a Cerberus asshole by the name of Gerian Eozara to justice.
A quest for justice that I could not walk away from or deny, not without dishonoring my dead friends, dishonoring their sacrifice. Their memory. Their service.
Tears threatened and I blinked them away with a fury I rarely allowed myself to feel. Cerberus Legion was responsible for the Quell being sold in my sector of space. Quell was the reason I’d ended up crawling through the mud on Xerima, my friends dead, my body broken. When the Coalition Fleet’s Intelligence Core had announced the bounty to catch the one who was responsible, I’d jumped at the chance to bring Gerian in, dead or alive. But a quick death wasn’t enough for the Quell dealer and his cohorts. Torture would be better for him… and any other Cerberus scum I ran into.
Forcing myself to forget the past for a few moments, I enjoyed the vision of the big guy’s tight ass and massive shoulders—I might be focused on my mission, but I was female. And his armband was green. Astra green.
This is not the alien you are looking for.
The mental play on Star Wars dialogue made me grin. Back under control, I looked around again. It grew later, the canteen slowly filling up with people in search of food or drink, of a semblance of normalcy in a place where nothing and no one was normal, at least not to me. More than a dozen conversations rolled through my mind in half as many languages.
Prillon.
Atlan.
English…
Turning my head to the right, I saw a handful of fresh, young, human recruits slamming shots of S-Gen whiskey like they’d just seen their first contaminated Hive soldier. Judging by the way their hands shook and the brittle natures of their false smiles, they’d probably just realized exactly what would happen to them if they were captured by the enemy. I’d slammed down half a bottle of space-made tequila after my first mission. My captain at the time, a no-nonsense military man from Italy, had let us all drown our sorrows in drink, carry each other off to bed and sleep it off.
The next day we’d all pretended nothing had happened, but the truth had been obvious. Scary as hell. No one in my ReCon unit—in all of the Coalition—wanted to be caught by the Hive. We’d rather die.
Careful what you wished for, Ivy. My mother’s superstitious warnings echoed through my memories, and I rubbed the thick scar that ran from the base of my skull, down the back of my neck. Lower. Careful indeed. There had been many nights the last six months I would have rather been dead. Like the rest of my friends in my unit. Dead. Gone. Oblivious.
I grimaced at the bleak thought and swirled the dark gold tequila around inside the glass with my free hand. A full bottle rested on the table in front of me, but I hadn’t touched it. Not one sip. It was a prop only, used to blend in. I needed my wits about me. This wasn’t the place to stand out. Here, being noticed was dangerous.
Not for the first time I wondered what I was doing out here on the fringe of Sector 437, at this transport station, where criminals, spies and species from every planet interacted under the strict rules of the Coalition’s Intelligence Core.
The rules were simple. No fighting. No killing. No violence allowed within the walls of Transport Station Zenith. Those who disobeyed were executed without question—if they were caught. Their goods confiscated. Their ships, too. Breaking the rules was rare, and those who did so were usually desperate and very, very sneaky. Or they wanted to die.
Since the transport station was within Battleship Karter’s sector, barely, it was under Coalition control, which made it just safe enough to conduct business and just wild enough to keep respectable people clear. Or around for a purpose, like mine.
I used to be one of those people. Respectable. Now I was what I’d once reviled. I wasn’t Coalition any longer. Obviously I hadn’t returned to Earth after my discharge. No fucking way. I was a rebel in space, a Han Solo of sorts. It was funny how the will to survive could change one’s opinion on just about anything.
I owed it to my unit—my dead friends—to see this through. I’d survived when they hadn’t. I would not stop now. I would meet with the Rogue 5 operative, make the trade and get what I wanted: onto his home planet where I could hunt down Gerian Eozara like the animal he was.
Transport Station Zenith was a little rough, but I knew it had nothing on the infamous moon base my contact hailed from.
The meet wasn’t for several hours. I had time to admire the huge male at the bar once more. The dark green band circling his biceps had the Astra Legion’s symbol emblazoned in the center. I’d studied up on Rogue 5, knew the history.
Hundreds of years ago a Coalition ship of a few hundred fighters crash landed on Hyperion, a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy. It wasn’t part of the Coalition; therefore it lacked all advanced technology. From what I understood, the native Hyperion population had been a few steps up from Neanderthals, unskilled and lacking any advancements the rest of the universe utilized.
For some reason I couldn’t fathom, some of the survivors from that crashed Coalition ship—Atlan, Forsian, Everian and more—mated with the Hyperions. Their ship was eventually repaired, and the survivors and their descendants rose from the surface, at least far enough to make it to Hyperion’s moon, Rogue 5. There, the Coalition crew, plus those Hyperion they mated, created a base to be their new home.
In the centuries since, they had survived by their wits, doing whatever was necessary to protect their home. They were little more than pirates and rarely allowed outsiders into their midst, but their Coalition and Hyperion ancestry remained. Because the survivors there isolated, almost all who lived on Rogue 5 now had Hyperion blood. But they were all mutts and Rogue 5 was the pound. Some were Hyperion and Atlan, Hyperion and Viken, Hyperion and Forsian, depending on who mated with whom in their ancestry.
To make it even more complicated, the moon base was broken into five legions. Everyone was part of one legion. At Transport Station Zenith—which was probably the only place they comingled with others—I’d come across dozens of members from all the legions, could tell them apart by their uniform colors, the insignia. Astra was one of the more respectable, as criminals went. Styx and Kronos as well. But the other two legions—Cerberus and Siren? They were ruthless. Assassins. Murderers. Thieves. They trafficked everything from weapons to slaves with no conscience or remorse. I had a feeling the operative I would meet later would be wearing one of their two colors.
The Astra Legion’s male at the bar was a forbidden fruit that I suddenly wanted very much to taste. Maybe I’d been wrong in my thinking. Maybe I could be here for my meeting and a little fun, too. When I’d been in the Coalition Fleet, we’d been told to steer clear of anyone from Rogue 5, regardless of their legion. They were rogue, just like the name of their moon base. Wild. They’d be called bad boys on Earth. No way could they measure up to Coalition standards.
But when it came to sex? Screw rules and regulations. I had no doubt he’d be as wild as his home world. The bad boy from Rogue 5 would be really, really good. I had no doubt he’d be up for a good time. A quickie. It had been a while since I’d had a male-induced orgasm, and based on the size of him, I had to assume he was proportional. Everywhere. My pussy clenched at the thought.
As if he knew I was thinking about him—and what he could do if we found the nearest horizontal surface—he turned and met my gaze.
My breath got trapped in my throat, and a flush of heat went through me as if I’d downed a few shots of the tequila. Holy shit, he was hot.
I
