Vendetta (Project Vetus Book 2) Read online

  VENDETTA

  PROJECT VETUS, BOOK 2

  EMMY CHANDLER

  EMERSON INK

  CONTENTS

  About The Project Vetus Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A note from Emmy

  Also by Emmy Chandler

  About Emmy

  Copyright © 2019 by Emmy Chandler

  Editing by Daisy Copy Editing.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.EmmyChandler.com

  Created with Vellum

  ABOUT THE PROJECT VETUS SERIES

  BY EMMY CHANDLER

  Sentenced to death for war crimes they didn’t commit, Captain Carson Sotelo and the Zeta 8 special forces team were given a choice: die in disgrace or live as something entirely new. Several dozen procedures and a medically induced coma later, they awoke on the prison planet Rhodon as super-soldier prototypes, spliced with genes from an extinct alien species.

  Now that they’ve escaped the lab where they were imprisoned, they’re ready to take revenge on Universal Authority, the hydra-like corporation that destroyed their lives and stole their futures. And along the way, they might just find love!

  1

  VAUGHN

  FROM SPACE, the planet Gebose looks like a beautiful green-and-brown-marbled ball, but from down here on the surface? Well, most of this rock is covered with marshes and swampland giving off the odor of a stagnant pond, and the stench is slowly permeating the interior of our poor little shuttle, thanks to the open boarding ramp.

  During the Great Expansion, every inhabited planet in the galaxy was terraformed with Earth-native flora and fauna, but some species are better suited to some environments. Which is why no two inhabited planets look the same, and why not one of them looks entirely like humanity’s origin world. Gebose in particular seems to have drawn the short straw. Evidently nothing can thrive here but moss, mold, and rotting wood.

  What that says about the people who choose to live here is anyone’s guess, but I can’t wait to scrape the mud from this shithole off the soles of my boots, on our way out the proverbial door.

  Based on the pinched expressions from the rest of the crew, I am not alone in that desire.

  “This is bullshit,” Lilli Malone snaps, holding up a long, heavy gray garment that resembles… Well, it doesn’t resemble anything, really, other than an inverted cloth sack the size of a person. “As if the smell and the heat weren’t bad enough. How come you guys don’t have to wear this thing?”

  “Because on Gebose, the rules for men are different than the rules for women,” Burke Jamison explains as he lifts a second, identical “courtesy garment” from the box he just carried on board. Supposedly, it’s a gift for the two women on our crew, from our hosts. A “gift” they evidently present to every foreign woman who sets foot on the planet. But Jamison’s light-eyed scowl says he feels the same way about it that Lilli does.

  As do I.

  “Back home—long before the prison planet,” Lilli clarifies. “—guys would sometimes talk about putting a paper sack over a girl’s face, if she were ugly and he were an asshole. But these sick fucks—” She gestures to the lowered boarding ramp, showing us a slice of this unfamiliar planet that consists of little more than the rooftop landing pad, shimmering with heat our climate control has thus far managed to stave off. “These sick fucks seem to have taken that concept to an even more abhorrent extreme. How am I supposed to see where I’m going, in this?”

  “Actually, that part’s kind of cool.” Thiago Zamora snatches the second garment from Jamison and drapes it over himself. “Check it out. From the inside, this thing is transparent. You can see right through it.” He turns in an exaggerated circle, pointing out the features of our cramped main deck. “Flight controls. Galley. And one, two, three, four bunks.”

  The galley is just a couple of appliances and a short stretch of countertop and cabinets, across from the wall the bunks are built into. There’s also a restroom with a narrow shower stall, as well as a metal staircase leading to a small cargo hold directly beneath the main deck.

  The seven of us have been packed into this flying anchovy tin since our escape from the prison planet Rhodon about a month ago, and if we don’t find a bigger ship soon, someone’s going to snap.

  That’s almost certainly going to be Carson Sotelo, our captain and Lilli’s…well, her everything. Which is why we’ve landed on Gebose.

  “I mean, it’s a bit like wearing one of those old sheath prophylactics—a condom—on your whole body,” Zamora admits, and I’m amused to realize he’s basically calling himself a giant dick. He shrugs, and the entire garment rises several inches with the motion. “But vision will not be a problem.”

  I grab the top of the full-body sheath and pull it off of him. “It looks as ridiculous on you as it will on her,” I say as I drop it into the box.

  Light footsteps echo from the narrow staircase coming up from the cargo hold, and Lieutenant Tirzah Dreyer appears on the main deck. She’s no longer a lieutenant, of course, just as I’m no longer a sergeant. But even several years post-military service, it’s hard not to think of her as Sotelo’s second-in-command. As my direct supervisor. “What the hell is that?” she demands as her gaze snags on the material Lilli still holds.

  “This is the ‘courtesy garment’ you and I have to wear, if we want to leave the ship.” Lilli holds it up, so Dreyer can see the shape. Er, the lack of shape.

  “Just the two of us?” Dreyer frowns. “Why?”

  “Because the rules for men on Gebose are different than the rules for women,” Jamison repeats.

  “Okay, but why?” Lilli asks, understandably perplexed.

  “‘This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate,’” I admit.

  Jamison cocks his head at me. “Who said that one?”

  “Simone de Beauvoir. French philosopher and activist.”

  “She figured that out half a millennium ago, but these sexist fucks…” Fury burns in Dreyer’s cheeks as she stares through the open ramp. “Absolutely not. If I’m going out there in that, so are every one of you assholes.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” I agree, crossing my arms over my chest as I sit on the edge of the control panel. “And I know I have no right to an opinion on the matter, considering that the same isn’t being asked of me. But unless we want to be stuck on this shuttle indefinitely, sharing bunks in alternate sleep shifts, then these are the rules we have to play by. Meshach Larsen is the only black market asshole currently willing to accept payment in services rendered, rather than cash or credit. And since we have neither cash nor credit…” I shrug.

  “Just think about what they’re really saying with these things.” Zamora runs one hand over the wad of cloth in the box.
“They’re basically saying your beauty burns so bright it’ll blind mere mortal men, so they have to…dampen it a little.” He winks at Lilli, a familiar gesture that might have lost him an eye, a month ago. But Sotelo has calmed down a lot since he and Lilli first got together. Maybe that’s because their mating frenzy has finally eased, now that her pregnancy hormones have fully kicked in. Or maybe it’s because we’ve been cooped up in here for weeks, and no one has attempted to take his woman. Either way, Sotelo hasn’t tried to kill anyone even once since we broke out of the prison planet lab where we were held and studied by Universal Authority for more than two years.

  “Technically, he’s right,” I say. “The men on Gebose believe they’re protecting their women by shielding them from the eyes of potentially predatory men.” That’s what they claim, anyway.

  “I’m plenty protected.” Dreyer places one hand on the sidearm strapped to her hip—one of several laser pistols we’d found in the locked armory cabinet of our stolen mid-range shuttle.

  “If they’re worried about their women’s safety, maybe they should check their predatory men, rather than punishing every woman on the damn planet, just for being alive,” Lilli snaps.

  “For the record, I agree with you,” I assure her. “But they don’t see it as punishment. They believe they’re safeguarding their women’s modesty.”

  “Safeguarding it from what?” Dreyer demands. “Sounds to me like they’re creating an environment in which women are in danger, then taking away their rights under the auspices of protecting them from that manufactured danger. That’s some archaic shit, right there.”

  “You don’t have to go out there at all,” Jamison says, his voice soft with empathy for the two women on our ship. “You can both stay on the ship, and—”

  “Fuck that,” Lilli snaps. “I’m not giving up the first chance I’ve had to breathe fresh air just because I was born with girl parts instead of boy parts. We’re all going to stretch our legs and see what this weird-ass planet looks like.”

  “No,” Sotelo growls as he stomps up the ramp, with Everett Lawrence on his heels. “You’re staying onboard, where I know you’re safe.”

  “The hell I am.” Lilli’s eyes flash in anger at him, and if a retreat to the cargo hold wouldn’t look like cowardice, the rest of us would be racing for the narrow metal staircase right now, to avoid standing awkward witness to their argument. “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “I’m in charge of this crew,” Sotelo says, his chest puffed out with an imagined insult to his authority. Thanks to his beast, which is closer to the surface than ever, since he met Lilli.

  “I’m not one of your crew members,” she reminds him. “And I was never one of your soldiers.”

  His jaw clenches. “You’re my woman. Mine. And that’s my baby,” he adds with a glance at her still-flat stomach.

  “Until you’re able to contribute more to the effort of childrearing than a simple injection of genetic material, this is my baby,” she fires back. “And I’m no more yours than you are mine. Which means that if you have the authority to keep me here, I have that same authority over you. So, either we both go, or neither of us goes. Got it?”

  Zamora snorts, and I can’t resist a smile at Sotelo’s frustrated grunt. No one’s ever spoken to the captain like that. Not even the sick scientists who turned us into monsters, then spent the next two years poking and prodding us. “Fine,” he says at last. “But I don’t make the rules out there. If you’re going out, you have to wear this asinine thing. Same goes for you, Dreyer,” he says as his focus shifts to Tirzah, our only female crew member. “And as stupid as I think that is, I’m not going to waste time apologizing for a rule I didn’t make up.”

  “Well, you’re in a mood,” Lilli observes. “Are you pregnant too?”

  Subtle coughs and cleared throats all over the main deck disguise laughter at our captain’s expense, but Dreyer doesn’t seem to have heard the joke. “This is such bullshit,” she mumbles, echoing Lilli’s comment from moments ago.

  They’re not wrong.

  “It’s only for a few minutes,” Lawrence says. “We’ve already pre-negotiated the terms with Meshach’s brother, Aaron. All that’s left is for him to make his official offer and for us to accept.”

  “Why bother, if we’ve already come to terms?” Dreyer asks.

  “Because people on this planet are very concerned with propriety. With observing their formal and somewhat archaic traditions,” I explain, drawing on what I read about Gebose during our two-day journey here. “And one of those traditions is sealing any agreement with a handshake.”

  “They better be selling one hell of a ship,” Lilli grumbles.

  Sotelo snorts. “It’s outdated and ugly. But Lawrence and I have inspected it, and it’s functional, long-range, and big enough for all of us to comfortably live in. Once we’re out of here for good, Lawrence and Zamora can see about upgrades. And since the ship is unregistered, Coleman can register it under a new name with some unremarkable objective, so that it’ll pass casual security scans. Right Coleman?”

  I nod. “That’s the plan. But we don’t get the ship until we render the service.”

  “Cargo retrieval, right?” Lilli eyes the gray garment she’s still holding. “Are we sure the missing cargo even really belongs to this Meshach? I mean, couldn’t he be using us to steal something?”

  “He certainly could be, and that changes nothing for us,” I tell her. “But if it makes you feel any better, I’ve done a preliminary trace on this missing cargo, and it was officially reported stolen, along with a bunch of other freight, when the ship it was on was hit by pirates. So even if he’s looking to retrieve it through unofficial channels—i.e. us—that’s probably because the delivery was uninsured, which is illegal. Or because he’s worried that filing an official report with the intergalactic shipping union will draw attention to other, less legal ventures he may be involved in.”

  Lilli frowns. “So, we’re doing an honest job for a dishonest man. Off the books.”

  I give her half a smile. “Exactly.”

  “Well then, let’s get this over with.” Dreyer heaves a reluctant sigh, then she grabs the other “courtesy garment” from the box and drapes it over her head. While the material ended around Zamora’s calves, it swallows Dreyer entirely, the neatly stitched hem swishing around the tops of her black combat boots.

  She looks like a child wearing a gray ghost costume.

  Lilli dons the other garment, and if I hadn’t seen her pull the damned thing on, I would have no idea who was beneath it. She and Dreyer are close enough to the same height that once they start moving around, I won’t be able to tell them apart because the “courtesy garment” disguises their builds, and they’re wearing identical boots.

  Except for Lilli, who was never a soldier, we all wore identical uniforms for years, in battle. But those uniforms didn’t obscure our identities or limit our interactions. This feels like something else entirely.

  “Come on.” Sotelo stomps toward the ramp. “I want to be off this planet in fifteen minutes.”

  We disembark behind him, and Zamora and I take up the rear, behind the women, and just as I expected, I can’t tell which is which until I see a bump in one of the gray coverings, at hip height, and I realize that Dreyer has one hand on her gun.

  Outside, without the benefit of our stolen shuttle’s climate control, the air is hot and humid. My shirt begins sticking to me almost immediately, and I feel sorry for Dreyer and Lilli, who must be sweltering beneath all that material.

  As directed by the local officials, Jamison, our pilot, has set us down on a large landing pad atop a building several stories tall, which stands near the edge of the small capital city of Telma. Beyond a few more squat buildings and a grid of elevated roads, mile after mile of swampland stretches into the distance. Trees grow out of a stagnant soup of moss, sawgrass, and duckweed, with the occasional blooming lily floating on the surface. Patches of this ubiquitous
swamp are obscured by a heavy fog that probably never truly dissipates, in a land characterized by nearly one hundred percent humidity.

  The damp quality of the air is nothing new to most of us, even after two years spent on Rhodon and several years in battle on foreign rocks, before that. All of us except Lilli are from the planet Tethys, ninety-five percent of which is covered by a glittering green saltwater ocean. But this humidity paired with such intense heat is new and virtually unbearable within seconds of stepping out of the ship.

  There’s only one man waiting for us on the rooftop, and as soon as he sees us, he raises his hand and speaks into a slim device strapped to his wrist. The door behind him opens, admitting a ten-man delegation from our host.

  The men each wear some variation of a loose, light brown button-up collarless shirt and darker brown pants. They are all pale—some paler than others—with light eyes and hair ranging from a nearly translucent blond to the golden brown of fresh honey.

  There isn’t a single woman in the group, yet I’m pretty sure I know what all their women look like.

  A man at the center of the delegation steps forward rubbing a short, reddish blond beard that is just starting to sprout streaks of silver. He’s a couple of inches taller than most of his own men, as well as Sotelo, yet he’s not quite as tall as Lawrence or me. But his build is solid. Physically, he could be a threat to any normal man.

  We are not normal men.

  “Captain Pryor?” the man with the reddish beard says.

  Sotelo steps forward, acknowledging an alias that has nothing to do with the fact that we’ve recently escaped from a prison planet. Universal Authority would never acknowledge our escape, much less our existence, after what they’ve done to us. After what they’ve turned us into. They’re definitely out there looking for us, but they’re doing it quietly. Without sending out alert notices or circulating our pictures.

  We’ve given Sotelo an alias because all of us except Lilli are officially deceased, purportedly having been executed for war crimes we didn’t commit more than two years ago. We’ve all undergone significant physical changes since then, but if Meshach and his men were to run a search on any of our real names, our anonymity would be blown.