“Deflection. Interesting, if sloppy; I taught you better than that. Regardless, the answer is simple: I was preparing to be fielded in Ada, and had to be recalled. Passing through that gate undetected at the moment is a tricky matter.”
“Fielded in Ada?”
“There was conjecture that you might require help to come home.”
Don’t react. “Kind of you to look out for me. It’s a big universe, easy to get lost in.”
“Sanda Greeve. Why did you assist her beyond the mission?”
“I felt the mission would be incomplete if I left her to die.”
“You can lie to Lavani, Cepko, but you cannot lie to me.” She placed her hands on either side of the blank folder. Her words came rapid-fire. “What is your relationship with Sanda Greeve?”
His heart jumped into his throat. “Personal.”
“Did you sleep together?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“That’s a yes. Do you love her?”
“Fuck, Caid, I don’t know. Even if I did, what does it matter? I’ll never see her again. Either she gets cleared of the murder of Lavaux and goes back home a hero, or she gets arrested and spaced. Neither option has a lot of room for me.”
Caid sighed and leaned back, the faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes relaxing. “Developing feelings for a target is not unusual, Cepko. You did not need to lie about your relationship.”
“You ever think it was private?”
Her expression sharpened. “Everything is our business. That’s the point. I needed to assess your emotional stability.”
Tomas surged forward and gripped either side of the table. “You’re evaluating me for the field? You can’t send me back out, Caid, not this soon, not after that mission. I need real rest and recovery, not this bullshit safe house. I want to see my mom and grandma. I earned all that.”
“I agree with you, but we have an order from a client we cannot refuse.”
“Bullshit. No one’s big enough to force the Nazca to take a contract.”
Caid stayed silent, letting him think it through.
“No. No fucking way. Okonkwo?”
“The Prime Director has requested you, personally. ‘The man who really found Major Greeve between the stars’ were her exact words.”
“I’m a finder. I’m not even suited to all missions.”
“This is a finding.”
“There are others.”
“She wants you.”
“You’re better.”
Caid arched one brow. “Maybe. But I have another mission to see to.”
“Bigger than one from Okonkwo?”
“Nazca internal affairs.”
Tomas scrubbed the sides of his face with both palms. “I need rest.”
“You want to run off and make sure your girlfriend is safe. I understand.”
He clenched his jaw. “Sanda can handle herself.”
“I’m sure she can. Which leaves you plenty of time to find Okonkwo’s target. You’ve met this person, in fact.”
Despite himself, that piqued Tomas’s interest. “Who is it?”
Caid pressed her palm against the folder, activating it. She’d been ready for this—of course she had. There was no way she’d fail to pivot him into taking on this mission. She’d been spinning him like a top since the moment she’d plucked him off that Elysian refugee ship at ten years old.
He glanced at the photo she pulled up and laughed. “Rainier Lavaux? Keeper Lavaux’s widow, are you serious? She lost her husband, and while she didn’t strike me as particularly sentimental, she’s probably in hiding because she’s grieving, worried about blowback from Lavaux’s less-than-legal activities, or both. There’s no need to bring the Nazca into this.”
“Do you recognize this picture?” Caid said, ignoring his outburst. She’d had a lot of practice.
He forced himself to take a second look. Rainier stood at the edge of a garden, wearing a long, dusty blue dress with silver embroidery covering it from bodice to toe in geometrical designs. Her ashen hair had been piled on top of her head, and in her left hand she carried a champagne flute.
“Sanda’s welcome home party. I met Rainier there, for a second. She seemed drunk.”
“She wasn’t. I’m not sure she can get drunk. Look at this.”
Caid pushed the image to the corner and pulled up another one of Rainier. This one was in a standard-issue Prime jumpsuit and mag boots, her hair tacked up but sticking out in the way that betrayed a low-g environment. He didn’t know the location. The command deck of some ship or another. It looked a little like the Taso, but wasn’t, so he guessed another of Lavaux’s personal fleet.
“Yes. That’s still Rainier,” he said, puzzled.
“And this.”
Another picture. Rainier again, this time in a flowing white dress that would never be useful off-planet, her hair spilling down to her waist. She cut far too fancy a figure for the warehouse she was walking toward. Grotta dirt clung to the hem of her dress.
Another picture. This one of her in a lab coat, buttoned tight over another jumpsuit, her hair cut down into short spikes, a HUD monocle surgically inserted over her left eye.
Caid reached to bring up another but Tomas grabbed her hand to stop her. Something caught in the back of his mind, an itch he couldn’t shake. Something wrong. “Wait. Go back, to the white dress.”
Caid obliged without comment. He flipped the picture around, pinch-zooming, searching, trying to find the thing that his subconscious had screamed at him was wrong about the image. There, that was it.
“She’s not wearing a wristpad here.”
“Yes,” Caid said, letting him chew things over.
“That’s weird, I grant you, but why are you showing me these? She’s a lovely woman with a varied life, and I’m sorry her husband was scum. I hope she wasn’t scum, too.”
“These images were all taken at the same time.”
“Excuse me?”
She pressed a button and the images spaced themselves equally, each popping up a time, date, and location stamp. They were exactly the same. The day of Sanda’s return party.
“What the fuck,” Tomas said.
“Exactly. And, as of this moment, no instances of Rainier Lavaux can be contacted. She’s disappeared from the grid. Okonkwo wants you to find her and discern which instance of Rainier Lavaux is the correct one.”
“You mean ask her what the fuck is going on.”
Caid inclined her head. “I’m confident you’ll find a more elegant approach, but yes.”
Tomas grunted and dragged the folder closer, flipping through the images again and again. The obvious answer was body doubles. Common enough among the elite, they were used to distract kidnappers, thwart assassination attempts, and make appearances on behalf of the real thing. But those were actors who used masterful makeup skills to shift their already close features into the almost-there category. Makeup wasn’t this good. Doubles like this would require plastic surgery.
And what would Rainier want with so many doubles, anyway? Keeper Lavaux had been an important man, politically speaking, but even he didn’t have doubles. Tomas would have bet his paycheck she was drunk at that party, but according to Caid that had been an act.
Who was Rainier Lavaux, really?
He drummed his fingers against the table. They had thought Keeper Lavaux was the real threat, but if this was true, if Rainier commanded so many doubles, then maybe they’d been wrong. The Keeper might have been acting on his wife’s orders when he put a blade to Sanda’s head, and despite Tomas’s efforts to frustrate her, Sanda would go for the coordinates Keeper Lavaux had been after the second she was able.
Tomas couldn’t contact her. Any attempt to do so would trigger a burn unit from the Nazca, and while he was exemplary at avoiding detection from outside forces, the Nazca had implants hardwired to his body. He wasn’t even sure of all they’d put in there when he’d been recruited. He couldn’t tell Sanda
that Rainier Lavaux was a threat, but now that he knew, he couldn’t walk away.
And, if he were being honest with himself, he desperately wanted to know how, and why, Rainier was doing it.
“I’ll take the job,” he said.
Caid smiled. “I thought you might.”
CHAPTER 14
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
TACT IS FOR PEOPLE WITH TIME ON THEIR HANDS
Sanda didn’t know Arden Wyke from a hole in the ground, but guessing by the look on their face, they did not, as Nox had insisted, want to talk. In fact, they looked like they’d much rather see the backside of Sanda than listen to anything she had to say. But that doleful stare was nothing compared to the look Arden gave Graham. If the nethead wanted to see Sanda gone, they also wanted to see Graham dead. Not an advantageous position to be negotiating from.
“Hello,” she said, friendly as starshine as she rolled her chair into the cargo bay of their beat-up hauler and locked her wheels. She wasn’t going anywhere. Too bad Arden had eyes only for Graham.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” they told him.
“I know,” Graham said, shuffling over the threshold right before Nox pulled the airlock shut. “And I’m sorry. But we need your help. I wouldn’t ask if there was anyone else I could trust.”
“So sure you can trust me?”
“No. But I hope so.”
Arden’s expression flattened, the only lines on their face leftover creases from having worn a set of net goggles for longer than was healthy. Though Graham had warned her Arden was dangerous—quite possibly the most dangerous person on Atrux—she had a hard time believing that, looking at them now.
They slouched against a bulkhead on the command deck, thin arms crossed, not casually but defensively. Their net goggles sat haphazardly on top of their head. Sanda didn’t need to have Tomas’s ability to read people to understand that Arden was upset and wishing the cause of their upset—Sanda and Graham—would turn right around and go back out that door.
But somebody wanted them here, and that left Nox.
“You took a big risk, blowing the tops off of those SecureSite,” she said, half turning to catch Nox’s eye.
The big man didn’t look up from the already spotless rifle he was cleaning. “I take a lot of risks, Major. Stepping on ants like SecureSite is nothing in comparison.”
There was probably a tactful way to do this. Some trick to get them to tell her what they wanted from her and Graham without quite tipping her hand. A clue in the fact that these two were holed up in a derelict ship—the ship wasn’t pulling through the air recyclers, and it had the stale smell of a lived-in place, a too-small apartment. A trick to make this all go her way without ruffling any feathers. Tomas would know what to say. But she wasn’t Tomas, and she was getting real tired of playing other people’s games.
“What the fuck do you want with us?”
That got Nox’s attention. His head jerked up and he looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.
“You’re a major, Greeve, and we need to get to the Ordinal system,” Nox said.
“I don’t see how my rank helps you out here. Bars on a shoulder aren’t enough to make this bucket fly.”
“We’re in the market for another ship.”
Sanda had a sinking suspicion of where this was going. “Let me guess: Credit isn’t your problem.”
“Credit’s a digital figment, hackable as any other,” Arden said. “But we can’t buy the access we need.”
“We need a gunship,” Nox elaborated. “They aren’t for sale.”
“Neither is my daughter’s allegiance,” Graham cut in.
She didn’t need to look to hear the balled-up fists and hard-set scowl. “Dad. Shut up.”
Nox chuckled.
“I’m not here to play, Nox,” she said. “I’ve had my fill of games, so I’m going to be clear with you: There is no fucking way in the ’verse I can get you a gunship, and it has nothing to do with my willingness. I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news on this rotting shoebox, but if I roll onto a gunship, they won’t hand me a command, they’ll throw me in the brig. Or did you forget that it was the fleet coming to collect me when you so kindly introduced yourself?”
“Oh. That.” Arden flicked their goggles over their eyes without bothering to find a seat. Most people would have lost their balance immediately as the blue lights around the edges of the goggles blinked on, indicating they were diving into the net. Arden just lost the tense hunch to their shoulders.
“What are they doing?” Sanda asked the world at large.
“Give them a minute,” Nox said. He stowed his rifle in a bulkhead panel and pulled out a handblaster, then set to polishing that.
“Is this why you left?” she asked Graham. “Because all your old friends are insane?”
Graham grimaced and stepped to her side, resting a hand on her shoulder. Her bone moved against his palm and she closed her eyes, wishing for a proper weight room to help her get her strength back. A bowl of noodles and a bad attitude would have to fortify her for now.
Arden flipped their goggles up and blinked a few times to clear the net from their eyes. “Done. I scrubbed the edits from that taped-together deepfake mess of you killing Lavaux and pushed it through to the Keepers at Ada, the fleet general there, and a few choice news outlets in case those in authority have a vested interest in keeping you in trouble. You’re welcome.”
“How the hell…?”
“This is what I do,” Arden said, an edge creeping into their voice that hinted at steel beneath. “What I can’t do is hack my way onto a gunship. Nox is right. We need a ship with weapons. You need your name cleared. I’ve helped you, your turn to help us.”
“Hold up. Clearing my name wasn’t my price, it was what you needed to make what you want work.”
Their smile was coy. “I figured you’d catch that, but I had to try.”
“First question: Why do you need a gunship in the first place? You must know we’re here with Graham’s hauler. It could get you anywhere you want to go without the risk of being arrested for your trouble.”
“One of our people was taken,” Nox said.
Sanda pressed her lips together, thought about how deep she wanted to step into this shitpile, then said, “Jules Valentine.”
They didn’t have a clue. Sanda saw it in Arden’s face the second she said Jules’s name. They’d been hopeful. The only circumstance in which they would be hopeful upon hearing Jules’s name was if they didn’t know what had happened to her and were hoping Sanda did.
Laguna had seriously miscalculated when it came to these two. The detective thought they knew where their ex-partner, the trigger woman, was. That they were hiding her somewhere, that they understood what had happened the day Keeper Nakata died.
“How the fuck?” Nox switched from cleaning the handblaster to pointing it at her in the space of a breath. He was definitely fleet trained.
Sanda held her hands up, palms out, and gave Graham a surreptitious elbow in the ribs before he could make matters worse.
“Detective Laguna showed us the footage. She’s hunting you two. I can’t imagine why she hasn’t found this place yet, but she will. You’re roosting here on borrowed time.”
“Are you working for Laguna?” Nox’s gaze slid off her and landed on Graham. “Is that what this is? Bait us out by asking after Arden, then roll us up in a bow for her?”
“No. Never,” Graham’s voice rasped.
Sanda didn’t know what kind of emotional baggage was hanging between Graham and his old crew, so she needed to make this about her dealing with Arden. She needed to spark Arden’s infamous curiosity, because right now they were her only shot to track the coordinates in her head without setting off any alarms.
“I know what it’s like to be hunted for killing a Keeper,” Sanda said, drawing Nox’s attention back to her. “And I’m not here to light you up for that. You’re ex-fleet, aren’t you, No
x?”
“What’s it to you, Major? If you’re looking for a salute, I got one for you, special-made.”
“If you watched that video, then you know a Keeper tried to kill me. I’m not exactly loyal to their cause.”
“Your brother’s one.”
“Yeah. He is. You think I ran all the way from Ada to this shithole of a city to help Laguna find a couple of suspects in the murder of a Keeper because I love my little brother? If I were doing anything for Biran, it’d be staying put in Ada until my name was cleared so he’d have a few less grey hairs. But here I am. What makes a major in the fleet run, Nox? You think of that?”
“I don’t fucking care, so long as you get us—”
“Nox,” Arden cut in. Their eyes had lost the glazed effect of the net and they straightened, no longer resting their slight weight against the bulkhead. She’d asked the right questions and snagged their curiosity. Now she had to give them a compelling enough reason to help her find those coordinates. Sanda forced herself to meet their gaze, even though it meant looking away from the blaster pointed at her chest.
“Stop looking for a reason to shoot and listen,” they said.
Arden moved toward her but stopped halfway across the cargo hold as Graham let out a hard, low sound. They held their hands out, weaponless.
“I looked you up, Major Greeve. You don’t run from any damn thing. Everything about your psyche profile says you should be sitting pretty in the Ada Cannery, waiting for your brother and the fleet to clear your name so you can go back to service. So why are you here?”
Sanda had to lie. She didn’t want to, but they couldn’t know the coordinates she needed Arden to locate came from a chip in the back of her skull. A chip that Icarion had found in the skull of Keeper Kenwick, plucked out, and shoved in her head in a lab on board Bero in a failed attempt to force her to access the chip for them.
Not only could they use it against her, but knowing about a rogue Keeper chip could be enough to get them executed if that information ever came to light. Someone else had to own those coords, and the people these two trusted the least were the Keepers.
“The tattoo, on Keeper Nakata’s wrist,” she said. Graham’s grip tightened on her shoulder. She ignored him. “As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to find you. Keeper Lavaux had the same tattoo.”
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