As We Rise: Rogue (As We Rise Saga Book 1) Read online

  When the woman finally looked up, her face blanched as she took in Jo’s intense stare. Her cybernetic eyes remained unexpressive, but the woman couldn’t hide the shaking in her hands as she passed. That thrilled Jo more than it should have.

  Jo followed the woman to the middle of the room, noting how her eyes seem to be the only modified part of her body, and wondered why an Elitian woman would have such an offensive body modification. Not that Jo thought it offensive. She wasn’t ashamed of her own cybernetic parts, but for an Elitian of high standing to have such a degrading body upgrade was an intriguing mystery.

  “Take me home,” the woman’s firm demand pulled Jo from her thoughts.

  “No,” Jo answered with a grin. “That’s not what we were paid to do.”

  The muscles in her neck rolled as she swallowed, “What were you paid to do?”

  “Apparently, we were to kill you.” Jo leaned against the edge of her desk and crossed her legs. It was humorous how the woman could keep her face perfectly calm, but her hands gave away her emotion. Right now, they were clenched tight but still shaking slightly. She was angry and scared, understandably.

  “Why did you hide me if you were paid to kill me?”

  “It was a spur of the moment decision,” Jo answered honestly.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Don’t thank me. My crew felt you shouldn’t be murdered. You’re just lucky the Drachen attacked my ship when they did, or you would be 2 rotations away from roasting in Arietis’ atmosphere with me none the wiser.” Jo sighed. “That would have made my life simpler.”

  The woman gasped. “You’re not serious.”

  “Your people murder every damn day, but you’re shocked by my lack of sensitivity. You being here, alive, brought the GCM onboard.”

  The woman perked up and smiled.

  “I hate to break it to you, but the military corporations under Advisor Eltanin are the ones that hired us.” Jo stared at the woman as the news sank in and all the bravado deflated.

  “What’s to become of me?” Her voice cracked with restrained emotion. Jo felt a twinge of guilt.

  “I don’t know yet, but you are safe on my ship. For now.” Jo pushed off the desk and walked up the woman. She was considerably taller than Jo, but most people were. Jo tilted her head back in order to fully see the woman’s face. “There’s a single GC lieutenant left behind to make sure we finish our job. He doesn’t know that you are outside of the crate, and we need to keep it that way. If he finds you, it would be detrimental to my crew, and I will not allow them to come to harm. You are not important to me. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “Stay hidden. Stay alive.”

  “That’s right. As soon as the contract is completed and the GC officer is off my ship, I’m dropping you at the nearest station.”

  “I’ve never been off Leonis. I have no credits and no skills to earn them. What will I do?”

  “Not my problem.” Jo shrugged and stepped away from the woman. “The quarters next door have been unused for years. You will stay in that room unless I or one of my crew say otherwise.

  “Thank you.”

  “Stop thanking me,” Jo grunted. For some reason the woman’s thank yous stirred feelings of guilt, and Jo couldn’t afford to let another person affect her when she was already dealing with emotional mess that was Raiden.

  Jo messaged Sky for an update on Raiden’s whereabouts. When she received confirmation that he was safe in his room and the door panel coded to allow certain personnel in or out, Jo motioned for the woman to follow her. Still feeling paranoid, Jo thoroughly checked the hallway before leading the chancellor’s daughter to her new quarters.

  Once inside the new room, Jo set about changing the codes on the door panel while the woman explored her glorified jail cell.

  “It’s dirty,” she noted.

  “You would be too if you hadn’t been cleaned in twenty cycles,” Jo mumbled.

  “Why has this room been abandoned?”

  The question was a barb pressed into an already festering wound. The memories of her father pressing his head against the door late at night, crying softly into his large hands, surfaced without invitation. She had never felt the loss of her mother like he did, and she always respected his grief, but Jo didn’t understand his compulsion to make a shrine of her former quarters. In her more rebellious moments as a child, Jo had sneaked in to see why it deserved to be entombed. As a child, she enjoyed scrolling through the pictures and vids on her mother’s holoscreen, reading through journal entries, and on one occasion trying on a few of her mother’s old clothes. In those moments, she had felt an aching loss for the mother she would never know, and eventually she stopped sneaking in. The last time she was in this room, she had copied her mother’s files and sent them to her own secure disk. This room was never anything special to her, but it meant something to her father, and now that he was gone too, she finally understood why he did it.

  Jo shook her head and chose to ignore the question. It had been almost one and a half cycles since she had slept, and all she wanted was a long shower and steal a few hours of rest to sort through everything that happened. Jo stood and stretched out her back, rotating the kinks out of her neck.

  “Someone will be by later with some food. Enjoy your stay, princess,” Jo swiped her wrist over the lock pad, eager to get back to her own quarters.

  “Rana,” the woman’s voice rasped as the door swished open.

  “What?” Jo asked, glancing over her shoulder.

  “My name is not princess. It’s Rana,” she stated, her hands on her hips and lips curled in distaste.

  Jo lifted a shoulder and smiled. “I didn’t ask your name, and frankly, I don’t care.”

  Fifteen

  Harsh vibrations and a shrill ring from her UAB pulled Jo from blissful oblivion. With a furious swipe across the screen, Jo growled at multiple messages from Sky indicating that she wanted an audience, but they weren’t flagged as urgent, so Jo decided to ignore them. She did, however, scan the ship’s logs. Jo could hear her father’s voice reminding her that being away from the bridge didn’t mean she could ignore her duties. With decades of experience in service her father, Haedus took brief but detailed notes. They completed the temporary repairs shortly after Jo retired to her room and would be arriving at their destination in six hours.

  Caught up with the ship’s affairs, Jo stretched out on her bed, arching her back while reaching up toward the headboard. A breathy groan escaped her lips. Her muscles were stiff from her long rest, and Jo had always luxuriated in the pleasure that come from elongating her body until it neared pain.

  Jo lay in bed, her body relaxed, but her mind was a whir of thoughts. There were so many unpleasant things she had to deal with, and a part of her, larger than she would have expected, wanted to her say damn it all and walk away. But this was her home, her ship, and her crew. Although she wished that her father was alive and she’d have many more years of being with him without the pressure of keeping every soul on the vessel breathing, she had prepared her entire life to take over.

  The door chime echoed loudly throughout the room, and Jo sat up in her bed. She scanned her body, double checking that she was dressed before instructing the AI to let the visitor in.

  “How did I know it would be you?” Jo asked. As she stood, the long t-shirt that once belonged to her father flowed down to her knees, covering the shorts she had worn to bed.

  “Maybe it’s because I’ve been messaging you all day and you’ve been ignoring me,” Sky answered as she walked into the room and over to Jo’s desk, where she disconnected the magnetized chair and flipped it around so she could straddle the seat.

  “I would never ignore a valuable member of my crew,” Jo stated with faux innocence. Sky rose an eyebrow, the motion pulled at her skin and warping the red ink that framed her right eye.

  “We need to discuss Rana and your boy toy.” Sky’s quirked her lips at Jo’s flinch.

>   “Yeah?” Jo turned her back to Sky and rifled through her clothes, sniffing and discarding items before settling on a black racer-backed tank that smelled mostly clean and a pair of red pants with laces up the sides that served no other purpose but to show off skin.

  “We need to find out what Rana knows about those bodies in the containers,” Sky announced. Jo nodded her head in agreement before stripping down to her skivvies. Sky averted her eyes and kept talking. “She could have some information on the identity of the bodies.”

  “I’m not sure I want to get involved,” Jo slipped the tank over her head. “You can look now.”

  Sky met Jo’s gaze. “I think we’re not going to have much of a choice when all this is said and done.”

  “That sounds too much like giving up.”

  “No. It is suffering through the consequences of our own choices. We all decided to take on that cargo, and now we will have to deal with whatever may come our way, but I like to prepare for all possibilities.”

  Jo plopped down on her bed and began brushing her hair. There was nothing she could say to counter that logic. So she kept quiet, waiting on Sky to continue the conversation.

  “As for the soldier…” Sky’s smile bled through to her voice, and the teasing lilt annoyed Jo.

  “What about him?”

  “You will have to meet with him today. His superiors are demanding a report.”

  “He can send a damned report without seeing me,” Jo growled as she roughly pulled and twisted sections of her hair back to pin down.

  “The way he tells it, he has to speak with you first.” Sky chuckled.

  Jo knew that neither of them were idiots. This was an obvious stratagem to get her alone with him. Jo’s stomach fluttered at the imagery that flashed in her mind. There wasn’t a lack of vivid memories. Almost all of them starred her and Raiden tangled with each other.

  “Captain, may I speak freely?”

  Jo snorted. “You always do.”

  “All teasing aside. The crew doesn’t know how to feel about Raiden. Your history with him. It’s not a secret. Yet, they saw how you reacted to him. What we all want to know—what I must know to do my job correctly—is do you trust him?”

  Jo closed her eyes and took a deep breath. What a loaded question. There were many facets to how she felt about Raiden, and her natural reaction was to lash out in anger at Sky for even asking, but this wasn’t the time to let her emotions rule or to tuck them away.

  “No. Not completely, at least,” Jo replied bitterly. “I don’t know anything about him. Our times together weren’t exactly filled with talking. He hasn’t done anything to make me not trust him. Except…”

  “For being a GC officer,” Sky whispered, completing Jo’s sentence.

  “Yeah…that.”

  “It never bothered you before?”

  “Before, he was just some guy I slept with if I happened to see him when we were in port.”

  “Yet, the two of you hooked up quite often, but you also spent time together outside the bedroom.” Sky spoke softly as if she knew that she was balancing precariously between helping and pissing off her captain.

  Jo stared at Sky, keeping her expression neutral, trying to hold back her natural reaction to lash out. “Yes.” It took every ounce of restraint to not growl the single word through clenched teeth.

  “I can tell you are finished with this conversation, but I will end it with this thought.” Sky stood and reached a hand out to Jo, which she took. Sky pulled Jo to stand, bringing Jo closer to Sky than she had ever been before. Jo could see the individual golden swirls in her amber eyes. “Find out who he’s loyal to, and if it’s not the Galactic Consulate, then you need to take a hard look at yourself. Try to find out why the two of you gravitate to each other, one orbiting the other like our binary stars. Do it before it’s too late.”

  Sky could have put a hole in Jo with her blazer and Jo would still feel less shocked. The edge of anger that coated every thought since Sky brought up Raiden melted away and left her feeling exposed. Jo lifted her chin, ignoring the burn in her cheeks, and nodded stiffly. Sky’s sad smile and golden eyes that shone with a deep and total understanding revealed to Jo more about her mysterious security chief than she had ever learned through verbal conversation.

  There was an unspoken kinship between the two women, and Jo felt the spark of friendship ignite. Relief washed over her in waves. She’d needed this. She needed someone who could see though her bullshit and still be trusted. At one time she thought that maybe that could be Raiden, but now she wasn’t sure.

  “Haedus has the bridge for another two hours before he needs to rest. We should visit Rana now, and then you should stop by Raiden’s room before relieving him,” Sky announced as she walked to Jo’s door and swiped her wrist.

  “So we have a moment and you think you’re the captain?” Jo teased.

  “Nope.” Sky smiled. The action erased the mask she constantly wore and made her look years younger. Jo pushed past Sky, giving her a one fingered salute and a toothy smile as she passed.

  Jo rather enjoyed this new side of Sky.

  Sixteen

  Rana was sitting primly on the edge of her bed when Jo and Sky sauntered in.

  “Good morning.” Jo nodded to Rana as Sky slipped into the room behind her, hugging the shadows. Jo snickered. It seemed Sky had returned to business mode.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Rana answered.

  “I need you to look at some photographs and tell me if you recognize anyone in them,” Jo turned her back to the woman and began swiping at the room’s holoscreen.

  “A gracious host would ask if their company was well or if they needed anything,” Rana stated in a resigned, almost sad voice.

  “Did I give you the impression that I was either gracious or your host?” Jo stated dispassionately as she searched for the image files she was looking for. “You’re here because of complicated circumstances, not because I wanted to talk with someone about the latest fashion trends.”

  “Captain…” Sky’s soft voice came from right next to Jo and it startled her. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to the way Sky glided without a sound instead of walking like a normal person. “It’s my opinion that you should be a bit more compassionate.”

  Jo narrowed her eyes at Sky and spoke with the same low-tones, “Why is that?”

  “She may not be forthcoming if she feels threatened.”

  “You’re right,” Jo relented. Sky stepped away and Jo finished pulling up the files she needed. With a deep breath, she turned around, making a conscious effort to force her body language to project something close to friendliness. “Listen. From now on I’ll try to be nice, but you must stop with the prissy commentary. You’re on a cargo freighter with a bunch of riffraff, and you won’t find a single person who can relate to your Elitian sensibilities. Well, maybe Jax would understand, but I think he’d rather eat Drachen dung than reminisce about your shared world.”

  “I’m scared,” Rana whispered, a single tear tracing the curve of her apple cheeks and leaving a sparkling trail on her milky flesh.

  Jo tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling. Watching someone cry made her terribly uncomfortable. The few times in her life when she shed her own tears, she’d wanted to crawl into the airlock and press the eject button. Releasing a long breath through her nose, Jo looked at Rana. To her surprise, there were no more tear tracks marring the woman’s face, and Jo was impressed with her fortitude.

  “Want to know how not to be scared?” Sky’s voice flowed from the corner.

  Rana startled, her entire body jerking for a second before she straightened her spine. Jo smiled; it was easy to forget when Sky was in the room.

  Rana met Sky’s gaze and nodded. “More than anything.”

  “Then you need to take control of your situation.” Sky shrugged one shoulder and pushed off from the wall. “Someone tried to murder you, and they don’t know that your sleeping body won’t be l
eaving the airlock with those containers today. That leaves you at an advantage. You can fight back by looking at the files and telling us what you know.”

  “Okay.” Rana’s voice shook and her fingers were red from rubbing them together, but her face was stoic as ever. “But I want information on how I came to be on your ship in return, and when it’s safe, I want to be let out of this room.”

  “That’s fair,” Jo answered before sharing a look with Sky. She’d tell the girl everything that pertained to her situation and nothing more. As Jo detailed the circumstances of how Rana’s pod arrived on the Kismet, she studied the woman. Her cybernetic implants whirred as she followed Jo’s report. The mechanical rotations were unnerving, and Jo wondered if Rana was processing her story at all. As understanding dawned, Rana’s brows lifted, creasing her forehead, and her mouth curved into a small O before falling into the flat line of acceptance. Rana didn’t complain or act like a vapid narcissist like every other Elitian woman Jo had the displeasure of running into, and for that, Jo liked Rana a little more.

  “Eltanin’s deal didn’t seem questionable to you?” Rana asked.

  “Any deal with the Consulate is questionable, but the risks did not outweigh the profits. There was always the risk that he wouldn’t be completely truthful about the contents of those crates, and we were willing to take the risk. We just didn’t plan on you.”

  Rana nodded. “I cannot pretend to understand the complexities of galactic commerce, but I believe you. I know your type, Captain. You are loyal unto death, and I can see that your crew and this ship are what matter to you.”

  Jo resisted the urge to bristle at her comment. It was truthful enough that anyone who knew Jo for more than 30 seconds would be able to conclude the same thing, but the idea of this stranger even pretending to know her set her on edge. It was too intimate.