Ash refused to feel guilty for the way Mira’s shoulders sagged in defeat.
4
“Hey.”
Ash’s eyes snapped open at the whisper. Her hand shot to her Covar and her gaze shot to the doorway.
The kid who’d killed Harrion approached her thin mattress.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Mira left.”
She took her finger off the trigger and sat up. “With who?”
“She was alone.”
“You have her followed?” She secured her hair with a band, then stood. On his mattress against the opposite wall, Hauch reached for his boots. They were in a stripped-out generator closet that hadn’t lost the smell of soldered curuk and oil.
“I did,” the kid said.
“You had her followed, or you did the following?”
“Me. I followed her,” he said, all but thumping his chest. “She’s headed to the spaceport.”
Damn it, Mira.
Ash crammed her feet into her boots. “How long has she been gone?”
“Couple of hours.”
She wanted to shake the kid. “Next time you recon, you get a message to me immediately. Understood?”
“You’re lucky I didn’t go to Scius.”
Ash’s hand tightened at her side. She could almost feel the textured grip of her combat knife against her palm. A clear image popped into her head: her shoving the blade between the kid’s ribs like he’d shoved his between Harrion’s. She could do it before he lost that overconfident gleam in his eyes.
But she wouldn’t, and he was observant enough to know it. He’d seen her help Harrion and Nyla. He’d seen her stop Chace from shooting the other kids. The standard you-get-to-live line wouldn’t work.
Instead, she let her silence emphasize just how insignificant he was, how little he knew, how it might be a risk to underestimate an unknown dreg.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You’re her, aren’t you? You’re the Ash.”
Well, damn. Maybe not so unknown.
What had he heard though? He couldn’t have been a decade old when she’d left, and she’d been careful not to flaunt her schemes.
She kept the question from her face.
“I don’t know who you think the Ash is, but I’m someone you don’t want to cross.”
He stilled, and that measured look he’d had before he shoved Nyla returned. Ash doubted Harrion was the first person he’d killed. Hell, by his age, Ash had sent more than a few dregs to their graves. This kid was the standard level of lethal on Glory, and he was thinking about killing her.
“Where’s Chace?” she asked in an attempt to get him to focus on something that wouldn’t end up with him dead.
“I’m here,” Chace said, striding into the crowded room.
Suspicious timing. Had he been standing in the hall, waiting to see how this conversation ended?
“The tachyon capsule is in-system.” His gaze was too steady.
“You didn’t have someone watching her,” Ash said.
He lifted a shoulder. “She slipped away.”
Anger scraped across her skin. Chace had never been incompetent. If he had been, someone would have put a bullet in him a long time ago. No, this was something else.
“You want the shipment.” Her fists clenched. He could make good currency selling the medications.
“No. I want you.”
In the past, that might have been a sexual comment. It wasn’t one anymore. He wanted her to finish the scheme they’d started five years ago.
“Mira makes good bait,” he said. “If we—”
Ash slammed her palm into his nose.
He’d known the blow was coming, had tried to move out of the way, but she was quicker than she’d been before.
She darted in for what would have been an easy takedown if Hauch hadn’t slung his arms around her.
Chace planted his boot in her gut. The kick knocked the air from her lungs and sent her and Hauch backward. Hauch tripped on his mattress, lost balance, and crashed sideways into a stack of broken electronics.
Ash slipped free, dodged a second kick from Chace, then she punched his throat.
He jerked.
Gagged.
Fell to his knees.
She dropped down too, drawing her Covar and jamming the barrel under his chin.
Hauch called her name.
She waited for Chace to stop choking. When he did, she leaned forward. “Sure you want me to be the person I was before?”
That person would have blown his head off.
He swallowed, a movement that looked difficult, then said, “You changed before you left, Ash. Lot of us did.”
She dug the barrel in harder, forcing his head up and back as coughs wracked his body.
Hauch called her name again.
She should do it. Kill him. She should forget about Mira and focus on ensnaring Neilan Tahn. Getting to him was more important than anyone on Glory.
She felt herself backsliding again, becoming that heartless person who thought only of her own schemes and survival. If she left Mira to suffer her fate—if she took Chace down—she would be irredeemable.
“Look at me, Ashdyn.”
Something in Hauch’s voice made her shift her focus. He’d drawn his Covar, too, and had it pointed at her head.
She and Hauch hadn’t hit it off when Ash had been assigned to Gamma Team. They’d been tasked with guard duty on Meryk, an assignment that didn’t put to use any of their elite training. She thought they’d moved past that though.
“You hearing me?” It was a careful question.
Oh.
Chace didn’t know what she was, but Hauch did. He knew what anomalies were capable of doing, and he knew their history of snapping.
He also knew her mind had been screwed with by telepaths.
She supposed she couldn’t blame him for pulling his weapon on her. She doubted he’d shoot, but she released Chace anyway, then stared down at him. “You should get out of my sight.”
“Mira—” Chace choked, swallowed, then tried again. “Mira’s going to hijack the shipment. You can’t just walk in the front gate. I have a way in.”
Hauch holstered his weapon. “Why does she need to steal a shipment with her name on it?”
Chace snorted, braced a hand against the wall, then rose to his feet. “We were paying mercenaries to protect the deliveries, but the incoming credits stopped flowing for some mysterious reason.” He glanced at Ash. “Scius’s dregs took the last shipment. They’ll be there to take this one too.”
And they’d get Mira as a bonus. Scius would make an example out of her. He’d carve her into pieces and put her head on a stake to show everyone what happened to people who supported Ash.
“If we’re going to help her,” Hauch said, “we need to go.”
She met his gaze. Was he eager to help Mira? Or eager to get Ash to the spaceport and off the planet?
“We’ll need supplies,” Ash said to Chace.
“I’ll take care of it.” He used his shirt to wipe blood from his face. “Meet me outside the freighter in ten.”
When he left, Ash retrieved her combat belt from her mattress. She buckled it on, holstered her Covar, then patted the pocket on her right thigh. She had one booster left. The need to inject the chem wasn’t too severe yet—fortunately, because the moment she used it, she would have to make plans to return to the Fighting Corps. If Ash kept her head clear and her body in one piece, she wouldn’t need to inject it anytime soon.
Which was good. She didn’t know how long it would take to draw Tahn to Glory, and she had no intention of leaving before she tracked him down. Trevast, her murdered team lead, had spoken to the crime lord more than once. Tahn was her best lead to discover how deeply the telepaths had infiltrated the Coalition.
But Tahn wasn’t there yet. She had the time and ability to help Mira. Mira might not want that help, but Ash owed her. She wouldn’t let Scius
get his hands on her.
“Want to tell me what we’re up against?” Hauch asked.
Ash reached into a box shoved into a corner and grabbed a few ration bars. She tossed one to Hauch.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll brief you on the way.”
5
Ash crouched behind the southern satellite array and took the EMP disk Chace handed her. She peeked around the clunky box and visually measured the distance between her and the knockout fence. It reached high toward the brightening sky, separating Glory’s dregs from off-worlders and the very small population who had enough money to buy their way inside the gray-walled spaceport beyond it.
“Watch that guard tower,” she said to Hauch.
“I’m watching it,” he said, which was about all he could do with the pulse-pistol in his hand. They weren’t accurate at this range, and even if he hit his target, the pulse wouldn’t be strong enough to do much more than give the guard a good shock. Hauch had insisted on bringing the nonlethal weapons though. He wasn’t comfortable with killing someone who was just doing their job.
Ash had to remind herself that she wasn’t comfortable with it either. Fortunately, Hauch didn’t object to bringing their Covars as backup. If Scius’s dregs found Mira before Ash did, she’d kill the bastards, no hesitation.
Ash glanced at her comm-cuff one last time, hoping Mira had grown a brain and returned her message, but no new communications lit up the screen.
They were doing this.
She looked up at the tower again. Its soot-stained facade was the closest part of the huge, star-shaped spaceport. Each of the star’s five points contained a landing platform and terminal. This one, Terminal E, was, according to Chace, deserted aside from the two guards stationed in the tower. He’d made entry sound easy. He’d better be right.
She waited until both guards looked away, then she sprinted the distance to the knockout fence. Ten meters before she reached it, she launched the EMP disk. It hit and stuck to the metal latticework, then flashed with a blue spark that split into a thousand tiny fingers and exploded outward.
With perfect timing, Ash jumped. Her fingers hooked into the fence just after the sparks flickered out. It took only seconds to reach the top, swing over it, then drop to the ground on the other side.
Ash sprinted to the tower, then pressed her back to the wall beside the door. Power glitches were common on planets like Glory, but standard procedure would be to send someone down to check the perimeter.
Seconds ticked by. They turned into minutes. Ash didn’t move, but a tendril of uneasiness snaked up her spine. The spaceport’s guards would be underpaid and corrupt as hell, but surely their job performance wasn’t this bad.
She eyed the door handle. She had a breach disk, but it would be loud. The guards would call for help before—
The door opened. Ash shot the man before he stepped outside.
Profanity signaled a second guard. Ash darted inside, knocked the weapon from his hand, and shot him too.
He dropped with a loud thud.
She looked at both unconscious men. Neither one had been at the top of the tower. There were more than two guards stationed there.
Suppressing a curse, she sprinted up the spiral staircase. At the top, two men stood with their backs to her, scanning the knockout fence with sight magnifiers.
Ash’s pulse-pistol hadn’t recharged enough to drop another person so soon. She swung it into the back of the nearest guard’s head. He went limp just as the man next to him turned.
Ash slammed the pistol into his face. He stumbled backward, still conscious, and tried to draw his weapon.
Ash hook-punched his jaw. He fell unmoving on top of his companion.
After a signal to Hauch and Chace, Ash quick-tied both guards, then moved to the security console. Someone had triggered the power reboot. Ash interrupted the command, pulled up the source code, then rearranged the startup sequence. Security cameras would stay down for another three minutes.
By the time she ran back down the steps, Hauch and Chace were inside.
“Just two guards?” she said.
“It’s usually two guards,” he said, giving her an assessing look. “You move fast.”
She’d always been quick, but now she had training, experience, and a body amped by the anomaly program’s booster chem.
She let his bad intel go and helped him and Hauch secure the first two guards she’d dropped.
Hauch moved to the door at the tower’s base and placed a breach disk over the internal locking mechanism.
“Boom in three,” he called, sidestepping two paces.
Three seconds passed and the charge detonated, blowing a perfectly round circle the size of a fist into the door.
Hauch yanked it open and Ash swung inside, recharged pulse-pistol raised.
“Clear,” she said, scanning the long corridor.
They jogged down the dark hall, passing trash bins and dead floor scrapers, until they reached a broken door. It hung from one hinge, bent in the middle despite being made from recycled ship hulls.
The musty smell of mildew tickled her nose when she stepped past it and into the terminal. Gray fungus clung to cracks between floor tiles and crawled up graffitied walls and empty kiosks. Half the frosted windows in the arched ceiling were broken. Sunlight filtered through the jagged openings, casting shadows over ripped chairs and couches.
Glass crunched underfoot as Ash led the way across the deserted terminal. A minute, maybe two, and they’d be outside where they could join the mob of Gloridians and off-worlders.
When they reached the opposite end, Hauch muttered, “This is too easy.”
Ash didn’t like it either. In her experience, the smoother an op went, the bigger it blew up in your face.
“You thinking ambush in the marketplace or at the platform?”
“The platform will be more isolated,” Hauch said.
“Yeah,” Chace agreed, “but Scius loves human shields.” He used the sleeve of his longcoat to clean the dust off a small section of a window.
“He’d provoke the oligarchs if he disrupts ’port operations,” Ash said.
“Scius doesn’t give a damn about the oligarchs.”
She paused with her hand on the door. Glory’s bosses had been accruing power for decades, but they tended to leave the planet’s government buildings and spaceports alone, giving the oligarchs the illusion that they ran things. If the bosses started to inconvenience the oligarchs though, the oligarchs could, theoretically, call in Coalition support. They hadn’t yet because they profited from the corrupt balance of power.
“Let’s hope today isn’t the day he chooses to piss them off then.” She opened the door.
All thoughts of Scius and the oligarchs fled when the stench hit her. The alley reeked of sewer and toxic waste oils. When Chace had said this part of the terminal wouldn’t be guarded, she’d had her doubts. Now she understood why no one watched the alley.
She breathed through her mouth, walking quickly, eager to escape the nauseating fumes. When she spotted the crowded market, she tucked her pulse-pistol into a holster beneath her longcoat. Hopefully, the stench wouldn’t stick to them. They needed to blend in with the crowd, not have the crowd shun them.
She pretended to be engrossed in one of the huge displays that hung over an entrance to another ’port terminal. It made it plausible that she’d wandered away from the swarm of people. She rejoined them casually, her gaze still locked on the screen. The market wasn’t usually packed like O2 tanks into a too-small freighter, but the minute people spotted the tachyon capsule’s huge, ugly oval in the sky, they flocked to the spaceport. Merchants fought for the best spots in the rows of kiosks that combed through the market’s center.
Ash was about to change her route and cut down an aisle when the giant display switched to the latest interstellar news download.
The picture flickered several times, a side effect of outdated tech trying to swallow the gargantuan am
ount of data the capsule force-fed the planet. When the picture finally settled, Javery filled the screen.
The view zoomed out, showing the planet and its moons and the Saricean warships strategically distributed through the star system.
Ash’s chest felt like it was filled with bruidium. She pried her gaze away, but she couldn’t refocus her mind. There were more Saricean ships than there had been in the last update. The Sariceans were after Javery’s thrysite, a rare mineral they used to build their new tachyon drive. The technology allowed individual ships to travel via time-bend, and it was the reason Jevan Valt had intercepted her team’s shuttle, murdered her brothers, and left her kneeling in five expanding pools of blood, telepathically silenced.
And the bastard was still alive, sitting in a prison on Caruth.
A woman stopped in front of her, and a man veered abruptly out of her way. Others glanced at her face, then found other things to look at.
She filled her lungs with air, slowly let it out, and erased the tear-down-the-universe expression from her face. She couldn’t strangle Valt right now, and she couldn’t do anything to help Rykus or his home world, not until she met with Neilan Tahn.
Besides, her fail-safe was the hero of Gaeles Minor. His father was Javery’s Grand General. They knew what they were doing, and if the Sariceans tried anything, they would send the enemy straight to hell.
“Take a left,” Chace said, sliding through the crowd to walk beside her. Hauch strode on her other side, scowling up at the billboard.
Ash had neutralized her expression, so she received fewer sidelong looks, but now eyes followed Hauch instead. He towered over nearly every other person in the market.
“Seeker’s God, Hauch, slouch or something,” she said.
He frowned. “You want to find Mira, don’t you?”
“I want to find her without painting a big fat target on us. Blend in.”
The frown turned into a glare. He rolled his shoulders forward and bent at the waist.
Chace cursed beside her, and Ash stared.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
Shades of Allegiance Page 4