Drifters' Alliance, Book 3

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Tell your friends!

  Book Description

  Other Books by Elle Casey

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

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  About the Author

  Other Books by Elle Casey

  Want more?

  Drifters’ Alliance

  Book 3

  ELLE CASEY

  Being an independent author, I depend entirely on you, the reader, to get the word out about my books. If you liked this book, won’t you please leave a review online and recommend it to a friend? The more you spread the word, the more books I can write, and nothing would please me more than to put a new book in your hands every single month!

  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  Captain Cass and the crew of the DS Anarchy have been accepted into the Alliance, and plans are in the works to move forward as independent yet allied drifters. Unfortunately, the OSG isn’t onboard with their plan, and people high up in the chain of command are determined to bring Cass to heel.

  SERIES: This is Book 3 in an ongoing series

  GENRE: Science Fiction, Space Opera

  AUDIENCE: For older teens and adults

  CONTENT WARNING: Colorful language, sexy stuff, and general badassery

  Want to read more of my books?

  Please ask your friendly librarian to add more Elle Casey books to your library’s collection!

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  OTHER BOOKS BY ELLE CASEY

  SCIENCE FICTION

  Drifters’ Alliance (ongoing series)

  Winner Takes All (short story prequel to Drifters’ Alliance,

  Dark Beyond the Stars Anthology)

  CONTEMPORARY URBAN FANTASY

  War of the Fae (10-book series)

  *Book 1, The Changelings, is a free ebook at most retailers*

  Ten Things You Should Know About Dragons

  (short story, The Dragon Chronicles)

  My Vampire Summer

  Aces High

  DYSTOPIAN

  Apocalypsis (4-book series)

  ROMANCE

  By Degrees

  Rebel Wheels (3-book series)

  Just One Night (romantic serial)

  Just One Week (romantic serial)

  Love in New York (3-book series)

  Shine Not Burn (2-book series), also available as an Audiobook

  Bourbon Street Boys (3-book series), also available as an Audiobook

  Desperate Measures

  Mismatched

  ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  All the Glory: How Jason Bradley Went from Hero to Zero in Ten Seconds Flat

  Don’t Make Me Beautiful

  Wrecked (2-book series), Book 1 also available as an Audiobook

  PARANORMAL

  Duality (2-book series)

  Dreampath (short story, The Telepath Chronicles)

  Monkey Business (short story, Blood Iris 2012: A Dark Fantasy Anthology )

  Pocket Full of Sunshine (short story & screenplay)

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  © 2015 Elle Casey, all rights reserved, worldwide. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, uploaded to the Internet, or copied without author permission.

  The author respectfully asks that you please support artistic expression and help promote anti-piracy efforts by purchasing a copy of this ebook only at author-authorized online outlets that serve your country. If you’re viewing this book without having paid for it, you are pirating this creative work.

  PIRACY = STEALING

  Elle Casey thanks you deeply for your understanding and support.

  DEDICATION

  For Madzy…

  and all the other girls like her,

  who bring color to an often monochrome world.

  Chapter One

  BAEBONG TURNS IN HIS SEAT to watch me bust a move. I haven’t felt this limber in a long time. Yeah, baby. Must be that sarciossis magic. The expression on his face is confused, like he’s observing something he doesn’t quite understand. It slows me down.

  “What?” I ask, my hands up above my head as my hips swivel around to the left.

  He looks over at Jeffers, who I just notice is staring at me with his mouth partway open.

  “Is she having a stand-up seizure?” he asks.

  My arms drop to my sides, and I quit with the hip swivel action. “Ha, ha, very funny. What’s the matter? Never seen a girl dance before?”

  He just shakes his head really slowly side to side. Jeffers joins him.

  “Oh, shut up. What do you know about rhythm? Your idea of dancing is snapping your fingers twice and winking.” I walk over to my chair and sit down, ramping up the courage and calm I’ll need to speak with the Alliance again. They’re all waiting on my response after having welcomed us into the fold.

  Baebong mumbles, but I hear him loud and clear. “I know when I dance, it doesn’t look like I’m suffering an electrocution.”

  Ignoring him, I lean in toward my array and transmit to the entire Alliance at once. “Thanks, everyone, for the warm welcome. We’re really glad to be here with you. So … what’s next?”

  “My girls are asking for a meet and greet.” I think it’s Captain Alana speaking, leader of the ship full of women who spend their lives having sex with strangers for money. I gulp, remembering how close I came to joining their ranks once.

  The door to the flightdeck slides open and Gus walks through. “What’s going on? What did I miss?” He stops at the back of Baebong’s chair and hangs onto it as he stares out the clearpanel at the other Alliance members.

  “That’s fine with us,” I say, not really meaning it. Meet and greet? Is that whore-talk for having a big, all-in Alliance orgy? I can suddenly think of fifty things I’d rather do than have a face-to-face with the crew of the DS Osiris.

  “She wants a meet and greet,” Baebong says in a loud, slightly hyper whisper.

  “Who does?” Gus asks. “Captain Cass?” He looks over his shoulder at me.

  I shake my head and wait for him to put it all together.

  His eyes light up and he turns his attention to the clearpanel again. “Tell me it’s the whores.” He grabs Baebong’s shoulder and squeezes. “Tell me!”

&nb
sp; Baebong twists his arm over to release Gus’s hold on him, shoving him away in the process. “Get off me, man!” He’s still smiling, though. “Yeah, it’s the whores. A meet and greet. With them. And us.”

  I roll my eyes. “You guys should probably come up with a different way to describe our new partners. I don’t think they’re going to appreciate being called whores to their faces.”

  “Why not?” Gus asks. “That’s what they are, right? Nothing to be ashamed of. I respect all whores.” He nods very earnestly.

  “Yeah,” I say, not believing a word of it, “so long as they’re putting out.”

  He frowns. “Yeah, well … that’s what they do, right?”

  “Not for gingers,” Baebong says, laughing silently.

  Gus frowns, his attention back on my lieutenant. “Wait … what? Whores like gingers. Whores love gingers.” His confidence falters. “What are you talking about?”

  Baebong shrugs. “Oh, nothin’. Just something I heard once.”

  “What? What’d you hear?” Gus is getting more agitated by the second, by something I’m almost sure is completely made up.

  “Gus, relax. He’s just messing with you.”

  Baebong shakes his head. “No, I’m not. Swear. Some whores aren’t into the gingers. All those freckles … freak ‘em out or something. I’ve heard rumors of other things too …”

  “Aw, come on! That’s not true!” Gus looks at his arm and his face falls. “My mother always said our freckles were cute. Girls love freckles.” He holds his arm out at me. “Tell him, Captain. You’re a girl, kind of. You think they’re cute, right?”

  “Gus, go back to the engine room.” I work really hard at not smiling, focusing my attention on the clearpanel.

  He takes a step toward the door, but his arm is still out so I can see it. “I don’t have that many, you know. That’s good, right? Tam has way more than I do. His connect into one big blob in some spots. Mine don’t, see? All individual. Every last one. I’ve checked, believe me.”

  I refuse to look at him anymore. I have to negotiate our position and our future with the Alliance right now, and then I’m going to have to figure out how to execute whatever plans we come up with, so casting judgment on freckled skin is at the very bottom of my priority list.

  The door slides open.

  “Gingers have hidden talents!” Gus says loudly as he moves through the opening. “You wish you had ginger blood in you, slant-eye!”

  Baebong’s hand slides over to the door controls at his array, aiming to make it close regardless of whether Gus is out of the way or not. “Door closing. Better watch your freckled ass … wouldn’t want you to get it pinched in the door.”

  “You’ll see!” Gus yells as he jumps to the other side of the threshold. It’s the last we hear from him before the portal seals shut and blocks out any remaining sounds coming from the corridor.

  I sigh and look over at Baebong. “Did you have to do that?”

  “Do what?” Baebong is the picture of innocence.

  “Get him all paranoid about his ability to lure a whore into his ginger bed.”

  Baebong tries not to smile, but fails. “Hey, I spoke the truth. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

  “The rumors are not true,” Jeffers says, acting the peacemaker. “Gingers are just as human as the rest of us.”

  I tilt my head at that. “Overshine did say something weird about Tam when I was on the Baltimore. He said they don’t AI patients like him.” I search Jeffers’ face. “What do you think he meant by that?”

  Jeffers shakes his head. “I have no idea. I don’t know anything about either Tam or Gus that would make them ineligible for AI treatment.”

  “Hmm.” I gaze out the clearpanel as I think about it. There are just too many mysteries on this boat, and I need to get them figured out before we get too deep into the Alliance’s plans for us. I don’t like flying blind.

  “We agree with the meet and greet,” Beltz says, breaking the radio silence. “Which ship?”

  “The Osiris, of course,” Alana says. She sounds like she’s got some kind of secret joke she’s enjoying at our expense.

  I break out in a cold sweat. “That’s fine with us.” Not really. But what am I supposed to do? Run scared from a boat full of chicks who want to get in my crew’s pants? That’s the quickest way to stage a mutiny that I can think of. A sated crew is a happy crew, and I’m not going to stand in the way of that. Sexually frustrated humans lose control of their tempers too easily and make stupid mistakes being distracted. I’ll just have to take advantage of the down time. While they’re getting their rocks off, I’ll work on cleaning our cargo area and setting up an exercise program. Maybe Lucinda will feel like sitting down and having a chat about her Romanii biogrid building team.

  “That’s fine. When?” I ask.

  “The Huna crew is available at any time. We just need a couple hours to prepare.”

  “That is the same for the Arcadia,” says a male voice. I don’t think it’s the Romulus person who transmitted before, though. It sounds like a younger version of that man.

  “Good! It is decided,” says Beltz. “In two hours, we shall meet at the DS Osiris.”

  When I was in the OSG, we did slingshot maneuvers to bring over large groups of people wearing darksuits to a single airlock, but I can’t imagine that’s what’s going to happen here.

  “What’s the protocol?” I ask, hoping I don’t sound like a complete idiot.

  “We will come and get you,” Alana says. “Be at your airlock to meet us.”

  I try to imagine her DS maneuvering over to each one of our airlocks to do a pickup, but it’s not computing. We don’t have enough space where we are now. Even so, no one else is complaining, so I decide to keep my mouth shut. She’s been in the Alliance longer than I have, so maybe she knows something I don’t know. In the meantime, I have two hours to get some shit done around the Anarchy and a few questions needing answers. It’s not a lot of time, but I plan to do whatever I can to get this slate back to clean status, starting with Macon.

  Chapter Two

  I’D EXPECTED TO FIND MY old friend in the biogrid, but Lucinda said she hadn’t seen him in a while. He’d told her he was tired and had to rest. I find him in his bunk, sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at the wall on the other side of the chamber. Thankfully, he doesn’t look like he wants to stab me. At least not yet, he doesn’t.

  “What are you doing in here?” I descend the short stairway to be on his level.

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Dying.”

  I sit next to him on the bed. “That’s cheerful.”

  He says nothing.

  I don’t remember ever feeling awkward around Macon before; there was always this easy regularity to our interactions, like we were siblings who grew up together. But that’s all gone, now. He’s a stranger, more familiar to me as Rollo than as the person he really is. Macon.

  “Listen … I know I’m probably the last person in the world you want to talk to right now, but we have some things between us and I need to clear the air.”

  I wait, but he says nothing. There’s no outward sign that he even heard me.

  “Is that okay with you?”

  His expression doesn’t change. “You’re the captain.”

  “I’m not asking you if it’s okay with Rollo-the-stowaway. I’m asking if it’s okay with Macon-my-former-friend.”

  He huffs out a single bitter laugh, but that’s it.

  His response makes me ashamed for some reason. Maybe because I turned him from a very good friend into the former kind. Or to the kind that would rather strangle me than actually have a conversation with me.

  “You said that me winning this ship was a setup. You meant I didn’t really win the ship by chance, right? What do you know that I don’t?”

  His jaw bulges out as he grits his teeth. Either he’s mad about what happened or he
’s trying to keep himself from saying anything. Regardless, letting me see this emotion at all is something he shouldn’t be doing; he’s lost a lot of his training in the three years we’ve been gone from it. Call me heartless, but I’m going to use that to my advantage.

  “Did Langlade set me up?” I watch for any signs of truth to my statement reflected in his body language, but there’s nothing there that I can see.

  “Did his man Tremblay set me up?”

  Macon’s right eye twitches just the slightest bit.

  “Why would he do that?”

  Macon looks at me sideways. “I didn’t say he did.”

  I smile. “Sure you did.”

  Macon hisses out his anger and goes back to staring straight ahead. “You always were too good at the training, Cass, weren’t you?”

  “You were pretty damn good too, Macon, so don’t try to put all your shit on me.”

  He shakes his head, obviously pissed, but doesn’t respond.

  “Why would Tremblay want me to get Langlade’s ship?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Macon’s statement catches me off guard.

  “So, go ask Jeffers for some pellets.”

  “I’m not hungry for pellets. I’m hungry for a fritter.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. I’m sitting here as his Captain and captor trying to interrogate him about very sensitive, life-or-death information, and all he can think about is his stomach?

  “Are you serious?”

  He glares at me, his voice rising more with each sentence. “Yes, I’m serious. I want a fritter. If you want me to talk, you’ll feed me a fucking fritter, Cass!”

  I can’t help it. It’s the look on his face. I start to laugh.

  “You find that funny?!”

  I bite my lip to keep from losing it completely, but the effort makes tears come to my eyes. Macon is losing it … not over having been held captive on a warship by our former psychopathic trainer, not over having faced me in the pit again, and not over having been nearly floated for crimes he didn’t commit … but over a fritter.