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reflect well on them.”
    “Right. Well, as the other Brides were happy to leave, you have set yourself apart in the eyes of the regulatory bodies that arranged your arrival.”
    “Wonderful.” She sat back and finished her tea.
    “I am going to continue to check my weaponry for my assignment. If you want to come with me and keep me company, you are welcome to do so.”
    She followed him out of the galley with a fresh cup of tea. While he laid out the long-range weapons, she simply watched to figure out what he was doing and why.
    When he had checked out all of the rifles and pistols of the energy variety, he sat back on his heels. “Well, we have three hours until we land. Would you care to rest?”
    She jerked upright, unaware that she had been slumping over.
    “Um, rest? I think I would like to learn about where we are going.”
    He chuckled. “Fine. Meet me on the command deck.”
    He stood gracefully and headed down the hall. With a groan, Cleo got to her feet and rubbed her butt. The rush of pain prickles to her backside woke her up for the moment.
    She hobbled to the command deck and curled up in the navigator seat. He pulled a small crystal out of the console, and he inserted it into a tablet.
    “Here is everything you need to know about Ytheera. We are going in with a visibility-obscuring unit, and you are to remain in the ship at all times. If you leave, you will be visible to the locals, and they have a bad reputation for abusing alien women and men.”
    She frowned and nodded, opening the file and reading the whys and wherefores of the mission. Helbri was after a serial rapist and murderer operating under the guise of a cult leader.
    He was not a nice man, and he had hurt a lot of men and women. A price had been put on his head, and Helbri had been invited by one of the family members of the deceased to collect it.
    Cleo was just along for the ride.
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    The first seven hours on Ytheera were quiet. Cleo was bored out of her mind. Helbri was off doing whatever it was that he did, and she was stuck reading one horrific file after another.
    The moment the proximity alarms went off, she froze in place. As quietly as she could, she triggered the exterior displays and watched as heavily armed men walked toward the ship as if drawn to it.
    She identified the style of detector in the man’s hands and looked it up. “Fuck.”
    They were looking for life signs.
    She bit her lip and debated what to do. They were close now, only five hundred metres away from their shaded location.
    If it weren’t for the rocks surrounding the ship, she wouldn’t have gotten up the nerve to act on her impulses.
    Helbri was here. If she could survive this, he would come for her.
    It sounded very dramatic and fainting-heroine-ish, but it was all she had. If they found the ship, she was screwed.
    She grabbed a ration pack and a water bag before walking to the hatch. Cleo opened the hatch with the code, and when she stepped outside, she set the lock and ducked as the door swung shut.
    Knowing what direction the men were coming from, she chose a right angle to the ship and started to run.
    She was slapped by brush and skidded on rocks, but she made it out of the twisting valleys to stand in front of a huge, deep basin that was occupied by a large city built around a central, circular, open area. She knew that place from the files. That was a bad place.
    There was a sound behind her, so she ran through the brush, keeping low and hoping that her hair would blend in with the dark scrub. It wouldn’t help, but then, she wasn’t supposed to know that she was being tracked.
    Every few hundred feet, she took some food and some water, but she ran out in a matter of hours.
    The game of cat and mouse took her past sundown. When she thought she could get away with it, she curled up at the base of a tree and sobbed gently.
    She was unsurprised when a beam of light illuminated her. She jerked and covered her eyes.
    A language