by Natalie Grey
“A week? Two? Why—”
“Give me three days. If she’s not dead by then, you can send Apollo as my backup for the rest of the two weeks. Deal?”
His eyebrows went up. He was almost smiling. “Very well. Deal. But, Tera…”
“I said, if I fail—”
“No. Come here.” He held out his hands, and waited until she came to place hers in them. “You must know this is not personal. Yes? You must accept that. When I took this job, the Alliance had just made its opening gambit against the Warlord. There were thousands of soldiers on that carrier. Tera, that is beyond one assassin. I am trying to do something no one else has managed. Do you understand that?”
Tera closed her eyes. It was bigger than her—and he had raised her better than this. On the one hand, her pride; on the other hand, all of Ymir.
How had she let her judgment become so clouded? Shame weighed down on her chest.
He saw it. He had raised her, after all. His hands tightened. “You are a good person.”
“I—” Her voice broke off, thick.
“You are.” He reached out to touch her cheek, and when she looked up, she saw worry in his eyes. “You amaze me, Tera. You always have. I was amazed by your spirit the first time I saw you, and since then, you have become—” He took a deep breath. “Be safe. And if ever you want to give up this life….”
“Never.” She laughed. “Not ever, you raised me too well. It’s not about comfort, or wanting. It’s about what’s right.” She gave him a grin. “And I’m good at this. I’m the best.”
His face was troubled. “I know you are. But—”
“I’m not going to retire to the country and paint, or whatever. Sit at a desk. Push paper.”
“Like your father?” His voice was tart.
“You know what I mean.” She kissed his cheek, grabbed her sweatshirt back up, and headed for the door. “I’m going to do this. I won’t fail you.”
“Of course.”
“And listen to me about Apollo, all right?” She threw a glance over her shoulder. “I don’t like that man. He’s shady.”
“Tera, I got his referral from Julian. The man knows his stuff.” Tera wrinkled her nose, and he sighed. “I will check again. Myself. Will that do?”
“Yes.” She gave him an impish smile. “I’ll see you in three days.”
Apollo stared at the details on his screen. “Lesedi Diaho?”
“Yes.” On the other screen, Julian gave a cold smile. “It needs to be done at once. She’s a complication we don’t need. She’s already put a hitch in one mission.”
“And so you need me to clean it up.” Apollo gave a satisfied smile. Julian had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked Apollo—probably, in Apollo’s opinion, because while Julian sat in his office all day, pale and soft-handed and useless, Apollo was out actually accomplishing things. He was the one with the golden armor. The golden gun. He was the one whose name was spoken in the dive bars of New Arizona and Osiris and Hades.
“Yes.” Julian bit off the word. “And I need it done quickly, and I need it done without any further communication. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you when it’s done … well, if that communication is allowed.”
Julian ended the call without another word and Apollo laughed. Julian might hate him, but he needed a man like Apollo. They always did, the men in suits. They always needed someone who could get things done.
And it didn’t get old, either, pulling one over on Alliance Intelligence. They thought they were so damned smart that it blinded them. They couldn’t see the wolf in their midst.
They’d pay for that, someday soon—and if he was lucky, Apollo would get to take a few of them out, himself.
“Hey. Morel.”
Liam jerked awake. A door was ajar at the far end of the room, spilling light into the sleeping quarters. Victoria stood by his bed, looking down at him.
“You wanna….” He pushed himself up. “Spar?” He gave a huge yawn and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Gimme a minute.”
“No, I’m….” She sighed and crouched down. “I’m going. I got recruited to Team 17.”
“You did!” His face split in a grin and he reached out for a handshake.
She didn’t smile back. “Morel—you could be going, too.”
His grin faded and he sat back. “That’s not … it’s kind of you to say, but—”
“Team 11 is still in port. Wraith says she hasn’t found anyone, I asked my commander. They’d have you if you changed your mind.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“Liam.” She hadn’t ever used his first name before. She took a deep, slow breath. “Think seriously about this.”
“I am. I want to serve with Talon.”
She leaned forward to whisper fiercely. “If you believed in the mission of the Dragons, you would serve with anyone. Wouldn’t you? D’you think it’s worth the world losing a soldier like you, just because you can’t serve with your favorite commander? Why are you even here?”
“Victoria—”
But she was gone, casting one last, angry glance over her shoulder. In the darkness, Liam bent his head into his hands and tried to ignore the shame her words had sparked.
Because she was right. He’d come here to do good in the world, and what was he doing, instead? Stamping his foot and throwing a temper tantrum. Making nothing of himself.
First thing in the morning, he would go find Wraith.
17
Satomi had been a smuggler for the better part of a decade, and she’d been a fairly good one at that. Of the customs enforcers, she had dodged the laughably incompetent ones—which was the vast majority of them—and she had bribed the rest.
It had been a relatively easy life, not only because she was reasonably good at it, but also because she hadn’t been smuggling anything particularly precious. Mostly, it had been food, or the mismatched guns that were bought in one or two at a time for defending farms and monasteries, or the sort of garden-variety luxuries that people in remote places craved: tobacco, liquor, sometimes books.
Those who smuggled gemstones, or precious metals, or ran information in the heavily cloaked ships that slipped along the edges of gravity wells … they could have their profits, as far as Satomi was concerned. She had never been greedy enough to want to increase her profits that far, and as a consequence, she had not had to spend those years looking over her shoulder.
Then she had left that life for this one, and as her new reputation had grown, so had the sense that told her when she was being followed. She had become very good at listening to the subtle signs her body gave her: the tensed shoulders, the feeling of too much space behind the nape of her neck. She had learned a soldier’s respect for instinct—what was instinct, after all, except things the conscious mind had not yet processed?
Right now, she was being followed. More than that, she was being hunted.
She had sensed it last night as she left a contact’s office, and this morning, in the semi-darkness as she hurried toward the city center.
She hated New Arizona. Osiris was miserable, yes, its towers grey, its citizens beaten down. Even those who ruled the neighborhoods of Osiris lived squalid, brutal, and above all short lives.
New Arizona was worse. Above the grimy alleyways and run-down towers where the poorer citizens lived, there were glittering skyscrapers and elegantly paved streets. The city existed in a permanent state of winter, and it was always adorned in glittering lights. Seneca had its politicians, its business owners who operated enough above board to attend state functions … and New Arizona had the richest of human occupied space.
Nowhere was more stylish, nowhere was more opulent, and nowhere else reminded Satomi so viscerally of the woman she had been in her past life: uncaring, closing her eyes to suffering, telling herself that the world lifted some up and cast others down and it was neither her fault nor her responsibility to help.
She hated the reminder, and so she hated coming here. The problem, of course, was that New Arizona was where the most successful weapons dealers did business, and so it was where hopeful arms manufacturers brought weapons to be shown and sold. There were always scrap orders, a few here or there that hadn’t fit in a cargo hold.
It was from this, that she would build the shipment for Ymir’s resistance. They would be plain, unassuming weapons, the sort that were easy to run and easy to fix, some of them even made with parts that could be swapped across manufacturers. They would all take the same ammo, and it would be cheap. They weren’t top of the line, but then, neither were Ymir’s resistance fighters. A little more or less accuracy wouldn’t be what doomed them.
She was thinking like a defeatist again. Satomi shook her head as if to clear it. She always started to think like this when she came here. She started to think she had a target on her back, and her jobs were useless.
She clenched her hands and squared her shoulders.
She was giving them a fighting chance. That was what was important.
Well, that and breakfast. And some coffee, since she was planet-side. It would be expensive, but she always had it when she could. Something about space travel ruined the taste.
And then she came around the corner, and saw the woman waiting for her, and she felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. The deserted alleyway, the easy way the woman lounged as she waited, and the utter lack of surprise to see Satomi arrive at that very moment. It all meant one thing:
She was going to die.
It was festival season for the farming planets that made up most of the sector, and Akintola Station was redolent with the scents of moon cakes, spice tea, and some sort of licorice-flavored alcohol that always made Lesedi’s eyes water.
Above-board cargo ships and smugglers alike stopped at Akintola to refuel before their last push to bring festival supplies to the outer colonies, and they off-loaded some of their goods to the station-dwellers who had learned a taste for the foods, if not the religious customs. Stalls popped up along all of the main boulevards, and even in the tram cars.
The mood of the station noticeably lifted in this season, and Lesedi was glad of it, especially this year—it had been a grim few days.
There was someone in Alliance Intelligence, someone placed high enough to be manipulating the flow of information. Someone they should have caught by now, in Lesedi’s opinion. What use was it to be an organization of spies, and be unable to notice one, yourself?
Perhaps if she had taken the job in Intelligence, all those years past, they wouldn’t have this problem right now.
Or perhaps she would be dead in a ditch, or a useless bureaucrat, or worse. She had always hated the little death of chaining herself to a salary, with her talents reduced to a set number of hours per week and subject to arcane protocols that had usually been devised for other situations.
She was much happier here, in her little apartment, with her own clients and her own business.
But something about this case was weighing heavy on her heart. She ran her fingertips over the little mokorotlo hat that dangled from her necklace and tried to remember the herb gardens her grandfather had tended on Crius. She had loved those gardens more than anywhere else, with the jumble of scents, sweet and sharp and bitter and sour, and his low voice telling her about the roots and the earth, his stained fingers bruising the leaves for her to smell each herb in turn….
Perhaps, when this case was over, she would go back.
Best not. Whoever owned the land now had likely let the gardens go to seed, and her grandfather wasn’t there to hug her and make her a cup of tea, in any case. Home was a place lost to time, not just on a faraway planet.
She made her way down the empty corridor, stopping once to look around herself. Seeing no one, she unlocked the door and hung her purse and coat carefully on the back of the door. No excuse for bad manners, Lesedi. Her lips curved at the memory of her older sister’s voice.
Again, she looked up and around, and again, she heard no one and saw no one. She shook her head and pressed a button on her bracelet to release a tiny metal ornament, that she then pressed into the carved front of one of the drawers. It stuck and she frowned, pressed again. There was a click, the drawer slid open, and Lesedi found herself staring down at the blinking red lights of a tiny and exquisitely made bomb.
Fire ripped through the metal-and-plastic flooring of Akintola Station’s main garden level. Several tables at one of the more popular cafes were gone in an instant, smoke billowed from the hole in the flooring, and there was an ominous creak as the flooring tiles toppled back into place and sagged, their support struts broken.
And that was three levels up from the information broker’s office. Apollo gave a cold smile, finished his coffee, and left the cafe. He wove between people running to see what the problem was, listening to the music of alarms and screaming, and a few corridors away, he pulled out a comm unit and hooked it into the station’s main grid to hijack their FTL communications array.
“Yes?” Julian’s voice was impatient.
“It’s done.” Apollo couldn’t keep from smiling. “And I think this time, I’m going to require more payment.”
“The payment we discussed is—”
“I think a great deal of people would be interested to know about the Warlord’s place in Intelligence, don’t you?” There was a long silence, and Apollo raised an eyebrow in irritation. “Have I not made myself—”
“Perfectly clear.” Julian’s voice was cold. “I’ve transferred money. It should be sufficient.”
He hung up the call without any further words, and Apollo smiled to himself. Julian really couldn’t deny him anything, not with what he knew.
He was going to begin to make use of that now.
Criminals, especially those who dabbled in the darker and more dangerous sides of the underworld, should never be surprised when someone came for their lives. Justice, true justice meted out by those who valued order and safety, was all too rare—but those who started violence could expect to be consumed by it. None of them slipped into it unknowingly, and so none of them should be surprised.
Yet, in Tera’s experience, they invariably were. She had seen slave traders, their holds filled with captives, who stared at her in disbelief when she came to take their lives. She had seen politicians who had sold their constituents into danger, who had taken bribes and ordered their rivals killed, who had believed they were above any law, human or natural.
All of her missions had been different. She was good, very good, at tailoring her strategies to the patterns of those she hunted. But there was one thing that she remembered from every one of them: the moment of shock when they realized they were going to die.
Which was notably absent from Satomi Kreuger. The woman stopped dead in her tracks, and there was no surprise at all, only acceptance.
And it was that, that stayed Tera’s hand. By rights, she should have ended Satomi’s life then and there with a single shot. Heroics and close-fought battles were for the foolish. An assassin should never give someone the chance to run away and continue their evil, but too many of those who worked for the Alliance played by outmoded notions of civility. They thought it was too unfair to kill someone without ever giving them a chance to fight back.
Tera wondered what those people would say to the innocent bystanders whose lives were ruined when evil men and women were set free to continue their work.
Now, her hand clenched around the grip of her rifle—more accurate, always, than a pistol—and for the first time she could remember, she wavered. What was it about this resigned acceptance that was making her doubt? This was the very thing she had always thought criminals should have.
“You know why I’m here,” she said finally. Her voice sounded almost rusty to her own ears.
She never spoke to her marks. Never. They screamed at her to tell her who had sent her, they taunted her and called her names, and she never res
ponded to their words.
“Of course,” Kreuger said. She gave a smile that faltered a bit too obviously. “I expected it since I took this job.”
“You shouldn’t have taken it.” Tera’s eyes traced over the woman’s face: the hook nose, the deep brown eyes, the brown-black hair in a rough braid. Her clothes were in good order, as were her weapons, though they weren’t fancy.
Tera liked that about her, though. She thought of Apollo’s useless gold armor, his complicated weapons that often failed him. Kreuger was, in many ways, Apollo’s opposite.
Including the fact that Apollo, whatever she thought of him, did jobs for the Alliance—and Satomi Kreuger aided one of the worst humans who had ever lived. Tera raised the gun and laid her finger on the trigger.
“If I can ask—” Kreuger’s eyes were sad “—why did you take this job?”
Tera stared down the sights of the rifle. Kill her. Kill her, now.
“I know why I took jobs like yours, in the past.” Kreuger was clearly stalling for time—wasn’t she?—but her eyes were almost impossible to look away from. “I thought the world was too big for me to change.”
None of this made sense. Tera wanted to lower the weapon and run, redo the research, reverify what had been passed to Intelligence—and she wanted, too, to put a bullet in Kreuger and end this conversation. The deadlock kept the gun up, but shaking. Her finger was off the trigger now.
“Who do you think you work for?” Tera asked her.
“People whose names no one will ever know,” Kreuger said, with a terrible finality. “People who are doomed.”
She thought….
No mercy. A woman this easily misled should be taken out of the game before she could hurt more people—and Tera could not afford to miss this target, let the Warlord have his weapons, and prove to her father once and for all that she was too easily swayed to false mercy.
And yet….