Alien Outlaw Read online

  Alien Outlaw

  C.F. Harris

  Contents

  1. Rachel

  2. Vrath

  3. Rachel

  4. Vrath

  5. Rachel

  6. Vrath

  7. Rachel

  8. Vrath

  9. Rachel

  10. Rachel

  11. Vrath

  12. Rachel

  13. Rachel

  14. Vrath

  15. Rachel

  16. Vrath

  17. Rachel

  18. Vrath

  19. Vrath

  20. Rachel

  21. Rachel

  22. Vrath

  23. Rachel

  24. Vrath

  25. Rachel

  26. Vrath

  More from C.F. Harris

  Alien Outlaw

  C.F. Harris

  Copyright 2019 C.F. Harris

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by C.F. Harris, March 2019

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  1

  Rachel

  My grip tightened as I moved in close. I held my breath then chided myself for it.

  There was nothing but the cold vacuum of space between me and my target. It’s not like the sound of my breathing was going to carry out of my suit and through that vacuum.

  Old habits died hard, I guess.

  Closer. Closer. Close enough that I could practically feel it. I flexed my fingers on my free hand as I prepared to grab my target and forced trigger discipline on my other hand so I didn’t fire too soon.

  Some might say this was ugly work, but I knew it required delicacy. Precision.

  I slammed into the target moving fast enough that the impact reverberated up through my suit. My breath was deafening in the small dome that showed me all of the cosmos laid out around me.

  I was just a tiny speck in all of that. It would’ve been humbling if I didn’t have a job to do.

  And it was a job I was very good at.

  I squeezed the trigger and charged plasma lanced out. Slammed into the target. That target melted in a bright flash that my visor automatically compensated for, and then it was done.

  “Good weld Rachel,” Kotomi said through the commlink.

  “As always,” I said with a grin.

  The chunk of metal where some micrometeorite or bit of space debris had knocked the array out of whack still glowed, but it wouldn’t be glowing for long.

  The cold of space always took care of that. Sure it might take a few billion years in some cases, but there was no outrunning the vacuum and entropy in the long run.

  “Come on Rachel,” Dirk’s voice came through the commlink. “I’ve done three cuts while you were working on that one.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, a hint of irritation coming to my voice as I glanced at him through the lattice cage that held me and Kotomi. “Maybe that’s because they have you doing the grunt work any idiot straight out of tech school could do out there in the open.”

  “Bitch,” he growled.

  “Come on people,” Captain Arnold’s voice filtered through. “We have a job to do here. This array isn’t going to fix itself. Now get to it.”

  I sighed. Luckily the commlink was closed down so they couldn’t hear my sigh.

  This wasn’t what I’d wanted to do with my life.

  Sure I wanted to travel in space. I’d wanted that ever since the first time my mom pointed to the night sky on Praxis VII-C and explained that I was looking at light from the Sol system that had started its journey back when people from the ancestral home were still riding around on hairy animals to get from point A to point B.

  I guess I should’ve remembered the old phrase about being careful what you wished for. Here I was out in the middle of space with all of observable creation before me, but I was a glorified mechanic repairing a warp space communication array.

  Yeah, talk about the opposite of going out there and exploring strange new worlds like the ancient legends talked about.

  Another sigh. The weld was done and it was time to move onto the next one. My heads up display gave me a quick summary of the next part of the job.

  Great. This next one was going to require actual work on the circuitry to keep cutting the busted piece of the antenna from sending feedback through the rest of the system and frying the whole relay. This wasn’t simply cutting off chunks of metal that’d broken apart in a hard to reach spot in anticipation of moving in a new unit.

  At least it was a challenge. Good challenges could be hard to come by on this job. I was almost thankful this thing had run into some space rocks that I was calling meteorites in my head for all that they weren’t streaking through an atmosphere.

  “Moving on to the circuit job,” I said.

  I looked up the vast length of the array. I was in the interior cage and so the thing looked like a massive latticed cave all around me with the stars winking through the openings that were almost large enough for a human to fit through.

  In the distance I could just make out the shape of the Lucky Linda. Named after Captain Arnold’s daughter, he claimed, though I was pretty sure it’d originally been named after his ex-wife who also happened to be his daughter’s namesake.

  It wasn’t much, but it had engines that allowed it to travel through warp space and enough space to house a repair crew and our equipment which was enough to get us this contract from the Aegis Fleet.

  Another sigh. Yeah, definitely not what I’d wanted to do with my life, but what choice did I have?

  Join the military? No thanks. The ancient fantasy of some massive galaxy-spanning federation of aliens and humans all hanging out and singing kumbaya to each other was just that: fantasy.

  Which meant joining the military was more likely to find me getting shipped down to some godforsaken planet to wipe it clean of aliens in the name of truth, justice, and the Terran way than out among the stars exploring.

  Travel the galaxy. Meet interesting new species. Destroy them from a distance with asteroids slung at their homeworld wherever possible.

  And likely get my ass shot off in the process when the asteroid didn’t do the job and they needed grunts to go do a re-enactment of some of the nastier squishier bits of Starship Troopers.

  No thank you.

  “Come on Rachel,” Kotomi’s voice said quietly through the commlink. “It’s not all that bad is it? We’re getting overtime for this one, after all.”

  I looked up to my companion far above me in the array interior. We were “lucky” enough to be small enough to fit in here through the access panel, so we got the shit work.

  She was tethered to me because that’s how it was supposed to be done, but it wasn’t necessary in this case with that comm lattice forming a cage all around us. Not much danger of drifting off into the void with that protecting us, but procedure was procedure.

  “Yeah,” I groused, making sure I was on the local line between the two of us and not chatting where the rest of the ship or Captain Arnold could hear me. “Traveling out among the stars so I can do galactic telecom repair work is exactly what I want to be doing with my life!”

  “At least you’re not in the military,” she said. “This might not be glamorous, but it is necessary and exempt.”

  “Sounds perfect for a coward like you,” Dirk said.

  “Didn’t Arnold talk to you about getting onto the local commlink without telling people you were patching in?” I asked. “Besides, you’re out here exempt right along with us asshole.”

  Apparently the log
ic of what I said worked through that pea brain of his. That or he was ashamed and decided not to pursue that line of insult. Not that it would stop him for long.

  I could see my target up ahead. It looked different from the sort of damage you’d see from your typical microscopic bits of space dust and debris slamming into a sensitive piece of equipment.

  I pulled up and flipped my external camera on.

  “Get a look at this,” I said, switching to the commlink that patched me into the Linda.

  The panel had been wrenched open. Something strong had been out here, and that set a prickle running down my spine.

  There weren’t supposed to be strong somethings out here in the middle of space. Suddenly all the stories I’d heard growing up of monsters lurking in the void came back with a vengeance.

  I forced myself to calm down. I wasn’t going to waste life support freaking out over children’s stories. Even if they were compelling children’s stories that suddenly seemed so much more terrifying with nothing but the cold vacuum of uninhabited space for light years around me.

  “Weird,” Arnold said over the comms, his voice absolutely calm.

  Of course he’d be calm. He was safely cocooned in the ship behind what meager weapons we had. It’s not like a star troll or a space vampire could do any damage to him safe in there.

  The space vampire would have to ask permission to step into the airlock before it could do any damage, for starters.

  “What is it?” I asked. “There shouldn’t be anything out here that can do this.”

  “Probably a weird impact that did it,” Kotomi chimed in, obviously inspecting the damage through my video feed.

  I reached out and touched the panel. The way the metal twisted and charred didn’t look like any impact I’d ever seen. Not to mention there was no corresponding hole in the latticework that would indicate something punching through it.

  “This looks like someone shot it,” I said. “Like they came in through the access panel and shot it.”

  Something drew my attention inside the panel. A flash of light that couldn’t be accounted for by the meager light of the distant star that held this system together.

  I pulled off a piece of twisted metal, careful to grab it in such a way that it didn’t pierce my gloves.

  These suits were rated for industrial commercial work which meant they weren’t supposed to make like a popped balloon every time I touched something sharp, but I figured better safe than sorry.

  I’d be very sorry if I punctured my suit here in this cage where I couldn’t easily get back out to the ship.

  “Shit,” I breathed.

  There was only one thing that light source could be. It was a small light blinking every few seconds. A warp space transmitter calling home. Wherever the fuck “home” was.

  “What the…” Kotomi whispered.

  “I know, right?” I replied.

  It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking about the transmitter I’d just found. No sooner had I uncovered it than it started blinking furiously.

  Did I do that? Maybe it was rigged to go off if it was exposed to light. Maybe there were a hundred other traps set on the thing, and that didn’t make me feel any better considering one of those traps might be something designed to kill yours truly.

  “Rachel…” Kotomi said.

  “I know,” I said. “We need to make sure there aren’t more of these and…”

  “Rachel. Look,” Kotomi said, her voice firm.

  There was something about her tone as she said it that had a pit of ice settling in my stomach. That and the way there was suddenly a new shadow moving over us where there shouldn’t be anything casting a shadow, let alone something big enough to cover the entire array.

  I slowly turned, terrified of what I was going to find.

  2

  Vrath

  “What do you mean we’re not the only ship in the system?” I growled.

  It was a low menacing growl. The kind of growl that promised very bad things to the person delivering bad news.

  Not that bad news was always bad for the person delivering it. A crew didn’t last very long if the captain got in the habit of shooting the messenger. Even on a privateer ship.

  Much better to have a policy of only shooting the messenger when they’d done something so monumentally stupid that they had it coming. Like now with Doran.

  “I’m telling you there shouldn’t be any ships in this area! This is out of the way! It was derelict space junk! I even made sure to disable its ability to call home with a drone!”

  My eyes narrowed. “Space junk? You told me there was valuable tech on this thing and now you’re telling me it’s nothing but junk? And why would you disable it with a drone? That’s probably what they’re doing out there!”

  The growl was lower. More threatening. It more than matched my mood, and it wasn’t a good one.

  Doran seemed to sense his doom in that mood, and he shied away from me.

  Good. He knew the price of failure. I tried to be an understanding captain. Conditions on this ship were better than most other privateers. I tried to make traveling from system to system pillaging what we could find from the Terrans fun.

  Unfortunately for Doran some of that fun involved the crew occasionally getting together to watch me vaporize someone who’d endangered all of us, and right now he was at the top of that list.

  His eyes darted around the room. I wondered if he expected to find some help from the rest of the crew. If he did then he was seriously mistaken.

  I looked to Vlox. He eyed me steadily, but there was a tightness to his eyes that said he wasn’t any more happy about the situation than I was.

  As well he shouldn’t be. We were deep in Terran space. That would’ve been bad enough, the Terrans had itchy trigger fingers when it came to anyone invading their territory on a good day thanks to launching into space from a war world that had never unified before discovering faster than light travel.

  We’d been stupid to ever declare war on them. As we were learning the hard way. And when they found you deep in their space trying to steal something they thought was theirs? Even if that something was out of the way and they likely wouldn’t miss it right away if there wasn’t already a frigate sitting practically on top of the thing because Doran had disabled it?

  That could be very bad indeed. Assuming a Terran force from their damnable Aegis Fleet capable of challenging us got to us in time.

  It was a race now.

  My fingers danced across the screen on my command chair and pulled up a three dimensional readout of the system. The Terran frigate had nothing as ridiculous as a control center located right on the top of the ship where anyone could shoot it off.

  Ancient humans and their entertainments we’d intercepted and analyzed for hints about our enemy. Their ideas about space travel would’ve been laughable if they hadn’t proven themselves so formidable in combat now that they were exploring strange new worlds for real and not just within the confines of cheap entertainment sets.

  “One small frigate on the other side of the communications array,” Vlox said, again with a tinge of unhappiness in his voice.

  I glared at Doran.

  “A communications array. You had us come all this way to poach something that could’ve been found on the border!”

  Doran drywashed his hands. Glanced around the room as though he was expecting help from someone else in the control center.

  If he thought he was getting help from anyone in this crew then he had another thing coming.

  “But the technology they use here deep in their territory would surely be better than…”

  I sighed. Made a slight motion with my fingers. I didn’t have to say anything. Rikar knew what was needed.

  “I’m going to vaporize you later when I have more time,” I said as the Rikar wrapped a beefy arm around Doran and dragged him to the exit. “You’d better hope we find something to make this trip worthwhile. Otherwise I
’m going to make sure to put everything below your neck in a paralytic field and start the vaporization at the tip of your big toe. I’ll put it on the slowest setting, too.”

  Doran’s eyes went wide. I was mad enough that I was sorely tempted to actually do it. Not that I’d done something like that before.

  That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to let him think I’d do it though. I had a reputation to maintain.

  “Get me a scan on that Terran frigate,” I said.

  “Already done,” Vlox said, really not sounding happy now. “It looks like it’s a simple repair vessel. No armament worth speaking of, but also not much of anything worthwhile to speak of either.”

  I tapped a finger against my lips. Not much armament worth speaking of. That would make it easy to take, at least.

  “Low investment to take a low value target,” I muttered.

  Vlox must’ve been thinking along the same lines.

  “We could disable their life support and then pick it apart at our leisure. It’s not military, but salvaging a human ship would at least start to make up for the danger and cost of this trip.”

  “We’d have to go pretty far into Vosk space to salvage her if we kill her crew,” I said, frowning. Yet another one of those times when my reputation and what I’d prefer to do were at odds. “You know I don’t like to go any deeper into our territory than I have to.”

  “Or we could not kill the crew and make even more,” Vlox practically purred.