*
Gisela rolled her eyes open, but it took a moment for her to recognize what she was seeing. She lay on the deck of the Veracity, looking across a large puddle of blood.
She put one hand to her head tentatively, trying to ascertain if her brain really was in danger of falling out. Her head pounded, but her skull seemed intact.
Eilif lay across her legs. As Gisela’s vision cleared, she could tell the little woman was dead. Blood ran from her ears, nose, and mouth.
The sound that woke Gisela repeated. She crawled across the deck, leaving a red smear, to slap at the comm button. Then she leaned against the console to fight off a tidal wave of vertigo.
“Answer me,” her mom repeated. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Gisela said. “Eilif’s dead. I’ve got a head injury. Don’t know where Jim is.”
She heard Ariel suck in a deep breath. More calmly than Gisela expected, her mom asked, “Can you stand?”
Gisela used the console to wobble to her feet. “Shaky,” she said.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. For now, make sure you are safe. Seal up the ship if you’re alone. Are you armed?”
“My gun’s gone. I’ll get something else.”
“Good girl. Call me when you find Jim.”
Gisela didn’t nod because she was afraid to slosh her brain around.
As soon as she stepped out of the cockpit into the passageway, she felt a hot draft blowing through the ship. The main hatch yawned open. She closed and locked it, but she knew Jim was gone.
The gun lockers by the main hatch stood open. In fact, every cubby where Mykah had hidden weapons was empty. Gisela wasn’t sure what that meant, but she knew it was bad.
She searched the ship, dreading to find Jim’s body bleeding out like Eilif’s, but she didn’t. In the process, she’d tracked bloody footprints all over the ship, but she didn’t think she could deal with them herself without blacking out again.
Once she was sure she was alone, she went to the galley to make herself an ice pack and a cup of tea and to wait for her mom to come.
CHAPTER 12
Raena came out of the shower finally. Her skin had gone a weird reddish shade, like a sunburn beneath her normal coloring. She’d gotten the coughing somewhat under control, though.
She skinned into one of Ariel’s extra dresses, a loose green sundress that hung to her feet. Tricky to fight in, Mykah would have said, although Raena’s boot heels would have helped somewhat. They’d have to retrieve her boots from the Veracity later. Until she stopped coughing, though, she didn’t need to be fighting.
Breakfast came while everyone rotated through the shower. Mykah had ordered a spectrum of food: eggs, pastries, crunchy beetles for Haoun, stir-fried vegetables and rice, something that would pass as miso for Raena. She smiled at him gratefully as she settled down over the thermos to eat.
Glancing at her comm bracelet, Coni said, “Oh, the curfew is over now.”
“About time.” Ariel took Raena’s face in her hands and kissed her good and hard. Then she grabbed some of the pastries and headed out the door. Mykah and Coni stared after her, waiting for Raena to let them know if they should worry. She didn’t put her miso down.
“Where’s she going?” Haoun asked.
“To check on her daughter,” Raena rasped.
“Should we worry?” Mykah asked her.
“If she wanted us to worry, she would have said something.”
Mykah shifted, more bothered than Raena appeared to be. It seemed out of character for Ariel not to have told them whether she got through to the Veracity or not.
“What should we do about the gray soldiers’ gun?” Coni asked at last.
“Maid cart?” Haoun suggested.
“Don’t get anyone else in trouble,” Raena said. “Is there a trash chute in the hallway? A window to a light well?”
“No, the hotel has concentric circles of rooms,” Mykah said. “The outside circle has balconies and windows. The inside rooms, like this one, don’t have any connection to the outside.”
“Before we dispose of it, we should go clear out Ariel’s other room,” Raena said.
Coni said, “I could hack into the hotel’s security system and see if anyone had been in there.”
Raena nodded. “That’s a good start. It will help us know if they came through the hotel, but not if they came in from the balcony.”
“You think they actually messed with her stuff?” Mykah asked.
“Don’t know. I can’t figure out what they were doing last night.”
*
When the security video turned out to be clear, Raena led Mykah and Coni upstairs. They let themselves into Ariel’s room, but as far as Coni could tell, it was in the same shape as the night before. Ariel wasn’t one to live in military tidiness, the way Raena did. Clothing and jewelry lay scattered all around the room.
Raena checked the balcony door and poked around halfheartedly. After that she helped collect up Ariel’s stuff briefly, before lying on the bed while Mykah and Coni finished up. Her breathing had gotten more ragged.
“All right?” Mykah asked.
Raena laughed softly. “I think I broke something with the coughing this morning.”
Coni looked at her sharply.
“Kidding,” Raena said.
Coni wasn’t convinced.
On the way back to the elevator, Raena detoured into the room at the end of the hall that housed the vending machines. When she stooped to collect her bottle of water from a machine, she gently unwrapped her skirt from the bulbous gun, placed the gun on the floor, and nudged it under the machine with her toe. The movement would have been too smooth to see, except that Coni had been watching for it.
“What’s the plan for the rest of the day?” Mykah asked.
“Hospital,” Raena rasped.
“I’m coming with you,” Coni said.
“Good.”
They went back down to the other room to drop off Ariel’s stuff. Haoun was waiting to let them in.
“Ariel’s at the Veracity,” he said. “Mykah, she wants you to meet her there.”
“Will do.” He gave Coni a big hug, then slipped out the door ahead of them.
*
Raena found the walk through Kai City eerie, like the morning she had walked in from the underground river. Was the stillness a function of the early hour or had people frightened themselves with the previous night’s rioting and Planetary Security’s enthusiastic response?
In the jail, she’d worried that Haoun, with his head up higher than hers in the smoke, would damage his lungs. Now it hurt to draw a deep breath. The cough didn’t seem to want to leave her alone for long.
She was grateful for Coni and Haoun walking on either side of her, but she knew if it came to a fight, they would be less than no help. She’d seen the limits of Haoun’s bravery, and Coni … Well, she knew Coni could run away. For her own part, Raena decided to simply lie down and take her punishment. Last night, the grays had proven how little they cared about collateral damage—but her own surrender might give the others enough time to escape. At this point, she would rather lie down and take a beating than stand up, doubled over and coughing.
The area around the hospital seemed especially quiet. Raena hoped that meant the doctors had processed everyone who’d come in before curfew took effect, so she’d be able to waltz in and waltz out.
The waiting room gave the lie to that. Raena hadn’t known there were so many people on Kai.
Coni gently led the way through the crowd to the intake window. Raena heard her cough echoed throughout the room. The clerk had ceased being sympathetic.
While Coni checked her in, Raena looked over the waiting room. The people looked thoroughly miserable: eyes streaming from smoke, heads aching from Doze gas, completely traumatized by Planetary Security beating them back, compounded by the nightlong wait for treatment. Raena sympathized. She wondered if she could find a little patch of floor to
curl up on and pass out.
To placate the people trapped in the waiting room, several screens played news from around the galaxy. One screen showed Raena fighting the Thallians’ soldier in court yesterday. Raena watched herself, noting how she could have done the takedown more elegantly. Just like Corvas’s video of her fight against the Thallian abduction squad, this video counted the amount of time between when the soldier launched himself from the witness stand at her and when the courtroom guards finally stunned him. It took longer than she expected.
After Coni finished the intake process, she occupied herself by making calls on her comm bracelet. Raena leaned against Haoun for support as much as for comfort. The lack of oxygen made her woozy.
A knot of young humans, followed by their disapproving nonhuman chaperones, came to encircle Raena, Haoun, and Coni. Haoun positioned himself protectively in front of Raena. She smiled up at his back, even though he couldn’t see it.
“You’re from the Veracity, right?” one of the boys asked eagerly.
Haoun nodded skeptically.
“We’ve been watching the trial.”
About the same time as her crewmates, Raena realized that the kids wore “Free Raena Zacari” T-shirts.
“Have they dropped the charges?” one of the girls wanted to know.
Raena shook her head. “Out on bail.” Her voice sounded alien to her own ears.
Others in the waiting room began to recognize her. The crowd around them grew denser. People wanted to congratulate her for killing the Thallians or ask where she’d trained. One guy wanted to hire her, either as a bodyguard or as a companion, Raena wasn’t clear. Not all the attention was approving, but Raena had trouble tracking it. The kids closest to her all babbled at once, something about role model and standing up to anti-humanists and what an honor. Raena wondered if they were breathing up all her air. Haoun kept a grip on Raena’s shoulder, holding her upright.
Then Corvas appeared, wading through the crowd. Even though the slim lizard was much smaller than Haoun, he knew how to command space. He cleared a margin around her. The kids stared at him, starstruck. Security cameras buzzed around, getting a good view of Raena being supported and protected by Haoun, Coni, and Corvas. She wondered if that would make it into the broadcast of her trial.
A human doctor showed up, flanked by a couple of hospital security guards. They cleared a path for Raena into the treatment area.
Raena whispered to Corvas, “What just happened?”
His eyes rotated to regard her. “Exactly what Ariel hoped would happen.”
*
The doctor asked Raena to sit on an examining table. Luckily, Haoun was there to boost her up. Her skin looked even more sunburned now, the reddish tone brightening under her usual color.
“You need the soot suctioned from your lungs,” the doctor said. “It’s filling the alveoli and making it hard for you to get enough oxygen. The suctioning process is uncomfortable. You need to hold absolutely still or there’s a chance that we could puncture your lungs. Sedation is not optional.”
Raena reached out and Coni took her hand. The blue girl said, “Haoun needs to be treated, too, but Corvas will stay with you.”
“Where are you going?” Raena rasped.
“Something has happened on the Veracity. Mykah wants me to meet him there.”
Raena’s vision went black around the edges. She felt her body going away.
*
“Everyone out,” the doctor ordered.
“I’ll stay,” Corvas said calmly. “You know who she is.”
The doctor nodded.
“I’m losing count of the number of attempts on Raena’s life on Kai,” Corvas said. “I know you will do your best for her, Doctor, but for your safety, she needs a guard. I will be it.”
“All right. Everyone else …”
Coni took Haoun’s arm and tried to nudge him away.
“I’m staying, too,” he growled. “She didn’t leave me last night. I’m not leaving her now.”
“I don’t care who stays or goes,” the doctor snapped, “but I need to help her now.”
Coni led the other two back out of the doctor’s way. “The Veracity was attacked in the night,” she said quietly. “Ariel wants me to pull up the video. I need to go.”
“Go,” Corvas said. “We’ll watch over Raena.”
*
Coni wasn’t sure what she expected as she walked across Kai City, but the strange and frightening silence that filled the morning wasn’t it. Most shops remained shuttered. Most tourists seemed to have kept close to their hotels. She was almost the only person loping through town.
She watched for the soldiers in gray, but they didn’t seem to be lurking around. She tried to remember if they’d ever attacked Raena in the daylight.
Coni had never particularly worried about her own safety before. On the scale of people in the galaxy, she was average size. Her teeth and claws were sharp enough to make most creatures think twice about getting too close. She’d taken some self-defense classes in school, but now she wished she’d sparred with Raena aboard the Veracity. More fight training might have made her feel more confident this morning.
That spun her thoughts off into another direction. She didn’t know what to expect aboard the Veracity. Mykah had locked Ariel’s daughter and the two Thallians aboard last night. Coni hoped that Raena’s mistrust of Jim Zacari was unfounded. She kind of liked the boy.
*
Unlike the rest of Kai City, the spaceport bustled this morning. The party on Kai seemed to be over. Ship after ship powered up around Coni, taking off in search of a good time elsewhere.
When she reached their docking bay, Coni found the Veracity locked. She commed Mykah, who didn’t pick up. As she left him a message, he opened the ship from the inside. He glanced over her shoulders before stepping back out of her way.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, Coni smelled blood. Death. “What’s happened?”
“Someone got onto the ship last night.” Mykah’s voice quavered with fury.
“I thought you locked it,” Coni said, before she thought better of it. She realized it sounded like an accusation.
“I did. It looks like Jim opened it from the inside. We need you to access the Veracity’s recordings to see if you can figure out why.”
“Who is dead?” Coni heard a flutter in her own voice. Mykah turned back to take her in his arms, holding her close.
It was comforting, but she couldn’t see his face when he said simply, “Eilif.”
A little noise escaped her.
“It’s bad in the cockpit,” he said. “Can you work in our cabin?”
“Is Jim all right? Gisela?”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Mykah promised. “Let’s get to work first. I want to know what happened, too.”
As she followed him down the passageway, she caught a glimpse of Ariel on her hands and knees in the cockpit, mopping the floor. Shuddering, Coni closed her eyes and tried to wipe the image away.
“Is Planetary Security on their way?” Coni’s voice still had the shrill flutter to it. The sound made her hackles rise.
“We didn’t call them.” Mykah opened their cabin door. Coni let him usher her in. She collapsed onto the desk chair. Everything looked normal inside. “Ariel says that they have completely failed to protect us at every opportunity so far. If they find out that we were sheltering another Thallian, beyond the one they already knew about, they will spin Eilif’s death into more charges against us—or against Raena, since she was out of jail last night. Ariel wants us to find out who killed Eilif, so Raena can avenge her.”
Coni’s hands trembled as she reached out to wake the screen. She realized he hadn’t told her about Jim or Gisela, but she was afraid to ask again.
*
Last night’s recording from the cockpit’s camera showed Gisela, Eilif, and Jim gathered together to stare down at the view screen. It was impossible to see what they were looking at, but the
argument was easy to hear.
“You know he’s dead, Jimi,” Eilif said. “You’ve seen the video.”
“We’ve seen all kinds of videos,” Jim argued. “I know everyone believes Raena killed him. What if it was one more cover-up? What if Kai couldn’t admit that they had him? That he was injured, but they patched him up and let him go?”
“At least set a test for him. Ask him something only Revan would know.”
Coni sat back from the screen and stared at Mykah. “Revan?” she echoed.
“Can you pull up last night’s recording from the exterior cameras?” Mykah asked.
“Do you want the Veracity’s cameras or the security cams in the docking bay?”
Mykah hugged her, amused to have been given a choice. “Let’s see what they saw in the cockpit first.”
Coni typed in the right commands and triggered the playback. On their screen, the docking bay filled with a squadron of soldiers in gray, their heads covered in mirrored helmets. They all looked similar in size and shape. “Human, do you think?” Coni asked.
Mykah shrugged. “We can rule out a whole lot of people they’re not.”
In the video, one of the soldiers stepped forward and stripped off his glove. He popped open the cover on the Veracity’s palm lock and laid his hand on the screen. The Veracity chirped as if it recognized him, but the door remained locked, waiting for Mykah’s passcode.
The soldier stepped back out of the hatch alcove. He reached up under his helmet, unfastened its strap, and pulled it off. Then he gazed at the Veracity, silver eyes stormy with displeasure. It certainly looked like Revan Thallian.
“Are there more of them?” Mykah asked. “More Thallians than we knew about?”
“Gods, I hope not,” Coni said. She toggled back to the cockpit’s camera.
Jim walked out of frame. Eilif leaned over to Gisela and suggested quietly, “Hide.”
Coni pressed pause on everything. “I’m not sure I can watch this.”
“I need to see,” Mykah said. “Why don’t you ask Ariel to come, too?”
Coni was only too happy to get up from the desk chair. Fear swirled around in her blood. She took a couple of steps toward the cockpit, before deciding she didn’t really want to see what Ariel was scrubbing up.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 21