Exile's Throne

by Rhonda Mason

  Kendrik approached as well. Lopez’s chant grew in volume.

  “She is not meaning what she says.”

  “Yes I am. Yes I am!” Lopez shouted.

  Kendrik pulled Lopez aside, speaking in a low voice to her. It took some time, but eventually Lopez calmed down. She shot them one last look, suspicious this time, and then marched to the back of the room to resume her pacing.

  “Who is doing this to you?” Kayla asked the officer.

  Kendrik sighed. “It not being clear to me. I have a remembrance of time before, we were not in this room always.” She looked around at the closely stacked bunk rows. “I had a cabin to my own. A command of my own.”

  “What happened?”

  If she remembered, and it wasn’t clear that she did, Kendrik wouldn’t say. “You must needs talk to First Officer Zimmerman.”

  “Wait,” Malkor said, “isn’t Benny’s last name Strokar?”

  “Benny isn’t actually Ida’s first officer,” Vayne replied. “Though he seems to act in that capacity now.”

  Kendrik nodded. “Zimmerman is First Officer, the only one who opposes the captain when it is becoming necessary.”

  “The First Officer is out of cryosleep?” Kayla asked. “You’re certain?” She felt a little breathless—they might finally be getting somewhere on the stepa threat.

  “Zim had control of my awakening, and I am here.” She nodded at her own words. “I have spoken with him in this now time. It is to him that you should speak as well.” With that she walked back to bed, lethargy showing in each dragging step.

  “We can’t just leave them here,” Vayne insisted.

  “I don’t think they’ll come willingly,” Tia’tan replied. “Not if Kendrik orders them to stay. And we’re not exactly equipped to drag off four unwilling hostages and two comatose people.”

  Toble seemed torn as well. “It kills me to leave their wounds untreated, to let them knowingly continue to ingest those drugs.”

  “If we want to help them,” Kayla said, “we need to find Zimmerman.” Wherever the frutt he was… “And hope that he’s still sane.”

  * * *

  It was far too early the next morning when Kayla stood in the shuttle bay watching Rigger and Malkor get suited up in EMUs. Ariel was huffing and puffing from inside the shuttle, doing her preflight checks and grumbling about the imperials not being ready yet.

  “She really is kind of a bitch, huh?” Kayla said to Vayne, who had come to the shuttle bay, not to support the agents, but to support her.

  He chuckled. “Ida likes to say, ‘grumpy is her lot.’”

  “Then she’s sugar-coating it.”

  “After this much time in Ariel’s company, I agree with you.”

  They waited in silence as Ariel grumbled and Malkor and Rigger donned the multiple layers of suit necessary for a spacewalk from the shuttle into the Tear.

  Kayla couldn’t stop the misgivings from running through her mind. Malkor would be half a galaxy away from her, out of any range of help she could give. He’d be at risk undercover, and likely considered an enemy by either side. The rebels wouldn’t be any help if they were found out. Wetham still hadn’t forwarded any concrete plan for the extraction of the scientists, and Malkor would be without the backup of the rest of the octet.

  “Damnit,” she muttered.

  “You worry for him.”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t think he can complete the mission?”

  Kayla cut Vayne an irritated glance. “I worry about you: does that make you incompetent?”

  “You’re my ro’haar, it’s different.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not.” She turned to face him, meeting his brilliant gaze. “This has nothing to do with Malkor’s abilities. The worry is for myself, for the pain I know I will feel if something happens to him. I worry because a piece of my heart will die if I lose him, the same as it would if something happened to you.”

  She continued, even though Vayne looked away. “Malkor is one of the most capable people I have ever met. There isn’t a mission I would hesitate to send him on—as long as psi powers weren’t necessary for its success.”

  Vayne turned back to her. “That’s my point. In our world, Kay, he’ll always be a ‘less than.’”

  How dare he call Malkor a ‘less than!’ “I don’t have my powers. Am I ‘less than,’ too?” she asked, the question a verbal snapping of teeth.

  “That’s only temporary—”

  “Five. Full. Years.”

  “It’s temporary,” he stressed. “Now that you’re back among your own kind, you’ll find your powers again.”

  She let that go for the moment. She had the same hope, but was afraid to jinx things by saying it out loud. Across the room, Hekkar and Malkor were conferring, since Hekkar would be in charge of the remaining octet members in Malkor’s absence.

  “The only reason we have a shot at rescuing the hyperstream drive specialists from captivity is because of Malkor and Rigger. You or I could slap on a hologram and look like an imperial, but Malkor can act like an imperial. He doesn’t need a translator bot to understand orders: he can actually read Imperial Common. He knows about life in the imperial army, frutt, he knows idiosyncrasies we couldn’t begin to guess at.”

  Vayne crossed his arms over his chest. “Wetham said we have rebels embedded in the imperial strongholds who can do the same.”

  “Not as well, I assure you. Besides, those rebels have established imperial cover identities. They can’t ditch all that hard work and disappear from the role they’ve been playing. We need those rebels where they are.”

  He didn’t argue that point, instead turning a stony glare toward Malkor.

  “Vayne, you need to stop underestimating him. I trust him, and every member of the octet, with my life.” She willed him to listen. “With Corinth’s life.”

  “But not with my life?”

  She opened her mouth. Closed it.

  He leaned in. “Exactly.”

  “That’s not fair.” Damn him. How could she trust Vayne’s life to anyone but herself, when she’d only just recently gotten him back? “It’s different, you’re my il’haar.”

  He indicated Malkor with a lift of his chin. “And what is he to you?”

  How to answer that? She loved Malkor, wanted a future with him, but what would that future look like? She thought of their time together, all they’d done since he’d found her on Altair Tri, and answered the only way she knew how. “He’s my partner.”

  “ Ro’haar and il’haar don’t have ‘partners,’” Vayne said in disgust. “They might each take a lover, they might have friends, but they don’t have ‘romantic partners.’”

  She hated him for being right. Neither member of the twin bond felt the need to form a lasting partnership with anyone outside of it. They had family, friends, and might take a lover to satisfy those urges, but they didn’t “fall in love,” they didn’t have children unless they were the head of the family and needed heirs. Even then the il’haar chose the mother of the children by psionic pedigree, not desire.

  Nothing superseded the ro’haar–il’haar bond.

  “Exactly,” Vayne said again. Kayla felt like kicking him in the shin.

  Malkor had finished speaking with Hekkar, she realized. He must have known she and Vayne were arguing and hung back, not wanting to come between them. She could tell from his expression, guarded though it was, that he was less than pleased with Vayne at the moment.

  Great.

  Was this what her future looked like? By trying to hold on to both of them, would she be stuck in an unsatisfactory relationship with each?

  “It’s too early in the morning for this shit,” she told Vayne, and went to say goodbye to Malkor and Rigger.

  13

  “You’re grinding your teeth, boss.”

  Rigger’s voice rose above the roar of the shuttle’s engine and snapped Malkor out of his thoughts.

  “He’s kin
d of an ass, huh?” Rigger continued. Malkor didn’t have to ask who she meant. “I mean, I know he’s been through an unbelievable nightmare and I should be sympathetic no matter what he does, but…” She shrugged the shoulders of her EMU. “He’s putting the screws to Kayla every time I see him.”

  “He doesn’t mean to,” Malkor said, but it still pissed him off to see Vayne upsetting Kayla once again this morning. She never got mad at Vayne for anything the man did. She only got defensive, and that meant he had said something to make her doubt her worthiness as a ro’haar.

  Which made Malkor feel like punching something.

  “Grinding,” Rigger pointed out again.

  “So helpful.”

  She grinned. “I try. Here, pop your helmet on. We’re almost to the Tear and I don’t trust Ariel to warn us before she opens the doors.”

  “Do you know,” Malkor said over comms, once they had both sealed their helmets. “The sad truth is the Wyrds on the ship like us a whole lot more than anyone on Ordoch is going to.”

  “Just another beautiful day in the life of us IDC agents.”

  Malkor chuckled. “I guess we never were that popular back home, either, were we?”

  “Speak for yourself. Gio was practically a superstar.”

  Mention of one of the two octet members who had stayed behind on Falanar brought the mood crashing down. They rode the rest of the way in silence, until it was time to jump out of the shuttle and soar through the Tear.

  The breath caught in his chest as he floated, untethered, toward the anomaly. The Tear had no depth dimension, and its pulsing light made it hard to gauge its exact shape, so an image of him zooming right past and into the Mine Field to become a snack for the rooks filled his mind. He thought he heard Rigger praying to Falanar’s three Divines, and then they were through.

  At first everything was black. For a disorienting second he thought he’d slipped between realities or something, riding the Tear’s time-space anomaly straight into no-man’s-land.

  Then his helmet’s UV filter transitioned from shielding out the impossibly bright light from the Tear to managing the weak industrial lighting inside the cave. Rigger stood to his left, looking as dazed as he felt.

  She popped her helmet off. “I think we survived that insanity?”

  “You did indeed.” The quiet male voice surprised them both, not least because it spoke Imperial Common. A diminutive Ordochian stepped out of the shadows at the mouth of the cave. He was slender and almost feminine by imperial gender reckoning, his age somewhere between that of Corinth and Vayne. “Welcome to Ordoch, agents.”

  This must be Mishe. “You speak Common?”

  “I spend a great deal of time among your people,” Mishe replied, unsmiling. His face showed neither welcome nor censure. It was a perfect mask of politeness, but Malkor had the feeling that if he and Rigger tried to walk back through the Tear with their helmets off, Mishe wouldn’t lift a finger to stop them. “Come, let me show you where you can change before meeting with Wetham.”

  Mishe started out of the cave without waiting. As she passed Malkor, Rigger murmured, “Told you I was popular.”

  They left the bulky EMUs in the cavern, grabbed their rucksacks, and followed after Mishe. Malkor had a sense, as he left the Tear behind, that he walked away from his last chance of ever seeing Kayla again.

  At least he could finally make Vayne happy, he thought sarcastically.

  Sometime later, Mishe left them cooling their heels, waiting for an audience with Wetham in a room that looked suspiciously like an emptied supply closet.

  “Is Hekkar going to keep you apprised of the situation with the new stepa Tia’tan found yesterday?” Rigger asked. She was sitting on the floor, digging through the electronic equipment she’d brought with her.

  “He’s agreed to send messages through the Tear to this base.” Malkor leaned against the bare shelves on one wall. “But I doubt we’ll be in contact with the base once we go undercover.”

  “True.” She had a datapad on each knee and was typing on both, one hand on each. “The good thing about this terrible plan is that at least I get to play with imperial tech again.” She didn’t look up from her fiddling as she spoke. “I feel next to useless on the Yari.”

  “We all do. And hey, you’re not useless—you carry boxes like a champ.”

  This time she did look up, and her irrepressible grin was back in place. “Yeah, but not with my miiiind.” She wiggled her fingers like a magician.

  Malkor groaned. “You and your awful sense of humor should be right at home where we’re going.”

  Not that he knew where that was, precisely. Or even generally. He’d had to argue against his own better judgement—not to mention with Kayla and Hekkar—to accept the assignment without knowing the details first.

  It was worth the risk. He agreed with Natali and Kayla’s assessment that in order to have the leverage to force the empire to the negotiating table, they needed to have the Yari and its superior weaponry in orbit around Ordoch. If sneaking three scientists off the planet was the only way to accomplish that, then Malkor would sneak three scientists out from under his fellow imperials’ noses.

  A knock sounded, and then an aide appeared in the doorway. She informed them immediately, “I don’t speak your language,” in a tone that would wither spring grass, and escorted them to Wetham’s private study without another word. Well, apparently it used to be a storeroom, judging by the crates stacked in one corner still, but it now served as a study.

  Wetham stood as they were announced. “Thank you for coming,” he said in unaccented Imperial Common. “We appreciate your help.”

  “Of course.” Malkor and Rigger seated themselves in two straight-backed chairs that had clearly been set out for them. They looked uncomfortable, and stood apart from the other chairs placed around the large table off to one side—definitely chairs for unwanted imperial “guests.”

  Wetham reseated himself at the head of the table and introduced two of his lieutenants. “Ygreda, my spymaster”—the woman with a headful of blue curls inclined her head—“and Aarush, my tactical genius.” The tactical genius looked half dead. Bandages covered a portion of his face, wrapped tight around his head and spiraled over both arms and down his hands.

  Malkor gave a seated bow to both rebels. “We are grateful to be able to help.”

  Aarush glared at him with one baleful eye. Malkor sensed that Ygreda was no more impressed by them, but she hid it better.

  “I mean no insult,” Malkor said, “but before we begin, who else here speaks Imperial Common?” He had no problem understanding them, but he wasn’t sure about the reverse.

  Both lieutenants raised their hand.

  “Your kind have been here for five years, after all.” And just like that, Aarush made him feel like a jackass for not learning Ordochian.

  “That makes things easier,” he said instead. “How many others in the base speak it? In the rebellion?”

  Wetham answered. “Not many. Our spies of course, I and my lieutenants, and only a handful more. It’s not exactly popular.”

  “A bit like choking,” Ygreda added. “Crossed with hacking and a little barking.”

  Rigger gave her a sweet smile. “So we’ve been told.”

  Starting a meeting with insults seemed to be the Ordochians’ style, at least around them. Malkor shrugged off his irritation and got down to business. “Tell us about your plans to free the scientists.”

  Aarush, after another second with the one-eyed stare, turned his attention to the map spread out across the table. “Your target will be Mesa. She’s a prisoner at the detainment structure inside Vankir proper itself.”

  “Here? She’s in the capital city?” Not entirely surprising. The empire would have made Vankir their main foothold on Ordoch, and Kayla had said the imperials—well, the other imperials—considered Mesa a top resource. She’d be held in their most secure location.

  “We’re a little outside of Vankir,
but yes, she’s close, relatively speaking.” Aarush tapped a location on the map. “You’ll need to free Mesa from the prison, then escort her through the city’s several guard checkpoints, finally clearing the heavily fortified gate in the massive wall they’ve built around part of Vankir.”

  That much he’d assumed. “Natali told me one of the imperial base commanders had flipped?”

  Aarush nodded. “A man by the name Brid Chen: have you heard of him?”

  “Brid Chen?” Malkor leaned forward in his seat. “Are you sure?”

  Aarush exchanged a glance with Ygreda. It was she who answered. “Several of my spies have had dealings with Chen, I’m certain it is him. Why?”

  “He’s… Well, he’s something of a friend.” More like a gambling buddy, and that was years ago, back when they’d both been in their respective academies. The friendship had died a swift death once they’d sworn their allegiances to rival agencies, the IDC and the army.

  “Friend or not,” Ygreda said, “he’s proven his dedication to our cause. I believe we can trust him with this mission.”

  Insane to think that someone so high up in the occupation command structure had changed sides and was now acting as a double agent. They would be shot on sight if anyone knew: no arrest, no trial.

  Now that he knew Brid was the commander in question, though, Malkor was a little less surprised. The man always did have a strong moral center.

  Ygreda met his eyes. “I have entrusted the lives of several of my spies to his keeping, if that convinces you.”

  “It does.” And even if it didn’t, he had no choice but to risk it if he ever wanted to see the Yari move its gigantic ass. “We need his cooperation to pull this off. My people can create a near perfect forgery of imperial army credentials, but they’re useless if the commander who signs off on them is a fictional character.”

  Rigger agreed. “If we show up with orders to transport a high-profile prisoner, the officer in charge will follow up with the signing commander to confirm the orders are legit. Standard procedure.”

  Malkor waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. “That’s it? That’s the entirety of your plan?”