One
Alexa stared at the Cyborg on the other side of the airfield.
The one creature in this universe she’d spent years chasing. The bastard who murdered her father. She knew she was being conspicuous—she wasn’t shy about staring—but she wasn’t the only one. The rest of the crew watched him too.
Hysterian.
Cyborgs were uncommon, relics of a past that everyone wanted to forget, but still lived with everyday. Products of a war that devastated two species.
But the crew didn’t watch him the way she watched him.
They didn’t have the burning hatred for Hysterian like she did. They didn’t have a history with him.
She squeezed the rag in her hand then wiped it across her brow. She was sweating like crazy, and it wasn’t even that hot. It was a mild day near the end of summer. Even though she’d been doing manual labor all morning to prep the ship for takeoff, the heat shouldn’t have affected her like this. None of her other crewmates were as hot as she was.
Alexa glanced at them. Some glanced back, and she averted her eyes.
All of them were men. She knew they would be but had hoped there would be at least one other woman on the ship with her. That was a lot to hope for in her field. Getting a degree in space systems technology, space law, and ship management wasn’t something a lot of women did, though there had been a handful in her classes on Elyria. Elderly women especially.
No one wanted to retire on Elyria. It was a glitzy metropolis with the seediest underground in all the cosmos. It was cheaper to get a job working on a spacecraft for a woman than going through the application process to move to a different planet, even with the looser restrictions for women who hadn’t been born on Earth.
Old folk wanted to retire on Gliese, or Kepler, but not Elyria. Even retiring on Earth was better than a place that gave no rights to the elderly.
Turning back to the task at hand, Alexa lifted her case and headed for the hatch. Her gaze slid to Hysterian as she walked up the ramp.
Covered from head to toe in a black mesh and cloth suit, he stood out.
Speaking to several men in business suits out on the tarmac, Hysterian was devilish and enigmatic. His dark eyes lightened to gray when numbers skittered across them. If that didn’t command attention, then it was his height, or the way his uniform hinted at the manmade muscles beneath it.
The muscles were hidden, though. His suit covered him from toe to…eyes. Alexa averted her own eyes when he looked in her direction.
He’d been speaking to the men most of the morning.
She tried to find a reason to get within earshot of them earlier, but nothing had come to mind. Whatever they spoke of would remain a secret.
If I was a higher rank, I could maybe find out…
She wasn’t. She was high enough to be on a Cyborg’s ship, but she wasn’t an officer. She wasn’t military. She wasn’t even bridge crew.
She was one of two people to oversee the ship’s laboratory and requisitions. She wouldn’t be in Hysterian’s neck of the ship.
Alexa wanted to be closer, needed to be closer. After he killed her father, she’d only wished to get as close to Hysterian as possible. To kill him. To do to him as he did to her father.
Elyria had been hot that day too. She’d sworn the planet was trying to cook her.
It was a hungry planet, after all. Elyria, always insatiable. Cooking her would be the kindest thing the planet could do. She hated the heat. Almost as much as the man she now worked for. Though, back then, she didn’t even know Hysterian existed. His kind had been nothing more than a distant nightmare. A prickling memory. One she hadn’t experienced since she was a child.
Regardless, the day her dad was murdered, her blood boiled under the sun… Skin melting in the summer heat…
Alexa shook her head, clearing it. It’d been a hot day.
She entered the ship.
Earth was just as hot as Elyria on its worst days. And with it being midsummer on the human planet, she’d already experienced a few. She checked her grip on the case, bypassing the ship’s menagerie and making her way to the storage facility attached to it.
The door opened for her as she neared.
A blast of cold air hit her, and Alexa paused, enjoying the chilling relief. It was enough to take the edge off. She placed her load on a shelf and locked it into place, scanning the barcode attached to it.
Inventory updated.
It wasn’t something she needed to do. The ship was high-tech enough to have an artificial intelligence programmed into it to keep inventory on everything up to date, but she did it anyway. She moved to the other resources and scanned them as well.
She didn’t trust anyone else’s data. They were often wrong. Her lack of trust had saved her ass on several occasions. If she trusted Elyrians, she’d still be in the slums. If she trusted the police on her home planet, her father’s death would go unavenged.
Why else did women not get degrees in her field of study? Because they were discouraged—sometimes aggressively—to do so.
Women, and only women, were welcomed within the Trentian-controlled space sectors. If a woman owned and piloted her ship, what would stop her from leaving Earth’s jurisdiction and cross over? What would stop her from smuggling other women across?
Trentians suffered a breeding disease—their society had few women left because of it—and those who remained had trouble reproducing. Trentian males and females could reproduce with humans, though, and with the lack of Trentian females having babies, or even being born, Trentian males sought human females to replenish their ranks.
Human men don’t like the competition, especially not from a species that had warred with them for over a century.
The Earth government couldn’t afford to lose women to the aliens. They want to have the biggest dicks in the universe. Keeping women landlocked was what the government sought to do instead.
There was talk that the Trentians grew their young now in labs, but that was speculation and rumor. No one actually knew. She didn’t. Breeding politics meant nothing to her. She had no interest in having kids with a human man or an alien.
Hysterian’s demise was all she cared about.
Which was Alexa’s driving force to degree-up because she didn’t have access to money any other way. If she was going to kill a Cyborg, she had to be competent, smart. She had to know more than what she could learn in the slums. She knew Hysterian wouldn’t remain on Elyria forever. Traveling through space was expensive.
Though Elyria was different from most Earth territories. It was easier to do as you pleased, even as a woman. Breaking the law was commonplace.
Yet another reason why she didn’t trust easily.
The medical examiners said her dad died of a drug overdose—their equipment verified it. They were wrong.
Dad hadn’t overdosed on drugs. There were no needles, no marks on his flesh. There was no sign of vein bulge from Elyrian Sky, or excessive sweating from Scarlet opioids.
He was murdered.
All they found was an abnormal substance on her dad’s hand, nothing more. The substance neutralized all their tests—it responded to nothing. Benign, they decided. They took a sample of his skin and put it in a container to cryopreserve it. But when she followed up with them, the sample had miraculously gone missing.
It wasn’t missing. Someone stole or destroyed it. Why else would it have gone missing?