Of Sea and Stars (Partners Book 3)

by Melissa Good

  Then a surprise as a crowd appeared behind them and started pounding on them with fists and cast iron pans, all dressed in space jumpsuits and all yelling for Dan Kurok.

  Melee. Insanity.

  Then she saw one of the bios pick up an enemy soldier twice his size and throw him against the wall. The enemy turned and started firing at them, and then a figure let out a yell and threw himself between them and the bios.

  So stupid. Elaine braced and fired, ducking behind a piece of twisted steel and targeting the bad guys implacably as they fired into the oncoming bios. She saw Kurok disappear beneath a crush of bodies.

  Then a bio stepped in front of a Bay rat, a kid just past childhood, and took one for him, body parts exploding across the room and hitting everyone in range. Elaine got the one who got him, her blaster fire getting him right between the eyes. It sent him flying back into his comrades in a flailing of twitching arms and legs as his brain disintegrated.

  Everything stopped for a moment, and then Johnathan was there at her side, bellowing in bass rage. Then from the side corridors, from every direction, Bay residents came running, bringing a wash of seawater and blood with them. Elaine saw the enemy squad leader’s face. His eyes met hers and she knew.

  He knew.

  “Kill ’em all.” She aimed and fired. “No one lives today.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “JESS, THEY ARE hailing us,” Dev said. “Asking for you.”

  “Gimme.” Jess straightened up a little in unconscious reaction as she heard the faint popping in her ear before the link opened. “This is Jesslyn Drake,” she stated, then fell silent.

  She clearly heard an indrawing of breath. “Drake,” a voice answered, low and slightly raspy. “What is your pitch?”

  Jess rested her elbows on her console. “Give up, or I’ll kill you,” she said in a mild tone. “That’s all I got.”

  April leaned back against the wall of the carrier, eyes blinking in pained exhaustion, and smiled. “All we got.” She repeated softly.

  “And...” the voice paused, “we fight to nothing.” It sounded wryly resigned. “Die, die, die, soon nothing but seals and gulls left.”

  “Probably,” Jess said.

  Arp listened in silence. Now he spoke up. “That’s Brudegan.”

  Jess nodded. “Josten, turn around and go home,” she said. “Or stay and we fight. Pick one. I’m hungry, and I can tell my pilot wants a break.”

  Another sigh. “You talk? This is your homeplace. We sit down and talk before die?”

  “Why?” Jess asked.

  “Why not?” Brudegan answered with the same offhand mildness. “We have never met face to face. I have never looked into the eyes of a Drake. I want to before die,” he said. “But maybe you say yes, and I die anyway your guns shoot me.”

  Jess considered that. “If I say yes, my guns won’t shoot you. Word.”

  “And what is that worth?”

  “You tell me.” Jess smiled. Brudegan was their ace of aces. Overage now, her father’s vintage, but a strategist without peer and a legend even Interforce respected. Careful, rational, and often incapable of coping with the madness that was what Jess was sometimes.

  Most times.

  “What is it with all the, let’s talk, crap today?” April grumbled. “Yak, yak, yak.”

  Dev tapped a pad next to her, regarded it, then grunted softly under her breath. “That is a somewhat attractive animal.”

  “What?” Doug leaned over. “What is that?”

  “A yak.”

  It was an oddly poignant moment and they both produced pained grins over it. “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” Doug said.

  “What will it be for us, Drake?” Brudegan sounded faintly amused. “I have heard you have heart. Come show it to me.”

  “Sure,” Jess said with a faint shrug. “Land at the top layer there, near the cave entrance. Flight, stay in position.”

  “Jessie,” Jason’s low tones rumbled. “Guy wants to plug you.”

  Jess got up as the carrier started to move, Dev bringing them around in a gentle curve. “Yeah I know, Jase.” She opened the sideband. “Everyone wants to plug me. Maybe I can get a straight answer out of them for once and it’ll help some poor intel bastard someday.”

  “Jess, the other flight is holding back beyond the ridge,” Dev reported. “I just got them on scan as we elevated over the ridge.” She held the carrier in place, waiting for the enemy light speeder to land. “I have tried to inform Bay ops but they are offline.”

  Not good. Jess held on to the overhead rigging as the carrier set down and faced the possibility this was an end game. “Come with me, Devvie. Everyone else stay here.”

  April’s eyes slitted.

  “Someone has to have their hands on the guns.” Jess correctly interpreted it. “Jase is probably right. They’re probably going to try and skunk me.”

  “Why take Rocket then?” Doug asked, unexpectedly. “Point to get you both skunked?”

  “Yes, actually,” Dev answered. “The point would be there is so much unpleasantness it would be incorrect in the extreme to have to deal with it without Jess here.” She stood and shrugged into her sharkskin jacket, closing up the front of it as she joined Jess at the door.

  As no one put forth any further protest, Jess hit the hatch and stepped backwards through it, then stood with her hand on her blaster as Dev followed her out.

  The enemy speeder was crouched nearby, rough and blocky architecture, as ugly and utilitarian as their own craft with slightly more angular lines. A man in a long jacket stood outside, with thick, windruffled gray brown hair and a blaster fastened across his chest.

  “C’mon.” Jess put her hand on Dev’s shoulder.

  They walked across the rocky ground, scoured by a stiff wind and as Jess blinked a few times to clear it from her eyeballs. It occurred to her that right now life wasn’t good. She wished she was weeks back in Base Ten, having lunch with Jason and listening to Dev make sonic booms overhead.

  She slowed to a halt an arms length away from him, studying his lined, weathered face just as he was studying her, his hazel eyes revealing nothing.

  “So you are Drake,” Brudegan finally said. “You much resemble your father.”

  Jess nodded. “And grandpappy Jack,” she said. “We all look like gargolyes with no sense of humor.”

  He shifted his eyes to Dev. “And this is the prodigy?”

  “Hello,” Dev responded before Jess could. She held a hand out. “I’m Dev.” She waited for him to take her hand and then she squeezed down and released him. “I am Jess’s partner.”

  Jess smiled. “Also known as Rocket.”

  “Yes,” Dev admitted. “Also known as Rocket.”

  Brudegan studied her. “You did not learn this flying from them.”

  “No,” Dev said. “My technical instruction was given to me as biologic programming prior to my arrival.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Dev is short for NM-Dev-1. I am a biological alternative.”

  “We ordered a bunch more.” Jess smiled lazily. “But I was lucky enough to get the original.” She watched his face and read the twitches and unconscious reaction without effort. “You were hoping it wasn’t true, weren’tcha?”

  He moved his head a trifle. “What you purchase, so can we.”

  “In time,” Jess agreed. “But you’ll never have this one.”

  “In time we can do better.” The enemy flyer was behind him, and he leaned back against it, perching a little on the wing. Though tall, he was shorter than Jess, and he relaxed a little, reviewing her angular form. “A force is coming, Drake, that you cannot defeat. You know it.”

  “I don’t,” Jess said, “know it. I’ll know I’m defeated when I’m dead.” She gestured faintly at the wall. “You know what we are, now.”

  “Monsters,” Brudegan said. “Yes.”

  “Yes.” Jess wasn’t offended. “Designed and bred monsters. You think the barrage was bad? G
o inside. I have ten-year-old cousins you won’t be able to stop.” And it came home to her, that lifelong sense of difference that had nothing to do with her as an individual but had dogged her all her career.

  She felt a little idiotic, really, not having put that together.

  He remained silent for a moment. Jess merely waited and watched, her body relaxed, stained with blood, all the preceding hours of effort leaving no mark.

  Everywhere else, they’d been able to make inroads. Insertions in the west had been easy, his overarching plan a success. “I found a leverage point here,” he remarked with a little smile.

  Jess smiled back. “And I killed him. But if I hadn’t, someone else would have.” She laced her fingers together, her thumb rubbing idly at some dried blood across one knuckle. “It’s part of our crazy.”

  He looked at Dev, who watched him with an intent, sober stare.

  “It would be excellent,” Dev said, “if you would explain what you want.” She blinked placidly. “Because I do not think anyone is having an optimal experience here.” She paused. “And it would be interesting if there was an alternative to having everyone made dead.”

  Brudegan’s bushy grizzled eyebrows lifted a little. “So we have the speech of a construct but perhaps not the mind of one, eh?” His eyes flicked to Jess. “Perhaps you were leveraged more than you knew.”

  “As in she comes from your side? Nah. The guy who made her is a lot smarter than you are.”

  Brudegan’s lips twitched. “And if I said he was ours?” He folded his arms over his chest. “Never Interforces’.”

  “Half true.” Her blue eyes twinkled just a little. “Neither yours, nor Interforces’.”

  Dev straightened up a little, but remained silent.

  Jess sat down on a nearby uneven rock. “So what do you want? All of us dead? All of us, and all of us. Everyone dead, so that we run out of spirals and it all ends with a seagull eating our guts?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Because of Gibraltar?”

  “No. Because if you exist, and continue to exist, you will eventually make all this side of the world in your image, and when the wolves run out of rabbits to eat, then what?” Brudegan asked. “We cannot let you exist. Your own side cannot let you exist. You are a sickness with no cure.”

  “Probably true.” Jess folded her hands over one knee, her ears picking up motion behind the craft and knowing it. You’re right, Brudegan. We are wolves. You can’t defeat us.

  He straightened as he now sensed the motion, and from the landing bay to the right of them emerged a drifting crowd of armed figures, coming around the side of the flyer to stand and watch.

  Covered in blood and dust and in the working coveralls of the Bay.

  “But wolves know their own,” Jess said with a faint smile. “And they defend their territory.”

  “Cuz.” It was Dustin, blood covering half his face. “We got ’em all inside.” He stared insolently at Brudegan. “Want me to get this one for ya?”

  “No, he’s flagged,” Jess said. “My chit.”

  “Too damn bad.” He winked at Dev. “But they put some hurt on the non coms, cuz.”

  Dev felt a sense of apprehension and she looked at Jess.

  “Tried to get at the kids, but the spacies whacked at ’em,” one of the youngsters with Dustin added. “Pretty cool.”

  “Cool,” Dustin agreed.

  Jess stood up and moved closer to him. “I told Interforce about your scam. I told them how you wormed your way in and were setting us against each other. Games up.” Her voice hardened a trifle. “They’re hands off.”

  Brudegan looked over at the line of waiting carriers outlined against the clouds and faintly shook his head.

  A faint crackle in Jess’s ear and she touched the comms. “Jase?”

  “Heard the channels open up,” Jason said with wry calmness. “Westies ordered to stand with us against the incoming.”

  April’s voice chimed in. “Yeah, the jackass here heard it, too. Bitching.”

  Jess’s eyes went to Brudegan’s face, studying it. She could sense the coming fight, and like a mist of rain coating her skin, her body responded, flushing out the exhaustion and replacing it with the subtle buzz of excitement and anticipation.

  “Ops says they’re gonna have to farm out the bodies if the rest of them come on in here, cuz.” Dustin glanced up at the thickening clouds. “Gotta sharpen the process blades.”

  Jess saw the faintest of flinches in her enemy’s face. Just the minutest of contractions, and she felt time slow as she took another of those minutes out and stepped back in her head, coming out of the moment into that gray place of no emotion.

  Where really was the win? She replayed and considered the last words Dev had said, their clear tones echoing in the back of her head. Everyone expected the battle now. Wanted it. She could even sense the taste for blood in her kinfolk standing nearby, denied them for so long.

  Where was the win? Was there a win? Or just the lesser of two losses?

  She drew breath and came back in. “You want to see what this whole scam was about before you die for it?” she asked. “See if it was worth it?”

  She’d startled him. She read it in his eyes, in the flicker of reaction, in the sudden shift of his body he couldn’t quite control. “You talk big. Walk it. I’ll show you.” She gestured to the bay opening across the rocks now full of fighters.

  He shook his head. “I can die here as well in the clean air,” he said. “What protects me in there? The word of a Drake?”

  Jess looked him in the eye. “My father told me once the only thing you come into and out of the world with is your honor. And that you can’t have it taken. You can only give it away.” Her lips twitched a little. “Jimmy died for giving his.”

  Brudegan shifted his gaze off hers just long enough to see the crowd nearby unconsciously nodding their heads in agreement. He lifted one hand and let it drop. “Go. I will follow,” he said, with the faintest of shrugs. “Death is death.”

  They walked across the rocky ground that moderated and became flat and regular as they approached the cliff opening and entered, the worksuited figures inside slowly drawing aside to let them pass.

  JASON STARED AT the screen. “What the hell is she doing? Are they going inside?” He triggered comms. “Jess!”

  “Ack.” Jess’s voice came back at him. “Standby tac. Ops G1.”

  “Got a game on,” Brent said.

  “What kind of game...oh. Gonna leverage the bastard,” Jason said. “Insurance.”

  “Jason.”

  He flicked comms. “Go, El.”

  “Had a bad mix up here. Doc’s down,” Elaine said. “Need to get him to the tank.”

  Jason straightened up. “No med there?”

  “TP bandages,” Elaine responded. “He’s in countdown.”

  “Crap.” Jason considered a minute. “Bring up the sidechannel to April, Brent.”

  “Sideband up.”

  “April, this is Jason.”

  “Ack,” April responded promptly. “Sup?”

  “Need you to take a med run back to Base Ten.”

  Dead silence for a moment. Jason figured it could go either way. “It’s the doc,” he added in a card. “Took a hit.”

  Still silence.

  “Pissed,” Brent said. “Don’t want to miss the fight.”

  “Ack,” April finally answered. “Going in.”

  A moment later a carrier broke out of formation and pitched down, heading for the cliff face. “El, the kids are on the way in for a pickup. Jess’s bus.”

  “K, ack.” Elaine cut off and the channel went offline.

  Jason leaned back in his seat and folded his hands over his stomach. “Least they get to do something.” He sighed. “Wish I knew what she was up to.”

  THEIR BOOTS SCUFFED on the cut stone floors and then rang as they reached the circular iron stair. They started downward bathed in gray light from the cap at the apog
ee of it. Below, they heard shots and shouting and a low booming roar.

  “I have heard of this place,” Brudegan said after a long silence. “This hall.”

  Jess nodded as they climbed down past the residential levels, all doors closed and sealed, red light that bathed the landings in warning. She was in the lead with Dev at her side and Brudegan a step behind. The fighters from the Bay followed in an unruly clump, a dozen of them at her heels.

  They reached the bottom, and now there were bodies evident, growing more numerous as they skirted them and headed down a corridor.

  Bay security chief Mike emerged from the ops area. “Jess! All sealed.” His eyes went to Brudegan and his hand to his gun in the same motion.

  “Stop.” Jess lifted a hand. “Let him alone.”

  Mike stared hard at her and him. “Some like him just blew out some worth a lot more then him,” he said. “Including your buddy from space.”

  Jess hauled up sharply. “Kurok?” She saw Dev’s eyes widen and she gasped.

  Mike nodded. “We just hauled him into your crate and that nomad lit out for the base.”

  “Ah,” Brudegan said. “Best news I could have had. The traitor dead.” He barely got the words out when he was lifted up bodily and slammed against the rock wall, held there with solid force. He reeled and his head went back and forth before it dropped down to see furious green eyes looking up at him.

  “If Doctor Dan is injured,” Dev said, “or made dead, it is not at all good news.”

  Jess exhaled, letting the momentary shock fade. “Easy, Devvie.” She patted her back. “Let him down. I’ll find out what the score is. They’re getting him back to med.”

  Dev released the unpleasant man, and he fell to his knees on the rock from the force of it. It took a lot of concentration, more than she’d expected, to resist hitting him.

  She wanted to. There was no sense in her that it was even wrong for her to do so. She glanced up and found Mike looking at her. He nodded at her in understanding.

  Which she in no way understood. But she could feel Jess’s hand still on her back, the tips of her fingers making little scratching motions.