasure.” For a long moment she was caught in the loop of thinking about the taste of his skin over and over, seeing an afterimage of her own tongue flicking out and gliding over the salty scratchiness of his jaw.

  “You unsheath it when you look at me like that.”

  She stepped back. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Using your mindsnake tricks on me.” She turned away to hide her blush. His voice was too gentle when he murmured those words. To know she had an effect on him—it didn’t fit the equation! I’m the hunter. He’s the bounty. We’re enemies. He shou
ldn’t want anything more than to get far away from me. And I shouldn’t want anything more than to bring him back for justice. Pursuit and capture. The eventual triumph of the law over chaos. She activated the water dispenser and got herself a cup of cold water.

  She turned back to him when she fought down her blush. Vice Hunters didn’t back down. They searched the depths of galactic depravity and rooted out the corruption that put the entire Union in danger. Vice Hunters didn’t flinch.

  “My lady, I assure you, you’re in no danger from my ‘mindsnake tricks.’”

  Her eyes jumped to the neuro-collar, and the little green LED that indicated that it was functioning properly. The neuro-collars were guaranteed to block psypath talents. She’d witnessed the tests herself.

  His voice dropped an octave. “Or did you adorn me with a collar for another reason?”

  Her fingers wrapped around the cup in a death grip.

  He lowered still, to a whisper, so that she had to step closer to hear him. “Are you the type of lady who enjoys her partners helpless?” he asked. “I’m sure we could come to an…arrangement.”

  The collar had to be malfunctioning. There was no way the images that flashed before her could come from her. She’d never done any of those things! Never stood naked before him and shoved him down on his knees among scented pillows. Or felt a white-hot thrill when he looked up at her, his shoulders straining from the elaborate ties that bound his hands behind him and his cock straining from the pleasure they both knew was imminent.

  A loud crack split the air between them. She glanced down to see the front of his pants soaked through. It took a full thirty seconds, along with his, “Your hand,” for her to realize that she’d broken the plastiform cup, and launched the water in it everywhere.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw herself stepping towards him. Throwing the cracked cup up into the air over her shoulder and pressing herself against him. Felt the dampness from the spill soaking his pants seep into her own clothing, echoing the damp between her legs. Of plastering her thighs to his, her belly to his pelvis, her breasts to his chest. Hunger rose in her, threatening to choke her with its force.

  The cup flew into the air.

  Her boots made hollow thunks on the deck plates. The anticipation of skin and heat and touch roared in her ears until—contact!

  INDULGENCE IS DANGER! VICE BEGETS DESTRUCTION! THE VIRTUOUS SOCIETY IS THE PROTECTED SOCIETY! THE UPRIGHT CITIZEN IS THE PROTECTED CITIZEN!

  “Aaaughh!” She wrapped both arms around her head and dropped to her knees. Pain radiated from her kneecaps at the hard landing, and her lips began to move along with the principles of the Union’s New Morality. Inside her skull, the Voice screamed, drowning out all other thought.

  “Danger lies in indulgence. Immorality compromises the safety of the people. The upright citizen is the protected citizen,” she murmured. She couldn’t help it. The screaming in her head left her no other recourse.

  “Treska?”

  She barely heard him over the Voice shouting in her head. She repeated the Principles over and over again. “The virtuous society is the protected society. The people must be protected from Vice. Vice is danger. Vice brings destruction. The impure and unclean are unjust. The risk of the unjust must be neutralized.” If she spoke with enough conviction, the Voice would shut up, shut up, just please shut up! Her body began to rock back and forth with the cadence of the Principles, and the world narrowed down to only obedience to the Voice.

  “Treska! Treska!” Micah shouted now, fighting against the damned repulsor cuffs. What started as a simple flirtation with his captor had taken a strange and worrisome turn. One second she stared at him with those huge eyes a man could drown in, and he watched the hunger fill them, turn them soft. Her body brushed his. Heat and the trace of musk filled what little air remained between them and his cock sprang to life for real, and then—

  Then she was on the ground, curled in around herself as if he’d bashed her over the head, and muttering the Principles of that damned New Morality nonsense in a barely-conscious, singsong voice. He struggled uselessly against his confinement, and against his better judgment, tried once again to use his mental powers to break through her sudden psychosis. Closing his eyes, he formed his thoughts into a white-hot arrow and sent it towards her with an exhaled breath.

  As soon as his breath left his lungs, the arrow returned to him and bounced off the inside of his skull with the mental equivalent of a thousand shrieking demons. Red crept into his vision and he felt his body jerk in response. He came back to himself with a snap and a grunt of pain, blinking back shock-tears that did little to wash away the red haze that still dotted his vision.

  He shook his head to clear it. The pounding headache thumped in time with his pulse, and Treska’s muttering. He ground his teeth in frustration. I can’t do this without my talents. He could neither take advantage of the situation, nor could he help her, without the use of his talents. Never had he felt quite so adrift.

  You knew there would be a likely scenario where you were unable to use your powers, he told himself. So think and remember what else you have at your disposal.

  He had his voice. “Treska.” He put all he had into her name. It wasn’t much. Trained psypaths could influence the minds of others—the technique had been taught at the monastery where he’d spent his youth in training. However, it was only taught to students who’d demonstrated, via rigorous testing, the most incorruptible moral fiber necessary to avoid abusing it. It was used only in the most desperate of cases, to heal a mind splintered by the deepest of traumas. But the psypath healers had been some of the first to go, voluntarily surrendering themselves to aid the reconstruction…and disappearing into the maw of the New Morality.

  If he could just move his foot far enough forward to nudge her, perhaps the physical touch would jolt her out of it. He strained against the magnetic field that kept the cuffs around his ankles close together. His thigh muscles burned with the effort, and he was rewarded with a few millimeters’ worth of movement. He kept repeating her name, and noticed that while her rocking had continued, one of her hands came down from her ears and fumbled at her utility belt for the small tube of tablets he’d seen her use earlier.

  Some sort of drug, to be sure, but what kind, and for what purpose? Could the weakness be exploited?

  Her clumsy fingers loosened the tube, but she dropped it, and it rolled towards him, coming to rest against his bare ankle. Her hand scrabbled on the floor, stretching outward and blindly seeking.

  “This way,” he said. “To your left. That’s right.” Finally her hand came to rest, halfway on the tube and halfway around the arch of his foot. Her fingers were cold, but her touch was welcome.

  I’ve been living among Hathori for too long, he thought, if I’m speculating over The Huntress. Hathori sensuality wasn’t limited to the sexual, and as the years passed, he remembered with increasing fondness the time he’d spent in the Hathori Temple in the Capitol, not just for the sex, but for the mornings of waking up and enjoying the comfort of the bodies surrounding him. Staving off some of the loneliness of exile from the monastery and the quiet hum of other minds.

  Still, her reaction to his suggestive remark was nothing less than astonishing. He nudged the bottle of pills to a more firm position in her hand and her fingers worked the cap off, spilling the tablets over the deck plating, but accomplishing her goal. She jammed one of the ovoids into her mouth and bit down on it with an audible crunch.

  He watched as she winced at the taste, but swallowed with some effort. All the intelligence the Restoration had received about the Vice Hunter claimed that she was incorruptible. One hundred percent loyal to the Union’s New Morality cause. That she was dogged and unstoppable. Unable to be persuaded, coerced, threatened, or cajoled. And he suspected he’d just discovered why.

  “Treska?” After several minutes, her rocking slowed. She panted as if she’d just finished a sprint in heavy gravity.

  “I�
�” she began. “Wh—” She shook her head and looked up, her eyes focusing on him. She blinked several times and her mouth worked, but the power of speech seemed to elude her.

  “Give yourself time to come out of it,” he said.

  She stretched her legs out in front of her and shook her head, bits of reddish hair falling out of her tight headband.

  “Does that happen often?” he asked.

  She rolled her shoulders back and forth. “Only when I forget what I’m here for.”

  He wanted to find hope in that statement. Do I make you forget?

  Escape

  The transport bringing in boxes of salvage was the best-smelling transport the tech had ever experienced. His training in the New Morality kept him from complaining too heavily about the stench of his new job, when before he’d served as the kitchen inventory manager for one of Tenraye’s most exclusive destination restaurant resorts.

  He hadn’t thought about the restaurant in six years. The training kept him focused on his tasks at hand, as he processed one transport after another through Spaceport Receiving and routed it to orbital hoppers destined for the gargantuan freighters in orbit. But something about this pallet, full of the usual assortment of reclaimed junk, was different. He switched his handheld scanner to a Union-supplied one.

  Predictably, the Union scanner went crazy as soon as he activated it. Threats popped up on the readout coming from all over the loading bay. Security holes sent out warning beeps of varying tones and colors and the formerly quiet dock now sounded as if it hosted a house band. The formerly relaxed tech tensed. He lifted his head and searched for the threats. His movements went from lazy to purposeful. As if programmed like a bot, his hands moved over the scanner, then moved the scanner towards threats, one by one identifying them and marking them for neutralization, quarantine, or termination.