Nothing. No scent, no tracks, no more blood. Nothing that would tell Raze where Toran and Kayde were. He recounted the bodies they’d left behind and was sure that only seven of the ten pirates they’d encountered were there. He spared a minute to dig out his information tablet to try and call up the trackers that Toran and Kayde were both wearing. Neither of them came up, but neither did his own, which meant that whatever was interfering with the signal in their comms was also interfering with the tracker. He stuffed the tablet back in his pocket and turned his attention to the bodies.

It was grueling work to make them disappear. The ground was too rocky to easily dig a pit, but he got lucky. A little more than a hundred meters from the hill there was a moss covered bog and a quick scan showed that it was deep enough to make seven men disappear, at least for a little while. It didn’t matter if they were discovered after he’d retrieved his men and they’d completed the mission. The bodies just needed to stay gone long enough for them to get off the planet without being found.

By the time he finished he was covered in sweat and his muscles ached. Each of the slavers was covered in muscles and many of them were just as big as he was. The work took hours and the suns were beginning to set. But he couldn’t take the time to find a place to camp. He needed to get a signal and see if he could call up information on the trackers. If not, he’d need to figure out another way to find them. Raze called up his scheduler and set the time. Protocol gave him seventy-two hours to act in his own capacity without reporting back if Toran and Kayde were incapacitated. If he didn’t find them before that, he’d need to return to the ship and get orders from HQ.

But as soon as Raze put the scheduler away, he let that thought slip from his mind. He would find his fellow soldiers.

He searched the area methodically after setting a drone to scan for any other hostile forces in the area. But it seemed that the group they’d encountered was the only danger for the moment. He covered every centimeter of the hill and the area beyond it, what would have been out of sight when he was shooting from beyond the rocks.

Nothing.

No more blood. No tracks. No clues. If he hadn’t been nearby for the entire encounter, he might have believed that a stealth ship of some kind had taken them hostage. If that were the case, he had no prayer of finding them. He had to examine his other options, the ones he could do something about.

Raze turned around. Night had fallen, but the moon in the sky overhead was bright enough to see by. His bones were heavy from the long trek and the exertion of disposing of the pirates, but he could go for a long time before collapsing, days perhaps. He let the pain and weight of the day lay heavy on him and held the physical sensation close. It wasn’t emotion, but it was as close as he could get now.

He gave up on the hill and fanned out. While there were no clues at the abduction site, that didn’t mean that all hope was lost. A few hundred meters away he found tracks that had pressed hard into the mossy ground, as if a heavy vehicle had sat there for some time. The tracks headed toward the hill before disappearing, he discovered as he walked alongside them a second time. They disappeared so quickly that the vehicle must have engaged its hover mode.

It wasn’t enough evidence, not yet, but he was willing to think that this had been the vehicle used to take Kayde and Toran.

He took out the mostly destroyed drone that the pirates had discovered and checked to see if any of the memory or display function had survived. They were sturdy beasts, meant to work through the toughest conditions that a habitable planet could offer. And while they could be destroyed by a determined person, it took a little know how to truly damage them beyond use.

The pirates lacked that know how.

It wouldn’t fly again, not without significant repairs, but the memory drive and holo display had survived well enough that Raze could view what the drone had picked up before and during the fight. He found a boulder that came up to his waist and set the drone down, engaging the display and quickly navigating through hours of data that were useless to him.

There.

The drone shook as something struck it and air whooshed by in a dizzying drop as it felt to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at the pirates, not with the machine so unstable, but he’d found the time he needed. He let it play through slowly and shut off any thoughts he had of the battle. This was an entirely new, if disorienting, perspective and he didn’t need his preconceived thoughts interfering.

At some point in the fight, the drone had fallen out of the hands of the pirate who was holding it and the angle was all wrong to see what happened to Toran and Kayde. But Raze let the holo play through in case there was anything that could help.

It took several minutes, though at the end of it all, the fight had taken less than a quarter of an hour. Skirmishes were always shorter than he’d thought they’d be before he became a warrior.

He didn’t see the survivors who took Toran and Kayde. He didn’t see most of the battle. But the holo feed gave him something just as important. A witness. It was a brief hint of a moment. She—and he was almost certain the pirate he saw was a she—ducked out from behind a stone pile and made her way closer to the fight. Raze enhanced the display, making it larger in hopes of getting a better view of her.

Dark leathers, bound hair, pale skin. Human, he thought, though the image was blurry enough that he could be wrong. His gut said he was right, though. A human female pirate who’d witnessed the whole thing.

She seemed to freeze after the fight, watching out for something. Did she see the pirates take his team? She walked away after several minutes of watching and he could not see any emotion on her face. Did the sight of her dead fellows make her feel… anything? Or was she just another heartless pirate bent on destruction and pillage?

This was a slave colony, he reminded himself. The pirates and slavers worked together to sell people to the highest bidder, which made this woman, this witness, one of the worst scum in the universe. He could do whatever he needed to get the information he was after.

His focus sharpened, noting the path she used to escape. He found it easily after stashing the drone away where it was unlikely to be found. It was too big to be easily carried.

Before setting off on the journey to find the pirate woman, he forced himself to eat a nutrient bar and take a half an hour to rest. Night was all around and if Toran were here, he’d be ordering Raze to take the entire night. But Toran was gone, captured and possibly undergoing torture or worse. The longer Raze waited, the longer they suffered and the longer it would be before they could complete their mission.

The time passed in silence with no animals or insects crying in the night. Once upon a time, he might have found that eerie, but now he merely noted the fact as he sat as silent as the night. Once his food digested and his limbs no longer threatened to give out from the stress of the day, he pushed himself to his feet and continued on, chasing down his lead.

Tracking a stranger on a strange planet at night was no easy task. But he’d find her or die trying.

***

She was so close she could taste it. As night fell, it got trickier to move around, but Sierra used the cover of darkness to her advantage. She moved with stealth, cloaked in shadows, unseen and unnoticed, taking stock of her surroundings and looking for points of attack and extraction that could be used when a team came in to recover the stolen women.

The static crackling in her ear was a welcome reminder that she’d made contact with Mindy after getting away from that dead zone. Dead in more ways than one. She idly wondered what had happened to the surviving pirate that she’d seen. Had he called help for his friends? Or was he now gathering allies to make a move against some weakened faction on this hell planet?

That kind of information needed to go in her report. She wouldn’t add that she’d wondered what color eyes he had or if he was as strong as he looked from a distance, wondered if he could lift her up with little effort while he—

Nope, she wasn’t going there. Pirate, she reminded herself. Pi-rate. Evil, bad, slaver, killer. Not a sexy alien dude who could fulfill some of the fantasies she didn’t even let herself think about while she was still on Earth. Besides, he probably wasn’t nearly as hot as he’d seemed from a distance. His teeth were probably all rotten out and he might have been all slimy and gross.

Alien-human relationships were becoming more common on Earth as more aliens migrated to the planet, but Sierra was going to have to draw her personal line at gross alien-frog man slavers.

She didn’t know why she couldn’t quite get him out of her head. Every step she took, every time she dodged away to hide from a patrol, every crevasse she hid in to get a better vantage to spy on the slaver settlement, he was squatting in the back of her mind, uninvited and unwanted, but she was unable to get rid of him.

Night had fallen in truth now and Sierra needed a place to hide for a few hours. At the moment she was close enough to hear the moans and screams of the captured women and her heart tore in half at the sounds. She wanted to rush in, open the gates, and set them free. But that would only end up with her dead or captured, doomed alongside them.

The slavers were enjoying dinner and… entertainment. She tried not to think too hard about what that entertainment consisted of, even as the screams gave her little doubt. But given a few hours of revelry, they’d be at their weakest, the watches minimal, the alcohol and drugs consumed, and the men, women, and other beings tired out from the partying. All she had to do was stay hidden for long enough and then she’d have plenty of time to gather data at the safest point of night.

She ended up on the middle branch of a squat tree on a hill near the settlement. There hadn’t been tree cover for most of her journey here, but around the settlement, there was a veritable forest of new growth. It might have helped with the air quality, or maybe they just liked the decoration, she neither knew nor cared. She took a few surveillance photos and settled in for the wait.

Would her— no, not her, what the fuck—that pirate show up here? Would she see him again? For a moment she imagined him showing up, guns blazing, in a reveal that he’d been a double agent all along. She shook her head with an embarrassed smile. There had to be something weird in the air here to have her thinking such crazy thoughts. She’d never before caught a glance of a dude on a mission—let alone an enemy—and started daydreaming.

But she wanted to know his name, and his species, and if they were biologically compatible. She wanted him to not be a pirate, to be an ally she’d never imagined finding. She wanted…

Okay, when she got back to Earth, she was going to get laid. This was fucking nuts. Thank every god out there that neither Mindy nor Jo could see her now. They’d be giving her so much shit. And she would 100% deserve it.

Crazy space air. There was probably sex pollen here, or sex moss, something that made her think of sex when it was beyond inappropriate. Something beyond hormones denied for far too long.

“I’ve detected movement three hundred meters away,” Mindy came in over the comms, almost like she could detect what Sierra had been thinking.

“Heading this way?” Sierra whispered back. The night wasn’t silent; wind whipped around her and the revelry and terror from the settlement was carried with it. But she couldn’t be too careful. A tree didn’t provide that much cover.

“Affirmative. Suggest you find a different position to the north of your current location.” Mindy was monitoring everything through a mix of a hijacked satellite feed and drone footage. They could have gathered most of the relevant information from her surveillance alone, but there was no use in wasting a trip of so many light years and not getting human eyes on the location.

“Copy that.” Sierra climbed to the edge of the branch and tried to see if she could spot the patrol that Mindy had warned her about. It was too dark and they were too far away, but that gave her the advantage. She clambered down quickly and made her move, keeping to the deepest shadows cast by trees, rocks, and buildings. Either drone and electronic security was too expensive, or the slavers just didn’t care, but it was her saving grace. She could evade people far more easily than she could technology.

But she couldn’t defend against a blow that she didn’t see coming. The skin on the back of her neck prickled, but before Sierra could even think to turn around and scan her surroundings, something punched her spine and she fell to her knees, the world around her blotted out to darkness.

***

She came to with a splitting headache and her nerves crackling from the stun blast. It wasn’t the first or the tenth time that she’d been shot, but it hurt like hell every time and she wanted to turn over and curl up into a ball to stop the pain. But Sierra held herself still, trying to keep her breathing even. One eye opened a crack and she saw everything through a veil of eyelashes.

Everything wasn’t much. The stars sparkled in the sky above. She’d need to move her head to see anything more than that sliver of freedom. The silence in her ear wasn’t a good sign. Normally she couldn’t feel the communicator that rested snugly against her skin, but it always gave off a faint noise when she was in range, like a very subtle ringing in her ears. She wanted to reach up and feel if the device was still there, but if she was under guard, she didn’t want that to be what alerted her captors to her consciousness.

Not if she could find a weapon.

For some reason her hands weren’t bound, and she hoped that was a sign of general incompetence. She let her fingers dig into the ground at her sides, searching for a rock or a piece of glass or anything she could use to bludgeon a slaver bent on making her his. All there was under her fingers was loose dirt and gravel. She curled a fist around some, deciding it was better than nothing.

She didn’t hear the sounds of the revelry, which meant it was either later than she thought, or she’d been dragged far away.

A shuffle to her right caught her attention and she gave up the pretense of unconsciousness and opened her eyes as she turned. Shock rocked through her as her eyes locked with the green alien slaver she’d seen earlier that day. He was tall, at least six inches taller than her. He kept his dark hair short, but her fingers itched to touch it, which was one of those crazy impulses that was going to get her killed one day. Under his thick clothes, he looked built enough to bench press a small car and he carried himself with a predatory grace she might have found attractive back on Earth. But not from a slaver. She had to be suffering from a concussion or oxygen deprivation to be thinking like this now. He froze, a length of rope in hand, his dark eyes intent on her. For a moment, she thought she saw a flash of red, but it must have been a trick of the moonlight.

I know you.

What? No she didn’t. He was a fucking slaver who was about to tie her up and have his way with her. That was not how she was about to spend this mission, especially if she couldn’t rely on her comms.

She flung the dirt and gravel straight at his face and sprang to her feet, taking off in a run. She’d figure out where she was later, she just needed to get away, out of range of his blaster. She expected shouting or a curse and the silence was so unnerving that she had to turn around to make sure he was actually on her tail.

Yup, there he was, right behind her, his long legs eating up the distance between them like it was nothing.

She sped up, but despair blossomed in her chest. There was no way she was going to make it to safety. She was screwed.

***

A shock of something ripped through Raze in that moment when their eyes locked. He faltered and pain scored his chest as if claws raked him from shoulder to hip. In a blink it was gone as the pirate woman flung grit at him with astonishing accuracy and was off running like an Oscavian hound was on her heels. He stumbled for a moment, heart pounding so hard it threatened to beat out of his chest.

He clenched his fists and for one crazy second his claws threatened to slide out of his hands as something they couldn’t define washed over him.

Find her, that foreign urge demanded. Protect her. Claim her.

He could almost feel it, could almost recognize what it was, but his mind rejected the impossibility even before his feet moved and the chase was on. He didn’t pull out his blaster. Though the pirate had quickly recovered from the stun, far more quickly than he’d thought possible, two shots in such a short amount of time might do permanent harm to her. Why he cared about that, he wasn’t sure, but his gun remained in its holster all the same.

She glanced back and that was her undoing. He had height on her, and endurance. He could run for days and not give in to exhaustion or pain. No pirate training was a match for a Detyen warrior.

Though he wondered why she hadn’t cried out, hadn’t tried to raise an alarm. Surely she must have some allies in the nearby settlement. They were probably too far away to be heard, but didn’t creatures such as she rely on hope like that for survival? Or were her enemies too numerous that she doubted help would come?

He closed the distance between them in easy strides until he could almost reach her with a swipe of his arm. Just as he launched the final step, she dropped and rolled to the side, her hand coming up with a small knife he must have missed on her person.

“Fucking pirate scum,” she spat as she rolled to her feet, knife held confidently in her hand and absolute disgust written across her features.

Pirate scum? “You’re the pirate,” he replied without thought, keeping his distance. His claws should be out now, with her on her back at his mercy, her cheeks flushed and breath coming in hard as she panted under him. What that stirred froze him in place, his body rocking with sensation he hadn’t known in years, sensation he could barely remember.

The distraction cost him and she took advantage, swiping in with the knife in a move that showed practice and training to rival his own. His instincts took over and he rolled with her, taking her arm and flipping her as she cut a ragged wound across his shoulder. The hot flash of pain brought his focus back and they rolled together, neither able to take a position of advantage on the ground.

The woman—not a pirate?—sprang back up and jumped on the balls of her feet, those cheeks flushed like he’d imagined and her eyes glinting bright in the moonlight. “Of course a giant like you isn’t going to make it easy for me. What are you, anyway?” The run and the fight hadn’t winded her and as his subdermal translator worked, he realized she wasn’t speaking IC, interstellar common. His translator identified her language of origin as English, an Earth language. Strange.

Remaining silent would frustrate her, but Raze couldn’t stop himself from answering. “Detyen.” He should have kept it hidden in case she escaped and reported back, but he found himself wanting to talk to her, and he hadn’t wanted anything in so long that he couldn’t deny this one simple thing.

She blew at an errant strand of hair, ruby red in the moonlight, as her eyes narrowed. Her eyes flicked down to his hip, where his blaster remained holstered. The distance between them wasn’t long, both of them standing just out of reach of one another, but it might as well have been a deep chasm. “Why aren’t you shooting me?”

“I don’t—” he couldn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. In the last ten minutes, he’d been more alive than he’d been in two years and his control was shot. If Toran or Kayde saw him, they’d order him put down in a second, and he’d deserve it. He wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t operating at acceptable capacity. He wanted to… he wanted and for a soulless Detyen, there could be nothing worse.

That narrowed gaze of hers relaxed a fraction and she took a step back, her knife still out, but the hold not quite as threatening as it had been only a moment ago.

They stared at one another, neither sure of what action to take. No, Raze knew what he should do, what he must do. Anything that would give him the information he needed about his men so that he could retrieve them and complete the mission, find the data they’d been assigned to retrieve and return home to his bleak existence, where nothing awaited him except years more of gray emptiness until he came to his natural end by his own hand or that of his fellow soldiers.

And that should bring up no reaction in him except acceptance. He’d chosen the path when he let his soul be ripped apart in the name of the survival of his people.

But in this endless moment between him and this strange woman, he wished that he’d taken another path, one he’d never realized was there in the first place.

The woman broke him out of his daze. “You’re not a pirate, are you?”

Before he could answer, he caught a hint of movement and light out of the corner of his eye. He moved without thought, launching himself at the woman and tackling her to the ground, his hand clasping her wrist and keeping the knife away from anything important. For a moment, their hands met, skin to skin, and agony ripped through his body and he held it close with a silent scream.