Exile's Throne

by Rhonda Mason

  Especially when only two of those are psionics, Kayla mused at the end of another fruitless day.

  “If I never see another EMU it will be too soon,” she told Vayne, as they returned to the powered section of the ship.

  “I second that.” They hung their suits in the recharging bay, grabbed their plasma bullpups from a locker, and trekked back to the lift.

  Kayla couldn’t decide if she wanted a meal or a shower first. Maybe a meal in the shower. Then a nap. Then she’d get back in the EMU and start the cycle over again.

  She kept her bullpup ready as they walked, though it was hard to imagine being surprised by a stepa at es when they’d been trying so hard to locate them for days. Frutt. At this point she’d almost welcome an ambush, just to get the whole thing over with. It certainly would save time.

  And keep their movements on the ship from looking increasingly suspicious. Ostensibly they were searching the unpowered levels for any other supplies or parts they could salvage. Ida and Benny had argued against it, saying it would be a fruitless endeavor, but Natali had given them the go-ahead. End of discussion.

  Kayla had visited Kendrik and the other prisoners with Vayne and Toble today. The medic was cautiously optimistic about their progress, but Kayla wasn’t convinced they could be helped. Since the cessation of the tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medication, Enska and Gaar had become increasingly agitated, and Airman Lopez seemed just as obsessively focused on hiding as before. The one positive was that Kendrik seemed more lucid.

  More lucid was relative in this case, though. All in all, it was a depressing and frustrating visit.

  Kayla looked up as they passed a team of rebels in the corridor. Rebels working in teams had been tasked with rigging temporary grating across the entrances to the maintenance tunnels on each of the many powered levels. No one wanted the stepa to have free rein on the lower levels, but they couldn’t afford to cut off all access to the maintenance shafts permanently, not on an aging ship. The rebels saluted as Kayla and Vayne passed.

  “I wish they’d quit doing that,” Vayne muttered.

  “It would take an order from Natali to get them to stop, and I rather think she enjoys it.”

  “Well it’s ridiculous,” he countered, but as usual avoided talking about their older sister. The lift arrived and he almost dashed in, like getting away from that level would leave the subject behind them. She longed to ask him about it. The intention must have been clear in her expression because he said, “Don’t.”

  Give him time, she counseled herself yet again. Stars knew, Natali was never going to speak of whatever had happened between them. She’d never been a sharer, not even before the incarceration, and she was only more closed off now. Whatever secrets she did share had died with her twin.

  Corinth confirmed that they’d been like that ever since captivity, that nothing had happened between Vayne and Natali since then that he was aware of. Tia’tan concurred. Kayla had even tried to approach the subject obliquely with their uncle once or twice, but the usually talkative and jovial Ghirhad shut down when their time with Dolan was even hinted at. Not that she blamed them for wanting to pretend the last five years didn’t exist; it was just that selfishly she wanted her twin back, and that could never happen until he began to heal.

  “If you don’t stop looking at me like that,” Vayne said, “I’m locking you in this lift until morning.”

  She put her hands up. “I’m done, I promise.” For today. I’m never giving up on you.

  They arrived on their level. “I’m grabbing a shower,” she said. “See you after for some dinner?”

  He hesitated. Looked almost guilty. Or pained. Or both, maybe. “I… just need a break. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, don’t be sorry.” Her heart broke for him that he thought he needed to apologize. That wanting alone time meant he was somehow damaged. “Even ro’haar and il’haar don’t have to spend every waking minute together.” She forced herself to grin. “I was actually looking for a nice way to say ‘I can’t stand the sight of you at this moment.’”

  He laughed, relaxed, as she’d meant him to. She’d give him space, even if it killed her to be away from him, even if the fear that if she closed her eyes for a second he’d vanish, this time forever, chased her every day. He wasn’t the babysitter of her paranoia.

  “See you in the morning,” she said, and used every bit of her willpower to turn and walk away.

  * * *

  Vayne watched Kayla go, wearing her slightly-too-bright smile, and hated himself a little more. He’d always assumed that the self-loathing would stop if he ever escaped from Dolan’s machinations. Some days, it just seemed to get worse. Because now he had no excuse, and yet he still hurt the people that he loved.

  Must you be melancholy all the time? the ghost of Dolan asked him, as it materialized in the corridor. I remember you being a lot more fun.

  “And I remember you being a lot more dead,” Vayne muttered. Yup, talking to a dead guy/himself in the middle of the corridor. He was halfway to being stepa at es even without the cryosleep brain damage.

  Being alone with his thoughts—and his demon tormentor— probably wasn’t healthy, but sometimes Vayne couldn’t stand to be around other people while Dolan yammered away. And the bastard certainly liked to yammer when Kayla was around these days. Whatever reprieve Vayne had gotten from reuniting with his ro’haar was over. Dolan crept into his thoughts when he was too tired to guard against him, which was most nights lately. Sometimes it was just easier to give in and let Dolan say what he wanted. The kin’shaa’s voice was almost comfortable in its familiarity, and Vayne wondered if he would cease to exist without it. If their souls had somehow fused together.

  Now you’re getting the picture, Dolan said with a smile.

  No, now he was getting one step closer to the edge.

  He should fight it, for Kayla’s sake. For his own. And he would… tomorrow. Tonight he stumbled to his cabin to lock himself inside with his ghost.

  * * *

  Kayla was halfway through her shower cycle when Natali’s voice came over the ship’s comm.

  “Kayla, Malkor’s calling in.”

  Thank the stars. She practically bolted from the shower to reply. “On my way. Hekkar?” The agent would have heard the ship-wide comm, but of course Natali hadn’t invited him.

  “Meet you there,” Hekkar replied, and the channel clicked off.

  In Natali’s defense, she might not have noticed that Hekkar was in charge of the octet while Malkor was away. Kayla discarded that thought as too charitable, pulled on her clothes while still damp, and hurried to the control room.

  Relief hit her as soon as she entered the bridge and saw Malkor’s face front and center on the giant vidscreen. The other people in the room—Natali, Hekkar, Benny, and Ida on this side, Wetham and Rigger planet-side—didn’t register for at least a solid minute.

  Thank the stars he was alive.

  He was alive, and he was frustrated, though he hid it well.

  “What is it, what happened?” Kayla demanded. Rigger’s and Malkor’s faces were streaked with dirt and sweat and who knew what else. There was blood on both their uniforms, Rigger’s eyes were glassy, and a bandage covered her entire left hand.

  Wetham was the one who answered. “The mission was a failure due to the worst reason of all: sheer bad luck.”

  “Explain,” Natali said, the word cutting like a laser beam through plascrete.

  “Vega showed up,” Malkor said. “She’s there on the planet already. Hopped on a super-secret army plane probably the day the Imperial Army named her as the new head of the occupation.”

  “Did she identify you?” Kayla couldn’t imagine he and Rigger would be walking around free, if that were the case.

  Malkor shook his head. “No, but she was at the prison. She took command of Mesa minutes before we could. Minutes.” He let out a sound of frustration. “If I hadn’t made the call to wait one day and get charges put in place
on the prison as a backup plan, we could have skated through with our IDs and Chen’s orders.”

  “You couldn’t have known that.” And it was true, but she could tell he thought he somehow still should have known.

  Natali got right to the point. “How do we extract Mesa now?”

  “We don’t,” Wetham said. “The agents weren’t identified, but their cover was blown. Now Vega knows someone—even if she doesn’t know who, or why exactly—wants Mesa. She’ll bury the woman underground, and we’ll never see her again.”

  “What about the other scientists on the list?” Natali asked, but everyone in the room anticipated Wetham’s answer.

  “Mesa’s world-renowned for her work on hyperstream drives and little else, so it’s hard to imagine another reason why someone would go after her. Vega will have anyone who’s anyone in the field of hyperstream technology rounded up and locked down.”

  “The only good bit of news,” Malkor said, “is that we were able to notify General Chen in time. When the prison contacted him, he disavowed all knowledge of us and claimed the orders were forged, so at least we didn’t lose that asset.”

  Natali said nothing. A less controlled person would probably be blistering the air with curses and kicked things. Kayla would have rather that than the icy calm Natali radiated. It chilled the air about ten degrees.

  “So that’s it, then,” Hekkar said. “The Yari’s dead in the water.”

  Kayla winced. Natali gave him a venomous stare that had to have the agent wishing he hadn’t opened his mouth.

  “Putting that aside for the moment,” Malkor said, “we have a big problem with Vega.” He explained what he and Rigger had heard from the officers, and what had happened at the prison. “Hekkar’s report months ago is correct, she does indeed have psi powers.

  “Worse, though, our plan to infect Dolan’s data with a complink virus before we handed it over to her obviously failed. She arrived on Ordoch with a Wyrd—an Ilmenan, judging by the look of her—and I’m convinced they brought the Influencer with them.”

  “Agira,” Natali said. The name sounded like a curse. “Dolan’s pet.”

  “You know her?” Kayla asked.

  “She’s a thrall. Somehow her mind conditioning is permanent. She helped him with his experiments.”

  Then Agira was lucky Natali hadn’t been the one in the prison with her today, or the woman wouldn’t have survived.

  “Isonde has seen her in Vega’s company; is it possible Dolan switched her loyalty to Vega somehow?”

  Natali shrugged. “Who knows how that damn device works? I didn’t think he’d ever be able to transfer powers to imperials.”

  “Is the process permanent?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kayla said. “Now that she’s got an entire planet of Wyrd batteries at her fingertips, she can suck the charge out of us whenever she wants. Plus she has a brainwashed Ilmenan who will complete the transfer process for her.” She felt her rage beginning to build at the thought of the same process that had destroyed her family members being used on her people.

  And on what scale? If Vega decided to give psi powers to other imperials, she could start a factory, churning them out, one after the other after the other. Hundreds of thousands of Wyrds used as fuel. Her hands curled into fists. She couldn’t image what Natali, who had lived through the process time and again, must be feeling.

  “If that is indeed what Vega intends and the various councils find out,” Malkor said, “the empire will never release its grip on Ordoch.” It took courage, but he met Natali’s eyes as he said it. “We have to get the Influencer away from Vega, whatever it takes.”

  Natali finally nodded. “Thank you, agents. For your efforts. I’m sure you’ll want to debrief with your team, and Wetham and I have much to discuss.”

  Ida spoke up for the first time. “Kayla, Hekkar, you can have the using of stateroom mine. The rest of us will be conversation for some time still.”

  Kayla couldn’t be more thankful to escape what was sure to be a verbal power struggle, but she wasn’t about to have a private conversation at Ida’s desk, where it might be recorded. “It’ll take a few minutes to round up the others,” she said. “Just route the comm to my cabin and we’ll convene there.” She fled the control room before anyone could change their mind.

  Trinan and Vid were waiting outside her cabin when she and Hekkar arrived.

  “Toble?” she asked.

  “Asleep,” Vid said. “Wouldn’t even wake when I rang his door.”

  Let him sleep; at least someone would be, and they could brief him in the morning. It’s not like anything was going to change between now and then.

  “Got word from the boss?” Trinan asked, and Kayla let them all into her cabin—which was entirely too small for one ro’haar and three burly male imperials.

  “You two.” She pointed at Trinan and Vid, then at her bunk. “Sit. You,” she pointed to Hekkar, “take the chair. I can’t breathe with the three of you crowding me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, Vid with a cheeky salute.

  For her part, Kayla was still too edgy to sit. Now that she knew what could have happened, what almost did happen, her worry had kicked back in. Stupid response, that, being after the fact.

  She flipped on her vidcomm, which was still waiting for a signal from the planet.

  “So when are Malk and Rigger heading back?” Trinan asked. “They might not be able to sense psionic blank spots, but we could sure use their help searching for heat and energy signatures.”

  That they could. “They’re not coming back, not yet anyway,” she said, and explained what had happened in the prison.

  Then Malkor appeared on the vidscreen. It looked like he’d stopped to swipe a clean rag over his face, but no more than that. Rigger wasn’t with him.

  “I had to order Rigger to rest,” he said in response to her question. “You Ordochians sure know how to party: she’s high as shit right now.”

  Kayla winced. “Sorry about that. I think imperials require a smaller dose of pain blockers than Wyrds do.”

  “I don’t know what the medics gave her, but she said she couldn’t feel her face, never mind her injured hand, so I guess that’s a good thing.”

  Kayla adjusted the vidscreen so everyone could see, then sat on the floor beside the bed. “Run it back for me. What, exactly, went down?”

  By the time he finished briefing them on his day, no one was laughing any more.

  “Rigger’s hand will be fine,” he finished up. “She has lacerations from flying glass shards, and a few of her fingers are fractured, but she’ll heal quickly.” He shook his head. “It could have easily been a lot worse.”

  Hekkar explained their progress—or lack thereof—with finding Zimmerman or any other stepa. “Without more people we can trust, I don’t know if we’ll find them.”

  “If they’re even out there,” Kayla said quietly. It was beginning to feel like they were chasing fumes.

  “Well, someone stole those weapons,” Trinan offered.

  Vid punched him on the arm. “Potentially crazy people with plasma rifles—don’t remind me.”

  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news about the search,” Hekkar said. “Which do you want first?”

  They all agreed on the good, because otherwise the highlight of the day was that Malkor and Rigger had only kind of been blown up.

  “I was talking with ship’s physicist Tanet earlier and quizzed him about the unpowered levels. We can rule some out entirely because those decks sustained massive damage and have pockets left open to space.”

  “What’s the damage from?” Kayla asked. “I assumed the Yari just popped out of whatever void they’d been in and magically appeared in the Mine Field.”

  Hekkar shrugged. “I’m still having a hard time following the crew’s speech, even with my translator, but I gather some of it happened at the time they disappeared. Tanet mentioned that when they tried to test the superweapo
n five hundred years ago there was a starbase nearby. The whole thing—and I mean the whole thing, including the asteroid it was built on—got pulled through the Tear with them. Things got bumpy somewhere along the way. The Yari sustained quite a bit of collision damage and the starbase got destroyed. Remnants of it are floating around in the Mine Field. Tanet’s had a lot of time to speculate on how things happened, has created hundreds of predictive models, but there’s just no way to know for certain. As for the other damage, that comes from collisions with present-day Mine Field debris, and of course, the rooks.”

  Kayla held up a hand. “Wait a minute. The rooks attacked the Yari? I thought they’d always kept their distance, until the stress test on the hyperstream drive.”

  “What do you mean ‘until the stress test?’” Malkor demanded. “Rooks approached the ship? Explain.”

  Shit. Had all that happened since he’d left? She took a detour to catch him up.

  “Anyway,” Hekkar said once she’d finished and before Malkor could let them all know what he thought of Kayla doing a spacewalk with a family of rooks. “According to Tanet, the rooks would blink through the debris field, tear at the Yari like rats on a corpse, and blink out of existence again. That’s what happened to the fuel for the hyperstream drive, as well as the parts in storage for completing it. It wasn’t until the crew repaired the ion cannons that they could keep the rooks away.”

  “The rooks stole the hyperstream fuel?” Kayla asked, trying to picture it. “And how the frutt is any of this good news?”

  Hekkar forced a hand through his flame-bright orange hair, looking sheepish. “Well, it’s not exactly good per se, but I can cross several areas and a few whole levels off of our search pattern, considering they’re exposed to hard vacuum. The other unpowered levels are structurally sound, it’s just a matter of corrupted circuits et cetera.”

  Everyone else in the room looked as stupefied as she felt.

  Malkor finally said, “That’s the worst batch of ‘good news’ I’ve ever heard. How can there be any bad news left over?”

  This time Hekkar definitely looked chagrined. “There’s a whole lot more ship to search than we previously thought.”