Chapter 1
Trader ship
En route to Planet Dispora
Her sister had managed to get herself signed up as the next female sacrifice on some backward planet. Had she been stupid, money-hungry, or just unlucky? It could be any of those, knowing Tiana.
Mila settled back in her bunk and nudged the little vid player. So primitive to use this but the ship’s system would pick up most transmissions, and she wasn’t risking confiscation by sending it to her memory chip and playing it via her retina. She chewed off a nail and spat it out. The ship was efficiently run and another nail on the deck floor wouldn’t add much. One of the mech cleaners would pick it up.
The file took its time loading into the player.
She shifted her butt on the rock-hard bunk mattress. She should have been doing some odd jobs on this ship to help defray her passage fee but the Boogers, as she unaffectionately called the rat-faced race that ran this trading ship, were aghast at her history...when they dug it up. She was annoyed that they’d managed to find that. They’d refused to let her leave her room much at all.
Just because she was a thief cross mercenary cross intrepid explorer of dead planets.
As if she’d steal from them, or kill them in their sleep.
Pffft. Mila blew the fringe of hair from atop her nose, rubbed her nose, then turned and bashed her pillow into something resembling softness.
The screen on the player flickered.
Buying this data had taken many days of negotiation and far too much cash. The Booger traderman had only released it because they were close to landing. He’d made her promise not to tell his captain.
Fricking stoneshifters guarded info about them and their Planet Dispora as if it was precious...or deadly in some way.
What was their weakness? Tiana had sent umpteen panicked emails to her on the starwebz. The gist of most was: I’m being sacrificed to a stoneshifter called Lord Zarblu. Help! ASAP.
Normally she might have frowned, sent back a: Sorry, I’m busy.
Tiana was often in trouble and she rescued herself ninety-nine times out of the one hundred when Mila hadn’t managed to arrive.
Except...Mila swallowed, remembering...the last planet she’d been on had been one muthafucker of a place and not quite dead. The tomb she’d blasted open had contained a special alien something. It’d jumped her and infected her in spite of her well-made spacesuit, as if the thing were made of cheese. She couldn’t shake it.
Hadn’t.
The instruction manual that’d come with it had been quite unique. Not many diseases came with manuals.
A shiver ran through her. The thing was slow growing but sent her chills, regularly. She held her splayed fingers before her eyes. There it was – the little fringe of black wriggling through her nail tips.
No cure.
“Well, maybe I’ll go out doing something good,” she murmured. This parasite-leech infection, whatever it was, could go to hell. She was in rescue-the-annoying-sister mode.
Mila whacked the side of the cube-shaped player.
“Play!”
What did these stoneshifters do with a sacrifice? Sacrifice sounded bad, if she went by the dictionary definition.
The vid began.
Blinking ceased, as she took it what it showed. “Oh, fuck.”
That? The size of the shifter’s male appendage was a problem. Dick was too insignificant a word. She needed a new one like lollapoloozaram-a-dam-a-dingdong.
When these dudes shifted...they shifted.
No sound but she could imagine the screams from the woman tied to the sacrifice table.
In fear, her blood had crawled away to her toes.
Enough with the jokes. She stared at the wall.
Now she knew she really did have to get Tiana out of this.
No wonder stoneshifters had an embargo on info escaping their planet. She checked the embedded metadata. The vid was dated four hundred years ago. Not current but the planet was considered backward on most civilization scales. It was likely the stoneshifters hadn’t altered what they did. And if they hadn’t, if Tiana was strapped to that table, she would be dead soon after.
Here she was, a cash-depleted chick with one weapon to her name – make that two, if you counted Mister Ram – plus a one-piece suit that buckled up at the crotch as if designed for a synth-porno game, and a bad-ass attitude.
Mila rubbed the middle of her temple and let her head flop back onto the pillow. Above, the ceiling was vibrating. The lowering thrum of the interplanetary drive said planet-fall was going to be within hours.
This stoneshifter was going to be in so much trouble.