The Officer's Mess (Warriors Book 3) Read online

It was slow going with Danielle’s heavy boots against the metal grating. She expected to slip up any moment. Scrape her boot, set down too heavily, step on a loose bit of grating that would sound like an alarm when it hit the metal beneath it.

  Attention! The human is escaping!

  Her nerves were shredded and had been for a while, ever since the hall when she looked back and saw Rebekah had disappeared, leaving them to face the aliens alone.

  She’d never thought, in a million years, that Rebekah would abandon them. It cut like the deepest betrayal.

  Voices floated from a room up ahead. Danielle stopped, afraid she’d been caught, but just when she was readying herself to turn and flee, she heard laughter. Group laughter. They were in the mess, talking.

  Steeling her fraying nerves, Danielle walked towards the door. It was closed, the noises floating from within.

  A thousand thoughts crowded through her mind. She could almost see the door open. The leering faces and suggestive taunts and invitations. She began to shake when the shadow from her dreams joined them.

  ‘No!’ she whispered. She wouldn’t let him in, not now, not when she needed to be strong.

  Forcing the shadow down deep in her mind, she took a step. Then another. Then another.

  She passed the mess, her fear bubbling up through her throat in gasps. She was hyperventilating, she realised.

  The voices moved closer to the door, and suddenly Danielle was on the verge of getting caught.

  Behind her, a small hallway led to the stairs going down to the hold and engine room.

  Danielle slipped inside and descended, hoping no one would follow.

  * * *

  Aerdan led the way off the bridge. Bedvir had already gone and was probably already waiting in the mess for them all. He liked to do that. Get to places early and judge Haddis for being late, even when he often arrived right on time.

  Haddis was the youngest of the three males. Born in the solars following their abandonment of their home planet when they discovered the Bentari were on their way to steal their homeworld and enslave their race.

  But just because he hadn’t been born on Temir didn’t mean he didn’t know his culture. His lore. He was the oldest son of a Mita Vadice, after all. A clan chieftain, destined to represent Mita Kar when his father passed beyond the stars, many solars from now if he lived a long life.

  It was one of the reasons he’d left and the reason he’d joined Aerdan’s crew. Aerdan had been the Mita Vadice of Mita Madar before the invasion. Mita Madar had always been small. When the Bentari came, as the current ruling mita of Temir, they’d been culled to the last child, leaving only Aerdan, who was off-planet at the time, behind.

  The Bentari thought culling the ruling Mita would bring Temir to heel, not understanding how their culture worked. Mita Madar was only in charge because they were living a time of unprecedented peace. Madar was the Mita Temerin turned to in peace times. In wartimes, in famine times, in times of mita political wrangling, it changed. It changed constantly. But the Bentari could only see how their own culture worked and extrapolated from it.

  It had been a lesson, though. When Haddis was in charge of Mita Kar, the mita people turned to in times of war, he would send assassins to kill the ruling classes of the Bentari. Stagger their whole culture and use their distress and confusion to free the slave races and turn them against their masters.

  Haddis’s father had rejected Haddis’s plan. That was another reason he left them.

  Looking around the bridge, Haddis realised he was late to the mess.

  ‘Charvosh!’ he swore, standing and running to catch up.

  ‘Late,’ Bedvir croaked as Haddis entered. ‘Even Kentor and Sidha made it here before you.’

  Haddis looked at his brother, who sat with the small orange and yellow Sindaal in his arms. Haddis repressed a smile. Kentor had missed Sidha after he left. Everyone but him knew he loved Sidha, was in love with him. It had taken Sidha leaving for him to realise it himself. Now that Sidha was here, he wasn’t going to let him go again in a hurry. Haddis suspected they’d be attending a bonding ceremony at the next temit.

  The next proper temit. Not this ship meeting.

  Haddis closed the door behind him and took a seat at the table.

  Aerdan was sat at the head, a thoughtful, contemplative look on his face.

  The whole table fell silent, looking at the Madar and waiting for him to talk.

  ‘We need to find a way to get Danielle to trust us,’ he said, stating the blatantly obvious.

  Haddis rolled his eyes. Of course they did. This was Aerdan’s problem. He genuinely thought everything he said had to be significant and was the reason Haddis enjoyed annoying him. Temerin were light-hearted by nature. Even in the face of their mass exodus from their homeworld, even in the face of being pursued across the sector by slaver-after-slaver, they didn’t allow darkness into their hearts. Aerdan was the most serious of those who didn’t take things to heart, and Haddis rode him mercilessly because of it.

  ‘Kentor, Sidha, I know you’ve only been reunited for a few rotes, but we need Sidha to reach out to Danielle. I believe she’ll trust him because other humans did.’

  Haddis looked into the golden eyes of the Sindaal. He was sat between Kentor’s legs, leaning back against his chest. Kentor had a look of pure bliss, his hands wrapped around Sidha, his thumb stroking his arm. Every now and then, he’d lean down and take a deep breath, scenting his mate.

  ‘I miss his scent on my pillow,’ Kentor admitted a quarter cycle after Sidha left. ‘It was there for a while. But it’s gone. He’s gone.’ It was only then Kentor had realised what a mistake he’d made, letting Sidha leave.

  The next time they saw him, they were collecting Tonni and Galla, a Temerin girl and Surilan girl who’d been captured by Tolomus. Sidha had been rescued from slavery, a fact that had spun Kentor, making him fiercely possessive and protective of Sidha. But Sidha was locked into a contract with the Tessans. They’d made their promises to each other to reunite. Kentor hadn’t looked at another male in the last five solars. Patiently waiting for his mate to return to him.

  The peace that had settled over both of their faces over the past few rotes was inspiring. It made Haddis think of Danielle.

  ‘I was in that room an hacri before you all arrived. I barely know her,’ Sidha sighed. ‘She’s still not out?’

  ‘Won’t even take her meals if one of us is in the hall.’

  Sidha shook his head. ‘I don’t blame her. I was on Tolomus’s ship for several rotes. It’s a horrible place to be.’

  Haddis saw Kentor’s face become a mask of fury, as it did whenever Tolomus, the Fedhith slaver, was mentioned. He leaned down and kissed Sidha’s neck, his arms tightening around him. Sidha leaned his head against him and whispered in Kentor’s ear, no doubt calming him. Haddis looked away, not wanting to disturb their moment.

  ‘Anyway, it’s about time Kentor got back to his duties.’

  ‘I don’t need him in the engine room,’ Bedvir said quickly.

  ‘There’s maintenance he can be getting on with,’ Aerdan said.

  ‘Yeah, on me,’ Sidha answered. The room broke into laughter.

  ‘That settles it. Sidha, you go talk to Danielle. Kentor, maintenance. Bedvir, engine room and Haddis, bridge.’ Aerdan stood up, slapping his hands on the table.

  ‘What about you?’ Haddis asked.

  ‘I’m going to get some vrokking sleep while the two of them are separated,’ Aerdan said. ‘I don’t know how the rest of you don’t hear it, but it’s all I hear every night.’

  Aerdan walked around the table and was the first one out of the room. Haddis followed Bedvir, who took the stairs down to engineering.

  ‘Waste of my time,’ Bedvir whispered as he entered engineering. His presence hadn’t been required; it was just Aerdan and his theatrics again. The male seemed to actually think he was in charge of the ship, and they let him believe it because it suited their purposes. But Teme
rin didn’t really have leaders, and when they did, they were elected for a specific purpose, an exact task or time frame and no more.

  Something prickled Bedvir’s senses as his feet came to a stop. He looked around engineering. Something felt off.

  Casting his eyes around the room, Bedvir looked at the piping that went all around it, leading to the radiant containment at the far end. There were panels all around it for monitoring purposes, and several workstations set about the room.

  They needed at least one more set of hands, but Temerin bonded in a small knit family, usually made up of kin, who were a part of a larger mita. But in the rush of leaving Temir, Temerin of different mita ended up on the same ships, and in the aftermath, many of them had stayed that way. It made them a closer-knit species than they’d been previously.

  Losing your home would do that to anyone.

  Bedvir stepped inside, his eyes carefully scanning the pipework. There was still something off about the room.

  There.

  Someone was moving in there.

  Bedvir frowned but looked away, continuing to scan the room.

  It was her, Danielle. The female who set his blood on fire.

  Bedvir shrugged and walked into the room, trying to appear as though he’d given up. He wasn’t worried about her being there. There were no vital systems located where the human had chosen to hide, nothing that could hurt her. If she felt safe there, then Bedvir wasn’t going to do anything to upset her.

  Walking over to the comm, Bedvir was about to let Aerdan know where she was when he stopped himself.

  If he told Aerdan, Aerdan would just come down here and try to lure her away. He’d talk to her, make her uncomfortable and scare her even more.

  While Bedvir didn’t doubt that Sidha could help, he didn’t think forcing company on her would work. There was pain behind those big brown eyes. Deep, old pain. Distrust was there too. It radiated from her. It reminded Bedvir of the rotes after they’d fled Temir. When they hadn’t been able to trust other races or even each other. The pain, the trauma of losing everything, was too deep.

  The female was skittish. He needed to let her be there, let her believe she was safe because she was. He wouldn’t remove her. Wouldn’t approach her. Everything would be her decision. But how to move about the room without scaring her?

  ‘Right. Time to get discharge valves cleaned,’ Bedvir said, crossing the room far away from her and opening a panel in the wall. The discharge valves discharged a fluid, called vysor, that entered the radiant engine, syphoning off excess radiation. The fluid was naturally occurring near sites where radioactive materials were naturally found on Temerin. Despite the radiation being put out, the fluid was cool, and research had shown it was rich with radiosynthesis-capable microscopic lifeforms. They fed on the radiation, effectively neutralising it. It was a secret the Temerin kept to themselves, and it made their ships a safer place to live.

  Bedvir purged the valves, shutting the system down and emptying the pipes. The valves controlled the amount of vysor that would enter the radiant chamber, depending on how much output the ship needed.

  Bedvir diverted the valves to the cleansing system. A mix of vysor to mop up any radioactive particles left behind and cleansing agents scrubbed the valves clean. They would also be deposited in the collection chamber to be disposed of next time they passed by a black hole or star.

  Not in the case of this load, of course. Bedvir chuckled to himself. They had plans for this load.

  Bedvir talked through the whole process, letting the human know where he was at all times.

  The human was skittish like a frasin calf. They needed to coddle her once she let them near her. Bedvir didn’t doubt she would eventually allow them, as long as they let her come to them in her own time.

  When he’d finished cleaning the valves, Bedvir went back to the engine, moving around the outside of it and taking in the continual feedback coming from the engine. Temerin engines were extremely efficient, more so than those they’d experienced of other races. Moving around the engine, Bedvir stopped when Danielle came into sight, hiding in the pipework. She moved back farther into the shadows, and Bedvir suppressed a smile.

  Beautiful female.

  What was she doing out of her room? If she still didn’t trust them, why leave?

  A chilling thought descended on Bedvir. He walked over to the comm. How long had they been in the mess?

  ‘Haddis, is everything all right up there?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Has anyone accessed nav or sent a comm call out of the ship since we got off the call with the Protectorate?’

  There was a pause. ‘No. Bedvir, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Bedvir let out a sigh of relief. ‘Nothing. Could you send Sidha down here?’

  ‘Sidha should be talking to Danielle.’

  ‘He’s not,’ Bedvir said.

  ‘How do you know?’ There was tension in Haddis’s voice.

  ‘Turn on the camera.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Pipework,’ Bedvir said, careful not to look in that direction. He was talking low enough so she couldn’t hear him, the volume on the comm down so she couldn’t hear that either. Human senses were nowhere near as sensitive as Temerin.

  ‘What garrock did this to her?’ There was a growl, ‘If that Fedhith touched her…’

  Bedvir grunted in agreement. ‘Send Sidha down.’ Bedvir’s voice was getting rougher as the pain set in. He’d already spoken so much this rote.

  ‘Will do,’ Haddis agreed.

  Bedvir walked away from the comm towards the pipework. When he could clearly see Danielle, he crouched on the floor so she could see him.

  ‘Hello, little human,’ Bedvir said, aware his size was probably frightening her. He was a few inith from seven fenth. Aerdan was an inith taller than him; Haddis was the shortest, ironic considering Kentor, his little brother, was the tallest of them all at seven fenth. Sidha was a few inith over six fenth, and Danielle, the smallest on the ship, was a couple iniths short of it. Tall for a human female, tiny compared to their own and him. It just made Bedvir all the more protective of her.

  Danielle looked down as though she could disappear by denying he’d seen her.

  ‘I know you want to go home, little human. I know you don’t trust us, and I understand why. But we have a slave ship on our tail. If you were to call the Tessans and give them our coordinates, you’d be giving it to the slavers following us as well.’

  Danielle frowned. He’d gotten her intent right.

  ‘Do not fear, Danielle. We like you. We want you to like us. We will never harm you.’

  Danielle’s frown deepened, distrust etched in her features. Who had done that to her? Who had begged her trust and betrayed her?

  ‘Sidha is on his way down here to talk to you,’ Bedvir continued on. ‘I’m going over to the radiant engine, and I’m going to do some work. I’ll be right over there,’ he said, pointing in the direction where she could easily see him. ‘So, you know where I am the entire time.’

  With that, he stood and carefully backed away.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll trust you about as far as I can throw you,’ Danielle muttered under her breath. And now the orange guy was coming down here as though this wasn’t embarrassing and difficult enough.

  It was annoying how quickly the brown and orange spotted one found her. It became apparent he was trying to ease her almost immediately. In many ways, Danielle would have preferred he shouted at her. At least then she’d know where she was with him. All this faux concern grated on her nerves.

  She watched him turn around and go back to the radiant chamber. She eyed it with an engineer’s eye. It looked more complex than the one on Endurance. There was more piping going in and out of it, and the chamber had some sort of viewing window that glowed, which was just bonkers! How could he even go near it? Was it even safe?

  She turned her eyes back to him. His orange and grey hair w
as braided more than midway down his back, loose; it had to touch his waist. It was so undisciplined to wear hair like that on a ship. Danielle shifted uncomfortably, trying not to admire it.

  They all had long hair. The one with the grey-red skin and red striped markings had crimson hair down the centre of his head. When she first met him, she thought it was shaved, but when they brought her to the bridge that first day, she realised his skin was smooth. There weren’t any follicles for hair to grow out of. The other two didn’t look like that. They both had hair all over their heads. Were they different subspecies? It confused Danielle. Everything about them, their ship, their attitudes and their race was just confusing to her.

  Danielle hated being confused. She was spinning. She had no control here, no direction, no north. Even the stars betrayed her.

  Footsteps came down the stairs and landed on the grated floor. Danielle jumped. The landing was quickly accompanied by singing.

  Ah, the orange guy.

  ‘Hi, Bedvir. I believe you have a human down here.’

  The one with the orange and brown spots nodded in her direction, his orange eyes meeting hers for a moment.

  Danielle felt her stomach flip.

  ‘There you are,’ the orange guy said. ‘You know I’ve been talking to your door for the past few metri, convinced I’d get you talking back as soon as you felt comfortable.’ The orange guy winked, then walked around the piping.

  There was something amusing about the idea this guy had wasted minutes talking to her door.

  ‘I’m coming in,’ the orange guy said as he moved towards her, ducking down and moving awkwardly through the piping. He hit his head a few times, each time accompanied by a hiss. Finally, he sat down. ‘I don’t think my body can take anymore.’

  What was his name again? he’d said it when they had breakfast together. Rhona had said it too.

  ‘Sid?’

  ‘Sidha,’ he said. ‘Sid-aa.’

  ‘Danielle.’

  ‘Danielle. I remember from breakfast.’ Sidha grinned. ‘I heard the guys scared you. That human with the green guy… Sophia asked me to tell them to back off. The impression I got was if I didn’t, she would.’