by R Coots
Breathe. Calm down. He could deal with Kizen as a subordinate. Which was technically true. But until the man did something so insane that making an example of him was the only thing left to do, the footing was less than solid. And Kizen would keep trying, pushing until he made Syrus lose his temper. If he’d known how close he’d gotten today, they might have had a bloodbath right there.
Syrus growled and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand. He wished he’d been able to just let go. Problem was, killing Kizen would leave his second in charge instead of transferring command. And if Kizen managed to kill Syrus, the same would happen to him. Quinn would take over until they were done with the next system. Stalemate.
Did the man realize Syrus knew all this? If Kizen hadn’t when he came on board, he did now. Syrus had sent Quinn to make sure the other warlord didn’t get “lost” on his way to find the chief steward. And to make sure Kizen didn’t start any shit when he realized the steward was a woman. Bastard seemed like the type. Somewhere in all that, Quinn would make sure the warlord knew Syrus’s record.
If not, the history of Campaigns was open right there on the Fleet network. Anyone could log in and see the chain of victories reaching back, unbroken for hundreds of years, with the commanding warlord’s name listed for each. And a respectable number of those were tagged with Syrus’s code.
Syrus snorted to himself, untangled his fingers from the hair of the woman using his shoulder as a pillow, and eased himself out of bed. Most of the women were in their cubbies tonight. By the time the women in the infirmary were straightened out and he’d gotten rid of the second dead body to grace his quarters in as many days, even screwing the concubines’ brains out didn’t sound like any fun.
The women were glad enough to be left alone. This one hadn’t offered anything more than the knowledge that there was another body to take up some of the yawning space in the huge bed. Even that wasn’t helping. A sleep-tousled head poked out from behind her curtain as he padded across the floor. He put a finger to his lips and waved her back. She vanished.
He grabbed a hilt from the rack and sliced his thumb open again, right over the barely healed cut from this afternoon. Teeth clenched at the pain, he smeared the blood over the lock and stepped in. The lights in the infirmary were on their dimmest setting, but he didn’t bother to turn them up. He could see well enough as it was.
The women looked worse than they had in the caskets, if the wires and tubes and various blinking lights on towers at the head of each unit were anything to go by. Iira must have decided that getting clothes on them wasn’t worth the effort, because they were both naked. They looked small under the sheets, swallowed by the drape and folds of the fine fabric.
Muttering to himself about technology and medicine and the unholy mix they made, he looked for a way to get the darker one upright without pulling everything loose. Turning her over was a guarantee of yanking half the leads out of her skin. Fucking hell. Why hadn’t he thought of checking their maruste before they’d been turned back into evil science experiments?
He had her halfway to sitting up before he realized there was an extra light source in the room.
Her head hit the table with a thump. He stared at his hands. At the woman. Touched a finger to her forehead. A muted orange glow filtered through the cloth beneath her, rimming her body in light.
He hadn’t felt so much like the bottom had dropped out of his world in years. Not since he’d walked into this room for the first time.
Fists clenched, he picked his way around the equipment and over to the other table. Another finger to the forehead. Another orange glow. Brighter this time. Probably because of her skin color. Maybe. Who knew?
He backed away, ran into the tower of the medunit, adjusted course, and kept going. It wasn’t until he hit the wall that he looked down at his hands. They shook. What the fuck? What. The. Fuck? How was this possible?
“Milord? What are you doing?”
He nearly gave himself whiplash as he jerked his head up. Iira stood in the doorway. Her hair was a mess, the bruise around her eye looked even worse than before, and she’d clearly thrown on a sleeping robe without bothering to make sure it was fastened all the way. He caught a flash of skin before she pulled it shut and tied the cord.
In contrast to her clothes, the look on her face was cold and professional. Eyes steady, a slate and an IV bag in either hand. She watched him with all the passion of an ice queen.
Then he remembered that she’d taken one of the cubbies in the main room, so she could be on hand if something went wrong in the infirmary.
“What—” His voice broke. He coughed and tried again. “What woke you?”
She gestured at the medunit. “You set off the alert.”
He looked at the blinking lights that covered the unit and wondered how in the cosmos she could tell one light from another. “Hmph. Well. They’re alive. You can go back to sleep.”
“On the contrary.” She set her slate down on the corner of the nearest unit and the IV bag on the end of one table before bending to look at the readouts. “You have not told me what you are doing here, milord. If you intend to use these women, I will have to unhook them. Is that what you wish?”
If she’d been in arm’s reach, he would have snapped her neck. As it was, his foot caught on a length of cable before he made it two steps. By the time he caught his balance, he had himself under control. Bitch. When would everyone stop assuming he was going to follow in Brander’s footsteps?
Why was he still surprised that they were so ready to help him down that road? Did they think he’d finally caved now that he’d opened up the infirmary? Did they all take it as some sort of sign that he was acting more like a “proper” Fleet soldier should? None of them had lifted a finger when Riss—when that bastard was alive. Plenty of young outFleet children acted more and more like Fleet soldiers the longer they were on board. They were all probably waiting for him to go native.
Well, he wasn’t some green boy, brainwashed and drugged into forgetting where he’d come from. He’d show them just what happened when they tried to make him into something he wasn’t. Why he’d—
Iira laid one hand on his arm, interrupting his vision of sending the whole Fleet into the nearest star. He caught himself just before his fist made contact with her jaw.
“Hell, woman,” he snarled at her. “The fuck you think you’re doing?”
“Attempting to gain your attention, milord.” She left her hand on his arm. Even with the contact, she was just a shimmer of feeling to his sai, not enough to understand. What was this woman made of? Stone?
“Well, you’ve got it.”
“Milord, I’ll ask again. What were you doing?”
He made the decision before he could talk himself out of it. “I need you to look at something.”
Iira had to disconnect about half the leads before they could move the woman with the dark skin. The glow lit up again as soon as he slipped his hands under her thin arms. Dull brown patterning turned the orange of amber lit from within, getting brighter and brighter the longer he touched her. By the time he got her upright and half draped over his shoulder, the light was so bright he was almost blind.
How long had it been since he’d seen a maruste light up? None of the women in his quarters ever offered to show theirs off. Now that he thought of it, he wasn’t sure they all had marks to start with. The further away from the Core, the less people worried about getting their maruste activated—if they had the nanites in their bloodstream at all.
When his sight cleared, he looked through the glow of floating glyphs and met Iira’s eyes. “Well?”
She shook her head, shading her face with one hand as she leaned back and squinted. “You would know what they mean better than I, milord. We have not made a catalog of the markings of the Navlad.” The unspoken ending to that went: because we’re trying to wipe them out.
“Hold her, then.”
Once the transfer was made, he backed up en
ough to see the glyphs in full. They tracked a glowing line down her spine, pulsing slightly, like a heartbeat. There at the top was her family. Nobody he recognized. Planet of birth, some place in the Core he’d only heard of in the news vids. The usual flourishes and loops that came with money. Skill set.
He frowned. “Hold still.”
There was a spot. It varied from person to person and with age, but it was usually over the sixth cervical vertebra. He brushed some stray hair out of the way and traced his thumb down her neck, counting the bumps in her spine. There. The glyphs flickered. He twisted his finger and pushed.
And nearly lost his eyesight again as the maruste virtually exploded into light. Lines and curves shifted from solid to broken in the space of a breath. Letters and glyphs crawled across her shoulders and wrapped around her ribs, then dripped down her back nearly to her hips. The light of the glyphs broke out and up, painting the expanded story of her life on the walls and ceiling.
Iira made a noise and Syrus reached out blindly to steady her. When she stiffened under his hand, he backed up, knuckled his eyes open, and stared.
“What is it, milord?” she asked, eyes still shut against the glare.
“Let’s check the other one.”
He didn’t bother trying to pick the redhead up. Iira detached her from the medunit, then stopped and looked at him. He couldn’t feel a thing from her in the way of emotions. If she knew what he knew, looking at these glyphs, she would be terrified at the very least. “Milord? A question?”
She’d stand there all night if he didn’t let her ask. “What?”
“They did not light up when you brought them in, milord.”
“Not a question.”
“Why did this phenomenon not occur earlier?”
Syrus looked at the young woman on the table. She didn’t look much better than she had when he’d opened the casket, but something Iira hit her with must have started working.
His Chief Med-Tech just stood there. Waiting. The lack of emotion was worse than silence.
“They had slipsuits on,” he said after listening to his heart beat in his ears for another minute or so. “You need skin contact. Even if I’d touched them, they were too far gone. I don’t know if the cold storage had something to do with it. But once a body’s far enough along the road to death, it just doesn’t have the juice. The nanites in the blood need power. If a person has one foot over the edge anyway . . .” He looked up and shrugged. “No lights. Now, you going to help me?”
Iira nodded and moved forward. In one easy motion, she pulled the girl upright, sweeping the twisting coils of red hair over one bare shoulder.
He looked for the right vertebra on the sleeping woman. A flicker of light, a twist, and the bright orange light painted the insides of his eyelids with glyphs.
“Is that—” Iira spat out a mouthful of red hair. “Is that the seal of—”
“No.” He cut her off and took his hand off the redhead’s skin. The light blinked out. “It’s not. Get them hooked up again. Go tell Oona to get the Fleet to the next Barb. Then go wake your husband. I’m declaring Campaign. As soon as Kizen’s Fleet makes it through the first Barbican, get the Hudran commanders over here. We’ll meet him on the other side.”
He left her there, stalking out into the main room and pulling on his pants and boots before heading to his command center. Then he collapsed into the throne, pulled up the data for the next system on the table floating in the center of the room, and sat there, watching his hands shake.
The Empire had found him again. It had gone back in time, laid a trap, and waited until his pride and restlessness made him stumble into it. How the hell had he ended up owning the contract on a pair of random women who’d been in cryo for at least two hundred years? It had to be a blood tie. No other explanation. Indentures didn’t answer from the top down. Maruste only lit up when the person who owned the bond touched the bonded.
He knew. He remembered the pain as the priest activated the fresh nannites with their indenture glyph. And again, when it was broken so a new one could be entered below it. The only three things that belonged on his back. Two broken indentures and the loopy curves of He’la marking him as the lowest of the low, there for anyone to see. No Open Blossom. No matter what he did to mask them, blood would tell.
He clenched his fists and watched his knuckles turn white. Fucking Empire. One way or another, it always came up to bite him in the ass. Now his chances of staying hidden in the Fleet were even worse than before. As if hiding his reactions to being baked, electrocuted and drowned was easy. If they found out. If the Fleet figured out he had a blood connection to two women with the crest of the Imperial family in their blood. That it took a certain sort of person to activate an Open Bloom..
Death was one thing. That would come one way or another. Once Iira told Quinn that the foundlings had something like the Imperial Seal on their skin, he’d go digging. He’d have to. And once he found the differences between the Navlad Imperial Seal and the family crest of its ruling house, he’d make the connection. At which point Syrus’s freedom to range planetside would be gone. Quinn would lock his warlord up and run things in Syrus’s name until they hit the capital of the Empire. No more fighting. No more killing. No more destroying the people who’d made this little adventure possible.
An honest death was better than being a two-bit chit in a bad game of War and Crosses. He had to keep hiding. Same as always. Eventually he’d die in battle and his true lineage would surface on his skin. By then they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
He just had to hold out. Do his best to sidetrack Quinn. And take as many Navlad Imperials with him as he could when then time came.
> Chapter Eight
Jossa
Check the wine! Bad grapes have been added to even worse fruit!
-first prophecy of the Delfi Oracle, literal translation
Everything hurt. Her bones hurt. Her muscles hurt. Her head hurt. Pain tingled up her arms, ran in streams down her legs, and curled into a hard ball inside her ribcage. The light was dim, and then it was gone, and then it was bright. Something thudded in her ears, hard and fast. Her heartbeat? She couldn’t tell. She didn’t know. All she knew was that it hurt.
But her heart hurt most of all.
Aching. Empty. Straining around the agony of loss and despair. And somewhere in the middle of it, a hole. Was she missing something, or had that always been there? What went in the hole? Was that the place for more feelings? It kept trying to fill itself, and then it drained right out again. Like an air leak in the hull.
Consciousness came slowly. The lights steadied. The blur resolved. Metal panels. Curved lines over her head; organic, almost alive.
Something beeped quietly.
Her head turned when she told it to. At least that part of her still worked. But all she saw were clear tubes hooked to a tall machine with lines and buttons and blinking lights in various colors. A bag of something hooked to the side of the . . . whatever it was. There was a word on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t remember it.
Had they gone to sleep yet? Had Goris put them under?
There was something past the forest of tubes and . . . wires. That’s what those things were. Something red and soft around the edges, but not far away.
Her arms gave fresh shrieks of pain when she tried to lever herself up. And then more as she caught her hand in one of the . . . things attached to her. And then everything hurt all over again as she lost her balance and fell back against the bed. Table? She couldn’t tell and couldn’t remember, and something about that red blur was too familiar to make her worry about it for long.
She made it up on the second try. Muscles screamed. The thudding in her head grew worse, and the beeping noises sped up. But she was sitting. Not lying down. That was progress, wasn’t it?
She nearly fell again as she tried to rub her eyes, and all the things stuck to and in her skin pulled and dragged at her. It took a moment to realize
that her hands were taped down. Another few minutes to get her fingers to stop fumbling with the sticky stuff and actually take hold and pull. She lost her grip twice before she managed to yank it loose. Then the needle. Yes. Needle. That was the word for it.
It was cold in this room. She shivered, swallowed, and jumped when she heard a mewl. Was that her? It sounded like her. And it had come when everything in her throat rebelled at being made to move.
Even her insides hated her.
Finally, she managed to free herself of the tubes and needles and odd little circle things that weren’t tape, but weren’t needles either. The whole mass of it hung around her, and she tried very hard not to get wrapped up in it as she eased her legs over the edge of the table. Table? It was too high for a bed. Beds let you touch the floor. Yes. Table.
Feet to floor now. Lose the balance and clutch at the edge of the mattress. Falling on one’s face was never pleasant, and the fuerrus did not like his women to have visible bruises. Other places, maybe. But never their faces. Or their backs. Or any other bit of skin routinely on display. His ornaments must be perfect in every way.
Something about that didn’t feel right. Ornaments? No. Not just ornaments.
She swayed as she shook her head, trying to clear the fog from her brain and make things work properly. There was an order to things, wasn’t there? And she’d broken it? Or had she? This was so familiar. She knew she should know this. Should know how to get herself back online.
Or was she? Should she? Someone helped her last time. Someone was always supposed to help her. Help them. Come for them?
Pick up the foot. Come on. You can do it. Up. Forward. Down.
Pain ripped through her body. She hit the other mattress with a thud and hung from the edge by her fingertips, shaking and swallowing against the feeling in her stomach. Then she mewled again at the pain in her throat and tried not to lose her grip on the only thing keeping her from hitting the floor and never getting up. It was a miserable thought. If she fell, she’d have no way to catch herself. Nothing to cling to.