My finger hovered over the button. “Prove it.”
He started probing at his eye, as if he had something in it. An odd time to be checking for damage, I thought. And then I realized he did have something in it. He flicked a thin, transparent film off the tip of his finger, and then removed the same from his other eye.
Contact lenses.
He also pressed parts of his cheek and wiggled his jaw as if cracking it into a different place, squeezed the bridge of his nose and inhaled. I’d heard of disguise capabilities like this, but only rumors. The advanced drugs they required were way too expensive for anyone on Alaxak. When he dropped his hand, the lump was gone, and his jaw was subtly different, and yet the overall difference was drastic.
He’d looked handsomely out of place before, but this was just absurd. His eyes were a pale silver-gray that nearly shone, and his face was perfectly shaped, with smooth planes and edges that met in exactly the right places, not just some, more like it had been mat-printed from an engineer’s design. In short, he was stunning, in spite of the blood trickling from one of his too-straight eyebrows.
Only years of careful selection, pure bloodlines, gave someone a face like that. And even I, who was about as far from royal as a person could get, knew what the color of his eyes meant.
“My name is Nevarian…Dracorte,” he said.
It sounded like he’d been leaving something out. But it was enough, his name.
Ancestors. He was a Dracorte.
“Great Collapse!” Telu nearly shouted, while Arjan gaped with his jaw fully dropped. Eton was staring as much as he could through swelling eyes.
“Unifier help us,” Basra murmured.
Whatever divinity it came from, I’d take all the help we could get. A member of the Dracorte family, one of the most powerful royal families in the known universe—if not the most—was worse than a bomb on board. He was a target for every missile in the galaxy. I thought he might have come from one of the royal planets, but I never would have guessed he was a royal himself. If I’d had even the slightest hint, I would have run as far and fast as possible.
“What…?” I began, then had to begin again as I steadied myself against the wall. “What are you doing on my ship?”
His mouth quirked into an odd smile. “Looking for you.”
My stomach felt like it did a full turn. “The second ticket. On the cruiser. That was…”
“For you, yes.” His smile twisted further. “I wish you could have let me explain…and that you would let me explain now,” he added more softly, as he saw my finger twitch closer to the button.
All I could do was shake my head. “No. No, I don’t want to know. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I took a deep breath and steeled myself. “I want you off my ship. I want no one to ever know you were even on my ship. I want you to disappear.”
Before my finger could so much as twitch again, Nev whipped out a gun, sleek and shiny with a white glow, from somewhere in the crisp folds of his jacket. So not only was he himself a weapon, he also carried them on his person. But he didn’t point it at me.
He pointed it, no doubt accurately, at the junction between the hull and the first set of doors. “Tell them, Eton,” he said. “They won’t believe me.”
“That’s an XR-25 Molten-Force.” Eton’s shock was audible through his wet, bloody grimace on the floor. “A plasma pistol that makes most others look like toys. It’s worth about half of this ship, and it has the power to blow through all of it. We’ll all die.”
Of course a Dracorte would be able to afford one of those…or a dozen of them. I’d taken him for just another rich boy, but he was much, much richer than that.
“Eton, always ready to state the obvious,” Telu said, but her sarcasm was only a mask for her fear.
“Now, let me out,” Nev said.
I didn’t move.
Basra’s sharp voice cut through my hesitation. “Captain, you should open the doors.”
I cast a glance at him. “But he might be bluffing.”
His eyes never left Nev’s face over his folded arms. “If he’s not bluffing, we have to let him out, and if he is bluffing…we have to let him out. Dracortes don’t just disappear, not even their bodies.” He murmured under his breath, “And something tells me this Dracorte especially won’t.”
Eton didn’t seem to hear the last bit. “I know plenty of ways to make a body disappear in space. A few shots of the mass driver—”
“Captain,” Basra said, in what was nearly a warning tone. I’d never heard anything like it from him.
My finger shifted an inch…and hit a different button. The inner doors of the airlock, not the outer, slid open with a gasp.
Nev stepped out—if not with haste, with efficiency. He does seem to love efficiency, I thought with something bordering on hysteria.
It didn’t feel as if I’d just released one young man into our ship. It felt like I’d released a cataclysm. Looking at him, I felt more afraid than if staring down a clogged asteroid belt I had to fly through with a sputtering engine, or at half a dozen drones, or at the darkness inside me blackening my own vision. The floor of the bridge seemed to drop out from under me, even though it remained firmly welded in place.
“Thank you, Qole,” he said, as if I’d had any choice in the matter. “Now, if you’ll let me finish…”
He moved toward me, half smiling as if in entreaty. So much of it made sense now: his arrogance, his knowledge, his combat training—he could afford all of it, along with the pistol. He still didn’t point the gun at me, but he kept it ready at his side.
His mistake. When he got close enough, I hit him as hard as I could in his perfect nose.
Ow.
Ow, ow, ow. Ow to the hours of slinging about frozen containers of volatile fuel, ow to getting knocked out, ow to Eton using me for his anger therapy, and ow to feral captains hitting me right on the soft bits of my face.
But the worst pain, and what had really left me unprepared for that punch, was the sick look on Qole’s face. She was trying to present it as fury, but I could see misery there, misery from the realization at just how much her life might be changing.
If only she knew.
The lesson here being: save the sympathy for the pain you are causing until after someone punches you in the face and the entirety of their crew comes tumbling on top of you.
Because tumble on top of me they did. As I stumbled back from Qole’s punch, clutching my bleeding nose, Telu latched onto the arm that held the pistol, and Arjan launched himself straight for me.
After the match with Eton, however, this was child’s play. I planted one boot firmly in Arjan’s chest, let go of the pistol, and snatched it with my other hand as it dropped. I twisted my arm while rotating to pry Telu clean off, and then finished the spin facing the three of them again, this time training the gun on Qole.