Stealing Mercury (Arena Dogs Book 1) (9 page)

Carn spoke up, clearing away the silence that had sprung up between them like a trap. “She’s different. Perhaps she isn’t human.”

Mercury pulled against the bars, fear and rage like acid in his veins. “Two days.” He couldn’t stop envisioning the things they could do to his female in two days.
His
female? No! Maybe Lo was right to remind him of his responsibilities. He couldn’t let himself think of her as his.

“I don’t know what she is,” Lo sounded calmer. “But I do know she’s not from the arena. Not a Dog.”

Carn shifted. “But she provided for us. And that lurch in the ship’s responses when the whip-master attacked you—she tried to protect you, Mercury. Lo is wrong. She’s not the enemy.”

Emotion shredded Mercury. Relief that Carn would defend her. Fear for her safety. Rage that he couldn’t protect her. Hunger to claim her. Useless emotion that brought him no closer to redeeming his past mistakes.

“What in hell?”

Sam lurched up, nearly falling out of her seat. Damn, she’d fallen asleep and at the worst possible time. Her passengers had taken to sleeping in shifts to keep an eye on her. Two days of nervous energy had finally pushed her to her limit.

A strong hand clamped her shoulder. “I asked you a question. What is that?” Sam recognized the voice without looking up—Drake.

The control panel showed the ship had dropped out of skipdrive exactly as she’d programmed it to do. “I don’t know why we’ve stopped. Something must be—”

“We’ll get back to that.” He pointed to the external view screen, which had apparently been engaged while she slept. “First, you tell me what
that
is.”

Samantha blinked her eyes and tried to clear her vision. A large hunk of equipment crowded out the space that should have been visible on the screen. Beyond that a nearby sun hovered. The sensor readouts showed several planets circling the Sol class star. She’d found it on one of the unofficial nav-charts stored in the
Dove
’s database. The planets hadn’t come up on the commercial charts, so she was more than relieved to see them and their sun chasing away the darkness.

At first she’d only planned to create a delay to hope the resistance could still intercept, but as the tension on the ship had wound tighter, she’d decided to look for a delay spot that would give her more options.

She focused on the equipment visible on screen and made a show of initiating a fresh sensor sweep. She’d seen similar equipment enough to recognize its function, but the glyph-based writing on the hull didn’t come close to any language she’d seen before.

“It’s a terraforming platform. Inactive. Sensors don’t show any signs of heat or electromagnetic fields, so it must be unmanned. Whatever company owns it probably parked it here waiting for their next project.” She turned to face him and noticed Resler hovering at Drake’s shoulder and looking ready to chew nails. “But we have bigger problems. For some reason we’re smack in the middle of a solar system,” right where she wanted them, “and I have no idea why we dropped out of skipspace.”

Drake pushed past Resler and toward the section of storage compartments built into the back wall of the pilot’s station. The sharp thwak of his fist slamming into one of the half-meter square doors made Samantha cringe. Resler shouldered his way next to her, hunching forward to put his face near hers. “The ship came out of skipdrive pretty smooth. Not like it was a malfunction.”

“Unless you’re a pilot, maybe you should let me deal with this and clear out of my way.”

“I know a thing or two.” Resler puffed out his chest like a cockle-bird strutting for dominance. “I worked at a lunar mining colony for ten years. I’ve flown plenty of shuttles.”

“Shuttles!” She tried to play off the nervous energy bubbling through her circulatory system as anger. “This is
not
a shuttle.”

Drake leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Resler, you can check our position, right? You know how to read nav charts.”

“Yeah.” Resler leaned over the console. “But I can tell you now, if we were on track we should have dropped out in a shipping lane. Not a solar system.” He lifted his face as if he were talking to the bulkhead above them. “Computer response.”

The
Dove’s
computer remained silent.

Resler glared at Samantha. “Voice control locked out, sneaky bitch.” He reached across her and pounded away at the controls.

Samantha wanted to smack his hands away, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Damn. She hadn’t been prepared for them to have any real knowledge of the ship’s systems. If she’d known, she would’ve locked it down tighter.

“Here it is.” Resler shook his head. “Not even close to where we should be.”

Drake humphed and shook his head.

“Wait.” She swallowed past the tightness in her throat. “If the navs have been malfunctioning along with everything else on this cursed ship, we might be off course but it won’t be by much. There’s an auxiliary nav check at every skip-point in the course. Let me pull up the charts.”

She reached for the controls, but Resler grabbed her wrist. Sharp pain spiked up her arm, but she managed not to react.

“Let her do it,” said Drake. “But watch her.”

Resler released her.

“Look, I’ll do this real slow.” She rubbed at the tender joint then called out the steps. She unlocked the skipdrive navigation then pulled up the charted course and their course log. “See. We’re off track, but not by much. It had to be a small nav error at the last skip-point. The computer must’ve pulled us out of skipdrive when it detected this solar system in our path.”

Resler snatched her up by the shoulders and shook her. “We’re not going to fall for your crap.”

Drake straightened and started pacing. “Let her go.” He strode the length of the small pilot’s deck then turned back to her. “And why should I believe you, Sam? Maybe you have us off course to rendezvous with a buyer. Maybe you want to steal my Dogs. They’d be worth a lot to the right people.”

Samantha shivered at the thought of anyone selling Mercury or any of the caged men.

“Yeah,” said Resler. “Maybe that’s why she was spending time in the cargo-hold. Checking them out for resale value.”

Drake pinned Resler with a look to freeze over a sun. “Shut up, Resler.”

Samantha breathed a sigh of relief. Dissent between them could only aid her. And they hadn’t realized the significance of their location on the Gollerra border. “Look. This job is a big break for me. No way would I intentionally screw it up. Not for any amount of money. This is my career on the line.” Stars, she hoped she sounded convincing.

Drake smiled, a grim tug of his lips. “Your denials might be more convincing if you were getting us back on course while you made them.”

She nodded. “Right. It’d be better though, if I ran a diagnostic first.” There was still a chance that the rendezvous ship might find them if she managed to put out a beacon and stayed put.

“Just do it.”

Samantha turned to study the view screen. “First, I’ll have to maneuver us out of this system.”

Resler sneered. “I’ll fucking do it.”

The next thing she knew, he was dragging her out of her seat. The air rushed out of her lungs as she hit the floor. She looked up from where she landed, but couldn’t get enough air to shout out a warning. Before she could stop him, he took the standard drive controls. The ship lurched. Samantha slid across the deck. She heard Drake slam against something and curse.

At the screeching of the proximity alert, she scrambled to her feet and leapt for the controls. She tried to reach across Resler, but his bulky shoulders blocked her path and he resisted when she gave him a shove.

Something wet dripped into her eye from her forehead. She blinked trying to clear it. She’d been too panicked to notice, but she must’ve hit her head during her slide across the deck.

“Fuck me.” Resler leapt out of the chair. He picked her up and slammed her into the seat. “Fix it.” His voice shook.

She was still trying to clear her vision and when she did, she saw the terraforming platform now took up the entire view screen. “Hold on!” She flipped on the intercom to warn Mercury, Carnage, and Diablo. “Brace for impact!” Even as she shouted it, her hands flew across the controls.

“Turn us,” Resler stammered. “Fucking turn us.”

“I’m trying. This isn’t a shuttle. She doesn’t respond as quickly.”

In the view screen a bit of space opened up. They were turning. Resler sighed as if in relief. He clearly didn’t have a good grasp on the size of the
Dove
or how slowly she was turning. The nose of the ship might miss the platform, but her tail would never get clear in time.

Drake got to his feet behind her. Didn’t anyone understand what brace for impact meant? Samantha reached back for her safety straps, looped her arms through, then adjusted them across her shoulders.

An obscene scraping sound echoed eerily along the port side of the ship and everything from the floor to the control station to the hatchways shimmied. A sudden jolt rattled her bones and the realization that the hull had buckled clutched her heart in a painful grip. The doors of the storage bins popped open and Samantha put her hands over her head to protect it from the flying debris. Anything that hadn’t been bolted or lashed down bounced around the ship like dice shaken in a cup. A cacophony built and dragged on for what seemed like a lifetime but was probably about five minutes then everything went dead silent.

The knot in her chest eased.

She could still breathe and nothing floated around the pilot station so the environmental and grav drives had made it without critical damage. A quick check of the readouts showed the skipdrive at the far end of the ship wasn’t even sending up data and hull integrity on the port side was down thirty percent. The emergency pods were on the starboard side, so they should be clear.

Her readouts streamed damage reports. One assured her life signs were stable for all six on board. She quickly weighed her options. She would either have to jump all-in on her determination to free the Arena Dogs or give up her plans and let them be killed. Decision made, she got to work setting things in motion.

It only took a handful of minutes to put her reputation, maybe even her life, on the line. The moment her fingers executed the last command, she used the view screen to check on her passengers in the cargo-bay then climbed out of her chair to check on Drake and Resler. They were on the floor out cold, but not showing any sign of serious injury. She grabbed the emergency med-kit and pulled out two doses of a restorative that would keep them under long enough for what she needed to do. Pulling the cord around Drake’s neck, she slipped it free of his shirt. The green code-key for the cage locks pressed coolly against her palm as she pulled the cord over Drake’s head. She administered the doses then left the men there and went back to work, blocking everything but getting the ship into orbit from her mind.

The Dove

Earth Alliance Beta Sector - Gollerra Border

2210.157

Mercury choked back a growl as Sam darted through the hatch. His worry had taken him to a special corner of hell the moment he’d heard her shouted warning on the ship’s communication system. It seemed he’d been right to worry. A coppery tinge overshadowed her honey scent. Her hair was streaked with blood.

She stopped in the middle of the cargo-hold, her lips tilted in a half smile. “Everyone okay in here?”

Mercury nodded as he reached through the bars and held out a hand palm up. She flicked a cautious glance at Lo as she stepped forward. Everything inside him settled when her warm palm pressed into his. “You’re hurt.”

She pulled her hand back and pressed her fingers to her temple. They came away wet with crimson, but she shrugged it off. “I’m fine, but those idiots have wrought havoc on the
Dove
.” She rubbed her fingers along her dark brown trousers, smearing away the blood as if she could hide it from him. “It’ll be okay. I just had to make some adjustments to the plan.”

“Plan?” He resisted the urge, the need, to touch her again, but he could feel it building in him like a thirst gone too long unquenched.

“We were supposed to rendezvous with a ship eight days ago. They were going to help you guys get away from Roma. But things have gone straight to hell and—” She was talking fast and her eyes were everywhere but on him.

“Sam.” Her name came out more bark than he intended, so he said it again softer. “Sam.”

She frowned and he wanted to smooth away the lines that appeared on her forehead. He reached out and touched the side of her face. Her wince threw fuel onto the embers of his anger and he couldn’t hold back his snarl. She flinched and he grabbed her wrist before she could move away. “Never. Be. Afraid. Of me.”

She frowned. “Maybe if you didn’t growl like that—”

“It’s part of me,” he ground out. “Deal with it.” The words felt right when he said them, but grim pessimism rushed in to wash the feeling away and he wondered if she
could
deal with it—with him—an unnatural creature with the instincts of a beast.

Her arched brows shot up over wide eyes.

He pulled her closer and pressed his face against the bars. He drew in a deep breath letting her fill his lungs. She didn’t scent of the whip-master. That cooled his rage enough to relax his hold and allow her to put a few inches between them.

“Speak slowly.” He nodded encouragement. “You made a plan?”

She started to shake her head, but the movement was aborted, pain etched into her features. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t my plan. I was hired to get you to the rendezvous and look the other way when they freed you. Sorry I couldn’t tell you before. They told me not to.”

Mercury heard Lo and Carn shift in their cages. “Who would—”

“It doesn’t matter now. They aren’t here and we’re going to have to improvise a plan B.”

“Another plan?”

Her small teeth bit into her plump bottom lip. “Yes, and actually it’s probably more of a plan C now.”