Free Assassin's Hunger by Jessa Slade Page B

down.”
    “Seems the captain believes otherwise,” he said back to her.
    She slipped free of his grasp—his fingers clenched on the lingering heat of her body—and staggered down the tilting corridor, slamming into first one wall then the other as the Asphodel careened, seemingly on the verge of going down.
    He followed her—again with the following; he needed to stop doing that—and they made their way to the corridor outside the bridge.
    Jorr was there already along with Patter, another crew member. Both were armed to the teeth. Literally in Jorr’s case since he held an unsheathed nano knife in his mouth. A nano knife’s rudimentary AI interface made it a flashy but unpredictable weapon, most often used in scripted action vids where the blood was no more real than the heroes.
    “We won’t be able to break atmo with a thruster down,” Patter said.
    “Put us down and we’ll break something else,” Jorr growled around the knife blade. It growled back softly in response. He glanced at Shaxi. “You with me, robot girl?”
    “Right ahead of you,” she said.
    Eril stiffened against an unfamiliar twist of possessiveness. If anyone was going to be following her, it was him. “Can I borrow someone’s gun?”
    They all looked at him, eyebrows raised in six identical disbelieving arcs.
    He spread his hands. “If we’re going to charge out there, guns blazing, it’d be nice to have one.”
    Jorr spit out the knife and tossed it to him, underhanded. “Maybe save the blazing for your kitchen pans, auxo, and leave the fighting to us.”
    Eril caught the tossed knife competently enough, though not so competently that anyone might think it odd for an auxo, but Patter smirked. Shaxi just watched him, brows furrowed again, the gold rings around her pupils expanding and constricting. The Asphodel ’s crew thought of him as nothing more than a simple supply clerk. But she’d doubted him from the moment she saw him.
    Maybe it took one merciless killer to truly see another.
    The haft of the knife quivered under his fingers as its component particles tasted his sweat. Some nano blades, usually the larger ceremonial sizes with more extensive colonies of nanotech, allegedly came to possess a primitive sentience. Most civilized societies along the sheerways objected to the blades because for all their cutting-edge science, the resultant AIs—created and nurtured in conflict and fed on their holders’ violence—tended toward instability. Those who carried them were even worse. No one trusted such an unnatural melding of man and machine.
    He averted his gaze from Shaxi when she slapped her palm over the comm screen on the wall. She used her cyber-embeds to override the blinking alarm signal and patched through to the Asphodel ’s forward cam. They had a glimpse of a dozen figures swarming into the otherwise empty hangar.
    “That doesn’t look so good,” Patter muttered.
    The ship abruptly tilted upward, showing them only the pitted gray surface of the hangar ceiling.
    “That looks worse,” Jorr said.
    The bridge door slid open, and the captain gripped the doorway when the ship tilted again. “Party out here and I wasn’t invited?”
    Patter crossed the plasma cannon over his chest. The giant gun could blow a small sheership out of the sky and seriously destabilize even a larger ship. “We were just getting ready to hang the ‘surprise’ banner.”
    “Save it for now. We’re only dealing with a ground incursion.”
    Eril steadied himself against the wall. “Yet they seem to have gotten the drop on us.” He wondered why the underwriters hadn’t found a way to alert him their enemies were so close.
    Or was this the work of a secondary team? Had the underwriters gotten impatient?
    As if she didn’t notice Deynah’s imposing scowl wasn’t an invitation to opine, Shaxi said, “The fact they got so close and there’s been no response from port security means someone was paid off. We’re on our own.”
    The