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  From #1 New York Times bestselling author duo Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings comes the first book in The Androma Saga, full of action, fantastical intrigue and steamy star-crossed romance

  Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness, a powerful mercenary whose reign of terror stretches across the Mirabel Galaxy. To those aboard her glass starship, Marauder, however, she’s just Andi, their friend and fearless leader.

  But when a routine mission goes awry, the Marauder’s all-girl crew is tested as they find themselves in a treacherous situation—and at the mercy of a sadistic bounty hunter from Andi’s past.

  Meanwhile, across the galaxy, a ruthless ruler waits in the shadows of the planet Xen Ptera, biding her time to exact revenge for the destruction of her people. The pieces of her deadly plan are about to fall into place, unleashing a plot that will tear Mirabel in two.

  Andi and her crew embark on a dangerous, soul-testing journey that could restore order to their ship—or just as easily start a war that will devour worlds. As the Marauder hurtles toward the unknown, and Mirabel hangs in the balance, the only certainty is that in a galaxy run on lies and illusion, no one can be trusted.

  ZENITH

  The Androma Saga

  Sasha Alsberg & Lindsay Cummings

  From Sasha:

  To my amazing father, Peter Alsberg,

  for always telling me to shoot for the stars.

  From Lindsay:

  To my dad, Don Cummings,

  who gave me a love of sci-fi! Here’s to #7!

  Contents

  Cell 306

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Acknowledgments—Sasha Alsberg

  Acknowledgments—Lindsay Cummings

  Cell 306

  The Past

  ENDLESS DARKNESS.

  It surrounded him in Cell 306, twisting and turning itself into his bones until he and the darkness became one.

  His thoughts had long since stopped running wild with every groan and creak of the prison walls. A thinning blanket, his only companion, was wrapped tightly around his shoulders, but it failed to block out the cold kiss of air that snuck through the threads.

  I am Valen Cortas, he thought, rolling the words over and over in his mind. It was the only thing that kept him going, leashing a sharp coil of courage around his veins. Vengeance will be mine.

  What he would do, what he would give, to have a single moment of time in the light. To feel the touch of a warm midday breeze on his skin, to hear the rustle of leaves on the trees of his home planet, Arcardius.

  He had lived on Arcardius all his life, and yet in Cell 306 the memories of his home had begun to grow dim. Valen had always looked at the world and seen it in a thousand colors, his fingers itching to paint each turn of the light, each curl of the wind sweeping through the silver streets.

  Every shade was unique in his eyes.

  And yet...he was losing the colors.

  Try as he might, Valen couldn’t remember the precise shade of purple that spiraled across the Revina Mountains. He couldn’t recall the exact hue of the blue and red moons that mingled together in the sky. The sparkle of starlight when true night fell, a constant, glowing guide through the sky. As each moment in this abyss passed, the colors all melted into a single shade of black.

  He shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around his emaciated frame.

  The pain of remembering things loved and lost had sunk its claws into him, threatening to crush his bones.

  Somewhere in the dank prison, a scream rang out, razor-sharp, like the tip of a blade scratching its way down Valen’s spine.

  He rolled over, pressing his hands to his ears.

  “I am Valen Cortas,” he whispered through cracked lips. “Vengeance will be mine.”

  Another scream. The sizzle and pop of an electric whip, a flash of blue light that ghosted across the bars. Valen gasped, his eyes aching, head throbbing, memories churning. Color. A blue like the powerful sea, a blue like the open, cloudless sky. And then...darkness again, and silence.

  The new prisoners always screamed for days, until their throats went ragged. They cried out the names of loved ones and tried to hang on to who they were.

  But on Lunamere, everyone became a number in the end.

  Valen was 306. Deep in the belly of hell incarnate.

  The cold was endless. The food was enough to keep skin hanging on bones, but muscles atrophied and hearts slowed. The stink of bodies rose up like a wave, a scent that had long since sunk into the obsidinite walls and bars.

  Those walls of obsidinite were the only thing separating Valen and the other prisoners from the void of space and their untimely deaths. He’d thought of escape, as every other prisoner had. He imagined leaping through the wall, diving out into the airless abyss.

  Death had once scared Valen, but with each day that passed,
it grew closer and closer to becoming his greatest wish.

  Still, deep within his tormented soul, he knew he had to survive.

  He had to bide his time and hope that the Godstars had not forgotten him.

  And so he sat, dreaming of darkness, wrapped up in its cold arms.

  I am Valen Cortas.

  Vengeance will be mine.

  Chapter One

  * * *

  ANDROMA

  HER NIGHTMARES WERE like bloodstains.

  They were impossible to get rid of, no matter how hard Androma Racella tried to scrub them from her mind. On the darkest nights they clung to her like a second skin. In them, she could hear the whispers of the dead threatening to drag her down to hell, where she belonged.

  But Andi had decided, long ago, that the nightmares were her punishment.

  She was the Bloody Baroness, after all. And if surviving meant giving up sleep, then she would bear the exhaustion.

  Tonight the nightmares had come as they always did, and now Andi sat on the bridge of her ship, the Marauder, scratching a fresh set of tallies into her twin swords.

  The glowing compression cuffs on her wrists, which protected skin burned in an accident years before, were the only light in the otherwise dark space. The press of a button was all it took to power them up.

  Her fingertips were white beneath red-painted nails as she gouged a piece of steel against the flat of one blade, creating a thin tally the length of her smallest finger. Without its spirals of electricity, the sword looked like any other weapon; the tallies, any other soldier’s lucky mark. But Andi knew better. Each line she etched into the metal was another life cut off, another heart stopped with a slice of her blades.

  A hundred lives to cover up the pain of the very first. A hundred more, to shovel away the hurt into a place that was dark and deep.

  Andi glanced up as an object in the sky caught her eye.

  A piece of space trash, hurtling away among thousands of stars.

  Andi yawned. She had always loved the stars. Even as a child, she’d dreamed of dancing among them. But tonight she felt as if they were watching her, waiting for her to fail. Mocking little bastards. Well, they’d be sorely disappointed.

  The Marauder, a glimmering starship made from the rare impenetrable glass varillium, was known for its devilish speed and agility. And Andi’s crew, a group of girls hailing from every hellish corner of the galaxy, were as sharp as Andi’s blades. They were the heart of the ship, and the three reasons why Andi had survived this long so far from home.

  Five days ago, the girls had taken on a job to steal a starload of sealed BioDrugs from Solera, the capital planet of the Tavina System, and deliver them to a satellite station just outside the planet Tenebris in the neighboring system.

  It wasn’t an abnormal request. BioDrugs were one of Andi’s most requested transports since these particular drugs could burn someone’s brain to bits or—if used correctly—carry one into a blissful oblivion.

  Which, Andi thought, as she resumed her death-mark scratching, I wouldn’t mind experiencing right now.

  She could still feel the hot blood on her hands from the man she’d slayed on the Tenebris station. The way his eyes had locked on to hers before she’d run him through with her blades, silent as a whisper. The sorry fool never should have tried to double-cross Andi and her crew.

  When his partner had seen Andi’s handiwork, he eagerly handed over the Krevs her team was owed for the job. Still, she’d stolen another life, something she never relished doing. Even killers like her still had souls, and she knew that everyone deserved to be mourned by someone, no matter their crimes.

  Andi worked quietly with only the hum of the ship’s engines far beneath her for company, the occasional hiss of the cooling system kicking on overhead. Outer space was quiet, soothing, and Andi had to keep herself from falling asleep, where the nightmares would be lurking.

  The sound of footsteps brought Andi’s gaze up once more.

  The rhythmic tapping made its way down the small hallway that led to the bridge. Andi continued her scratching, glancing up again when a figure stopped in the doorway, her blue, scaled arms poised on narrow hips.

  “As your Second-in-Command,” the girl said, with a voice as smooth as the spiced Rigna they’d shared earlier, “I demand that you return to your quarters and get some sleep.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Lira,” Andi said with a sigh. Her Second always seemed to know where she was—and what she was doing—at all times. Her sharp eyes caught every detail, no matter how small. This quality made Lira the best damned pilot in the Mirabel Galaxy, and it was the reason they’d managed to succeed with so many jobs thus far.

  It was one of many peculiar qualities Lira had, along with the patches of scales scattered across her skin. When she experienced strong emotions, the scales began to glow, giving off enough heat to burn through the flesh of her enemies. All of Lira’s clothing was sleeveless for this reason. But this defensive mechanism also took a lot of energy from her, occasionally rendering Lira unconscious when activated.

  Her scales were a trait many from her home planet desired, but few had. Lira’s bloodline traced back to the first Adhirans who colonized the terraformed world. Soon after the colonization, the planet experienced a radioactive event that transformed its earliest settlers in a number of strange ways, including the scales Lira had inherited.

  Andi’s Second stepped into the starlit bridge and lifted a hairless brow. “Sooner or later, you’re going to run out of space on those swords.”

  “And then I’ll turn my tallies on to you,” Andi said with a wicked grin.

  “You should take up dancing again. Perhaps it would ease some of that deadly tension you’re carrying around.”

  “Careful, Lir,” Andi warned.

  Lira grinned, swiping two fingers across her right temple to activate her internal communication channel. “Rise and shine, ladies. If the captain can’t sleep, we shouldn’t, either.”

  Andi couldn’t hear the response Lira chuckled at, but soon enough, two more pairs of footsteps sounded from the deck above, and she knew the rest of her crew was on their way.

  Gilly arrived first, her fire-red braids bouncing on her shoulders as she approached. She was small for her age, a girl no older than thirteen, but Andi wasn’t fooled by her wide, innocent blue eyes. Gilly was a bloodthirsty little beast, a gunner with plenty of death on her hands. She had one hell of a trigger finger.

  “Why do you insist on ruining my beauty sleep?” she exclaimed in her fluid little voice.

  A tall, broad-shouldered girl appeared behind her, bending so as not to hit her head on the doorway when she entered. Breck, Andi’s head gunner, rolled her eyes as she placed a large hand on Gilly’s small shoulder.

  “Kid, when are you going to learn not to question Lira? You know she won’t give you a reasonable answer.”

  Andi laughed at Lira’s sharp glare. “If you would only look up from your gun sights long enough to listen to me, you’d know that my answers are, in fact, quite reasonable.” Lira winked at the girls before settling into the pilot’s seat next to Andi’s captain’s chair.

  “Adhirans,” Breck said with a sigh, crossing her thick arms over her chest. At seven feet tall with choppy black hair that just brushed her muscled shoulders, Breck was the most intimidating member of the crew. They all assumed she was a giantess from the planet New Veda, where Mirabel’s greatest warriors were born.

  The only problem with that assumption?

  Breck had no memories of her past. She had no idea who she was, or even where she’d come from. She’d been on the run when Andi picked her up, a bruised and beaten ten-year-old Gilly at her side.

  Gilly, plucked from the market streets of her home planet Umbin, was struggling to escape from a couple of Xen Pterran slavers when Breck found her. The ol
der girl had saved Gilly from a fate worse than death, and now the two girls were as close as kin. To them, it no longer mattered what life Breck couldn’t remember or what past Gilly tried to forget. All that mattered was that they had each other.

  Breck tugged on one of Gilly’s red braids, then lifted her chin and sniffed the air. “I don’t smell breakfast. We need a cook, Andi.”

  “And we’ll get one as soon as we have the funds to buy a culinary droid,” Andi said with a curt nod. The girls usually traded off on kitchen duty, but Breck was the only decent cook among them. “We’re down to less than three hundred Krevs. Someone spent a little too much on hair products on TZ-5.”

  Breck’s cheeks reddened as she touched the new crimson streaks in her black hair.

  “Speaking of Krevs,” Gilly added, her tiny hand grazing the golden double-triggered gun at her hip, “when’s our next job, Cap?”

  Andi leaned back, arms crossed behind her head, and surveyed the girls.

  They were a good crew, all three of them. Small, but mighty in the best of ways, and better than what Andi deserved. She stared at her blades once more before putting them back in their harness. If only she could put her memories away just as easily.

  “I’ve got a tip for a possible job on Vacilis,” Andi said finally. It was a desert world where the wind blew as hot as the devil’s backside and the air was choked with the stench of sulfur, just a few planets over from ice-locked Solera. “But I’m not sure how many Krevs it’ll haul. And it’ll be messy, dealing with the desert nomads.”

  Breck shrugged her broad shoulders. “Any money is good money if it brings us more food stores.”

  “And ammo,” Gilly said, cracking her knuckles like the little warrior she was.

  Andi inclined her head at Lira. “Thoughts?”

  “We will see where the stars lead us,” Lira answered.

  Andi nodded. “I’ll get in touch with my informant. Take us away, Lir.”

  “As you wish.” Lira punched the destination into the control panel’s holoscreen. A diagram of Mirabel illuminated the room with blue light, stars floating around their heads and the little planets that made up each major system orbiting their suns. A bright line traced from their current location near an unnamed moon, too barren for habitation, to Vacilis, almost half a galaxy away.