No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three

by Rhoads, Loren

  “Do you swim?” Raena asked Coni.

  “No, but I drink by the ocean,” the blue-furred girl joked. “When I get wet, I have to keep moving or I sink. Drinking is much less exhausting.”

  “That’s often true,” Raena agreed.

  Vezali slid toward them. She deftly slipped her tentacles between the stools and other tourists, pulling herself along as smoothly as gliding. “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” she confided to Raena, “without your entourage.” She lifted a tentacle to indicate the goggles.

  Raena guessed that was fair enough. Of the whole Dagat people, Raena had only ever seen Vezali, who changed in color from a deep blackish green to fiery orange as emotion took her. Raena couldn’t guess how Vezali’s people told each other apart.

  “Mykah, would you keep my translator for me?” Vezali asked.

  “Coni will. I’m going in the water, too.”

  “You swim?” Raena asked.

  “No, I wade. And look at shiny rocks. I never learned to swim.”

  Vezali unbuckled the braided gold belt she wore around her midriff and set it on the table amidst the glasses. Raena realized she’d never seen Vezali without it before. She’d also never heard the squid creature’s natural voice. Unlike Haoun’s voice, which spoke a second ahead of his translator, Vezali’s translator provided the only sound Raena had ever heard her make.

  Haoun nudged a glass toward Raena.

  “What is it?”

  “The bartender said it’s a kind of cider.”

  “Earther cider?” she asked.

  “Be adventurous,” he teased.

  “Careful what you wish for,” she told him.

  Coni and Mykah traded a glance. Raena almost choked on her first sip. Clearly, the gossip had already started. She should have known there would be no secrets amongst the Veracity’s crew.

  *

  Mykah let the waves play against his ankles as he gazed out at the horizon. It felt good to be on a planet again, even if the gravity of Lautan was slightly heavier than he preferred and its steamy air less pleasant than Kai’s desert heat. The air smelled alive here. Birds sang in the jungle that surrounded the city. A winged lizard skimmed above the water, fishing.

  He felt as if something in his chest unhitched. He’d been wrapped up in producing the Messiah newscast with Mellix for the last month, holed up in a secret studio in the Tohatchi asteroid belt. The pressures had been enormous: to get everything right, to keep Mellix hidden as they researched, to represent humanity as the victims in the Messiah puzzle.

  And to heal. Mykah had been shot by the Outrider androids. Luckily, the torso shield Raena insisted he wear caught most of the bolt, or he would most surely be dead. As it was, he hadn’t sealed the shield exactly right and some of the energy seeped through the seam. He’d broken his pelvis and gotten a really impressive scar.

  The bone hadn’t been bad to heal. Kavanaugh had gotten him immobilized and packed off to the hospital immediately after Raena put the androids out of commission. Mykah chose to keep the scar, though. It branched across his stomach and onto his chest, white against his dark skin. Its surface was still ultra-sensitive. In fact, he could feel the sun’s heat on it now. Belong long, he’d need to join Coni under an umbrella.

  He looked out over the steely water for Raena. Her small head with its cap of completely black hair bobbed a hundred meters out, where she was playing with Vezali and Haoun. Vezali picked Raena up with one tentacle, lifted her from the water, and Raena somersaulted back down. He couldn’t hear her laughter from this distance, but he could see it.

  He turned back to the horizon. Unless one of the Veracity’s crew won big at gambling while on Lautan, Mykah figured they could afford a week on the ground. After that, they would need to look for work.

  He wasn’t sure what should be next for the Veracity. Mellix had encouraged him to follow up Raena’s interest in the Viridian slave trade, but that problem was so huge, so diffuse, that Mykah couldn’t imagine where to start.

  Behind him, someone called, “Hey! Aren’t you the guy on the news yesterday?”

  Pleased to be recognized, Mykah turned, only to find himself partly surrounded by a half-dozen or so large Walosi. The toad-mouthed people did not look like fans.

  “You a friend of Mellix’s?” one of them demanded.

  Mykah wasn’t going to lie about that. “Yes.”

  He saw the first punch coming and dodged, but they had formed a semicircle around him and he couldn’t get back to the beach. Raena would go over the top of them, probably with some kind of crazy scissor kick, but the stones under Mykah’s feet shifted uncertainly. He backed up a step into the water.

  “Come on, human,” one of them taunted. “Isn’t your kind always up for a fight?”

  Mykah didn’t answer. You would think in twenty-four years of being harassed for being human he would have come up with something to say at times like these, but every clever thing he’d ever said had only made his attackers more determined. It never defused the violence.

  “Mellix,” another muttered. “We ought to make him tell us where the goddamned rodent is hiding. We could sell that information. I got kids to feed.”

  “Yeah, you said,” another growled, shoving the angry dad forward. Mykah danced back even farther. The water lapped up over his hips.

  The others advanced. They didn’t even have to hit him, Mykah realized. They just had to back him up into deep enough water. He had no chance to swim away from them.

  One of the thugs dropped with a splash. He lay unmoving on his back in the water. Another screamed and clutched his face.

  Something grabbed Mykah’s thigh and yanked his legs out from under him. He fell forward onto his face. Before he could panic, a number of tentacles hauled him away from the fight. One tentacle encircled his forehead and pulled his head above the water.

  Vezali blinked at him. Mykah spluttered, “Thank you,” but knew she couldn’t understand him. Her translator was back at the table with Coni.

  Raena walked out of the water with a handful of stones. One of the thugs dared to laugh at her. She whipped a stone sideways and it struck him in the throat, shutting off his laughter with a yelp.

  The remaining four rushed her. Raena flung the handful of stones into the first one’s face, then vaulted over him as he fell. She avoided the whole slippery footing issue by not letting her feet touch the ground. She stood on the fallen to kick the attackers, leapt over the falling to move on to the ones hanging back.

  A camera drone buzzed overhead, recording the fight.

  After Raena had dealt with the Walosi, she scooped up another handful of rocks. Mykah saw her taking aim at the drones. “No!” he shouted, just in time.

  Raena twisted toward him, puzzled.

  Vezali propelled him closer with such a smooth motion that it felt like flying through the water. “Don’t take the cameras down,” he panted. “So far we haven’t broken any laws, but if we damage property belonging to Planetary Security …”

  Raena dropped the rocks. She skipped toward him through the surf. “You okay?”

  “Thanks to Vezali.”

  At the sound of her name, the Dagat rose from the water behind him, striding forward on her tentacles.

  “Where’s Haoun?” Mykah asked.

  “I sent him to get help.” Raena nodded toward the beach, where Security had corralled the one Walosi who’d gotten away. Haoun stood beside Coni. Vezali’s golden translator glinted in her hand.

  Raena grabbed hold of two of the fallen Walosi and started dragging them back to shore. Vezali grabbed three more. That left one for Mykah to manage.

  “I can’t believe you took them out barefoot and in a swimsuit,” Mykah said.

  “The footing had them off balance,” she said. “And I was armed.”

  “With rocks,” he pointed out.

  “They didn’t expect it.”

  As soon as Mykah’s feet cleared the water, Coni clutched him in a hug so emotional it
nearly knocked him over. “I was so worried,” she said.

  Mykah laughed and hugged her back. “I was worried, too, but I shouldn’t have been.”

  He extricated himself from her arms and went to speak to the Planetary Security detail. The smoked face-shields of their helmets turned his way as he came nearer. “I’m Mykah Chen, captain of the Veracity,” he said. “These are my crew. Are we in trouble?”

  “We’re reviewing the security video, Captain Chen. Please stand by.”

  The pause went on long enough that Mykah began to be concerned. He looked back at his crewmates. Coni talked to Vezali, who’d put her translator back around her midriff. Raena leaned against Haoun, who had curled up to drowse in the sun.

  Mykah noticed that Raena’s swimsuit looked like an opaque violet leotard. It covered her completely from the base of her throat to her muscular thighs. The worst of her scars were all hidden.

  She had her arms folded around her waist, the picture of nonchalance. As she watched the Security agents, her face remained impassive behind the gargoyle shades. If you ignored the way muscles corded her arms—and you hadn’t just seen her take down six guys twice her size with a handful of beach stones—she looked like someone’s kid sister.

  “Captain Chen, we’ve reviewed the security recordings. You were clearly not the aggressor. You are free to go.”

  “And my crew as well?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  Raena nudged Haoun as she got to her feet. He opened one eye, then heaved himself up onto all fours. “What was that all about?” he asked, when Mykah got near enough.

  “The Walosi recognized me from the newscast,” Mykah said. “I’m guessing that they’re out of work because of the tesseract flaw. They blame Mellix. And they didn’t seem to care for humans very much.”

  “Even humans have rights,” Raena muttered, the punchline to a joke that had been circulating—and mutating—since the War.

  “Exactly,” Mykah said. “Thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  “Any time.” Raena nodded back toward town. “I saw a nabe place down the beach. Anyone else hungry?”

  “I’m going to sleep through dinner,” Haoun warned. “There’s too much excitement for me here.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Ariel heard someone crying in her office. The sound was awful, shredding a human voice almost past enduring. Unable to recognize who could be making those noises, Ariel leaned into a sprint.

  The last thing she expected to see was Eilif sitting at her desk, bent double with sobbing.

  Ariel knelt in front of the little woman and tried to pull her hands away from her face. Eilif shook her head and wouldn’t let go.

  “What’s wrong?” Ariel asked gently. In many ways, Eilif remained half-feral, too traumatized to interact with the ugliness in the galaxy.

  “He’s alive,” Eilif whispered. Terror made her voice unfamiliar.

  Ariel’s core temperature plummeted. She also had been tortured by Eilif’s husband. No matter what she did to blot out the memory, her body would never forget.

  Ariel forced the words past her numb lips: “He can’t be. You saw his body burn.”

  More than that, Raena had promised her. Raena said that she and Eilif stood shoulder to shoulder and set Thallian on fire. Raena said she had pulverized his bones and scattered his ashes and burned the castle down around his ghost.

  Eilif pulled one hand from her face long enough to wave vaguely at the screen beside her. Dreading what she might see, Ariel leaned around Eilif and opened the message there.

  The boy on the screen was no more than thirteen. He held himself ramrod straight, like Raena or Eilif. He wore his glossy blue-black hair tied back at his nape. Black brows arched over eyes so much like his father’s that Ariel felt she’d been punched in the chest. Those silver eyes marked him as a Thallian.

  However, this Thallian was still a child, whatever that meant in a universe where monsters like Thallian would clone themselves sons.

  Despite the boy’s youth, Ariel could only see the face of her rapist when she looked at him. She set the message to play and stared at the floor.

  “Mother, I’m sorry to have tracked you down like this. I didn’t know where else to turn. I need you to pass an urgent message to Raena Zacari, who saved me from our family. She must have saved you as well. I’m hoping you will know how to reach her. I hacked into the cameras in the city beneath the sea. Someone has patched the hospital dome and restored power. I saw someone moving in there. It may be nothing. It may be looters. I … I want it to be looters. I don’t want to think that Dr. Poe would try to bring him back.”

  Ariel glanced up. The boy’s eyes shone with unshed tears. He looked just as frightened as they were.

  “Raena forbade me to contact her. She said she would kill me and I believe her. But I … She needs to know this. As soon as you can tell her.”

  Ariel demanded, “Which son is that?”

  “Jimi,” Eilif said with certainty. “Raena told me she’d let him go.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Yes.” Eilif didn’t dissemble or explain.

  “Shift,” Ariel ordered. Eilif abandoned her chair without complaint. After Ariel took it, she marked the message Extremely Urgent and forwarded it to the Veracity.

  And that was all she could do for now. If Raena had a comm code like a normal person, she hadn’t given it to Ariel. Since her escape from prison, they’d never had an emergency that necessitated anything beyond leaving a message on the Shaad family priority channel for Raena to pick up at her leisure. Now Ariel didn’t dare wait around for Raena to check in. As far as Ariel knew, Raena never went far from the ship.

  To calm Eilif, Ariel echoed what the boy said: “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  But like the young Thallian clone, she feared it was something awful.

  Ariel hit the silent alarm that would lock down the villa. She didn’t know if Jonan Thallian would come looking for Raena or to reclaim Eilif, but Ariel didn’t want to give the madman an opportunity to hurt any of them ever again.

  She didn’t generally walk around armed in the house, but she kept a pistol tucked in her desk. She retrieved it and brought it back to Eilif.

  “It’s past time for you to learn how to defend yourself,” Ariel told her. “Come down to the range and I’ll show you how this works.”

  *

  Although the nabe restaurant was mostly empty at this time of the afternoon, the staff still squeezed the five of them around a low square table toward the back. Haoun stretched out along the wall, put his chin down on his arms, and went to sleep.

  No one said anything about Raena keeping him up too late, for which she was grateful.

  Raena ordered soup for the crew. The slender lizard waitress delivered a big iron kettle full of broth and set it on the burner in the center of the table to boil. She brought out two large platters, one heaped with vegetables, the other with shellfish and mystery slices of meat. Chankonabe used to be one of Ariel’s favorite foods. Raena hadn’t tasted it since before her imprisonment. Nabe restaurants used to be easier to find, she thought, but maybe that was a function of where she used to find herself.

  While the crew watched her stirring the vegetables, Mykah poured sake for everyone.

  “Do we need to be drinking again?” Coni asked.

  He laughed. “I need to be drinking. Here’s to surviving the morning.”

  Before they put their cups down, Mykah told Raena, “At the risk of freaking you out again, I wanted to apologize for the documentary yesterday.”

  She sipped her sake. “I don’t blame you,” she said at last. “I knew Mellix had a camera. I should have covered my face. I am an idiot for trusting a journalist to understand how much I loathe having my image broadcast across the galaxy.”

  “But you’re a new person now,” Vezali pointed out.

  “This new person is still paranoid,” Raena answered. “None of you know what i
t’s like to be hunted, never sure when or where you can sleep. The Empire had agents everywhere I went. Of all the things that have happened in my life, being on the run was about the worst.”

  They digested that in silence, then Coni reminded, “There’s no one after you now.”

  “No one that I know of,” Raena argued.

  “I’m still sorry,” Mykah said. “Mellix might not have known, but I knew how you felt about it. I should have argued more strongly against including that closeup. I’m sure Mellix would apologize, too.”

  “I doubt it,” Raena countered. “He’s enough of a showman to recognize a good story when he sees one.”

  There was a pause in which she could see that they wanted to refute that, but couldn’t.

  “He owes you his life,” Vezali said at last.

  “And I can believe that revealing me to the galaxy was his way of thanking me. Doesn’t every celebrity believe that fame is the greatest gift they can share? But whoever attacked Mellix on Capital City is still out there. If they can’t find him, will they come after me?”

  No one answered. Raena stirred her chopsticks around the cauldron. “I think it’s ready. Hold your bowls out and I’ll serve.”

  *

  After they’d polished off a second kettle of soup, Coni and Vezali went to use the facilities. Haoun went to settle the check and order himself some takeout. Mykah leaned over to talk to Raena. He knew he was drunk, but this might be the only time he had the courage for this conversation.

  “Can I ask you about the fight today?” He heard himself slurring and swallowed hard, trying to regain control of his tongue.

  Raena nodded, her face closed off like usual.

  “What should I have done? They had me surrounded before I knew they were there. I knew you would have leaped at them, but the rocks underfoot seemed slippery. I knew if they got me face down in the water—hell, if they got me on my back in the water—I was dead.”

  She took his hand and held it in both of her little ones. Beyond the differences in size and skin tone, hers was much more scarred. “Look, Mykah, you did exactly the right thing. You survived. You’re unhurt. Don’t second-guess that.”