Chapter 4

Book leaned back into the pilots chair and closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure if closing his eyes made the pounding worse but he was sure it didn’t really help. He felt like all the cattle in the ‘verse were stampeding through his brain with no way out. He opened his eyes and looked over at the strange woman that for some strange reason he had invited on board his ship. It must have been some kind of fate. Had he not brought her on he might still be lying on the floor amid the stains of his blood. She had patched his head up stopping the bleeding. Book knew how much head wounds bled, he’d given people a fair heaping portion of head wounds over the years. He might have bled out while unconscious had he been piloting alone like he usually did.

Pei’s attention was fixed to the small screen as she piloted his expensive unmanned craft toward the wreckage. The assassin almost forgot the pain as he studied her face. She had a few years on him, but not too many. Her skin was a light shade of olive, and while abused from too many hours working amid the grease and grime of the dump he had pulled her out of she still held onto her beauty. Not a fake manufactured beauty like the doxy girls with racy clothes and makeup, she wasn’t one of those women who fret over every eyelash and curl, but he didn’t care, he preferred them that way. Many people in the ‘verse were all too concerned with how they looked and what others thought of them.

She glanced at him from the display for a heartbeat or two and went back to business. Book could see the pain and weight she was carrying. It would be weeks before she wouldn’t see her victims bloody face every time she closed her eyes. Derrial had been in that place before. Long ago when he had taken his first life it took him a long time to shake the face of the thug he had choked to death. He sometimes saw his victims in dreams but he had too much blood on his hands now to feel much remorse. Especially for the gorram filth that were Slim and his gang. There