Forced Compliance (The Galactic Outlaws Book 1) Read online

  “We might not have that kind of time,” she said already moving deeper into the building.

  “Unless you have a better idea, it’s all we’ve got.”

  She just made a motion for me to follow her into the turbolift. There was only one button on the panel. The damn thing was shaped like a skull and was made out of silver. Classy. I pushed the button, and the lift didn’t move. Maze pulled out a card I hadn’t seen before, it was solid black. She must have swiped it from one of the dead guards. She held it to the panel, and I hit the button again. The lift started descending.

  Maze had her gun out, so I grabbed mine. She was right we couldn’t take a chance on this door opening on a bunch of armed guards without being prepared. I wasn’t too worried about it. Most of the security we had seen had been outside of the club, and that was Gabe’s problem. If the security stayed about the same this was going to be a walk in the park.

  The door to the lift opened and two guards turned towards us a look of surprise on their faces. Maze dropped them with one shot each. I tossed her my gun as she discarded her now useless weapon. She put me back to work pointing to where I could hide the bodies.

  With the bodies stashed and one of those fancy black cards in my own hand, I started to move down the hall. I noticed that Maze paused by the desk and was looking over some papers. Hopefully they would tell us where Kyra was, but I wasn’t waiting around. After seeing how this club worked, I was starting to get a real bad vibe about our chances of finding her safe.

  I used the card to open the nearest door. I was still thinking about Maze, and I almost pulled the door closed before I realized what was happening in the room. The nightmare playing out in front of me, brought me back to reality like a swift kick in the balls. The only thing that stopped me from running away was the thought that something like this could be happening to Kyra right now. I couldn’t tell who the victim was from my angle outside of the room, but I’d seen enough to become damned near sober. I pulled my knife out from inside of my coat and headed into the room.

  Three steps into the room and I knew it wasn’t Kyra. The long blonde hair had me worried, but it was a man hanging from the steel cables attached to the ceiling. He was hanging so his toes barely scraped against the floor, not giving him enough leverage to take any of the strain off of his upper body.

  The man standing in front of him was a real sick fuck. From what I could see, he was slowly cutting pieces off of the man and then soldering the wounds closed. He’d had to have been in here for a while, because burn marks littered the man’s chest and legs. The blonde seemed to be passed out, that was a small mercy, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t matter. The kind of sicko that would do something like this would probably wait for you to wake up before cutting you again.

  It didn’t take long for me to figure out I was wrong. The man placed a soldering iron against the victim’s skin. The sizzle of hot metal against flesh reached my ears, and the victim hanging from the ceiling didn’t even move. So I guess they didn’t have to be awake for this guy to get his kicks. Rushing forward, I sank my blade into the base of the man’s skull. His body went limp as his spine was severed. I kicked him once to make sure he was dead and then shoved the body out of the way. I didn’t have time to spend checking on the man in front of me. Not when Kyra could be in one of these rooms. I lowered him to the floor and rushed back into the hallway. I said a small prayer as I looked down the hallway. I’d never be able to forgive myself if something happened to Kyra.

  Maze was two doors up on the right. She had the right idea. We didn’t have time to waste. She only had a knife in hand so I could assume whoever had been in those first two rooms was dead. Turning away from her, I swiped the card on the door to room number two. What was happening in there was even worse.

  The smell of cooking flesh reached my nose as soon as I entered the room. I’d seen a lot out in the black and cannibalism was something I hoped never to see again. It was too late for that now. She was hanging from the ceiling just like the man in the last room, only this time she was facing the door. I could see several wounds on her that had been stitched closed. Her eyes were wide open but the fear was gone from them. It had been replaced with resignation to her fate. She watched the man sitting in front of her with a detachment I wouldn’t have thought possible as he began to cook. My best guess was the guy got off on making his victims watch while he ate them.

  The man sitting at a table covered in white linen turned and screamed at me. “I told you, I am not to be disturbed.”

  His fork still had a piece of flesh attached to it, and his lips were stained red. As I ran forward the man leapt to his feet and tried to put the woman between us. He held a knife to her throat, his eyes cold and calculating as they met mine.

  “I’ll kill her,” the man said, slobber dribbling from the corners of his mouth.

  “That would be a kindness,” I said.

  I pushed the woman back into him, hoping he would be too startled to cut her. He stumbled away, the knife falling out of his hand. Before he could find his feet again, I was on top of him. My arm rising and falling with six rapid blows to his chest. His cries of pain turned into gurgles before I made my way back to my feet. I went back to the table and grabbed the napkin. I stood over him for a second and then shoved the fabric into his mouth. I hoped he fucking choked to death.

  The woman was hanging in the center of the room much like the man I had just left. She had several sets of stitches on her. They seemed to be in the places you would need to cut to remove certain organs from the body. The wounds have been expertly sealed, making me wonder if the man on the ground was a surgeon of some kind.

  Her eyes snapped open and locked onto mine. I could see the relief in them, the barest glimmer of hope starting to set in. When she tried to speak, only a gagging sound came out of her mouth. It took me a minute to realize her tongue had been removed. Her dull blue eyes begged me for only one thing and how could I deny her such a simple request? If it had been me hanging up there, I would hope that someone would do the same thing for me. It would be a mercy, but that didn’t mean I needed to feel good about it.

  I put my blade to her throat, and she nodded. I cut it, and the look of relief that flashed across her face would stay with me forever. I fucking hated this place. I started to wish that we had brought some demolitions with us. Nothing would make me happier than leaving this place as a smoking pile of rubble.

  I reached up to my ear and activated my comm. “Gabe?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “We might be coming out of here hot. When I give the signal take out the guards at the front entrance.”

  Relief flooded his voice. “So you found her?”

  “Not yet, but we will.”

  “I’ll be waiting for your signal, Captain.”

  I deactivated the comm and headed for the next room. It was just as bad. Shit, every member of this club must have been a deranged psycho. It was like a multi-world group of serial killers. So much for getting some alone time with Maze later. After seeing this shit, I wouldn’t be able to get hard for days. Really, I’d be lucky if I didn’t find myself curled up in a ball in the corner of my bunk shaking from the nightmares. I’d seen a lot of torture during the war, but this was something different. The next three rooms went by quickly and just as messily. The spark inside of me that said we were going to find Kyra alive was starting to fade.

  I came out of the last room on my side just as Maze left hers. Our eyes met, and I could see that she was tired. Not physically, but from the strain of what we had found and what it might mean for our friend. Neither of us wanted to find her dead, but this was so much worse than we had imagined.

  There was only one door left, and it was right in front of us set into the back of the hall. If Kyra wasn’t in there, we didn’t have any other active leads on where to find her. That meant starting at square one again and based off what I had just seen that wasn’t going to cut it. I felt the guilt clenching my st
omach. All of this was my fault. If I had just gone with her to the market, we wouldn’t be stuck on this backwater moon dealing with this shit. We would have already completed the next job and would have been sitting flush with credits to spare.

  Maze put a hand on my forearm and gave it a squeeze. “You ready for this?”

  “Not in the slightest.” She let go of my arm and moved her card against the scanner. I kicked open the door and charged into the room. Three women screamed, and a man tried to push himself through the bars at the back of his cage. The reaction seemed to fit the situation. I was sure we didn’t look like people that could be trusted. If I was covered in as much blood as Maze, then it had to look like the crazies were coming for a new victim. The man was mumbling something that sounded eerily like, don’t pick me.

  “Captain?” A weary voice called out from my right.

  Maze was already moving in that direction when my eyes found the sweetest sight I had seen in days. She was in a cage but all of her limbs were still there, and after seeing what was happening here, that was a blessing. My engineer had a few bruises and one eye was a little puffy, but otherwise she looked good. “Kyra, thank God.” I ran towards the cage. Maze already had the door open, Kyra wrapped in her arms. I pulled both of them into a fierce hug. We did it, she was safe. Now all we had to do was get the hell out of here.

  I broke my embrace from the two women and opened up the other three cages. The two women came out, but the man stayed huddled in the back corner. I had seen something like this before during the war. He was broken, and we didn’t have the time to make him come with us. One of the women tried to talk to him, but he just screamed and started shouting gibberish as he tried to squeeze further into the corner of his cage.

  “Time to go ladies.” I felt almost giddy as I said it. It probably sounded wrong to them that anyone could be so happy in a place like this, but I was. Kyra was back, and it was time for us to get her home.

  “Who are you?” one of the women asked.

  “Not important.” I didn’t want them to be able to tell the authorities anything about us. We’d left a trail of dead bodies in our wake that couldn’t just be explained away. “We can take you somewhere, or you can wait here for the police.”

  “We’re coming,” they said in tandem.

  “Good decision.” I turned to Maze and Kyra. “Maze, make sure our girl stays safe. I’ll take point.”

  The trip out of the club was much faster than the way in. We didn’t run into any more guards on our way out of the basement. On the main floor no one had seemed to notice the missing guards. I contacted Gabe and heard the sound of gunfire from outside. We moved through the stunned patrons inside of the club, and out the main entrance.

  The sound of sirens already filled the night air. It was time to get the hell out of here. No way the authorities would be on our side when we murdered half the people in the damn building. Even if they were sick fucks, killing more than ten people was generally frowned upon anywhere in the verse. We had to get back to the Talon and off of this rock before they figured out who we were.

  “Ladies, this is where we part ways.” I tossed each of them a credit stick with five hundred units on it. “You can use those to get out of here on your own, or just stay put for the local authorities.”

  “What should we tell the police?” one of them asked.

  “Whatever you want, just make sure to leave us out of it.”

  I turned my back on them and jumped into the driver’s seat of the car. Gabe was grinning ear to ear as he slid back into the passenger seat. Maze and Kyra were loaded into the back. It was time to get the fuck out of here. Gabe hadn’t seen the horrors that we had inside of the building. He was just happy to have his friend back. I pushed down on the accelerator and darted out into traffic. We were almost home free.

  Chapter 6

  Captain Drake

  As we pulled up to the Talon Ice and the Doc came down the loading ramp. Both of them had huge smiles on their faces. Why wouldn’t they? Kyra was home, and we were about to leave. They helped Kyra board the Talon, and Gabe pulled the car off to the side of the landing bay. The rental company would be pissed we didn’t return the car, but since we used a fake Ident and the car was coming back in perfect condition, they would just have to forgive us. I didn’t want to stay on this planet any longer than we had to.

  The events of the night weren’t sitting well with me. As much as I trashed this planet, it was one of the more civilized out on the rim. They had cities and actual law enforcement. So how had an establishment like Club Morte ever stayed in operation?

  Despite the fact that we had Kyra back, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t over. The people that had enough influence to run a club like that wouldn’t just let this go. It wasn’t good for membership when one of your clubs had been infiltrated. That and the fact that we led the local law enforcement to their doorstep wouldn’t sit well with them. This was something that would take some series credits to erase. That meant I had just put whoever ran the club’s crosshairs on us in a big way. After everything we went through tonight, I hoped that wasn’t the case, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

  Once we were all inside of the Talon, I hit the button to close the ramp. The faster we got out of here the better. I turned and looked over the crew. All of them looked exhausted, but we could sleep when we hit FTL. “Ice, get us off this rock.”

  “Yes, Sir.” She gave me a mock salute and headed to the bridge of the ship.

  Kyra turned to go with her. “Kyra, I’d like you to get checked out by the Doc first and then you can join Ice on the bridge.” The Doc nodded and held out his hand, indicating Kyra should lead the way.

  Kyra turned towards me. “Captain, I’m fine. I just want a shower and to get back into my engine room.”

  “You’re not fine until the Doc gives you the all clear. The engines can wait.”

  “Fine, but I’m giving you a list of parts I want on our next stop.” She smiled. “This time you’re going to pick them up for me.”

  “I’d be more than willing to do that. It’s not like I can spend my entire life chasing you across the goddammed system.” That was the best I could do for now. It had been a long time since I had surrounded myself with people that I cared about. Emotions were tricky things, life was so much simpler when all I had to worry about was myself.

  Kyra pulled me into a fierce hug. “Love you too, Captain.” She held me firmly, and her next words almost came out as a whisper. “Thank you for coming for me.”

  “Always,” even as I said it, I felt the emotions of the last few days wash over me. We broke our embrace, and I put my hand on top of her head, messing up her hair like she was my kid sister. Kyra gave me a smile and started to follow the Doc back to medbay. I was little choked up knowing how much faith my crew put in me. With that came a certain kind of responsibility. I knew that I would do everything I could to never let them down.

  I watched Kyra for a moment brushing a little bit of wetness from my cheeks. It was a welcome relief when I felt the Talon’s engines roar to life under my feet. Gabe walked past us heading towards the rec room. He looked happy, for him this had been a pretty easy win. For Maze and I, not so much. She hadn’t told me what she had seen in those rooms, but she didn’t need to, for me to know that it was horrific. What I had seen reminded me of my worst days in the service, enforcing the law out on the border worlds.

  Maze was still in her pretty dress, but now it was covered in blood. I’d have to make sure to buy her a new one. There was no way the sanitation box was getting all of that blood out. I still felt a lingering sense of arousal from the kisses we had shared at the club, but it was being washed away by the desperate look on her face. I knew just how she felt. Sometimes you just needed comfort from someone that understood what you were going through. I put an arm around her, taking comfort from her presence. I led her into the ship, and she pressed herself tightly against me. It didn’t matter how hardened
you were by war, killing always took something from you.

  I stopped and turned Maze so I could look into her eyes. “Let’s go and get cleaned up.”

  “I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to wash the stain of that place off of me.”

  “All we can do is try.” I pulled her into a hug and held her there for a moment. Pushing those memories away wasn’t going to be easy, but right now we didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. We were behind schedule for our next job, and focusing on that might help us move forward. We broke apart, and I watched Maze walk towards her quarters before turning and heading to my own.

  The warm shower cleaned my skin, but my soul still felt dirty. My soul wasn’t exactly what you would call squeaky clean anyways, but some things went too far even for me. I guess you could call me morally ambiguous, but I lived by a code. I’d rain fire down on anyone that tried to hurt me and mine, but what we had seen tonight just reinforced how twisted the world had become. People like that didn’t have lines or codes that they lived by, and worse yet they didn’t understand why they needed them.

  Sure I’d killed people before, in the war. Now my rule on killing revolved around keeping my crew safe and the Talon in the air. If you came at us or tried to hurt one of mine, I’d put you down without hesitation. I could handle the guilt, shit, I had big enough shoulders to carry half of someone else’s guilt right along with my own. I didn’t feel guilty for what we had done tonight, and if I didn’t see that woman thanking me for killing her every time I closed my eyes, I’m sure I would have been able to sleep like a baby.

  The ship groaned as I stepped out of the shower. Something about the sounds of the ship eased my mind. It felt good being home, being somewhere safe. We were already breaking atmosphere. Ice must have put in our request to leave a while ago, either that or she hacked their system and moved us to the front of the line. The comm in my ear buzzed, and Ice started to speak.

  “So where we headed, Captain?”