“How’s that?” Mo asked her.
“A handful of these worlds—I’ve visited them, as well. Esa and I both, in our official capacity. Esa, here: Nellioc—”
“That sucking waste of time? The swamp world, with the . . . the . . . the leech things, the horrible leech things? Where we found—”
“Where we found absolutely nothing.” Jane nodded. “No sign of the next-generation child our intelligence said was supposed to be there. Some of these others, I’ve heard them mentioned in briefings, from Criat. They’re all false positives.”
“Because he got there first,” Sho said quietly. “Because he had already found your ‘next-generation’ child. And taken them.”
“How far back do they go?” I asked. “How long has he been . . .”
“Doing the same thing we have?” Jane asked, something brittle in her voice. “Tracking gifted children, pulling them off their homeworlds? Quite a while. Here.” She reached across the Preacher, tapped her own set of commands in, focusing on one world in the Cyn’s timeline, several years back, a world I recognized immediately when she pulled it up on the screen.
“My home,” I said, my breath catching in my chest just a little bit.
Jane nodded. “He visited less than a month after I took you away.”
“I hope he had fun, fighting his way through the Pax occupation.” I couldn’t help it; my voice was a little sour. There was something awful about the idea of the Cyn and the Pax killing each other off, each trying to kidnap me.
“Wait—let me see that.” The Preacher shouldered Jane aside again, her fingers dancing over the keyboard; Jane gave her a sour look, but let her do her thing. Dates and worlds spun past on the screen—whatever the Preacher was looking for, it was way, way back.
“No.” And apparently she’d found it, and didn’t much like what she’d found.
“Katya? I’ve never even heard of that system,” Jane said, looking at the corner of the galaxy map the Preacher had pulled up. “I mean—there’s nothing there. A handful of gas giants, no habitable worlds, not even—”
“There was something there—once,” the Preacher said, bitter. “A station, a research station, hidden in the upper atmosphere of one of the planets. Hidden, where no one could find it. The research station I used to run. Look at the time stamp.” She pointed; seventeen years ago, almost to the day.
Seventeen years ago. A station the Preacher had operated from.
No. No.
Everyone at the table was staring at me; even Mohammed and Sho, who didn’t understand the implications of the text glowing on the screen. Such a little thing—just a string of numbers—to mean so much. To carry so much weight. “Esa,” Jane said slowly. “Calm down.”
I looked at her with wild eyes, my jaw clenched tight, my knuckles white as my hands gripped the table. I didn’t remember standing. I also didn’t remember levitating every single object in the room that someone wasn’t currently sitting on, but I’d done that, too. My powers got tricky when I got upset.
“Is that the place, Preacher?” I asked, trying to force my voice to be calm, trying to force myself to be calm, missing by miles.
“Esa, you shouldn’t—”
“Is that the system where I was born?”
The Preacher nodded, once.
I dropped the furniture with a crash. Looked slowly at Sho, a dawning feeling of horror sinking into my gut like a stone. “I don’t think this is about you, Sho,” I told him. “I don’t think it’s about you at all.”
For a moment, no one spoke; no one was even willing to look at each other. We just stared at the table, or the walls, trying to process . . . this. “It is the first entry,” Mo said finally, bending over another machine, following the map further back—but there was nothing. “The records go no further. There may be more information to be had once we can translate the language, but this particular . . . mission, this crusade he’s on, whatever it was that made him start hunting the gifted—it started there. On Katya.” With me.
“Okay. All right.” It took a great deal to rattle the Preacher. This was a great deal. “Jane—here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll bundle Esa and Sho onto Scheherazade; you’ll have to give over control of her systems to Esa—”
“She won’t have to give over a damn thing,” Schaz put in on the comms; now that she was aboveground, she was free to listen in to our conversations again. “I’ll be happy to take Esa and Sho wherever they need to go. Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, Preacher.”
“We don’t have time for your nonsense, ship,” the Preacher snapped. “Scheherazade will take Esa and Sho back to Sanctum; Jane, you and I will take Shell to Valkyrie Rock.” “Shell” was what the Preacher called her ship; the name—such as it was—came from the fact that unlike the rest of the Justified, the Preacher hadn’t let our engineers install an AI into her craft. She operated it herself, plugging her intelligence directly into its network of operating systems. For all intents and purposes, when Shell was in motion and the Preacher was on board, the Preacher was Shell, and vice versa. “Between the two of us, we can . . . learn what this thing wanted with the children. What he started on Katya.” She hadn’t even mentioned that the Cyn might be carrying a solution to the pulse—this new information was enough to make even the Barious disregard what he might represent.
Seventeen years hunting gifted children. Seventeen years of the chaos he’d sown on Kandriad, of the Vyriat girl, dead in her cage on his ship. And it had started with me.
“Bad idea.” Mo shook his head.
“It’s the only idea,” the Preacher responded hotly.
“Then find another one.” Mo reached out and tapped—hard—against the Preacher’s carapace. She took a step back, stunned: I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched her like that.
“Right there.” Mo nodded at the place where he’d rapped his knuckles against the Preacher’s metal skin. “Right below there, in point of fact.”
“My power system? What the hell does that—”
“Your power system, fueled by kinetic motion and tiny solar reflectors dotting your skin, stored in a fusion battery inside of your chest.”
“Oh, fuck.” Jane was staring at the Preacher’s chest now as well.
“So?” The Preacher glared at them both. “That’s how Barious operate; I don’t understand what it—”
“You cannot be anywhere near this threat, Preacher,” Mo said forcefully. “The Cyn manipulates energy. He does it from afar, and no shielding can stop him; we’ve seen this, on the vids Jane brought us from Kandriad, and Valkyrie Rock. If he wants to reach into your chest and turn you into a bomb, he will do that thing, and you will be powerless to stop it.”
The Preacher stared at him for a moment, in mute shock; she’d clearly never thought of her machine nature as a liability before. At this moment, it was. The energy that flowed through organic beings was probably too diffuse for the Cyn to manipulate—if it wasn’t, surely he would have done so by now, or at least we would have heard stories from the few legends that survived of the Cyn who had populated the Golden Age—but actual electricity ran through the wiring that made up the Preacher’s veins. If the Cyn wanted to rip that energy straight from her body and feed it back into the battery into her chest until she went up in a miniature version of the blast that had consumed the factory city on Sho’s homeworld, he could, and there would be nothing she could do to stop him.
“You must return to Sanctum,” Mo said again. “Other Justified forces may well be on their way to the rally point around Valkyrie Rock shortly—you can tell them of what we have learned when you cross their path, make sure there are no Barious among their number, but you yourself must get as far from this . . . thing . . . as possible. And you must take Sho with you.” He looked at the young Wulf. “I believe Jane promised him new legs. It’s time someone kept that promise.”
“And Esa,” the Preacher said mechanically. “If this thing is . . . focused on h
er, somehow, none of us should be in the team that tries to subdue the Cyn. We should all head back to Sanctum—”
“Not me,” Mo shook his head. “I’m staying here.”
“If the assault on Valkyrie Rock goes poorly, and the Cyn gets off—he knows what trajectory we took from that system,” Jane said to Mo. “He can track us here. You shouldn’t risk that, Mo.”
“This world is where my search has taken me, and this world is where I shall stay.”
“Don’t be an idiot; that’s—”
“All I can be is as God made me.”
“Yeah, which is apparently an idiot. You were the one who told us what this thing was capable of, and now you—”
“I’m going,” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard, so I shouted the next sentence: “I’m going to Katya. Preacher, you take Sho back to Sanctum. Jane, if you want to go with them, I’ll take Scheherazade on alone, if I have to.”
Jane shook her head. “That’s not an—”
I’m done waiting around,” I snapped back. “I’m done sitting on my hands, just as much a captive here as the Cyn is on that fucking asteroid. I’m going to find out what this . . . this asshole learned there, what it was that made him start all this: I’m going to find out why he was there three months after my birth. The rest of you can do whatever the hell you like.”
“Don’t be a fool, Esa,” the Preacher snapped. “If you truly want to revisit that . . . place . . . wait and do so from a position of strength, not when—”
Sho: “If Esa needs my help, then I will go as well. I will not abandon my sister. Not when she needs me the most.”
That hit me; I hadn’t expected it. A few tears ran down my face before I could stop them. “Sho, you can’t,” I told him, kneeling beside his chair. “God, I love you for offering, but you just can’t. You should go back to Sanctum, get your legs fixed up—”
“And who will channel energy into your telekinesis?” he asked simply. “If the Cyn escapes Valkyrie Rock somehow, or if there are more of his kind, claiming that station: energy is all he has feared, all that has worked to even slow him down. If it comes to a fight, you’ll need—”
Whatever he might have said next was interrupted as alarms started blaring from Mo’s cobbled systems, loud enough to drown out everything else; the same “vessel on approach” alert we’d heard when Shell had been making her entrance into the atmosphere.
More Justified? Not the force from Sanctum, perhaps, but if Marus or Javier or another operative had been close enough to get our message—and done the same thing the Preacher had, ignored the directive to mass outside of the nebula surrounding Valkyrie Rock and traced the signal back to its source again—maybe that would explain the alarm. If we were lucky.
I only had time to put that thought together in my head, though, before another one of Mo’s screens turned bright red, and suddenly my attention was drawn to motion, not on the monitors at all, but out the open doorway instead—a line of fire, streaking down through the lavender sky, pieces splintering off as it crossed in front of the twisting planetary rings: an object falling from orbit, disintegrating as it broke apart on reentry.
Someone had just shot down one of the war satellites. More were falling, even as we watched. I’d thought it would have taken a dreadnaught to break through that defense network, but we’d be able to see a dreadnaught hanging in orbit: this wasn’t that. All the same, though, it was an assault—more satellites were falling, streaking the sky with bright plumes of fire.
Whoever was coming, it wasn’t the Justified.
CHAPTER 15
Jane was the first to speak, the first to wrench her attention from the impossible sight of the war satellites crashing down, the Jaliad defenses—defenses that had protected this world for centuries—being torn down, one by one. “We need to go,” she said. “We need to go now.”
Sho tried to object. “We don’t even know that it’s him, we don’t know—he was trapped, we don’t—”
“Of course it’s him, of fucking course it is,” Jane snapped. “After everything else that’s happened . . .” She just shook her head. “Preacher, take Sho. Get to Shell. Esa and I will take Mo and get to Scheherazade—”
“I am going with Esa,” Sho put in again.
“Actually—no. you’re not.” The Preacher wasn’t one to mince words. She just leaned over and pulled Sho out of his chair, throwing the struggling Wulf into a fireman’s carry and making it look easy in the process; it was tempting to forget how much strength there was in her slim metal frame.
“Dammit, no!” Sho shouted, beating at the Barious with his fists.
“Sho—it’s all right,” I told him, reaching out to still his hands. “Go to Sanctum; that’s where you belong. I’ll see you again.”
“You promise me?” There was something very much like despair in his voice, the fur on his cheeks streaked with tears.
“I promise you.” I didn’t even hesitate. Jane always said that she wouldn’t make promises she wasn’t sure she could keep. I would. I fully intended to keep this one, and if I couldn’t—that would be the Cyn’s fault, not mine.
Then they were gone, the Preacher vanishing in a blur of metal limbs, moving as fast as she possibly could—which was damned fast.
Meanwhile, Mo—for no apparent reason—was ripping up floorboards. “Those satellites have defended my refuge here for decades,” he said, sounding more annoyed than anything else, his voice still relatively calm for a man tearing apart a priceless luxury villa, about to be threatened by a being from legend. “How is he bringing them down with one ship?”
“How the hell does he do anything?” Jane answered, checking the action on her rifle. “How did he get off the Rock, how was he tracking gifted children?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter—not right now. He doesn’t have to bring down all the war satellites—as soon as he’s cleared an approach path, he’ll be on his way to us: he tracked our trajectory here from scans on Valkyrie Rock, just like we tracked him from Kandriad, and he’ll be able to track the broadcast signal to the tower, same as he used our comms to track us on the Rock. We need to—”
Except he wasn’t on his way; not anymore. The villa shook as a craft flew overhead, its passage close enough to be felt in the boards underneath our feet. Whoever was coming to visit—and we all knew who it likely was—they were already here.
Mo finished ripping up the floor, and reached deep into the recess he’d uncovered, pulling a weapon out from the hidden stockpile inside. Not the antique ballistic hunting rifle he’d been using to bring down our meals every day—that one was still leaning against the wall—but instead a massive gauss rifle, bigger than any I’d ever seen, so big I doubted Jane could have even lifted it. Maybe not even the Preacher—the damned thing looked like it should have been mounted on a shuttlecraft rather than used as an infantry weapon.
“Go,” he said to us, getting up off his knees and setting the weapon on his shoulder like it weighed nothing. “I’ll greet our guest.”
“Mohammed, god damn it—” Jane followed him out to the deck overlooking the ocean. I did the same.
It was the Cyn’s ship that was hovering over the beach, maybe half a mile away. How was that possible? I’d set off a bomb in its fusion core. Even if whatever strange material the ship itself had been made of had been able to shrug off the damage from the blast, the drive should have been left in tatters. There was no way he’d been able to fix it. No way.
Except there was pretty compelling evidence that he had, in the form of the ship, battered but flying, just hovering in silence perhaps a half mile down the beach. He’d had nothing but time on Valkyrie Rock, time and material both; I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised he’d managed to break out of the prison we’d left him in.
I shouldn’t have been surprised he was capable of anything.
“You need to go, Jane,” Mo said, already setting up his rifle, laying the barrel across the railing of the deck. “You need to
go now. If you wait around, he’ll stop you from reaching Scheherazade. Go get to your ship and get out of here.”
“We’re not leaving you behind, Mo. That’s not an option.”
“Fine. Then come back and get me. But do it with a ship capable of burying that creature in laser fire. He’ll have to disembark if he wants to search the villa; I’ll keep him pinned on the beach long enough for you to get to Schaz.”
Jane’s jaw snapped shut on whatever objection she was about to make; that was actually a pretty decent plan. It had worked once, back on Kandriad, after the nuclear blast—it could work again.
Down the beach, motion: a hatch had opened, and the Cyn emerged from his ship, back in his suit of metal, his wings spread wide, his thrusters firing, keeping him airborne for a moment. Then the thrusters cut, and he dropped to the sand below, the razor-pinioned wings folding in behind his back. And then he started walking.
Not running. Not flying. Just . . . walking. Down the beach. As though he knew we were watching.
Mo tapped something under his jaw, some ancient implant; when he spoke again, his words boomed out over the surf as though he were speaking through a loudspeaker. “Hey,” he said to the distant creature. “Go find a different beach. This one’s mine.” Not giving anything away—not letting the Cyn know that Jane and I were here. He might as well have been some vagrant, squatting in the abandoned villa, just warning off another vagrant from encroaching on his turf.
The Cyn didn’t play along. “Twice now, you have interfered with my hunts.” Once again, the voice came through our comms—he could sense the Justified encryption active on the channel’s frequency, didn’t buy Mo’s facade for a moment. “You will not be allowed to do so a third time. I have received . . . new orders. A new . . . communion.”
New orders? So he did answer to someone else—there was some sort of command structure in place, a threat we knew nothing about. But how would he have reached out to them, how—
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