She ignored the whimpers and burbling cries as the man tried to beg for mercy through blood and shattered teeth. He was still conscious, so he was still a threat. She kicked him hard in the temple, possibly fracturing his skull. His body spasmed once, then went limp. Another hard kick to the ribs evoked no reaction, assuring her he was really out.
She dropped down onto the ground beside the body, moving quickly in case somebody came into the alley to investigate the commotion. The fake MP had cuffed her hands behind her back, but he hadn’t done a very good job of it. The metal rings were loose enough on her wrists to allow Kahlee to slide them several inches up and down her forearms — there was just enough play that she might be able to get free. Squirming and struggling, she managed to contort her body enough to slide her chained wrists
down past her hip bones and along the backs of her thighs to her knees. She rolled onto her back and side, twisting so she could pull her feet through. Her wrists were still cuffed, but at least they were now in front of her.
Suppressing a gag reflex, she crawled on her hands and knees through the blood of her assailant until she was directly over his motionless body. He was still breathing in shallow, half-choked gasps. Kahlee let loose the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding. She felt no remorse over the savage beating she’d inflicted while fighting to save her own life, but she was glad she wouldn’t have this man’s death on her conscience.
Training and adrenaline had saved her. That, and the carelessness of her opponent. But as her adrenaline wound down and she took in the gruesome scene, she felt the first hints of panic. She was a soldier, but she’d never seen combat duty. She’d never encountered anything like this.
Come on, Sanders! The voice inside her head was that of her former drill instructor, though the words were her own. You’re not out of this mess yet.
She gritted her teeth, determined to finish the job. Even so, Kahlee shuddered as she fumbled around the man’s blood-soaked belt until she found the key to unlock her shackles. Releasing the cuffs proved even more difficult than sliding them around to her front, as she had to clasp the key in her teeth and try to fit it into the lock. But after several frustrating minutes she heard the click, and the bonds fell away from
her left wrist. With one hand free it only took another second to unlock the other cuff and Kahlee was free.
Kahlee took a quick look around, relieved to see nobody had stumbled into the alley yet. She grabbed
the gun from the man’s holster, checked that the safety was on, and stuffed it beneath her jacket and into her belt. She stood up, then froze.
She didn’t know who the unconscious man at her feet was working for, but it was obvious he had been specifically looking for her. That meant others probably were, too. They’d have the ports staked out, just waiting for her to try and get off-world. She was trapped. She couldn’t even go back to the main street. Not with her clothes covered in blood.
There was only one option left. Taking another breath to calm her jangling nerves, Kahlee left her assailant’s body where it lay, moving quickly in the direction away from the busy thoroughfare. She spent the rest of the night skulking through the back alleys of Elysium, careful to avoid detection, slowly making her way toward the house of the only person she could turn to for help. A man she promised her mother she’d never speak to again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Within a decade of its discovery by batarian surveyors, Camala had become one of the most important planets in the Skyllian Verge. Unlike most colony worlds, where initial populations were small and settlers tended to congregate around a single major city, Camala boasted two distinct metropolitan regions of over a million people each: Ujon, the capital, and the slightly larger Hatre, location of the world’s primary spaceports.
The two cities were nearly five hundred kilometers apart, built on opposite sides of a wide, inhospitable desert — the source of Camala’s rapid growth. For below the thin layer of orange sand and the hard, red rock underneath were some of the largest deposits of element zero in the Verge. The rich deposits of eezo
— the galaxy’s most valuable fuel source — drove Camala’s economy, drawing in colonists eager to seek their fortunes working at the hundreds of mining and refinery operations scattered across the empty desert. The majority of the world’s population were batarians, and only they enjoyed the full privileges of true citizenship under local law. But like any colony world with a prosperous economy, there was always a steady influx of visitors and immigrants from every recognized species across Citadel space.
Camala was easily the wealthiest of the batarian colony worlds, and Edan Had’dah was one of the wealthiest batarians on Camala. He was quite likely among the ten richest individuals in the entire Skyllian Verge, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. Normally he wore the latest in cutting-edge fashions: asari-designed ensembles made with the finest materials imported from Thessia itself. His preference ran to the opulent and extravagant — flowing black robes highlighted with splashes of red to bring out the hues of his skin. But for the meeting tonight he had donned a simple brown suit covered by a drab gray overcoat. For someone as infamously ostentatious as Edan Had’dah, his plain garb was an almost impenetrable disguise.
Typically, Edan would be enjoying a soothing nightcap at this hour, sipping the finest of hanar liquors in the den of his mansion in Ujon. But this night was positively atypical. Instead of relaxing in comfort and luxury, he was stuck sitting on a hard chair in a dingy warehouse in the desert outside Hatre, waiting for the Verge’s most infamous bounty hunter to arrive. Edan didn’t like waiting.
He wasn’t waiting alone. At least a dozen other men, all members of the Blue Sun mercenary gang, were milling about the warehouse. Six of them were batarian, two were turian, and the rest were human.
Edan didn’t like humans, either. Like his own species, they were bipedal. Similar in height, the humans were thicker in the torso, arms, and legs. They had short, stubby necks and square, blockish heads. And like all binocular species, their faces seemed lacking in character and intelligence. Instead of nostril slits they had an odd jutting protuberance for a nose. Even their mouths were strange, their lips so full and puffy it was a wonder they didn’t slur their speech. He actually thought they closely resembled the asari
— another race Edan didn’t like.
But he wasn’t one to let personal prejudice get in the way of business. There were several other so-called private security organizations for hire in the Skyllian Verge, and most of them charged a lot less than the Blue Suns. But the Suns had developed a reputation for being both discreet and ruthlessly efficient. Edan had used them several times in the past when “unconventional” business opportunities had presented themselves, so he knew from personal experience that their reputation was well earned. He wasn’t about to trust a mission as important as this one to someone else simply because the Suns had recently started taking on humans. Even though it had been a human member of the group who had screwed up on Elysium.
Normally Edan would never meet directly with the mercenaries he employed. He preferred to work through agents and go-betweens to keep his identity hidden — and also to avoid dealing with those who were socially beneath him. But the man he was hiring tonight had insisted on meeting him in person. Edan had no intention of bringing a bounty hunter into his home… or of meeting with him alone. So he’d donned the nondescript clothes, left his mansion, and traveled hundreds of kilometers by private plane to the outskirts of Ujon’s twin city on the other side of the desert. Now he was spending the night in a cold, dusty warehouse filled with soldiers for hire, sitting in a chair that was causing his back to ache and his legs to go numb. And the bounty hunter was over an hour late!