Marauder Aegus Read Free

bleed out will be of teal alien cock. People have died thinking of worse things.
    The armor covers me completely. I feel its cool liquid form rush into my neck as it encases the wound.
    When I try to breathe again, I feel the air come blessedly out of my mouth and nose rather than gurgling through the hole in my neck.
    The armor doesn’t just cover my neck, it blocks out all the light and completely enshrouds me. I can’t see a thing, but I can still hear.
    “Fuck!” Rickon grunts.
    And then I hear Rickon’s voice gurgling, and I know Aegus has slit his throat.
    When the armor pulls away from me, my throat stays healed. None of the other smugglers were so lucky.
    Aegus looks up at the blaring alarms and klaxons, and then those perfect green eyes shift in my direction. He peers deeply into my eyes as he holds out his hand to me and speaks to me for the first time. “Woman, what is your name?”
    “Anya,” I say, mouth agape.
    “Anya,” he says. “Take me to Venus.”

4 Aegus
    “ I ...just left Venus! I’m not going back there!” she shrieks.
    I notice then the gleaming ruby on her ring and realize she must have been someone important there. Rubies like that cannot be found on Venus.
    I move toward the docking gate and order my biosuit to interface with the computer. It’s a simple hack and the door opens up.
    “Are you coming with me?” I ask.
    She’s followed me to the door, but she’s frowning at me. Her face is flushed with anger, which I must admit makes her all the more attractive to me.
    “Why the hell would I come with you?” she snorts.
    I point down the terminal corridor where I notice the slow advance of security robots in our direction. Behind them march the cowardly human guards, afraid to take on a Marauder without a shield of robots in front of them.
    “They don’t want me ,” she says. “I’m…”
    Her voice trails off.
    “Shit!” she shouts. “You idiot! I was less than an hour from freedom, and you ruined everything!”
    I bow my head to her and say, “I owe you great shame debt, and if you help me to Sankt Petersburg, I will be even deeper in your debt.”
    “What? Really?”
    “Yes–”
    “So, you owe me like, two favors?”
    “At least,” I start to stay, “But we–”
    She grabs my arm and starts tugging me into the docking gate.
    “So you’ll help me?” I ask.
    “I’m so mad at you,” she says, looking up at me. Her blue eyes betray something other than anger, and my chest tightens at the implications. “But I want those favors.”
    I seal the door shut behind us, and she leads the way into the shuttle.
    “I hope you can fly this,” she says, buckling into one of the seats, “because I can’t.”
    I trained hard for every aspect of this mission, in orbit around Titan and later on Mars. Flying a simple shuttle like this is nothing.
    “Yes,” I say, strapping into the pilot’s seat. “Will they have scrambled fighters to intercept?”
    “No,” Anya says. “Not yet. Just drop fast into the ionosphere, that’s where my father’s territory begins. They can’t touch you after that.”
    Her father? Anya...Anya Ivanov, daughter of the Tsar. The Tsarevna.
    This was not the stealthy infiltration of Sankt Petersburg for which I had planned, but ever since my arrival in the solar system years ago, nothing has ever gone according to plan.
    I detach from the docking gate and slam the throttle to reorient the ship. I scan through the windows to make sure no one is going to shoot us down, and then I burn hard to bring us into the atmosphere.
    Venus’s atmosphere is the thickest in the solar system, so I can’t exactly nosedive into it without burning up, but at nearly the last moment, I dive hard and adjust for a shallower entry.
    The alarms blare as I skid across the atmosphere, barely pulling the nose of the ship up in time.
    “Shit,” Anya says. “You’re cutting it damn close.”
    Sweat drips down my forehead, but I keep calm as the warnings begin to