The Skypirate Read online

  Dax grinned, a deadly imitation of the guard’s lewd expression. “It’s not her leg I’m concerned with.”

  The man returned the grin, but then his eyes narrowed. He abruptly shook his head. “No. I can’t. Not a gold collar.”

  “Oh? Are they so valuable, then?”

  “The most valuable of all Coalition property. My life would be the price for misplacing a gold collar. And I hear they have special plans for that one, once she’s broken.”

  Which is nothing, Dax thought grimly, compared to the special plans they have for me.

  “You’re sure?” he asked, hoping to avoid what his gut was telling him was rapidly becoming inevitable. “Perhaps you could just say she escaped?”

  The guard snorted. “Hasn’t been but one gold collar ever escape. A lot of people parted company with their heads over it. More just plain disappeared.” He shook his head, more definitely this time. “Coin’s worth nothing if you’re dead.”

  “How true,” Dax muttered.

  Then he let out a sigh as if giving up, and walked back to the cell. Rina met his gaze, apology—a bit late, as usual—in her green eyes. But Dax merely glanced at her; his attention was fastened on the other occupant of the cell. Still, she held his gaze unflinchingly.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he questioned softly, too low for the guard to hear.

  She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I have no choice.”

  As the guard came up to stand beside him, Dax drew in a deep breath. “I guess I’ll have to give you one, then.”

  The Arellian looked, for the first time, startled. The guard’s forehead creased. “What was that?”

  “I said ‘Too bad, she’s a live one,’” Dax improvised.

  “Hmph,” snorted the man. “You’re better off with the younger one. The Arellian’d probably freeze a man’s nether parts off.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps.”

  Dax reached down to tug at his cloak, as if it had caught on the uneven floor. The guard’s eyes instinctively followed the motion of his hand. The moment his field of vision was diverted, Dax grabbed the unlocked cell door and swung it open in a swift, powerful arc. The bars caught the guard at the temple, and he went down heavily.

  Rina was out the cell door in an instant. The Arellian, while not quite as quick, was only a step behind.

  “They’ve got my disrupter in that locker over there,” Rina said, pushing thick blond bangs out of her eyes as she ran to the metal door they’d seen before. “It’s locked,” she exclaimed in frustration.

  “What did you expect?” Dax asked mildly. He glanced at his companion. “Roxton?”

  The older man nodded, keeping a wary eye on the Arellian as he walked toward Rina. Dax, too, was watching the Arellian, who had followed close on Rina’s heels, and was showing her first sign of tension as she stared at the locked cabinet door as if the sheer fierceness of her gaze could melt it.

  Roxton pulled out his disrupter, and aimed it at the lock on the metal door. At the piercing sound, a rumble of voices began echoing down the corridor.

  “Be quick about it,” Dax muttered as the door swung open. “The guests are getting restless.”

  Rina reached in and grabbed an armful of weapons, tossing a couple to Roxton, three more to Dax. He caught them and stuffed them into the pocket that had held the coins—

  The coins. He was bending to retrieve the pouch from the unconscious guard when a movement by the Arellian brought him sharply upright. He suppressed a groan of relief at standing full upright for the first time in what seemed like aeons, but barely had time to savor it; he leapt forward, slammed the metal door shut, and trapped the Arellian’s hands in his. He felt her pulse leap beneath his fingertips.

  “You’ll pardon me for not arming the person who was so very eager to hand the Coalition my head,” he said dryly.

  “I had no choice,” she repeated. “Besides, I wasn’t going for a weapon.”

  “Oh?”

  He released her hands, but kept hold of both her wrists with one hand as he pried open her fingers with the other. She resisted him with a strength that surprised him, but eventually she had to give way.

  What she held was like no kind of weapon he’d ever seen. It was palm-sized, adorned with buttons, a knob of some sort, and three crystals, one each of red, yellow, and blue. No, not crystals. Lights. His gaze flicked to the collar that banded her slender throat. The matching lights were there. This must be the controller the guard had mentioned. He hadn’t the slightest idea how the thing worked, but knew he wouldn’t like it if he did.

  The racket increased down the long corridor of cells as the prisoners began to guess that something was going on. The shouts were starting to ring off the damp stone walls. Dax bent to remove the code key from the downed guard’s belt.

  “Better move, Cap’n,” Roxton urged. “They’ll soon hear all the noise.”

  “If we go back that way,” Rina whispered, staring down the long, dark corridor, “we’ll run right into them as they come down.”

  “Give me a weapon,” the Arellian snapped. “I can help you fight them.”

  Dax lifted a brow. “Fight? Four against . . . what, forty? Sorry, that’s not my kind of odds.”

  She glanced down the hall, then turned back to Dax, contempt rife in her eyes and voice. “In a few moments, you’ll have no choice.”

  She didn’t call him coward, but Dax heard it as surely as if she had. It didn’t matter; he’d been called that and worse. He’d called himself worse. But it made him wonder about this female, and why she was prisoner here.

  “Quiet,” he ordered. He turned to look at the stone wall that was the dead end of the corridor. Then he spoke to Rina. “Did you pay any attention when they brought you in here?”

  “Of course,” the girl answered indignantly.

  He gestured toward the wall. “What’s on the other side?”

  The girl closed her eyes for a moment. It was a familiar action to Dax; he knew she was pulling up the memory. And when she did, it would be, as it was aboard the Evening Star, as accurate as any star chart. But the sound of shouts and distant running footsteps overhead told him they were running out of time.

  “The cliff,” she said a second later. “About twenty feet high, here. Above the main path.”

  “Good.” He reached beneath his cloak once more.

  “Good?” The Arellian gaped at him. “What’s good about it? That wall’s so thick even the strongest disrupter would barely scratch it.”

  Dax gave her a look suitable for a pesky insect, then ignored her as he turned to face the blank wall, pushing his cloak back with one arm. He now held a lethal-looking yet beautiful gleaming silver weapon. Its short stock was etched with an intricate design that ended at a heavy oblong cube, which in turn gave way to an arm’s length half cylinder with a wide groove hollowed out of the upward-facing flat side. Near the far end of the long cylinder was a curved crosspiece, bent back and held with a strand of some material that shone as silver as the weapon itself.

  “The flashbow,” Rina breathed, her eyes widening.

  The Arellian glanced at her recent cellmate, then turned her gaze back to Dax. He bent for a moment, reaching for something beneath the cloak, then stood once more, pushing the hood back. With his free hand he slid what looked like a handsbreadth-long bolt of an oddly colored material into the groove, moving it back until it butted against the metal case. He pulled the metallic string back until it slid into a slot in the case, behind the bolt. He moved a lever on the metal portion, and an odd, low-pitched hum began. The bolt began to glow. He raised the weapon to his shoulder, ignoring the staring Arellian as he concentrated, focusing on the spot he’d chosen on the wall. His right hand curled around the stock, his finger slid over the trigger.

  The sound of the
footsteps above were growing fainter, which only meant they were closer to the stairway at the far end that would lead them down here. He heard the Arellian say something, urgently, heard Rina hushing her, but he blanked it out. It had been a while since he’d used the weapon, and he needed all his concentration.

  He expelled his breath slowly, mentally closing out his surroundings. He closed his eyes, focusing all his energy on the feel of the silver, until it grew warm beneath his hands. Then he opened his eyes, sighting down the groove to the place on the wall he had instinctively chosen.

  Only when all he could hear was the steady thud of his own heart and the hum of the flashcharger, when all he could see was that spot on the wall, so clearly he could count the nicks in the stone, when he had no breath left in his lungs to strain to hold, he moved that one finger.

  The glowing bolt shot down the groove. A split second later the corridor was lost in a flash of blinding, fierce light and a sharp, deafening crack of sound that made their ears ring and their balance waver. Dax stood frozen as the others lowered the hands they had put before their eyes at Rina’s warning.

  Before them, the wall that had been the dead end of the corridor had vanished, leaving nothing but a few settling motes of dust. They stood on the edge of open air, nothing but the drop of the sheer cliff in front of them. Only Rina seemed capable of movement; she stepped toward the motionless Dax. He didn’t react. She reached upward, taking a lock of thick, dark hair in her fingers and tugging.

  “Unh!” Dax grunted. Then he shook his head sharply, as if coming out of a daze. Slowly, he lowered the flashbow from his shoulder.

  “Eos,” the Arellian breathed, her eyes wide as her gaze flicked from the gaping hole to the man who had done it.

  “Come on,” Rina urged, releasing Dax’s hair and pushing her own bangs from her eyes. “They’ll be here any minute.”

  Dax blinked, and shook his head again. Roxton moved then, taking a long, thin cord from under his own cloak. He looped one end around the base of the bars of Rina’s former cell and knotted it, then tossed the other end over the drop. Gingerly, he leaned forward to look.

  “Have to scramble the last few feet, but it’ll do.”

  “Go ahead,” Dax said, back with them now.

  “But—” Rina began.

  “Let Roxton go first.” The flashbow disappeared beneath the voluminous cloak once more. “We don’t know how visible we’re going to be going down that line. There could be somebody waiting for us by the time we hit the bottom.”

  “Just why I should go first,” Rina said. “I’m a smaller target.”

  “While you’re wasting time arguing, I’ll go down,” the Arellian snapped.

  “No,” Dax ordered firmly. He nodded at Roxton, who disappeared over the side without hesitation. Dax moved to the edge and looked over. After another long, silent moment broken only by the clang of the metal door at the far end of the hall, he nodded at Rina. She scrambled over the side with youthful agility.

  Dax turned to look at the Arellian. With an elaborate bow, he gestured to the taut line.

  “You expect me to dangle there in the open, unarmed?”

  Dax shrugged. “Or wait and meet the guards, unarmed.”

  She looked at him sourly. “Are you sure you want me below you?”

  With a movement so swift it made her blink, Dax swept the controller from her hand. “As long as I have this, it won’t bother me a bit.”

  She swore, an Arellian oath he’d heard but didn’t know the meaning of, then swung over the edge. Dax noticed the slightest stiffness in her left leg, but she didn’t let it slow her down once she’d begun; she was down the line and out of sight before he heard the sound of running footfalls at the far end of the corridor.

  He took out the code key he’d liberated from the guard. There was no way he could open the other cells; the possible combinations were nearly infinite. But given time . . .

  He ran back to the cell that held the Carelian. She was at the door, her hands curled around the bars, obviously aware something was up. Dax winced when he saw the twisted scars at her fingertips, where they had removed—none too carefully, it appeared—the retractable, curved fingernails. He held out the code key.

  “I’d suggest you keep it hidden until you have all the combinations,” he said lowly. “You’ll have a better chance if you all stay together.”

  She took it, quickly, then tilted her head back to look up at him, her eyes looking eerily pale in the shadows. “Why?” she asked, her voice harsh with the effort to lower her species’ normally loud tones.

  Dax grinned. “Why not?”

  She leaned closer, peering at him. Then she gasped. “Dax!”

  Blast it, he hadn’t realized he’d become so easily recognizable, even here. He backed up a step. The guards were getting closer, he could hear them. Was this fanciful gesture going to cost him his life? If she gave him away—

  “Skypirate or no, your name shall be held sacred in the house of my clan,” she hissed. “Go, and Eos be with you.”

  “Good luck,” he whispered. He spun on his heel and took off running back to the opening he’d blasted.

  He reached for the line, then stopped. He knew that as soon as they made the turn into the cell area, the guards would see the gaping hole at the end of the corridor, streaming sunlight into this place that hadn’t seen it in aeons. They’d head straight for it, instinctively. Hurriedly. With a crooked grin he moved back a few steps, swiftly adjusted the course of the line, then went back to the edge and over the side.

  The adjustment he’d made had cost him in the cord’s length, making the final drop at the end nearly eight feet. Hoping that he wouldn’t break a leg, he let go. He hit at an awkward angle, sending a sharp pain shooting up from his left ankle. He slipped, then rolled, biting back grunts of pain as sharp-edged rocks—and the bow—dug into him.

  “What in Hades took you so long?” Rina whispered through clenched teeth. “And what happened to the cord?”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Dax whispered back wryly as he limped out of sight behind the large outcropping of stone that hid Roxton and the Arellian.

  Roxton looked him up and down before, apparently satisfied that he would live, he said, “What did happen to the line? It was long enough—”

  “—to wrap around the bars of the opposite cell.”

  Roxton blinked. “Huh?”

  “Across the corridor. At about ankle height.”

  Roxton blinked again, then grinned. “Son of a whisperbird, that’s what you—”

  A scream cut him off, and they looked up in time to see first one, then a second prison guard cartwheel out of the opening above them and plummet downward, arms flailing uselessly.

  As one, the four of them turned and took to their heels.

  Chapter 2

  “YOU’RE AN IDIOT, you know that?” Rina stood in front of Dax, her hands on her hips, glaring up at him with more ferocity than anyone of that size and age should have been capable of.

  “I believe you’ve mentioned it on occasion,” Dax said amiably.

  “Going back like that, they could have caught you—”

  “They didn’t, little one. Let’s go.”

  “But they could have! One of these days you’re going to take one chance too many—”

  “It won’t work, Rina.”

  She blinked up at him. “What?”

  “You’re still in big trouble, and trying to divert all the attention to me isn’t going to change that.”

  The girl colored, looking away. But after a moment, she looked back at him, all the ferocity gone from her face and voice. “I wasn’t just trying a diversion. You scare me, the way you take crazy chances, and—”

  “I know, little one,” Dax said softly. “But now is not the time. We�
�ve got to make it to the shuttle and get out of here before they regroup.”

  “Shuttle?” The Arellian reached out and grabbed Dax’s arm. “You have a ship here?”

  “I did when I left it,” Dax said in a wry tone, turning to look at her.

  He realized his mistake as soon as he’d made it. The Arellian’s eyes widened as, for the first time, she saw his face in full light. Her gaze lingered a moment, as if assessing the jade of his eyes, then flicked to the long, thick mane of hair that gleamed darkly in the sunlight.

  “Dax!” she exclaimed, the same way the Carelian had.

  He let out a compressed breath. So she hadn’t known who he was, until now. She’d bluffed him. He shrugged it off; it had been a risk he hadn’t dared take, for Rina’s sake.

  “I’m getting too bedamned recognizable around here,” he muttered.

  “The infamous skypirate known by just one name, with a face that’s on reward placards all over the system?” the Arellian asked. “What did you expect?”

  “We’d best move,” warned Roxton, who had spent most of their lengthy run along the back paths of the outer city looking back over his shoulder.

  “No.” It came from the Arellian firmly, with a snap that made Dax look at her curiously.

  “No?” he asked, his voice giving away nothing of his rapid speculation.

  “I thank you for the rescue, but I’ll be on my way. If you’ll just give me the controller?” She held out her hand, palm up. Her fingers were long, slender, and elegantly tapered, Dax saw. And she was older than he’d thought. Woman, not girl. More his age than Rina’s. He’d be very interested to know where she had developed that air of command.

  “Just how far do you think you’ll get on your own?” His tone was light, one of idle curiosity.

  “Farther than you’ll get,” she snapped out, as if irritated by his tone, “with half the planet after you for the reward, and the entire Coalition looking for the glory of bringing your head on a stake before Legion Command.”