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CHAPTER 1

KEELA

Of course Vinian stabbed me in the back the first chance he got. Slimy bastard.

I should have seen it coming. The signs were there. This job had gone a little too well. The pick-up had been uneventful. The cargo—twenty unmarked and heavily secured crates—had made the journey across four sectors without any trouble. The handoff in a dimly lit docking bay on Daventi Station went like clockwork. The second half of the promised credits landed in my account on delivery, as agreed.

Once the crates were stacked onto an antigrav sled and taken away by Vinian’s people, I’d accepted his offer of a drink. But I didn’t make it to the bar he’d suggested on Deck 12.

I didn’t even make it out of the gods-damned docking bay.

Lying face down in a pool of my own blood gave me a chance to contemplate the error of my ways.

“It’s not personal, Keela,” Vinian burbled, his tone conversational, as if he hadn’t just plunged a plasma-edged dagger hilt-deep into my upper back. He’d changed the hues of his blobbish central body and many tentacles to dark mottled gray, probably to match the color of the docking bay’s floor and walls.

Vinian flicked the dagger, splattering my blood across the metal deck. “This is business,” he added, as if I was being unreasonable for having cursed his name once I realized who’d wielded the blade.

“A knife in the back is always personal,” I grated. My ears rang with a combination of blood loss and the hum of my nanobots as they mobilized in my bloodstream, fighting to heal the wound before I bled out or Vinian finished me off, whichever came first.

I’d never trusted Vinian. I didn’t have the luxury of trusting anyone. Not even an affable Wundi broker who’d gotten me more than a dozen well-paying contracts over three years.

We’d shared bottles of smuggled booze in dingy back rooms where the kinds of deals he specialized in tended to hatch. Up until about ten seconds ago, I’d never dropped my guard around him, but I’d always sensed Vinian at least respected me, and not just as a smuggler he could rely on to get a job done so we both got paid. At the very least he’d made a lot of money off the jobs I’d completed. Enough not to betray or kill me, I’d thought.

Apparently I’d thought wrong. And that was my mistake. In this business, it only took one.

What really had me seething, though, was that no one should catch a survivor of Ganai’s arenas off-guard. We were the best of the best, in the arena and off-world. Our trainers and endless battles on the sand had honed our bodies and instincts from the moment our hands were capable of holding weapons. For me, that was shortly after my fourth birthday.

Before the arenas had all finally been shut and burned, the child gladiators who’d survived to the age of sixteen and been granted freedom became some of the highest-paid smugglers, mercs, and specialized soldiers in the galaxy. We were vicious. Ruthless. Monstrous.

And yet here I was, eye level with the tips of Vinian’s tentacles, cheek pressed into the filthy corrugated metal floor of the docking bay and the familiar sickening scent of my blood and seared flesh filling my nose. At least shock and my nanobots made the physical pain distant.

I gritted my teeth to hold in a groan and craned my neck to look up.

Vinian and I were no longer alone. Two huge serpentine Altasians had entered the docking bay. Both nagas were males, judging by their size and spread hoods. They stared imperiously at me with golden eyes and diamond-slit pupils. Like my betrayer, the nagas towered over me, swaying upright on their coiled lower bodies as opposed to Vinian’s many tentacles. Each carried a plasma rifle and a variety of other weapons in specially designed holster rigs. Their uniforms bore no official insignias. Mercs, maybe. Or someone’s soldiers.

So they’d been sent to either execute me or haul me back to their boss. The fact I wasn’t already dead indicated the latter. Who the hells had I pissed off?

Despite my situation, I almost snorted. I’d been a smuggler for a decade, so the suspect list was long. But the list of people who would be motivated and wealthy enough to pay Vinian to stab one of his best operatives in the back and hand her over to these Altasians was much shorter.

Oh, this was personal for someone, all right. But who?

Since it usually worked in my favor to feign being much more injured than I was, I let out my most pitiful groan and dropped my head as if too weak to hold it up. I needed to stall to give my nanobots time to heal me enough to keep me alive. The tone of their humming in my blood had a frantic edge to it that I didn’t like at all.

“What the hells, Vinian?” I didn’t have to fake a raspy voice or the wheeze and gurgle in my breathing. My chest felt tight. That dagger had definitely hit my lung. “I thought you liked me. I know you liked the credits we’ve made together. I was planning on us making a lot more.”

His burbly laugh made me wish I still had my guns. His nimble tentacles had taken my guns and blades from the holsters on my thighs and waist at the same moment the dagger went into my back. None of them would respond to any bio-signature but mine, so they were useless to anyone else, but seeing them scattered across the deck out of reach made the fire of my hate burn brighter.

“I am fond of credits,” Vinian agreed, his chortle stoking that fire in my belly even hotter. “But someone has offered me favors worth far more than I could make off you in ten years, and…well, there are other smugglers out there just as good.”

A very inhuman growl escaped my clenched jaw. This bastard was already dead, but now I’d take a lot more pleasure in sending him to the afterlife.

Three of Vinian’s black eyes stayed fixed on my face while the other three looked at something behind me. “And what I’ll make from selling your ship will fund upgrades to my private yacht. Its mating tank needs a better bar, my concubines say. We will drink to your memory once the work is complete.”

Icy cold washed through me, narrowing my focus and clearing my buzzing head. The chill had nothing to do with blood loss or the nanobots, or even the temperature of the deck under me.

Nobody threatened to take away my ship and lived.

The CS Nivilus wasn’t just my means of making a living. It was my first and only real home, my refuge, my armor against a cold and unfeeling universe where my life meant little and my well-being even less. Every day I spent in its pilot’s seat was proof that not only had I survived the arenas but that my life was now my own.