“Tabitha!”
Tabitha looked up at the screen.
Bethany Anne arched an eyebrow. “Are you ready?”
Tabitha frowned. “Ready for what?” Harry stared at her, and she realized what Bethany Anne wanted. “Oh, yeah. Um…” She got up to pace while she spoke. “Harry has committed a shit-ton of crimes. Like, so many crimes. You might even call him a crime boss. So he definitely needs to be punished.”
Bethany Anne’s mouth twitched. “I thought you were speaking in this man’s defense? You’re not endearing me to him, Tabitha.”
Tabitha waved at the screen. “Hang on, I’m not done. This whole place is so crooked I’m surprised the hull integrity holds. On a station packed with corruption, he’s not the worst. On that note, I don’t think Harry would be best corrected with physical labor. I have a better idea.”
Bethany Anne tilted her head. “I’m listening.”
“He should be sentenced to clean this place up. Get it fit to fund the Order like it’s supposed to. When you get my report, you’re going to want me and the Tontos to stick around here for a while anyway.”
Bethany Anne considered Tabitha’s proposal for a moment. “Sounds good to me. I think we’re done here?”
Tabitha nodded that they were.
“Then I will see you after I’ve read your report. Stick around and help Harry for now.” The Empress ended the call, and the screen went blank.
Harry stared at Tabitha in shock. “I can’t. Where would I even begin?”
Tabitha slapped his arm as she walked past him to leave the meeting room. “We’ll figure it out, Harry. Same as we’ll figure out how to best deal with Iona.”
Chapter 14
Nickie
Rebus Quadrant, Aboard the Penitent Granddaughter, Cargo Bay B
Nickie ignored the sweat pouring down her forehead and laid into the punching bag with renewed purpose. She’d woken up early from a dream about her aunt and headed straight to the bay to burn off the apprehensive energy it had left coursing through her.
She felt Meredith hovering around the edges of her consciousness, but she didn’t give her a chance to interrupt. Nickie appreciated the space; this was something she needed to figure out for herself.
Everything was moving so fast, and she didn’t know if she wanted to keep up or run. Her first instinct was to run, her next to fight her way out. The problem was that she could neither run from nor fight emotion, and since she was done with numbing hers with drugs, the only thing she could do was face up to her feelings and work through them.
Hence the punching bag.
The chain holding the bag creaked in protest at her continued assault, but the seams held this time. She pulled back to catch her breath and allowed it to swing to a stop. Why did this shit have to be so difficult? It should be simple. When she hadn’t wanted to be around people it had been easy enough to cut them out. Why did it have to be so hard to let them in now that she felt ready to connect again?
She turned it over in her mind while she worked out. There was no easy fix, she concluded. She would just have to keep rolling with it as she had been doing and work out how she felt about it when they were done with the mission. With that decision, her skin ceased to itch with the intensity of her emotions.
She stood back from the bag, catching her breath for a few minutes. And then, undoing the tape from her hands, she headed back to her quarters to grab a quick shower and a change of clothing before she went to find breakfast.
The aroma of breakfast cooking drew her along the corridor. She followed the food smells to the mess, where she found everyone except John already tucking into Grim’s offerings. Grim pushed a plate and a steaming mug toward her when she sat down at the table.
“Morning!” Adelaide chirped.
Nickie took a grateful sip and peered at them all over the rim of her mug incredulously. “You’re all so…bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
Keen snorted. “You make that sound like a bad thing.”
Nickie let a smile slip. “No, it’s just a bit more than I’m used to first thing in the morning. It’s good that morale is high. Everyone will be at their sharpest for the mission.”
“It’s the change of scenery,” Keen told her with a grin. He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “It’s giving me a new lease on life. I feel like I could climb a mountain.”
“That’s great,” Adelaide quipped, “because we’ll be doing that soon enough if John’s description of the volcano is accurate.”
Grim chuckled. “It’s definitely a change from construction and farming.” He stood and picked his plate up. “We have equipment and supplies to pack.”
Nickie went to push her breakfast away. “There’s no time like the present. We’ll be at John’s coordinates in a couple of hours, and I still need to go over the plan with the prince himself… if he ever drags his ass out of bed.”
“No, you finish,” Grim told her. “We’ve got this.” He didn’t give her a chance to argue. He swept from the mess, herding Durq, Adelaide, and Keen with him.
Nickie kept eating, turning when she heard footsteps approaching from the other side of the mess.
John walked in a moment later and made a beeline for the remaining breakfast items. He selected a piece of fruit and poured himself a mug of coffee before taking the chair across from Nickie. He peeled his fruit without taking his eyes off her.
She got annoyed with that before even ten seconds had passed. “What?” she snapped.
John grinned. “How did you sleep?”
Nickie scowled. “Fucking terribly.” She saw the crestfallen look on his face and held up a hand while she clarified. “Not because of the bed, which I was going to thank you for, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” he supplied. “But you still didn’t sleep? You don’t look like you didn’t sleep.” He paused. “I have to ask. You’re enhanced, aren’t you?”
She nodded and poked at her food. “Yup.”
John was suitably impressed. “Are you really a Grimes, Grimes?”
Nickie nodded. “It’s not a big deal.” She prepared herself for the inevitable fanboy questions about her grandfather. It was why she kept her name to herself if she could. That shit was tedious in the extreme to deal with.
John’s eyes widened. “That’s… That’s just…”
“Still not a big deal,” Nickie reiterated firmly. “I’m estranged from my family.”
John looked at her with something approaching pity. “It must be pretty lonely out here by yourself.”
What the fuck? She scowled at him. “What makes you think you know how I feel?”
John shrugged. “I dunno, maybe because in history class it always looked so tight at the top of the Empire. I thought you might miss them.”
Nickie snickered, diverting him from his questions. “They made you learn about my family in school?”
John nodded. “Uh-huh. So why are you all the way out here instead of living it up back in the Federation?”
Nickie sighed. “That is a long and complicated story.”
John sat back with his coffee and regarded her interestedly. “I’m listening.”
Nickie wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him a single thing about herself. Then again, part of her longed to talk about the road that had led her here. She put it down to the effects of her broken sleep and decided this was a good time to just go with it. “The short version is that the Empire broke up, then my Aunt Tabitha was sent away, and I couldn’t handle it. I went on a bender to end all benders, and my Aunt Bethany Anne told me to shape up or ship out, so I shipped out and lived the party life until I got a rude awakening.”
John shook his head. “Your ‘Aunt Bethany Anne?’ The Empress is your aunt? So many things make sense now. So what’s the long version? Space is a big place, and people move around all the time without their relatives going off the rails.”
Nickie shrugged. “I love my aunt, okay? She was the only one who didn’t t
reat me like something to be fixed. Everyone else, especially my grandfather—they wanted me to change and be more like them.”
John grimaced. “I get that pressure. Everyone wants me to prove I’m as capable as my father. Did you ever feel like just—”
“Running away?” she finished. She made a flourish with her hands. “Welcome to my hideaway.”
John chuckled. “You know, we’re not that different.”
Nickie raised an eyebrow. “Really? I wouldn’t agree, Prince Preppy.”
“Really,” he insisted. “Your assessment of me would have been pretty close to the mark a couple of years ago.”
“So it’s not Prince Preppy, it’s Prince Playboy?”
John groaned. “How many of those names have you got for me?”
Nickie smirked. “An endless supply. You were telling me about your dubious past.”
He shook his head with a grin. “Actually, you were telling me about yours. You were all set on painting the galaxy red. What made you change track?”
Nickie shrugged. “I got in a hell of a bar fight. I was injured pretty badly, and my abilities were activated. It left me with a choice, and I chose to get my shit together and help people. When I came across the colony and found out they were about to be sold as slaves by the Skaines, I helped. And I’ve more or less been there until now when you showed up.”
“Hey, at least you’re not bored.”
That cracked Nickie up. “You got that right. This kind of action is more satisfying than anything I started in the whole five years before. Sure as hell beats starting brawls in bars just to break up the day. It has purpose or something.”
John frowned in amusement. “You went around starting fights in bars?”
Nickie smirked. “Well, yeah. What else do you do for a good time and an easy fight?” She collected her breakfast things and got up to clear them away. “Are you done? We’ve got a mission to plan.”
John drained the last of his coffee. “Yeah, sure. So, um… Does this mean we’re going to stop sniping at each other? And by ‘we,’ I mean you sniping at me.”
Nickie laughed. “I dunno, maybe? I can’t promise anything if you’re going to annoy me all the time.”
John put his hand over his heart and made a half-bow. “Then I shall endeavor not to annoy you too much.”
Nickie shook her head and walked off. “Well endeavor harder. You’re not quite hitting it yet.”
John threw up his hands and hurried to catch up with her. “I can’t win with you.” They walked along in silence for a few minutes. “Joking aside, thank you for agreeing to help.”
Nickie grew uncomfortable. “Don’t mention it.” John opened his mouth to protest, but she held up a hand and picked up her pace. “Seriously, don’t.”
John scrutinized her for a long moment. “Okay, I won’t. Hey, do you want to train together? I saw you had a setup in the cargo bay.”
Nickie narrowed her eyes. “Don’t push it. It’s not too late to space your ass.”
Rebus Quadrant, Planet Zuifra, Aboard the Penitent Granddaughter, Bridge
Meredith had concealed the Granddaughter in a close orbit on the dark side of one of the system’s larger moons. They had waited for the necessary alignment between the moon and the planet for Meredith to locate the area around the volcano and scan it, and she had rendered the data into a workable model of the area.
Nickie and John pored over the resulting imagery while he talked her through what to expect once they got there.
He pointed out a break in the jungle canopy. “We should leave the ship by the edge of the jungle and hike in from here.”
Nickie assessed the topography and shook her head. “That’s like forty-five klicks away, and over rough terrain. I can handle that, no worries, but I’m not sure anyone else can, apart from Grim.” She indicated a place near a wide river that was half the distance and on a more forgiving plane. “What about here, and then we can travel the river instead of feeding the mosquitos while we trek through the jungle?”
“There are no mosquitos here,” John told her. “What we face are bigger and angrier.”
Nickie smirked. “Of course we do. So, we go in here and up the river, and if that doesn’t work out, we can just hike the twenty klicks to the volcano. Then we get through your labyrinth and get the plant. No sweat.” She saw a slight shimmer in the air above the volcano. “Is it active?”
John zoomed in on the caldera. “Yes. That’s why we should leave the ship out of harm’s way—so Meredith can fly in if it erupts.”
Nickie looked at the sleeping death trap. “Meredith, how often does the volcano erupt?”
“One moment,” Meredith replied. “Around once every decade, according to local records. There was an instance of two eruptions within a couple of years of each other around eighty years ago.”
Nickie didn’t like the look of the volcano at all. She glanced at the rising heat above the ragged basin and turned back to John. “How long since the last eruption?”
John shrugged. “Ten years ago, give or take.”
“Why am I not surprised? Just our luck. Meredith, can we get imaging of the inside the volcano?”
“Unfortunately not,” Meredith replied. “With Federation technology, yes. This ship is rather lacking in that department, however.”
John headed for the door. “I need a few things from my quarters.” He returned a few minutes later with a small crate, which he set down by Nickie’s chair. “This should help,” he told her as he retrieved a handheld device from his pocket and plugged it into the console.
“What is it?” Nickie asked.
“My treasure map. Meredith, would you open the file X Marks the Spot, please?”
“Certainly, Your Highness,” Meredith replied.
Nickie blew a mental raspberry at Meredith. Suck-up.
The previous image was replaced with a heavily annotated three-dimensional representation of the interior of the volcano.
“Thank you, Meredith.” John swiped the image to hide his notes and zoomed in on a craggy opening in the base of the rock. “This is the main entrance.”
“The main entrance? That makes it sound like a place people visit.”
John nodded. “It’s a spiritual site for some. It’s where our warriors are forged; they go there to be tested and prove their worth. Just the outer chambers of the labyrinth, of course. Any deeper and they tend not to come back…as we’ve said.”
Nickie raised an eyebrow. “That sounds… Um, how exactly do they do that?”
“I’m not exactly sure about that part,” he admitted. “I do know there are a series of tests, like I said, and they’re specific to the warrior. All my research indicated that I’d find out when I got there.”
She flopped into her chair and put one boot on the console. “That’s not much to go on. What do you know?”
He swiped at the map again and the view of the outside blurred and refocused into what looked a lot like the inside of an ant nest to Nickie.
“Shit, when you said it was a labyrinth, I expected a labyrinth, but that’s a fucking labyrinth.” The tunnels began to branch almost as soon as the entrance opened up into the cave beyond, and pretty soon after that, the layout lost any semblance of logic. The tunnels twisted and turned, converged, and looped around and inexorably down until they all ended abruptly in a cavern deep underground. “Where’s our objective? And how the shiny fuck are we supposed to find our way through that?”
John grinned. “That’s where my research comes in.” He tapped his device, and a layer of scribbles was superimposed over the maze. “This is just the first section. It’s all the recorded routes taken by scholars and failed questers. I spent some time talking with a professor who claimed to have made it this far.” He pointed at the cutoff point. “I have no idea what comes after this, but the inner chambers lie somewhere beyond here.”
“There’s no information?”
John shook his head. “No. No one who mad
e it past this point has ever returned to tell the tale. I can only assume that they didn’t survive the tests.”
Nickie frowned in thought. “Who set these tests up in the first place?”
John held up his hands and shrugged. “It’s all lost to legend. Nobody knows for sure since no one has ever come back, remember?”
Nickie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “So we have no idea what we’re actually walking into?”
“Nope. All on faith.” John left his handheld on the console and went over to kneel by the crate he’d brought. “Well, faith, and some pretty cool tech.”
Nickie snorted. “I sure hope your tech’s awesome. Faith isn’t going to get us very far in that heat.”
John opened the crate. “I’ve got that covered. Actually, it was while I was on the trading outpost picking these up that the Briar Rose intercepted the message to you.” He pulled out a shiny hooded coverall and held it up to show her.
Nickie’s voice held faint alarm. “Were you planning on going disco-dancing afterward or something?”
John frowned, then chuckled when he saw the sideways look she was giving the silvered fabric. “Oh, no. They’re cutting-edge heat-resistant suits. I had extra made anyway since I was already looking for help, so everyone may as well use them. This one can be made to fit a Yollin, maybe.”
Nickie nodded. “Good idea. Is there anything else you think I should know before we get going?”
John thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Nickie got up from her chair. “Then we’re good to get started. Meredith, call the others to the bridge. We should get the briefing underway.”
Chapter 15
Nickie
Rebus Quadrant, Planet Zuifra, Reinek
Durq, glad to be remaining on board, waved to the group from the top of the ramp. “Be careful!” he called in a trembling voice. “We’ll be here if you need us.”
Deuces Wild Boxed Set: Books 1-4: Beyond the Frontiers, Rampage, Labyrinth, Birthright Page 55