Victorious Dead (The Asarlaí Wars Book 2) Read online

  Vas was going to seriously lock his ass up if he survived.

  “Keep him in a decontamination chamber. Anything equally stupid from Marwin or Walvento?”

  “Pela is going over them now, but it looks like they’re fine.” The clipped tone of her words told Vas she’d be handling things on her end.

  Vas clicked off from the med room. Still no response from Marli, and her ship still hadn’t moved.

  “Gosta, can you track the empress’s ships? Specifically, the one that would have been at Mayhira? Maybe we can get a jump on this third Deven while Marli is dealing with what’s happening on her ship.”

  “I already started scanning. Her ships aren’t easy to find, you know. They use scramblers,” Gosta said.

  “And I have every faith that you will break them down in no time,” Vas responded.

  “Captain, incoming message,” Xsit said. “Line one, no codes.”

  That, at least, was good. After that run-in with ships that may or may not have been Commonwealth, Vas was going to be wary of answering coded hails for a bit. “Send it through.”

  She leaned back in her chair, still watching the screen and Marli’s stationary ship. “Vas here.”

  “Captain Tor Dain, I am calling to check on the progress of my package.” The voice was old money, very old money, or had been money at one time. It was also a voice Vas had forgotten about for the moment. The job they’d left unfinished on Mayhira when it blew up in their faces. And a few other possibly universe-changing situations that had popped up since then.

  Damn it, she still had the stolen ident card in her pocket back in her room. “Vizier Ramoth, we’ve had a few setbacks. But we are currently working on repairs to the ship and will be retrieving the item soon.” Then she paused, the date they’d agreed upon for the drop wasn’t for a few days. “Is there a reason you’re calling?”

  “I became concerned when I was sent this vid. I believe you’ll see why.”

  Vas hit accept as her screen flashed the attached item. There she was, in all her glory, being flung over Ragkor’s shoulder, and him running away. The vid only lasted a few seconds, and didn’t show them vanishing as they were taken onto their ship. But there was no mistaking who it was or where they were.

  “That’s a little disturbing, is it not?”

  Vas ran her hand through her hair, it was in a ponytail and not the braid, but it stopped her movement. “Look, Vizier Ramoth, we have ways of doing things that don’t always appear to make sense, but, trust me, they work.” Vas shook her head. There were too many big things going on right now to worry about some former rich baron and his missing heirlooms.

  “Captain Tor Dain, I am not concerned about the actions in the vid. I’m sure there is a certifiable method to your madness. Your crew is one of the best after all, or I wouldn’t have hired you. I was concerned that it appears you left the planet without my object.”

  Vas looked up to Gosta, but he hadn’t been on board when they fled. “Just a moment, Vizier, I have an important communication coming in.” She put him on hold before he could respond.

  “Okay, folks, how did he know we left? That image shows us running, but he seems damn sure we’re not near the planet.” Which they weren’t, but no one, especially a down-on-his-luck vizier, should be able to know where they were. Aside from Marli. And those attack ships. Although they could have been coming to check out the explosion.

  Mac popped his head up. “We might have been tagged, Captain.” The guilt on his face was clear. Any ship who got close enough to paint the Wench with trackers should have been noticed by the pilot—a.k.a. him. “I honestly have no idea when someone could have gotten close enough to do that though.”

  “Didn’t you say you had a run-in with a former flame of Mac’s? One involving an electro net attempt?” Gosta’s head bobbed as he spoke, but it was clear where he was going.

  Mac flushed and shook his head. “But they got a part of it stuck on our ship, they never got it fully attached.” He stopped talking.

  Vas made the same connection that caused Mac to shut up. “That entire escapade was simply to paint trackers on us?”

  “I think so, Captain,” Gosta said as he flipped a switch and split the front view screen. A few more changes and a colored film appeared over the part of the screen that wasn’t facing the Scurrilous Monk. Red, blue, yellow, all showed nothing. Nevertheless, green lit up an entire section of the hull—right near where the broken electro net had been stuck. A small dusting of tiny objects as if the ship had drifted through a space snowstorm.

  “Let me guess, micro trackers.” Vas turned to chastise Mac, but he was standing at his station, his light blue eyes wide, his jaw slack, and a stunned look on his pale face.

  “She was heartbroken. I know she was. She…used me, didn’t she?” He fell back into the pilot’s netting with a sigh as if the entire world was ending.

  Vas knew he thought of himself as a ladies’ man. He wasn’t. He also thought of himself as a mastermind of wheeling and dealing. He wasn’t that either. He was a damn good pilot, but that wasn’t enough for him.

  He was going to have to pull up his big boy panties and deal though.

  “Gosta, how fast can we get that crap off?”

  “I can get a crew to start immediately. It might take two hours to get it all off though. They used top of the line micros on it. At least we warranted the very best.”

  Vas had her finger on the comm button, ready to resume speaking to the vizier, when Gosta’s words finally settled in. She pulled her hand back. “Wait, top of the line? Like pricey?”

  At Gosta’s nod, she started swearing, then called for Flarik to come back to the deck.

  Before the lawyer could get back up there, Xsit called to her. “Captain, Vizier Ramoth is hailing us again.”

  Of course he was. He was trying to figure out if she’d caught on. “Gosta, have a crew ready to take those things off, but we’re going to reuse them so they need to collect and contain, not destroy.”

  Flarik came out of the lift as Gosta started calling in who he was going to need. Vas wanted to use Mac, but it would be best if he were in the pilot’s sling in case things went sideways. Or rather, more sideways.

  “You needed me?” Flarik settled in and took one of the auxiliary consoles. This ship had way more stations than it needed to run up here. Whoever actually owned it before had been ripped off by their crew. Padding crews wasn’t unheard of on ships with inexperienced owners.

  “Yes, I do. Can you review the contract we have with Vizier Ramoth? Specifically, look for anything about what we’re looking for? He’s playing us. Telling us he’s financially wiped out, then spending way more than it cost him to hire us to buy brand-new”—she looked to Gosta, and continued at his nod—“high-end trackers to follow us. For a simple retrieval mission. Find something in the contract that allows us a way out.”

  Flarik had already pulled up the document on the station’s computer, but raised one eyebrow. “This is one of my contracts, Captain. It is very solid.”

  Vas waved her hand at Flarik. “I know. I also know if anyone can figure out what this bastard is doing from a legal end, it’ll be you.”

  “Thank you,” Flarik said, then frowned. “It does raise the question then, why would he tip us off that he knew we were nowhere near the targeted planet?”

  “That is a damn good question,” Vas said as she settled down in her command chair. “One which I believe I will now let him tell me. Of course, he just might be that cocky. The rich often are.” She flipped open the comm. “I am so sorry, Vizier, we’ve had a little technical problem. Now, did you say you thought we were no longer near Mayhira? What made you think that? We’re right outside the space lanes dealing with a bad motivator.”

  “I…I believe I was told that a ship had spotted you out in the Cane IV system. They knew I had hired you and were concerned.” His voice crept a little higher.

  Whatever his reason for tracking the Warrior Wen
ch, and whatever his reason for asking about their location, he realized one or both might be in error now. How cocky was he that he didn’t think she’d notice the trackers?

  Vas drummed her fingers on the console. Of course, most retrieval artists wouldn’t have the equipment she did, nor the people to quickly cut through the issue of mostly invisible trackers. Under normal circumstances, she might try to draw this out longer, make him squirm for whatever he’d done.

  With things going on as they were right now, she didn’t have that luxury. Marli’s ship still hadn’t moved, but there had also been no communications from them.

  “Captain?” The look on Flarik’s face told Vas she’d found something.

  “Vizier Ramoth, I’m going to have to put you back on hold. And please don’t disconnect and hail us again, it’s annoying my comm officer.” Again, Vas closed the line before he could respond.

  “Captain, I found a way out. If the hiring party does anything to hinder, impede, or otherwise annoy the finder party, the finders have the right to abandon the job with no return of funds.” She shrugged. “Well, that’s a summation, the entire passage is about three pages long.”

  The thing was they would have to tie Mac’s ex-girlfriend to the trackers, then the vizier to the ex-girlfriend. “Mac, what was your girlfriend’s last name?”

  Mac was out of the pilot’s sling chair again and he looked around, but Bathie wasn’t on deck at the moment. “It was Thoram, why?”

  Vas shook her head. Not even a creative fake last name, Thoram for Ramoth? “And her first name?”

  From the look on Mac’s face he finally caught on. And he was not happy about it. “Deithera.” He rolled back into the pilot sling with a sigh.

  Vas flicked open the comm again. “Thank you for waiting, so many issues with our motivator right now. Vizier, how is dear Deithera? Mac was very concerned that she might be mad at him.” Now a skilled con man would have no problem making up a lie on the spot. But then a skilled one probably wouldn’t have tried to rush whatever real job was going on by trying to force Vas to get back on track retrieving his items, or whatever was really in that locked storage unit. This was something far more than just a retrieval of lost heirlooms for a down-on-his-luck former bureaucrat. He was spending too much money—money he supposedly didn’t have.

  Ramoth was not a skilled con man. “She’s fine…I mean, whom did you say?” If his voice got any higher he’d be competing with the eunuchs of Zabetha for prime opera parts. “I’m afraid I misheard that.”

  “Ramoth, Ramoth, dear Ramoth. We have more than enough evidence in place to indicate that your daughter tried to trap us with an electro net. It failed, but it does breach our contract.” She almost mentioned the trackers, but she had a better idea. Besides, she still wasn’t sure why he’d had them planted. Right now she wanted him to back off and be pleading with her.

  “Captain! I…your crew is the only one I trust to get back my heirlooms. I can’t afford to hire anyone else and they will be moved from their current location soon.”

  Yup, still trying out for the choir. He didn’t even comment about her no longer using his title. Clearly money wasn’t actually a problem for him, if he could buy those annoying trinkets hanging on the hull of her ship. Yet he wanted her to still think it was. “I am very disappointed with you, Ramoth.”

  “My daughter is impetuous. She was upset about your pilot and acted without my knowledge. I only found out when I saw the charges to my account for the net. I didn’t warn you because I was hoping she wouldn’t go through with it.”

  Vas hoped he had tall boots on; he was hip deep in shit and flinging it around like a Palithian dervish. She needed to find out what he and his daughter had actually been up to. But she had a few other more pressing issues to deal with.

  “I simply can’t—”

  “I’ll double the finder’s fee.” He cut her off, then regrouped. “I’ll be having to, um, sell off some holdings in the mines, but I’ll do it. I’ll even extend the date a few days—they wouldn’t be moving them yet.” He must have felt confident about the new deal. His voice was lowering even as he spoke.

  As much as Vas wanted to tell him to go to hell, she also wanted to find out what was going on, and what it was she was supposed to retrieve. Anything that involved this much work must be worth a hell of a lot more than he was letting on. She just didn’t have the time to deal with it now.

  “I would need your word that you will not contact us, or interfere in anyway until the new delivery date. No matter what you may hear from other ships.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And you will sign a new contract, also without question, that my lawyer will be sending to you.”

  A slight pause, clearly he feared Flarik more than Vas. “Agreed. And I do apologize again for the mishap. My daughter will be taken care of.”

  “We will be in contact in a week and a half. Tor Dain, out.” Vas smiled as she punched the disconnect button.

  “Gosta? How is our retrieval team doing on those damn trackers? Are they getting them off intact?”

  He tilted his head toward his screen, then nodded. “Slow work, but yes, they are intact. They’d come off faster if we could just destroy them.” His question hung out there for a few moments.

  Vas looked around the deck, but everyone else had the same look of confusion. She sighed. “Think about it, folks. He doesn’t know we know about them. We can tag a drone and send it all over the place. He can’t contact us to ask what the hell we’re doing but he’ll be chasing the drone and if he is reporting where we are to someone else, his employers will be lost as well. And I assure you—he has employers behind him.”

  The more she thought about it, the more she believed someone was paying Ramoth for this entire thing. She’d looked into his finances before she took the job. He was broke. Which meant someone was behind him with money—someone who needed this job done, but didn’t want anyone to know who was actually behind it. It would be good to keep him, and his backers, on a string until the other issues—like Marli’s ship, Deven, and whoever had been after Aithnea—were done. His situation had gone far beyond a simple retrieval job.

  Flarik was still looking at her console, but she let out a laugh. “I like it. And I have modified a suitably annoying contract for our friend. The only way he’d agree to it was if he was desperate. I agree with you, his heirlooms, if they even exist at all, are not what’s making him panic. He might not even know what he has sent us after if he is not the one behind this.”

  “Captain?” Gosta’s voice had gone up almost as high as Ramoth’s. Vas went to his console and saw the same fear on his face.

  “What?”

  “This.” He tapped the screen with a long, shaking finger.

  It looked like the outside of her ship, and three crew people standing around pointing at a small dot on the screen. “And?”

  “The coding…oh, sorry,” Gosta said and clicked part of the screen. A series of familiar symbols popped up. Vas couldn’t read them, but she knew Gosta probably could. Deven and Marli definitely could.

  They were in Asarlaí.

  12

  “ Are there Asarlaí trackers on my ship? How? Why? Where?” Vas started punching buttons on Gosta’s console to pull the image in tighter, but absolutely no answers appeared. The Asarlaí were dead and gone, with the lone exception of the crazy lady in charge of the ship across the way. Any tech of theirs would be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

  The madman and his disciples that they’d destroyed months ago were believers in a returning of the Asarlaí, but Marli was sure none of her people had survived their self-inflicted genocide of almost eight hundred years ago. In her opinion, the Rillianian monks had been following scam artists.

  “I have no idea, Captain. The markings are only on a few and I’m having all of them scanned before they’re packaged up.” Gosta settled down quickly. Now that he’d passed the information on to Vas, he was no longer the one who h
ad to worry about it. At least in his mind.

  “Damn,” Vas said as she continued to stare at the screen. Not that they changed, or moved, but having Asarlaí tech on her ship, especially things not put there by Marli, was not good. “Keep them separate like you’re doing. Also, line their box with triple mag-lock shielding. Make sure we keep them in a secured spot on the ship.” Secured usually meant a smuggler hide. There were more than a few of those on her ship, and some were as high or higher in decon rating than the official decon chambers.

  “We need Marli,” Vas said before she thought about it.

  Only Gosta caught it. “What did you say?”

  Vas shook her head at her slip. “She’s an expert on Asarlaí items. Knows their language better than some of the folks on this ship know Common.”

  Gosta’s eyes narrowed, but he nodded. He didn’t completely believe her, but she was sure even his brain wouldn’t have stumbled on the truth. No one’s would.

  His computer pinged at him and he disengaged his staring contest. Vas wasn’t competing with him, but not having two eyes boring into her was a good start.

  “We know where the empress’s ship that had been on Mayhira is. It’s still on Mayhira.” He shook his head at something else he’d found, and punched up an item into the main viewing screen.

  It was a wanted poster with Vas’s name on it. She was wanted for disturbing the peace and other offenses that led to that. The poster was most unflattering, seeing as it was taken from a picture of her on the run, and after pouring beer on herself for half an hour.

  “You will not be going after Deven, I’m afraid,” Gosta said. His brief time as a partial second-in-command had changed him. His voice almost sounded like he was chastising her.