Chapter 2:
Talon’s feet carried him back to the bridge, but his thoughts stayed on Jessica.
She was a human, but she fought like the finest of Revant warriors. She was fierce and proud, and she was skilled in combat of all type.
She was a terrific asset, and she was one who was starting to be harder for him to have around.
His body always went tight with lust whenever she was around, and he knew that that was problematic. She had no interest in him at all, and he doubted that that was just because he was the leader of their crew.
Jessica had a deeply ingrained distrust of everyone around her, even him, and after everything that she had gone through; he could not really blame her for that. She had been betrayed by not just her fellow Capos—a betrayal she had rather expected, all things considered—she had been betrayed by one of the very people she had been trying to help.
His lips compressed as he recalled that she had said that the informant had sold her out for nothing more than a few pounds of nutro-loaf and a hundred credits.
It was pitiful and sad that someone would be desperate enough to sell a secret and a woman who was helping to keep the very person who had informed on her from starving.
But then again, he knew how it could happen.
When he had been a prisoner in the mines, one of his own people, a fellow Revant, had sold out a secret for an extra ration of water and food. Just one extra ration and he had never gotten it either because the overseers at the mine had killed him as soon as he had spilled that secret.
That secret had been that Talon and his brothers, as well as several of the other crew members forced into that slavery, were hiding the weapons they had been forging out of rock ends and bits of broken mining tools. They had been planning on using those things in an escape effort that was thwarted before it ever began thanks to the informer in their midst.
He understood betrayal. He completely understood why Jessica trusted no one and likely never would. But that distrust and fear of betrayal meant that she reserved her loyalty for herself and had yet to tender any to him or to any other member of the crew.
She was not exactly keeping it a secret that she was just there because she wanted to get her share of the plunder that they took from the ships that they wrecked. She cared nothing about his personal need to wipe out the Gorlites, the parasitic race that was the scourge of the skies. The same race that had helped to engineer the death of his parents and had sold him and his siblings, as well as many others of his people, into slavery.
He hated the Gorlites, and that hatred coupled with the need for revenge for what they had done meant that he was determined to erase that species from the entire universe forever. As far as he was concerned their extinction was not only necessary for his revenge, but to prevent them from doing the same to anyone else.
Jessica thought that his mission to eradicate the Gorlites was problematic on a lot of levels. She felt that he often paid more attention to hunting that race than hunting down ships that they could wreck and then pocket the credits. She argued, quite often, that they lost too many crewmembers during battles with the Gorlites and that hunting them took up far too much time that could be better spent earning credits.
He could not argue that she wasn’t correct in those things because she was. He had deliberately turned away from ships that he had known were ripe for the plucking because he had gotten word that the worm-like species that he hated so much was nearby and he would much rather kill them than wreck ships.
Talon knew that as soon as Jessica had the credits that she needed in order to live on a planet where her Old Earth status would not cause her to be hauled into a Federation prison cell, she would leave him. A small but insistent voice inside his head often asked him if that was why he chose not to wreck the ships that he did turn away from.
It was foolish of him to want her so much, but he did. It was getting harder to deny that and eventually he would either have to send her off the ship and out of sight in order to get her off his mind or simply…
Simply what?
Tell her what he felt for her?
That was laughable. Jessica had no interest in him. Of all the females in the universe, he had to desire one who felt absolutely nothing for him!
The bridge hummed with activity. Caleb was a young human who had found himself in debt on one of the pleasure planets and was being hunted by the Federation task forces. His answer to that was to take shelter in and stowaway upon Talon’s ship. He waved at Talon urgently.
Talon strode to where Caleb stood. “What is it?”
Caleb’s fingers stroked the scraggly beard covering the lower half of his youthful face. “There is a massive fleet headed right toward us. All Federation, and all warships. There’s really no way to avoid them. Their cloaking devices would get us past them as we couldn’t get high enough to get over them and dropping them would send us skimming over the planet’s force fields.”
Talon peered down at the monitor. Caleb was right, it was a vast fleet. There were at least one hundred heat signatures showing on the screen. The size of the signatures signified warships. A frown marred Talon’s forehead as he considered that.
“That makes no sense. The Federation is not currently at war with any planet or system. Why would they move an entire fleet, and in such a formation?”
Jessica’s voice spoke from behind him, making his head turn to look at her. “I would say that they are at war. The evidence is there on the screen. Whoever they are at war against likely does not know that they are about to have a battle brought to them. What systems are nearby?”
Inwardly Talon bristled. Jessica had a cool, commanding way about her that both aroused him and irritated him. She was used to being in charge, and she had a real problem with authority, especially his. He should’ve asked those questions himself. He would have if she had given him a moment to speak!
He said, “The only nearby planets and system are pleasure planets. We are in the Star World system. There would be no need to bring a war to the system because it has Federation loyalty and alliances. It feeds many credits into the Federation’s pockets and always has done that willingly.”
Jessica said, “Back on Old Earth they used to tell the story about how many, many centuries ago, all of the ships would come across the water—”
