The Vigilante Chronicles Omnibus

by Natalie Grey

  “Better, honestly.” Shinigami lifted a shoulder. “I would have thought they’d be at each other’s throats. Just when I think I have a handle on organic life forms, you all throw me another curveball.”

  “That’s…accurate.” Chuckling, Barnabas went to find Gar and Gilwar and tell them about the operation.

  There was a lot he could not remember. Gorsik drifted in the tank of his biosuit and tried to go over the events of the last day. For some reason, any attempt to think about it made him nauseated. He remembered terrible pain but little else.

  But why? What would have hurt so much?

  He must have been in an accident of some kind. The answer came to him slowly. His mind wasn’t working very well, after all. Yes, an accident. Perhaps his suit had malfunctioned.

  Then why was he here in his offices, alone? Surely he should have medical personnel attending to him. He tried to make his suit work, but the effort was too much for him. He did not understand what was happening. He did not…

  He fought the urge to vomit, tentacles rigid. It took longer than he wanted to get hold of himself, but eventually he was able to relax again.

  And then he remembered his purpose. He remembered why he was here.

  The admiral. He needed to bring the admiral to a certain location. They had told him this when they left him here in his office. They told him it should be easy for him to arrange. After all, he had been her aide for several years now. He knew what to say to get her off her guard.

  And when they had her…

  His heart filled with happiness. When the admiral was converted like he was, she would be happier. He wanted her to be happy. She had not been very happy lately. She would be happy, and Grisor would be happy, and the true work of the Committee could begin.

  Although he was still in pain, Gorsik struggled to his feet and went in search of Admiral Jeqwar.

  There was much to do. He could not afford to waste a single moment.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Holy shit, boss, it’s actually you.” Tom Mears strode across the docking bay of Heavensward Station. Although he stood only 5’4”, he radiated confidence and charm that filled any room he was in—up to and including the docking bay. He slung his bag over his shoulder and reached out to clasp Aliana’s hand. “Kinda thought I’d never see you again.”

  “Likewise,” Aliana replied honestly. She felt a stab of old hurt and pushed it away.

  Tom saw it, though. He shook his head at her. “I’m so sorry for what happened. I didn’t know at first, I swear. We just left port, and he said you had some business to finish up and you’d meet us a little later on. Then he said—”

  “That he and I were breaking up and I’d given him the ship,” Aliana finished. “I know. The others told me. I’m not mad at you, Tom. I shouldn’t ever have been, I should have known he’d lie to you all, too.”

  Ria, of course, had known the truth, but she and Aliana had settled that.

  “Well, I didn’t fix it when I knew, did I?” Tom shook his head. “Figured it was all legal-like, tied up so neatly, and we’ve all had bad bosses afore, haven’t we? Told myself I’d make it up to you if I ever saw you again, but that was dodging things and I knew it.” He gave a sigh. “Say, how did you get the ship back?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Aliana promised him. “Suffice it to say, Lawrence is not happy about it, but the whole process did involve him spending about an hour trying to land an heiress, and that was fun for all of us to watch.”

  She meant that literally. Shannon had sent along the video later, and they’d all had a good laugh, throwing popcorn at the screen as Lawrence laid a bunch of smarmy pickup lines on the woman.

  Aliana hadn’t seen her wearing a recording device, but she must have had one embedded. She found herself fascinated by the woman. She didn’t seem intimidated by anything, and last time Carter had mentioned Barnabas, he hadn’t mentioned any stunningly attractive female members of his crew.

  She had no idea that if Barnabas knew the general drift of her thoughts, he would have laughed himself sick.

  Anyway, she told herself firmly, she was not jealous. Not jealous at all. She busied herself letting Tom into the ship and showing him to his old bunk with a flourish. Lawrence had been lazy enough that he hadn’t cleaned out the cabins after he fired everyone, but since they were in port anyway for Ria to do the repairs, Aliana had busied herself cleaning the ship from stem to stern.

  Consequently, every part of her ached and all of her clothes smelled like cleaning solution.

  It had been worth it, though. She told herself that she’d scrubbed every last bit of Lawrence out of the Melisande. When they left port, the ship would be clean, and Aliana vowed to herself that she would never again think of him. It would be as if he’d never been on board.

  They’d come to Heavensward specifically to find Tom since Aliana had spent the last few days tracking down every member of the crew that Lawrence had fired. All of them had been happy to sign on again, and with every one of them, Aliana had made the same deal: it was all water under the bridge as long as they’d tell her the next time someone tried to tell them to leave port without her.

  They all promised they would—and more than one of them promised to give Lawrence a solid kick in the groin if they ever saw him again. Aliana had started to protest the first time someone had said that, then decided not to intervene. The crew had their own grudges with him.

  He solidly deserved it.

  She passed Ria in the hallway. The tiny woman seemed to be covered with grease smudges and the toolbox she was lugging was about half her size, but she was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Engine upgrades have her purring like a kitten,” she reported happily. “Just the gun turrets to do now. And did I hear Tom?”

  “You did.” Aliana pointed down the hall. “Same bunk. I think he’s still unpacking.”

  “Awesome!” Ria dropped her tools with a clank and took off. “Tom! Tom! You’re back!”

  Aliana watched her go with a grin. Seeing the rest of the family come together again was helping her feel better about everything.

  And she had to be honest—she had definitely looked the other way when a boss had done something unethical. She had given herself all sorts of excuses, like that it wasn’t her business or that a paycheck was a paycheck.

  She wasn’t very impressed with her past self now.

  She was humming an old Earth song when she heard a familiar voice nearby. With a frown, sure she must be mishearing, Aliana made her way to the front hatch of the ship.

  “Sir, please.” Tara was trying to block access into the ship. “Please just let me ask the captain if—”

  “It’s all right, Tara.” Aliana gave a chuckle. “Zinqued. Fancy seeing you here. What business on Heavensward? I warn you, if you steal the flour transport job out from under us, I will be very put out.”

  Zinqued chortled. “Ah, we are rivals now! This will be fun. But this time, I am not here for the same job; do not worry. In actuality, I heard you had come to Heavensward, so I came here to see you.”

  “Me?” Aliana frowned. Then she guessed what he must be getting at and groaned. “You can’t be serious, Zinqued.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zinqued sniffed loftily.

  “You know very well what I’m talking about.” Aliana jabbed a finger at him and then sighed, lifting both hands in a helpless gesture. “But still, I know you better than to think I’ll get you out of here without at least talking to you about this, so come on. I’ll make tea.”

  “Tea!” Zinqued followed her happily. “The one that makes my nose go all cold and hot at the same time, yes?”

  “Peppermint, yes, I remembered you liked that one.”

  She showed Zinqued into the main social room of the Melisande. He looked around appreciatively, and Aliana smiled as well. Handmade braided rag rugs covered the deck with circles of bright color, an old wooden table was w
orn shiny with use and topped with a pottery fruit bowl, and various comfortable chairs had been acquired over the years so that the whole crew could sit and relax together. Many nights, they did; there were game boards and a very scattered collection of old books, not to mention a few knitting projects.

  The kitchen was one of Aliana’s favorite parts, decorated with fading wallpaper that nonetheless had a pattern she liked, and with walls that could come down if someone burned something, and keep the smell from getting into the whole ship.

  This large room was surprisingly cozy. The day might come when this place got old, but it wasn’t going to be for a very long time.

  Zinqued sat while Aliana got the tea and brought it over to the table. When he took the earthenware mug, his nose twitched in appreciation and he sneezed the next moment. Peppermint made the Hieto sneeze, which seemed only to make him enjoy the tea even more.

  Aliana supposed humans did some pretty strange things, too.

  “So.” She took a sip of her tea and raised her eyebrows. “Make your pitch, then.”

  Zinqued took another sip of tea, sneezed again, and smiled broadly. “This tea is good! And you know what my pitch is, surely. You are a human, and you have a good rapport with Barnabas. You can help me more than any other crew member I could get. So the question isn’t what I want, it’s what you want.”

  Clever of him. Aliana smiled and tucked her legs up.

  She was surprised to find that she had no good answer to the question.

  “I don’t think I really want anything,” she told him honestly. “I have my own ship, and I can go wherever I want. Usually, I don’t have quite enough money for all the repairs, and I’m a little worried about where the next job will come from, but it’s still the best life I can imagine. Perhaps it won’t always be.” She thought of Carter’s bar on High Tortuga and the family apartments above it, with his twins shrieking as they played in the backyard. “For now,” she added quietly.

  Zinqued seemed to know that her mind was miles away. He waited, sipping his tea and sneezing occasionally until she looked at him again.

  “I’ll help you,” Aliana said slowly. She saw his face light up and held up a finger. “But I’ll only help you with a Barnabas-style plan.”

  Zinqued paused.

  A smile was tugging at Aliana’s mouth now. “Barnabas makes very clever traps,” she told Zinqued. “You heard me speak to him about it. They’re traps that only catch you if you do a foolish or immoral thing. I will set that kind of trap. Barnabas, of all people, should be able to evade it.”

  Zinqued might have complained that this was hardly useful, but he said nothing.

  “I’ll have to learn more about him,” Aliana said, suddenly flushing as she looked down into her tea. “Anything I can find out. Do my research. And I’ll make a plan. If he falls into the trap, it will be because he didn’t watch himself.”

  “Mmm.” Zinqued set his now-empty mug on the table. “I accept, then.”

  “You do?” Aliana was mildly surprised. “I’ll, uh…well, I’ll work on it.”

  “Do.” He stood. “I’ll wait to hear from you. Of course, this will likely mean you cross paths with him again.”

  Aliana’s stomach did its damnedest to hop sideways. She recovered before she spilled her tea everywhere, set the mug down hastily, and managed a smile.

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  It was a shame that she couldn’t tell if she was lying. The thought of seeing Barnabas again was terrifying.

  And yet…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Are you ready?” Barnabas asked Tafa as they walked down the corridor in the Shinigami.

  “I think so.” She looked at him. “Were you ever worried that you were going to…lose yourself? It’s just the thought of getting in that Pod and coming out someone else.”

  “I wasn’t changed in a Pod,” Barnabas explained. “My upgrade process was a little less…refined, shall we say.”

  Understatement of the decade.

  She was looking at him curiously, though, so he continued, “Yes, I did worry that I would lose myself. In fact, in the way I was first upgraded, there was a very strong voice in my mind telling me to give myself up to end the pain. But that won’t happen to you. What’s happening is that the Pod-doc—which doesn’t have a mind of its own—will make the changes Shinigami has determined. There’s no pain, and no voice.”

  Tafa relaxed a little bit.

  “You’re always changing, Tafa,” Barnabas told her. “Everything that happens to you changes you. You’re just choosing this change. And it’s all right—if you decide you don’t want to fight after all, you won’t have to.”

  “I do want to fight,” she insisted fiercely.

  He smiled at her. Privately, he wasn’t sure that Tafa would ever be a warrior, but he approved wholeheartedly of her reasons for this change.

  In the med bay, Shinigami was waiting. She was already in her armor for the mission, but she had covered it with a white lab coat and had her hair pulled back neatly. She somehow radiated quiet confidence as she helped Tafa into the Pod-doc. Beside her, Gar was clearly worried, but Shinigami must have told him to keep a lid on it because he wasn’t allowing himself to worry out loud.

  “I’m going to close the top,” Shinigami said, “but we’ll all be here. If you don’t like it in there, we can open the Pod-doc right back up, okay? But you’ll probably fall asleep at once. You might dream, but it’s more likely that you’ll just wake up when you’re ready to be taken out, okay?”

  “And you’ll be here if so?” Tafa looked worried again. “Even if the mission runs long—”

  “If the mission runs long, we can get a Pod back up here within a minute or two,” Barnabas assured Tafa. “And, remember, Shinigami is the ship. She can open the lid for you.”

  “Oh! Right.” Tafa nodded. She gave Gar a tremulous smile and lay back as Shinigami closed the lid.

  Not even two seconds later Shinigami reported, “She’s out cold.”

  Gar let out a breath. “I don’t know why this is so scary for me. I did this, and it was fine.”

  “It’s always harder to watch someone else do it,” Shinigami said with a surprisingly human dose of wisdom. “Come on now, get your armor on. We have to meet Vidrelor and the team at the city gates. He absolutely will leave without us, and you know he wants to.”

  “He doesn’t trust us.” Gilwar had appeared in the door. “I suppose he’s right not to, at least in my case. I thought I might stay behind on the ship to make sure Grisor doesn’t escape.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Barnabas replied easily. “We have a contingency plan.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Shinigami smiled as she took off the white lab coat. “The second it looks like he might actually get out? We’re ejecting that pod.”

  Gilwar gave a surprised chuckle. “Well, then. In that case, I’ll probably stay in the capital city.”

  “Why are you so determined not to come?” Barnabas asked suspiciously.

  “Well, you have Ferqar as a resource on Jotun technology, so you don’t need me, and…well, I don’t trust myself not to snoop if I’m in that bunker.” Gilwar gave a mechanical shrug. “You see, I’ve been a spy for almost all of my life, and that bunker has the absolute best in terms of Brakalon technology. Even if I’m not trying to snoop, I’ll hear them saying code words, and I’ll see their security processes. I’d rather just stay behind. I can advise whoever’s left on other technology they might see during the invasion.”

  “Let’s hope we prevent that,” Shinigami said.

  Gilwar nodded, but his silence was not encouraging. “Of course,” he added simply.

  “Well, then.” Barnabas made one last check of the Pod-doc controls and ushered them toward the shuttle bay. “Let’s get down to the surface.”

  A scant ten minutes later they joined the strike team at the gates of the city. Vidrelor, as Shinigami had predicted, did not look entirely pleased t
o see them. Still, as a warrior with a warrior’s honor, he had kept his word to wait until the assigned time; he wasn’t going to resort to trickery to leave them behind. He gave a sigh and motioned them into the trucks, and the party set off toward the bunker.

  Admiral Jeqwar sighed as she piloted her biosuit along the corridors of her office. She wished she could be in one of the tanks, floating happily among the seagrasses or hunting fish.

  That, of course, was just a distraction. What she really wanted was to be in the middle of her fleet, unleashing the full potential of the Jotuns on—

  Well, on other Jotuns, it seemed. She didn’t like that; she had never enjoyed her desire for war. She was what she was, however, and that had proved invaluable to the Jotuns over the years. She had saved her people from destruction more than once.

  She would do it again now. In fact, she did not intend to wait even one more day. She had made a decision: she was going to destroy the Committee, process and legalities be damned. Barnabas could carry out his theater with Grisor, but meanwhile, there would be no more of the vermin to carry out their plans in the shadows.

  It was a perfect solution to her way of thinking. She did not allow her enemies to stay alive and dangerous once she knew who they were.

  She was surprised, when she rounded the corner, to see Gorsik hard at work.

  “Gorsik.” He had been taken ill very suddenly a day or so ago, and she could see from his movements that he was not feeling entirely better yet. “You should not be here. We’ve all been working too hard.” How long since any of them had taken a night off?

  You didn’t get nights off, of course, when there was a plot within your government to violently overthrow multiple other species.

  And after a time, it wore on you. After a time, even when there was so much to do, a person could take no more. She should have noticed the signs of burnout coming, she thought guiltily. Even sick, he was still here.

  He looked up at her, however, and smiled. He was happy. He was calm, not frantic. That helped her feel somewhat better.