A Hero for the Empire: The Dragon's Bidding, Book 1

by Christina Westcott

  Running footsteps warned her a second before he tackled her, knocking her down.

  “Stand down. We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Fitz froze in confusion. The command had been in Scyran.

  He must have taken her stillness for acquiescence because he pulled her to her feet. As he stepped back, she noticed he favored the leg that had been pinned beneath the horse. She glanced down the slope toward the sanctuary of the forest, now tantalizingly close. Would his injury hamper him enough that she could out distance him and escape? It certainly hadn’t seemed to slow him up any when he’d tackled her.

  “Don’t even think about it. You wouldn’t make it.” He pushed aside the fur vest he wore over his chain mail to expose a holster containing a standard military-issue side arm.

  Fitz studied the man, a warning voice whispering in the back of her brain. According to her files on Baldark, the original settlers had been a racially homogeneous group of small, dusky-skinned, dark-eyed people. He was tall with blond hair and a beard several shades redder. His stance displayed the coiled-spring alertness of a warrior…or a soldier. An Imperial deserter was her first thought. Fed up with the tedious duty on the remote base, he’d gone native. That would explain his clear, unaccented Scyran.

  Then another, much less attractive, thought occurred to her. If these Baldarkii were working with the Imperials, that would explain why they were so anxious to track her down and capture her. She might get her chance to see the inside of that base far quicker than she anticipated and not in the manner she’d planned.

  “Put your weapons down,” he said. “We don’t want any misunderstandings; we just want to talk to you.”

  “You didn’t have to ride me down if that was all you wanted.”

  “You didn’t show any signs of stopping, and I had to get to you before you went in there.” He nodded his head toward the dark forest. “Only two outcomes for a woman who goes in the Taiga alone after dark. She freezes to death or the Tzraka get her. Either way, you wouldn’t survive the night.”

  “Thanks for your concern, but I can take care of myself. I’ve faced Tzraka before.” Only once before, but she wasn’t going to let that fact stop her from getting to that Imperial base and rescuing Wolf.

  “Look, woman, I don’t care if you freeze, but if the bugs get you, they’ll use your body to spawn hundreds of nymphs that’ll grow into fighters by summer and cause me a whole lot of grief. I’m not going to let you take that chance. Now put your weapons down.”

  The remaining riders galloped up, two halting behind the bearded man, but the third swept past them, reined in his mount further down the path and dismounted, blocking any hope of escape.

  The newcomer matched the bearded man in height, but had the slender build and smooth cheeks of an adolescent. A patch over one eye testified to the harshness of life on the low-tech planet. The youth stepped behind her, drew her sword from its scabbard across her back and pulled the sniper rifle off her shoulder. He studied the firearm as if it were a wondrous find, his fingers sliding over the barrel in an almost sensual caress. Fitz hoped he knew enough about weapons not to accidently shoot himself. Or her.

  The big man crossed his arms and studied her. “You still haven’t explained why you’re up here running through Achatya Pass armed up like you were off to hunt raktavi. I doubt you’re off that burned-out Imperial transport. They don’t post female troops to this base…leastwise not ones they plan on keeping alive for long. My guess is you came out of that freighter. You must have been running supplies to the base and lost an engine, but that still doesn’t explain who destroyed that transport and killed all those troops. You?”

  Fitz fisted her hands on her hips and glared up at him.

  He returned her gaze, brows drawn down, then burst out laughing. “Yes, you just might have, but I’m still not letting you go into the Taiga tonight alone.”

  “The Imperials took a friend of mine and I want him back.” Fitz kept shifting her gaze as the young man moved further behind her.

  “Him?” the bearded man asked. “You’re lucky your friend wasn’t a woman. She’d be dead by now. Or worse. As it is, the Imperials aren’t in the habit of keeping any of their prisoners alive for long. It’s probably already too late for your friend.”

  “No, he’s alive,” Fitz snapped, but while her attention was distracted, the boy slipped in and pulled the slug thrower out of its holster. Fitz lunged for him, but he darted out of reach.

  “Be careful with that.”

  The boy didn’t react. Either he didn’t understand Scyran or he was simple-minded. Fitz was leaning toward the latter from the way his fingers toyed with the weapon. His full lips pulled back in a smile, showing teeth too white and straight for a resident of a pre-industrial world. His single eye gleaned in a cold emerald hue.

  Fitz turned back to the bearded man. “The way he’s playing with that, someone’s going to get killed. It’s not a toy.”

  He didn’t seem to hear her, but had his head cocked at his companion in speculation. Fitz turned back to find the slug thrower leveled at her chest.

  The voice was a soft contralto. “Amil Koenigsagg was undoubtedly the most talented gunsmith in the Empire. I asked him to craft a pair—and only a single pair—of these pistols. One is still in my possession, and the other I gave to a man who was very special to me. Tell me, how is it that you show up here with the weapon I gave my lover over fifty years ago?”

  Fitz realized her mistake. He wasn’t a young man—he wasn’t a man at all.

  She was Ari Ransahov.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Wolf swam up through the darkness toward consciousness, thoughts drifting past like clouds, insubstantial as he reached for them. Memories slid through his mental fingers. He couldn’t hold on to them, didn’t want to. Remembering would be too painful. Better to slide back into the primordial night and forget.

  No. The denial jolted through him like unseen lightning.

  He opened his eyes, found only darkness and reached for his night vision. No response. They’d pulled his spike. They who? Who’d disarmed him? The answer skittered away, eluding him as easily as his earlier thoughts. No sound reached him, only a low muttering inside his head. The symbiont whispered to him, only a half heard sound as it repaired and rebuilt his body. The entity that lived inside him felt slow and sluggish as if it too fought against the lethargy dulling his mind. He could almost pick out words, a cadence of language, as the organism sang to him.

  Icy air flowed over his skin, raising goose bumps on his flesh—all of his flesh. He was naked. Beneath him, the cold metal surface of an examination table sucked away what little warmth remained inside. He shivered. The cold and the smells hinted at either a med-center or hospital, but he couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there. The memory refused to come, hovering just beyond his grasp, taunting him.

  He willed his muscles to relax, stilling the tremors. A lock of hair lay across his eyelashes, tickling each time he blinked, but when he reached to brush it away, his arm wouldn’t move. He tried again, without effect. The old fear of helplessness washed over him, threatening to swamp his tenuous hold on reality. His hands clinched into fists. Not paralyzed then, but restrained. A thick strap rubbed against his wrists. He threw his weight against his bonds, discovering he was pinned down completely—arms, legs and torso—even a band across his forehead, immobilizing his skull. The edge of the restraints dug into his flesh, sawing through the skin and drawing blood.

  Images flashed across his mind. An angular monstrosity twisting in flames. Lights slashing through the darkness. And running, running, running. The pain in his wrist brought him back, blasting through the fog in his mind like a super nova. He ground the strap deeper into his flesh, welcoming the waves of pain rolling up his arm. Not enough. His teeth clamped down on his tongue until the copper taste of blood filled his mouth.

 
Pain brought memory. A woman’s face, battered and bloody, staring back at him, eyes filled with hopelessness. He’d failed her, like all the other people he couldn’t save. She’d died but he would go on forever with the memory of one more loved and lost face eating away at his soul.

  “Fitz.” He shouted the name, arching against the restraints.

  “Stop that. You’ll hurt yourself,” a voice said as the lights came on. A man wearing the white lab jacket of an Imperial med-tech entered and began rummaging through the drawers of a cabinet. He extracted a handful of wipes and began cleaning the wounds on Wolf’s wrist. “It doesn’t make any sense to tear yourself up. It’ll just heal right away. You’re only causing yourself pain.” The doctor finished cleaning the abrasions and tossed the soiled cloths in the recycler.

  The med-scanner mounted above Wolf was inactive, its glassine screen black and reflective. He glimpsed a pale and emaciated image glaring back at him. An IV infuser clamped around his right arm, dispensing a white fluid. Catheters snaked out of his body and data pick-ups clung to his chest like blood sucking insects. The line exiting the unit on his left arm flowed a dark red that pooled in a clear bag. They were bleeding him. That explained the symbiont’s ongoing low-level reaction. It replaced the blood as quickly as they drained it from him. As long as they supplied it with the nutrition it needed, the symbiont could keep that up forever. He shivered from more than the cold.

  The doctor cleaned the dried blood from his other, now unmarked wrist.

  “There was a woman with me,” Wolf said. “What happened to her?”

  The man’s dark eyes shied away from his. “If she was lucky, the Imperials killed her.”

  Wolf was suddenly back in a muddy field, on some forgotten planet, in the middle of the Tzraka War. He’d found the woman’s body, bloated with bug eggs, the larvae just beginning to eat their way out of her. The eyes that begged him for death were now silver-gray—Fitz’s eyes, in Fitz’s face.

  He slammed against his restraints and the medic cringed back, dropping the data pad he’d picked up.

  “You go tell your buddy Tritico that if anything has happened to Fitz, he’s a dead man. I don’t care how long it takes, but I will catch up with him and I’m going to rip his bloody spine out and shove it down his throat.”

  Indolent applause caused Wolf to shift his gaze to the door where Janos Tritico leaned against the frame.

  “Now that’s the old Wolfie I remember from our Academy days. Always ready and willing to kick someone’s ass. What happened to you? I liked you a lot better before you developed a conscience.” He leaned over Wolf, his predator’s smile sardonic.

  “What did you do with FitzWarren, Jan? You’ve got me. You don’t need her. Let her go.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that. I suspect she’s already become acquainted with my breeder by now.”

  “I’m going to kill you, Jan. Slowly. And I’m going to enjoy every bloody minute of it.”

  Tritico laughed. “I don’t think so. You see, you’re never going to get up off that table. We’ve discovered a way to kill the Lazzinair symbiont, haven’t we, doctor?”

  Von Drager looked up from changing out a full container of blood. He placed it in a small stasis case, watching Tritico with the eyes of an old dog that fears his master’s hand.

  “Destroy the symbiont and we die too,” Tritico said. “It’s become too much a part of our cellular structure. We can’t survive without it. Unfortunately, the rest of his research hasn’t progressed as quickly, but I suspect that will change now—with an unlimited source of material for his experiments. It must be quite helpful to a researcher to be able to dissect his subject only to have it all grow back, so that he can do it all over again tomorrow. And the next day. Your body will be the factory to produce the raw materials to create a new race of Lazzinairs, Lazzies who are loyal to only one person. Their creator. Me.”

  As the spy master strolled around the table, he trailed a finger along Wolf’s bare thigh and chuckled as his touch made the skin twitch. “I’ll admit I was quite surprised to see you here on Baldark. I thought I’d taken care of your threat when I ordered the destruction of your base at Ishtok. Blowing a Lazzinair to bits is an effective, if inelegant, way to eliminate the problem.”

  “Like you did Ari?”

  Tritico sighed. “It was unfortunate that she chose not to cooperate. It would have been interesting to learn if two Lazzinairs could produce a child who already carried the symbiont.”

  “I can see why she might have preferred death to screwing you,” Wolf said.

  Tritico backhanded him.

  Wolf rotated his jaw, tasting blood from a split lip. “It’s easy to hit a person who’s tied down, isn’t it, Jan? Have you got the balls to release me and have another go at this?”

  “I’m not that foolish.” Tritico laughed, turning to Von Drager. “Now that you have an unlimited supply of blood to experiment on, I expect results. I’m getting tired of your excuses and foot dragging. It appears our time table has been advanced, so I need these results immediately. Do you understand me?”

  “I still haven’t solved the problem with the high mortality rate.” The doctor refused to meet Tritico’s gaze.

  Wolf watched the exchange with interest. Jan frightened the doctor. Perhaps he could use that to his advantage.

  Tritico shrugged. “I don’t care how many die. There’ll always be another fool willing to bet his life on a possibility—however remote—of living forever. If you can supply me with the same success rate as the original experiment, I’ll be happy. And then you’ll get your chance at immortality. If you’ve got the balls to take the risk.”

  Tritico started to leave but paused at the door and turned back to Von Drager. “You keep him sedated. Don’t let him wake up like this again. I don’t think you understand how dangerous he can be. If you give him one infinitesimal opportunity, he will rip your head off so fast you’ll never see it coming. And then he’ll come looking for me, and that would make me very unhappy.”

  The doctor nodded as he adjusted the settings on the IV unit with shaking fingers. A cold numbness crept up Wolf’s arm. Gray fog formed at the corners of his vision and began to expand, narrowing his sight into a collapsing tunnel. Sounds muted as darkness rose around him. Von Drager leaned over him, eyes sad.

  “I’m sorry about this, Youngblood. I truly am.”

  “Ma’am, you’re still alive. When we followed the signal to that, uh…destroyed room, I thought…we, we thought…” Fitz’s stammers trailed off, her mouth as cottony as a first year cadet in the commandant’s office. She wasn’t surprised to see that, like Wolf, Ari Ransahov hadn’t aged. If anything, the woman appeared years younger than her official holo images.

  “We?” Ransahov asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Colonel Youngblood and I.”

  “Wolf? My Wolf?” Ransahov’s smoky voice rose an octave. She locked gazes with her companion, but the bearded man looked down, a patch of lichen on the rocky path seizing his attention. His teeth worried at the red-gold hair on his upper lip.

  “Where is he?” Ransahov demanded. “And who the hell are you?”

  Fitz braced to attention and snapped her most precise salute, her eyes focused at a point over the other’s shoulder. The disparity in their heights made it uncomfortable. She hadn’t realized Ransahov was so tall. “Commander Kimber FitzWarren, Triumvir Maksim Kiernan’s Shadow. Special Operations, Fleet HQ, attached to the AriR, ah, the Arianne Ransahov, ma’am.”

  “The what?” The woman arched her single brow.

  Had Wolf picked up that maddening gesture from her?

  “The Triumvir’s flagship, ma’am. The battleship named in your honor.”

  Surprise flickered across Ransahov’s face. “But that doesn’t explain why you have this weapon. Wolf wouldn’t have given it to you.”

>   “No, ma’am, I took it from the man who shot Wolf and then I killed him.”

  “You killed Wolf?” Ransahov stepped forward, towering over her, so close Fitz could feel the warmth of the other woman’s breath against her face.

  “Ma’am. No, ma’am,” Fitz sang out in her best parade ground voice. “I killed the man who shot Wolf.”

  “But Wolf, is he…?”

  “Dead? Oh, no, ma’am, of course not. He was only taken prisoner by those Imperial bastards.”

  “Commander, aren’t you one of ‘those Imperials bastards’?”

  “No. ma’am. I’m not with them.”

  “There’s something I’m missing here, Commander. Why would those soldiers take another Imperial officer prisoner?”

  “Wolf’s not active duty military any longer, ma’am. He’s a mercenary.”

  “Wolf would never be a mercenary. He hated mercs, said they were a pack of money hungry scavengers without a shred of honor.”

  “Nevertheless, that’s what he’s been doing since he left the Empire, ma’am, and he’s a damn good one.” Fitz glared at the bearded man, her jaw jutting forward. “And I am going to get him back.”

  “You know where the Imperial base is located?” A speculative look passed between Ransahov and her companion.

  “I pulled the black box from that transport we destroyed, and my ship’s computer located their base.” She raised her arm to display the handheld taped to her wrist. “I’m on my way there now, ma’am. If you could give me back my weapons…”

  “You’re not going anywhere tonight, Commander.” Ransahov pointed toward the valley where a layer of clouds the color of old iron streamed in from the north. The tops of the trees swayed and whispered in its gust front. “These spring snow storms are common on this side of the mountains. They blow up out of nowhere, and in a couple of hours, you’ll have white-out conditions. You won’t be able to see two meters in front of you. Alone, on foot and unfamiliar with the terrain, you won’t last the night. The only advantage is this storm will send the Tzrakas to ground.”