Prologue

Violet made her way down one of the ship’s corridors listening intently for any patrol coming nearer. Since infiltrating the ship, she’s accessed the mainframe, which told her this ship had a skeleton crew and where the package had been stored, then accessed the security room, which had no guards in it, disabling the motion sensors, recordings, and allowing her to get through the vessel without using air vents to get everywhere. She had to commend the designer of this cruiser-class cargo ship for keeping the mainframe and security separate. It made this job ten percent harder…maybe six percent…okay, two. There hadn’t been a patrol in four hours, and she’d been there for six; the automated security turrets had no ammunition, and the five security droids still ran on plasma batteries. It truly did make Violet disappointed about the job.

She soon reached the ‘special’ cargo hold where the package had been stored. The airlock blast door had a type three holographic twenty-digit combination lock, the best security lock in the forty, or now forty-four, federation systems. It would take her ten minutes… maybe five. Violet flicked her right wrist, activating the cybernetic implants within her hand and a screen appeared over her blue and yellow eyes. The screen wasn’t obvious to outside observers unless they looked closely.

Violet set a stopwatch to time herself as streams of twenty-digit numbers scrolled across her vision, vertically and horizontally. Her fingers twitched as she typed in codes and bypassed the locking mechanism. The satisfying sound of an airlock unlocking made her smile, and she stopped the stopwatch with a quick mental command. ‘four minutes fifty-nine point five five-six seconds. A new record,’ she thought as she entered the cargo hold. In the center of the hold stood a pedestal with a small wooden box; she quickly checked for any other security she didn’t know about before going to the pedestal and opening the box.

An even bigger smile spread across her face as she confirmed the box’s contents. Six uncut meteor diamonds, each two and a half to three inches in diameter, and completely pure. The owner of this cargo had hired her to steal it from him and bring them to a secondary location he owned for safekeeping. Then once he reports it stolen, he can receive insurance money and send Violet an excellent cut of it after things cool down; plus, he promised one of the diamonds worth six million credits.

Violet placed the box inside a messenger bag, then re-adjusting her brown leather jacket. She turned and went back to the airlock; she had one last thing to do on the ship, and she couldn’t leave before leaving a job half done. Walking silently on the metal floor, Violet made her way to the crew courters where most of the ship’s crew had been sleeping, which meant fifteen people are asleep for this size ship. She opened the airlock and looked inside, counting ten people, which, combined with the skeleton crew’s status, meant ten people are currently awake.

She shrugged, pulled a small tripwire charge out of her bag, placed it just outside the airlock at shin height, and activated its laser tripwire. She then closed the airlock door and hunted for the other ten crew. She only needed to kill one of them, the captain, a man with a crooked nose and no hair anywhere on his head, but it’s best to kill the whole crew and then destroy the ship. No loose ends, no trail, no evidence, no crime, a lot of blood.

She soon found the mess hall in the cargo ship; seven of the ten crew played cards within; Violet guessed low stakes Texas Holdom judging from the one-hundred credits worth of credits still on the table. ‘I could buy a nice bottle of wine with that after I’m done here,’ she thought as she casually walked over to the four men and three women crew members. She didn’t bother identifying anything else about them; they’ll be dead soon after all.

Violet walked up behind one of the men with nobody noticing. She peeked over his shoulder as a fresh pair of cards had been dealt; the man had two of hearts and eight of clubs, a terrible hand, then he closed his hands and had a pair of aces. Violet smirked and slowly clapped loudly, startling everyone at the table, and said, “Bravo, good game, guys, good game. By the way, he’s cheating.”

The man in front of her turned and exclaimed, “Who the hell are-” his last words died as Violet flicked her left wrist, which had a bracelet that could create a small plasma blade twelve inches long, a creation of her design, and decapitated the man. She wasted no time or momentum as she drove the blade into the woman’s heart next to him, spun, and severed the jugular vein of the next person before they could run. The blade flickered out; then, she pulled a snubbed pulse pistol she had hidden up her right sleeve and fired four times, killing three of the people as they stood to run, and the fourth, a man, got a plasma bolt in their left shoulder blade and he fell to the ground trying to scream, but nothing came out.

Violet walked around the table to the man and pulled the bracelet off her left wrist, “Well, shit. It looks like I need more R-n-D on this thing,” she said, then stepped on the spot her plasma bolt struck the man. The man let out another silent scream, and Violet bent over to look at the man’s unremarkable face, “Do you know why you can’t scream right now?” she asked. The man shook his head, fear in his eyes as he looked up at her, “It’s because that bolt punctured your lung, and it’s now filling with fluid and cannot hold oxygen. So, you’re basically drowning in your blood right now,” Violet gave him a kind smile. Then shot him in the face.

Violet stood still for a moment and listened for any sound that told her people had heard her. Once she confirmed no one heard, she quickly gathered the credits and placed them in her bag. She then made her way out of the mess hall and headed to the engine room. Once there, she looked at the engine model, a type ninety-five fairy drive. The name sounded ridiculous, and the drives themselves tended to be temperamental.

Violet heard a woman curse as a wrench hit the ground. She walked around to the side of the engine and saw a topless woman with her head up in the engine. She wore a cargo jumpsuit with the top pulled down and tied around her waist and a tight-fitting sports bra, and her glorious four-pack abs and breasts glistened with sweat as she worked the engine. The woman reached for the dropped wrench, saw Violet’s black cargo pants, and said, “Hey, could you get me that wrench?” Violet walked over, picked up the wrench, and handed it to her, “Thank you, I’ve been working on this coupling for hours now, and just as I was about to finish it, my wrench slipped, and I have to start all over again. I keep telling the captain we need to replace the engine with something new, like the NTR-202 drives, but no, it’s too expensive. Buying one of those drives would pay for itself within two runs with the cargo we usually hold.”

Violet nodded as the woman went on a rant about engines, agreeing with every word. “Yeah, I know what you mean. The NTR-202 is an excellent engine. Not to mention using neutron energy is incredibly ingenious. I managed to snag the NTR-303, which is still a prototype but works wonders.”

The woman stopped what she had been doing, slowly slid out from under the engine, and looked up at Violet, “I have many questions. Who are you? How did you get here? Can I see the engine?”

“Hi. I am Violet. I got here with my ship, and no.”

“Please, let me see the engine! I’ll do anything!”

Violet raised an eyebrow and smiled, “Anything?”

“Anything!”

“Even join my crew on my ship?”

“If you need an engineer? Yes.”

Violet studied her, actively taking in the woman’s face. She looked to be of Asian descent, not that it matters that much today, and her eyes shimmered a beautiful emerald green. She had several smudges of black grease on her face, and her raven black hair had been tied into a bun. Violet rubbed the back of her head, running her fingers through her long blond hair, then smiled and said, “Okay, we’ll see how you do,” the woman’s face lit up with glee, and Violet knocked her out with a left uppercut, dislocating her jaw. “Well, you can’t take a hit, sadly. That can be fixed eventually,” she mumbled, then picked the woman up and carried her out of the engine room.

Violet laid the woman down on the metal floor, went back to plant an explosive charge on the engine, and left. She threw the woman over her shoulder and made her way to the bridge. She laid the woman back down just outside the door and placed an ear to it. She put an ear to the door and heard a rhythmic banging and a woman moaning. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ she thought as she listened and began to open the airlock. It also had a type three holographic twenty-digit combination lock; it took six minutes to unlock this time since she kept getting distracted by the woman’s moans and dirty talk.

The door opened, and the moaning naked woman sat on the holographic navigation table with the bold crooked-nosed captain pounding her with his dick and bare hairy ass facing Violet. When Violet opened the door, the naked woman’s screams of pleasure became crystal clear, “Oh, yes, give it to me, Pirate- hey! Who the fuck-”

Violet rolled her eyes and shot the woman without hesitation, cutting off the woman, and the bolt went right between her eyes. The captain screamed the highest pitched scream Violet had ever heard from a man, looking down at his crotch, then over his shoulder to Violet. “You make her call you Pirate lord, and you just came, didn’t you?” Violet asked, disgusted. The man nodded slowly, shame and fear on his face. Violet made a gagging face and said, “Your wife says hi,” then shot the captain in the head, closed the airlock door, locked it, and blasted the controls so nobody could get in… ever.

After taking a minute to mentally scrub her memories with bleach and fire in an effort to get rid of the memory, it didn’t work. She picked up the unconscious grease monkey she’s being allowed to kidnap and returned to her ship. Her ship had been docked on the port side of the cargo ship for hours, and nobody noticed. This crew almost deserved death if they are this incompetent. Violet boarded her small ship, only big enough for four people, with broadside neutron cannons and the NTR-303 engine; she had the fastest and deadliest ship in the galaxy.

She placed the unconscious woman in one of the four bunks and closed the airlock door. Then she detached from the cargo ship and flew safely away before activating the explosives she had placed on the ship. The cargo ship went up in a massive ball of fire and light, leaving only scraps of metal behind. Violet smiled a little at the destruction and entered the coordinates for the rendezvous. Still trying to rid herself of the memory of that hairy ass.

***

While the ship’s nav computer plotted a route to the rendezvous at planet GC-22b, Violet went back into the main cabin and examined her unconscious guest. She then patted her down, looking for tracking devices, weapons, or contraband. Finding nothing, she sighed in disappointment and got up to find a stim pack from one of her compartments. Once she retrieved the stim and the injector, which looked like an injection gun, she inserted the hypodermic needle into the woman’s jugular vein. She pulled the trigger, only injecting a small amount of the stim.

Then she tossed the used needle into a disposal bin and felt the woman’s dislocated jaw. It had moved over to the left, so Violet placed her hand on the woman’s left lower jaw, stabilized her head, and then pushed. The jawbone relocated with a loud crack, and the woman’s eyes shot open as she made a muffled scream with Violet holding her mouth shut. “Hey, you’re awake,” Violet said cheerfully, then knelt beside her, “How’s your jaw?”

The woman rubbed her jaw and said, “It’s okay. What happened?”

“Well, you offered to be my mechanic on my ship in exchange for seeing the NTR-303.”

“Oh, that’s right, the NTR-303! Can I see it now?!”

“Not so fast,” Violet said, holding up a hand, “Proper introductions are in order,” Violet stood and gave a small polite bow, “I am Violet V. Vermillion. My friends call me Fives. Everyone else calls me the Fifth Reaper. And who might you be?”

The woman got out of the bunch and said, “I am Yang Chuuntiaan. Everyone calls me Yang.”

“Chuuntiaan,” Violet said a second later, “Doesn’t that mean spring? Yang Spring. I like it. But we’ll have to create a new name for you to use.”

“What, why?” Yang asked.

“Well, you died. At least that’s what people will say when they find the ship’s wreckage.”

“What wreckage?” Yang asked, a little horrified.

“Well, after I knocked you out. I killed the captain of the ship and the girl he was fucking at the time, and then I set off the explosives I planted on the engine and destroyed the ship with everyone on it,” Violet said matter of factly. Then noticed that Yang looked distraught, so she tried to cheer her up, “Congratulations! You’re dead! Time to start your new life as an assassin mechanic…person,” Yang still didn’t look pleased, then a beeping sound came from the cockpit, and Violet said, “Want to see how fast this ship goes?”

“Yes!” Yang said excitedly, forgetting that she had just been told she had technically died.

Violet entered the cockpit and sat on the left seat while Yang sat on the right. Violet quickly examined the controls in front of her, flipping a few switches here and there, then placed her hands on the two joysticks connected to the seat. The left stick controlled speed, while the right controlled the ship’s roll, pitch, and yaw. An excited smile spread across her face as she slowly pushed the throttle forward, “I never get tired of seeing this. One moment we’re on one side of the galaxy, then,” the spots of light in the endless void that is space stretched and brightened, “you’re on the other.”

The throttle went as far forward as possible, and the ship blasted off into the distance, leaving behind a blue-white trail. The stars that had once looked stretched and thin now swirled and bent as the ship’s nav computer made impossibly sharp turns and mid-flight corrections to avoid unseen objects. Then it stopped, and Violet pulled back on the throttle till the ship rested in cruise.

Yang held on to the armrests of her seat for dear life and asked, “Where are we? How did the ship make all those turns?”

“We are at GC-22b, better known as…whatever the locals call it.”

“GC-22b! That’s two-thousand light-years away!”

“I know! The amount of energy one teaspoon of a neutron star could produce is incredible. And the navigation system is a CLC-314 best navigational computer in the galaxy.”

“CLC-314!!! I’ve wanted to get one forever!”

“They’re very nice. Now, I got to bring us in for a landing,” Violet pushed the throttle forward and entered the planet’s atmosphere. The ship rattled and shook but entered the atmosphere just fine. The planet GC-22b had been classified as a dead world, just a hunk of rock floating in space with enough minerals to make it valuable to large corporations, but otherwise looked grey and baren.

Violet pulled a headset from a hidden compartment, placed it around her head, the microphone resting on her upper jaw bone, and said, “Tower delta bravo, this is raven echo requesting permission to land, over.”

A few seconds later, she got a response, “This is tower delta bravo. We hear you loud and clear raven echo. You are clear to land on landing pad three-three, over.”

“Heard, landing pad three-three,” Violet said, accelerating the ship to bring the station within sight. The station had one large control tower, forty landing pads of varying sizes, thirty large landing pads for cargo ships on the surface, and ten mid-sized landing pads for passenger ships to transport workers or for business deals, such as the one she had come here to attend. The rest of the station hid underground, creating a network of hallways and mining tunnels, which Violet had memorized several days before.

She flew the ship into the hanger with a large three-three painted onto it and landed safely, shutting off the ship. “By the way,” Yang said, making Violet stop and listen, “What’s the name of your ship?” she asked.

Violet finished shutting down the ship’s systems and said, “Mauler.”

“Oooh, cool name.”

“I know, right?!” Violet exclaimed as she got up and retrieved her bag of meteor diamonds.

“Can I come too?” Yang asked.

Violet looked her up and down and said, “Fine, but I would cover up if I were you,” Yang looked down at herself, realized that she had been topless the whole time, and quickly pulled on the top half of her jumpsuit. Her face turned a deep red. Violet chuckled, “Alright, let’s go.”

Violet opened the airlock, and a ramp came out of the bottom of the airlock leading down to the ground. At the bottom of the ramp, a service droid waited for them to exit; it had a pill-like head and glowing eyes and wore a nice tuxedo. Violet didn’t know why, but she found it funny. Once at the bottom, the service droid bowed, “Greetings, I am W4-LT3R. You may call me Walter. I have been told to escort you to master Charles. Shall I lead the way?” the droid, Walter, asked.

“Yes, lead the way,” Violet said, then followed the droid. W4-L-whatever its name led them down several long hallways before arriving at an elevator that opened upon approach. The droid pressed a button on the console in the elevator, and they began moving down into the facility. They stopped two floors down and went through another maze of hallways and corridors before arriving at another elevator, bringing them down three floors. They then went down one massive corridor with equally huge doors, which looked to be where the workers entered the mining tunnels. The odd thing that stuck out to Violet had been the workers. Something didn’t feel right to her.

The droid stopped at the door at the end of the corridor, turned, and said, “Please leave any weapons you may have on your person with me,” then it extended a hand. Violet glowered at the droid and handed it the snubbed pulse pistol. The droid continued to extend the hand. Violet groaned and began handing the droid fifteen knives, two pistols, three explosive charges, two grenades, and one electro-kyoketsu (a blade attached to a twenty-foot electro rope). The droid continued holding out its already full hands. Violet sighed again and reached into Yang’s boots, pulling out one more knife. “Thank you. You may now see master Charles,” the droid said, placing the items into a compartment next to the door with a type five holographic forty-digit rolling encryption combination lock.

“When did you put a knife in my boot?!” Yang asked.

“When you were unconscious.”

“I could’ve been cut with that knife!”

“But you didn’t,” Violet said as the door opened, and she followed the droid into the room.

“This is master-” the droid began, but Violet didn’t let it finish. She ran forward, grabbed its head from behind, jumped, and spun, twisting its head. Then when she came down, she yanked the head over her shoulder, relieving it from the droid’s body. Violet held the droid’s head in one hand, revealing its spine and connecting circuitry.

She tossed it aside and looked up at the elderly gentleman sitting at a wide, oak desk, with his hands interlaced, not even blinking at the destruction of his robot. Wooden furniture became rare and expensive; the room had no other furnishings. That desk is a symbol of power and wealth. Violet approached the desk without a care in the world, as though she hadn’t just ripped off the head of the robot with her bare hands and placed her bag on the desk.

“Was it necessary to destroy my butler?” the gentleman asked.

“Do you really think I would accept being unarmed in here with you? I’d rather keep things in my favor.”

The gentleman shrugged and said, “Fair enough,” He opened up a drawer in his desk and pulled out a tungsten steel box, opening it to reveal a mountain of credits, “one-hundred million as discussed. Plus, your one diamond.”

Violet smiled and pulled out the box of diamonds revealing the five in exchange. “Looks like we have a deal,” Violet said, extending a hand for a handshake. The gentleman raised an eyebrow and cocked his head. Violet let out a small laugh, “Fair enough,” then took the case of credits.

The door behind her exploded, and a dozen heavily armed, armored men entered the room yelling, “GET ON YOUR KNEES, NOW! GET ON YOUR KNEES!”

“You cheeky little dick waffle. You set me up,” Violet said accusingly as Yang dropped to the ground without hesitation.

The gentleman shrugged, “You’re worth more than the diamonds.”

“GET ON YOUR KNEES!!”

Violet nodded, “I can respect that.”

The man yelling at her came up behind her and pressed the barrel of his gun to her head, and time slowed for her as one of her neural implants activated. Twelve officers, five on each side, one directly behind and another by the door. Three seconds till the one behind me pulls the trigger. Move now, starting with the left side of the room in three, two, and one.

Violet spun, elbowing the man behind her in his jaw, knocking him out, then going to the left side of the room with inhuman speed, pulling on one man’s gun and wrenching it from his hands. She spun behind him and fired at the men next to her as a storm of plasma bolts filled the room. The man she used as a shield didn’t last very long; she pulled the rifle’s trigger, activating the safety systems, and threw it at the men on the other side of the room. The rifle exploded in a shower of shrapnel and knocked over the other officers.

Violet lunged, grabbed Yang, and pulled her along, “What is happening!?!” Yang yelled.

“It was a setup to capture me!” Violet answered, running down the corridor as fast as possible with Yang tailing along. They reached the elevator, and it exploded, knocking Violet and Yang backward onto the ground. Then the massive airlock doors in the corridor opened, and an army of federal military officers filled the room.

A man in the back of the armed men spoke over a megaphone, “Stand down now, or we will shoot.”

Yang raised her hands, and Violet seethed with anger and yelled, “I will never surrender!” then men fired, and the storm of plasma bolts stuck Violet and Yang in the chest. Killing them both.

At least that’s the official report.