Read Dana Cartwright Mission 3: Kal-King for Free Online Page B

by the way!  
    “I need you,” Hawk rumbled, in a low, throaty, grating voice, an attempt at a whisper.
    “Need?” The word caught in Dana’s throat. Maybe the translator in her link-reader had gotten it wrong. They certainly proved capable of bollixing up other languages at the most inopportune times. Maybe he meant something more respectable? No, not likely…
    A nasty retort caught on her tongue as she looked up, staring with her disconcerting mismatched eyes — right brown and left blue — into his black and amber irises.
    He blinked first — ruffling his solar cloak as a bird of prey would ruffle feathers — and exhaled loudly. Once again, uninvited, he pushed his chair closer, bumping the one where her injured leg rested.  
    Biting back pain, she reluctantly moved her aching left foot to the deck. The thigh and knee also throbbed, beyond the scope of the pain meds from the injector, though she’d dutifully been keeping the limb elevated.  
    As Hawk got comfortable, she contemplated how to proceed, not liking any of the immediate scenarios that came to her. On Earth she’d have an advantage; but here, at a spaceport where she already had the pleasure of being persona non grata , well, the prospects were not good at all.  
    “I would speak to you in private? I need you.”
    There, he’d repeated that word and the translator hadn’t belched.  
    Alarm bells, too bloody loud to be ignored, started jangling in her brain and a fresh headache pounded like a sledgehammer beating an anvil right between her eyes. She resisted using any form of empathetic training with the Tresgan.  
    “This is as private as you are ever going to get,” Dana snarled with contempt, suppressing the fight-or-flight instinct until she could be certain of making a clean escape.
    On a good night, the café held two hundred fifty. Thankfully, it was an hour after sunrise, so the place held only seasoned, foreign spacers loitering and looking for a cool place to escape Tonnertown’s blistering forty degrees Celsius. The locals rarely ventured out during daylight so the place was nearly empty. Of the dozen or so spacers there, however, all were watching.
    Hawk settled back in the padded chair; a little too tall for it to be comfortable for his towering frame. His eyes fell upon the link-reader on the tabletop. “The Captain will listen?”
    His attempt at being polite came across as being too damned nosey. She slammed the cover of the link-reader closed to hide the personal financial computations on the screen. “What do you want, Tresgan? Just say it straight?”
    A robot-server, mistaking the question for a command, appeared to take the Tresgan’s order, but it retreated when neither Hawk nor Dana spoke to it.
    “I may address Captain Cartwright openly?”
    Through gritted teeth, she reminded, “Considering where we are, you might want to use some discretion.”
    He frowned at first, but finally understood her attempt at humor and offered a smile, crooked carnivorous teeth, and all. “You hope for a flight out of here.”  
    She detected a trace of sarcasm in his voice, making her wonder just how much the Tresgan knew of the situation.  
    Dana said, simply, “Don’t we all?”
    “I dare to go further, Captain, and say, you are stranded here. I am wrong?”
    At least half the galaxy knew by now that Seraph had disintegrated after landing three days ago and Cartwright was the only survivor. “Get to the point, sir!”
    “I offer so fine a captain a prestigious position aboard Kal-King ; a tour of duty to begin immediately, if you accept. I need you.”
    The pain in her left leg and in her forehead couldn’t compare with that stabbing her in the heart.
    For one evil moment, Dana Cartwright contemplated what it would be like to sit at the controls of a private, Hale Star Yards yacht the size of Kal-King. A look into the Tresgan’s face squelched any notion of accepting the offer. Serving a Tresgan had as much appeal as