Pirate Consort Page 2

  He stared at her fingers, sitting immobile. His mind held to the drive core with a strange desperation. He wanted badly to take her hand. He wondered what would happen when he did.

  These people have used you. Sold you for their own profit, abused your gifts. You don’t belong with them. The woman’s mental voice was soft, yet held more authority than all of Braxton’s shouting. You belong with us.

  Still, he hesitated. A pirate? His tone was dubious. He didn’t want to do any of the things in the stories. He didn’t want to space people or maroon them, or own his own slaves. He didn’t want to hurt people unless he had to. He knew what it felt like to be hurt.

  Her eyes gleamed, and he had the feeling she was amused again. Give us a chance. If you decide you don’t want to stay, I won’t force you.

  He stared into her eyes, wanting so badly to believe her.

  I swear to you. If you don’t wish to come with us, we will leave you here. She paused, glancing over her shoulder. The boy realized the man was speaking to her mentally. She gave a nod, then turned back to meet his gaze again. We will even fix your drive core, so you can jump to a waystation. Her expression hardened. And we will remove everyone else from the ship, and give you a cut from our take.

  His suspicion deepened. No one helped a slave like him for free. Why would you do that?

  You are like us. Talented.

  He thought about that. He’d been sold for his abilities. For what he could do. If these people were like him, maybe they didn’t need his Talent. Maybe they really would help him.

  You don’t want anything?

  Only for you to be free. And safe.

  He studied her. He could usually get a sense of what someone was like when he met them. But she was a contradiction. Hard, yet soft. Distant, but vibrant and warm. He thought about what she said. Even if she did everything she promised, and he made it to the waystation – even if he had credits or hard coin to start a new life – he had no idea where to go or what to do. He’d been a slave for as long as he could remember. And he felt drawn to this woman as he had never felt drawn to anyone before. She felt warm and safe. Like something forgotten, but right on the edge of his consciousness. Something he didn’t know he’d been missing.

  Or, you can come with us. Where, I promise you, no one will ever hurt you again. She was still holding her hand out to him. Waiting.

  What would I have to do?

  Her head tilted as she eyed him. Why, learn. Learn your heritage. How to properly shield your mind and use your Talent more efficiently. She paused, a smile widening her lips. Learn who you really are.

  The boy swallowed. He wanted to do everything she said. But he was so afraid. He thought about the peace of the void that awaited him. His mind still held the drive core, ready to punch power into it with a thought.

  Lilith waited, like she had all the time in the universe. The man behind her shifted, looking uncomfortable. His stance over the woman was protective. Worried.

  She was important. Not someone who should be waiting on a nobody like him. Kai had called her a queen. The boy looked down at his own grimy fingers, his skin pale beneath the layer of dirt and bruises, the nails bitten to the quick. A tightness filled his chest and his breath hitched. For a horrible moment he thought he might cry, and he knew if he did he wouldn’t be able to bear the humiliation.

  “Sebastian,” said Lilith.

  The boy looked up, his eyes darting to the man, but he wasn’t moving. She wasn’t talking to him. “What?” he asked out loud. His voice cracked.

  She smiled at him, and it was the most glorious thing he’d ever seen. “Your name. It will be Sebastian, if you like.”

  The man behind her made a noise. His chin lifted in obvious surprise.

  “It was my father’s name.” There was something in Lilith’s voice. An echo of sadness. “A good name for a strong man.”

  The tightness in the boy’s chest expanded.

  “Sebastian.” It felt strange as his tongue shaped the name. His name. Tears blurred his vision, and he dropped his hold on the drive core, letting it go silent and dead once more. When he moved, it was in a clumsy lunge forward to grasp Lilith’s fingers before she changed her mind. Her touch was warm, firm, but not painful. She took his hand like he was an equal.

  “I like that name,” he said, ducking his head so she wouldn’t see his tears.

  Lilith pulled him to his feet. She smiled at him as though he was the most important person in the universe.

  “Welcome home, Sebastian.”

  Chapter One

  Present Day

  Mercy nursed her drink and tried not to fidget. She didn’t want to risk moving too much and getting any of the sticky, unidentifiable residue clinging to the table and chairs transferred onto her. Even a place as shady as the Birn waystation had access to cleaning drones. Why the hell didn’t they use them? It might not officially qualify as a colony, but that didn’t mean they had to live in filth.

  The cheap ale hit her tongue, a wash of bitterness with a sour aftertaste. Mercy glared down at the glass, wondering how long she’d have to continue drinking it. The pirates and their high quality goods were clearly making her soft.

  “Try to act less like you hate every second of this.” Her best friend, Atrea, eyed her from across the table, a glint of amusement in her blue eyes. “I can remember a time when a trip to Birn was exciting.”

  “When we were fifteen, sure.” Mercy forced herself to relax back into her seat, trying to look as casual as the handful of people scattered at similar tables around them. “The thrill has faded.”

  Atrea covered a laugh by sipping her own questionable glass of ale. She didn’t even grimace, a feat Mercy couldn’t quite manage. The two of them were in the spaceport bar, a place characterized by its bad beer, worse food, and the lingering smell of unwashed bodies, layered with the more prevalent burnt-metal odor that clung to any ship venturing through space. Most spaceports and stations had air recyclers that dealt with the worst of the smell, but this place either didn’t have any, or hadn’t bothered servicing them in a few dozen years.

  Birn was positioned in the Toth system, on the furthest edge of Commonwealth controlled space. Little more than a waystation, it officially existed to provide refueling and a few supplies for the sanctioned merchants who traveled out this far, those few who ventured to trade with the Commonwealth’s most distant colony worlds. Unofficially, it provided refueling and a thriving black market for smugglers, mercenaries, and pirates.

  It was a pit, a place where dubious deals were made and mercenaries went to be hired. Which made it the closest thing to neutral territory between the Commonwealth of Sovereign Planets and pirate-controlled space. But it still technically fell within Commonwealth borders. A fact that made a lot of the less official visitors uneasy. Including Mercy.

  Fortunately, this wasn’t her first time visiting a place like this. She’d lived for several years as a smuggler beside Atrea and her father, Wolfgang, before rejoining her pirate family a few months ago. Both she and Atrea wore armored clothing, and were visibly armed. Every so often, Mercy would meet the gaze of one of the shadier sorts sharing the waystation, and tap her fingers on the grip of the disruptor holstered against her hip. Just to let them know she was aware of them.

  No easy marks here.

  Atrea was armed to the teeth, of course. And not with a standard disruptor, either. She preferred weapons of her own design, antique metal throwers she’d built herself. They were limited in ammunition, but the wounds they left were messy, bloody things. Getting hit with one tended to shock and terrify people, even if it failed to kill with the first shot. As a backup, Atrea carried a disruptor modified to be deadly. She wore her weapons openly, in holsters that had the worn look of long use.

  When she wanted to, Atrea could appear completely guileless and non-threatening. She was small and delicate looking, with an ethereal beauty holo stars paid a lot of hard coin to try and achieve. Her blue eyes could be
hard and steely, or wide and naïve. Men often seemed driven to try and protect her, which Mercy found amusing. But right now, Atrea’s blond hair was braided back, and she occupied her seat with a casual confidence. From the moment they’d stepped off the ship and onto Birn’s soil, she’d radiated a dominance that clearly said “fuck with me at your own peril”.

  Mercy wasn’t quite as good at projecting that aura as her friend, but she had something Atrea didn’t. With her Talent, she could put pressure on the minds around them to turn their attention elsewhere. Once, it would have taken all of her concentration. But she’d spent the last few months working hard on her telepathy. She found that now she could maintain the pressure with little thought, so that most of the furtive glances skipped right past them and landed somewhere else. No one was mistaking either of them as targets of opportunity, if their gazes lingered at all.

  Of course, maybe the location wasn’t entirely responsible for Mercy’s nerves.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Damn, Atrea knew her too well.

  “No.” Mercy moved her gaze over the room, but she still didn’t see or sense any other Talented individuals. Only Atrea and herself. Everyone else was head blind. Nulls with no psychic ability at all.

  “Sure. Just wallow in misery and tension over there.” Atrea took another drink.

  “I’m not tense. Or miserable.” Mercy forced her fingers to relax where they gripped her glass.

  Atrea laughed, a low sound that didn’t carry past their table. “Please. You hate this place. Part of you hates what we’re about to do. And you really, really hate that we had to sneak away to do it. Besides, we both know he’s going to be seriously pissed.”

  Mercy lifted a shoulder. “So I went against the king’s order. Cannon will get over it.”

  “Will he? I’m not so sure. And we both know I wasn’t talking about Cannon.”

  Mercy winced. Yes, Reaper was going to be seriously pissed off. Not only had she defied Cannon and the Core – which included her consort, Reaper – but she’d snuck away from the pirates like a thief in the night, stealing a ship and putting herself in the path of their greatest enemies.

  She took an extra-large swallow of the terrible ale, choking the vile stuff down where it sat in her stomach and burned like acid.

  “If they’d only listened to reason, I wouldn’t have had to steal a ship to be here. But none of them are exactly objective.”

  “That’s true.” Though she was speaking to Mercy, Atrea’s attention was focused outward, on the room around them. She’d grown up working her father’s ship as a smuggler, and after that spent several years in the Commonwealth Navy. Security was second nature to her. “But pissing off a Killer is probably a bad idea, even if he is your lover.”

  “Reaper would never hurt me.”

  Atrea cocked one blond brow. “You mean like you would never hurt him? You know, by lying to him and sneaking away to put yourself in the hands of the people who tried to kill you a few months ago?”

  Mercy glared across the table at her. “I didn’t lie to him. Not directly. And you know what I mean. He would never hurt me physically.”

  “Maybe. But there’s still going to be hell to pay when we go back.”

  Mercy chose to ignore that statement. “Besides, Veritas can’t hurt me anymore.”

  “Just because they can’t directly kill you doesn’t mean they can’t get creative.” Atrea tilted her head thoughtfully. “Although you are a lot safer now that you’re their Queen. I suppose you could just force them to obey and we could all go home early.”

  Mercy shifted in her seat, nervous fingers adjusting her collar. She didn’t like being reminded that claiming the Talented meant she could control them. She hated that aspect of her power.

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  Atrea shrugged. “It was just a thought.”

  Having been tortured and almost killed by them herself, Atrea had no love for the organization of Talented who called themselves Veritas.

  “You’re my friend. Aren’t you supposed to be supportive, instead of kicking my ass?”

  “A real friend tells you the truth, even if it hurts.”

  Mercy couldn’t argue with that, and her mood slid from anxious into dread. To say that the pirates were overprotective would be a massive understatement. Cannon, Dem, Treon, all of the members of their ruling body, the Core, and especially Reaper, dogged her steps even on board their flagship, Nemesis. The one visit she’d made to one of their colony worlds had turned into a ridiculous affair of armed guards and absolutely zero time to herself to enjoy or explore it.

  Part of her understood. She was too valuable to lose. The pirates needed a queen, and she was the only one they had. The rest of her was beginning to suffocate under the constant supervision.

  “I’m just saying,” Atrea said with a shrug, “Veritas made the choices that got us all here. And when someone chooses conflict again and again, chances are it’s going to be hard for them to choose peace without a really compelling reason.”

  “No one said this was going to be easy.”

  Descendants of psychically gifted soldiers, the pirates’ ancestors were created to fight a war that ended more than a century ago. Once the war was over, the new government didn’t know what to do with their army of psychically enhanced soldiers. In the end, they decided it was too dangerous to let them live. Most of the Talented fled Commonwealth space and gathered on the fringes, turning pirate to survive. Others scattered within the Commonwealth itself, going underground. They called themselves Veritas, and decades later, they had infiltrated the most successful corporations, and every facet of the Commonwealth government.

  Some said they controlled the monarchy itself.

  One would think the two factions of Talented would get along, but that wasn’t the case. Veritas viewed the pirates as rivals, a dangerous threat to their power. They spent years trying to wipe out their brethren, nearly succeeding. Their history included everything from furious space battles to unleashing a deadly bio weapon.

  The bad blood between the two groups ran deep.

  “Come on, I’m sure it won’t be that bad. Stop looking like you’re about to cry into your beer.” Atrea’s voice reminded Mercy that this was not the time for dwelling on the past. She scowled at her drink.

  “If I cry, it’ll be because this stuff is so awful.”

  “We’ve had worse.”

  A smile tugged at Mercy’s lips. “Sure. I think it was even when we came here. The old Wolf let us order drinks, and we were so damn proud, we choked the vile things down.” She shook her head. “Nice to see they haven’t improved over the years.”

  Atrea’s face didn’t soften, but Mercy could see the humor in her eyes. “Yeah. I’m sure Dad had a good laugh at our expense.”

  Wolfgang’s parenting style had often involved self-inflicted consequences. Mercy winced, thinking of him now. He was going to be just as angry as everyone else about this. Maybe more. Things had been strained between Atrea and her father lately, and guilt snuck in as Mercy considered how this could impact them. It wasn’t just her own relationships at stake here.

  Well, in for a credit, out hard coin as the saying went. This wasn’t a choice either of them had made lightly.

  “Have you given any thought to what we’re going to do if they don’t show up?” Atrea finally voiced Mercy’s biggest fear. That all of this would be for nothing.

  “They’ll show. They’re the ones who wanted this summit.”

  Atrea cocked her head. “Do two people really count as a summit?”

  “I’m Queen, right? I mean, Cannon’s always after me to step up and really embrace the role.”

  “I’m pretty certain this isn’t what he had in mind.”

  So was Mercy.

  When Veritas requested a meeting to discuss peace and cooperation between the two groups of Talented, none of the pirates had been willing to entertain the idea. They immediately assumed it wa
s a trap of some kind. Over a decade ago, Veritas unleashed a bioweapon that nearly destroyed the pirates, killing eighty percent of the female population. In the process everyone lost someone they loved. Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives. Then, just a few months ago they tried to take control of the pirates with a queen of their own, an unstable young girl cloned from Mercy’s own genetic material. They almost succeeded.

  A queen controlled a population of Talented by claiming them as hers. It was a kind of psychic bond. Through it, the Talented gained a connection they needed in order to feel whole. The downside was, an unscrupulous queen could then rule them through mental influence, manipulation, or outright control. Mercy overrode Rani’s bond with her own, claiming the pirates – and everyone else – as hers. Technically, the Talented members of Veritas were just as much her people as the pirates.

  Not that the pirates wanted to admit to that.

  But facts were facts. Mercy wasn’t exactly a fan of Veritas, either. They’d held her captive for a time and forced her to hurt her best friend. They’d taken control of the pirates and tried to kill Mercy. But the man responsible for both of those actions, Willem Frain, was dead. Things had changed. Mercy couldn’t explain how, but she just knew it. She’d been feeling a low but constant mental pull for weeks. She’d told Reaper about it, and then Cannon. Both of them had been pleased, thinking the bond between members of Veritas and Mercy would mean an automatic end to future hostilities. That was good enough, as far as they were concerned. They had no interest in negotiating any further terms. Everyone wanted Mercy to just ignore the pull she felt.

  Which was pretty damn short sighted.

  The door to the waystation bar opened, and Mercy went still. She felt it – the warm, golden presence of another Talented mind. Just one, which was odd. Surely, Veritas would send more than one representative.

  Then she realized she knew the person that mind belonged to. The mental signature was familiar. Her stomach dropped and she sat up straight in her chair before he entered the bar.