Chapter 19

Mitnick

We lay on our sides, curled together beneath the emergency blankets. Harper was kept cozy and warm by the wing I'd slipped beneath her, and the other draped on top of her. Her breathing was slow and steady, and I relished listening to the sound now that the winds outside had died down. The storm had passed, which meant an end was coming to our brief escape from the galaxy.

For three days the storm had raged, which kept us locked inside this tent and shut off from any communication. We'd missed our rendezvous point with the Varakartoom, and if they had tried to reach us, we did not know. My com was down. Or it had been until five minutes ago when it had started beeping on my wrist. I'd shut off the noise because I was not waking my mate for anything except a threat to her safety.

I'd worn her out. She was tired after all the mating we'd been up to while confined to the tent. She called it a ‘honeymoon' and I intended to look up what that meant as soon as I was able to; I wanted to know about all her Earth customs. I didn't want to miss a single one, especially if they were about celebrating our mating.

My body had fully recovered from the damage that the laser shot had wrought, and the subsequent exposure to the storm. So had Harper, but I wanted Dravion to check her over once we returned to the Varakartoom. I felt a niggle of worry about my place on the ship: I had disobeyed my captain by taking the shuttle. Not a direct order exactly, but I'd done some very creative interpreting of his wishes. Asmoded was not a lenient captain. He wasn't going to be happy that we'd dragged him and the crew into this. Let alone the danger to his mate and his son...

Harper started to stir, rising from sleep slowly but surely in her usual, adorable manner. A soft stirring of her head, the way she opened her mouth as her lashes fluttered. She always looked confused for a few seconds, like she didn't know where she was. Then her eyes would locate me and a smile would spread on her face that made me feel on top of the world.

"Hi," she said softly, "It's quiet outside… Does that mean the storm ended?" I lifted my wing off her so she could sit up. It was her routine to check our supplies first thing each morning; counting out our ration bars and checking how much water was left. I let her do this because it gave her peace of mind, even if I knew exactly how much we had, and so did she.

"It does. We'll have to leave soon." I had used my visor to connect quietly with my drones while she slumbered, and all except one had survived the storm. They were doing recon for us now, and I'd already verified my connection with the mining planet's orbital system was intact, too. I did not like how vulnerable we were. I needed to take the fight to the crimelord, and I needed to do it in a way that wouldn't risk Harper.

"Okay, I'll get dressed. You think we'll have a chance to refill our canteens?" I helped her with her clothing while I assured her that we'd take care of it. Then I cut a hole in one of our blankets so she could wear that as something she called a ‘poncho' over her head. Readings from my drones had informed me of the current weather conditions, but after that freak storm that lasted three days, I wasn't going to trust that.

When we emerged from our partially buried tent not much later, it was at the sight of a completely changed world. The clearing had gotten bigger, but the trees the storm had toppled had been buried by the sand the wind had brought. The trees that still stood had lost any last remaining leaves and been sanded clear of their bark. We were in a ghostly wood of pale white, skeletal trees at the foot of a mountain pierced by one of the surveying lances, which stuck like an ominous warning into the roiling, cloudy sky.

I unearthed the emergency tent and packed it back into one of the pouches strapped to my body. My eyes never lost track of Harper as she wandered around the clearing and snapped pictures of our surroundings with her datapad. "I should write an article about the devastating effects of this mining practice," she was muttering to herself.

My drones returned the mapping data and location intelligence I'd been looking for and my attempts to contact our shuttle went through at the same time. Good, now I knew where we needed to go next. The shuttle hadn't been accessed, our security was too good, and the sandstorm had kept people away. Its computers had kept running all this time, working to crack the encryption on the data Batok was so desperate for. They weren't done yet, which meant my tweaks hadn't been good enough, but I was confident it wouldn't be long now.

"Okay, I'm ready to go. Are we leaving this planet? Back to your ship?" Harper asked while carefully tucking away her tablet beneath the improvised poncho. She gave the fast-moving clouds above us a dubious glare and I reached out with a wing to cup her beneath its protective shelter. It was satisfying to see her lean into the regrown feathers with a sigh.

"Not yet. We missed our rendezvous with the Varakartoom. Let me see if I can hail them. Now that I've got a connection to the shuttle again, I should be able to." Activating my visor, I pulled up the communication feed for the ship. A message from them had been waiting on my com, but the storm had scrambled it. I knew what it would say, anyway.

"Mitnick, come in. Where the fuck are you?" demanded Jaxin in my ear when the signal connected with a click. The Weapon Master was always blunt, but he sounded even more stern than he usually did. I hid a wince from my mate and contemplated the best way to respond. The captain had to be angry that I'd taken Harper and the shuttle without telling him my plan.

"We're on Batok's little mining planet. You know, the one where I found Harper." I glanced at my little Novi and saw that she was frowning at the drifts of sand at her feet, a worried little crease between her brows. I urged her closer to my side with my wing and she came happily, nestling beneath my arm against my chest.

Jaxin confirmed he knew the location. "You missed your agreed meeting time with Aramon. What happened?" He already sounded calmer, which I took to be a good sign. It was simple to fall back into the habits ingrained in me by years of serving on the ship, serving with males like Jaxin and the captain. In succinct sentences, I explained why I'd taken Harper and gone to this planet. Then I outlined what we'd gone through since our arrival.

I never got to speak to the captain himself, and I wondered if that was on purpose, or if I'd just reached the ship when he wasn't on the bridge. If he was with his mate or son, he wouldn't let anyone interrupt him unless the ship was in grave danger. Jaxin agreed to direct the Varakartoom to an orbiting position above the planet, which meant our exit would be easy once we were ready to take it. It wasn't far for them because I'd picked a rendezvous point nearby but out of range of the orbiting station. Batok wouldn't notice them until they arrived inside the solar system.

That was who I was really after now, the crimelord himself. The information from the orbiting station made me think he was nearby, and I knew just who to press to get us close. "Come, Harper. I know where we need to go next." She trotted over, flung her arms around my neck, and grinned. My dual hearts soared at that look, and for a moment, it was very easy to forget all the dangers that still loomed over our heads.

I flung us into the air with a few powerful beats of my wings and was delighted when Harper laughed rather than screamed this time. "I think I'm starting to like this. It's a bit like a rollercoaster," she said. It was automatic to reach out through my visor and implant for a search on what the word ‘rollercoaster' meant. Contraptions meant for entertainment on set tracks. They seemed rather pointless, but maybe humans who could not fly needed that kind of thing.

As I winged us over the desolate, barren planet, I outlined my plan to my mate. She listened attentively, but I could tell she was focused just as much on the damaged world. She had a soft heart, and it tore at her to see the results of Batok's greed. The storm had brought more damage, and I knew it would not be long before the atmosphere would turn toxic, unable to provide us with the oxygen we needed to breathe.

It took me an hour to fly from our hiding spot, around the mountain with its ominous spire, to the mining camp on the other side. I brought us to the ground for a covert landing, and then we had to walk the rest of the way or we'd be spotted. Harper kept up with a determined frown as we crossed a rough stretch of uneven, rocky terrain and circled to the remains of a forest for a vantage point on the still-working mining camp.

"That's disgusting," Harper said with a glare at the belching plumes of smoke coming from the heavy machinery. Batok hadn't paid for top-tier mining equipment, and these machines were on their last legs, struggling to extract the remaining ores they could squeeze from this nearly empty mine. My drones brought me back all the information I wanted. The layout of the camp was nearly identical to the one we'd left behind. The barracks were in use, but as I tallied the heat signatures, I had to assume that they were running on half strength.

The office where my target was located was occupied. Perfect. He'd squeal all the details on Batok he had, and then he'd pay for making my Harper suffer in his damn vault. "Stay here," I said to my mate, and I pressed her back against a nearby tree trunk. "I'm going to ensure a way in."

Most of the time, my skills weren't utilized to their fullest potential. My crewmates liked using brute force too much, and it took less time. But I knew I could take control of the gates, their security systems, and even the laser cannons mounted at the top of the gate. From there, it wouldn't take much to sneak the two of us into the compound to take their boss hostage.

I had nearly completed my attack when an alert drew my attention to the data the orbiting station was still feeding me. A ship had arrived above the planet, but from the looks of it, it wasn't the Varakartoom. No, this was a Star Class Cruiser, and from its name, it could only mean one thing: Batok had arrived. That was going to create a mess when the Varakartoom showed up. Our ship would outgun them; it always did, but this was the opposite of the safe extraction I'd been planning.

Harper was much calmer about it when I told her of this new situation. "We'll deal with it. Maybe we'll have that data decrypted by then. We'll have something to barter with." From the fire in her eyes, I had to assume that bartering with Batok was not exactly what she'd prefer. "Aramon seemed eager to fight him with us. Your ship could take him out, couldn't it?"

It could, it was just not usually Asmoded's policy to majorly piss off an influential crimelord. The criminal element hired us as often as the more morally right. Unless it came to Jalima, the biggest crimelord of the twelve. There was nothing Asmoded wouldn't do to put an end to that male, but I couldn't count on such motivations when dealing with Batok.

"They won't unless they have to. They want Batok to leave us alone, but Asmoded has no beef with him. We'll have to figure this out on our own if we can first. I'm in, let's go." The last of their defenses was down, and it was obvious they were not on the lookout for an attack. With their cameras disabled, we could simply walk to the gate and slip inside.

Harper stayed close to my back, and I covered her with my wings when we entered. There was a lone guard lounging in a chair near the gatehouse, but it took care of him before he could so much as blink. We reached the office of the supervisor without any incidents, and the locked door was no barrier either.

My mate kept her hand on my back as I strode inside like I owned the place, a laser pistol in my hand to dissuade the bastard from resisting. "Ovran," I barked at the Xurtal male napping behind his desk. He was a big, bulky guy with red skin and swirling gold marks on his bare arms. It was a point of pride for any Xurtal male to display them to the best effect, but this male was grubby and his gold markings tarnished. Not a male who took pride in much of anything.

He jerked upright with bleary eyes and a confused expression that quickly sharpened into something cunning and mean. "Yes, I'm Ovran," he said, and he rose to his considerable height and stuck out his hand as if this was a business meeting. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

I ignored his outstretched fingers and the fading red at his fingertips; those were a sure sign of his unhealthy habits. "Not your friend," I told him, "But you are going to tell me everything you know about Batok. And then you're going to tell me why you thought letting a girl starve in a vault was fine." Leaving Harper near the door, I stepped around the desk and slammed a palm down on the viewscreens. It engaged their security features, locking his office, and shutting down all communications at the camp. I monitored the frequencies carefully with my drones so there would be no surprises.

Ovran glanced down at the pistol and bared his teeth, not yet suitably impressed, but he would be. When he lifted his eyes to mine, that cunning look was back. It was no surprise when he snapped out a hand to try to take the pistol from me, all the while loudly denying that he worked for a crimelord. He didn't realize who he was dealing with either, but he'd find that out, too.

As soon as he made his move, I flowed with him. My wings snapped out for balance, my free hand collided with his arm, and the hand with the gun moved back while squeezing the trigger. The male shouted in pain, first as my blow reverberated up his arm and made the limb go numb, then when the laser fire struck him in a glancing blow along his neck. A carefully aimed shot that mimicked exactly how I'd been injured a few days ago.

He slapped his hand over the bloody burn with an outraged shout. A shout that morphed into rage a moment later and he launched himself at me as if his previous encounter hadn't just taught him what a bad idea that was. Harper yelped, but the struggle lasted no more than two seconds before I had the bastard pinned to his desk. With his arms twisted behind his back, he had nowhere to go, and I made sure to put more than a little pressure on those stressed joints. He deserved every ounce of pain for what he'd allowed Harper to suffer.

After that, it was the work of a moment to make him squeal.