Arena Book 6 Read online

  Chapter One

  “Ahoy, me hearties! Trim the mizzen mast and make sail for Tortuga!” I shouted with the wind in my face and my right arm extended high in the air with a long, recurved cutlass clutched in my fist.

  “We don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, Havak!” Tempest Dirk shouted back. The devil-may-care, blue-green skinned alien stood off to my right, her orange hair whipped by the wind as she held onto one of the thick ropes that made up the rigging of the massive silvery sails of the ship we were on.

  “Doesn’t matter!” I cried back. “It was still fun to say.”

  In my other hand I held one of the grips of a dark, polished wood steering wheel that was at least four feet in diameter. I couldn’t help myself from smiling as I looked around at my surroundings.

  My alliance mates and I stood on the deck of an honest to goodness pirate ship. Except this one had come from a planet where the seas were made from air, oh, and had laser guns instead of cannons. The big ship looked like someone had shoved the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean into a Star Wars movie. It was made from a sleek, dark, metal-like wood, and the sails were some kind of glimmering gold foil that caught not only the wind but the rays of this strange planets three blazing yellow suns. A sea of blue sky stretched out ahead of us and clouds, thick and white like cotton, passed us by like islands.

  It wasn’t until a volley of red laser blasts flashed bright to my right before falling short of actually hitting the ship that I was pulled from my little reverie of appreciation. We were in an intergalactic battle royal called the Crucible of Carnage, and this was just another match that we had to survive. But it was pretty freaking cool to be a Space Pirate.

  “PoLarr!” I shouted up to the crow’s nest mounted at the top of the main mast of the ship three stories above me. “How close are they?”

  “Maybe two miles out, Marc!” she replied. The lithe, sexy, Val’Keerye warrior braced herself in the small basket-like crow’s nest and pointed off to our right. Her normal flight jump-suit had been replaced with a pair of tight, black and purple striped breeches that were tucked into dark brown buccaneer boots, a frilly white shirt that had been tied just under her small, perky, breasts to show off her taut, smooth stomach. She had a matching purple bandana tied tight over her blonde spikey hair and held a long, steampunk looking telescope in her hands as she gazed off into the sky. “Just over the horizon and on a patch to intercept.”

  “Roger that!” I shouted back up. “Okay, me hearties, time to batten down the hatches and prepare to repel those scurvy dogs!”

  “Aye, captain!” PoLarr yelled with glee.

  “Havak,” Nova said to my left as she pressed a button on a computerized control panel near the side of the ship, “I do not think that ship is manned by dog aliens at all. This planet does not have a life form that resembles a dog.”

  “God, remind me that we need to watch The Curse of the Black Pearl when we get back to the apartment,” I said.

  “Oh, this is movie stuff again,” Nova nodded. She pressed a few buttons and I watched as seven panels on either side of the ship slid back and fourteen laser cannon’s on swivel turrets popped up. Nova slid two metal gauntlets over each hand, tapped them together, and holographic sighting reticles appeared on each of her fists just above the knuckles. She held her arms out to her sides and the guns on either side of the ship followed in the direction of the respective arm. “You know, your incessant need to make everything we do relate to some arcane bit of Earth entertainment while we face the constant threat of death used to drive me insane.”

  “And now?” I questioned with a smirk. It was hard to smile at the knight errant from the feudal world of Paladin Prime even when she was sort of making fun of me. Nova Qwark stood roughly five feet nine inches tall and had the powerful, muscled body of an elite crossfit athlete or fitness model while still mouth wateringly feminine. Her normal white and blue metallic space knight armor had been replaced for this match with space man at arms gear. She wore a pair of skin tight tan leggings that looked to be made from a kind of stretchy suede which were also tucked into a pair of high heeled buccaneer boots, her large, marvelously round and full breasts were barely contained in a dark blue crushed velvet tunic shirt that was somehow loose and tight all at the same time. Over the tunic she wore a three-quarters length captain’s coat with oversized lapels and bright brass buttons. At her left hip was a medium bladed scimitar sword with an elaborate basket handle, and a blunderbuss short rifle was slung across her back. It looked like a cross between a seventeenth century flintlock and something out of Star Trek. A small, tri-corner hat made of brown leather sat atop her dark, auburn hair. It was an interesting look for the orange skinned warrior, but it worked.

  “Now,” Nova grinned back at me as she let loose a test volley of brilliant red laser fire from the cannons, her glow-stick green eyes filled with delight, “well, now, it is only a minor irritation.”

  “Progress is still progress,” I quipped back at her.

  “Hey, sugars, not to interrupt your flirting,” Aurora Starfall drawled in her delightfully sexy somehow southern accent from my left, “but I think we have more company coming up from below and behind us.”

  “Is that a request for later?” I asked arrogantly as I turned to see where she was pointing. I let my eyes linger on her seductive form before they gazed out into the blue expanse all around us. Aurora Starfall was the last of the people of Starfall, a planet destroyed by a maniacal terrorist. She was on the shorter side, maybe only five foot four or so, but she had the curvaceous body of a nineteen sixties Playboy Playmate. Her alabaster white skin glowed pearlescent in the sunlight, and there was plenty of it bared to catch that light. The geometric tribal tattoos that covered most of her body pulsed with a pale blue light as they helped her keep the spirit of a Shriike that lived within her at bay.

  Aurora had been bitten by the space vampire years ago and only by the ingenuity of her witch like nanny had she been saved from a life of roaming the galaxy in search of life force to feed on.

  Aurora liked to wear as little as possible. Her attire would normally be described as lingerie for everyday wear and today wasn’t really that different. Her outfit made those sexy pirate wench costumes you’d see on slutty girls at halloween seem demure and chaste. Her shapely legs were encased in shiny, black leather thigh high buccaneer boots that seemed to be kept in place as if by magic. A pair of booty hugging black boy shorts covered her naughty bits but just barely. A black lace hi-low skirt flowed out from the bottom of a silver corset that struggled with all its might to contain her huge, soft, gorgeous breasts. The skirts front barely covered her boy shorts while the back scalloped down and out until it almost touched the ground. Her breasts swelled over the top of the corset like mountain tops that I desperately wanted to climb, her nipples just out of view. Detached sleeves made from the same material as the shirt covered her arms. Her silver hair was pulled up off her face by a purple sash tied across her forehead.

  A silver cutlass hung from a drop waist belt and as always, her ensemble was finished off with a long, flowing, black cloak that had a blood red lining and curled around her as if it had a mind of its own, which I was starting to think that it actually did.

  “Sugar, you know I like it all the ways,” she cooed back, her voice full of the promise of delightfully naughty pleasure as her purple eyes glowed with devilish glee. “But I like a little warning when someone tries to sneak up my backside.”

  “Uh…” I sputtered actually at a loss for words for once.

  Aurora giggled, and Nova rolled her eyes.

  “Jesus, you two need to fuck again, huh?” Tempest said matter-of-factly. “Good lord. But she’s right, there is another ship gaining on us fast.�
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  This time I actually turned and peered over the stern of the ship. Looking into an ocean made of air was a little disorienting at first, but I’d gotten used to it since we’d dropped into this match thirty minutes earlier. Sure enough, a small, sloop looking intercept ship sailed maybe three hundred feet below us and a quarter mile behind. It was closing the distance fast.

  “Oh, and it looks like we are going to have our first air skirmish of the match, ladies, gentlemen, and beings of all genders,” Chi-Cheshire’s voice boomed from the horizon as his face materialized in the sky forty feet high. “Team Havak is the first of our champions to get discovered by the Nautallian Royal Army, who hate air pirates and have orders to exterminate with extreme prejudice. If Team Havak can survive, maybe they will be able to locate the hidden treasure of the Ancient Sky Mariner that will win them the match.”

  “Thanks for the exposition, old buddy,” I said to myself and put the airship into a controlled descent, as if we were a cross between a 737 and a submarine.

  My normal jumpsuit and light tactical body armor had been replaced by what I liked to call the Space Jack Sparrow get up. I had on soft leather pants tucked into, that’s right, buccaneer boots, a cream colored pirate shirt, and a tight on the arms but roomy through the chest, leather captains coat. I didn’t like hats and had tossed the tri-corner one that I had materialized into the match with over the side of the ship the second we teleported in. Instead I’d tied a red sash over the top of my skull. Over my left eye was a black eyepatch that was actually a targeting reticle for the ships massive forward facing cannons. It also showed a path through the sky that was supposed to be leading us to the treasure Chi-Cheshire had just mentioned. Two short bladed cutlasses with intricate clamshell baskets covering the pommels sat on either hip, and two single shot pistols were tucked into my belt in a cross draw fashion.

  “Aurora,” I barked, taking command, “do you have enough energy to give the rear of the ship some shielding?”

  “Sure do, sugar,” she nodded. “As long as you make it quick for a change.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I shot back, “you know how I aim to please.”

  “Well, if you could make sure to aim to knock those assholes out of the sky, that would be fantastic, you horny bastard,” Tempest threw over her shoulder with a grin.

  Tempest was the newest member of my alliance and liked to give me shit whenever she could. She was a scoundrel in the truest sense of the word and had an attitude that was part Han Solo, part Nebula, and part Indiana Jones, which made her hot as hell. Well, that and her body would have made Laura Croft jealous. Tempest came from a planet of grifters and con-men and had a personality closest to mine out of the whole group. It was equal parts infuriating and endearing, which is probably how everyone felt about me. She had on the simplest outfit of the crew but it was still tight and body hugging enough to show off all of her impressive curves. Tempest wore simple black leggings, buccaneer boots, a frilly burgundy colored halter top with attached sleeves and had a long barrelled rifle in her hands. She was a skilled sniper, and I knew she could squeeze a quarter-sized bullet through a dime-sized hole at a thousand yards.

  “How about you take a position on the gangway and try to knock out the other ships captain, dead eye?” I shot back.

  I pulled the ship out of the dive that I’d put it into when we reached the same plane as the enemy ship that had been trying to sneak up under us. They’d closed the distance to two hundred feet and sent a few blasts of laser cannon fire our way to let us know that we’d fucked with their plan.

  The blasts flew wide as I cut the ship hard to port. I pulled a lever next to the rudder wheel that lulled the mainsail stalling our speed.

  “Um, what you doing there, captain?” PoLarr shouted down.

  “I’m going to let them get alongside us!” I shouted back up. It was a risky move but the ship we were on didn’t have any aft cannon’s, and I wanted to get rid of this little sloop before the Man-of-War caught up to us. The sloop was meant to distract us while the much larger ship bore down and crushed us. I was not going to let that happen.

  Unlike in the movie, most naval battles were about strategy and positioning. I’d gone through a very brief Master and Commander phase briefly after the mediocre Russell Crowe vehicle had come out. I’d tried to read the source material and realized very quickly, that eighteenth century naval warfare was boring as fuck.

  “When they shoot us again, I’m going to let them think we are dead in the water… or air. Then, once they think they have us, we’re going to board their ship and take it from them.”

  Almost as if they heard me, several laser cannon blasts splashed across the ship. The thick armored sides of the boat took the hits well but when they hit, I yanked another lever near the wheel and dropped our sails completely. We came to a slow list in the air, carried by the wind current as if I had no control of my vessel, and I watched as the sloop closed the distance. It was a much smaller ship that ours, meant for fast, quick, debilitating attacks. Which is exactly what I’d let them think they’d done.

  As they started to pull up alongside us a series of grappling cables fired from small guns on the side of their ship and wrapped around our railings. Winches pulled the ships closer together, and I counted a crew of ten plus the captain. They were dressed like eighteenth century British navy sailors with long, forest green coats that had gold epaulettes and were armed with weapons that were very similar to ours.

  Just as their ship was about to pull as close as it could get, I climbed up onto our sailing rigging, grabbed a cable, and held my sword up high.

  “Attack!” I shouted and then cut the cable with my cutlass. It released one of the sail arms and flung me out around the side of the ship. I flew through the air in a move that would have made Errol Flynn incredibly jealous and then landed on the deck of the sloop amid four sailors as if I were their captain. “Gentleman, thank you for delivering this ship to us. We’ll be taking it from you now.”

  “Uh, wha?” One of the sailers uttered in complete confusion.

  “Repel boarders you fools!” The green skinned alien captain bellowed.

  Then the air was rent with the sound of laser blasts and the clanging of alien steel on alien steel as my alliance mates began to engage the enemy sailors.

  Three of the sailors who surrounded me drew their swords, but I was much faster. The Viking martial art known as the Glima mod fired up, and while I didn’t have my trusty Space Viking Axes, or SVAs for short, I was still pretty damn good with a blade. The Vikings, while not officially known as pirates, were brutal ship to ship warriors. I swiped my cutlass up in front of my body in a wide arc and blocked all three of the sailor’s swords as they tried to cut me down. As my blade swept up, I drew one of my pistols with my left hand and fired it point blank into the chest of the nearest Nautillian sailor. He flew back with a big, smoking hole in his chest and a surprised look on his avian face.

  As I mentioned, the pistols were single shot only and had to be manually reloaded with a laser cartridge before being able to fire again, so I flipped it into the air and caught it by the barrel just in time to block another sword swipe.

  The handle of the pistol acted like a hook and trapped the sailor’s blade. I yanked forward and pulled him off balance before running my cutlass through his belly. Bright blue blood spread across the white of his tunic like spilled ink as he dropped to the deck of the ship.

  The remaining sailor roared in fury and rained blow after blow around my head and shoulders. I danced back quickly like an olympic fencer to give myself some room. The sailor pressed his attack a little too aggressively, and I saw my opening. I darted forward as he swiped at my head and let my own blade glance off his while I ducked around behind him and brought my arm slashing downward. The razor-sharp edge of the cutlass sliced through his achilles tendon as if it were made from soft butter, and he crashed forward. I brought my cutlass down hard and drove the point through his spine. It was
a brutal move, but I knew that he would not give me any quarter if I let him live.

  There was a loud boom from behind me, and I spun in time to see three Nautillian sailors fly over the side of the sloop. Nova stood five feet away with her blunderbuss held at hip level, its gaping barrel bellowing thick black smoke. She looked over at me and grinned wide.

  “I like this gun,” she said wickedly and began the somewhat slow process of reloading it.

  “Have at thee!” I heard PoLarr yell in a mock Spanish accent like she was in some kind of Zorro movie as she dropped from a rope onto the deck of the sloop and began to fence with one of the Nautillian sailors. “You killed my father. Prepare to die, you son of a bitch.”

  The sailor didn’t know what the hell had hit him and backed up so quickly he tripped and fell over the side of the ship.

  “I thought your father was still alive?” Tempest asked as she took aim and shot a Nautillian who was trying to turn one of the sloop’s cannons toward us.

  “Princess Bride,” PoLarr retorted.

  “Only if she’s old enough, but what does that have to do with my question?” Tempest said, her face scrunched up in confusion.

  “Movie, sugar,” Aurora drawled as she whipped the pistols out of an enemy sailor’s hands with a dark matter whip that extended from her right hand. The sexy space vampire could control the purple-black energy at will. She then pounced on the poor unsuspecting sailor, wrapped her legs around his waist and dropped him to the deck. His eyes went wide with shock and then bliss as her lips barely brushed his and bright blue life force began to flow from his mouth into hers like warm breath on a cold day. A few seconds later, his eyes glazed over in death as the last of his life force passed into her lips.

  “That was tasty,” Aurora said, stood, and wiped her mouth as if she’d just had a delicious meal. The tattoos on her body glowed brighter, and her eyes were like violet lights as the life force filled her.

  I turned back and walked up the short stairway to the bridge of the ship where the Nautillian captain stood at the wheel, his sword held in his violently shaking hand.